Far From The Madding Crowd

The Turret

Night has pressed itself flat against the windows of the flat, yet inside the turret there is no night — only a muted glow, the kind that belongs to the hours when sound grows its own shape.

Nell sits on the warped boards, shawl wrapped close, her ear turned toward the wall.

The reed-garden outside is moving — she can tell by the change in the hum. It is softer tonight, almost speech.

She imagines the wind threading itself through the rusted girders of the roof, striking some hidden harmonic that only the house and she can hear.

Her notebook lies open beside her: lists of objects, fragments of dreams, the names of people long dead written in columns like ingredients.

Every night she adds something — a phrase, a smell, a new way of arranging time.

She believes if she listens long enough, she will hear the moment before the break — the day her father left, the sound his boots made on the stair.

She thinks if she could learn that pitch precisely, she could stop it happening again.

The air is thick.

Each breath seems to move dust rather than air.

Somewhere beneath the floor, water turns in a slow circle, brushing against the foundations — the ghost of the fen the building was built on.

Nell closes her eyes and listens.

At first there is only the hum: steady, maternal, almost kind.

Then — faintly — another tone beneath it, like a chord resolving.

It takes her a moment to realise it is not under the floor but inside the wall, and then not the wall but inside her ear.

A vibration that knows her name.

She presses her palm to the plaster.

It is damp. Warm. Breathing.

The veins of water within it seem to answer her heartbeat with a slower one of their own.

“Not tonight,” she whispers. “You’ve had your say.”

The hum deepens, like a sigh turned backward.

Something shifts in the cradle behind her — a single creak, deliberate, then stillness.

She does not look.

For years she has told the boys that the past can be kept safe if they leave it alone.

Now she wonders if she has misunderstood her own rule.

Perhaps keeping it safe is not the same as keeping it still.

Perhaps the listening is what feeds it.

The hum grows softer, more regular — the sound of a sleeper turning in bed.

She stays until the first light touches the cracks in the plaster, turning them gold.

Then she gathers her notebook, folds it shut, and whispers, almost tenderly:

“Thank you. I heard you.”

When she leaves, the cradle rocks once — just once — and the air falls silent, as if satisfied.