By Jennie Wren Foster. A free reader bonus.

The Room Next Door

A Coven General bonus scene. Osric’s POV.

Free reader bonus (~1,800 words). Forty-one years, through a wall. Jennie Wren Foster.

The rule was never written down, which is how you know it was serious.

Madame Blackwood did not write things down. She had a horror of it, the way some people have a horror of birds. Everything in her house ran on what had been said in a room, once, to your face, and on the certainty that you would remember it for as long as it was useful to her.

What she said to me, in the November of 1961, in the long room with the red wallpaper, was this: You may keep her, or you may speak to her. Not both.

Then she gave us adjoining rooms.

People assume, when I tell them, that we were in cells. We were not. I want to be accurate about it, because the accuracy is the whole of the cruelty. We had rooms. Good ones. Mine had a window that did not open onto anything but had a window’s dimensions, and a chair I chose myself from a catalog she made me look at, and a door with a handle on the inside.

The door was never locked. Not once. In forty-one years I never tried it and found it locked, because I never tried it.

Ilse was on the other side of the east wall.

I could hear her.

That is the part I have never been able to make anybody understand, and I have stopped trying, except that Catherine asked me, and Catherine asks in a way that does not require you to perform it for her. I could hear Ilse move. A house is not silent when someone is living in the next room of it. There is the sound of a chair taking weight. There is the particular knock of a cup set down on wood, which is different from a cup set down on cloth. There is the sound a person makes when they are turning the pages of something and are not enjoying it.

In the winters she coughed. Every winter. It got worse in the eighties and then better again, which I have thought about a great deal, because getting better means somebody was giving her something for it, which means somebody was seeing her, which means for thirty years there was a person in that house who spoke to Ilse and it was not me.

And she hummed.

Not often. Not when she thought anyone might be listening. But sometimes at the end of a long evening, when the house had gone quiet and she believed she was alone in her half of it, she would hum four or five notes of something, and stop, as though she had caught herself.

I never learned what it was. I have listened to a great deal of music since I came out. Catherine put a thing on her telephone that plays you music if you hum at it, and I have hummed those five notes into it more times than I am going to admit, and it has offered me a great many wrong answers with tremendous confidence.

The terms were simple and Blackwood only had to say them once.

If I spoke to her, she would take something from Ilse. If Ilse spoke to me, she would take something from me. She did not specify what. That was the elegance of it. A named punishment is a thing you can weigh and eventually decide to accept, and an unnamed one is a thing you carry every hour for forty-one years, doing arithmetic you can never finish.

I want to say that I considered it. I did consider it. I considered it every single day, and I would like the record to show that the considering was not idle. I worked out, over about the first decade, exactly how it would go. I would put my hand flat on the wall. I would say her name once. She would answer, because she would not be able to stop herself, and that would be the two of us, and Blackwood would come.

And then there would be a thing taken from her, and I would not know what it was, and I would spend whatever came after listening for a change in the sound of a woman on the other side of a wall.

So I did not.

That is the whole of my heroism across forty-one years. I did not.

There is a thing I have not told Catherine, and I am going to write it here because she is going to read it eventually and it will be easier than saying it.

In 1974 I began knocking.

Not a message. Not a code. I did not have the courage for a code, and I am not certain a code would have counted as speaking, and I was not willing to test the boundary with somebody else’s cost. Just a knock. One, on the wall, at the same hour, when the house was down.

The first month, nothing.

In the second month she knocked back.

That is all it ever was. One knock, and then one knock. Perhaps four thousand times, across twenty-eight years, and not one of them meant anything more complicated than still here, and not one of them ever needed to.

In 2002 she was moved.

I use the word she was given to me. I have been told since that I should not, that it is a euphemism and that euphemisms let people get away with things, and I understand that argument and I do not accept it. Moved is the word I have. Blackwood came into my room on a Tuesday and said, “Ilse has been moved,” in the voice she used for the weather, and then she left, and I did not ask, because asking was speaking about her, and I had no way of knowing whether that counted.

Twenty-four years.

I knocked for a while after. Some months. I would like to say I stopped for a good reason. I stopped because a man can only listen to a wall not answer for so long before he starts to understand that he is doing something to himself.

When the weaver came through that house and tore the leash off me, I was in the sixth room on the third floor, and the first thing that came back was not my own name.

It was the arithmetic.

I want to explain this, because I do not think anybody has ever put it correctly. Being freed is not the removal of a weight. It is the sudden and total permission to go and look. Forty-one years of every hour built around not asking, and then a woman with silver hands puts her palm against the side of my face for two seconds and all of it is simply allowed, and there is nowhere to go, and there is nobody to ask, and the house has been empty for twenty-four years.

Everyone was very glad. I remember that clearly. There was shouting, and Aldric was doing something operatic in a corridor, and the boy was crying, and somebody had found champagne, which none of us could taste but which mattered enormously to Marcus.

It did not seem the moment.

And then it did not seem the moment the following week, and it did not seem the moment at the first council meeting, or the fourth, or the eleventh, and I sat at the end of a table for twenty-six days with my hands flat on it, which is what a man does with his hands when he has spent four decades being careful with them.

Nobody asked. I want to be clear that I do not hold that against a single person at that table. They were building a city out of nothing, and they were doing it kindly, and I have watched a great many people run a great many houses and I have never seen it done kinder.

I do not ask for things. It is not modesty. It is that forty-one years of not being permitted to speak does not stop on a Tuesday because somebody opens a door, and there is no version of me left that knows how to begin a sentence with the word I.

On the twenty-sixth day the weaver got up in the middle of an argument about chairs and came down the length of the table and sat next to me.

She said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know your name.”

I want to put down exactly what happened in me, and I find that I can only do it as a physical account. There was a pressure behind the face that I had not had since the war. My hands, on the table, did nothing at all, which is what they do.

Because that is not what people say. People say how are you settling in, and isn’t this all extraordinary, and you must be so relieved, and every one of those is a door you can close politely. She said the one thing that has no polite door in it. She said the thing that admitted, out loud, in front of nobody, that a man had been sitting eleven feet from her for a month and she had not looked.

“Osric,” I said.

And she said it back. That is a small thing and I am not going to be able to make it sound like what it was. She said it back, once, the way you do when you are putting a thing somewhere you intend to keep it.

Twenty-six days, she said. And I said, twenty-six days. Because I had counted them. Of course I had counted them. I have counted everything since 1961 and I will be counting until somebody makes me stop.

She asks about Ilse now. Twice a week, and she drives across a city to do it, and she has never once come with a theory or a plan or a piece of comfort, which are the three things I could not have survived.

There is a woman in Milwaukee who wrote two letters in 1961 that nobody answered.

There is a house on Kedzie, and a Tuesday in 2002, and somebody who signed for a van.

It is not enough. It is more than I have had in twenty-four years, and it exists because a tired woman in a hospital lanyard sat down in a chair nobody uses and asked a man his name.

I have not hummed the five notes into her telephone in front of her.

I am going to. Thursday, possibly.