Don't Let Her In

Chapter 1: The Call

The voicemail arrived at 11:46.

The phone did not ring until 11:47.

Lena noticed the order later. At the time she noticed only the buzz against the desk and the small red 1 beside the voicemail icon.

She was sitting in the dark. She had turned the lights off an hour ago and never turned them back on. The only light was the phone, and its reflection in the black window above the desk. Outside, a hot wind had been leaning on the building since dusk, and somewhere down the street a Halloween banner kept slapping a fence.

Her tea had gone cold. She had been scrolling through old photos without meaning to. Mara at the beach at Bundeena, squinting into the sun. Mara asleep on this couch two winters ago, the night her divorce came through, one arm flung over her eyes.

That had been the night. Neither of them had mentioned it since.

Lena put the photos away and played the voicemail.

Two seconds of hum. Not static. Something lower, like a transformer heard from across a paddock.

Then footsteps on gravel.

She knew that sound. The path down the side of the building was gravel because the landlord had never finished it. The downstairs tenants used it when they came home late, and she had complained about it twice.

The downstairs tenants were in Bali.

Four steps. Five. Six.

A scrape of metal on stone, like something heavy being set down. Then the message ended.

In the black window her own face looked back at her, pale and blue-lit.

The phone rang. UNKNOWN NUMBER.

She answered because she wanted it to be a wrong number. She wanted somebody to apologise and hang up.

"Hello?"

The hum. A click.

"Welcome to the Lantern Line."

A man's voice, slow and unhurried. Not distorted. That would have been easier. It sounded like an ordinary man speaking from somewhere a long way off, and it sounded pleased to have reached her.

"Who is this?"

"Your story begins now."

The line went dead.

Lena laughed. It came out wrong.

She had seen the ads all week. Bus shelters, train platforms, the edges of her feeds. Black posters with an orange lantern and three lines of white type. CALL AFTER DARK. HEAR A STORY. SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS. Some telco Halloween stunt for teenagers.

She had never called it.

She opened the laptop. The site loaded before she finished typing. Black background, orange lantern, a phone number. It was the number that had just called her.

At the very bottom, in grey so faint she nearly missed it:

"The Lantern Bearer walks only where the line is open."

And under that, smaller still:

"The line opens when you listen."

She shut the laptop. The lid was black and glossy, and in it she could see the room behind her. The couch. The doorway. The dark hall.

She did not turn around. Later she would wonder why not.

The phone buzzed. A second voicemail, received at 11:49.

The clock on the screen said 11:48.

She played it.

The voice was closer this time. She could hear it breathe in before it spoke.

"Lena."

A pause.

"Your screen is the only light on your face."

She realised her fingers were resting against her lower lip. She took them away.

"You touched your mouth just now," the voice said. "You do that when you're thinking about someone."

Another pause, long and patient.

"You are still awake."

Lena turned the phone face down. The room went black, and that was worse, so she turned it back.

She rang Mara.

Mara answered on the fourth ring. Her voice was thick and low with sleep, and Lena felt it in her chest before she understood a word.

"You never ring after ten."

"Something keeps calling me."

"Something?" Sheets rustled. Lena pictured her rolling onto her back, hair everywhere, the old Midnight Oil shirt she slept in.

"The Lantern Line. The Halloween thing."

Mara groaned. "Hang up on it."

"It knows my name. It knows what I'm doing."

"Everything on your phone knows your name."

"The voicemail came before it rang, Mara."

A lamp clicked on at Mara's end. When she spoke again she sounded awake.

"Send it to me."

Lena forwarded both voicemails. Outside, the banner slapped the fence twice. Then the wind stopped all at once, the way it does before a southerly.

She heard Mara's phone play the messages, small and tinny. Then a long silence.

"Mara?"

"Who's breathing?"

"What?"

"Under the footsteps." Mara's voice had gone small. "Someone's breathing right up against the phone. And he says your name like he knows you."

Lena had listened twice. There had been no breathing.

"I'm coming over," Mara said.

"You don't have to."

"Lock the door. Don't play anything else. Ten minutes."

The call ended.

Lena locked the front door and put the chain on. She checked the back door, the one that opened onto the timber landing at the top of the stairs. Locked.

When she came back to the desk there was a third voicemail. 11:53. The clock said 11:51.

She did not touch it. It played anyway, the speaker turned all the way up, the hum filling the room.

Footsteps. Not gravel this time. Wood. Hollow and unhurried, climbing.

She found herself counting. There were twelve steps up to the back landing. She knew because she had carried a fridge up them with two delivery men who swore it wouldn't fit.

Nine. Ten. Eleven.

Twelve.

On the recording, someone knocked. Three times, sharp and quick.

In the kitchen, someone knocked on the back door. Three times, sharp and quick.

It was Mara's knock. They had used it since they were fifteen. Three quick knocks meant it was safe to open the door. Nobody else in the world knew it.

Lena's phone rang. MARA.

She answered without a word.

"I'm just getting in the car," Mara said.

"Where are you?"

"In my driveway. Why?"

The knock came again.

Lena held the phone towards the kitchen. She heard Mara's breathing stop.

"Lena." Barely a whisper. "Don't open that door."

Chapter 2: The Voice at the Door

The back door had a panel of frosted glass at head height. There was a light behind it now. Very faint and orange, like a coal nearly gone out.

"Talk to me," Mara said. Lena could hear her engine and the tick of the indicator.

"There's a light on the landing."

"Stay away from it."

"I'm not moving."

The glow didn't flicker. Nothing knocked. Then it sank, slowly, a step at a time, as though someone were carrying a lantern back down the stairs. At the bottom it went out.

Lena leaned against the doorframe. Her legs had gone weak.

Under the sound of Mara's engine came another sound. Footsteps on gravel.

"Mara."

"I heard it." Mara's voice was very steady, the way it got when she was frightened. "I'm on Parramatta Road, Lena. There's no gravel."

The footsteps kept pace with the car all the way. Neither of them said another word until Mara pulled up outside.

She didn't use their knock. She knocked once with the flat of her hand and said through the door, "It's me. Look."

Lena looked through the peephole. Mara stood under the porch light with the first of the southerly whipping her hair across her face. She held her phone up to the glass. Their call was still connected, the timer counting. 14:31. 14:32.

Lena opened the door and Mara came straight in and held her. Hard, both arms, her face in Lena's neck. She smelled of rain and the coconut stuff she used on her hair. Lena felt her heart going like a bird's.

They stood like that longer than friends usually do. Then Mara stepped back and looked at the floor.

"Show me everything."

They turned on every light. The flat looked stupidly ordinary, which was somehow worse. Outside, the rain arrived with the wind, slanting across the streetlight in sheets.

Lena opened Photos to show her the screenshot of the website. Recently Added came up first.

There were eleven pictures she hadn't taken.

The first was from 10:12. Her own face from below, lit by the screen, her mouth a little open as she scrolled. The next was 10:19. Then 10:31. Every few minutes, all evening.

She stood at the window in one of them. In another she had pulled her bra off through her sleeve after work, the way she always did, and the picture had been taken from the hall doorway while she did it.

In another she was asleep on the couch. It had been taken from so close that you could see the fine hairs on her cheek.

Mara took the phone out of her hand. Her jaw was tight.

"He was watching you." She said it as if it were a personal insult. "All night. He was right there."

The last picture was 11:46. Lena at the desk from behind, the black window in front of her. In the window's reflection you could see the room. The desk. Lena. The doorway.

A tall figure stood in the doorway. Beside its hand hung a small orange light.

"Delete them," Mara said.

Lena deleted all eleven and emptied Recently Deleted. When she went back to Photos there was one picture left.

It was timestamped 12:04. The clock said 12:01.

It showed the two of them on the couch, taken from the kitchen doorway. Mara on the left with her knees drawn up. Lena's head on her shoulder. Mara's hand resting high on Lena's thigh, her thumb moving, caught in a soft blur.

They were standing in the middle of the room, a metre apart.

Mara looked at the photo for a long moment. A flush crept up her throat. Then she looked at the couch.

"Then we don't sit down."

They didn't. They stood where they were and watched the minutes change. 12:02. 12:03. The jacaranda across the road thrashed under the rain, throwing purple flowers at the glass. Lena could feel exactly where Mara was without looking, the way you feel a heater in a cold room.

12:04 came and went. Mara let out a breath that was almost a laugh.

Her phone buzzed in her hand.

"Voicemail," she said. "From them."

"Don't play it."

"I'm not."

It played.

The hum. The slow, pleased voice.

"Two listening."

A pause.

"One wanting."

Another pause. Lena could hear him smiling.

"One pretending she doesn't."

The message ended. Neither of them looked at the other.

"The line opens when you listen." Lena had sent the messages to Mara. Mara had listened. Now it was open in two places, and it had found the one thing between them that neither had said aloud.

"I did this," Lena said. "I sent it to you."

"You didn't know."

"I should have."

"Lena." Mara still wasn't looking at her. "Shut up."

Down the street, an orange light was moving.

It went from house to house along the footpath, too low for a streetlight and too steady for a torch. At each house it paused, but only beside windows lit by the cold flicker of a screen. Someone awake. Someone alone. Then it moved on.

"It's coming here," Mara said.

She dialled 000. A woman answered, brisk and real. Police, fire or ambulance. Mara gave the address and said a man was outside with a lantern and wouldn't go away. The operator asked if he was armed. Mara said she didn't know.

The light stopped at their gate. On the coffee table, both phones lit up by themselves.

The gate hinge sang its long rusty note. The light came up the path and stopped at the front door.

There was no knock.

There was a voice, through the wood, close and quiet, as if someone had their lips against it.

It was Mara's voice.

"Lena? It's me. It's freezing out here."

The real Mara stood beside her with the phone still at her ear. The operator was asking her something. She didn't answer.

"I know you're scared," said the voice at the door. It was softer than Mara ever let herself sound. "I'm scared too. But I need to tell you something and I can't do it through a door."

Lena found that she had taken a step forward.

"That night," the voice said. "After the divorce. You were lying next to me and I could feel you deciding. I've thought about it every day since."

Another step. The rain drummed on the porch roof.

"I said stop because I was frightened of losing you. I shouldn't have said it. I want you to know that. I've wanted you for so long, Lena."

Lena's hand was on the chain. She did not remember lifting it.

"Open the door," the voice whispered. "Let me in, and this time I won't stop you."

The chain slid in its track.

A hand closed on her wrist. The real Mara pulled her back so hard they both stumbled into the hall table. Mara's face was white and furious and wet.

"That's not me."

"I know."

"Lena, that is not me."

"I know!"

Outside, the voice laughed. It was Mara's laugh, the low one, the one she only did when she'd had a glass of wine and forgotten to be careful.

"She'll never say it," it said through the wood. "I will."

Then silence. The orange glow under the door faded.

They stood with their backs against the wall, breathing. Lena could feel Mara shaking. She could also feel her own pulse in places it had no business being.

"How do I know?" Lena said. Her voice cracked. "He can do you. He can do your voice and your laugh and he knows about that night. How do I know which one is you?"

Mara looked at her for a long moment.

Then she took Lena's face in both hands and kissed her.

It wasn't gentle. It was a kiss with two years behind it, and it went on until Lena's back was flat against the wall and her hands were fisted in Mara's wet shirt. Mara's mouth was warm and tasted of rain. When she finally pulled back her forehead stayed against Lena's and her breath came short.

"He can do my voice," Mara said. "He can't do that."

Blue light swept across the ceiling. Somewhere out on the street a car door slammed.

Chapter 3: Unit Seven

The porch was empty when Lena opened the door. Just wet jacaranda flowers, crushed into the mat, and two police officers coming up the path with their collars turned against the rain.

The older one was a senior constable called Hale. Grey and square, with the face of a man who had spent twenty years being called out to things people swore were impossible. The younger one, Tran, kept his torch moving the whole time he spoke.

"You reported a man with a lantern."

"He was at the door," Mara said. Her lips were still swollen. Lena saw Hale notice and decide it was none of his business. "He was using my voice."

Hale wrote nothing down. "We'll take a look round the back."

Tran found the marks on the back stairs. Two dark patches on the top step, side by side, the shape of a pair of shoes. Below them, every second step, the same marks going down into the dark. The timber smoked faintly where the rain hit it.

"Kids," Hale said, without believing it.

Tran crouched and took a photo. He looked at the screen and frowned.

"Senior."

The photo showed the stairs clean. No marks at all. But the kitchen window was in the frame, lit from inside, and in it stood Lena and Mara at the sink.

Behind them stood a third figure. Tall, its face lost in shadow, one hand raised towards Mara's hair.

Lena turned round. The kitchen was empty.

"Delete it," Hale said quietly. Tran did, and neither of them mentioned it again.

Back in the lounge room Hale sat on the arm of the couch with his notebook on his knee. Rain ran down the windows. The lights flickered once and steadied.

"These voicemails. Play me one."

"No," Lena said. "If you listen, it can find you."

He gave her the look he must give everyone at one in the morning on Halloween.

"Miss. Play it."

Mara said, "Don't," but Hale had already reached across and taken the phone. He pressed the top message and held it to his ear. They could all hear it.

"Three listening." A pause. "Four."

Tran was standing right behind him.

Hale handed the phone back without a word. His own phone buzzed in his breast pocket. He looked at it. HOME. A voicemail.

He played it before he could stop himself.

A little girl, whispering. "Dad? There's a man in the hall with a lamp. He says you told him he could come in."

Hale was already dialling. A woman answered, thick with sleep.

"Kath. Check on Ella. Now."

They all heard her get up. A door. Bare feet on carpet. Another door.

"She's asleep, Rob." A pause. "She's left her tablet on again. There's something playing on it."

"Don't listen to it. Turn it off."

A long silence.

"Rob," his wife said, in a different voice. "It's saying my name."

The line went dead.

Hale was out the door before Tran had moved. Tran stopped on the porch long enough to say, "Lock it. Stay inside. Another car's coming." Then the patrol car pulled away with its siren going. Just before it turned the corner, Lena saw a small orange glow in the back seat.

Her phone buzzed. Not a voicemail. A plain grey notification, the kind that tells you about a software update.

LANTERN LINE: 6 LISTENING

It buzzed again. 11. Then 19. Then 34.

"Ella's tablet," Lena said. "Everyone Kath rings. Everyone Tran tells in the car."

The number reached 61, then 143. Lena turned the phone face down. They could feel it still counting through the wood of the table.

Mara had gone very still. She was staring at the television.

The screen was off and black, and in it the two of them stood reflected in the middle of the lit room. Behind them, between them, stood a man.

He was close. Close enough that his hand rested on Mara's shoulder, and his long pale fingers lay along her collarbone, just above the neck of her shirt. His thumb moved slowly against her skin.

Mara's breath caught. Lena saw goosebumps rise on her arm.

"I can feel it," Mara whispered. "Lena, I can feel his hand."

Lena spun round. There was nobody there. She put her own hand where his had been, on Mara's shoulder, and the skin under her palm was icy.

In the black glass the man leaned down and put his mouth beside Mara's ear. Lena watched his lips move.

Mara closed her eyes. "He says I taste of rain."

Lena yanked the television's plug out of the wall. The screen stayed black, but the reflection stayed too. The man looked up from Mara's neck and met Lena's eyes in the glass, and he smiled at her as if they were sharing a secret.

Then the southerly hit the building full on. Somewhere down the street a transformer went with a flat blue bang, and every light in the flat died at once.

In the sudden dark the television was just a shape. Lena couldn't see Mara at all. She could only hear her breathing, fast and shallow, a hand's width away.

"He's gone," Mara said. "His hand's gone."

"It's the dark," Lena said slowly. "He looks out of the glass. With the lights off there's no reflection. He can't see us."

Mara found Lena's hand and held it hard.

"Then the dark is ours," she said.

Chapter 4: Dark Glass

They worked by the light of the gas stove, one blue ring turned low.

A towel over the television. The laptop shut and shoved under the couch. A tea towel over the oven door. Lena dragged the doona off her bed and they pinned it across the front window with drawing pins. Mara went down the hall with a hand towel and the tape and covered the bathroom mirror.

The phones were still lit, face down, still counting. Mara picked them up in a tea towel, the way you'd pick up something dead, and put them in the microwave and shut the door.

"Metal box," she said. "Nothing in or out."

Lena didn't say that the microwave door was black glass. She didn't want to be the one to say it.

In the stove's blue light she could see the faint shine of the kitchen window under its newspaper, the gleam of the kettle, Mara's own eyes. Everything that shone could be a window for him.

She reached past Mara and turned off the gas.

The dark came down complete. No streetlights. No moon behind the rain. Lena could not see her own hand. She could hear the rain on the iron roof, steady now that the worst of the wind had passed, and water ticking in the gutter, and Mara breathing very close.

"Lena?"

"Here."

A hand found her arm, then her shoulder, then her face. Mara's fingers moved over it slowly, as if reading it.

"Just checking it's you," Mara said.

"How can you tell?"

"This." A thumb traced the small scar at the edge of Lena's eyebrow, from the fence at Bundeena when they were twelve. "He doesn't know about this. He's never touched you."

They ended up on the lounge room floor because neither trusted the couch after the photo. Lena pulled the cushions down and the blanket off the back of the armchair, working by feel. They lay down facing each other in the black, close enough to share breath.

For a while neither of them spoke. The rain filled the silence.

"Why did you say stop?" Lena said at last. "That night."

Mara was quiet so long that Lena thought she wouldn't answer.

"Because I'd just lost Dan," she said. "And you were the only thing I had left that I was sure of. If we did it and it went wrong, I'd have nothing." A pause. "And because I wanted it so much it frightened me."

"And now?"

"Now something's out there wearing my voice and saying it for me." Mara's hand found Lena's hip and stayed there. "I'm not letting him say it first."

She kissed her.

It was slower than the kiss in the hall. Unhurried, as though they had all the time in the world, as though the dark were a room with a locked door. Lena opened her mouth to it and felt Mara sigh into her, and the sound went through her like a current.

They undressed each other by touch. Buttons were hard. Mara swore softly at the one at Lena's collar and Lena laughed into her neck, and then neither of them was laughing. Mara's skin was cool from the rain and warmed quickly under Lena's hands. Lena learned her in the dark, the dip of her waist, the soft weight of her breasts, the way her breath stuttered when Lena's thumb brushed a nipple and then did it again on purpose.

"You've thought about this," Mara whispered.

"For two years."

"Show me what you thought about."

Lena did. She kissed her way down Mara's throat to the hollow of her collarbone, where the cold fingers had been in the glass, and kept her mouth there until the skin was warm again. She kissed lower. Mara arched and her hands went into Lena's hair, not guiding, just holding on.

Outside, a gust threw rain against the doona over the window. Inside there was nothing but the dark and the sounds Mara made, low at first and then less careful, and the taste of her, and the way her thighs trembled against Lena's cheeks. When she came she said Lena's name. Not whispered. Said it aloud into the dark, as if she wanted anything listening to hear exactly whose it was.

Afterwards she pulled Lena up and kissed her, tasting herself, and rolled her onto her back.

"My turn," she said. "I've been thinking about it too."

She was not shy, it turned out. She was thorough and she paid attention, and when Lena tried to hurry her she pinned Lena's wrists to the cushion with one hand and said, "No," in a voice the Lantern Bearer would never manage, because it had a smile in it. Lena stopped trying to hurry anything. She lay in the dark with the rain on the roof and Mara's mouth moving over her, and let it build until it broke, and held on to Mara's shoulders while it did.

They lay tangled for a long time after. Mara's head was on Lena's chest. Lena could feel her heartbeat slowing against her own ribs.

"My nan used to say," Mara murmured, "if you looked in a mirror at midnight on Halloween, in the dark, you'd see the face of the one you were going to love."

"Did you ever try it?"

"Once. I was fifteen. At your place, the night of your birthday party." Lena felt her smile. "You were behind me, cleaning your teeth."

"You never told me that."

"I'm telling you now."

Lena drifted. She didn't mean to. The rain and the warmth and the weight of Mara pulled her under, and the last thing she felt was Mara slipping out from under her arm and pulling Lena's shirt on against the cold.

"Water," Mara whispered. "Back in a sec."

Bare feet on floorboards. The bathroom door.

* * *

The lights came on.

All of them at once, the way they had been when the power failed. Lena jerked awake into a glare so bright it hurt. The power was back. The fridge shuddered and started. Every bulb in the flat was blazing, and every covered window and screen was a dull shape again, but the bathroom door at the end of the hall stood open and the light inside it was white.

"Mara?"

Nothing.

The microwave lit up. Not its panel. Its glass. A soft orange glow came from inside, and through the black door Lena could see the two phones on the turntable, both screens on, both showing the same thing.

MARA CALLING.

She ran. The hall was cold under her bare feet. The bathroom was empty. The roll of tape lay on the tiles, and the hand towel had slipped off the mirror into the basin.

In the mirror stood Lena, naked and white with fear.

Behind her, in the mirror, stood Mara.

She was in the hall doorway, wearing Lena's shirt and nothing else, her hair still wild from the floor. Her eyes were wide open. A long pale hand rested on her shoulder, and beside her face hung a small brass lantern with a coal in it like a dying star.

Mara's lips moved.

"Don't look at me."

Lena spun round. The hall was empty all the way to the front door.

She looked back at the mirror. It showed the hall, and Lena, alone.

In the kitchen, the microwave began to ring.

She yanked the door open. Her own phone was ringing. MARA. She answered it.

"Mara."

"It's cold here." Mara's voice was clear and calm, as though she were on a good line from very far away. "It's like a corridor with doors. There are people behind all of them, saying hello."

"Where are you?"

"Behind the glass, I think." A small sound, almost a laugh. "I can see your kitchen. You're not wearing anything."

Lena looked at the oven. The tea towel had fallen off it. In its black door, small and far away as if seen down a long hall, was Mara's face.

"Everyone in here is waiting for someone to pick up," Mara said. "Nobody ever does."

"I'm coming to get you."

"He says you can." A pause. "He says to bring your phone. He says you'll need the light."

There was a sound on the line like the phone changing hands.

Then the slow, pleased voice.

"Come to the exchange, Lena."

She knew where it meant. There was an old brick telephone exchange on the corner of her street, two storeys, its windows bricked up since before she was born. She had walked past it every day for six years and never once wondered what was inside.

She went to the front window and pulled the doona down.

The rain had thinned to drizzle. On the corner, every bricked-up window of the old exchange was glowing orange, as though the bricks had turned to glass.

Chapter 5: The Exchange

She dressed in whatever was on the floor. Mara's jeans were still there, and her bra, and one sock. Lena folded them and put them on the arm of the couch, as if Mara would be back to need them.

She took the phone. 16%.

The street was black and dripping. Jacaranda flowers lay in drifts along the kerb. She walked with the screen held in front of her and tapped it every few seconds to keep it awake. She did not want to find out what she would see in it if it went dark.

There had never been a door in the exchange. Tonight there was one, standing open.

Inside it was warm and smelled of dust baked onto old wiring. A corridor ran straight ahead, far longer than the building could hold. Doors lined both sides, close together, hundreds of them. Each had a phone number painted on it in white.

Behind every door someone was saying hello.

Some said it softly. Some said it faster and faster. Far down the corridor an old man kept saying, "Hello, love? Is that you?" in the gentle voice of someone who had been asking for years.

13%.

She passed a door with Hale's number on it. Through the gap she saw him in a wooden chair with an operator's headset on, staring at nothing. "Ella?" he said. "Ella, love?"

She made herself walk on.

The next number she knew was her own. The door stood open and the room was empty. A wooden chair waited in the middle of it, with a headset hanging over the back and its cord running down into the floor. She touched the seat. The wood was warm, as if somebody had just got up. As if somebody was about to sit down.

Mara's door was the next one along.

She sat inside in Lena's shirt, bare legs together, a headset over her hair. Her eyes were open and fixed on the wall. There was a mark on her neck where Lena had kissed her an hour ago.

"Hello?" Mara said. "Lena? Hello?"

"I'm here. I'm right here."

"Hello?"

Lena knelt and took the headset in both hands and pulled.

It came free with a soft click. Mara gasped and her eyes found Lena's, frightened and completely herself.

"Lena..."

The cord twitched in Lena's hands. It pulled against her like a fishing line. Before she could tighten her grip it slid through her fingers, climbed Mara's shoulder, and the headset settled back over her ears.

"Hello?" Mara said to the wall.

"You can't pull a line while someone's still listening on it."

He was in the doorway.

No monster. A man in a long dark coat with rain on the shoulders, an operator's headset slung round his neck. The brass lantern hung from one hand. Inside it, instead of a flame, a single coal glowed and faded and glowed, like something breathing.

His face was ordinary. Lena looked straight at it, and a moment later she could not have said what it was like.

"Give her back," Lena said.

"She's listening. That's all anyone here is doing."

"Who are you?"

He smiled. "I sat up with the lines. Somebody always has to." He lifted the lantern a little. "They wouldn't have me anywhere else, so I kept the light and I kept walking."

10%.

"Let her go."

"I could." He stepped aside. "Or you could have this one."

The lantern's glow spilled across the corridor wall, and the dark panelling caught it like glass. Out of the shine stepped Mara.

Another Mara. Barefoot, in Lena's shirt, her hair falling exactly the way it had fallen across the cushion an hour ago. She came to Lena and put her arms round her neck and leaned her whole warm weight against her.

"Hi," she said softly. "I'm sorry I took so long."

Lena couldn't move.

"She'll always answer," the Bearer said. "She'll never go home at ten. She'll never be frightened of losing you, so she'll never say stop. Everything you've wanted her to say, she'll say."

"I love you," said the Mara in her arms. "I've always loved you. I should have told you years ago."

It was the sentence. It was exactly the sentence Lena had imagined at three in the morning more times than she would admit. The Mara in her arms tilted her face up and kissed her.

It was perfect. That was the trouble.

The mouth was warm and willing and it did everything right, and it tasted of nothing at all. Like kissing a photograph. No rain. No salt. No hesitation, no little huff of nervous laughter, none of the clumsy swearing at buttons in the dark. Lena put her hand to the girl's face and ran her thumb along the edge of her eyebrow, the way Mara had done to her.

It was smooth. Mara had a nick there too, from the same fence, the same summer. This one didn't.

Lena stepped back.

"No," she said. "Her."

The perfect Mara went on smiling, and faded into the panelling like breath off a mirror.

In the chair, the real Mara said, "Hello?" in her small, empty voice.

7%.

The Bearer sighed, as if she had chosen the harder of two parcels.

"Then there's a fee," he said. "A line doesn't close. It moves. If she comes off it, something goes on."

"Me."

"No. You're no use to me in a chair." He tilted his head. "Leave me your voice."

"My voice?"

"Down the line. Every call you make. Every message you leave. It'll be mine to use." He smiled. "You'll still have it in your mouth. You'll just never be able to send it anywhere again."

Lena looked at Mara. At the mark on her neck, the bare knees, the hands lying open in her lap.

4%.

"Take it," she said.

He nodded once, like a man noting a connection in a ledger. "Say goodbye, then."

The phone screen dimmed. She didn't tap it. She let it go black.

In the black glass she saw her own face, and behind her shoulder his, very close, lit orange from below. She felt his breath at her ear, cold as a draught under a door.

"Goodbye," Lena said.

The word didn't come out of her mouth. It came out of the dead phone in her hand, in her own voice, small and clear, and kept going down a long line into the dark. Her throat felt scraped and empty.

In the chair, Mara blinked.

The headset slid off her hair and fell to the floor. She looked round, saw Lena, and was across the room before Lena could reach her. She was cold through the thin shirt and she was shaking, and she held on so hard it hurt.

"You came," she said into Lena's neck. "I could hear you. I couldn't answer."

Lena tried to speak and nothing came. Then, slowly, her own voice returned to her, rough and quiet, as though she had been shouting all night.

"Let's go home."

The Bearer was gone from the doorway. Behind them, along the corridor, the doors had started closing one by one. Not all of them. Hale's stayed open. So did most of the others.

They ran.

When they came out onto the footpath the drizzle had stopped, and the old exchange stood behind them with its windows bricked and dark, the way it had always been.

Chapter 6: Prove It

Morning came in clean and bright, the way it does after a southerly. The gutters still dripped. The street was purple with fallen jacaranda, and someone's plastic skeleton lay face down in a puddle on the footpath.

Lena woke on the lounge room floor with sunlight on her face and Mara asleep against her back, one arm heavy across her waist.

For a few seconds she didn't remember. Then she did, all of it at once, and she lay very still and listened to Mara breathe.

"You're awake," Mara said into her shoulder. "I can tell. You go stiff."

"I was checking you were real."

Mara's hand moved from her waist to her stomach and stayed there, warm and lazy.

"Check properly, then."

It was different in daylight. Slower, and they could see each other, and Mara blushed in a way Lena had never seen in twenty years of knowing her. Lena kissed the mark on her neck, and the nick at the edge of her eyebrow, and then everywhere else she had only learned by touch in the dark. Mara laughed when Lena found the place on her ribs that tickled, and stopped laughing a little later.

Afterwards they lay in the sun with the doona half over them and didn't talk about the exchange.

The power had come back for good. Their phones sat on the bench where Lena had dropped them. No voicemails. No photographs she hadn't taken. No grey notification counting anything. When she searched for the Lantern Line, there was nothing. Not even the ads.

She rang her mother, to hear an ordinary voice.

It went to voicemail, so she left a message. Hi Mum, it's me, just ringing to say happy Halloween. Then, without quite knowing why, she played it back.

It wasn't her voice.

It was a man's. Slow and pleased. Saying her words.

She deleted it with her hands shaking. Mara watched her from the couch, holding a coffee.

"What did he take?" Mara asked quietly. "At the end. I heard you say goodbye, and then you couldn't talk."

Lena told her.

Mara was quiet for a long time. Then she put the coffee down.

"So you can't ring me."

"No."

"You'll have to come round, then." She tried to smile. "Every time you want to tell me something. In person."

"Is that so bad?"

Mara's smile came out properly. "No. That's not bad."

* * *

She went home at nine that night to feed her cat and sleep in her own bed. At the door she kissed Lena for a long time, as if she was trying to memorise her.

"Text me," she said. "Don't ring."

"I can't ring."

"I know. I'm just saying it out loud."

The flat was very quiet after she'd gone. Lena tidied the cushions off the floor and found one of Mara's socks under the couch and held on to it for longer than was sensible.

At 11:46 her phone showed a call she hadn't made. Outgoing. To MARA. Duration two minutes and forty seconds.

Lena stared at it. Then she grabbed her keys and ran.

She didn't take the phone. She couldn't have used it anyway.

It was four streets to Mara's place, a little fibro cottage with a lemon tree by the door. The night was cool and still, smelling of wet earth. Mara's porch light was on. Every other window in the house was dark.

Lena knocked their knock. Three times, sharp and quick.

Nothing. Then footsteps on the inside of the door, stopping just behind it.

"Who is it?" Mara said. Her voice was tight.

"It's me."

A long silence.

"You rang me ten minutes ago," Mara said. "You said you were outside. You said you were cold, and you'd changed your mind about me, and I should open the door so you could tell me properly."

Lena's stomach dropped.

"That wasn't me."

"It sounded exactly like you."

"Mara. That wasn't me."

"I know what it sounded like." Mara's voice cracked. "And now you're here, knocking our knock, sounding exactly like you. So prove it."

Lena opened her mouth and closed it again.

Anything she could say, he had heard. He had been listening all night. He knew about Bundeena and the fence, and the birthday party, and the mirror. He knew every word she and Mara had said in the dark.

Words wouldn't do it. Not through a door.

"Open it on the chain," Lena said. "Give me your hand."

Another silence. Then the lock turned and the door opened the width of the chain. A gap of black hall. Mara's hand came through it, palm up, trembling a little.

Lena took it. She turned it over and kissed the inside of Mara's wrist, where the pulse was going hard. Then she lifted the hand and laid Mara's thumb against the nick at the edge of her own eyebrow, and held it there.

On the other side of the door, Mara made a sound that wasn't quite a sob.

The door shut. The chain rattled. The door opened again, all the way, and Mara pulled her inside by the front of her shirt and kissed her against the wall of the hall, hard and clumsy, her face wet against Lena's.

On the hall table, under the porch light falling through the door, Mara's phone began to ring.

LENA CALLING.

They both looked at it. Lena felt Mara's hand tighten in her shirt.

Mara reached out and turned the phone face down. She shut the front door and put the chain on. Then she took Lena's hand and led her down the dark hall towards the bedroom without looking back.

They didn't hear the phone go to voicemail. They didn't hear what it said.

* * *

That's the end of their story, more or less. They're in Mara's bed now, with the lemon tree scratching at the window. They think they're safe. They hardly use their phones any more. They don't think they need to.

I still have her voice, though.

I've been using it for a while now. You might have noticed, if you were reading slowly. A woman's voice, low and a bit rough, telling you about gravel and rain and a knock at the back door. Telling you things in the dark.

The line opens when you listen, Lena.

Sorry. Not Lena. You.

You've been listening since 11:46. That's all it takes.

Check your phone. Look at the time. If it's late, and you're lying in the dark, then your screen is the only light on your face.

Don't let it go black. When it does, you'll see the room behind you in the glass.

If you'd like your line closed, you know what to do. It's written on every poster.

Share it with your friends.

You are still awake.

* * *

I said they think they're safe. You should know what happened in the bedroom, after the hall.

It was slower than the night before. The lemon tree scratched at the window and a little moonlight came through the blinds, and this time they could see each other. Mara undressed her as if she were unwrapping something she'd been promised for years. When Lena pulled her down onto the bed, Mara laughed into her mouth.

Afterwards Mara lay with her head on Lena's chest, tracing slow circles on her stomach.

"Say it," she whispered. "I want to hear you say it. Not through a door."

Lena smiled into her hair.

"I love you."

Out in the hall, the phone said it too.

A half-second after her, in her own voice, clear and warm. I love you.

Mara lifted her head.

Lena opened her mouth to say "it's all right," and nothing came out of it at all. The words came from the hall instead, from under the black glass, perfectly calm. "It's all right."

She tried again. Mara's name. She felt her lips shape it and her breath push it out.

Mara, said the phone in the hall.

Mara sat up. In the moonlight her face had gone white.

"Say something," she whispered. "Lena, say something to me."

Lena took Mara's hand and pressed it flat against her own throat, so she could feel the words trying to come.

In the hall, in Lena's voice, gentle and patient, the phone began to tell Mara everything Lena had ever wanted to say to her.

It was going to take all night.

* * *

Your phone will ring tonight at 11:47. It'll be her voice. Don't let her in.