It’s quiet when it ends. That’s all Herb will ever remember thinking about. The noise had been a cacophony and Herb had felt fear twist around his fragile bones, and it was so loud, he could feel it beating through the earth, a bloody heart dripping acid rain down on all of them.
The silence was so complete that Herb worried for his eardrums in that distant, far-off way his thoughts had turned into. Silent. Silence. Absence of noise. His thoughts were too loud in comparison. He was drowning in them. Choking on air. Choking on silence, thick and still in the back of his throat. It’s beyond quiet – it's a deadly silence, a foreboding one. Something all consuming.
Herb takes a deep breath. It rattles in his lungs, shaken and unsure, unsure if this was part of the script, the next scene. Uncertain if this was going to be allowed. When it’s exhaled into the night air, it’s loud in the quiet street.
The neighbours spring into action. They freeze like that, sometimes, when they forget no to wait for their orders, for their lines and stage directions. Sometimes, the rain runs rivets down the sides of their faces, and Herb stands right there in the gutter, a statue waiting to be worn down.
It hasn’t happened in seven months and twenty-three days, now, and even that hadn’t been bad, everyone going back to their lives when a girl, a toddling little thing too young to remember her part, had stumbled out of her house and thrown her doll into the street.
“My want a truck,” she had wailed, and one of the neighbours who had shed both names, the one from Before and the one from During, had bought her a nice yellow one, since he’d made it on time to his interview because of her.
That had been life, for a very long time, and then for seven months and twenty-three days it hadn’t. The neighbours unfreeze, begin to duck in and out of each other’s houses, gossip hiding shaky hands and dulled eyes and reset numbers.
It is very, very unfair that seven months and twenty-three days is erased in one hour, by one storm, by one witch. But Herb is used to things being terribly, horribly, wrenchingly unfair, so he nods to Abilash, and to Harold, and fixes on a cheery grin as he begins to water his plants.
“Alright, Herb?” asks Abilash, who has never once asked to be called Norm, and who has never once asked Herb why he is not John.
Herb breathes in deep. “Alright, Abilash,” he says, like it’s easy, except he knows that Abilash and Harold will be around, later, once they’ve got their breath back. They did it last time, and they’ll do it this time, and every time after.
Miss Agnes had called them cowards, and maybe they are, these three men who don’t speak that woman’s name, these three men with their unsteady hands gripping cards, these three men who have each other, these three men with the nightmares they don’t speak of either. Maybe Miss Agnes was right. Maybe this is always going to be what cowardice means, intertwined with fear in a way everyone forgets to do with bravery.
The sky had gone green, this time. Not red. Herb wonders if he will ever be comforted by storms rolling in from the horizon again – he'd liked it, once. Sitting by the tallest window and watching the heavy clouds smother the world in darkness. But then, he used to know that every storm ended.
The sky had gone a vibrant, venomous green and Herb’s joints ached, his bones brittle and ready to break. Herb was too young for chronic pain, too healthy, too cheerful. But there was this too; Herb hadn’t used to know how to lie. How to pretend. How to act.
They all of them had chronic pain. Herb had ripped up the garden Wanda had written him into creating, and then, dirt under his fingernails and sweat on his forehead, he’d replanted new seeds from the packet on the kitchen bench.
Susanna down the street – Susanna who had been Susanna her whole life, who had been Susanna for all of Herb’s, who had been labelled Mary until the very name Susanna felt unnatural in Herb’s mouth – had packed up her house and her dogs years ago, the second the Hex came down.
“I don’t understand why you’re staying, Herb,” she’d said once, brash as Mary had never been. She hadn’t been part of the main cast – most of her time had been spent too scared to so much as twitch. “You’re not an actor. You’re not her plaything. Do you even know that? Do you even know?”
Herb, with his dirty hands and the earth pulsing underneath the soles of his feet, hadn’t said anything.
Susanna calls him now. “I heard there’s been another incident,” she sighs, because of course she’s heard, of course she has, and of course someone has alerted all those old Westview residents, tied together by a playwright as they are.
He expects her to say what the fuck, John, or I’ve got a spare room, please, I’ve got a spare room. Instead, she just says, “you be careful now, fuckwit, cos I ain’t rescuing no one.”
“Not even your fuckwit?”
“Not even him,” Susanna says sagely.
“I didn’t expect you to say that,” Herb admits, and he watches the clouds recede like that will make anything better at all. Like maybe they won’t return, this time.
“You can’t make someone leave for you, John,” Susanna whispers. She says all her saddest and wisest things in whispers.
He doesn’t know what to say to that, so he says nothing at all. The flowers in the front yard are going to die soon. He should bring them inside, enjoy their beauty while it lasts. But then he’d have to watch them rot.
Herb finds himself in the front yard with an unopened, ice cold bottle of beer in one hand, watching the house across the street like he’s waiting for the lights to flick on. Watching the foundations to the left, the graffiti and the hate and the fear that the director might choose to rebuild there, one day, and rebuild and reshape all of them along with it. The night air is cold, Herb can hear his own breaths, and somebody died tonight.
Agnes O’Connor had been his friend, at least sort of. At least mostly. At least when it counted the least, but never when his breath stuttered, or when she had blood on her teeth and an unlit house. Never when it mattered most.
Welcome to Westview: Home! It’s where you make it, says the sign. And Wanda – she - had made it her home, had made it their stage and their prison and their personas, but Herb had made it his home first.
Herb had felt her devastation roll over him, like the clouds over the grey sky, and Herb still itched with it, sometimes. Chronic pain, chronic fear. Bruises and scars and wounds.
Herb had done his best to scrawl his fury and his fear onto the foundations of what she should have had, and Herb had kept the name Herb, and Herb had missed Wanda’s little rascals scampering over the place. Herb hadn’t known where John ended and Herb began, so he decided to stop looking. The sky turned green, instead of red, instead of scarlet, instead of bloodlike, and tonight, Herb had lost a friend.
A rascal had returned home, and scampered off again, and Herb had thought something awful about fractured halves that he couldn’t remember now. Home. It’s where you make it. Susanna is gone from here, and Mary is more gone. Herb is still here. The hedges and the hydrangeas and the fig tree out back are here. The gentle flowers, the tulips and the dandelions and the daisies, with their silky, delicate, breakable petals are here.
You can’t make someone leave for you, and you can’t make someone stay. And someone must always leave first. It was never going to be Herb, who has put his roots deep into the earth and clings to them, there. When the storms roll in, Herb watches avidly, but not joyfully, and never comforted.
“You’re batshit crazy, Miss Agnes,” Herb says, gesturing with his beer bottle, not ready to speak in past tense, “but I reckon I’ll miss it all the same, if you’d believe it.”
And then Herb, Herb who is strong, and durable, and delicate, and breakable, turns his back on the unlit house and the filthy foundations and the clear sky, and he walks inside to wash his hands.
He’d never had to ask Abilash or Harold to stay. They’d never had to ask him. Maybe this is cowardice. Maybe this is bravery. Herb wouldn’t know.
What he does know, as the tap screeches and the floorboards creak under his heavy tread, weighed down and grounded, is that the storms can keep coming, and keep coming, and keep coming, but that only means that each of them must end after all.