On the Eleventh Night

 

4th of January, 1602

 

YOU HAVE BEEN running now for hours, running to the edges of your endurance, running to the limits of your sanity.

You ran from the church and through the streets of Stratford. You ran past home; you ran with your children by your side. You ran as behind you the world was eaten up, as all that you have ever known was dissolved and erased, swept away by that implacable, pitiless bank of sheer white, that wave of bright death which even now is hard upon your heels, the void which dogs your every desperate footfall.

If you are exhausted, then the children must be near surrender, though all three of them—Judith and Hamnet, stoical and determined; Susanna, tearful since her dull lover was swallowed by the hungry nullity a yard or two from the glovemaker’s door—keep going, grim and uncomplaining.

You are all four of you running for your lives, until at last, panting and exhausted, you see, perhaps inevitably, the forest hove into view; you realise with a queasy certainty that it is here, in Arden, where everything has to end.

At the very moment when this thought presents itself, you hear a voice—familiar and much-missed—echo from behind you; from, it seems, the void itself, calling as if from the underworld.

“Anne! Anne, my love!”

It is a voice which you had all but lost hope of ever hearing again and at the sound of it, despite your determination to go on, despite your grit and rigour, you stumble. The past days and hours have taught you fearfulness and suspicion and so, as you force yourself onwards, your first thought is that this is a trap, a means by which to gull you and make you hesitate. But, that voice—unmistakeable and heartfelt—is heard once again.

“Anne, please!”

And so you relent. You let yourself believe and you stop and you turn around. At the second that you do so, you understand that your children have gone, that they have been erased from the world. And when you face your husband again, it is with a shrill peal of despair upon your lips.

Impossibly, the void has stopped moving, not gone but waiting, a great unmoving monolithic wall of white, pure absence made manifest.

And yet, standing before it, outlined, silhouetted by the unforgiving glare, like an inky pictogram upon blank parchment is Master William Shakespeare. Your William Shakespeare.

Bloodied and bruised, hair matted, beard wild and unkempt, bleeding from two ugly-looking gashes on his forehead, he is, nonetheless, unmistakably yours, the man whom you married and for whom you bore three children.

He smiles at the sight of you but it is a smile against the odds and it is filled with sorrow.

“Anne,” he says again. “My love.”

“William.”

“It has been a long, strange journey to come home to you.”

“I know. I have seen... I have been shown a little of it.”

“The news is not good. This, I fear, is now to be the end of all things.”

“The void,” you murmur, reaching for the strange language of the Guild. “It has reached our world. It has been drawn here by the knife? I suppose that there is nothing that can stop it now?”

Your husband bows his head. You think at first that this is regret at the scale of the catastrophe. That or else bashfulness, at having been for so long from your side.

Then he raises his eyes and you meet his gaze and understand the truth. He is neither regretful nor abashed, and what you see in his familiar features—the face of that person whom you know better than any other—is something quite unfamiliar. It is, you realises, with a shiver in your heart, pure shame.

“It has been defeated,” he says. “The void. This is to be the finish of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“This world is being scoured clean, my love. It is being destroyed by our own creation before the arrival of the true void.”

“I do not understand,” you murmur. “No, William, I don’t...”

“It is the scorching of the earth, my love, as of that which is laid down to stop the progress of some inferno.”

“No. No, that cannot be.”

“The lattice is safe now. And millions upon millions shall live. One pinprick of a world will die, one amongst an infinity. One single star in the sky. So that all the rest may flourish and thrive.”

“No.”

“We took the decision together. The Guild voted and we were unanimous. The damage that the knife had wrought was too great. We had no other choice but this.”

“But why?” You are protesting, but the answers are already palpably, painfully clear.

“My love, you know why we were chosen.”

Tears sting the edges of your eyes. “Because here, uniquely, you never left. You never wrote. You stayed with us. With your family.”

“Yes,” says William. “Yes, my love.”

And he steps towards you, arms outstretched. There are tears in his eyes too, although he blinks them fiercely away.

Behind him, the void—or rather, perhaps, the pseudo-void—begins once again to advance.

“Tell me,” you say as your husband reaches you and enfolds you in his arms, in his warm, smoky scent. “Hamnet? Does he—I mean, in other worlds? Or is he too only with us... when you stayed?”

“I am sorry,” he says. “Truly. It was the only way.”

He holds you, and you hold him too, and there is a little comfort to be found in this as that great and terrible white wall draws nearer.

But then you raise your head over his shoulder and you look at that logical monstrosity and with all the passion which dwells within you, you shout out your defiance. You shout your name and that of your husband. You shout that of your daughters and that of your doomed and melancholy boy.

You shout of all the things that have made your life important, of everything that has made it count. And your last words, as the blankness washes over you and brings with it the cool sweet balm of oblivion, are those of profound and imperishable love.