Keep it small.

Whatever you do, keep the light small. I know it is hard. I know how much of the dark there is, and how little of it you can hold at once, and how badly you want to open your hand and let the whole room come back. Do not. That is the first thing and the last thing and every thing between.

I do not know how long I have been down here. Long enough that the lamp oil went, and then the candles, and then the box of matches one by one, each a second of the room before it guttered. Now there is only what you carry. I write by it. You move it across the words and I feel, somehow, that they are being read — that someone is out there in the last of the light, following my hand.

Hello. I did not think anyone would come.

Here is the rule, and I have paid for it, so believe me. The thing in the dark is not in the dark. It is in the light. It is only ever exactly as large as what you illuminate. In a small light it is a small thing, a stain at the edge, a wrongness you can almost ignore. But the more you light, the more of it there is to see, and it is all of it there, waiting to be given a size.

So we keep it small. My grandmother kept it small her whole life, one candle, never two. She told me the dark is not empty and not full — it is undecided, and light is the thing that decides it. Show it a hand's width and it is a hand's width. Show it a room and God help you.

Your light is smaller than it was a moment ago. Have you noticed? Mine did that too, near the end. It is not you. It is the hour. The light goes whether we feed it or not.

I should not have read the last keeper's book. I found it down here, in a tin, and I read it the way you are reading mine — a stranger's words surfacing out of the black one line at a time. He wrote the rule too. He wrote it in a hand that got smaller and smaller as his light failed, until the last page was a single word I had to press my eye almost to the paper to find.

The word was run.

But you cannot run from a thing that is only where you look. You can only stop looking. And I have been trying, God, I have been trying to stop, but the dark is so complete and the light is so warm and there is always one more line, one more line, one more —

You are doing it too. You know you are. Every word you light, you are deciding a little more of it into the room.

Stop reading.

Please. While your light is still small. Close the book, and let the dark stay undecided, and go back up to wherever there is a sky. I mean it more than I have meant anything. There is nothing at the bottom of this page worth the size it will cost you.

But you won't. Will you.

No. Neither did I. Here — I will make it easy. I will hold the last of my light for you, all of it, everything I have kept small for so long, and I will open my hand, and for one moment you will see the whole room the way I have never let myself see it, and you will know exactly how large it has been all along, standing just past the edge of every light I ever —

there. it is looking at you now. don't