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Prentisstown?” I say. “There ain’t nowhere else on New World but Prentisstown.”
    They take yet another look at each other.
    “Stop doing that!” I say.
    “Come on,” Cillian says. “We’ve already got yer bag packed.”
    “How can you already have my bag packed?”
    Cillian says to Ben, “We probably don’t have much time.”
    And Ben says to Cillian, “He can go down by the river.”
    And Cillian says to Ben, “You know what this means.”
    And Ben says to Cillian, “It doesn’t change the plan.”
    “WHAT THE EFF IS GOING ON?” I roar, but I don’t say “eff”, now do I? Cuz it seems the situashun calls for something a little stronger. “WHAT EFFING PLAN?”
    But they’re still not getting mad.
    Ben lowers his voice and I can see him try to get his Noise into some kinda order and he says to me, “It’s very, very important you keep what happened in the swamp outta yer Noise as best you can.”
    “Why? Are the spacks coming back to kill us?”
    “Don’t think about it!” Cillian snaps. “Cover it up, keep it deep and quiet, till yer so far outta town no one can hear you. Now, come on!”
    And he takes off back towards the house, running, actually running .
    “Come on, Todd,” Ben says.
    “Not till someone explains something.”
    “You’ll get an explanashun,” Ben says, taking me by the arm and pulling me along. “You’ll get more than you ever wanted.” And there’s so much sadness to him when he says it that I don’t say nothing more, just follow along running back to the house, Manchee barking his head off behind us.
    By the time we make it back to the house, I’m expecting–
    I don’t know what I’m expecting. An army of Spackle coming outta the woods. A line-up of Mayor Prentiss’s men with guns at the ready. The whole house burning down. I don’t know. Ben and Cillian’s Noise ain’t making much sense, my own thoughts are boiling over like a volcano, and Manchee won’t stop barking, so who can tell anything in all this racket?
    But there’s no one there. The house, our house, is just as it was, quiet and farm-like. Cillian busts in the back door, goes into the prayer room which we never use, and starts pulling boards up from the floor. Ben goes to the pantry and starts throwing dried foods and fruit into a cloth sack, then he goes to the toilet and takes out a small medipak and throws that in, too.
    I just stand there like a doofus wondering just what in the effing blazes is going on.
    I know what yer thinking: how can I not know if all day, every day I’m hearing every thought of the two men who run my house? That’s the thing, tho. Noise is noise . It’s crash and clatter and it usually adds up to one big mash of sound and thought and picture and half the time it’s impossible to make any sense of it at all. Men’s minds are messy places and Noise is like the active, breathing face of that mess. It’s what’s true and what’s believed and what’s imagined and what’s fantasized and it says one thing and a completely opposite thing at the same time and even tho the truth is definitely in there, how can you tell what’s true and what’s not when yer getting everything ?
    The Noise is a man unfiltered, and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking.
    “I ain’t leaving,” I say, as they keep doing their stuff. They don’t pay me no mind. “I ain’t leaving,” I say again, as Ben steps past me into the prayer room to help Cillian lift up boards. They find what they’re looking for and Cillian lifts out a rucksack, an old one I thought I’d lost. Ben opens the top and takes a quick peek thru and I can see some clothes of mine and something that looks like–
    “Is that a book?” I say. “You were sposed to burn those ages ago.”
    But they’re ignoring me and the air has just stopped right there as Ben takes it outta the rucksack and he and Cillian look at it and I see that it’s not quite a book, more a journal type thing with a nice