Chương 100: Danforth

At half past eleven at night Abe stopped the world in a school corridor and asked SECOND MEETING for the thing from the harbor, and it came. It did not walk in. It was standing where it had not been a second before, folded exactly as it had been folded in the water, dark red like wet brick, as high as the ceiling. The noticeboard on the wall behind showed straight through its head.

He had first asked on the Wednesday after the water went down, sitting on these tiles in his socks because his aunt and his sister were asleep four feet from his own bed. It had taken him until then to get his fifty seconds of calm back. It did not move while he walked around it, or when he put his face a hand's width from the blunt front of it and looked for its eyes and found that it did not have any. It moved when he stepped in past the first leg.

The leg came around low and fast, exactly as low and exactly as fast, as solid as it had been in the water, and took his feet out from under him, and he hit the tiles on his back, with the ceiling lights above him where the gray water had been the first time. He got up. It was folded back where it started, waiting. Nineteen times, that first night, in a corridor that smelled of floor polish and school dinners. On the fourth night he got his weight onto his back foot before the leg arrived.

He still went over, sideways instead of straight back, but the sea had never given him that much. Before this, one person had put him down in his whole life, and that was Jen Kelsall on a hotel carpet in Leeds, and she had done it in a room with nobody watching. This one had done it in front of the whole city. So he was going to train on it, every night, until he could take that leg apart in his sleep.

It would stand in this corridor and throw him for as long as he wanted, and one night he was going to walk in past that leg and stay on his feet, and then he was going to do it again, and again, until the move that beat him in front of Calder could not touch him. On the ninth night he did it. The leg came around, and he was not where it came, and his feet stayed under him, and he put his hand flat on the plate of its side and stood there breathing while the corridor lights buzzed over both of them.

Set Stance · Apprentice Lv 8 (0 / 12, 800) He read it standing in his socks with a dead thing frozen a foot away, and grinned at it like an idiot. Then he stepped in again and it put him straight back on the tiles. He got up. He was going to be here a while. He let the world go at about one in the morning and got back into bed. June was awake.

He could tell she was awake from her breathing, and she knew he could tell, and neither of them said anything, because she had stopped asking where he went at night some time in November. Two weeks went past. They pumped the low city out and carried its furniture into the road, and the water line stayed on every wall at chest height after the pumps stopped. They buried Dobbs on the Saturday and shut the harbor to do it. Abe had never seen the shed empty before.

Purnell walked at the front with crew nine and did not say one word the whole way, which frightened him more than the rest of it put together. He had thought he would come apart at that one and he did not. He had already done it, at his aunt's table on the Sunday with his head down on his arms, and what was left over at the graveside was a cold morning and a lot of wet men in their good clothes. The rail came down at the end of that week.

Fenn took every tag off it and put them in a box, except one, and nobody asked him about that and nobody ever would. Three days later they did it again, for Ada Bewley, at eleven in the morning. The church took everyone and then took more, and there were people standing along the back wall and out into the porch in the rain. Half the year came. Abe stood at the back with his aunt.

He managed all of it until the part where six people carried her out past him, and then he found he could not look at that, so he looked at the floor tiles instead until the door had shut. Mrs. Bewley shook every hand at that door for an hour in the rain. When Abe got to her she took his hand in both of hers and said thank you for coming, and she said it to him just like she said it to the man in front of him and the woman behind him. He had wanted that to be a relief and it was not one.

On the way out, a girl from the year below asked somebody whether it was true that Ada had trained in the school hall every single evening.

"Every one," the boy said.

"She hadn't anywhere else to go." Abe walked back down the hill with Peg, and did his Thursday at Riddell's shop, and came home smelling of the shop. The core stayed under his cot in its canvas. Nobody in Calder could buy a thing that size, and the last time he sold a big one two strangers had walked him up his own road for it. So it sat there, and June put her shoes on top of it, and it was worth more than everything else in that kitchen put together. School opened again on the second of March.

Nobody was frightened of him. He had lain on a cot sixty feet from that hall since six in the morning, bracing for it, and it never came. What came instead was forty people who had known him since he was eleven, and not one of them could work out what their face was supposed to do. Sam Ottley got halfway across the hall with his mouth already open and then stopped and put his bag on a hook.

His mother had come out of the Bell House on the Friday with a broken hip and was going to be fine, and there was no way to say they got my mam out in a room where Ellis Naylor was sitting, because nobody had reached Ellis Naylor's grandmother. So Ottley said nothing, and Ellis said good morning in a voice like a door closing. Then Nell Mott came in late and said "All right, Dolan?" from three rows away at her ordinary volume, which is enormous, and half the room flinched at the sound of a person being normal.

By the fire door the mat-order board still had ten tags in it, and the tenth still said BEWLEY in Nita's green marker. Nita kept that board and Nita never smudged anything, so it was perfect. Nobody had taken it down and nobody was going to. Croft came across the hall and hit him on the arm, and it was the bad one, and Abe let him.

"Ow."

"That's for three weeks of ducking me." Croft dumped his bag on the bench beside Abe's.

"Where are you living?" Abe looked at him. Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

"Everybody knows, you great idiot. Salt Row's condemned from the bend down. Where are you living?"

"School kitchens. There's cots."

"You're sleeping in the kitchens." Croft stared at him.

"In this building. Where I have eaten my lunch."

"There's a stove and everything."

"There's a stove and everything," said Croft.

"Right. We've got the whole top floor doing nothing, and my mother has been unbearable for two weeks because there is nobody in this city she is allowed to help. You'd be doing me a personal favor. I'd get my evenings back." It was not pity. Croft had never pitied anyone in his life and would not have known how to start.

"Peg won't," said Abe.

"Ah." Croft thought about that for exactly as long as it deserved.

"No. She wouldn't, would she."

"She'd rather sleep on a shelf than owe your mother a bed."

"That is the most sensible thing anybody in your family has ever said." Croft picked his bag back up.

"Then come and use the yard. Not the hour you owe me, that's separate, I'm still collecting that. I mean the bars and the mats and the lot. It's sat there two weeks and my father keeps walking past it looking at it."

"Your family's all right?"

"We're up the hill. We didn't get a drop." Croft's face did something quick and uncomfortable and then went back to normal.

"Which I know. People keep telling me how lucky we are, like I arranged it."

"Thursday," said Abe.

"Thursday. Bring the arm or don't, I'm not fussy." It was the first ordinary conversation anyone had had with him in that building, and Abe's throat went tight over a boy being rude to him. The room got worse through the morning. Tench walked into the middle of it at ten after nine, looked at them, and shut it down.

"Right. Everybody's had two weeks. Some of you in here lost somebody and the rest of you are standing around like the floor's wet." He dropped the roll book on the bench.

"It isn't. It's a Monday. Sit down." He uncapped the marker.

"Half of you will end up working the drowned streets, because that is where the work is now and it will be there for twenty years. Nobody has ever taught you to stand on wet ground. Everything you know about footing you learned on a dry mat." He drew a line on the whiteboard and put a stick figure on it, and then he taught, loudly, for an hour, about ground. It was the kindest thing anyone did for that room all day, and he did it with a marker.

Danforth found him at half past three, in the corridor outside Tench's office, with the year going home past both of them.

"Abe."

"Piers."

"I want to ask you something." Danforth put his bag down between his feet, and then did not seem to know what to do with his hands.

"Here. Not in an office, not to a teacher. I'm not going to be that."

"All right."

"You can tell me I'm wrong. I want you to be. I've been trying to be wrong about this for two weeks and I can't get there." He stopped, and started again.

"So." Abe put his hand on the office door and did not open it.

"October. One of them came up out of the ground on your street. Your building. Somebody went down eight steps in the night and killed it and never said so, and your whole road has spent four months asking who." Danforth held up a finger, not aggressively, just counting.

"February. Another one comes up out of the ground on the same street, in the same building, four floors under your sister."

"That's two things happening in the same place."

"It is. On its own it's nothing, I know that." A second finger.

"That same night there were nine of them dead in the road outside your door, and you were the one who told the shed how many. Nine. Before anybody else had been down there to count."

"They were lying in the street. Anybody could have counted them."

"Anybody didn't." A third finger, and his voice came up, and he did not bring it back down this time.

"And you told them what was under the sea wall. Not that there might be something down there. How big the room was. What the floor was covered in. That there was a big one in the middle of it and it was pointed at the mouth." Down the corridor, two people who had been getting their bags had stopped getting their bags.

"My father was on that wall!" Danforth was shouting now, and the shock of it went along the corridor like a dropped tray.

"Everybody's father was on that wall, because you said so, and you were RIGHT, Abe, you were right about every single part of it." He stood there with his chest going.

"Sorry," he said.

"Sorry."

"It's all right."

"It isn't." He pushed his hair back with one hand.

"And the house. Nether Street. You knew that house was empty from the middle of the road. Open door, black hall, you went past it and you didn't even turn your head."

"I guessed." It was out of him before he had decided anything. It was a small lie and it was a bad one, and he heard it land, and he watched what it did to Danforth's face.

"You guessed."

"There was no light in it. Nobody had-""I was there." Danforth said it quietly, which was worse than the shouting.

"I was two feet off your shoulder with my hand on my own lamp. You didn't slow down. You didn't look at it. You said empty like you were reading it off a list. And then I went in and did that house room by room, every room of it, and it took me four minutes to know the thing you knew from the street." Abe's ears had gone hot.

"I've asked you three times now. Twice that night and once just then, and the first two times you said nothing, and I let it go. People are allowed to say nothing. I say nothing about all sorts." He looked at the floor between them.

"But you just told me you guessed." He picked his bag up, and then he set it back down again.

"You already knew about all of this beforehand, didn't you." Abe stood with his hand flat on the office door and found the only true sentence he had.

"I didn't know it was going to happen." It was true, and it was not the answer. Danforth had asked what he knew. Abe had told him what he had not known, and heard himself do it a moment too late to take it back.

"That's not a no," said Danforth.

"It's not a-" Danforth said it again, over the top of him.

"It's not a no." His hands came down to his sides. The fight went out of his voice, and that was worse.

"You've had two weeks as well. That's the sentence you brought."

"Piers-""No, let me get it out, I've had it in me since the twelfth." He was not shouting any more.

"The bit I can't do is why. You knew something, and you said nothing, and there has to be a why, and the only one I can make fit is that you liked it. Being the one who knew. Being the boy off the television that everybody comes and asks." Abe's mouth opened and this time the words came out fast, all of them, in a rush.

"I never asked for any of the filming. Not one second of it. A woman put a phone in my face on a road in the rain and I stood where the crew lead told me to stand. I have never gone looking for a camera in my life. Ask anybody on that water what I did all week. I ran messages. I carried people out. I went in the houses nobody wanted. Not one person on any board in this city ever had to come and get me.

And if you think I did a minute of it for a clip, then you have never stood in that shed, and you should go down and try it for a day." It was more than he had ever said out loud about himself. Danforth listened to every word of it. He did not interrupt. When it stopped he waited a moment longer in case there was more, and there was not.

"You fought that one," said Danforth. Abe's hand was still on the door.

"I said you liked the attention and you went at me for a solid minute. I asked you whether you knew and you gave me a sentence you'd had ready." He bent and got the strap of his bag onto his shoulder.

"I'm going to tell the two who came for you in January. The ones who walked you up Salt Row and put you in a car." He said it plainly, and there was no pleasure anywhere in it.

"What I saw and what you didn't answer. Not what I think it means. I can't prove what I think it means."

"You don't know who they were."

"No."

"Nobody does. They didn't leave a name."

"Then I'll find one." Danforth said it without any heat, which is what made it land.

"Half your street watched it happen. Mrs. Bewley was out on her own landing with her arms folded. Colin was down by the stairs with his bike halfway out. Somebody saw the car, and somebody got a look at whatever they showed your aunt, and I am going to go and ask all of them until one of them tells me something, and then I'll go and ask the next thing."

"That could take you weeks."

"I've got weeks."

"They already know me."

"Then me telling them costs you nothing, does it," said Danforth. He had been kind to people his entire life, and this was the first time Abe had ever watched him decide not to be. He was not finished. He stood there with the bag on his shoulder and one more thing in him, and it was clear he had not decided whether to say it. He said it.

"I was top of that board for two years. I got up at six for it. Nobody helped me and nobody filmed it and I never minded, because I thought that was just how it went, and then you went past me in one morning." His jaw moved.

"I don't care about the board. I want you to know that, because you'll think it, everybody will think it. It isn't the board. There are people in this year who buried somebody last week, and you knew something, and I'd be doing this if you were the worst in the school." Then he went down the corridor toward the doors, past nine or ten people who had stopped pretending to do anything else. He did not drop his head going past any of them. Abe stayed where he was with his hand on the office door.

He had just given the longest speech of his life, every word of it true, and he had spent all of it on the one thing Danforth had gotten wrong. By the doors, someone said, "What was that?" Nell Mott said she did not know. Sam Ottley said he had heard most of it. Then Ottley started telling them. The doors banged and banged and the year went home, and Abe stood in the corridor with his hand on the office door, because he lived here now, and there was nowhere in this building far enough away.