Chương 88: Two Streets

The school was becoming a place people brought their families. They came up the hill in tens and twenties with bags and dogs and grandmothers, and the caretaker had both gates wide, and someone had turned on every light in the building. Peg was in the kitchens with her sleeves up. Abe had seen her through the window, pointing two women at a cabinet, with two hundred dinners coming. He decided against going in to tell her where he was going. The bells had stopped. He could not have said when.

June was supposed to be inside. June was standing on the school steps with her coat properly on now, watching the neighbors gather at the gate, and the neighbors were not coming in. They were going back down.

"No," said Abe.

"The Marsdens won't leave," June said.

"He's deaf and she won't go without him, and he won't get out of the chair for anybody banging on a door, because he can't hear the banging. Somebody has to stand in front of him and say it's time. And old Turner will say he's fine, and he always says he's fine, and he had a fall on Tuesday."

"Then Mrs. Bewley-""Mrs. Bewley is one person and it's a whole street." June said it fast and flat.

"I do their shopping, Abe. Turner gets up for me. Nobody else has ever seen him do it."

"June. There were nine of those things in our street an hour ago."

"And you killed all nine. You went down in the dark and you counted." She looked at him with her chin up.

"So the one street in the whole city that you know is empty is the one I'm not allowed in?"

"My count's an hour old," said Abe.

"The water moves."

"Then stop wasting the hour." June pointed down the hill.

"The longer we stand here, the older your count gets. That's your argument, not mine." Abe had an answer ready for everything but that.

"Peg said to stay where she could find-""She can find me at home. That's where she looks first anyway." The neighbors were already moving off down the hill, eight or nine of them, Colin at the front with a crowbar he had picked up somewhere. June went down the steps and in among them like a person joining a line she had a place in.

"Get them up here before dark," Abe called after her.

"Obviously," said June, without turning around.

"And don't follow me down. You're crew. Go be crew." He stood on the steps a moment longer. Then he went down the hill too, the other way, toward the water, because he was crew, and when the water went wrong the crews went to the shed. Everyone in Calder knew that. The Corn Road gave out into mud, and the mud gave out into boards, and the muster shed sat at the end of the boards with every light it owned burning. The sea was calm. Abe stopped on the boards when he saw it.

He had run down expecting the water to look like the enemy, but it lay there flat and black and enormous, minding its own business, having an ordinary Thursday evening. Whatever had come up under Salt Row had not come over any wall. It had come from underneath, up through the drowned streets, through the drains, from inside. The shed was louder than he had ever heard it.

Sixty people, maybe more, and the hatch going, and three radios on three different stations, and the back wall of chalk names lit up like a shop window. Fenn stood at the boards writing crew numbers with the stub, arguing with two people at once and winning both. Brammall was by the door with a slate, taking a count off everybody who came in. Streets, not names. He'd say a street, and men would call out what they knew about it, and he'd write.

"Nether Street."

"Dry at six. Watkin's boy came past it."

"The Longmarket."

"Nothing's come up from it since dark," said a man by the racks.

"Weaver's Row neither." Brammall wrote that down too. Mullen was at the hatch with his mug, telling anyone who came near that his hip had gone at four o'clock, a whole twenty minutes before the bells, and that from now on the city could pay him for the hip or take its chances.

"You can all write that down," said Mullen. Nobody wrote it down. It was the busiest anyone had ever been in that shed, and it was the same shed. Abe stood in the doorway and loved it so hard it surprised him. Purnell spotted him from the racks and talked the whole way over.

"There's the school one. You're wet, you're not hurt, don't tell me now, tell me in the boat, we're going out the minute Dobbs stops counting." She put a coil of rope on his shoulder without asking.

"Carry that." Dobbs stood at the middle table with a lamp and the tide sheets, sending crews out two sentences at a time, unhurried about every piece of it. Nobody had put him in charge of anything, and the shed ran through him anyway. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it. The argument at the table was Sefton.

"I've hauled every Sunday since October," Sefton said. His voice had gone up somewhere it did not usually go.

"I know the cuts. I know the Longmarket better than half the men in this shed."

"You do," said Dobbs.

"Then put me in a boat!"

"No." Dobbs shut the word like a drawer.

"Day work is day work. What's in the water tonight isn't hauling. Go home, tell your uncle what you saw down here, and be at the boards at six tomorrow if there's a six tomorrow." Sefton stood there with his fists at his sides. Then he turned and walked for the door, furious, seventeen, and the shed let him go without one joke. Croft was standing by the door when Sefton reached it. Miles Croft, in a proper coat, with a sword wrapped in canvas under one arm, in the muster shed, at night.

He had clearly been turned away already and had clearly not left, and he was arguing his case at the room at large.

"Whitfield," said Dobbs, not looking up. It was not his name.

"Croft," said Croft, who had possibly never had to say his own name twice in his life.

"Croft. Go home."

"I've got eleven years of a family form and my own steel," said Croft, pleasantly, loudly, to everyone, "and my family has bought its way onto every list in this county for two hundred years. There are lists you've never heard of. There's a list for the good seats in church. And now there's finally a door we can't buy open, and it's the one with the actual monsters behind it. My grandfather would have bitten a man."

"He would," said Mullen, from the hatch.

"I knew him."

"Thank you," said Croft.

"Somebody knew him." He shifted the sword under his arm.

"I'll stand at the waterline. Put me wherever it's thinnest, I don't care, I won't touch a boat and you won't have to watch me."

"I'd have to wonder about you," said Dobbs, "and I can't send a boat out and wonder." Dobbs shut it like he had shut it on Sefton. Croft looked around the shed once, at all of it, the boards and the lamps and the men.

"I'd have swept your floors," he said, to nobody in particular. Then he saw Abe, and grinned, and came over as if the whole thing had gone to plan.

"They tell me you killed nine of them with that bar of yours."

"They came up one at a time," said Abe.

"Mostly."

"That's still nine." He said it warmly. He was already going, walking backward toward the door, the trick Ottley did between lessons.

"Don't die before Saturday. We're still taking that opener apart, and I'm not doing it over a funeral." He went out into the dark after Sefton. The two best swordsmen the school had, walking back up the boards together, sent home.

"Dolan," said Dobbs.

"Come here." Abe came to the table. Dobbs looked at him, with the lamp hard on one side of his face.

"You're school," he said.

"Same as those two. Go up the hill." Abe had known it was coming since Sefton's argument, and so his hand was already in his coat. The card had been there since the thirtieth of January. Ainsworth had put it in his hand the day he signed, and said he'd know the day he needed it, and he had not believed her. It was gray, about the size of a playing card, with a crest pressed into it and a long number and not one name anywhere on it. He put it on the table next to the tide sheets. Dobbs picked it up.

He read both sides of it, which took a while, because there was almost nothing on it to read. The table had gone quiet. The men nearest it had stopped talking too, and Mullen was leaning half out of the hatch with his mug in the air, and a man at the back asked what was on the table and got told to shut up and look.

"I put my name on a permit for you in November," Dobbs said at last.

"Schoolboy, water work, my responsibility. If you drowned it was me who'd done it. That's what a permit is, a name." He turned the card over once more and set it down.

"This thing hasn't got a name on it anywhere I can go and shout at."

"No," said Abe.

"Whose is it?"

"I can't say."

"Can't or won't?"

"Can't," said Abe. It was true, the agreement had a line about it, but it would have been true with no agreement anywhere. Dobbs looked at the card, and then at Abe, for longer than he had ever looked at him, sacks included.

"He's district," said Cottle, from the racks, who had not spent a whole sentence on anything all evening. District meant the office that mapped the drowned streets from boats and wrote down what was under them. Nine years of that, and they had never once got a person into the water. Cottle had just decided Abe was the person they finally got. Nobody corrected him. Abe watched the word go into the shed and travel from man to man, and knew it would be up the Corn Road by Saturday, and that he could not stop it.

It was wrong, and it was safer than the truth, and he was almost glad of it. Dobbs slid the card back across the table.

"You've hauled for me since November and I've watched you in the water," he said.

"That's the half I can vouch for myself. This thing can have the other half." He pushed the card another inch.

"Put it away. Purnell. He's yours. The Longmarket." The shed emptied into the boats like a school at the last bell, all at once and by long habit. Purnell's boat was the third one out on the rank of boats tied along the boards, low and wide, with the poles racked down the middle. Cottle was already in the stern. Purnell talked the whole time she loaded it.

The Longmarket was the wide one, she said, the widest street in the drowned city, and there were people on the far side of it, on Weaver's Row and the streets behind, and no word had come up from any of them since dark, and Brammall had written the same nothing next to the Longmarket twice. Abe was passing the rope coil down to Cottle when the sound came. It came from the north and down the hill, off the wet roofs. Sound in Calder after dark is everyone's business. Screaming, and doors, and under it something else.

Something coming up out of drains. He knew the direction before he had finished hearing it. Salt Row. Where nine dead things were lying on the cobblestones because he had counted them and cleared it. Where the Marsdens were, and old Turner, who got up for exactly one person. Where June was. Purnell had stopped talking. The Longmarket was twenty minutes by boat, poling in the dark. Salt Row was four minutes if he ran, and he was the fastest thing this region had seen in twenty years, some man on the TV had said so.

He could empty one street fast and completely, or he could sit in a boat with a pole in his hands and be one pair of arms out of three, and reach neither street in time to matter. That was all the thinking he did, and he did most of it already moving. He let Cottle take the coil, and stepped back from the rail, and walked.

"Salt Row," he said to Brammall, going past the door.

"It's going again. Both ends of the cut." And that was every word he gave them. The rank of boats watched him go. Purnell stood in the stern with a pole in her hands, watching him, and Dobbs came out of the shed door with the lamp.

"That boat is going now," said Dobbs, to his back, flat and clear. Abe kept walking. He did not answer. Every step up the boards, with sixty people's eyes on him, said the same thing to the whole shed. He was not taking Dobbs's orders any more, and nobody in there knew whose he was taking instead. The boards gave out into mud, and the mud gave out into the Corn Road. Two streets were calling at once now, and whatever happened on the Longmarket tonight was part of what he had chosen. Then he ran.

Up the hill in the dark, with the shed's lamplight behind him and the sound in front of him, getting louder. He had been given exactly one job by the one person in Calder whose word he wanted, and his own street was screaming.