Chương 90: The Only Lit Thing

He searched the road first, because the road was where she should have been. Four hundred yards of it, doorway by doorway, in short stills strung together like beads. Then Salt Row itself, twice. Then the streets either side of it. His legs did not get tired, and that was the strange horror of the night. He could go and go, hour after hour, and the going found nothing, and being able to go forever just meant nobody was going to make him stop.

By the time the sky went from black to a dirty gray he had been through every doorway between the school and the water. His aunt was not in any of them. And she could not be lost. That was the one thing her Talent had ever promised. Wherever Peg was, all night, she had known exactly where she was, and she had not come home. He had tried not to think about that all night, because it could only mean one of two things: she could not come home, or she had chosen not to. He had not looked past the row all night.

She had been walking to them, so the road was where he kept looking, because as long as he was searching the road, she was still on the road. The school was where people went, and she was not at the school, and nobody at the school had said one word about a second place. He stood at the bottom of Salt Row and made himself look further down. The low city was dark. Street after street of it, down to the sea wall, not one window with anything in it.

The muster shed at the end of the boards stood dark too, and its rank of boats was gone. Everything that could float was out in the streets somewhere, working. One building had light. Out at the end, on the stones, the Bell House stood up out of all that black with every window yellow, the only lit thing between the hill and the sea. Abe went down toward it at a run, and the closer he got the more it sounded like water. Not the sea. People. Hundreds of people under a stone roof, all murmuring at once.

Six hundred people were in the Bell House, and the noise of them rolled around the stone like a tide in a cave. Families slept on the floor on coats. A row of old people had the bell-ringers' bench. Someone's dog went up and down the aisles being loved by children who had cried all night, and a man was asleep standing up against a pillar, actually asleep, with his arms folded. Three of the crew folk stood around a pot of coffee, arguing about a route.

And at the far end, on a chair, with her work coat still on, sat Peg. She had a half circle of crew around her and she was talking with her eyes shut.

"The bend in Weaver's Row looks like a left and it isn't. You keep on. The water comes over your boots there and it doesn't get deeper, it just wants you to think it does. The green door with the two steps is the only door on that side with two steps. That's the one with the family in it, third floor."

"How far past the bend?" said one of the crew.

"Forty yards. Little less."

"She's been doing that since before midnight," said a woman off one of the boats, seeing Abe's face.

"Every street in the low city, out of her own head. Fastest set of charts anybody ever sat on a chair." Abe stood in the middle of the Bell House and could not say anything. Then Peg opened her eyes, like someone feeling the weather change, and saw him. The chair went over. Her legs nearly went with it, dead from the hours of sitting, and she swore at them like they belonged to someone else.

Then she came through the crew, straight across half a family's floor space, and took hold of him by both arms, hard, and went through him the way a woman goes through a coat for a key. Hands. Head. The rip in his sleeve. The state of his knuckles.

"June," she said.

"Safe. She's coming down with the block at first light. Nobody's hurt. Not one of them." Peg shut her eyes for a moment and breathed once, all the way down and all the way out.

"Your phone rang," Abe said. It came out smaller and younger than he meant it to.

"It rang and rang. I stood in the hall listening to it ring."

"It's in my coat pocket and I never heard it ring. Listen to this place." She still had him by the arms.

"I know, love. I know."

"You said you were walking down."

"I got as far as the stones," said Peg.

"The boats went out all night." It came out of him harder than he meant it to.

"You could have sent one word on any of them."

"Yes," said Peg.

"I could have." This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Peg." A crewman at her elbow.

"Weaver's Row boat's going. Can we have the door with the steps again? The whole run, from the bend." Peg looked at Abe one second longer. The rest of that answer was long, and hers, and not for a hall full of strangers. She sat back down on the chair someone had set upright, and shut her eyes, and gave them the bend again. Someone had rung those bells, and Abe wanted to know who.

He asked a man by the coffee, who asked another, and the second one nodded across the hall at the tower step, where an old man sat alone with a mug he was not drinking from. Seventy at least, small and neat, with his coat buttoned all the way up. Abe went over and sat down next to him.

"You'll want the step," the old man said.

"I'll move."

"There's room."

"There's room if I move." He moved anyway, an inch. Then he said, as if answering a question nobody had asked, "I only rang the bells because I didn't know what else you'd ring. There's no bell for this. There's the tide bell and there's the six o'clock, and they're the same bell, if we're being exact about it. It's the striking that's different." Abe looked at him properly.

"You rang the bells," he said.

"On Thursday."

"I wind the tide clock Thursdays. Thirty-one years of it, though the first year shouldn't count, I was only carrying the oil." He turned the mug around in his hands.

"I went down to wind it and the water in the throat of the harbor was running the wrong way. Not fast. Just wrong. And I stood there a minute thinking, you're an old man, Prosser, and water doesn't run the wrong way. And then I went up and rang the only thing up there I know how to ring."

"At twenty after four."

"Twenty-two minutes after," said Prosser.

"If we're being exact." Abe thought about twenty-two minutes after four. Every person in Calder standing in a doorway, looking toward the sea, minutes before the first thing put its face out of a drain. Forty people already out of their houses on Salt Row when it came up the steps. June out on the front step in her coat, instead of at the kitchen table with her back to the yard.

"My whole street was out of doors before the first one came up," Abe said.

"They heard the bells and came out to look."

"I expect they did. People do." Prosser turned the mug again.

"I'll be honest with you, son. I've sat here most of the night feeling a complete fool. Ringing a tide bell at four in the afternoon with no tide. There'll be men at the harbor office with things to say about it, if there's a harbor office by Monday."

"How many hours can a person last in a doorway with their boots already on?"

"That's not a real question," said Prosser.

"Everybody I know spent last night alive with their boots already on," said Abe. Prosser looked into his mug for a while.

"Well," he said at last.

"It wanted oiling anyway." When the morning was full up, Abe walked back up the hill and fetched the block down himself. Eleven people and a girl coming down the hill in a line like a field trip, Colin at the back with the crowbar he had never had to use, and Abe out in front, watching the drains. Peg met her at the door. The first part of what passed there took no words, but the second part took a great many, both of them at once, neither listening.

When Peg finally let go of her, June came over to Abe at the coffee.

"You look worse than yesterday," she said, and then stood with her shoulder against his arm and did not move away for a long time. Within the hour she had been absorbed by the end of the hall where the small children were, and had a system going for whose turn it was on the rocking horse. Mrs. Bewley found Abe by the coffee past noon. She had been running the child-minding end of the hall like she ran everything, by name and at volume, and it was past noon before the hall let her stop.

She came at him with two mugs and handed him one, which was as near as she came to sitting down.

"Your aunt's the best thing in this building," she said.

"Half those crews would still be feeling down blind alleys without her." She drank from her own mug.

"You saw Ada up at the school, then. With the seniors." The mug stopped somewhere short of Abe's mouth.

"She's not up at the school," he said.

"She is. She was up there for the sword afternoon, and the school's where everybody stayed." Mrs. Bewley said it like a thing she had said to herself a number of times already.

"They kept the seniors up top. That's what they did."

"Mrs. Bewley. She came down." The hall went on being loud around a small circle of quiet that opened up with the two of them inside it.

"She came down Thursday," Abe said.

"I met her at the school gate. She asked me if I'd gotten you out as well, and I told her you were fine, and that the whole street was up, and she went past me down the hill at a dead run. I watched her go. She was running to you." Mrs. Bewley stood very still, and put the three facts together. The school thought Ada had left. Her mother had thought she stayed. And between the gate and Salt Row, on Thursday, in the dark coming down, nobody had seen her since.

"She never got to me," said Mrs. Bewley.

"She never got to the street," said Abe.

"I cleared it, and I was up and down it all night." His voice was doing something and he let it.

"She wasn't on it. And I checked every doorway between the school and the water last night, looking for my aunt. She wasn't in any of them either." Mrs. Bewley put both mugs down on the table, very carefully, like a woman whose hands had stopped being reliable.

"Right," she said.

"Right. Then somebody's seen her somewhere else, and I'm going to stand in the middle of this hall and find out who." She went. She got up on a bench in the middle of six hundred people and shouted her daughter's name, and her age, and where she was last seen, and the hall passed it back through itself in a wave, and Abe stood at the table with a mug he never drank from either, listening to the wave go all the way to the far wall. It came back with nothing.

Twice someone stood up with the start of something, and twice it turned out to be somebody else's daughter. The second time, Mrs. Bewley climbed down off the bench and went and looked anyway, at a girl she already knew was not hers, because not looking had stopped being possible. The hall did not find Ada. It just learned, all six hundred of it at once, that she was being looked for. Dobbs came through the doors while the hall was still passing Ada's name around.

He stood in the doorway with the gray morning behind him and the lamp in his hand, unlit now, and he looked down the length of the Bell House like a man reading a tide sheet, until he found what he had come for. What he had come for was Abe. He came down the aisle, past the families and the dog and the coffee, and the crews there went quiet like the shed went quiet, and Dobbs stopped in front of Abe with a face that had been up all night running boats and had something in it to say.

"You," said Dobbs.

"Walk with me."