Chương 10: The Drain

June got in at twenty after five. That was twenty minutes later than she should've, and she came through the door already annoyed about it.

"Don't," she said.

"I haven't said anything."

"You don't have to. It's all over you." She dropped her bag by the door.

"I went around by the Corn Road. It's longer. That's all it is." Peg did not look up from the sink.

"Everybody is going around by the Corn Road," Peg said. June went off to get her shoes off, and Abe stood in the kitchen doorway and swallowed it. The bottom end of Salt Row had been shut in everything but name for a week. Nobody had made a rule. The block had simply stopped going down there. Then somebody nailed two boards across the top of the old service steps, and everybody agreed that was that. Two dogs had gone missing off that end of the row.

One of them belonged to the Bewleys, two floors down, which is how Abe found out that Ada Bewley lived in his own block. June's walk to school was eleven minutes and now it was half an hour. She kept a count in her head of the streets she was still allowed to walk down on her own, and the count kept going down. She had never told anybody in that apartment that she did it. Peg dried her hands.

The knuckles had been split across the middle since October and she put cream on them twice a day and never once got ahead of it.

"You have not been down there," she said. It was not a question. She said it to the window.

"No," Abe said. That was the second one. He went and sat on the end of his bed with the door shut and got the tin out from under it. Thirty-one marks. Fourteen from Saturday, and eleven from sharpening, a mark for every blade he put an edge back on that week, and six that had been in there since August. June's doses were two hundred and twenty a month, and they came out of Peg's wages before anything else did.

There was a piece of paper on the kitchen wall with two million written on one side of it and three hundred and forty on the other. Abe had been at Riddell's for two years. He knew what things went for, because he'd carried most of them. He knew what a core went for. A clean one, off something the size of a car, sold for around three hundred marks in Calder. He'd heard that number said out loud across a counter more than once. It had always been a number about other people.

Then he had to sit still for a bit, because the next thought was who would buy it. The truck came to Riddell's on Thursdays, in daylight. Everything off it went into the crates by the side door and got sorted in the front of the shop, where anybody could see it. Except three or four times a year. A van came at the wrong end of the evening, and a crate went straight through to the back room, and it never appeared out front. Abe had carried some of those crates.

He was fifteen the first time and it was a job, and in two years he'd never asked one question about it. He sat on the end of his bed at eighteen and understood exactly what kind of shop he worked in. He was not frightened of Riddell, strangely enough. He simply knew something now that he'd always known. He had worked at Riddell's for two years without asking him for a single thing. This week he asked to move his Tuesday shift to the Monday, so that Tuesday night would be free.

On Saturday he'd taken a length of flat bar out of the yard, off the pile that goes for scrap weight. It was about as long as his arm and heavy at one end. Riddell had watched him put it in his bag and had gone back to the ledger without saying anything. School on Tuesday was a thing that happened to somebody else. He went past the board on the way out because he went past the board every day. DOLAN, A. · Layer 1 · Body 1 · Mind 1 · Blank at the end.

TOP 10 BY NOV 3 in the corner in green, gone furry now, with somebody's thumb through the middle of the 3. Thirteen days. That wall had been wrong about him since the Saturday before last. Nothing in this building was going to read him until a week from Monday, and there was no way on earth to tell one single person. Then somebody's bag caught him in the back and he moved. He was on the stairs when he tried to remember Nell Mott's demonstration and couldn't do it. He had it nearly.

Small girl, freckles, terrified, and then the whole year making a noise like a goal had gone in. He could hear the noise perfectly. He couldn't remember what she'd lifted. A bench, he thought, or one of the crates from the equipment cupboard, and the more he pushed at it the less sure he got about which. It was five weeks ago. She had come off the mat crying and laughing at the same time, and the whole room had been kind to her, which had not happened to anybody else all term.

Abe stood on the stairs and couldn't get it back. This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source. He thought about asking somebody. Then he thought about how that would sound, a boy stopping you on the stairs to ask what a girl had lifted five weeks ago, and he didn't ask anybody. Then the bell went and he went to French.

He left the apartment at half past eleven with the flat bar down the inside of his coat, a bottle of water, and the two ends of the loaf. Salt Row at that hour was orange lights and wet road and nothing else moving. Abe stood across from the boards and got quiet, and it took him about fifty seconds, and the street stopped. Then he did the new thing. He did not go anywhere. He stood in the middle of a stopped street with his hands in his pockets and worked it out. Properly, slowly, with as long as he wanted.

Sunday had taught him that he couldn't think and be frightened at the same time. So the trick was to do all the thinking first, somewhere the fear couldn't reach him. So he stood there for an hour and a half and thought it through twice. Where he would put his feet. What he would do if it turned. How he would get up eight steps with a bad hand, if it came to that. What he would tell Peg about his coat. Then there were the boards, and the boards were a problem. He could not move them while the world was stopped.

He'd learned that on the very first night, when he reached for his father's book and the world started up again in his hands. Anything he hadn't carried in with him stayed exactly where it was. So he let the street go. Salt Row came back all at once. Wind, and water dripping off the gutters, and a car somewhere three streets away. Abe was frightened as soon as it did. He was standing in the open at midnight with a sharpened bar inside his coat, and anybody could come around that corner.

He got the boards off as fast as he could and listened the whole time. It took hardly any time at all, because they'd been put on by somebody with no proper nails. He leaned them against the railing. Then he got quiet again, and the street stopped, and he went down. The steps went down between two brick walls. After the fourth one the streetlight stopped reaching, so Abe got his phone out for the flashlight. The flashlight worked, because it had come in with him. The frozen dark did not do what dark does.

It did not shift at the edges. It just sat. Eight steps, and the bottom four were under black water. It was standing about nine feet out from the bottom of the steps, in water up past what would have been its knees on anything with knees. It had its back to him. It had been standing the same way two weeks ago. Abe went down to the waterline and stopped, and the top of his head was level with the top of its shoulder. Then he had his hour.

He was more frightened than he'd ever been in his life, and the fear didn't go anywhere, and he stayed on the step anyway. He could look at it for as long as he liked. It could not look back. He counted the plates down its back. Nine, the same as before, and where they met the shoulder there was a finger's width of gap between each one. The gap didn't close when it was standing still. The legs folded backward at the top joint and forward at the second, like a bird's.

There were six of them and the front two weren't for walking. He got the flashlight onto the head and made himself keep it there. The mouth was not at the front. It was underneath, and it didn't have teeth so much as a ring of them, and Abe counted eleven and then stopped counting because eleven was plenty. By then the hand with the flashlight in it was shaking. Abe put his other hand around that wrist and held it still and went on looking. Then the water.

Past about twelve feet out it went deep, as far as he could tell from the way the walls went down. Along the left-hand wall, under the surface, something made a shelf. A person could stand on it and still have both hands free. There was nowhere else like that in the stairwell. The thing itself was up out of the water further than the depth allowed for, so it was standing on a heap of something about a foot high. That heap had not been there back when the steps still had their barrier.

Somewhere in the middle of that hour, Abe worked out what he actually had. The training was the least of it. Everybody in his year would have guessed the training inside a minute, and so had he, on the first night, kneeling in a puddle behind the trash cans and laughing. This was the other thing. He could walk up to anything alive in the world and stand a foot away from it and look at it for as long as he wanted, and then walk away, and it would never know he'd been there.

That went for a monster standing in a stairwell. It went for a teacher just as well, and for Miles Croft in a corridor with his hand out. Abe sat on a wet step in the dark with that in his head, and it frightened him more than the thing in the water did. He was in the middle of working out how wide that shelf was when he put his hand down to steady himself. He did it without thinking, the same as anybody puts a hand down. His palm came off the wall and went toward the water.

He was three inches off the surface when the back of his neck went cold and he stopped. Abe took his hand back very slowly and put it against the brick and stood there. Water moves. A wall does not move. A street does not move. He'd been leaning on both for two weeks without a thought. Water moves. A raindrop had come apart in his fingers in his own yard and put the whole storm back on his head at once. If he'd touched that surface it would've gone. All of it, at once.

He would've been standing four feet from a live thing, in a flooded stairwell, in the dark, with a bar he hadn't sharpened yet. He sat down on the fifth step and put his head between his knees until his hands were his again. Then he looked at the water properly, and that was when he saw the collar. It was floating about six feet out, on its side with the buckle down. Red once. Gone dark now, and small, and the little metal tag on it had turned over so that whatever was stamped on it was facing the bottom.

Abe sat on a wet step in a stopped world and looked at a dog's collar in black water, and he stopped being a boy who needed three hundred marks. Biscuit had barked at him every day of his life from behind that gate on the ground floor. She got out about twice a month and came back filthy and pleased with herself, and she'd never bitten anybody in eleven years. He looked up at it standing nine feet out with its head down, doing whatever it had been doing slowly for thirteen days while nobody came.

He was not frightened in the same way anymore. He was still frightened, but it had stopped being the only thing in him. He went back up the steps. He did not go away. He went up to the top, where the streetlight came down and there was a flat piece of sidewalk. Then he sat on it with the bar across his knees and Riddell's stone out of his coat pocket, and got to work. Riddell's stone had a coarse side and a fine side and Abe now knew, in his hands, what each of them was for. He put an edge on eighteen inches of it.

Then he put a better one on. Then he ruined the last four inches and started that part again. The world stayed exactly where it was and the streetlight didn't flicker once. He had to come out of it twice, because his shoulder gave up long before the job did. Both times he sat on the sidewalk in the real world with the traffic going somewhere on the Corn Road, and both times the boards were off the steps and the dark went down them and nothing came up. Altogether it took two days.

Somewhere in the second one he stopped and shook his arms out and read what the Weave had made of him. Meditation · Novice Lv 2 (14 / 200) Sharpening · Novice Lv 6 (300 / 1800) Conditioning · Novice Lv 9 (3, 850 / 4, 050) Two hundred. Abe sat on a curb in a stopped city with a sharpened bar in his lap and looked at that number for a long time. Two hundred off the end of Novice. Two hundred off the page in the back of his father's book, the one printed like a screen because some guard had copied it out from memory.

SET STANCE, underlined twice in blue pen, pressed hard enough to score the paper. He was going to get two hundred tonight. He was going to get it in the next ten minutes, in a stairwell, off something that had eaten a dog. A dog had died to make that true. Abe was pleased anyway, and decided to work out what that meant some other time. He stood up. He went back down the eight steps with the bar in his right hand. He did not stop at the waterline.

He stopped on the fourth step, on the left, with the wall against his shoulder and the shelf below him and eight feet of stone stairway at his back, because that was where an hour and a half of standing in a stopped street had told him to stand. Then he put the flashlight on it one last time. Nine plates. A finger of gap at the shoulder. Six legs and the front two useless. The mouth underneath. The heap it was standing on.

He knew everything about it and it didn't know he existed, and in about four seconds it was going to. Abe checked his feet. Then he checked them again. Then he let the world go.