Chương 27: Eight Steps

Peg told it at the table over the potatoes, secondhand, off two people at the bus stop and one at the servery.

"They had it out of there in about four hours," she said.

"Mrs. Bewley says it had been down there since October, which is what I said at the time, and nobody wanted to know."

"You called them."

"I called them the day the dogs went." She put the pan down.

"Seven weeks. There was supposed to be a barrier on those steps and there never was one, and now everybody's very interested." June ate her dinner and said nothing. Abe had finished his first, though there wasn't any more of it to go back for, and there hadn't been all week.

"And now they're all saying somebody killed it," said Peg.

"Which I don't believe for one minute. If a person had done that, then that person would have told somebody by now."

"Maybe," said Abe.

"They can't help themselves. Somebody would have had a drink and said it." June got up and took her plate to the sink, and going past she did not look at her brother. It wasn't that she looked away, which would have been something Abe could have asked her about. June had been looking at him all week, at breakfast and across the table and in doorways, the same as she had every day since the eighth of October. She went past him with her plate in both hands and her eyes on the faucet.

Abe sat there with his fork in his hand. June had worked out who killed it, and she wasn't going to say so, and she couldn't look at him while Peg was in the room. Four feet away, his aunt went on being annoyed about a barrier that was on somebody's sheet as done. So he said nothing. So did June, all evening. He checked his screens at half past ten, sitting on the end of his bed with his shoes still on. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body Layer 4 Foundation: 2, 290 / 2500 (Body Layer 5) Two hundred and ten short.

The board was five days away. He'd been three hundred and twenty short on Monday night. Two nights in the yard had bought him a hundred and ten points, and he'd wanted two hundred. He knew exactly why. The bar paid for hard, and there was nothing hard left in a concrete rectangle behind his own block, because he had spent two months making every single thing in it easy. Abe sat and thought about that properly for the first time. Swinging was the one thing he could do anywhere, so that part had been easy.

Standing up was what had been hard on Sunday. Three feet of moving water, on stone he couldn't see, in the cold, with the tide shoving at the back of his knees and a boat behind him that needed him not to fall over. That was what the crew had bought, and page thirty one of his father's book had been about it the whole time, and Abe had skipped that page nine or ten times. There was no water in his yard. There was water at the bottom of Salt Row.

Three feet of it, on broken stone, and a guard crew had spent all afternoon making very sure there was nothing else down there. Abe sat on the end of his bed for a long time with his shoes on. Then he got his coat. Salt Row at midnight was orange lights and wet road, the same as it had been in October. The difference was that this time he knew what the bottom of it smelled like. The tape was tied to a downpipe at one end and to nothing at all at the other. The boards were gone. Nobody was coming back until March.

Abe stood across from the steps and got ready to go quiet. He gave it fifty seconds. Then he gave it two minutes. Then he stood on a wet sidewalk for a quarter of an hour, doing the only thing he had ever been good at. The world stayed exactly where it was. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. In October he'd done it right here, first time, in under a minute. In October he hadn't known what was down there.

He shook his hands out and gave it another go. He got further, and lost it in the same place. Then he did it twice more. There was nobody on Salt Row. No crowd, no winch, no voices, nothing in a hundred yards of it but rain and a downpipe and a strip of blue and white tape lifting in the wind. He had the whole street to himself and could not get quiet in it, and he had no idea at all what a person did about that.

He ducked under the tape and went down the eight steps in real time, with his phone out for the flashlight, at five after twelve on a school night. The rail was the same rail. He'd had his left hand on it in October with two fingers that wouldn't close, and his hand knew the cold of it before the rest of him caught up. First step. Second. The light went down ahead of him and did nothing useful, because a phone lights up rain and not much else. The water came over his boots on the fifth step.

It was so cold it felt like a door closing on his legs. On the sixth step the smell came up at him. He hadn't planned for that. It was the same smell, six weeks on, and his body knew it before he could tell his body anything. He got down to the seventh step and couldn't make himself take the eighth. He stood there a while. Nothing came. Nothing was ever going to come. He knew that better than any person alive, because he'd killed it himself and stood in the road that afternoon watching the pieces come up on a rope.

Knowing it made no difference at all to his hands. He thought about going back up. He got as far as turning his shoulders toward the road, and the orange light at the top of the steps looked about a mile away and very warm. Then he took the eighth step anyway, because Sunday was coming. The first thing he learned was that he had no idea where the floor was. It was stone, and it was broken, and it was under a foot of silt, and the flashlight wasn't any use at all once the water moved.

He put a foot down and found nothing and put it down further and found something at an angle. He set his feet on ground he couldn't see and ran the gate. Half turn. Glide. Don't arrive. He went over on the fourth go and came up swearing, with the phone held over his head. The fifth time he went all the way in and came up blowing, with his hair flat to his head. After that he put the phone up on the fourth step, in a fold of his coat, dry and no use to anybody. He worked with what the road gave him.

That turned out to be more than he'd expected. The orange light at the top found the water and lay along it, and the wall had an edge to it, and an edge was enough. The cut ran somewhere past the wall and the tide moved in it, so the push came and went instead of staying still. Every single time it came he wanted to plant, and planting was the whole thing Croft had spent November trying to take off him. In the yard his feet had nothing to argue with.

Down here they had an argument every three seconds and they lost most of them. He did it wrong for the first hour. He planted, and the water took the plant. He went light, and the silt went out from under him. He ran the gate slow and it worked, and then he ran it at speed and it put him on his back with his mouth full. Twice he got out and stood on the sixth step to get his breath back. Both times he was shaking too hard to stand still, so he went back down.

Somewhere in there the cold stopped being a thing he noticed and started being a thing he was. That frightened him more than the smell had. His father's book had four pages on cold. It said the dangerous part starts when you stop minding it, and he'd stopped minding it about an hour ago. Somewhere in the second hour his feet stopped asking the ground for permission and started working with the water instead. That turned out to be a completely different job, and a much harder one.

It arrived on one particular go, and he felt it arrive. The push came at the back of his knees. He let his hips travel with it instead of against it, about an inch. He came off the far side still standing, with his hand exactly where he'd meant to put it. He did it again to check. Then he did it eleven more times and got it eight of those, and stood there in the dark completely certain that he was learning something. The yard had never once given him that.

Two months under a stopped sky, and not one minute of it had felt like this. He was colder than he'd ever been in his life. There was no stopped sky over him and no silver rain hanging in the air. Every minute he spent down there came off the actual clock, the same as it would have for anybody. He stayed until half past two. It came while he was walking a line around the bottom of the wall with his arms out. There was no crowd for it and no board and nobody to tell.

Just a light coming on somewhere behind his eyes, and a warmth going down through him like something poured. Abe Dolan stood up to his thighs in black water at the bottom of Salt Row and laughed out loud. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body Layer 5 Foundation: 41 / 3600 (Body Layer 6) It took twenty minutes to settle. He spent all twenty of them standing exactly where he was. He didn't dare walk about while a layer bedded in.

He was too cold from the knees down to feel anything new down there, so he couldn't have said what a whole layer felt like. He counted the wall instead. Eleven rows of brick above the waterline. There was a gap where somebody had taken one out years ago, and a bolt with no rail left on it. So he stood in the dark of a stairwell that had nearly killed him in October, and shook, and grinned at a bolt. The last layer he took, he took in a stopped world with all the time there was.

This one had taken two and a half hours he was never getting back, and he would have done it again for twice as long. He came up the steps at three, wet to the waist, with his boots making a noise like something being wrung out. He let himself in and stood in the dark hall, dripping on the floor. He had a new layer in him and nobody in that apartment he could tell about either half of his day. June's light had been on under her door when he came up the stairs, which it had no business being on a school night.

It went off about ten seconds after his key turned in the lock. She had been lying there in the dark waiting for the key. He wondered how many nights she had done that, and how long she had been keeping count of them.