Chương 74: Teleporter

They drove him up on the Thursday. He had been to Manchester more times than he had ever told anybody, and every time he walked in through a stopped gate with nobody to see him come. This time somebody drove him, and sat in traffic at the bottom of the ramp for ten minutes. The building had no name on it. It had a parking lot and a low brick front and four floors, and it looked like somewhere that arranges deliveries.

He spent Thursday night on the fourth floor of it, in a room with a bed and a window that opened four inches, and there was somebody sitting in the corridor every time he looked. He asked the man in the corridor whether he was going home.

"Somebody'll tell you in the morning," the man said. On Friday the thirtieth of January they took him down to a room on the second floor with a window and a radiator and a table, and they left the door open. Nobody shut anything all day. He noticed it in the first ten minutes and it took him most of the morning to work out what it meant. He was there for nine hours before anybody asked him a single question.

They gave him a sandwich at half past nine, a bowl of soup at one, and a mug of tea about every ninety minutes. Every one of those was carried in by somebody who said good morning, took the empty one away, and did not stay. There was always somebody in the room. Not with him. Near him. A woman with a laptop sat at the end of the table for two hours doing something that was not about him, and then a man swapped with her, and then a different woman. None of them talked to him.

None of them ever left before the next one arrived. By eleven he had worked out that the changeovers were the point. By two he had worked out that they were quite bad at making it look natural. They knew that, and it did not matter to them in the slightest whether he noticed. He talked to them. He asked the first one at eight whether he could phone his aunt, and she said she would find out. He asked the second one at ten and she said somebody would come and talk to him.

He asked the man who brought the soup, and the man said he was only bringing the soup, and that he was sorry, and he was. By one o'clock Abe had asked nine different people for a phone and every one of them had been kind to him about it. He asked what he was there for. He asked whether he was under arrest, because nobody on the stairs had ever said the word. Nobody ever told him no. That is the thing he could not get past. A no is something you can push on.

At about two he got up and went and stood in the open doorway. The man in the chair outside stood up as well, without hurrying, and said good afternoon. Thirteen days ago six hundred people had watched Abe finish a bout in four seconds. This one was about fifty and had a card on a strap around his neck, and nothing in that corridor could have stopped Abe walking down it and out. There was also forty one miles between him and his own kitchen, and two people who now knew his sister's name.

He said good afternoon back and went and sat down again, and the man outside waited until he was sitting before he sat. At about four, two of them had an argument in the doorway with him six feet away.

"It isn't a budget question."

"It's entirely a budget question." The man had his hands full of a folder and a coat and was trying to put both down.

"And I'd rather have it out here than in front of Marchetti in April."

"They are going to take Metcalf off it," the woman said.

"They are going to do what they were always going to do."

"He has been on it eleven years."

"He has been on it eleven years and he has nothing to show for them, and the office reads nothing as nothing." He got the coat onto a hook at the second go.

"You know what I think of it and you know I am not the one signing it."

"Then say what you think in the room, where it costs you something." The woman was not raising her voice and it was somehow much worse.

"He is fifty-nine and he has no other trade."

"I know that."

"I'm not arguing with you."

"You're doing it in a doorway, which is worse." Then she saw Abe watching and finished her sentence anyway, and only then came in. Her name was Ainsworth and she said it once and never used a title. The first thing she did was put a phone on the table and turn it around to face him.

"Four minutes," she said.

"Not enough, but it's what I could get." Peg was at work until nine. June answered on the second ring, which meant she had been sitting next to it. She had done the speaking exam that morning, twelve minutes with Mrs. Prewitt, on a market, and she had been word perfect, and she got all of it out before he could ask, so he could not spend the four minutes on her. Then she said, "Where are you."

"Manchester."

"Are they being all right with you."

"Yes. There's a woman, she's been."

"Peg's been down to the guard station twice and they don't know anything either." This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. He could hear the kitchen behind her. Somebody had left the radio on low and nobody had turned it off. Then Ainsworth put her hand out for the phone, and that was the four minutes. She put a folder on the table and did not open it.

The woman on the stairs the morning before had done exactly the same thing with a folder, and after nine hours Abe had gotten tired of the trick.

"You'll have worked out that nobody's asked you anything."

"Yes."

"Do you know why."

"Because you wanted to see what I did with nine hours."

"That's one of two reasons and it's the smaller one." Ainsworth sat down opposite him.

"The other one is that I've been reading about you since November and I wanted to do it in the right order." She went through it without opening the folder once, and somewhere in the middle Abe worked out that she had learned the whole thing so that she could watch his face instead of a page.

"The thirtieth of November, half past midnight. A storeroom on Marley Street. Opened and shut without the lock being touched, and four loaves and a block of cheese gone out of it." Abe kept his face still and did not manage it. Marley Street was in Calder. It was four streets from his own front door and he had walked down it to school since he was eleven, and she had put it first.

"The man who owns it thought he'd miscounted," she said.

"He counted again in December."

"And?"

"He stopped thinking that."

"December," she said.

"A warehouse in Prescot. A crate off a shelf twenty feet inside the building, lights on, a man on shift."

"That's a lot to know about a crate."

"He came around a curtain and saw a boy in a wet coat from ten feet." She let that sit.

"Then he finished the step he was taking, into an empty room, with his arm still out." Abe did not say anything.

"He's told four people. Two of them believed him."

"What about the camera."

"It has ninety seconds of a boy in a hood with his face down, and most of that is his back." She turned her cup around without drinking out of it.

"It also runs at twenty-five pictures a second. He is in one picture and gone out of the next."

"Prescot again," she said.

"A man called Dyer. Sells the tins the other stalls will not take, off one table at the night market. Six tins a night, until the crate had three in it, and then he stopped coming out."

"He counted them."

"He counted them." Ainsworth looked up at him for the first time in a while.

"He moved the crate to a lockup. Put a padlock through the hasp and pulled on it twice."

"Right."

"Then he stopped moving it. He sat up all night in a chair beside it with his coat over his knees." She looked down at the folder she had not opened.

"In the morning the padlock was shut and the crate was empty."

"He's fifty-eight," she said.

"He sat in a chair all night." She said the second sentence in the same voice she had used for the padlock. Nothing anybody did to Abe in that building was worse than those seven words, and she did not know she had done it. He sat there and took it with his hands on his knees, like Dyer.

"There are six more and they're all smaller. A woman on a bus. A gate. A shed on the Prescot road with its door standing open in the morning."

"None of that's worth anything."

"On its own, no. People miscount. Cameras fail. Tired men see things." Ainsworth put one finger on the folder.

"It's nine of them in two cities in nine weeks, and every one has the same shape."

"Which is what."

"That a door did not open."

"So here's what I think you are," she said.

"I'll probably get it wrong." Abe looked at the folder she had not opened.

"I think you move without crossing the distance." It was near enough to the truth that Abe nearly answered her.

"I don't know the range and I don't think it's far. I think you have to see where you're going." She sat back.

"And I think it costs you, because you did it nine times and not nine hundred."

"There's a word the trade uses. I'm not saying it in this room."

"Why not."

"Because the last time somebody said it out loud in a room like this, the boy in the chair spent four years being a story."

"You are not going to tell me what you are." Ainsworth got up and went over to the window.

"I have not asked you." Here is the thing Abe could not do anything about, and he understood it while she was still talking. Every single incident on her list happened. He was in the storeroom on Marley Street and he took the food, four streets from his own door, at half past twelve on a Sunday morning. He stood eighteen inches from a man in a company fleece with his arm out at coat height, and he did not read the name stitched on it, on purpose, and he had thought about that man every week since.

He emptied Dyer's crate while Dyer sat in the chair beside it with his eyes open. He had checked. He let the world in for ninety seconds from ten feet away to find out whether the man was asleep, and the man was not asleep, and he took the crate anyway, because a sleeping man would have made it easy, and easy paid him nothing. Dyer came up out of that chair and got a hand across his shoulder in the lane and it did not close, and Abe went around the corner and did not stop.

Ainsworth had every part of that night right. What she did not have was that he picked it. The only untrue thing in the whole of Ainsworth's account was her explanation, and he could not correct it without telling her the real one. She had built a completely wrong idea out of nothing but true facts. She was proud of it. She was going to be right about him for the rest of her life. At about six the room emptied. That had not happened once since seven in the morning, and it was not an accident either.

There was still somebody outside the open door. He could hear a chair. He sat down on the floor with his back against the radiator, because he had been on a plastic chair since seven that morning. Then he went for the settle. He had done the settle every day since October and it was the easiest thing he owned. It took him nineteen minutes. There was a person just outside an open door and Abe could hear him move on the chair, and every time the chair moved his heart went and he lost it and had to start again.

He got it in the end. The world was never going to stop for him in that building. What came instead was the quiet part underneath it, the settle every kid in Calder is taught at eleven and gives up on. He sat on a floor in a building with no name and got there with a stranger breathing on the other side of a door. Turning-Wheel Trance · Apprentice Lv 4 (140 / 3, 200) He looked at that for a long time. It had read nothing at all since the eleven days in the archive.

He had been doing it four and five hours a day ever since and the bar had not moved once, because it had stopped being hard. A hundred and forty points, for nineteen minutes on a floor with a stranger breathing on the other side of a door. Four and five hours a day since he got home had been worth none. He got up off the floor before whoever it was came back in. Ainsworth came back at seven with two mugs and gave him one.

"Right," she said.

"I'm going to be straight with you now. It's faster." She sat on the edge of the desk instead of going back behind it.

"I don't care what you did in Prescot." Abe put the mug down.

"Say that again."

"I don't care what you did in Prescot." She let him have a second with it.

"I'll say it the other way as well. There's a man three floors down who cares enormously."

"And?"

"He's going to be told I've handled it, and he's going to be annoyed." She drank some of hers.

"That's a Tuesday for him."

"Why."

"Because he has spent nine weeks on this and I am about to hand it to a-" The man from three floors down came up the corridor fast enough that they both heard him before the door. He was about sixty and he had his sleeves rolled and he did not come all the way in. He put one hand on the frame and looked at Abe for a good while, from the doorway, the way a man looks at a car he is not going to buy.

"That's him, is it."

"That's him," said Ainsworth.

"Nine of them. Nine that we know about." He said it to Ainsworth and not to Abe.

"There's a man in Prescot who's fifty-eight and sat up all night in a chair."

"I know that."

"And you've been up here since seven feeding him tea."

"Yes."

"I want her to have heard me say it." He turned his head about an inch and said the rest of it to Abe.

"You as well. You heard me. That will do."

"He heard you," said Ainsworth.

"Right," said the man, and hit the frame once with the flat of his hand, and went back down the corridor. Ainsworth watched the empty doorway until the footsteps had gone.

"That man is not wrong," she said.

"Hold on to that, because I am about to sound extremely reasonable at you." Somebody came up the corridor then and pulled the door shut, and did not look in at either of them while he did it. All day that open door had been them telling him he could walk out.

"Right," said Ainsworth, into the quiet the shut door made.

"There are four hundred and twenty streets standing under the water on the old coast. Nobody has been inside one of them in eighty years."

"I know what the sprawl is."

"Then you know every one of those houses has a door on it." She put her mug down.

"I want you to open one."