Chương 87: The Shallow End

Abe was out of the gym before the twenty-first ring. Peg was in the kitchens, up here, inside, with two hundred people and a wall between her and anything. June was not. June had left at the end of lessons, and June was home, and home was at the bottom of the hill with the bells coming off it. He went down the hill faster than he had ever gone down anything. There were people in the road already, standing still in their doorways, looking toward the sea like you look at a thing you can only hear.

Two men were running the same direction he was, flat out, coats open. He went past them like they were standing in a line at a counter. He took the four-foot wall at the bend with one hand on the top of it, instead of the road around it, and landed running. The bells did not stop. They came up the hill in pieces, ring after ring. Under them, as he got lower, there was another sound. Water, moving where water did not move. Salt Row was already outside.

The street had come out of its doors and stood in the last gray light. June was on the front step of their building with her coat half on. She was looking down the row toward the low end, where the cut came out from under the buildings. The water there sat in its channel all year and never did anything. It was doing something now. It was coming up the channel the wrong way, in surges, like something enormous was breathing through it.

"Abe." June's voice, high.

"Abe, the drain in the yard's going backward-" The first one came up out of the stairwell. It came over the top of the eight steps, where the tape had hung ragged since November, and stood in the road where the light could get at it. It was the size of a big dog and the color of wet brick. There were too many joints in its front legs, folded like a bird's, and it had no eyes anywhere that Abe could find. The street screamed. All of it at once, one animal. Abe did not scream, because he had met one before.

At the bottom of those same steps, in October, at half past two in the morning, with a bar in his hands and water to his knees. That one had stood with its shoulder level with the top of his head. This was the same thing, small. He knew the joints. He knew how the front legs folded. He had known what was coming from the moment the water started to breathe, and he had said nothing, and he was saying nothing now.

It got its too-many joints under itself and swung the face with nothing on it along the row, and stopped on the nearest person standing in the open. That was the front step. That was June. Abe crossed his own road before he knew he was moving. The scrap one came out of his bag on the way, the flat gray bar he had ground on Riddell's wheel in October, and it sat in his hand like it had grown there. He hit the thing so hard that the sound went off the housefronts like a shot. It did not get up.

The screaming stopped like a faucet shutting off. Forty people looked at the dead thing on the cobblestones, and then at the boy standing over it, and the bells went on ringing.

"Get up the road!" Mrs. Bewley was on the second-floor landing with a rolling pin in one hand, roaring like a foreman.

"Not past it, UP! Stairs on the far side! Move your feet!"

"Where's the guard?" That was Colin, from the next building, already hauling an old man along by the arm.

"Somebody get the guard!" Nobody answered him. There were three guards in all of Calder, and everyone in that road knew where the guard station was, and it was not here. The water was still breathing. There were more of them coming, and he had no idea how many, and finding out one at a time as they came up was a good way to find out too late. He needed to see under the street. So he stood in the middle of his own road and reached for the quiet. It did not come.

Two nights ago it had come in his own kitchen with Peg and June sitting right there, because they had looked at the table and let him be nobody for a minute. Nobody on Salt Row was looking at a table. Forty people were looking straight at him, and one of them was his sister, and the quiet does not come to a boy being watched. So he went where nobody could watch. The stairwell on the empty side of the building went down to the same water. The guards had never taped that one, and no one was on it.

He went down past the waterline, around the turn where the light from the road could not follow, and crouched in the dark, and let the fifty seconds happen. The world went off like a light. The water stopped mid-surge and stood in a shape water does not hold. Abe walked into it, and it opened around him and closed behind him. He went down the flooded channel under his own street, his flashlight making one solid white bar in the black. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent.

Report it. He counted. Two in the channel under the stairwell, hanging still in the water with their legs folded. Three more where the cut widened under the road. Three coming along the bottom in a line, frozen mid-step, like toys someone had posed. Eight. He touched nothing. The first blow would start the world again, and this world was black water over his head with eight of them alive in it. Up in the road he had air, and his own footing, and a place they could only come at him one and two at a time.

He looked at each one for as long as his air would let him. Then he walked back up the slope of the channel, climbed to the turn in the stairwell, and let the world come back on. The water boomed. The bells arrived all at once, mid-ring. He came up out of the empty stairwell into the road and said it loud enough for the street.

"Eight more coming. Up the cut, both ends. Get everybody above the Bewleys' landing and count your kids." The street moved. Nobody asked him how he knew. Mrs. Bewley looked at him once, the boy from the fourth floor telling grown people what was under their houses. Then she turned around and started emptying doorways, and that was all.

She went along the row banging on frames with the rolling pin, and she knew without looking which doors held someone deaf and which held somebody stubborn, and she gave the stubborn ones the voice she saved for dogs in her garden.

"Go up," said Abe. June did not move off the step, and there was no time left to argue about it. The second one came up the same stairwell the first had. The third came out of the cut's mouth at the low end and came up the road at a speed nothing that shape should have. Abe went to meet it. He put the second one down before the street had finished taking in that he was moving. The third met the backswing, coming around in the same turn, and the crack of the bar carried the length of the row.

Someone screamed his name. It might have been June.

"Three," he said, out loud, to nobody. They kept coming and he kept counting. The fourth and fifth came up the stairwell together, and he took them on the steps, above the waterline, where they had to come at him one at a time through their own dead. The sixth met the bar mid-leap and did not land as one thing. Two of them got their weight onto him before they died, one after the other, and neither moved him a finger's width.

He was set, his back foot on his father's line, and the road under him might as well have grown up around his boots. He could feel the stance paying him while he worked. He did not look.

"Seven." The road.

"Eight." The stairwell again. The ninth would not come up. It circled the mouth of the cut at the low end, half out of the water. The street watched from the high doorsteps, gone very quiet, and June said "Abe" once from the step, not loudly, and no one else said anything. Someone up on a doorstep had a phone out, held flat, filming him walk.

Abe walked down the middle of his own road toward it with the bar hanging from one hand, past his own front step and the Bewleys' gate and the doorways he had walked past every day of his life, and it watched him come with a face that had nothing on it to watch with. Twice it came halfway up at the road and pulled back into the water, testing him, and the second time he heard the street behind him take one breath all together and hold it. He kept walking.

He was thinking, in some far-off room of himself, that this one was more careful than the other eight, and that careful was worse, and that he wanted it dead before it finished learning whatever it was learning about him. It came for him at the last. They always came. He hit it out of the air. For a moment nothing on Salt Row made any sound but the bells.

"Nine," said Abe, to the empty low end of the road. The street came off the doorsteps in a wall of sound. It was only partly a cheer. It was forty people who had watched something out of the sea's oldest stories die on their own cobblestones, making noise because staying quiet had gotten unbearable. Over the top of it came Mrs. Bewley's voice, counting children by name at full volume, like a woman calling roll in a gale. Colin came back down the row with a boathook and stood over the nearest of the dead ones.

He did not touch it. He looked at it, and then he looked up, and what he said, he said to Abe.

"What do we do with them?" Not to Mrs. Bewley, who ran the street. Not to the guard, who was not coming. To Abe.

"Nothing," said Abe.

"Don't touch them, don't let the kids near them, and stay off the bottom steps. I have to get June up the hill."

"Right," said Colin, like you answer a foreman, and turned and started waving people back from the dead things. He carried June up the hill. He did not ask her. He picked her up off the step with one arm under her knees and one across her back, and she came up off the stones like a bag of groceries. She stopped arguing forty yards up the hill, when she worked out that he was not slowing down and was not breathing hard.

"Gill never came," she said, into his collar.

"I was out on the step watching for her when the water went wrong."

"Good," said Abe. She thought about that one and let it stand.

"You went down the empty stairwell."

"Yeah."

"And stopped everything. And went and looked. In the water."

"Yeah."

"That's how you knew there were eight more." She thought about it.

"Does the water not count as company?"

"The water was asleep. Everything was."

"That's the craziest thing you've ever said to me," said June, "and on Tuesday you told Peg the world stops." Then she was quiet for a few strides, and then she started counting, very softly, in his ear, in time with the bells.

"Sixty-one. Sixty-two. They're not stopping, Abe."

"I know."

"Bells stop. That's the whole thing about bells."

"I know." Ada Bewley came the other way through the school gate at a dead run. She had her school shoes in one hand and her feet bare for the running, and she stopped when she saw the two of them, all her weight tipped forward like a held breath.

"Did you get my mom as well?"

"No," said Abe.

"She's fine. She got the whole street up. She's down there counting kids." Ada looked at June, in his arms. Then she was past them and gone down the hill, running as hard as she had come up, out of earshot before he got to the part about the kids. He had started his answer with the word no. Ada had been looking at June while he said it, and he did not know what she had heard. June had stopped counting.

At the gate he set her down, and she stood holding his sleeve and looking back the way they had come, and he looked with her. From up there you could see the low city going down to the sea wall in the last of the light. Salt Row was quiet now. But along the next street over there was screaming, thin with distance. Along the one below it, lights were coming on and doors were banging. And under all of it, street after street after street, the drains were going, one after another, all the way down the hill.