Chương 89: Four Feet Under

Salt Row was empty when he came up it. The screaming had stopped, and that was worse. The nine dead things still lay on the cobblestones where he had left them, wet brick in the dark. Every window in the row was black except one. On the fourth floor of his own building, someone had put a lamp in the window of his own living room, and the lamp was moving. Colin stood in the doorway of the building with the crowbar, holding the door like a man holding a gate.

"They're inside," said Colin.

"Not yours. Mine." He was breathing hard.

"Something came up through my floor, Dolan. Through the boards. In my own living room."

"Where is it?"

"Went back down." Colin's hand worked on the crowbar.

"It came up, and it stood in the hole listening to us all shouting, and then it went back down. It's under there somewhere. We got everybody out of mine and into yours."

"How many people?"

"Everybody that stayed on the row. Eleven, and your June." He looked down at the black water sitting quiet at the low end.

"She counted us up the stairs. Like your aunt does the kids." Abe went up his own stairs three at a time. The Bewleys' door on the second-floor landing was dark, and without slowing down he worked out where they all were: Mrs. Bewley up the hill with the street, Ada gone down hours ago to find her, the two of them somewhere lit by now. Safe. He kept climbing. The sounds of the building came to him as he went. Feet above him. Voices above him.

And under all of it, very faint, something below him that was not feet and was not water. The living room was eleven neighbors and one lamp. The Marsdens had the sofa. He sat with his good ear turned to the room, and she held his hand on her knee. Old Turner had the good chair, under a blanket he had lost an argument about.

"I'm fine," Turner was telling the room.

"It was the rug. Anybody can trip on a rug. There's nothing wrong with the legs, the legs are the one part of me that's never given a minute's trouble, ask anybody."

"He fell over on Tuesday," said Mrs. Marsden, to Abe.

"On a RUG." The rest of the block sat along the walls on kitchen chairs, coats on, bags by their feet. June met Abe at the top of the stairs with the second flashlight.

"Took you long enough."

"I was at the shed."

"I know where you were." She said it fast and let it go, because there was a room behind her.

"Abe. Listen first." The room went quiet for him. Then he heard it. Under the floor, under the stairs, down in the dark bones of the building, something moved. It was not a rat sound or a water sound but a weight, being set down carefully, one foot at a time.

"It's been doing that for an hour," June said, evenly, for the room's benefit.

"It goes along and stops. Goes along and stops."

"It's listening," said Abe.

"I know it's listening." Her voice stayed level. Her hand on the flashlight did not.

"It stops whenever Mr. Marsden talks. He can't hear himself doing it."

"I keep telling him," said Mrs. Marsden, from the sofa, "and he keeps forgetting, and I'm not writing it down, because then he'll want the light on to read it."

"You could hold his hand harder," said Turner.

"I've been married forty years, Bill Turner. I know how hard to hold his hand." The room laughed. It was thin and it did not last, but it was a laugh, and June had the look of a girl who had been keeping it alive by hand all night. The sound under the floor had stopped when the laugh started. When the room settled, it started again, and it was closer to the stairwell than before, and everyone in the room knew it and nobody said it. Mrs.

Marsden took her husband's hand up off her knee and held it in both of hers, and he looked at her, and kept quiet without knowing what he was keeping quiet for. The building had one stairwell, running down its middle like a throat. The cellar door at the bottom had stood open since before Abe was born, because the cellar had four feet of seawater in it and nothing anyone wanted. Abe stood at the top with the flashlight off and worked it out in the dark, plainly. Three of them, if the sounds were right. Maybe more.

A black building, water at the bottom of it, eleven people and his sister four feet above the boards the things were walking under. If he went down with the light and the bar he would find them one at a time, in the dark, in halls he could not swing in. Every wall down there had someone's floor on the other side of it. Or he could look first, and fight second. He came back into the living room and crouched by June and said it quietly, and watched her understand.

"You need to be nobody for a minute," she said.

"A minute. Maybe a bit more." June stood up with the flashlight and clapped her hands once, like a teacher.

"Right," she said, to eleven people three times her age.

"Everybody look at the window and keep looking at it. Mr. Turner, you as well. We're counting the lit windows up the hill, all of us, out loud, and whoever counts the most wins."

"Wins what?" said Turner.

"The blanket." Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

"I've got the blanket."

"Then you'd better win," said June, and turned her own back on her brother last of all. Eleven people and a girl looked out at the dark hill and started counting. The room forgot him. Abe stood at the stairwell door and felt it forget him, and let his shoulders down, and the world stopped between one window and the next. He went down the stairwell through the dead quiet, the flashlight making its one white bar.

One of them was on the cellar stairs, low down, frozen with its front legs on the fourth step and its face turned up toward the door. Another stood in the flooded cellar itself, up to its joints in stopped black water, at the foot of the wall that held the Marsdens' floor. The one he had been hearing was a flight above them, on the second-floor landing. It stood with one foot lifted, on the boards outside the Bewleys' dark door, like a man stands outside a room he is deciding to enter.

There was nobody behind that door, and Abe was glad of that, and went on counting. Three. He touched nothing. He stood on the stopped landing, an arm's length from the lifted foot, and looked at the face with nothing on it, and hated it in a way that was new to him. Then he went back up the stairwell, and stood where he had stood, and let the world come back on. The counting was at thirty-one windows. Nobody had turned around.

He opened the stairwell door again, loudly, and Colin came to the top of the stairs with the crowbar, because Colin had been waiting all night for a job.

"Stay in the door," Abe told him.

"Nothing gets past you to the room. That's the whole job."

"Nothing's getting past me tonight," said Colin, and set his feet in the doorway. Abe took the stairs fast and loud, because quiet was their game and he was done playing it. The one on the landing came at the noise like the ninth one on the cobblestones had come at him, fast and low. It met the bar coming down the last four steps with all of Abe behind it, and the sound went up through the building like a dropped table. Upstairs the counting stopped.

"Keep counting!" June's voice, sharp through the boards. They kept counting. The one on the cellar stairs took the corner faster than anything that shape should. There was no room in the stairwell to swing, so Abe dropped the bar and took it with his hands, wrist first, like Ada Bewley took a wrist on the mats. The joint came apart the second time he turned it. He was surprised, distantly, at how strong he had gotten. The last one would not come up out of the water.

It circled the flooded cellar in the dark, and Abe stood on the bottom dry step and could not go in after it. The water was its, and the dark was its, and his family was four feet over his head. So he did the loud thing. He could not swing the bar down there anyway, so he gave it the one job it could still do: he threw it into the cellar, and the black water took it with a crash.

The thing came at the splash, at the noise, because they always came, and Abe stood on the step in the dark with his hands open and took it by the sound of it climbing. It was the worst ten seconds of the night. He did it anyway, and it worked. Upstairs the counting stopped, and June's voice came down through the boards, not quite steady for the first time all night.

"Abe."

"Done," he called up.

"Three. That's all of them." The ceiling over his head creaked with eleven people all moving at once. Someone up there started crying, the relieved kind.

"Forty-one," said Turner.

"I counted forty-one windows and I want it written down somewhere."

"He counted the moon twice," said Mrs. Marsden. The room laughed properly this time, too long and too loud, because it was allowed to again. Abe sat down on the cellar stairs in the dark, wet to the knees. His hands started to shake, now that they were allowed to as well. The screen came up while he sat there. Realm 1 · KINDLED · Body 17 Foundation: 340 / 25, 600 (Body 18) He read it twice, with his hands still going, and climbed up out of the dark.

Colin was still in the stairwell door with the crowbar, exactly where Abe had put him, and had not had to use it once.

"Was one of them mine?" he said.

"The cellars run together under the whole row," said Abe.

"Whatever went down out of your floor came up into mine. It's not coming back through your boards, Colin. None of them are." Colin thought about that. Then he set the crowbar against the wall and looked at his own hands, which had been shut around it since dark. The living room took a while to give June back.

She had the Marsdens to settle and Turner's blanket to lose another argument about, and Abe stood in the doorway and counted eleven heads without meaning to, and then counted them again, because the first count had come out right and he had not quite believed it.

"Anybody hurt?" he said, when June got to him.

"Nobody's hurt. Mrs. Marsden cried on me. That's the worst injury in the room." She looked at him for a moment longer than the room needed her to.

"Your screen came up, didn't it. Down there in the dark."

"Seventeen," said Abe, quietly, the first number he had ever had someone to tell.

"Is that a lot?"

"Yes."

"Good," said June.

"Because you look terrible." The hole in Colin's floor stayed open. Nobody went back down into any of it, and the block held a short argument about tomorrow and settled it the only way it could go. At first light, everyone up the hill, and the buildings could stand empty until somebody with a boat and a day said otherwise. That still left the night to get through. Past eleven, June tried Peg's phone from the arm of the sofa. It rang until it gave up.

So she called the school instead, and it took an age for anyone to pick up, and then a boy who sounded about fourteen told her the gym was full and the kitchens were still going and everyone was fine, and could she please keep the line clear. June chose to believe him. Near midnight Abe tried Peg's phone himself, from the top of the stairs, twice. It rang for a long time both times, and nobody answered, and both times he stood listening to it ring and told himself that a kitchen at midnight is a loud place.

Then he called the school. He started with the block, in case anyone was keeping track: cleared as far as he could clear it, eleven people staying till first light, and a hole in a floor in the next building, with nothing moving under it that he could hear anymore. Then he asked them to put Peg Dolan on. It took a long time for anybody to find anybody. The phone lay on its side on a desk somewhere while feet went away and came back, twice.

Then a woman's voice he did not know came on, tired, reading off a list by the sound of it, and told him what the list said. Peg Dolan had signed out at half past seven, telling the woman on the door that she was walking down to Salt Row, to her family. She had signed nothing since. She was not in the gym and she was not in the kitchens, and she had never, at any point in the night, arrived at Salt Row. The boy who had answered at eleven o'clock had been guessing at all of it. Nobody had looked at a list until now.

Abe stood in the dark hall with the phone at his ear and the hill in his head, every black window of it, and the drains still talking under all of it. Four hundred yards of road between the school and this door, and Peg had walked into it at half past seven, and it was midnight. June was in the hall doorway. She had come out without him hearing her, and she had heard enough.

"I called her at seven," she said.

"I told her about the thing in Colin's floor. I told her we were all sitting in the living room with it walking around underneath us." She stopped.

"She signed out at half past seven, Abe." He did not tell her it was not her fault. He had told Ada Bewley every true fact he had, at the school gate a few hours ago, and watched them not slow her down by one step. He put his hand on the back of June's head instead, Peg's own move, and June let him.

"She can't be lost," June said.

"She can't be. She's never been lost in her life."

"No," said Abe.

"She can't." Somewhere out in the dark between the school and this hall, Peg's phone was ringing, and nothing was answering it. He put his phone in his pocket and picked up the bar.

"I'm lighting the row," said June.

"Every window we've got. If she's out there she'll see where home is."

"Quietly."

"I know what listens," said June, and was already going. Abe went out into the dark road at a dead run, and he did not call his aunt's name, because he knew now what came to a voice in the dark. At the first corner he stopped, got his breathing down, and let the world stop, and walked a hundred yards of dead-still road with the flashlight, looking into every doorway and every black window. Nothing. He let the world come back and ran on to the next corner, and stopped, and did it again.

Corner by corner, still by still, quiet, listening, with Salt Row lighting up window by window behind him, and the street gave him nothing back.