Chương 92: Nether Street

Nobody went home after the count. The boats were in and racked, and by every habit the shed had, a hundred wet people should have been walking up the Corn Road to their beds. Nobody moved. The eleven names stood on the board in the lamplight, and the shed stood looking at them. Fenn said it first, because the boards were his.

"It froze last night." He did not turn around.

"Anybody still out there has had one night of it, and tonight makes two. I don't like their chances for a third."

"Boats are no good in the dark," said a man by the racks.

"Not with what's in the water."

"No," said Fenn.

"So we walk." Dobbs came off the middle table with the tide sheets still in his hand.

"Pairs. A lamp between two, a pole between two, and a name each. Nobody swims and nobody gets clever." He looked at the column.

"In black water you can pass a live man at ten feet and never know it. We'll be searching by shouting, and shouting brings company." The shed did not want to say the next thing out loud. Cottle said it from the racks.

"We don't know where to look." Dobbs looked at the column a moment longer. Then he looked at Abe.

"Go and get your aunt." Peg came down to the shed with her eyes already shut half the walk, and they gave her a folding table by the boards and a lamp, and Fenn read her the first name.

"Askew. Marsh Lane, the low end. Not at the count Thursday, not at the Bell House, not anywhere since."

"Marsh Lane. Go in from the chapel end. The low end has the culvert, and the water in it moves." Her voice was the voice she used for telling June where the scissors were.

"Nineteen doors on the left, and Askew's is the last of them. Two feet inside his hall there's a step down, and the water will be sitting on it looking like floor. Sixty-two yards, chapel to his door." The two men looked at each other over the lamp.

"You heard her," said Fenn. Two men took a lamp and a pole and went out into the dark with sixty-two yards in their heads, and the water took their light and gave nothing back. Peg had been inside half these houses over the years, feeding people out of one kitchen or another, and once she had been inside a place, she never lost it. Behind them the next pair was already at the table, and the pair after that, and Peg took the column name by name and turned it into roads. The Askew pair came back inside the hour.

They brought him in wrapped in blankets off the racks, walking on his own feet, complaining in a whisper about the state of his hall carpet. He had been sitting on his stairs above the waterline for two nights, too cold to shout back. The shed cheered, properly, for the first time since the bells, and Mullen came all the way around the hatch for it. Fenn wrote something small and neat beside Askew's name, and the column got shorter.

"Step down's two feet in," the lead man told Peg, on his way to the soup.

"Right where you said. I'd have gone in it face first."

"I know," said Peg, and took the next name. The next pair came back with nobody walking in the middle of them. A big man came up the boards carrying Colley across his shoulders, said "Colley," to Fenn, and set him down on the racked nets, and took his cap off.

"Give me the next one," said Peg, to Fenn, in the same voice she had used all night, and the table went on. Yesterday morning, in their own kitchen, she had called her Talent the least useful thing anyone in this city had ever been given. Abe stood by the boards and watched a pair walk into black water on her word alone, and he was prouder of her than he had ever been of anything, including himself. He was not the only one watching.

A young surveyor had stood near the table for an hour without once looking at the boards. Finally he said, to the man next to him, not quietly enough, "She isn't reading off anything. There's nothing on that table but the list." The man next to him had a freight yard off the Corn Road, and half the search's rope had come down the hill on his truck. He watched Peg a while longer. Then he asked, quieter, what the woman's name was.

The headlights came down the Corn Road a little before midnight, and work stopped along the rank to look, because nothing on wheels had come down that road since Thursday. Piers Danforth came along the boards with Mrs. Amery beside him, carrying her own folding chair. He asked for Dobbs, and Dobbs was out on the water running pairs across the deep end, so it was Fenn he stood in front of. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"Mrs. Amery's paid until morning," he said, plainly, loud enough to carry down the rank.

"For anybody who comes back needing her. It's already done." Mrs. Amery set her chair down at the end of Peg's table like it was the end of the mats, established that nobody needed her yet, and got her paperback out. And then Piers Danforth stood on the boards in the lamplight with both hands empty. Everyone on that rank had a job. The pairs had names, the hatch had soup, the boards had Fenn, the table had Peg.

Danforth stood in the middle of it with nothing to do, and Abe, coming down the ramp, saw his face and knew what was on it. It had been on his own face every day of his life until October. Fenn saw it too.

"Can you walk all night?" said Fenn.

"Yes," said Danforth, before the question was done.

"Then you're with Dolan. He's the only one going up that way, and pairs means pairs from here on. Nobody goes out alone again tonight. Not even him." Fenn reached up into the lamplight and put the chalk flat against one of the eleven names, and said it.

"Sedden. Nether Street." Abe knew the house before Fenn had finished saying the street. That afternoon a man at the shed had asked him, quietly, whether the crews had been into a house on Nether Street yet, and Abe had run the question out to the crews and carried him back the answer: not yet, tomorrow. He had kept the address all evening without knowing what he was keeping it for. Tomorrow had come early.

They went up together through the dark, and the water thinned as the streets climbed, until it was over the curbs and no higher. Danforth ran badly. He ran like a boy who had been coached at everything except running, arms wrong, breath wrong. He did not complain about it once, and he did not fall behind either, because he would clearly have died first. Abe shortened his stride and kept the lamp between them. The screen came up somewhere past the second corner, mid-stride.

Running · Novice Lv 9 (0 / 4, 050) He read it without breaking stride, beside a boy who was running badly. He had already thought about the still, back at the boards, and decided against it. In a stopped world nobody can answer a shout, and the one night he had searched these streets inside one, looking for Peg, it had given him nothing back. And there was no being nobody with Piers Danforth four feet behind him.

"Left at the chapel," said Abe.

"Then it's the third street."

"You know it?"

"I know it." Nether Street was black on both sides, with the water lying thin and still over the cobblestones, carrying the lamp light along it like a skin. Their feet went through it with a sound like tearing paper. Halfway up, on the left, a door stood wide open, with a black hall behind it and the water sitting on the doorstep. Abe went past it without slowing and without looking. The house had been empty since August.

He knew it like he knew his own yard, because he had walked past it and through it a hundred times with the world stopped, on nights when the still needed somewhere to go. There was nothing behind that door but bare rooms and a smell of mold, and the Sedden house was four doors further up, and a man was maybe alive in it. It took him ten steps to notice he was alone. Danforth had stopped at the open door. He stood in front of it with his lamp up, and then he went in.

Abe stood in the street and waited while the light moved behind the windows, room by room, upstairs and down, missing nothing. Then he came out, and caught up, running badly.

"Empty," said Danforth.

"I know." He said it before he could stop himself, and it landed like a dropped tool in a quiet room. Danforth ran three more steps.

"How did you know?" Abe said nothing. The true answer had a rack of bread in it, and a market crate, and a locked shop in Prescot, and every quiet thing he had ever done inside a world with nobody in it.

"Abe. How did you know it was empty?" Abe held his lamp higher and counted doors, and did not answer, and heard Danforth not asking a third time.

"This one," said Abe. The Sedden house was shut and dark, and when they hammered on the door a voice answered from somewhere above and behind it, small and dry as paper. They found him at the top of his stairs, sitting against the wall with a blanket and a dead flashlight. He was a big man gone weak, his ankle the size of a kettle and the wrong shape. He had fallen on the stairs on Thursday, running for his own door, and crawled back up above the waterline.

The water had come up the hall after him and sat there, and his phone had died Thursday night with everything else.

"My brother's at the shed," he said, before anything else.

"Somebody tell my brother."

"You can tell him yourself," said Abe.

"We're taking you there." Getting him down his own stairs took both of them and all of him. On the street Abe could have carried the man alone, and all three of them knew it. Danforth took the legs and did not put them down again. It was the better part of an hour, the long way around the deep streets, resting where Peg's roads said the footing was good. Danforth's arms were shaking by the second rest, and his breath had gone ragged by the third. He changed his grip and kept walking.

The one time Abe offered to take the whole weight he said "No," with the little wind he had spare, and that was the end of that. Sedden talked in bursts the whole road back. About his brother. About his ankle. About the water coming up his hall like it had been sent for him personally.

"You're the Dolan boy," he said, at the second rest, peering up.

"Off the television."

"He is," said Danforth, from the legs end. The brother was at the shed doors before they cleared the last corner, because word had gone up the boards ahead of them. He came down the boards at a run and stopped short of them like a man reaching the edge of something.

"You said tomorrow," he said, to Abe. It was not a complaint. He was checking a sum.

"It came early," said Abe. The brother got his hands on Sedden's face and said his name twice, and Sedden said "Mind the ankle" instead of anything a person plans to say, and Mrs. Amery put her paperback down and stood up. Abe stood back out of it. There was still a boy's name on the board, and the light in his lamp had maybe an hour left in it, and he was already turning when Danforth spoke behind him.

"You went past that open door and you didn't look at it. Not even after. I went through that house top to bottom, and I didn't know it was empty till I'd seen every room of it. You knew from the middle of the street. You didn't even turn your head."

"I have to go," said Abe.

"There's still a boy on the board." He went up the boards toward Fenn and the column. Behind him, at the bottom of the ramp, Piers Danforth stood in the shallow black water with his hands hanging, watching him go.