Chương 93: The Bell House

The boy was not in any of the houses. Abe and Cottle worked the streets above the chapel until the lamp went dim, knocking, listening, wading into houses the earlier pairs had searched and chalked, and wading out again. Nothing answered. The last door was a shed with a hole in the roof, and the boy was not in that either. Cottle held the lamp up to look at it dying, then looked at the sky, which was starting to rain.

"Is it falling?" Abe asked him.

"The water. Mullen says Sunday."

"No," said Cottle. They walked back down together. Cottle turned in at the shed with the dead lamp. Abe stood at the boards long enough to read the night's found names off the board, four of them, for four families waiting up at the hall. Then he went out along the stones toward the one building in Calder with light in its windows. The Bell House hall at two in the morning was six hundred people trying to sleep in a room that wouldn't go quiet, and mostly failing at both.

Somewhere down the hall a baby was being walked up and down. Two men by the coffee urn were arguing about whose crew had the worst boat and enjoying it. Sedden sat up against the wall with his bad ankle on a rolled coat, telling the story of his own rescue to anyone who slowed down. It got a little better every time he told it. Mrs. Amery had come up from the shed after midnight, when the hurt ones started being brought here instead, where the light was.

Her folding chair stood at the end of the first mattress row and she was asleep in it sitting up, with her paperback open on her knee. Inside the doors, the shed's big flashlights stood charging in a row, fat as bottles, because the Bell House had the only power in the city. Abe took one off the shelf, and then went along the hall giving out his names. A woman took her husband's name standing up and then had to sit down. An old man took his sister's name and said thank you twice.

Then he went straight back to staring at nothing, as if good news needed somewhere to be put and he had run out of places. Four names left on the board now, out of the eleven. June was down at the children's end, asleep at last, sitting on the floor with her back against the rocking horse and a toddler asleep across her legs. Abe stood and looked at her and did not wake her. Abe went the long way back up the hall, past the Salt Row end, where nobody was asleep.

They had lost too much this week to lie down quietly, so they sat up in a ring of blankets and talked, and Piers Danforth sat among them, listening. He had paid for the healer and run out of things to do hours ago. It was the one end of the hall with room for a stranger. Colin still had the crowbar. He was telling the October story.

"Bottom of our road," he said.

"Same kind. Somebody killed it at the foot of the taped stairs and never said one word. Never came forward. Mrs. Bewley called it in and got nothing back for seven weeks." He turned the crowbar over.

"And the guard pulled a whole heap of something off the dock in the autumn and stood around it not talking. My cousin watched them do it."

"Everybody's cousin watched them do it," said a man from the block.

"Well, mine actually did," said Colin. Danforth listened with his elbows on his knees and asked nothing. Prosser went down to the clock room at half past two. He had wound the tide clock on Thursdays for thirty-one years, and the tide clock did not need him at half past two on a Saturday morning, but he went down anyway. He had been going down every hour since dark, to stand on the bottom step and listen to the water in the throat of the harbor. The last time he trusted the water, it lied.

The hall had gotten used to the sight of him crossing to the tower door with his coat buttoned up, apologizing to people who were not in his way. This time he was down there less than a minute. Prosser shouted, down in the clock room under the floor. Then boards broke, one after another, loud in the dark under everyone, and Prosser shouted again, higher this time, and something heavy fell on the stairs. Abe was moving before anyone else understood what they'd heard.

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. Prosser came through the tower door on his hands and knees, his coat torn open from shoulder to hip and the shoulder wrong under it. Behind him, out of the dark of the stair, came the thing from under the floor. It was the same kind he had been killing all week. It stood in the lamplight over the man it had climbed, dripping, and it turned its head, listening.

A child at the near end of the mattresses woke up and screamed. The head swung toward the scream. There was no room. There were mattresses on every side and children asleep on coats and the folding table with the urn on it, and nothing anywhere to swing, and no time to reach for anything anyway. Abe crossed the last of the hall like the floor was moving him, took the thing by two of its front legs as it turned, and used everything he had. It came off the ground.

He put it down again, backward, under him, and drove his knee through the middle of it, and felt the whole frame of it go at once, like a crate goes. It got one leg into his coat and tore the sleeve half off. Then it stopped, all of it, everywhere, and the only sound in the Bell House was rain on the windows. Then every sound came back at the same time. People were screaming and standing up on mattresses and grabbing children who were perfectly safe.

The two men from the coffee urn were shouting at everyone to stay back from a thing that was finished. Somewhere behind Abe a woman started laughing and couldn't stop, and was being held onto. All down the hall, people were pulling children close and looking at the boards under their own feet. Down at the children's end, June was on her feet with a crying kid on each arm, looking at her brother over the tops of their heads.

"That's them," Colin said loudly, from the Salt Row end, on his feet with the crowbar finally in both hands.

"That's what came up out of my floor. That's it exactly." Under all of it, near the tower door, one of the Marsdens was down on both knees next to Prosser, shouting for the healer. Mrs. Amery had her chair and her bag at Prosser's side before most of the hall knew he was hurt. She cut what was left of his coat off him without asking, and looked at the shoulder and the long tear under it. Then she went to work, level and unbothered. The shoulder went back with a sound Abe heard from ten feet away.

The tear closed under her hands in under a minute. The crowd around them watched the wound close into a red line, and the red line fade to almost nothing.

"The clock," Prosser said, while she worked on him. He was shivering hard.

"The case glass has gone. I heard it go."

"The clock can wait," said Mrs. Amery, and went on strapping the arm across his chest. The hall did not go back to sleep. The news went along the rows instead, both pieces of it, the dead thing by the tower door and the boy who had killed it, and it was the boy the hall wanted to talk about. Abe stood at the edge of the lamplight and heard his own name go down the hall in pieces.

"That's the Dolan boy. The one off the clip." Mrs. Garside said it from a nest of blankets, with a grandchild asleep on either side of her. She said it like you say the name of someone famous, and not the name of a boy standing thirty feet away.

"They've been saying it since November. That he's a prodigy." The word went along the row, one blanket nest to the next. Three people looked over at him at once. At the Salt Row end, Piers Danforth heard it too, and looked at the floor. Abe picked a fallen mug up off the boards, set it on the table, and got out of the light. By then Colin had carried a chair to the tower doorway and set himself in it with the crowbar, facing down the dark stairs, and nobody told him to move.

The eighth name came off the board at half past three. He came in under a coat. The hall stood up in silence and stayed standing until the men carrying him were through to the back room. The ninth came in twenty minutes later, alive. His name was Perrin, off Low Marsh. He had spent three days wedged in his own chimney with the water at his knees, and he came up the hall between two crewmen with his feet in somebody else's boots, talking in a voice like a hinge. Mrs. Amery got up for him. He wouldn't lie down.

He had kept something for three days, and he would not rest until the whole end of the hall had heard it.

"I saw the little ones. Thursday. I shouted at them from my window, come up here, come up to me, and the water was in the road between us and they couldn't hear me or they couldn't do it." The mug they had given him knocked against his teeth.

"They went the other way. Down the cut road, ahead of the water. The two of them holding hands, going down the hill." He drank, and his eyes went around the faces.

"I said it to my wall for three days so I wouldn't get it wrong," he said.

"They were holding hands. The whole way." Everyone in that room knew what was at the bottom of the cut road. The cut goes in under the road there, into the dark under the low city, and the water goes with it. That was where the children had gone, two days ago. There were families on every side, and children listening from under coats, and nobody said one word of it out loud. Two names stood on the board now, and both of them were children's names.

One of them was the boy Abe had spent the front of the night not finding. Abe stood by the doors.

"Nobody goes out alone again tonight," Fenn had said, with the chalk still in his hand.

"Not even him." He looked down the hall. June was asleep with the toddler on her legs and her mouth open. Mrs. Amery was rolling a bandage back up. The two men at the urn had gone quietly back to their argument. Two names. The water went in under the road, and nobody in this hall could follow it there. But he could. Nobody was watching the doors. He went out into the rain.

It had settled in, fine and steady, the kind that doesn't stop by morning, and it was after four, and Calder stood black all the way up the hill. Somewhere under the black streets, the water was moving. Abe went along the stones at a run, up onto the harbor wall, to the place where the cut goes in under the road. Black water, rain standing on it, going in under the city in the dark. At the top of the steps he stood and got his breathing down.

Then he turned the flashlight on and went down, and the cold came through his boots, and his knees, and his chest, and he kept walking.