Chương 94: Under the Wall

The rain was loud on the black water, and then it was not. Everything stopped at once, the rain and the swells and the current pulling at his knees, and Abe stood chest-deep in a stopped sea at the mouth of the cut, alone with the sound of his own breathing. He could have sat down on the steps first, stopped the world, and rested. A whole night of it would have cost him a few real minutes. He had done it in the yard all winter, and got up afterward with his legs working and his head clear.

But that meant a night on his own with nothing to do but think, and he had spent the whole week making sure he never got one. He pointed the light ahead of him and walked in under the road. The water stood open around him wherever he was, and closed itself again behind him. Soon it was over his head. The air came down with him, in the space the water left, and it was all the air there was. Stopped water, stopped rain, stopped everything, and his own chest going in and out in the middle of it.

When it went bad, the walk was over, wherever he happened to be standing. His hands stayed at his sides. Take hold of anything down here and the world would start again, and the world starting again, down here, meant the whole sea arriving at once. So he looked with the light and kept his hands to himself, and the only sounds left anywhere were his boots and his breath. A cross was chalked beside the first doorway. Some pair had come this far in daylight and turned back.

Past the cross the walls were bare, and nobody had ever searched an inch of it. He searched. He gave every doorway the full light and a slow count of five, because there was nobody down here to catch what he missed. It had been a street down here once. Doorways opened off both sides, low and black, and he put the light through every one. Mud, mostly, and furniture that had stopped being furniture.

Ada had been two streets from her own door, in a back stairwell, under the water, and nobody had searched there until it was two days too late. Maybe someone would have found her on Thursday night if they had looked harder. Maybe he would have. He put that thought down fast and did not pick it back up. He could have stood in that doorway and thought about it for a week, and that was exactly why he would not start. He searched harder instead.

Something small and pale hung ahead of him, snagged on broken iron, at the height of a child. He stood still for one breath. Then he went to it fast, before his heart could climb any higher, and put the light on it from a hand's width away. A pillowcase. Mud-gray, torn, years old. Not a child, and nothing of a child's. He stood there until his heart came down, and walked on. Stone steps went up inside one doorway, to where a family had lived over their shop. He climbed them.

The room at the top was mud to the ceiling, and nobody small was waiting in it. There was a ledge running dry along one wall, with coiled rope on it and a lantern with no glass in it, and he walked it end to end with the light. There were three more doorways past it. Nothing, and nothing, and nothing. Two children were still on Fenn's board. He said that to himself, and kept going in. The cut grew as it went.

Streets narrow going in, and drains narrow going in, but this one widened, and its roof lifted, until the light ran out of wall to find on either side. The doorways stopped coming. The street stopped being a street. The air had started to taste used. He kept walking. The floor turned to shells. He felt it before he saw it, a crunch and a slide under his boots where stone had been. Gray shells, split open from the inside, empty, every one of them big enough for a dog to have curled up inside.

Small heaps of them first, then drifts, then nothing else in any direction. He turned a slow circle with the light down and could not find where they ended. Then he lifted the beam. The water over his head was full. At every height his light could reach, the same shape hung in the black, as still as the water holding it. He tried to count the nearest of them and stopped at forty. They went up, row above row, past where the light could follow, and the light gave out a long way short of the roof.

They were not all in the water, either. They stood on the floor too, in among the shells, a dozen inside the reach of his light and more past the edge of it. He made himself walk on toward the middle, to be sure of the size of the place, and the way through passed between them, close enough to touch and never touching. After another hundred steps the middle still had not come, and he had stopped counting the standing ones. Some of the shells were not finished.

One near his boots lay cracked wide, with a gray leg out of it to the first joint, stopped there, half out of its own egg. Another had only just broken, one piece of shell lifted like a trapdoor, something pale underneath. The room was not done making them. The city had been fighting for three days. The city had been fighting the ones that got out. If the water had carried the two children in this far, no light was going to find them, but looking was what he had come to do.

He looked, the whole floor, the slow way around, in among the standing ones and past them. Shells, and the things standing in them. Nothing that had ever been a child. Between him and the mouth of the cut, lying across the shells, was something as long as the Bell House. His light touched it for half a second. Legs folded underneath it, he thought, like a hen sits folded on a nest. He moved the light away, slowly, and did not bring it back.

He put the beam down at the shells by his own boots instead, and finally let himself know where he had seen them before. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. A grab bucket had brought shells up out of black water in October, three loads onto the dock, while three guards stood around the bucket saying nothing, and the one with the notebook did not write one word about it. Nobody on that road had known what they were looking at.

The heap on the dock had been eggshells. And he had known, that same night, that the thing he killed at the bottom of the taped steps had been standing on something in the dark. He had never told a living soul about that night. He had said nothing in October, and all winter, under the wall, the room had been growing. He stood in the middle of it and understood all of it at once, alone at the bottom of the sea. The light in his hand had begun to shake, and he made it quit. The air had gone stale for real now.

Every breath gave him back less than the one before, and the walk out was long. It was time to go. He turned back for the mouth, and the long shape lay between him and the way out, and this time he looked at it straight. For one bad second he thought it had moved. It had not. He had seen it wrong the first time, sideways, in half a second of light, and called it a sleeping thing. It was not sleeping. Every leg was set beneath it, carrying its weight, ready. Its head end pointed at the mouth of the cut. Out.

At Calder. Nothing down here was growing anymore. It was done. He gave it the widest room the chamber allowed, and then he ran. Running on shells at the bottom of the sea is barely running. They turned and slid under his boots, and twenty steps on, one of them rolled and put him down hard on his hands. The flashlight skated away and lay there, shining back at the dark he had come out of. He got it, and got up, and ran on between the standing ones without looking at any of them. The air was nearly done.

Every breath came in louder than the last. The walls found him again, and the doorways went by, the steps, the ledge, the broken iron, and then the floor was rising under him. Gray came into the water overhead, morning gray, wavering. His head broke out into the rain because his body decided it, not him. He let the world back in as soon as he was clear. Sound crashed down on him, rain and wind and the live sea, and the cold turned real.

He crawled up into the shallows, sat down in them, and let his breathing be everything for a while. He was shaking all over, and he let that happen too, because it was allowed to now. His hand had gone so numb around the flashlight that he had to look at it to know it was still there. Calder stood black up the hill. Not one window. Nobody awake, and nobody anywhere who knew where he was. The screen was still waiting.

It had been waiting since Friday afternoon, because there had not been one minute since then that belonged to him. This minute did. He opened it, kneeling in the sea, rain running off his nose. Turning-Wheel Trance · Apprentice Lv 6 (0 / 7, 200) The days he could take inside a still would be longer now. That had been happening somewhere underneath all the running, and he had not had one quiet hour since Thursday to notice it.

Two nights ago he had told June a number the minute he got it, in his own living room, and she had asked whether it was a lot. This number he read alone in the dark. He would have liked someone to ask him something. He read it again, longer than he needed to, and then stood up. The sound of the water changed while he was standing. A swell rolled out from under the road, long and slow, crossed the black water, and broke over his boots. Another came behind it. The same size. The same pace.

One after another after another, like breathing. The tide sheets said low water until midmorning, and the sheets had been right for three straight days. This was not the tide. It was not waiting for the tide. He counted five of them, standing there with the flashlight off. Then he quit counting, and ran. Abe came through the shed doors soaked to the neck and down the boards at a run, out of breath for the first time any of them had ever seen.

"Get everybody off the low boards," he said, before the doors had shut behind him.

"The water's coming. Not this afternoon. Now. And I know where from." The shed before dawn had been lamplight and steam and half the crews asleep sitting up on the nets. It woke around him, man by man. Dobbs was already on his feet at the middle table, where the tide sheets lay weighted flat. Brammall had the slate off his chest before Abe finished the first sentence, and Mullen came around the hatch drying his hands. Fenn got to him first, with the chalk still in his hand.

"The little ones," he said.

"No." Abe made himself say the rest of it.

"I went the whole way in. They're not in the cut." Fenn looked at him for a second, and then put the chalk in his pocket and did not ask him anything else.

"From where?" said Dobbs.

"Under the wall." Abe got a breath.

"The cut doesn't stop at the wall. It keeps going, under, and then it opens out. There's a room down there. I was in it."

"How big?"

"It's bigger than-" He stopped, and his hands made a shape and gave up on it.

"You could lose the shed in it. The school. I couldn't find the sides with a light." Nobody on the nets moved.

"The floor's all eggshells," he said.

"Big ones. Broke open from the inside. Thousands of them. And the water over them is full of the things. All the way up. As high as the light went, and the light didn't get near the top. And the things aren't only in the water. They're standing on the floor as well, in among the shells, everywhere my light went." Nobody said anything to that either.

"And some of them aren't open yet," said Abe.

"I saw one with a leg out of it, stuck halfway. That room's still making them."

"How many," said Dobbs.

"I stopped counting at forty." A breath.

"That was one layer. The nearest one." Mullen said a word the hatch did not usually hear, quietly.

"And there's a big one," said Abe.

"In the middle. Long as a hall. Its legs are set under it and it's pointed this way. It's done growing." The shed had gone so quiet the lamps could be heard.

"The mouth's breathing," said Abe.

"Swells coming out of it. Even ones. Like something breathing."

"How far apart?" said Dobbs.

"Half a minute. Less by now, probably."

"How deep?" said Cottle, from over by the stove.

"Deeper than my light," said Abe.

"Both ways." Nobody asked how he had been down there and come back alive. That had stopped being a question anybody asked him days ago.

"Then we shut it," said Purnell, off the nets, already standing.

"Tonight. We put the barges across the mouth and we sink them on it."

"With what crane?" said Dobbs.

"I don't care about the crane."

"It's thirty feet down and wider than this shed, and it's breathing," said Dobbs.

"We'd lose the barges and the men and it would still come. No." Purnell said something short and sat back down on the nets, and nobody told her off for any of it.

"You went out there on your own," said Fenn, to Abe, not loudly. Abe stood and looked at him and did not answer that either.

"Later," said Dobbs, to both of them. Then he put his knuckles on the table and started asking questions, one at a time. How far in past the wall. Which way the room lay. Where the roof came down low, and where it didn't. Abe answered each one, short, and Dobbs nodded him on to the next.

"My hip's been saying the water falls tomorrow," said Mullen, from the hatch, to nobody in particular, in the voice of a man asking to be argued with.

"Then it can fall tomorrow," said Dobbs.

"It doesn't get today."

"How long has all that been down there?" said Brammall, to his slate more than to anyone, and nobody answered him, and Abe looked at the boards under his own boots. Everything he knew about the water, he had given them. The one thing he did not say was October. The taped stairwell, and the bucket on the dock. He kept it, and hated how easy the keeping had gotten. Dobbs looked at the tide sheets for one more second. Then he pulled the weights off them and let them roll themselves up.

Three days of the sheets being right, done with.

"Fenn," he said.

"Wipe the board." Fenn looked at the two small names at the bottom of the column, wiped everything above them, and left them standing.

"Everybody up," said Dobbs, to the whole shed.

"Everybody, and every boat, and somebody go and wake the Bell House."