Episodul 161 · Possibly Continuous

The next afternoon, Krista went down to the bank with the tracing paper folded in her bag, her notebook for the measurements, a measuring tape in her coat pocket and, added at the last moment, a clean cloth.

At the service gate, the day guard looked up from his newspaper, then at the tape sticking out of her pocket.

— Measuring again?

— Checking.

— It was all checked before. Then it was all wrong.

He said it without bitterness. Since the exhibition he had started telling her things he had kept to himself most of his life, a sentence at a time, like a man paying back a loan. Krista said she would be an hour. He wrote the time in the gate book, in the daytime column, and turned the book so she could see it.

A wheelbarrow rattled across the footbridge above her. She waited for it to pass before crouching by the third block. From the path the stone looked as if it had always sat against the bank. From below, the hole beneath its edge was easy to find. Someone had widened it with shovels since the night she and Tesa had crawled through on their stomachs.

She switched on her phone’s light and went in on her knees. The ground was wet for the first few steps. Farther along, a pale patch of daylight lay across the floor where the passage turned.

Her drawing had given the turn a neat corner. The wall curved, and the curve began sooner than she remembered. She measured what she could reach and crossed out the straight line. The new one ran over one of her question marks.

Good start. You’ve moved the wall.

The joke was less comfortable here. When she turned the light toward the slab, the end of the passage came back to her with a familiarity that made her want to walk the rest of the way without looking at her feet.

She looked at them. Then she went forward.

Here Tesa had laughed in the dark so she would not swear, the cast knocking against the stone. Here the smell had come, old apples in a drawer. Farther in, an old flashlight with a K scratched into its handle had lain beside a line of dried drops. Krista remembered all of it exactly, the way she remembered everything she had seen. Remembering exactly had never once told her what she had not seen.

Before she passed the turn, she photographed it facing back toward the steps. From that side the wall hid more of the opening than she had expected. She drew a small arrow on her sketch. A plan that worked only when she was looking at the slab was not much use for getting out.

The slab was closed.

Krista put the notebook on a dry ledge and took out the photograph. The pale line she had traced at the archive ran along the repaired stonework near the entrance. Here, beyond the turn, she found another join at roughly the same height.

She wanted it to be the same line.

A match in height proved nothing, not when she had measured it from two different patches of uneven ground. When she put the tape against the wall, the floor rose under one boot and dipped under the other, and the figure changed when she changed feet. She wrote both readings rather than choosing the one that fitted.

In the notebook she wrote Possibly continuous. Underneath, she added Check height from the same level.

The second line annoyed her. It was also the one she would have asked anyone else to write.

Near the slab, mortar covered a narrow strip of the join. She wiped away the loose dirt with the cloth. One edge emerged, straight and smooth; beside it, a smaller stone had been cut into an awkward wedge to fill the space.

She moved the light to the other side.

Two more wedges. Different widths, fitted against the same smooth edge.

Krista crouched. The repairs followed the edge of the slab instead of carrying straight past it. Whoever had laid those smaller stones had worked around something already there.

She traced the arrangement on a clean page. The pencil moved quickly until the join disappeared behind the closed stone. At one angle of the light a shallow groove seemed to continue into the covered part. At another it vanished. She drew it faintly and put a question mark beside it.

A scrape sounded behind her.

She turned so sharply that the light struck the ceiling. A photograph had slid off the ledge and lay face down by her boot.

She let out the breath she had been holding and picked it up. While she had followed the groove, she had stopped listening to the passage behind her. She checked the ground between her and the entrance anyway.

On the old plan, all of this had been reduced to Existing. She had read it as a finished answer: old stonework, already accounted for. Now she wrote the word at the top of the page and drew a box around it.

Existing when?

The phone lit up with Soles’s name.

She watched it ring. If she answered, he would hear the water, ask about the passage, ask if she had gone through the door.

She had not. She could tell him that much.

The call ended while she was deciding how to begin.

If she told him, he would come down here with one arm that would not lift and one that would not straighten, and he would be polite about it, and he would put his palm on the slab because it was there. She knew him well enough to see it. She did not yet know him well enough to stop him.

At the slab she stopped again, close enough to touch it. She kept both hands on the notebook. The part she could reach had already changed her drawing. She would not use the blank space beyond the door to make the rest of the lines fit.

Outside, the daylight had thinned. In the clearest photograph, the smaller stones crowded against the smooth edge like fingers against a closed book.

She sent Soles a message.

I’ll be home soon.

Then she put the phone away and went back through the garden, carrying a measured drawing and another thing she had chosen not to tell him.