Episode 191 · What the Walls Carry

The handle came off the mug in Soles’s hand with a small, clean snap, and the mug went on sitting on the table as if nothing had happened to it.

He looked at the handle. He had not squeezed. He had not meant to squeeze on the stairs, either. He had only picked it up the way he had picked up mugs all his life, and somewhere between his fingers and the china there had been more of him than there used to be.

— That was my mug, Maxim said.

— It was my mug.

— It was my favorite of your mugs.

— You know you don’t actually live here?

— Keep smashing the crockery and I won’t.

Krista took the handle out of his fingers and put it in the drawer where she kept the things she meant to glue, which was most things now. She did not say anything. She did not have to. Since the washroom he had moved freely, and he could feel the strength under his ribs the way you feel a full tank through the floor of a truck. His body had been handed more than he knew what to do with.

Capacity. Not control. Fine. Don’t shake hands with anyone.

The guard’s sister was asleep on the sofa under Tesa’s coat, with Mina lying across her feet like a paperweight. It was nine in the morning. Tarn had not called. On the courtyard stones the day before, he had said that now they knew he had been there. Since then his phone had been switched off, and the silence from it was worse than any message.

— They’ll have taken him somewhere, Tesa said. Somewhere with no balcony.

She had pulled her sleeve down over her forearm. She had not mentioned the marks. Neither had he.

— Somewhere with walls, Soles said.

They looked at him.

He had been turning it over half the night, the way he turned over a gearbox that only failed under load. The man in gray took people. The man who walked out of walls had stood in this kitchen, and Tarn had named his branch. If anyone knew where the branch kept the people it took, it was him. And a man who walked through walls left something in them. Soles had felt it, the night he lay on the sofa and heard the kitchen wall change: a weight where no weight should be, then a seam.

— Walls carry things, he said. Load. Damp. Where a pipe’s been moved. If he’s been walking through this town, he’s been leaving a line.

— And you can read it, Krista said. Not a question. A measurement she was taking.

— Here, at night, lying down, with the house asleep. I don’t know about out there.

— Then you’ll find out, Tesa said.

— I’ll take Lucky out, he said. A long one.

It was not a lie. It was not the whole of it either, and Krista looked at him a second longer than she needed to, and let it go.

He started with his own kitchen.

He stood with his palm flat on the plaster beside the stove, where the dark sleeve had come out of it that night, and let his attention go into the wall. Brick, lime, the old chimney breast, the pipe to the boiler. And something else. Not a crack. A seam, as faint as a weld in two pieces of the same steel, where the wall had closed after something passed through it and had not quite closed the way it was made.

He followed it with his hand to the corner, and out.

Outside, it was harder. Every wall in the street was carrying something, and none of it had been arranged for him to learn. He walked slowly, with Lucky at the end of the lead deciding everything was interesting, and stopped at every wall and laid his left hand on it like a man checking whether a radiator was on. Mechanic’s finally gone a bit strange, he imagined the neighbors saying. He kept his hand on the wall.

Three houses down, he found it again. The same seam, in the side wall of the bakery, low, a man’s height, running straight through.

Then in the old wash-house at the end of the street. Then in the long wall of the tram depot.

It did not go along the streets. It went through them. A straight line drawn across the town by a man who had never in his life needed a door, from Soles’s kitchen down toward the river, through brick and concrete and somebody’s garage. Lucky stopped at every place where Soles stopped, put his nose to the bottom of the wall and sneezed, as though the wall smelled of something he did not approve of.

Good dog. I don’t approve of it either.

He walked the line for two hours. It took him through the back of the market, under the railway arch, along the old flood wall where the river came close to the town. The seams were fresher here. He could feel the difference with his palm: older ones settled and cold, these still faintly wrong, like a joint that had been welded that morning.

At the end of the flood wall, where the embankment went down in big stone blocks to the water, the line went into the stone.

And stopped.

He walked the whole length of the embankment and back. He went down the steps to the edge of the water and put his hand on every block within reach. Nothing came out the other side. The seam went into the wall and ended there, as if the man had stepped into the river and kept walking.

He stood on the bottom step with the water black and quick a meter from his boots, and felt, quite distinctly, the moment the hunt turned around.

A man who walks through walls doesn’t leave a straight line unless he wants it followed.

The thought came with an older, quieter certainty, the patience of a man who had once laid a wire noose on a path a target used every night. Soles could feel the familiar pull of that way of seeing. He had followed a line laid out for him, and only now was he asking who had laid it.

He looked past the steps, at the river. Ice had come back along the edges, a gray shelf, and beyond it the water ran open and black. No walls out there. Nothing to step into, nothing to hide in, nothing to come out of behind a man’s back.

He filed it the way he filed the size of a bolt he did not have yet.