Episode 244 · The Rope

On Thursday at two, Soles and the others stood on the shelf under the mill with the steam in their faces.

Maxim was staying up top. That had been decided at the kitchen table, without argument, which was how he knew they had all been thinking about it. He had his phone on a cord around his neck and Krista’s number already open.

— Talk to me every ten knots, he said. Or every time something’s wrong. Whichever comes first.

— It’ll be the second, Tesa said.

Corvin checked the bolts with her, as the standing orders said. Two pairs of hands, both bolts, the ring. The new one held as well as the old.

Then he wrapped the line once around his glove and went down into the white.

Soles followed. Krista came after him. Tesa went last, because she always did.

The passage went in under the bank and dropped at once. Not a ladder now; a slope of wet stone, steep enough that they went backward with the line in both hands. The steam closed over the shelf above them in three steps. After that there was only the rope, the warmth on their faces, and Krista’s voice behind him, counting.

— Four. Five.

The rock was warm under his palms. The smell he had noticed at the lip grew stronger, sweet and heavy, like fruit left too long in a closed room. Somewhere overhead, very faint, the river moved.

— Ten, Krista said.

The slope eased into a low chamber. Corvin was waiting there, crouched with his back to the wall, his lamp at his feet.

— This is where I stop.

— Why here? Soles asked.

— Because the surveyors went on.

He didn’t say it unkindly. He took a flask from his coat, unscrewed the cap and didn’t drink.

— I’ll hold the line. Shout if you want it.

Krista spoke into the phone. Maxim’s voice came back thin and steady, asking what she could see. She told him: a chamber, a man with a lamp, a rope going down. Maxim said that sounded like most of his deliveries.

They went on without Corvin.

Below the chamber the passage narrowed and the heat rose. Soles counted in his head with Krista now. Eleven. Twelve. The steam was thinner here, as if it had already come from somewhere else and was only passing through.

At sixteen the rope ended on a bolt in the floor.

Beyond it the passage opened, and in the floor of the opening was the light.

It lay in a seam across the rock, as long as a man and no wider than a hand. It rose and sank. Every time it rose, steam lifted off it and the sweet smell came stronger, and every time it sank the rock around it ticked as it cooled.

It was breathing. He could not think of a better word, so he stopped trying.

Tesa stepped up on his left without being asked and set her feet.

— If it does anything, she said, I’m pulling you out by your collar.

— Fair.

He knelt at the edge of the seam. The cuff was on his right wrist, the chain gathered short. The dark blade came into his hand and the light leaned toward it, the way the breach in the factory yard had leaned.

One cut. Hand back. If it moves past reach, stop.

He waited for the seam to rise. He found the line inside it, finer than a hair, brighter than the rest, and drove the point in.

It caught.

In the yard it had felt like cutting a tight thread. This was not one thread. The point went in and met something that held, and behind that something else, and behind that more, as if he had put his blade through a net and every strand of it ran up into the rock and away.

And at the other ends, something held on.

He could not see it. He could feel it through his wrist: weight, many small weights, all pulling the same way he was not. Upward. Out toward the town.

The seam dimmed. The steam above it thinned to a breath. Somewhere far above them the river’s sound changed, very slightly, the way a voice changes when the speaker turns his head.

Finish it.

He knew whose voice that was. He pulled.

— Stop, Krista said.

He pulled a little more.

The weights at the other ends did not let go. They tightened. The seam snapped inward along its whole length, like a hand drawn back into a sleeve, and the floor jumped under his knees. Dust came down from the roof. Tesa’s fist closed on his collar.

He let the blade come free.

The light was still there. Narrower. Lower. Not closed.

Soles knelt with the knife across his thigh and felt his wrist shaking, and could not tell whether it was his or the weight he had just let go of.

— What was that? Tesa asked.

— People, he said, before he knew he was going to.

Neither of them asked him what he meant. Krista was already on her feet with a hand on the rope.

— We’re going up. Now.

They climbed. Sixteen. Fifteen. The heat followed them. The phone in Krista’s pocket was saying Maxim’s name over and over in Maxim’s voice.

Krista first, then Tesa, then Soles, backward up the wet slope, hand over hand.

— Twelve, Krista said. Eleven.

She reached up for ten.

The rope jumped. Somewhere above her something gave with a soft, fibrous sound, like a sleeve tearing, and the whole line ran down through Soles’s gloves.

Krista’s boots came off the stone. She slid into Tesa, and Tesa, who had both feet set, took her and was carried anyway, and then both of them were coming down the slope at him.

Soles closed his hands.

The line kept running. Heat went through the leather at once. Below him was the dark, and the seam ticking in it, and whatever held the other ends.

Two meters. The knot comes at two. Hold to the knot.

The knot did not come. A meter went through his palms, and another, and the leather tore, and the rope went on through what was under it.

Krista had stopped counting. In all that noise, it was the only silence he heard.

Not two.

The knot hit the top of his fist at last. He wrapped the line once around his right glove, the way Corvin had at the top, set his boots against the stone, and took all of it: Tesa’s weight on his shoulder, Krista’s through the rope, into hands that had no skin left to give. Above them, the thing that had given went on giving, a finger’s width at a time, as if deciding.

Then it stopped.

The rope hummed under his wrist. Tesa’s breath was clenched beside his ear. Under it, the rock ticked.

If it goes again, I can’t hold it twice.

— Feet, Tesa said. Krista. Feet on the stone. Slowly.

Krista found the slope, then Tesa. The weight came off him a piece at a time, and only then did he feel his hands.

He did not look at them. He unwrapped the line and climbed, and every time his fingers closed on the rope it was like closing them on a stove.

At ten, in the chamber, Corvin’s lamp was still burning. Corvin was not beside it.

Krista stopped with both hands on the line.

— Soles.

She held the lamp to the knot. Above it, the rope was gray and soft with use. Below it, where they had just climbed, it was paler. Stiffer. Two ropes, joined inside the knot so neatly that a hand going down in the dark would never have found the seam.

— That isn’t the same rope.

She measured the next stretch with her arms, the way she measured photographs. Then again.

— Three meters. Not two. Below here, they’re all three.

Soles had known since the slope. His palms had counted it.

Soles looked down the passage. Sixteen knots, and they had counted every one. They had not been where they thought they were. They had been deeper. They had cut deeper.

— How far did we go? Tesa asked.

— I don’t know any more.

Behind them, down in the dark at the end of the paler rope, the rock began to tick.