Episodul 250 · Alone, With It

On Thursday evening, Zora’s kitchen had four chairs and five people.

Halloran had brought the last of the day’s bread in a sack. Noct sat beside the window, which stood open a hand’s width onto the frost; he had asked for that before taking off his coat. The man who had come up through the mill race the week before stayed in the doorway with his cap in both hands.

He had worked for the survey office, he told them on his first night. After that he had stopped telling them anything. He ate what Zora put in front of him and looked toward the river whenever the talk died.

— There isn’t— he began.

Varren had already pulled the stool from under the sink. He set it at the corner of the table, between Noct and the stove, where nobody would have to squeeze behind it.

— Sit. I made room.

The man sat. Halloran cut the bread. For a while there was only the knife, and the draft lifting the edge of the curtain.

Varren watched them eat. Noct finished first and pushed his plate an inch away, the way he did when he wanted someone to offer him more. Halloran’s eyes went to the stove door twice. The surveyor kept both hands around his cup, as though it might leave without him.

All of it had started that morning. The river, the calls from the oven, the voices Noct could no longer tell apart. Something had changed at the root, and Varren could not see what.

He said so.

Zora put the teapot down. Her hand stayed on the handle.

— There’s something I haven’t told you.

Halloran looked at his plate, as if he already knew what was coming.

— The day the new team arrived, she said, Halloran heard the detachment men talking at the morning delivery. Someone was coming up on the evening train, the man who had killed somebody called Bull. They said his name.

She said it.

The stove ticked. Noct turned his head from the window.

— I went back with Halloran in the afternoon, when he took bread to the house they’d readied, Zora said. While he stacked the loaves, I put two bowls by the radiator and a sack of food. I wrote her name on one.

— Whose name?

— Mina. You said she always wants something of her own.

He had said it. In this kitchen, on a night when she asked him what he missed, he had talked about Soles’s dogs, and the younger one by name. It had not occurred to him that the story could leave the room.

— You didn’t know the dogs were coming.

— No. I hoped.

— You’ve told him we’re here.

It came out flat. He watched it reach her.

He could see Soles in a strange kitchen, looking down at a dog’s name in somebody else’s handwriting. Soles would not have called it a kindness. He would have asked who had a key, and he would have kept asking.

— I told a dog she was welcome, Zora said. You talk about him as if he were family. I thought—

She stopped. Varren was on his feet. He had not decided to stand.

Soles was in Vatra. Soles, who carried the dark blade. For weeks the detachment had gone down to the river and changed nothing. Then he arrived, and this morning the water cooled.

Varren could not prove it. He did not need to. He looked at Noct’s fingers working against the sill, at the baker watching the stove door, at the surveyor, who had put his cup down and turned his face toward the river.

— He’s closing it.

— Closing what? Halloran asked.

Varren went into the hall. His bag hung beside Zora’s coat. Through the canvas he felt the shape of the wrapped blade before he lifted it down.

Zora followed him.

— Where are you going?

— To look.

— Then I’ll come.

— Stay with them. Noct shouldn’t be alone tonight.

— Noct has three people in that kitchen.

He buttoned his coat. She stood between him and the door without touching him.

— At the landing, I told you that you should have said, she said. So I said it.

— You did.

— And now you’re going.

He put his hand on the latch. Behind her, someone had moved a chair; he heard Noct ask for the window to stay open.

— Keep it open for him, Varren said, and went out.

The steps down to the lower landing were glazed with ice. Varren kept one hand on the wall and left his flashlight off until the last street lamp was behind him.

The slab opened to his palm. Warm air rose from the stair, thinner than he remembered.

In the chamber he went straight to the pillar.

The opening was still there. Three months ago it had hung beside his wrist and pushed heat across his face. Now he had to crouch to feel it. It was narrower. The deep sound had gone faint, as if he were hearing it through a wall, and the edge would not keep still. It trembled like a rope with someone pulling on the far end.

If it closed, what would it take with it? Noct losing his place in a sentence. Halloran answering an empty oven. Zora dropping a reading she had taken a hundred times. None of them had asked to be closed. Nobody had asked them at all.

He laid his hand flat against the stone. The strength was there if he wanted it. He remembered Halloran’s flashlight rolling across the floor, Zora’s closed fist, and kept it where it was.

He set the bag on the stone table and unwrapped the blade.

It lay pale in the flashlight: the narrow body, the curved edge, the hole near the base where something had once been fixed. The old voice drew back from it as it had the first time.

Away.

He did not.

He carried it to the pillar and held it close to the trembling edge. Nothing happened. He had no idea what ought to happen. For three months he had kept it wrapped, because a frightened voice told him to and because the men who knew the entrance might have come back for it.

Somewhere in the town, Soles had a bowl by the radiator and the other blade within reach.

Varren knelt beside the opening with the pale one in his hand. He did not know what it could do.

He knew who carried the other.