Episode 254 · Stage One

They came back at first light and crossed out the ten.

Soles heard the chalk before he saw it, a dry squeak on wood below the window. When he looked down, the cleaner with the stick was already two doors on. On their own door the 10 had a line through it. Under it, a 9.

Krista had been up before him. She sat at the kitchen table and at the top of a clean page she had written two words and underlined them twice.

Stage one.

Under them, three lines.

Nobody else sits down.

Three ropes. Ours. Tested.

A way down that isn’t theirs.

— That’s not a plan, Maxim said. That’s a shopping list.

— Stage one is shopping.

He read it again, nodded, and went to find his boots.

Tesa was at the stove. She lifted the full kettle with her right hand and poured four cups without spilling, and Soles watched the spout the whole way. It did not shake.

— I can hold a rope, she said, to nobody in particular.

Nobody argued.

The knock came while Maxim was still lacing up. Three knocks, spaced, the way a man knocks when he has stood on the step for some time deciding to.

It was Bram, from the hardware shop. His coat was buttoned wrong, as if he had put it on walking. He did not come in.

— They put a nine on my father’s door, he said.

— On ours too, said Maxim.

— You’re not from here.

He looked past Maxim and found Soles at the table.

— The coalman brings my coal. He told me what you did on Saturday. A washing line. He says it was the best he’s felt in thirty years, in there. He says it like he’d go back.

Maxim opened his mouth. Bram did not let him.

— Sterilization. My father had a dictionary. Nothing living.

Nobody answered that.

— Last week I asked you what happens to people who go down there. You said both.

— I did.

— I’m asking again. And this time I’ve got a nine on my door.

Soles did not answer at once. He turned his head, not toward the street this time. Toward the table.

Krista had put her pen down. Tesa had turned from the stove with a cup in each hand. Maxim stood with one boot laced and the other in his fist.

You should have let us answer.

He waited.

— Tell him, Krista said. I’ll write down that you did.

Tesa set the cups on the table. Maxim pulled on the other boot.

Soles stood up so that he would not be saying it sitting down.

— There’s something under the bank. We don’t know what it is. It’s warm. Near it, people feel better than they have in years, and they sit down, and they don’t want to get up. If nobody pulls them out, they don’t.

Bram did not move.

— On Saturday it came up into the street. It came up because we went down and cut at it. That part’s ours.

— And the eleventh day?

— Whatever they use on it, it’ll drink. It’ll get bigger. They don’t believe that yet.

— Do you?

— I’ve watched it twice.

Bram looked at the chalk on the door frame for a long while.

— And the part that’s still both?

— What it is. Where it ends. Who else knows.

Krista was writing every word. Soles did not ask her to stop.

Bram put his hand in his coat pocket and held something out across the step. A shackle, dull gray, the pin bright with oil.

Maxim took it. He worked the pin with his thumb and held it up to the window.

— That’s a hard one.

— It’s the one I kept.

Bram turned his collar up.

— I’ll show you where the race starts. Not the chief. You four.

They went along the embankment in a line, Bram in front.

The tape had been tied again, five meters higher. The frost line ran under it, white stones, then black. Beyond it the street was empty. On the woman’s step, her shopping bag sat where she had left it. The two windows lit below the tape last night were dark now. Krista looked at them as they passed and wrote something down.

Every door on that side had a nine.

The mill stood at the end of the sector, the wheel locked white in the ice, the iron stair to the platform running up its flank where they had hung the rope on Thursday. A cleaner sat on an upturned crate beside the wheelhouse door, a radio on his chest.

He stood up when he saw them.

It was the man from the tape. The color had come back into his face, all of it. His hand went to the radio and stayed there.

Soles stopped. So did the others.

One press of a thumb. Twenty minutes, and it would be typed.

Bram walked straight past Soles and up to the crate.

— My father’s mill, he said. I’ve come for his things before you burn them.

The cleaner looked at Bram. Then at Soles. Then down at his own hands, the way he had looked at them on the bench.

He took his hand off the radio.

— Ten minutes, he said. I was around the back.

He carried the crate around the corner of the wheelhouse and set it down facing the river.

Inside, the wheelhouse was dark and smelled of old flour and cold iron. Bram went to the far corner without looking for it, kicked aside a stack of rotten sacks, and crouched.

A flagstone. An iron ring set into it, flat in its groove.

— Nobody’s lifted that since my father, he said.

Maxim took one side of the ring and Soles the other. They braced and pulled.

The stone came up too easily. It came up like a lid somebody had lifted the week before.

Warm air rose past their faces.

Not much. A breath. It smelled of wet stone and steam, and Soles knew the smell. He had last smelled it on Saturday, with a washing line around his waist.

Tesa took a step back from the hole without seeming to decide to. Soles put his hand on her belt, and she let him.

Below, stone steps went down into the dark.

Krista struck a match and held it out over the opening.

The flame leaned. Not up, with the warm air. Down. Toward the dark, the way the blade on his hip leaned toward the seam.

— It’s breathing in, Tesa said quietly.

Krista knelt and held the match low over the first step.

The steps were thick with flour dust, pale and soft as the frost on the street. Bram looked at them and went very still.

— Those aren’t mine.

Boot prints. One man’s, the heel worn down on the outer edge. Krista lowered the match to the second step, then the third, as far as her arm would reach.

Every one of them was coming up.