Episodul 256 · Where It Drinks

Corvin took the case back from Maxim and put it under his arm. At the corner of the wheelhouse he stopped, his back to them.

— I check the mill on Sundays, he said. Today I checked it. There was nothing under the sacks.

He went round the corner. They heard him say something to the man on the crate, and the man laugh once through his nose, and then one pair of boots going away along the bank.

Maxim let his breath out.

— Does that mean what I think it means?

— It means he owes you, Krista said to Soles. And he’s paying before he changes his mind.

Inside, she knelt by the hole again with a fresh match and drew the heel in her notebook. Then she drew it a second time, beside the first.

— Two of them on the same step, she said. One over the other. The top one’s sharper. He’s been up more than once.

— And down? Maxim said.

— Not here.

Soles looked at the steps going into the dark and thought about a man who did not need a rope.

Krista closed the notebook on her pen and turned to Bram.

— When it rains, where does the street go?

Bram looked at her as if it were a child’s question. Then, slowly, as if it were not.

— Here. Every drain from the bridge down runs into the race. That’s why they cut it so deep. My father cursed every thaw.

— Put the stone back, Krista said.

They lowered it into its groove. Bram kicked the rotten sacks over it, his father’s bag held against his chest.

The man on the crate did not turn round as they passed.

On the embankment Krista stopped at the first drain grate past the mill, crouched, and struck a match. She held it low over the iron.

The flame leaned down.

She shook it out and walked on. Ten meters, another grate, its bars furred with frozen leaves. Another match. Down.

The third leaned so hard it went out.

Nobody said anything. Maxim had started counting under his breath, the way Krista counted windows. At the bottom of their own street they could not reach the grate where the seam was. They did not need to. Even from the embankment Soles could see the air above it, faintly bent, like the air over a stove.

Krista took the alley up behind the tape and came out into the street above it.

The grates ran up the gutter on the left side, one outside every second house. She went from one to the next, and at every one she struck a match, and at every one the flame went down into the iron as if it were being poured. Every door they passed had a nine.

Outside a house where a lamp was already on, Tesa crouched beside her and held her right hand open over the grate.

— Warm, she said.

— The iron’s frozen, Maxim said.

— My hand says warm.

She closed it. Opened it. Something in her face went quiet and pleased, the way the woman’s face had gone before she stood up from her step. Soles put his hand on her shoulder. Tesa took hers away from the grate and put it in her pocket.

— I know, she said. I know.

Above them the curtain moved in the lit window and fell still.

The last grate before their own door leaned like the rest.

Krista went on past it, all the way to the top of the street, where it met the road. A newer grate here, square, the iron still black with paint. She struck the match.

The flame stood straight up.

— That one goes to the river on its own, Bram said. New pipe. They laid it with the road.

Krista held the match until it burned her fingers. Then she looked back down the street. The last chalked door was two houses below her.

— They drew the line right, she said. They just don’t know why.

In the kitchen she cleared the table and spread the tracing from the archive, and beside it a clean page. She drew the river first, then the bank, the mill, the race running under it out to the water. Then the street, and a small cross for every grate, and from every cross a line down to the race.

She turned the page round so they could see it.

It was not a hole. Soles had been thinking of it as a hole since the rope: a place under the bank you went down to and cut. On the page it was a thick line under the river and the race, and thinner lines going up from it, one under every gutter, branching toward the doors.

Bram leaned over it, his bag still in his arms.

— Willow, he said. When I was a boy the willow on the bank got into the drains. My father had the roots out every spring. They go where the water goes.

Nobody answered him. Krista wrote one word beside the drawing and did not underline it.

Root.

Soles looked at the lines under the gutters.

It came up the street because I cut it. But it was already under the street. It was waiting at the grates.

— It doesn’t come up through the ground, Krista said. It comes up the water’s road. And the water’s road goes under every house with a nine on it.

— Including this one, Maxim said.

— Including this one.

She turned to the page headed Stage one. and put the pen on the third line.

— A way down that isn’t theirs. We have one.

— Tomorrow, Soles said. After dark. Our ropes.

— I sell rope, Bram said.

Maxim took the shackle out of his pocket and set it on the table between them.

— Then three coils. I test every meter in the yard first. Nobody else’s splice.

— We go to the step and the grating, Soles said. We find where the race meets it. We look. We don’t cut.

Tesa looked at him across the table.

— Last time you cut, it came up the street.

— That’s why.

Krista wrote it down as he said it. Then she looked up at Bram.

— Somebody has to hold the other end. Up top, where we can’t see you.

— My father did that for me. Belt round the waist.

— You know what might be down there.

Bram shifted the bag in his arms and looked at the drawing for a long time.

— Both, he said. You told me.

Krista wrote under the fourth line.

Monday night. The race. Bram holds the end.

Maxim got up to fill the kettle. The water ran into it, loud in the quiet, and the overflow ran away into the sink and gurgled down the pipe.

Krista watched it go.

She took the matches out of her pocket, struck one, and held it over the drain.

In their own kitchen, the flame leaned down.