Episode 267 · Four Sides

On Tuesday evening the detachment men came down the street with chalk and crossed out the ones.

Soles watched from the window. A man in a cleaner’s jacket drew a line through the number on the door opposite, then crossed the road and drew one through theirs. It took him less time than knocking would have.

Maxim had come back from the center an hour before, with dog hair on both knees and no dogs. He had not said much about it. He had checked the ropes again instead, coil by coil, on the kitchen floor.

They were lacing their boots when somebody knocked.

Halloran stood on the step in his apron, flour to the elbows, breathing as if he had run most of the way.

— He’s gone, he said. The surveyor. Since noon.

— Gone where? Krista asked.

— He took the candle end from the drawer in the shop. His coat’s still on the sacks.

He looked past her at Soles.

— He went down. I know he went down.

— And Varren?

— Didn’t come back last night. Zora’s sitting with Noct. She sent me to you.

Tesa pulled her second lace tight.

— Then he’s been down there six hours.

Soles took the coil Maxim held out to him. Six hours of heat in a man’s face, telling him to sit.

— Walk with us to the mill, he said to Halloran.

Bram’s shop at the head of the bridge was dark except for the back room. He came out with a lamp before they reached the door, his coat already buttoned, as if he had been waiting in it.

Across the road the detachment yard was lit. Two trucks stood in it with their engines off. A cleaner sat on the step of the old customs building with a cigarette and watched them pass. He did not get up. He flicked ash onto the snow and turned his head to keep them in view all the way across the bridge.

On the far bank the mill stood black against the snow. Bram unlocked the side door. Inside, the floor still smelled faintly of grain, and the hatch lay where they had left it, under a sack.

Krista told Bram about the surveyor while Maxim fed the rope through the anchor. She told it plainly, without softening the hours. Bram listened with the lamp in his hand.

— He came up through the race once, he said.

— So he knows the way, Soles said.

— He knows the way down when it’s calling him. That isn’t the same thing.

He set the lamp on the floor and began to unbuckle his belt.

Soles understood before he said anything.

— You agreed to the hatch.

— I agreed to the hatch with nobody down there but people who chose to be.

Bram drew the belt free and looked at it.

— You told me what it does. You told me you might end up fighting. I heard you.

— You can still stay up here.

— I know.

He wound the belt twice around his fist.

— After the second arch you go on your knees. You’ll be slow there. He won’t.

He held the end of the rope out to Halloran.

— You hold this. If it goes slack for long, you pull. If it pulls hard, you hold. If anybody but us comes through that door, you close the hatch and sit on it.

Halloran took the rope in both floury hands. He looked down at it the way the surveyor used to look at his cup.

— Varren’s down there, he said.

— Then he’ll want it held as much as we do.

Outside, an engine started.

Then another.

Maxim reached the door first. Soles came up behind him. Across the river the yard lights were moving. The trucks rolled out through the gate, swung onto the bridge road, and their headlights slid across the snow toward the mill.

— That isn’t midnight, Maxim said.

— They watched us pass, Krista said.

The first beam found the mill wall and stayed there. Doors banged. Men’s voices. Something heavy set down on frozen ground, then something else. Someone was shouting about the anchors on the platform.

— Down, Soles said. Now.

Bram went first, the lamp hooked to his coat. Then Tesa. Then Krista. Then Maxim, who stopped with the rope in his hands and looked up at Soles as if he meant to argue about the order, and didn’t.

Soles went last. Above him the hatch came down. The light from the mill floor narrowed to a line, then to nothing, and he felt the rope move once in Halloran’s hands.

The ledge. Black water sliding beside it. At the step the fall filled his left ear and left nothing for the right. The second tread was gone; Bram had them cross the gap at the wall end, one at a time, with his fist in the back of each collar until their boots were down.

Then the arches. Low, then lower. After the second one they went on their knees, the stone cold through Soles’s pants and the lamp swinging ahead of them. His elbow, the one he had wrenched in the crowd, complained at every push. Bram moved fast there, the way he had said he would. A man who had done this at twelve, with his father’s belt around his waist.

Krista stopped.

She shut her eyes. Soles watched her face go still, the way it did when she read a line twice, and knew she was pulling one sound out of the water.

— Someone’s counting, she said. Ahead of us. Out loud.

— Counting what?

— Down. From ten. He gets to one, and starts again.

Nobody said anything. Tesa’s hand found the back of Soles’s coat and held on.

They came to the grating. Warm air pushed through it into their faces. Beyond it, the chamber was already lit.

Varren’s flashlight lay on the stone table, aimed at the pillar.

The surveyor knelt at the slit with one palm flat in the heat. His lips were moving. Four. Three.

Varren stood over him. The pale blade was out of its cloth.

He looked at Bram first, and at the rope tied to Bram’s waist, and then at the rest of them. He did not look surprised.

Through the rock on their left came a sound Soles knew from the night of the splice. Metal ringing against stone. Men calling out knots.

The teams were coming down the other way.

Varren’s eyes came back to Soles.

— You brought them.