Episodul 76 · A Voice in the Wall

The first thing he learned was that walls were no longer walls.

He did not understand it at once. That first night he walked late along the old riverbed, on the path between the reed beds and the backyard fences, far from the streetlamps. He could not hear the footsteps behind him. He felt them differently, like a weight placed on the wrong side of a boat. Sometimes the weight came closer. Sometimes it stopped, and then it was worse.

Around three he reached the pumping station at the end of the riverbed, a low brick building with narrow windows and a tin roof that creaked in the wind. Kale had brought him here when he was ten, to watch a gasket being changed on a pump the size of a calf.

The door was tied shut with a rusty chain he could undo by hand. Soles went in, sat with his back to the wall facing the water and stayed there, the backpack in his arms, until it grew light.

He did not sleep. He listened to the building carry its weight. The beam over the door pressed harder on the left, where damp had swollen the brick. The wall behind him held everything calmly, like a man who has carried the same load so long he no longer notices it.

Toward morning, the wall in front of him changed.

Nothing showed. The brick stayed brick, with the same white patches of damp and the same thin crack in the corner. Only the wall no longer held the way it had. The weight in it shifted, as if someone had leaned against it from inside, with a shoulder, and was waiting.

Soles did not move. His heart was pounding against his cracked rib. Where the wall rested on something other than itself, there was someone. Someone who could come out.

Door.

The word came low and hoarse, with Leonatus’s accent. Soles nearly turned toward the wall. Instead he let his eyes continue past it to the door. Looking straight at the place where the weight waited would tell the man he had felt him.

Two exits: the door, and the narrow window over the pump.

The weight moved slowly toward the corner where the brick was cracked. There the wall was weaker. Soles felt it testing what held and what did not, the way he would have tested ice on a lake.

He stood without a sound, the backpack on his good shoulder. He reached the door in four steps, stepping around a canister he did not remember seeing but his feet knew, and went out into the fog over the riverbed.

He nearly ran. The reeds would crack against his legs; he would be heard before he reached the bend. He made himself walk. A borrowed steadiness settled through his feet.

Only after a hundred meters did he stop and turn. The station stood in the fog, low and gray. The cracked corner was intact. Nothing had come out of it.

Soles sat on a boulder and put his hand to his mouth, because it was shaking. A dull ache pressed behind his eyes.

He rested against the boulder and closed his eyes. Beneath the tree, Leonatus turned before Soles reached the narrow leaves. His gaze stopped on Soles’s bent shoulders.

Up.

Soles put a hand against the soldier’s arm. It held. Leonatus pulled him straight with the impatience of a veteran correcting someone who had never stood in line. Then Soles’s real shoulder slipped on the boulder, and the garden vanished.

Until then, the soldier had come to him the way an echo comes: late, without words, a hand that knew what to do before he did. Now Leonatus had seen him, touched him and spoken. That did not make him a soldier, or the borrowed judgment his own.

The next day he bought bread and water from a kiosk by the railway bridge and ate standing against a concrete pillar. It held the bridge without complaint, and for the first time since leaving he let his shoulders drop.

That evening he wrote to Krista: here.

The answer came within a minute, one word: good. Then another message: The investigator took the box. He said not to lecture you. I’m not.

He did not reply. One word had been the agreement. He switched the phone off to save the battery and sat with it in his fist, like a warm stone.

He spent the night under the bridge, between two pillars, on a layer of cardboard someone else had left. Trains passed overhead at odd hours, and then the whole bridge shook, and the pillars carried the shaking into the ground without keeping it. Soles learned to listen to them. A train was a train. Weight that shifted without a train was something else.

Around four, the weight shifted.

It went into the pillar on his left, the one he had leaned his head against. The concrete grew heavier on the inside by one man. Not a man standing. A man leaning over.

Wait.

Leonatus again. Soles lay still, his right hand under his jacket on the oiled leather. His backpack lay against his other side. Beyond the pillars, the road ran between stone walls; on the left were water and reeds.

Far to the south, the rails began to sing.

He drew his hand out to reach the backpack. Black fingers came through the concrete and closed around his right wrist.

The first car rumbled onto the bridge overhead. Soles shouted and heard almost nothing on his left. The grip pulled his arm across his chest, pinning the jacket over the blade.

He tried to wrench away. His shoulder struck the pillar. Pain went through his rib, and the hand pulled again, dragging him onto his back. A shoulder followed it out of the concrete. Above him, a face refused to settle into features he could keep.

Soles caught the glove with his bandaged hand. His fingers slipped. The Hunter’s free hand came toward his throat.

The bag. If I get up, I can reach the bag.

He tried to rise. The grip turned him back toward the pillar. The train filled his chest with shaking. Even if someone stood on the road, they would not hear him.

Now.

For a heartbeat the panic stopped reaching his feet. He stepped closer instead of pulling away, his shoulder behind the wrist, and turned his hand toward the gap beside the Hunter’s thumb. The movement was certain. The arm carrying it was his, and it hurt.

The fingers opened enough. Soles tore free, stumbled past the reaching hand and caught the backpack by one strap. He kept moving. His wrist burned; he could barely feel the strap against his fingers.

Any pillar could hide another man. The road offered more walls. The reeds offered mud.

Left.

He chose the reeds. Mud would slow him, but there were no pillars in it.

He waded in to the knees. The cold climbed his legs to his cracked rib and made him grind his teeth. He kept going until the bridge was a long shadow behind him with the train still on it, and he felt no weight that was not his own.

He sat in the mud under the bank and shook. The ache behind his eyes had sharpened, and he tasted iron. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and it came away red.

The cold shook him, and fear, but neither explained the ache behind his eyes. He had chosen the reeds himself. He had also liked how quickly Leonatus’s word could make a choice feel settled.

He remembered the boy carrying a friend toward the warm stone, frightened and unwilling to leave him. That was part of Leonatus too. Soles still had to decide which part he would follow.