Chapter 2: The Door Gives Way
The door bowed.
Not much. An inch of give in iron-bound oak that had held three weeks of tide, the plank across it creaking, the wood bending like a held breath. Kirk got the pry bar under the chair leg and leaned, and Béatrice came off the floor with her shoulder against the door before she'd decided to move.
The humming swelled. It came through the seam now, thin as a fiddle string, and it had a shape to it. Three notes up, two notes down. Patient. Sweet.
"It's her voice," Kirk said through his teeth. "That's Sylvia's hum. She hummed it on the roof, before we got her. Same tune."
"Don't say that."
"She hummed it the whole time I carried her down the ladder."
The door bowed again. The pressure was rhythmic, not the tide's constant shove. Lean, and lean, and lean. Something on the other side had learned the rhythm of a body settling its weight against a doorframe, the way a tired person does at the end of a shift.
Béatrice put her ear near the seam, an inch of iron between her and it, and hated herself for it. The humming was close enough to feel the wet off it. Cold air came through the gap in pulses, like breath, and each pulse carried the tune. Then, underneath the tune, under the melody, the whisper worked its way in.
Mac. Nam. A. Ra.
Her name for him. The one Sylvia had used on the roof, hoarse and half gone, before they'd gotten her inside. Not the choir voice. Sylvia's cracked, human voice, wrapped up inside the wet one.
"Kirk." She pulled back from the seam. Her heart was doing what his did, that chaotic tripping thing. "It's using her voice."
"I hear it."
"Is she out there?"
"I don't know." The pry bar shuddered in his grip. The wood of the chair leg split along one grain line with a sound like a knuckle cracking. "She couldn't have gone out. I barred the door after her. She was asleep in the corner when the tide came."
The corner was empty. She'd checked it at dusk, seen the folded blanket, thought nothing of it. People walked in their sleep. People drowned in their sleep too, in this city, and came back up.
The door bowed hard. The top plank popped free at one end and swung, and Kirk threw the pry bar across to catch it, and for a moment they were both leaning with everything they had, two bodies and a chair leg against whatever leaned on the far side. It was strong. It was patient. It did not hammer, which was worse. It just leaned, the way weight leans when it has all night.
Through the widened gap at the edge of the door, the night air came in thicker. It smelled of river bottom and old flowers, the smell from the courtyard, and something else. Tallow. A candle put out.
"Béatrice." Kirk's voice was very even, the way it got when the current turned bad. "Look at the gap."
She looked. Low, at the level of the lock, at the seam the bowing had opened to a finger's width, the dark outside had a shape to it. Water glistened there. And in the water, slow as something waking, a knot of fingers came curling through.
They came one at a time, feeling for the edge of the door. White, sodden, the nails gone soft and pale. The first hand found the iron edge and gripped, and the wood of the door took the weight, and the fingers did not claw. They rested. Like a hand on a sill. Like someone steadying themselves on a porch rail, coming home late.
The second hand came through lower.
"Pull," Kirk said. "I'll hold the bar, you grab its wrist and we break the grip before it gets purchase."
She didn't move. She was looking at the fingers. There was no wrongness to them, no swollen slack, no loosened joint. They were white and wet but they were shaped like fingers that could play a piano, and on the second hand, low, near the knuckle of the ring finger, the skin was abraded in a long raw stripe.
She knew that stripe. She'd cleaned it on the first night, with the last of the alcohol, while Sylvia shook and didn't talk. The chimney. Sylvia had come down the chimney brick by brick, and the brick had taken the skin off her hand doing it.
"Béatrice," Kirk said. "Now."
"Wait."
"There's no wait. That's how it gets in. It puts a hand through and then it's through."
She reached out. Slowly. Not to the wrist, not to break the grip. She put her fingertip against the raw stripe on the second hand, and the hand went still. The first hand kept its hold on the iron. The second turned, palm up, under her touch. Waiting. The hum through the seam thinned to almost nothing.
The whisper came then, and it was not the choir voice. It was small and cracked and hoarse, out of breath, the voice of a woman who had spent three hours on a chimney and three weeks in a flood.
"Let me in. Please. It's cold out here. It won't let me stop walking."
Behind her, she heard Kirk's grip shift on the pry bar, and heard him stop breathing.
"Sylvia," Béatrice said. Not a question. She made it not a question because if it was a question she would have to consider the answer.
The fingers curled once, gently, around the edge of her touch.
"Béatrice." Sylvia's voice through the seam, an inch of iron away. "You cleaned my hand. You told me about the peaches. You said you'd tell me about the peaches again if I ate."
"I did."
The first hand released the iron and came down, and both hands rested now on the outside of the door, palms flat, patient, the way a person waits when they know they'll be let in.
Kirk's voice came low, almost beneath the hum of the water. "Ask her what she hummed."
"What?"
"Ask her. Whatever's out there, it knows her voice and her name and her hand. If it knows the tune, ask it where the tune came from." He didn't take his eye from the gap. "She heard it somewhere. She told me that. Night one, whispering, shaking, she told me where she first heard that tune and I have never told a living soul, because there was no reason to."
Béatrice leaned toward the seam. The cold came through in pulses. Both pale hands waited on the far side of the door, and somewhere below them, water lapped at the marble tablets of the courtyard.
"Sylvia. Where did the tune come from?"
The silence lasted long enough for the tide to push the door another half inch, for the chair leg to creak, for Kirk's weight to shift against the wood.
Then the voice answered, and it was smiling. She could hear the smile in it, wet and wide, and it was not Sylvia's smile, and it said:
"Ask your deckhand."