Chapter 3: The Lock Turns
The words hung in the seam like breath on cold glass. Ask your deckhand.
Kirk's grip on the pry bar did not change, but his face did. Something went out of it, some small allowable expression, the way a lamp gutters when a door opens in another room.
"She's lying," he said. "It lies. It said the peaches. It said what would cut you deepest."
"It knew the wound on her hand." Béatrice kept her shoulder against the door's inner face, the oak trembling against her collarbone with each patient shove. "It knew the tune. It knew there was a question worth dodging."
"People dodge questions. That's what people do."
"Then answer it, Kirk. What did Sylvia tell you on her first night? Where she heard the tune?"
The hum swelled through the seam, sweet and cracked and patient, a woman's voice sung through wet cloth. Under it, the door leaned. The pry bar groaned where it crossed the brackets.
"I'm not doing this here," Kirk said.
"There's nowhere else. Look around."
He looked. The loft was one room and they both knew its inventory: the hammock, the water tins, the barricade, the dark square of the trapdoor down to the vault proper, flooded black and still. Three weeks of their whole lives.
"She told me," he said, and stopped. The hum stopped with him, listening, and that was worse than the humming. "She told me she heard it under the water. Down there." He nodded at the trapdoor, at the flood beneath the tomb, at the whole drowned quarter. "First night, before she'd eat anything, she told me she heard singing under the surface while she clung to that chimney. A choir. And it knew her name."
Béatrice did not let herself move. Her heartbeat was a thing happening to her, not a thing she chose.
"You didn't tell me."
"She was half gone with cold and fear. People say things."
"She said the choir knew her name. And now the choir outside knows yours."
The door leaned again, that patient human rhythm, shove and rest, shove and rest. The hinges wept a thin line of rust down the masonry. Then, beneath their feet, in the iron of the lock itself, came a sound.
Small. Deliberate. The shackle, still turning, took up its rotation once more where it had paused. They had both heard it start earlier; they had both pretended it was the tide shifting the hasp. It was not the tide. Metal moved inside metal with the slow certainty of a key finding its wards, and there was no key, and there was no hand at the keyhole, and still it turned.
"Béatrice." Kirk's voice had gone flat, the voice he used for cargo and heights. "The lock."
"I hear it."
The shackle completed its arc. The bolt dropped away with a sound like a bell tolling underwater, a round bronze note that came up through the floor and the soles of their boots and the marrow of them, and the great iron-bound door sighed inward a half inch, freed.
Kirk lunged. He did not think; he drove the pry bar through the hasp, jamming the hooked end down behind the strike plate, and threw his whole weight across it the way he had once thrown himself across a mooring line in a storm on the river, the honest river, the liar city. The bar bit. The door stopped. The seam stood open the width of two fingers, and through it came the smell.
Not rot. Worse. It was the smell of the river at dawn when the fog lay on it, cold and mineral and almost clean, the smell of something vast and indifferent breathing.
Wet palms flattened against the opening seam. Two of them, pale as belly-fish, pressed into the gap of lamplight, fingers spread, unhurried. The stripe of raw abraded skin crossed the second palm where the chimney brick had taken its toll. The hands did not claw. They rested there, patient as a congregation.
"Let me in." Sylvia's voice, cracked and small and smiling. "It's cold out here. You promised me peaches."
"The peaches promise wasn't for you." Béatrice's voice came out steadier than she had any right to expect. She put her back into the door beside the bar. "I made that promise to a girl I cleaned and fed. You have her hands. You have her voice. You are not her."
The palms pressed. The door moved a hair, and Kirk braced the bar with both hands, his boots skidding on stone worn smooth by a century of coffin-bearers.
"She's tired," the voice said sweetly. "She's so tired of walking. I'm only borrowing her for a while. You wouldn't begrudge a tired girl her peaches."
"Kirk." Béatrice did not look at him. The bar was bending; she could see it, a slow degree of curve appearing in the steel shaft where it crossed the hasp, a curve that had not been there a minute ago. "The question. Ask it the way you meant it. Ask where she first heard the tune. Not the story she told you. The question you built."
He understood. It was the only card left, and it had been marked from the start.
"Where," Kirk said through his teeth, weight on the bar, "did you first hear the tune?"
The hands went still against the seam. The humming stopped. For three full shoves of the tide against the courtyard wall, there was nothing but water and their own breathing, and Béatrice thought, absurdly, of the neighbor she had turned away on the first night, and the sound that door had made afterward.
Then the voice answered, and it was not smiling anymore. It was Sylvia's voice exactly, down to the little hitch on the first word, the one Béatrice had heard over tinned peaches and a cleaned wound.
"Under the water," it said. "Where you left me."
Kirk's grip broke. Just for a heartbeat, a spasm of the fingers, and the pry bar shifted in the hasp, and the door came inward another inch, and in the widened seam Béatrice saw the courtyard for the first time in three weeks: black water to the second step, and standing on it, not floating on it, a thin woman in a soaked nightgown with her head tilted at a gentle, attentive angle, smiling up at them.
Behind her, out in the flood-dark, other heads stood at the same angle. Row upon row. Waiting their turn to ask.
"Trade half your pharmacy," the voice said warmly, "and it still opens. You knew that when you bought it. You both knew what this place was."
Béatrice got her shoulder into the gap where Kirk's grip had failed and held. The stone was cold through her thermal. The hands began to slide, gently, along the seam's edge, feeling for purchase.
"Kirk," she said. "The hatch to the vault. Is it barred?"
"It's barred," Kirk said. "I barred it the first day. The water was already up the steps."
"Barred from our side or from underneath?"
He looked at her, and she saw him work it through, the same slow arithmetic she was doing. A bar was a bar. It kept things out. It also kept things in.
"From our side," he said.
The palms slid along the seam's edge, unhurried, feeling for the gap's widening lip. The door came inward another fraction under their patience. Béatrice could see the steel of the pry bar bowing now, a visible bend where it crossed the hasp, and beyond it the courtyard, the thin woman standing on black water with her head tilted, and behind her the rows of standing heads, attentive as an audience before the first note.
"How many," she said. "Count them."
Kirk put his eye to the seam. She watched his jaw work through the count.
"I gave up past forty."
"Can they climb?"
"They never have." He resettled his grip on the bar, knuckle by knuckle, forcing the spasm out of his hand. "Three weeks. They've had three weeks to climb and they've only ever scratched."
"Only ever." She put her shoulder back into the oak. It was like leaning against a tide itself, patient pressure without anger. "They learned the lock, Kirk. They learned the lock, and the door, and her voice, and the promise about the peaches. What else have they learned?"
The voice through the seam had gone quiet while they talked. That was its habit now. It listened the way a good bartender listened, she thought, taking your order, filing it, pouring it back to you later when it would do the most harm.
"You're arguing about me," Sylvia's voice said, gentle. "That's sweet. She did that too, you know. On the roof. She said, he'll come for me, the deckhand, he knows the water. She waited for you a long time, MacNamara. The water didn't hurry either."
"Don't listen."
"I'm holding a door with my spine. Listening is the only thing left I can do."
He almost laughed. She felt it in the door, a shudder through his braced arms that might have been a sob wearing a laugh's clothes. The seam's cold air pulsed against her cheek, in and out, in and out, a lung's rhythm belonging to nothing with lungs.
Then, beneath the shoving, beneath the tide's applause in the courtyard, a new sound started.
Kirk heard it first. He always heard the water first. His head came up off the door and turned toward the trapdoor, the dark square of it in the floor, the black flooded vault below, and Béatrice followed his eyes and then heard it too.
Knocking.
Not at the iron door. Below. From inside the vault, under the water, under the barred hatch: three slow knocks, then a pause, then three more. Wood against wood, muffled by flood and stone, but deliberate. Rhythmic. The rhythm of a knuckle on a neighbor's door.
"That's the vault," she said. "It's supposed to be sealed."
"It's my bar." Kirk's voice had gone very quiet. "I made it myself. Cypress."
"The water's twenty feet deep down there."
"Then somebody's knocking from twenty feet down." He did not move from the pry bar. She watched him decide not to move, watch him hold his post while every line of his body wanted the trapdoor. "Or somebody went down there when the tide came in. The night Sylvia went walking. While we were sleeping."
The knocks came again. Three, pause, three. And through the seam, Sylvia's wet voice began to hum the tune, sweet and cracked, and the knocking below found the rhythm of it and matched itself, beat for beat, patient and almost loving.
Béatrice's skin went cold from the inside out.
"Ask it," she said. "Ask it what's in the vault."
"You already know," the voice at the door said warmly, and the palms pressed flat, and the door opened the width of a hand. "You've always known. You bought a tomb, Béatrice. Tombs are full."
Kirk turned his head. In the lamplight his slate eyes had gone the color of the river in fog.
"First night," he said. "She told me where she heard the tune. Under the water. I thought she meant the flood. I thought she meant out there."
"And?"
"And the vault was dry the first week. We slept above it. I heard things below and I told myself it was casks shifting in the current." His grip tightened on the bending bar. "I boarded the hatch not to keep it out. I boarded it to keep it down."
The knocks stopped. In the silence that followed, the whole courtyard seemed to lean in, the woman on the water, the forty heads behind her, the hands at the seam, all of them waiting with the same terrible courtesy.
Then the voice said, in Sylvia's cracked and smiling tone:
"Ask your deckhand what he sealed in."
Béatrice let go of the door.
She crossed the loft in four steps, took the boat hook down from its pegs, and put her ear to the barred trapdoor. The flood below was black and still as poured tar. And down there, faint, rising through twenty feet of drowned dark, someone began to hum.