Chapter 4: Over the Side
The humming came up through the floorboards like water through cloth. Béatrice knelt at the trapdoor, one palm flat on the wood, and the vibration climbed into her fingers, steady and patient as a heartbeat that was not hers. The boards Kirk had nailed down six days ago were raised a quarter inch along one edge. She had not noticed that before. She would have noticed it before.
"Beatrice." Kirk's voice, low, from the door. "It's going."
She turned. The pry bar was bent now, a slow bow in the iron where there had been none an hour ago, and the door itself had come off its bottom hinge pin. The gap at the seam had widened from a hand's width to the width of her forearm, and the night came through it, wet and smelling of silt. The humming from outside had changed key to match the humming from below.
"Which bolt?" she asked.
"All of them." He had his shoulder against the wood, boots braced on the plank floor, the chore coat dark across the back where the water in the air had soaked through. "It isn't pushing anymore. It's leaning. That's worse."
She crossed the room and put her back beside his. The wood was cold and slightly soft, the grain swollen. Through it she could feel the rhythm of the thing outside, not frantic, not angry. Comfortable. A woman leaning on a door she already owned.
"What did you seal in the vault?" The voice came thin through the seam, sweet through the gap, using Sylvia's mouth and Sylvia's small, careful consonants. "Tell her, deckhand. She's asking."
"Don't answer it," Béatrice said.
"I wasn't going to."
The pry bar made a sound like a struck bell, one short note, and the bend became a break. The iron rang off the floor and skittered, and the door swung inward the length of its broken hinge, slow, the way a heavy thing moves when nothing human is hurrying it.
Water came in first. A low sheet of it, black, spreading over the boards toward their feet. Beyond it the courtyard lay flat and mirror-still under no moon she could name, and the woman in the nightgown stood on the surface not three yards from the threshold, hair plastered to her skull, smiling with a smile Béatrice had cleaned blood off of and fed peaches to. Behind her, strung out across the whole width of the courtyard, the heads. Forty, fifty. Still as cypress knees.
Kirk did not shout. She had learned that about him; the worse it got, the quieter he went. His hand closed on her apron strap and he hauled her backward off the door, across the loft, past the hammock swinging empty on its hooks, to the rear wall where a window sat narrow as a coffin vent, boarded until last week and now only shuttered.
"Roof," he said.
"It's three feet of black water out there."
"Then don't fall in it." He drove the heel of his hand into the shutters. They had rotted enough to give on the second blow, and the night poured in, cool and thick. He went through first, shoulders scraping the frame, and turned to reach back for her. "Rope's on the ridge. I coiled it there Tuesday."
She took his wrist and climbed. The sill cut into her palms, then the tiles were under her, slick with dew, and she lay flat against the ridge pole breathing through her mouth. Below, on the courtyard water, forty heads turned in unison. Not one sound. The turn itself was the sound, a click she felt in her teeth, and every drowned face tilted up at the roofline together, waiting their turn, patient as the tide.
Kick came out beside her, low on his stomach, the rope looped over one shoulder. He did not look down at the water. He looked along it, north, where the rooftops of the raised houses along the block stood out of the flood like moored hulls, gunwales to gunwales.
"Cap dat," he said, pointing. The nearest roof, a cottage with a chimney still standing, twenty feet across open water. "Then the Boudreaux place. Then the church ridge if the steeple's still up."
"You're reading channels."
"I'm reading what's left of them." He laid the rope along the ridge and began knotting one end around the chimney stack of the tomb behind them, his fingers quick, checking each loop twice. "Current's running left to right along this stretch. Feel it under the tiles, that tremble. That means it's deep enough to move."
"The woman is standing on it."
"The woman isn't standing on anything. She's standing on what it used to be." He pulled the knot tight and sat up, and only then did he glance at the courtyard, one flick, the way a man checks a wheel he already knows is broken. The heads had not turned away. "Riverman's rule. You don't cross where it's quiet. You cross where it talks, because where it talks it's shallow. Every quiet stretch between here and that chimney is where they're waiting."
Béatrice rolled onto her elbows and looked. The water between the tomb and the nearest roof lay smooth as poured glass, and the drowned were not in it, none of them, no heads, no hands. It was the only quiet stretch in sight.
"They want us to take it," she said.
"They want us to want it." He measured the rope against the gap with his eye, then his arm, then tied a running bowline into the free end and worked it open with two fingers. "I can throw this to that chimney cap. First try, maybe. You cross hand over hand, knees up, feet never touch. You touch, you go under, you do not come up alone."
"And you?"
"I throw it back to you and you hold it from your end while I cross." He fed the rope through his grip, testing the weight of the coil. "One rope. One of us on it at a time. That's the whole arithmetic."
Behind them, below them, through the tomb's stone, came a new sound. Wood, long and heavy, sliding. The bar across the vault hatch, moving in its brackets, an inch, then another. Then the humming from beneath the floor found the pitch of the humming from the courtyard, and the two of them locked together like hands.
Kirk stood up on the ridge, rope in his fist, and did not look back at the roof they had left. "Which of us goes first?" he said. "Say it quick."
"Me," she said. "You read the water. If I'm on the far side, I hold it for you, and if the throw's short you're the one who can swim it."
"Swimming's the one thing you don't get to count on."