Chapter 6: The Boudreaux Throw
The rope to the Boudreaux house came off the chimney in Kirk's hands, and he weighed it the way he had weighed it before, except now he weighed it longer.
"Forty feet," he said. "Same as the first gap, near enough. But the throw's against the wind off the ridge, and the wind's coming up the street, not across it."
Béatrice looked at the water between them and the next roof. Glass. The whole gap lay flat and black, holding the bruised sky in it without a single wrinkle, and the Boudreaux chimney stood up out of that mirror like a post. Behind them, under the courtyard, the humming went on, note by patient note, stitching itself together.
"You're not throwing," she said.
"I'm listening." He held up one finger.
She heard it a moment later. The tune under the courtyard finished its third phrase, and then, very quietly, from the gap in front of them, from the flat black water forty feet wide, the same three notes came up. Up, up, then down, then down. The tune she had hummed over the peaches tin on Sylvia's first night, the one she'd used like a hand on a frightened shoulder, and the water sang it back to her without a single mistake.
"That's mine," she said. "That's the one I gave her."
"It knows that." Kirk fed the bowline open, not looking at her. "It's not mocking you. That's the part I don't like. It's thanking you."
The notes rose again, sweeter this time, the consonant hum of a lullaby, and Béatrice found her own throat wanting to answer it. She bit down on the inside of her cheek until it hurt.
"Don't," Kirk said, without turning.
"I wasn't going to sing."
"Your breathing changed. I know what that sounds like on you." He measured the throw with his eye, rope coiled in his left fist, end knotted around the running bowline. "We cross now, while it's still polite. After me. Same arithmetic as before, only faster."
"Why you first?"
"Because the throw from that side is shorter, and because I'm heavier, and if the line fouls on the cap I want to be the one fixing it." He was already unwinding his forearm from the coil. "And because you held the rope for me once tonight and I don't want to owe you twice in one hour."
He threw. The arc went up flat and true, over the singing water, and the bowline dropped over the Boudreaux chimney cap on the first try, settled, and Kirk hauled it twice, three times, leaning his whole shoulder into the line. The cap held. The knot held.
"Rope's good," he said. "Chimney's holding whatever's left of that house together. Wrap your forearm, and when you're on it, don't listen to the tune. Count instead. Out loud if you have to."
"Counting what?"
"Anything. Pulls. Peaches. Cats named after painters. Just make it yours."
He went over the ridge with the rope doubled around his arm, and she braced her boots against the cottage chimney and took his weight, and it came to her hands heavy and steady, pull by pull, and she counted. One. Four. Seven. Below the line the water hummed her three notes, and the hum did not rise, did not reach for him, and somehow that was worse than the arm had been. The water was being kind. The water was singing a guest across.
At pull twenty the Boudreaux cap rose to meet him, and he was over it, and his voice came back thin across the gap. "Line's secure. Bring yourself over. Count loud."
She wrapped the rope twice around her forearm and went. The tiles dropped away and there was only the hemp burning through her sleeve and the black mirror under her boots and the tune coming up out of it, gentle, unhurried, the exact tempo she had used. She counted. Eleven. Fourteen. Her feet swung low over the lane, and there was a lane again, she could see it, a clear stripe down the middle of the gap with the pale shapes banked on either side of it like seats in a theater, and every one of them lay facing upward, listening, mouths slightly open under the silt.
Seventeen. Nineteen. The cap was under her elbow, and Kirk's hand closed on her wrist, and she came onto the Boudreaux roof and lay flat on the slate, breathing in gulps, the count still going in her head past the number it needed.
"Twenty-three," she said.
"Good count." He was already hauling the slack, unwinding the rope from the far chimney, coiling it fast. Behind them the tune from the cottage gap changed. It stopped being hers. The three notes slid down into the older one, the one Sylvia had carried, and the two melodies braided together over the water like rope being spliced.
"Leave it," Béatrice said. "Kirk. Leave the water behind us. Look here."
She was kneeling at the Boudreaux house's roof access, a low door in a raised bulkhead, the kind that led down into an attic. Someone had barricaded it. Two-by-fours, crossed and nailed, a length of pipe wedged under the handle, and the nails were bright. Not rusted. Bright as coins in the dark, bright as the week they had spent boarding the tomb.
Kirk came and crouched beside her. He put his thumb against one nailhead and pressed. "Driven hard. Not old."
"And look at the tiles." She moved her hand along the ridge. There was grit on the slate, dried mud, a smear of silt where a boot had dragged. Prints, a whole line of them, coming up over the roof edge from the garden-wall side, crossing the ridge, ending at the barricaded door.
"One person," Kirk said. "Light. Small feet, or careful feet."
"They climbed up from the water side. There's a gutter scuffed white where they pulled themselves over." She followed the prints back with her finger, and her breath went out of her. "Kirk. These are dry. The edges are dry. It hasn't rained in nine days, but the dew comes up every night and fogs these tiles by two in the morning, and there's no dew in these prints."
He was quiet a moment. "So before tonight's fog."
"Within the day. Within hours." She looked at the door, the crossed lumber, the pipe jammed under the handle, and something about the arrangement snagged at her until she found it. "Kirk. The pipe is on the outside."
He looked. His jaw moved once.
"You wedge a pipe under a handle to keep something out," she said. "You wedge it on the inside."
"Or you wedge it outside," Kirk said slowly, "when you're the last one going through, and you're barring the door behind you so nothing follows you up." He put his palm flat on the barricade, over the bright nails. "Somebody came across that water alive. Day, maybe less. Barricaded themselves in an attic, and then went down through that house to the street."
"Or something came up here that knew how to make it look like a person."
"That's the question I can't answer from up here." He drew the pry bar from across his back and set its claw under the lowest board, and glanced at her once, slate eyes flat. "So we're going to find out which it was. Stand clear of the swing."
The board shrieked and came free. Kirk worked the claw under the second one, and the nail fought him, bright metal grinding out of new wood, and Béatrice stood ready with the pipe she'd pulled from under the handle, both hands on it like a bat.
"Third board's the last," he said. "Watch the door. It'll want to fall in before I'm done."
It did. The pipe clattered, the door sagged toward them, and Kirk caught the edge with his forearm and lowered it open into the dark, slow, the way a man opens a hatch on a swell. Inside lay a stairwell going down into blackness, and a smell that stopped Béatrice's breath for a second before she sorted it.
Not rot. Cooking. Old cooking, grease and cornmeal, gone cold but still itself, and under it the ordinary human smell of a lived-in room.
"Three days," she said. "Maybe four. Nobody's cooked down there since."
"Or nobody's cooked down there and left." Kirk swung his legs over the sill, boots finding the top stair by feel. He unshuttered the small lantern clipped to his belt and lit it, and the flame came up low and yellow, and the attic assembled itself around them out of the dark.
It was an attic in use. A bedroll in the corner, army blanket folded at the foot. A crate of tins, opened neatly, the lids pressed back down and saved. A line strung between rafters with two shirts and a pair of socks drying on it. On the wall, in pencil, a tally mark going down the sloping joist, and beside the tally a calendar of strokes, days counted, the last stroke maybe an inch below where a next one should be.
Béatrice ran her thumb down the tally. "Fourteen. They counted fourteen days."
"Same arithmetic as us." Kirk knelt at the crate. Tins, peach halves, condensed milk, a churchkey lying on top. And under the tins, flat and government-issue, a stack of ration flyers, the kind the parish had handed out in the first week. He lifted the top one and read it and his jaw moved once, and he handed it to her without a word.
The flyer said: BOUDREAUX RESIDENCE. SHELTER IN PLACE. DO NOT TRUST ANYONE ASKING AT YOUR DOOR AFTER DARK. DO NOT ANSWER IN SONG. DO NOT SING.
"Where'd they get this?" she said.
"Church gave them out. St. Roch, maybe. Which means somebody from the church came through here." He stood, and the lantern threw his shadow long across the rafters, and he turned a slow half circle, reading the room the way he read water. "Or somebody heading to the church left these behind. Either way, they knew the rule already. Don't answer in song."
"Then they knew what's out there. And they went down into the house anyway." She moved to the head of the stairs. Below, the attic steps gave onto a hallway, and the hallway gave onto darkness, and the smell of old cornmeal came up stronger from down there. "Kirk. Listen."
He came and stood beside her, and they listened.
At first there was nothing, the ordinary nothing of a drowned house settling, water lapping somewhere far below the floorboards. Then she heard it. A tick, irregular, like a dropped spoon rolling somewhere on tile, down there in the dark under the stairs. Tick. Tick-tick. A pause long enough to doubt it. Tick.
"That's not water," Kirk said.
"No."
He took the lantern off his belt and held it low, and the light fell down the stairwell and broke on the turn of the landing, and below the landing it could not reach. The ticking went on. Patient. Pointless. The sound of a thing with nothing better to do.
"Kitchen's down there," Béatrice said. "The smell's coming from the kitchen. And that sound is coming from the kitchen."
"Could be the house. A loose shutter, a swinging gate of something."
"Then it'll still be there in a minute." She was already looking at the door they'd broken, the bright nails, the pipe wedged on the outside, and the whole arrangement turned over once more in her head and came up wrong again. "Kirk. You bar a door behind you so nothing follows you up. But you nail boards to the outside so nothing gets in while you're gone. They did both. They barred it coming in and they barred it leaving, and then they went down to the street, and you don't go down to the street in this city after dark unless you have to."
"Unless you have somebody waiting that you couldn't bring with you." He said it flat, but his grip on the lantern tightened, and she saw the thought land in him the way a wave lands on a hull. "Or unless something down there called you by name and you went."
The ticking stopped.
They stood at the top of the stairs without breathing, and the silence lasted ten seconds, twenty, long enough for hope. Then it started again, and Béatrice let her breath out slow, and it wasn't relief in the breath, it was only the next breath.
"It heard us," she said.
"Everything out here hears us." Kirk crouched at the head of the stairs and leaned out over the dark with the lantern, arm at full length, and the light swung across the landing, across a banister furred with dust except for one clean streak, wide as a hand, low down, at the height of a dragging palm. He pulled the light back and looked at her. "Someone came down these stairs holding the rail. Recently. Dust hasn't drifted back over the streak."
"Alive, then. Holding on."
"Alive, then." He straightened up, and for a moment neither of them moved, and the tune came faintly through the bulkhead door behind them, from the cottage gap, the two braided melodies still splicing themselves together over the black water, patient as rope. He looked back at it once, and then at the stairs, and she watched him do the arithmetic she'd already done.
"Three throws to the church ridge," she said. "Or one flight of stairs."
"One flight of stairs into a house with a kitchen ticking at the bottom of it." He unslung the pry bar from his back and checked his grip on it, and his voice dropped to the quiet register he used in bad channels. "We don't sing, we don't hum, we don't answer anything that talks before it shows its face. You stay one stair above me the whole way down. That's the whole arithmetic."
"And if it's the person who made those prints?"
"Then we feed them peaches and carry them up the rope." He put his boot on the first stair, and the wood took his weight without a sound. "And if it isn't, you'll be glad you kept one stair between us and the dark."
He went down. The lantern light shrank ahead of him, and the ticking, for the first time since they'd heard it, kept perfect time with his steps.