Chapter 7: Back to the Rope
Kirk went down two more stairs, and the ticking followed him step for step. Then it stopped matching his steps and started matching something else, and Béatrice felt it before she named it. The tick sat inside her own chest, between one beat and the next, patient as a hand on a wrist taking a pulse.
"Kirk." Her voice came out low. "It's not keeping time with you anymore."
He froze on the landing. Below them the kitchen door stood ajar, a stripe of nothing down its edge, and from the dark behind it came a hum. Three notes. Up, up, then down. Her tune, the one she'd given Sylvia over the peaches, sung wet and sweet through a throat full of flood.
"Is that mine?" she whispered.
"You know it's yours. Up. Now."
They took the stairs together, no order to it, just two people climbing on the same instinct. Behind them the hum rose, unhurried, gaining nothing and losing nothing, and the ticking kept her heartbeat all the way to the bulkhead.
They came out onto the slate and Kirk was already at the chimney, feeding the rope out, throwing without a word. The coil flew across the last gap, and the bowline dropped over the church ridge stack short by a foot, slapped the water, and the water took it.
"Again."
"You heard it too." Not a question. He hauled the rope back, coiling fast. Behind them the bulkhead door swung, slow, and shut without a sound.
On the second throw the loop settled over the cap and he set it hard, three pulls. "You first. Go."
She went, hand over hand, knees high, and below her the lane had changed. The pale shapes were up off their backs, rising through the black in slow columns, leaving the bottom for the first time, arms opening like men rising from pews. She counted pulls. Nine. Twelve.
Behind her the bright nails drove themselves back into wood, one by one, in the humming's rhythm.
Seventeen. Twenty. The cap came up under her elbow and she hauled herself over it onto the church ridge, slate under her palms instead of tile, colder, furred with moss. She got the rope around the stack in two wraps and put her weight on it.
"Line's secure. Come on, Kirk."
He was already over the edge of the Boudreaux roof, rope doubled around his forearm, and he went fast, faster than he'd crossed anything yet, no economy in it now, just pull and pull and pull. Below him the lane was empty. The shapes that had lain in it for three weeks were up in the black, and she could see them from her side, hanging in the water column like congregants rising for a hymn, faces tipped toward the surface, toward the rope, toward him.
"Kirk, they're standing up."
"I see them." His boots swung low over the gap, and an arm came out of the depth. Not slow this time. It came up like a hook on a line, white and streaming, fingers wide, and Kirk swung hard the other way, one long pendulum arc, and the fingers raked water a foot under his heels. "Talk to me. Where's it talking?"
"Past you. The whole gap's talking." The water under the rope had gone from glass to a low chop, wind-ruffled, muttering, and that was wrong, that had been the quiet stretch all night, and quiet stretches were where the drowned waited. Now it moved and they still waited. "It's all bad water. Move."
He moved. Hand, hand, hand, and the arms came up along the lane one after another, left and right of the rope, unhurried now, no more hooks, just hands rising open like men asking to be handed something. She hauled slack as he came, wrapping it around the stack, and the hemp burned through her palms and she let it burn.
At six pulls his hand closed on her wrist and she dragged him over the ridge, and they lay flat on the church slate, breathing, the rope trembling between the chimneys behind them.
Below the gap the arms lowered back into the black. All of them together. The chop smoothed itself out, and the water went glass again, and the humming under it dropped to something low and even, a congregation sitting back down.
"They let you cross," she said.
"They didn't let me do anything." He rolled onto his side, working the rope off his forearm, and his hands were steadier than his voice. "They stopped reaching."
"Because they didn't want you."
"Because they're saving the reach." He sat up and looked back the way they'd come, and she followed his eyes.
The Boudreaux bulkhead stood shut. While they'd been in the water, the door they had pried open, the door whose boards Kirk had torn out one by one, had closed itself, and the pipe was back under the handle. Wedged outside. Barring it behind them the way they'd found it.
"Kirk."
"I see it."
The nails came next. She heard them before she understood them, a small bright sound across forty feet of night, tack, tack, tack, in rhythm, and the first board was climbing back across the door frame, dragging itself flat against the wood, and the nail heads were sinking in, one, two, three, driven home by nothing, the humming from under the water keeping time with every strike.
"They're nailing us out," she said. "Or nailing something in."
"Both can be true." Kirk got to his knees, then his feet, careful on the moss, and turned his back on it. "We're not going back there either way. Church ridge, then down to the bell tower if there's a way down that isn't water."
"And if the church is the same?" She stood, and her knees shook, and she let them. "A ticking kitchen. A flyer. Fourteen tally marks."
"Then we learn the arithmetic." He was already walking the ridge, reading the church roof the way he'd read the cottage, the Boudreaux place, the tomb. Steep slate, a steeple stub at the far end, and below the roofline on the landward side a gutter, a downspout, a strip of brick that might once have been a gallery railing above the flood line. "Three throws got us here. One of them we didn't even use. That's the first night the math has come out ahead."
"Say it plainer."
"The water's behind us and it isn't following." He stopped at the steeple stub and put his palm against the brick. "It's holding. Whatever it wanted from the Boudreaux house, it got, or it put back, and we weren't it."
Behind them, across the gap, the last nail drove home. The sound stopped, and in the quiet that followed she heard the tune change again, faint, from the flooded streets below the church, three notes rising out of the water somewhere under the eaves.
Up, up, then down.
Her tune. Sung slower this time. Sung like something being taught to a new mouth.
"Don't," Kirk said, without turning around.
"I'm not singing." She bit the inside of her cheek, found it already raw from the last crossing, bit it again anyway. "Kirk. It sang it in the kitchen. It sang it in the cottage gap. It's not following us. It's leading somewhere."
He came back along the ridge to her, lantern low, and looked down the landward side where the downspout ran, and she watched his face go through the reading, channel by channel, and come up empty.
"The tune's coming from under the church," he said.
"Not ahead of us."
"No. Under." He crouched, put his hand flat on the slate, the way a deckhand puts a palm on a hull to feel what the water is doing to it. The humming came up through the masonry, through her boots, patient as a tide. "There's a crypt under St. Roch. Above-ground, like the tombs. Whole parish of them."
"And it learned our door."
He took his hand off the slate. When he looked up at her his face was the cargo face, flat and gray, but under it something had moved, something she'd only seen once before, the night the lock turned by itself.
"Then we don't go down," he said. "We go along. Ridge to the gallery, gallery to whatever brick is still above the waterline, and we don't stop on this roof past dawn."
"And if the water rises at high tide?"
"Then we climb the steeple." He shouldered the rope coil and started along the ridge, and the humming under the church followed them, note by patient note, learning the walk of their boots.
The ridge ran long and steep toward the steeple stub, and the slate under their boots was older here, furred with moss that took their weight with a greasy patience. The humming came up through it evenly now, matching their pace, and Béatrice stopped trying to walk out of rhythm. It had learned her breathing already. It would learn her stride.
"How many ropes left?" she asked.
"One, if we don't need the steeple." Kirk counted under his breath as he walked, eyes on the downspout. "Gallery, then the brick strip, then we're on the high ground by the parish office. Rope's for insurance only."
"Insurance against what?"
"Against the day the brick quits."
The downspout came up on their left, a sheet-metal run bolted to the church's flank, and below it the gallery railing showed its top course of brick above the flood. The water there was not glass. It muttered against the church foundations, choppy, moving, and Béatrice looked at it twice before she trusted the first look.
"It's talking down there," she said. "All of it."
"That's the good water. That's how it's supposed to behave." Kirk went over the roof edge first, boots finding the gutter, then the downspout, testing each bracket with his heel before he put weight on it. "Talkative water is empty water. Remember that."
She remembered the cottage gap, and the ruffle past the garden wall, and how the rules had still been true tonight until they hadn't. She climbed down after him, the moss cold through her palms, and the humming under the church changed key as her boots left the roof. Lower. Warmer. Almost comfortable.
"Don't listen," he said.
"I'm not listening. I'm feeling it through my boots. There's a difference and it's no comfort."
The gallery ran along the landward face of the church, brick and iron, three feet wide, and it held. Somebody had walked it recently. The railing's rust was rubbed bright in a continuous line at hand height, the same kind of streak as the banister in the Boudreaux stairwell, and Béatrice put her own hand on it and followed the shine.
"Kirk."
"I see it." He crouched at the gallery's far end, lantern low, and the light found a pallet laid against the church door. Blanket, folded twice. A single shoe set upright beside it, sole outward, the way a man leaves a shoe when he means to come back for it. Beside the shoe, chalk on the brick, a tally. Eleven strokes.
"Eleven days," she said. "Someone waited here eleven days."
"And left." He touched the blanket. Dry. "Recent. The chalk's not smeared."
"Left where? Down?" She looked at the church door. Wood, swollen, double-hung, and a padlock hanging open on the hasp, not locked, not removed. Left exactly as a person leaves a lock when they expect to come back before dark. "Or did they go in?"
"The humming's inside. So either they went in and are still walking, or." He didn't finish it.
"Say the rest."
"Or what's humming went in wearing them."
She looked at the shoe again. Sole outward. Patient. Everything out here was patient; the whole drowned city had only one manner. She crouched and set two fingers inside the shoe's collar. Damp, but not flooded. The dew-damp of a night, no more.
"The Boudreaux prints were dry," she said. "This is wet. Different person, or the same one coming back."
"Same one, I'd guess. Light feet, careful feet." Kirk stood and put his palm on the church door, and she watched his jaw move once, the way it moved when the water told him something he didn't like. "There's a gap under this door. Air's moving through it. Warm."
"Doors down here aren't warm, Kirk."
"No. They aren't."
Through the seam, faint as a pulse under a wrist, the three notes came again. Up, up, then down. Her tune, and this time it didn't sound taught. It sounded offered. The way you hum a lullaby through a nursery door to a child already asleep.
Béatrice's throat closed on itself before she could answer it. She tasted blood from the cheek bite, fresh.
"It knows I'm out here," she said. "The tune didn't change for you. It changed when I came down the spout."
"It doesn't know you. It knows the song, and the song was yours to give. That's not the same." He took her elbow and moved her back from the door, one step, two, and his hand was steady but his grip was a grip. "The whole city's got one voice and it's been borrowing pieces of us for three weeks. It doesn't know your name."
"It knew Sylvia's. It knew yours."
"It knew what we told it." He let her go and looked down the gallery, and she watched him do the arithmetic again, the slow reading, channel by channel. "Parish office is one more stretch of brick. Two hundred feet, maybe. Then high ground, then we find out where the church people went when they left."
"And the shoe?"
"The shoe stays with the church."
They went along the railing, and the humming followed under the brick like ballast, even, unhurried, and Béatrice made herself count the railing's posts instead of listening. Fourteen posts. Fifteen. At twenty the gallery ended in a collapsed run where a live oak had come down across the corner of the building, and the tree's root ball stood up out of the flood like a peeled island, and past it the brick strip continued toward the parish office roof.
"Rope?" she said.
"No rope. Walk the trunk." Kirk tested the oak with his boot, then his whole weight, and the trunk held, angled up out of the water like a ramp. "Twenty feet of dry wood and then a drop of four feet onto the brick. Go slow. The water under this side is quiet."
The water under the far side was quiet. She saw it before he said it, past the root ball, a stretch of black so flat it looked poured, and her stomach dropped with the old knowledge. She looked at the talking chop instead, kept her eyes on the muttering water, and started up the trunk, and the humming under the church stopped.
Not faded. Stopped, mid-note, and the silence that followed had weight, had attention, and her hands went cold on the bark.
"Kirk."
"Keep moving. Eyes on the brick."
Then, from the flat quiet stretch, unhurried, from a throat full of flood and somebody else's manners, a voice said his name.
"Kirk MacNamara."
Not the choir. Not the tune. His name, spoken plain, in the round consonants of a deckhand's river English, and Béatrice froze on the trunk with the root ball between her and the sound.
"That's not the water," she whispered. "The water doesn't talk. The water hums."
"It never talked before." He had gone still on the gallery behind her, and when he spoke his voice came out flat and gray and very quiet. "Which crew you with, calling me by both names?"
The voice laughed. Low, wet, pleased, and it came from the water under the root ball's shadow, three feet below her boots, and it was a voice she had heard every night for three weeks at a door, asking for peaches.
"Béatrice," the voice said kindly. "Tell him where I left him."