Chapter 10
The Roof
The phone buzzed against his hip, and he had nearly forgotten it.
He lay on the iron landing with his cheek on the cold metal and the church clock still going in his ears, and the thing shivered through the canvas of the bag like a small animal. It took him a moment to know what it was. Then he knew, and a clean cold fear went through him. Eight o'clock.
Five minutes.
He got the bag open with one hand. His fingers were slick. He found the phone, and held down the button, and the little screen lit his face, and the white numbers came up. 20:00. CHECK-IN. 01:29. He had made it with two minutes to spare. He had been lying on a landing, above a dead man, with blood on his ribs, and he had nearly missed the one thing he had never missed.
POSITION RECEIVED.
He let out his breath. He lay there with the phone on his chest.
A second message came up under the first, slowly, one line at a time.
NOTICE TO THE RUNNER.
THE HOUSE NOTES THE LOSS OF HUNTER D. PRATT. ALL REMAINING HUNTERS ARE RELEASED FROM ALL RESTRICTIONS FOR THE REST OF THE GAME.
THE RUNNER IS REMINDED THAT THE GATE OPENS AT 22:00.
He read it twice. It was the dry, polite voice he knew. The loss of Hunter D. Pratt. They had written it as if a man had been lost in the post.
They already know. They watched.
He thought of a gray room somewhere, and a screen the size of a barn door, and forty people leaning forward. Somebody had said, Oh. Somebody had put down a chip.
He put the phone away.
He bound his side with the tail of his shirt.
It was not much of a wound. He made himself look at it, kneeling on the iron with the flashlight cupped in his hand. It was a long groove across the ribs on the left side, about five inches, with the skin burned black at the edges, and the blood coming slowly and steadily, not fast. A hand's width to the right and he would have been dead, and he knew it. He tore the shirt with his teeth, and folded the cloth into a pad, and tied it hard round his chest, and the pain came up at last, hot and bright, and made his eyes water.
Right, he thought. Right. Right.
He sat for a while with his back against the brick.
He did not look over the edge. He did not need to. A mile off, in the dark, the church clock had stopped, and the wind sang in the broken rail. He thought of a round pink face, and a mouth making a little shape. I'm not at all sure that I. He thought of the courtesy of those fingers letting go.
He was going to kill me. He would have done it, and said whoopsie.
And I had his sleeve.
It did not help. He knew it would not. It was one of those things that two true statements will not make better, however long you hold them side by side. He got up.
He climbed the last flight with one hand on the wall.
The roof of Mercer Mill was mostly sky.
The old slates had gone years ago, and most of the beams with them, and what was left stood up against the stars like the ribs of something that had been eaten. A walkway of planks ran along the middle. On either side there was nothing, only black air and the broken tops of walls. At the far end, by the foot of the chimney, a small square hut of corrugated iron squatted on a concrete slab. It had a new padlock on the door, and a new cable running to it, thick as a wrist, and from the roof of it, standing up in a ring, six thin metal rods.
A small green light shone on the front of the hut, steady, in the dark. It was the only light on the whole of the Mill, and it looked as out of place as a lamp in a field.
He went along the planks, and stood in front of it, and looked at the padlock.
It was a good padlock, new and heavy, a hardened-steel one. He looked at it, and at the hasp, and at the screws. They were the ordinary kind, set in a steel plate, held into the iron wall by four rivets. He put the blade of the multi-tool to the edge of the plate. He worked it under. He bent it, and bent it, and the metal groaned. For a minute he felt nothing but the ache in his side, and the long cold wind.
The rivet popped.
He did the next. They were cheap, soft ones, a quarter inch, set in with a gun, and they gave like biscuits. The plate swung loose. The padlock hung on it, quite whole, with nothing left to hold, and the door sagged open, and a warm hum came out of the hut, and a smell of hot dust.
Inside, on a bench, sat a gray box.
It was the size of a bread bin. It had a row of small lights on the front, green and amber, and six cables like tentacles going up through the roof. Under the bench, on the floor, was a black power supply with a fan. A cable ran from it to a panel on the wall. And on the panel, in a neat row, there were four switches, each with a little white label, written in the same upright script that had written Mr. Ethan Cole on a parcel.
CAMERAS. LIGHTS. SPEAKERS. GATE.
He stared at them.
It was so simple that it made him want to laugh. He had come up six flights of a ruined building, with a dead man behind him and blood on his ribs, to find a thing that a child could turn off.
Nobody likes to be watched at the end of a thing.
He put his thumb on the first switch.
He did not push it. He stood with his hand on it, in the hot dark of the hut, and a thought came to him, quite coolly, from somewhere far back. If I turn it off, they'll know. Somebody will see a light go out.
They'll come.
They're going to come anyway.
He looked at the other three. Lights. He would want the lights, to see the floor. Gate. It would open at ten, whatever he did. Speakers. He did not know what they were for. But he thought, If they want to talk to me, I'd rather hear them coming.
He flipped the first.
There was a small plain click. The row of green lights on the gray box went out, one by one, from left to right, like a line of windows in a street at night. And the whole of the long dark Yard, which had been humming at the very edge of his hearing since the moment he got out of the car, a thin high sound like a wire in a wind, a sound he had not even known he was hearing, stopped.
The silence was so large that he swayed.
Every camera on every lamp post, every one of the blue bandages that had watched him eat a sandwich and wave and wash his face, had gone blind at the same moment. He thought of Cutler Row. He thought of Quay Street, and the cheerful stalls, and the little gray boxes above them like patient birds. They were only boxes now.
Now it's only the phone.
That's the one thing they've got on me.
He did not know what that meant. But he stood in the dark in the doorway of a small iron hut, with his hand on a dead switch, and for the first time since the car, he felt a small, clean, hard flicker that might have been a kind of joy.
"Mr. Cole."
It came from the chimney.
He had not seen it. A small gray horn bolted to the brickwork at about the height of a man, like the ones you see in an old station. It crackled. It coughed. And a rich, warm, amused voice came out of it, close, as though a man had leaned in at a window.
"I do beg your pardon. That was rather naughty."
Ethan did not move.
"You've cost a great many people a great deal of money. There were forty-one people in a very comfortable room who had put their chips on the next hour, and they've just been given a blank screen." The voice sighed. "I'd taken so much trouble. It's the little details. The cameras are very costly, you know. They belong to the House."
"Mr. Vance."
"Roy. I think we're past the stage of mister." There was a faint clink, as of a glass. "You've also dropped my Mr. Pratt off a stair. I'm told that was quick work, if rather untidy. He was a dear man. He'd been with me six years."
"He tried to kill me."
"He did. It was his job." The voice was gentle. "I'm not cross. I don't want you to think I'm cross. It's all rather exciting, in a way. I haven't had a runner do the cameras since Pennsylvania."
"Jack Ford told me."
"Jack always was too fond of the sound of his own voice, for a man who doesn't talk." The voice hummed. "It's no matter. You've made it necessary to bring the thing a bit closer, that's all. I can't have people watching an empty screen all night. I shall have to put it somewhere you can't miss."
"Where?"
"Oh, I think you know," said Vance, softly.
The horn clicked, and was still.
He stood there for a time, with the wind pulling at his hair. He was shaking, a little. It was not fear. It was the plain cold shake of a body that has had enough of everything, and is trying to decide what to do about it.
Somewhere I can't miss.
He knows about the locker.
He knows exactly what it is.
There was a smell in the air.
It was very faint. It was sweet, and soft, and dry. It was the smell of a shop: a smell of cotton and warmth, and a little lavender. It was not a smell that belonged on a roof, in the wind, in the dark.
It was wool.
He turned his head.
At the head of the iron stair, where the planks began, no more than fifteen feet away, on an upturned crate, with a little battery lamp at her feet, a short wide woman in a lilac coat was sitting with a knitting bag in her lap. She had been there for some time. He could tell. A faint rime of damp had gathered on her shoulders. She had a ball of yellow wool in one hand, and in the other, working slowly, patiently, in and out, the tiny needles. The little cardigan lay across her knee. It had grown. It had got a collar.
She had not looked up.
"Hello, Ethan," said Linda Pratt.
She said it quietly, kindly, without lifting her eyes from her work.
"I didn't want to disturb you. I could see you were busy. I thought I'd just sit." The needles went on. "I saw you go up the stair, from the courtyard. I had to come the long way. My knees."
He did not answer.
"I'm told I'm to say something. About being sorry for your loss." She tilted her head. "I don't think I will. It's not the same, is it? You've lost nobody. I've lost my husband." The needles stopped. For the first time, she looked up, over her little pink glasses. Her round powdered face was perfectly composed, perfectly kind, and the pale blue eyes in it were quite dry. "I came round the corner just as he went. He looked so surprised."
"I tried to hold him."
"I know, dear."
"I had his sleeve."
"I saw the mark." She nodded. "That's the dreadful part. I'd rather you hadn't. It would have been easier." She smoothed the little jacket on her knee. "I shall have to think about it. I shall have to do some thinking, over the rest of my life. About whether you tried."
"Linda."
"But I'm not going to do it now."
He stared at her.
"I'm not a person who does things in a temper," said Linda. "Dave always said. He said, Lin, you've got the patience of a stone. I'm going to give you an hour. I've decided. I'm going to sit here, and finish this row, and then the next. It's only decent." The needles started again. "Until nine. Quarter past, at the outside."
"And then?"
"And then I'll come and find you. Wherever you've gone. I'm very good at it. I've been doing it for thirty years."
"You don't have to."
"I do, dear."
"Why?"
"Because he was mine," said Linda Pratt. She did not raise her voice. She held up the little jacket, between her two plump hands, and looked at it with her head on one side, as one looks at a thing that is nearly done. "And you took him."
The lamp at her feet flickered.
The wind went round the chimney.
And Ethan, standing on the roof of Mercer Mill with a bound side and a key round his neck, looked into the soft round powdered face of the kindest murderer he had ever met, and understood that she meant every word.
"An hour," he said.
"Is that enough?"
"I don't know."
"Well. It's what there is." She bent her head to her work. "Go on, dear. You've got the door behind the hut. It's the old maintenance stair. You'll know it. You've been down it before."
He had not told her that.
He stood a moment longer. Then he turned, and went round the hut, and found the iron door, rusted half through, standing a few inches ajar, and behind it a stair that went down into the building, into black.
Behind him, on the roof, the small dry sound of the needles went on, in and out, like a clock.