Chapter 11
Locker Fourteen
He went down the inside.
It was so dark that for a minute he saw nothing at all. He stood on the top step with his hand on the wall, letting his eyes open. A cold stale air came up out of the shaft, thick with soot and wet brick, and under it, very faint, the sweet rotting smell of old paper and cloth. His heart was knocking. He took out the little flashlight from his bag and held it in his fist, and did not turn it on.
Count.
Fourteen stairs to a landing. Then a turn. Then another fourteen.
He did not know why he remembered that. It came up out of him, from some deep drawer, like a phone number. He put his foot on the first step, and it held, and he went down.
The Mill had been six floors. He knew every one. He had walked them in his sleep, in the long nights, with a bunch of keys and a flashlight: the loom floors, with their rows of great clanking machines; the spinning floor, hot and heavy with lint; the dye house at the east end, with its reek of chemicals and its steaming vats. He went down through them one at a time, in the dark. The floors had gone. Where they had been, there were beams, and gaps, and a black wind that sighed up the shaft from below. On the fourth landing he stopped, and looked out through a hole in the wall, and saw the whole Yard lying in the starlight like a plan, and no lights anywhere but the glare at the gate.
On the fifth, he turned on the flashlight.
He kept the beam low. It made a small yellow oval on the stairs, and on the stairs, here and there, the prints of other feet, small and clear and fresh, in a drift of gray ash, going up and down. A man in rubber boots had been through here. Or two.
They've been setting something.
He put it in the back of his mind.
On the second landing, the stair ended in a door, and on the door, stenciled in white paint that had gone the color of old teeth, was a number. 1. And under it, in capitals, GROUND. LOADING. LOCKERS. EXIT.
He put his hand flat on the metal. It was very cold. It had a rough scaly feel, like the skin of a lizard. From behind it came a long, soft, dripping silence, and now, very faintly, a sound. A scrape. A creak. Then a kind of muffled thump, a hollow one, like a fist on a coat.
Somebody's in there.
And a long way off, from somewhere up in the dark above him, a small dry sound, like a clock.
Click. Click. Click.
He turned the handle.
It was not what he remembered.
He had braced himself. He had thought, for seven years, that if he ever stood in this room again he would be knocked flat by it. He had imagined the smell, the sound, the heat. He had pictured it so often, in the small hours, that it had grown huge, like a place in a dream, a cathedral of flame.
But it was only a floor.
It was an enormous, low, bare concrete floor, about the length of a football field, with iron pillars every twenty feet, and a high ceiling lost in cobwebs. At one end, a pair of loading doors stood open on the night. At the other, a black gap showed where the east wall had been. The ceiling had come down in places, and lay in heaps, and the dust of it had dried and spread across everything, a pale gray snow. There were no machines. They had been taken out years ago and sold for scrap. All that remained were the racks.
They stood in long rows, down the whole length of the floor.
They were steel, painted yellow, rusted to the color of dried blood. They were twelve feet high, and each one had four shelves, and each shelf had once held a stack of bales, fabric folded and wrapped, a hundred and fifty pounds apiece. Now they held nothing. They stood in the thin light of his flashlight like the ribs of a ship, ranks and ranks of them, going back into the dark.
He did not go into the aisle.
Not yet. There was a door on his left, close, in the wall beside the stair. It was a plain gray steel door with a metal sign screwed to it, and the sign said LOCKERS, and under that, in smaller letters, somebody long ago had added with a marker, NO FOOD. Out on the floor, a long way off, something scraped, and thumped, and was still.
Rats, he thought.
It was what he told himself. He knew perfectly well that it was not a rat. He knew what it was like to be a man who has just been told to look at the thing he is afraid of, and who has found, a few steps to the side, a door.
The key first. It'll only take a minute.
He went in.
The locker room was long and low and smelled of damp wool. It had a floor of cracked red tile, and a bench down the middle, and on both sides, from the floor to the ceiling, in rows, stood a hundred tall steel lockers, painted green. The paint had blistered. Some of the doors hung open. Some were gone. Each one had a little brass plate at eye level, with a number, and under the number a slot, and in some of the slots, still, after seven years, a strip of card with a name.
He walked down the row slowly, with the flashlight.
COLE E.
It was locker nine.
It was a small thing. It was a green door with a dent, and a strip of card that had gone the color of tea. He had written it himself, with a ballpoint, on his first day. He had been twenty-three. He'd had a new jacket, and a packed lunch, and a feeling that he was going to be here for good. He put out a finger and touched the card. It came away in a little curl and fluttered to the tiles.
He went on.
Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.
REEVES D.
It was in blue marker, in a square boyish print, on a sticker that had been cut out of a cereal box. The R was bigger than the rest. Under it, in a smaller hand, somebody had drawn a small, careful, bad picture of a horse. He looked at the horse for a long time.
Fourteen.
He took the key from his shirt.
It came off over his head. The red string was damp. He held the brass in his hand, and the little worn number on the bow caught the flashlight. His hand was perfectly steady. He fitted it to the lock, and it went in like a word into a sentence, with a small bright oiled click, and he knew, as it turned, that someone had been here, in the last month, with a can of oil and a rag.
The door opened.
Inside, it was almost empty.
There was a hook, and on the hook a navy work jacket, with a cheap patch on the shoulder and the sleeves a little too short. There was a steel flask on the shelf, a dented one, with its cap beside it. A paperback with a cracked spine, a mystery, with a boy's name written in the front. A pair of fingerless gloves. And hanging from a second hook, by a loop of green cord, a plastic whistle.
It was yellow. It was the kind they sold in packets of ten, for school trips, for the dog. It was exactly the same as the one round his own neck.
He took it down.
It was very light. He did not know what he had expected. It was only a whistle, a small cheap thing, with a chewed mouthpiece and a crack in the side, and a tiny label that had been written on in biro, and had mostly come off. He turned it to the flashlight. He could just read it.
DANNY. IF LOST, BLOW.
He sat down on the bench.
He did it slowly, as a man sits who has been told to. He sat with the whistle in his hand, and the open locker in front of him, and the green doors going away on either side into the dark. And he saw, quite plainly, a thin boy in a navy jacket, grinning, with a flask under his arm, coming through the door of the Mill at ten at night, and saying Evening, boss. He saw the whistle round his neck. He heard Danny's voice, light and quick and cheerful. It's so loud in here, boss, nobody'd hear me if I fell. So I've got this. It's a joke. It's from the scouts.
Don't be daft, he had said. Take it off. You look like a referee.
I'm keeping it.
Suit yourself.
He closed his hand over it.
At the back of the locker, behind the flask, lay a white envelope. It was propped against the wall, quite flat, and on the front, in blue ink, in a small, upright, perfectly formal hand, was written: Mr. Cole.
He took it out.
Mr. Cole,
If you are reading this, you have come back to Mercer Mill, which I did not expect. I am writing it in October, at my kitchen table, before the game. I do not know yet what kind of man you are.
This is Danny's locker. I have not changed anything. I came in March with a can of oil, because I could not bear it to be stiff.
The whistle was his. He wore it round his neck at work, and I told him not to be silly. He said that the Mill was so loud that nobody would hear him if he fell. I thought it was a joke. I think now it was the only sensible thing he ever said.
I am not going to tell you how to feel. I have no idea. For four years I have wanted you to be someone I could hate, and I have found that I cannot do it from a distance. I have tried. I read the reports. I look at your photograph. You are a man who mends washing machines. You pay your child support, mostly. You have a daughter who draws.
I do not know what I want from you. I only know I would like to see it, once, with my own eyes, before I die: whether a man who left will go back.
Whatever happens tonight, I want you to know that I did not intend you to be hurt. I believed it to be an exercise. I believe it still, because I do not know how to believe anything else.
Helen Reeves
P.S. He ate the soup. He never said, but he did. I always sent too much.
He read it twice.
He read it with his lips moving, in the dim yellow oval of the flashlight, and when he had finished, he folded it carefully along its creases, and put it back in the envelope. His hands were not shaking. He felt very odd, quite light, and very far away, like a man who has been under ether. He sat on the bench in the locker room with the envelope on his knee and the whistle in his hand, and he was aware that he was smiling.
I believe it still, because I do not know how to believe anything else.
Oh, Helen. Oh, you poor, stiff, careful, stupid woman.
He put the envelope inside his jacket, over his heart. He took the green cord in both hands, and bent his head, and put Danny's whistle round his neck beside his own. They clinked together, softly, two small plastic things, both yellow, one chewed at the end, on his chest. It was a very small sound. It was like two glasses touching.
Right.
He closed the locker. He did it gently, as one closes the door of a room where a child is sleeping. He turned the key, and took it out, and put it in his pocket. Then he went to the door, and opened it, and out of the vast dark loading floor came the scrape, and the thump, and a long muffled cry.
He knew that it had never been a rat.
He walked slowly, under the pillars, with the flashlight low, and the long pale floor going away in front of him, across the black stains and the broken pallets and the scatter of old bolts. The sound came again. It was nearer. He found that he was holding his breath.
At the end of the fourth row, one of the racks lay on its side.
It was not a long way off. About thirty feet. It was exactly where he had known it would be. A great yellow steel frame, twelve feet by eight, with its shelves hanging open like drawers, fallen across the floor at a slant. One end of it rested on the concrete. The other was propped, at a height of about two feet, on a stack of old pallets that had been there seven years ago and were there still. Under the high end, in the long black triangle of space between rack and floor, he saw a pair of boots.
He stopped.
The flashlight shook in his hand. It made the boots dance. They were not workman's boots. They were a pair of scuffed white sneakers, with the toes turned in.
Danny.
He didn't say it. He stood with the whole of the night in his ears, a noise like a sea, and a cold white blankness like snow coming down over his thoughts.
The sneakers moved.
They scraped on the concrete, a short hard scuff, and then twisted, and kicked. And from under the rack, from somewhere in the dark, there came a sound. It was thick and muffled. It was a voice, through tape, saying, over and over, with tremendous urgency, a single sound that it took Ethan several seconds to understand.
Mm. Mm. Mmm-mm.
He crossed the thirty feet in about four strides, and dropped on his knees, and shone the flashlight under the rack, and there, flat on his back in a bed of dust with his eyes enormous and his mouth taped across with silver tape, lay Chris.
His hands were tied.
They were bound together at the wrists with a plastic cable tie, and lashed to a post of the rack above his head. His left leg was trapped. The weight of the frame lay across it, above the knee, and the leg beneath it stuck out at an angle that made Ethan's own knee hurt. His tracksuit top was torn. His yellow hair was gray with dust. His eyes found Ethan, and went round, and filled with tears, and he made a sound that was not a word.
"It's all right," said Ethan. "It's me. I've got you."
Mmmm.
"Hold still."
He tore the tape. He did it all in one pull, quickly, as one takes off a bandage. The boy gave a gasp that was almost a shriek, and lay gaping, sucking in great whooping breaths of the dusty air.
"Mr. Cole," he whispered. "I stayed in the car. I did. I said I would. I stayed in the car."
"I know."
"Two men came. The big one and the thin one. They took my gun. They said Mr. Vance had a, he said I was a disloyal. He said I'd talked." He was sobbing. "They said it was a, there was a thing they called a rhyme. They said, mind the rack. It's a bit loose."
"They dropped it on you."
"They pushed it with a stick." He drew a long shuddering breath. "I think it's broken. The leg. It doesn't hurt. I mean it does, but it's a long way off. It's like it's happening to a guy next door."
"Don't move it."
"I'm not planning to."
"I'm sorry," said Ethan. It came out of him before he knew. "You told me about the drums. That's why."
"Don't. It was my own fault. I just, I was so tired of not telling anyone anything." The boy's face crumpled. "I don't want to die in a mill. I used to work in a supermarket."
"You're not going to die."
"You don't know that."
"No." He put his hands under the edge of the rack. It was a big heavy frame, welded, riveted, and the steel was sharp and cold and gritty with rust. "But I'm not going to leave you."
He lifted.
It did not move.
He tried five times.
He tried it with his legs, and then his back. He tried it with one end, and then the other. He got his shoulder under the frame, and heaved, until the veins stood out in his neck and a red mist swam across his eyes, and the rack gave a long groaning creak, and shifted a quarter of an inch, and settled. Chris cried out. Ethan let go. He sat back on his heels, gasping, with the burn along his ribs gone hot and wet again.
Six hundred pounds.
I couldn't do it then. I can't do it now.
It came to him, quite flat and calm. He knelt in the dust with his hands on his thighs and looked at the thing, and it looked back at him, huge and yellow and perfectly indifferent. The same rack. The same bales that weren't there. The same thing. He felt, rising slowly up through him from the soles of his feet, a thing that was neither fear nor despair. It was a kind of wild dry humor.
Seven years. I've had seven years, and I've still got two arms.
"Mr. Cole," said Chris. "I'm sorry to be a, but there's a smell."
Ethan's head came up.
It was faint. It was so faint that he'd taken it for the dust. It was sweet, oily, and thin, and it was coming from somewhere behind him. It was the smell of a gas station on a hot day. He turned the flashlight.
Along the base of the nearest pillar, in a dark glossy line, ran a thin wet streak.
He got up and walked to it. He crouched. He put out a finger, and touched it, and held it to his nose. It was thicker than gas. It had a sharp, heavy, cold, chemical edge. It had been poured. It ran from the pillar to the next pillar, and the next, in a long careful trail, along the foot of every post, down the whole length of the floor, as neat as a line of paint on a road.
He followed it with the flashlight.
It went to the loading doors. It went to the east wall. It went to a small blue plastic drum, the size of a bucket, standing at the foot of the stair. A cap was off. A rag hung from it. There was a second drum by the lockers, and a third, near the door he had come in by. They stood at intervals along the floor like toadstools.
Twelve blue drums.
He knew it quite plainly, all at once, as one knows a name. A van at the gate. A cleanup. Winners who don't leave. They weren't going to carry bodies. They weren't going to wash anything down. They were going to burn it. The floor, the racks, the speakers, the lockers, a boy under a rack. Every trace. A great old derelict mill, with a history of fires, going up in the night. A tragedy. A pity. Some vagrants, some kids, a stray cigarette. A coroner would say accidental.
And Chris.
And me.
The horn coughed.
It came from the ceiling.
It was a small square horn, gray with dust, bolted to a pillar thirty feet up. It crackled, and spat, and the whole floor seemed to lean toward it, as a field leans to a wind. And out of the old iron horn, thin, rich, tinny and delighted, came a voice.
"Ladies and gentlemen."
Chris screamed.
"Oh, I do beg your pardon. I didn't mean to give anyone a turn." The voice laughed. "It's an old speaker. They put them in for the air-raid drill. I thought it'd be nice to use them."
"Vance," said Ethan.
"Mr. Cole. Good evening. I'm so glad you could join us. And I must say, I was sorry about the cameras." A faint chuckle. "I've got a man with a handheld in a cherry picker outside the east wall, and a lot of very bored people who've paid a great deal of money. I don't mind. It's brought us closer."
"Where are you?"
"I'm in a very comfortable room, about thirty miles from here. I've got a fire, and a glass of port, and a screen the size of a barn door." The voice was warm. "You look wonderful. You look like a man who's been through the mill."
Ethan said nothing.
"That's a joke, by the way. I'm told I'm rather fond of them. I'll tell you what's going on, because I always like to. It's the only courtesy I can think of. It's ten to ten. In ten minutes, the gate will open. You'll see it, at the east end. A big iron door. Through it, there's a lawn, and a drive, and a gentleman called Pierce, with a car."
"The van."
"I beg your pardon?"
"There's a van."
"There's a car," said Vance mildly. "With a very comfortable seat. It'll take you home. Your daughter's expecting you on Sunday. I looked." There was a small silence. "You're about ninety yards from the door. It's a straight run. You'd be there in twenty seconds."
"And the boy?"
"Ah."
"What about him?"
"That's the thing, isn't it?" The voice sounded almost sorry. "I'd hoped, I really did, that it wouldn't come to this. I thought you'd do the sensible thing. But I'm afraid we've had a special request."
"From who?"
"From a very particular lady." The voice dropped, was confidential. "She's here with me now. She asked for a, I believe the word was rhyme. The same floor. The same rack. A boy under it. Ten minutes to go. I thought it was rather neat. It's got a sort of, you know. A symmetry."
Chris was crying. He lay in the dust with his hands tied above his head and his face turned away.
"It's very simple," said Vance. "At ten o'clock exactly, the gate opens. It stays open for ninety seconds. If you're through it, you're out. You'll go home, and you'll sleep in your own bed, and in a month there'll be a nice check. If you're not, the gate shuts. That's all."
"And the fire?"
"What fire?"
"The drums."
"I'm sure I don't know what you mean. There's a lot of dust in an old mill. It's a hazard. It has to be damped down."
"With what?"
"With whatever's to hand." The voice paused. "I'll leave you now. I think you've got a decision to make, and I'd hate to be rude."
The horn crackled.
Then it did not go dead.
There was a sound in it. A scuffle. The rattle of a chair going over, and a man's voice, sharp and a long way from the microphone, saying, Madam, I really must, and another one, higher, firmer, a woman's, close and clear and shaking with a rage so old and so cold that it did not sound like rage at all.
"That is not true."
Ethan went still.
"Mr. Cole." It was a dry, level, formal voice, a voice for assembly halls. "Mr. Cole, I don't know if you can hear me. This is Helen Reeves. I did not ask for that. I did not ask for anything of the kind. I was told it was an exercise. I was told there were blanks." Her voice cracked, and steadied. "Roy, take your hands off me. I'm sixty-four years old, and I have a telephone."
"Helen, my dear."
"I have something I have never played to anyone." There was a click. "I should like it to be heard."
There was a hiss of static. And then, out of an old iron horn in the ceiling of a dead mill, small and tinny and perfectly clear, there came a boy's voice.
Mom? It's me.
Ethan did not breathe.
Don't be scared. There's a fire at the mill. I'm fine. I'm stuck, but I'm fine. Ethan's gone to get help. A cough. A breath. A thin brave laugh. He's good. He'll be back. I love you, Mom.
It stopped.
The horn gave a long soft crackle, and a man's voice said, That's quite enough, and there was a sound like a door, and a woman's footsteps going away fast, and then nothing at all.
He did not move.
He stood in the middle of the aisle, with the flashlight pointed at the floor, and the sound of a boy's voice going round and round in his head. He's good. He'll be back.
It was the voice from the road. It was the voice he had heard in a thousand showers, in a thousand nights, saying go. He had been so sure that was the last thing. He had never once thought there might be another. He had never thought that the boy, under six hundred pounds of steel, with the smoke coming through the roof, had picked up his phone and rung his mother and told her he's gone to get help.
He'll be back.
He never said "he left me." He said "he's good."
He looked up.
He did not mean to. His face went up to the horn on the pillar, the way a man's face goes up to a voice, and the flashlight went with it. The little yellow oval crawled up the pillar, the iron, the dust. It went over the steel girders, and the cobwebs, and the long black beam that ran across the ceiling from wall to wall. And there, hanging from the beam, on a runner, in the thin gray glimmer, a great rusted iron hook swung gently in the draft.
It was an overhead hoist.
It was a hand chain, a big one, the kind you pull. It hung above the fallen rack, directly above, on a track that ran the whole length of the loading floor, so that a man could stand beneath it, and run it along, and lift a bale or a bundle or a frame. It was twelve feet up. A long loop of chain hung from it to within a yard of the floor, black with grease, each link as big as his fist.
He had used it. He had used it a hundred times. He'd hung a motor from it. He'd hauled a loom bed onto a trolley. He'd hung from it, once, by one hand, and swung, to make Danny laugh.
I never thought of it.
I never thought.
It was the plainest thing in the world. He stood with the flashlight pointing at it and the whole floor tilted. He felt the blood go out of his face, and go back, in a rush, like a tide. It was so obvious. It was so stupid. It was not even a trick. A man could have gone to the hook, and run it across, and dropped the chain, and hooked the rack, and pulled, and the whole six hundred pounds would have risen like a cork. It would have taken three minutes.
Seven years. It was right there. It was right above his head.
He began to laugh.
It was not a good laugh. It was a thin, high, cracking sound, with a sob in it, and it went up into the dark of the ceiling and echoed. He stood with his head back and the flashlight shaking in his fist and laughed, and the tears ran back into his ears.
"Mr. Cole," said Chris, in a very small voice.
"I'm all right."
"You're scaring me."
"I'm sorry." He wiped his face. "It's a long story. I'll tell you later."
"Is it a way?"
"Yes."
"Can you do it?"
"I don't know."
"Please say yes."
He knelt. He took the boy's face in his hands, quite gently, and looked into it, and the two of them stared at one another across a foot of dusty air.
"I'm going to get you out," said Ethan. "I want you to hear that."
"You've got four minutes. You've got to go. You've got to run to the gate." The boy was shaking his head. "That's what he wants. Don't you see? It's a test. It's what they want you to choose."
"I know."
"Then go."
"I'm not going to leave you."
"You should."
"I know."
He did not go at once.
That was the thing. He would think about it for the rest of his life. He had said it. He had meant it. He had knelt in the dust and said I'm going to get you out with all the certainty of a man giving his word. But when he stood up, and brushed his hands on his knees, and turned, he found that his legs had turned him, a quarter of a circle, away from the rack. They had turned him to the east. To the wide black gap in the wall at the end of the floor, and beyond it, far off, small and bright and impossible, a square of light.
It was the gate.
It stood open already. He saw it quite clearly: a tall iron arch, wreathed with floodlights, with a drive beyond it going away over a close-cut lawn. A car was waiting there, long and gray, with its door ajar and its dome light on. A small neat figure stood beside it in a dark suit. He had a hand raised, palm out, like a man at a wedding. He was waving. Behind him, over the roofs of the Yard, the whole sky was starred, and there was a wind in the poplars, and a smell of grass.
It was ninety yards.
It was twenty seconds.
He stood with his arms at his sides.
He felt it all at once. It came through him in one great wave, from the soles of his feet to the roots of his hair: a cold, clean, simple, animal longing, so strong that it frightened him. Go. It was not a thought. It was not even a wish. It was a thing that his body did, like breathing. Go. Go. Go. You've done enough. You've done more than anybody. Dave's dead. A boy is tied to a floor and he's a hunter. You've got a daughter. You've got Sunday.
She said peas.
She said, don't just lie there. Do.
He did not move.
He stood and looked at the gate, and the gate looked back at him, in the starlight. He had a clear picture of himself going through it. He saw every step. The long run across the concrete. The grit. The gate rushing up. The man in the suit. The car. The warm leather seat, and the smell of mint, and the long drive home through the quiet streets, with the radio low. He saw himself get out, at Linden Court, and go up the three flights, and put the key in the lock.
He saw himself standing in the kitchen.
He saw the blue horse on the fridge.
It's a very good horse, said a voice, quite near. It was a child's voice, high and certain and flat. He's very fair. He doesn't let anyone get left behind.
His eyes were wet.
He did not know how long he stood. It could not have been long. A minute. Two. It was less than four, he knew that afterward, because the clock told him. But time had gone slow and thick, like honey. It was the longest stretch of time he had ever lived through, and in it, standing in the middle of a dead floor, with his face to the light and his back to a boy under a rack, Ethan Cole met, for the first time in seven years, himself.
Here he is.
Here's the man who stood in the road.
He was not a monster. That was the surprise. He was not even a coward. He was a tired, frightened, ordinary man of twenty-seven, with a bad back and a pay packet, who loved his mother and was afraid of fire, and who had been told to go. He was standing in the street with the smoke coming out of the door, and he had no phone, and no light, and nobody was coming. He was thinking: If I go in, I'll die. And it was true. He might have. He had never known.
I'm sorry, said Ethan, in his head.
I'm so sorry.
I should have come back.
I'm going to now.
He turned round.
It was the hardest thing he had ever done. It was harder than the cold room, harder than the ladder, harder than the long black wall of the dark. It took every ounce of strength he had. He turned his back on the light, and the gate, and the car, and the long safe road home, and he walked, very slowly, one foot after another, as a man walks into the sea, back across the cold floor to the fallen rack, and he knelt beside the boy, and he said, in a voice that he did not recognize:
"Right. I need you to hold on to something."
It was the longest ten minutes of his life.
He did not remember much of it afterward. It came back in pieces. The wet iron of the chain, cold and slick in his fingers. The hook, a heavy dull weight, dragging on the end of it like an anchor. The long run along the beam. He could not reach it. He climbed. He went up the pillar, hand over hand, on the rusted brackets, to a ledge, and got his arm round the girder, and hauled the hook across on its trolley with a scream of dry metal that went through him like a tooth. The chain came down. It swung. It swung back. He caught it in both hands, and wrapped it round his arm, and slid.
He landed on his knees.
He took the chain to the rack. He found the loop of steel at the top corner, a lifting eye, bright with old grease, that had been welded there for exactly this. He passed the hook through it. He took up the slack. He stood back. And for a moment he stood with the chain hanging across his chest, a great gray rope, with the whole heavy weight of the world on the other end of it.
Pull.
He pulled.
It was a hand chain. It worked on a gear, a block and tackle, with a wheel at the top, and a loop of lighter chain that hung down beside it, and you hauled it in your fists, link over link, like a man ringing a bell. It was slow. It was hard. At first nothing happened. The chain went taut. The hook creaked. The whole frame shuddered, and groaned, and a long dry rattle ran down the length of it.
Then it moved.
It rose a quarter inch. A half. An inch. He felt it come, through the chain, through the gear, through his hands and his arms and the bones of his chest: a deep, slow, grudging give, like a heavy door beginning to swing. He braced. He leaned. He hauled, and hauled, and hauled, with the sweat pouring into his eyes and the breath whooping in his chest, and the burn along his ribs tearing open, and the frame came up off the floor, foot by foot, with a grinding, tearing, creaking roar, and the pallets slid out from under it, and fell, and for a long trembling moment it hung in the air, six inches clear of the concrete, with a boy's broken leg beneath it.
"Now!" gasped Ethan.
"I can't."
"Chris!"
"I can't move!"
"Pull yourself, I've got it, I can't hold it, go!"
Chris screamed.
He did it with all the breath in his body. He dug his heels into the dust, and the tie on his wrists snapped, it had been cut half through by the edge of the frame, and he threw himself backward, on his elbows, dragging the ruined leg, in a long red smear across the concrete. He got six feet. Ten. He lay on his back with his mouth open, in the middle of the floor, gasping like a landed fish.
Ethan let go.
The chain ran through his hands. It burned. The rack fell with a roar that shook the building, and the whole floor jumped, and the dust rose in a long gray wall, and from every corner of the Mill, from the beams and the pillars and the ceiling, came a long groaning ripple of sound, a settling, like a great animal turning in its sleep.
Then silence.
He knelt in the dust with his hands on his knees and his hair in his eyes. His palms were cut to the bone. He could not feel them. He looked at them. They were black and red, and they did not look like his.
"Mr. Cole," said Chris.
"Yes."
"You did it."
"I did."
"You did it. You did it." There were tears running into his ears. His face was a smear of dirt and snot and blood, and he was laughing. "What was it?"
"A chain."
"A chain?"
"It was above his head," said Ethan. "The whole time."
The horn coughed.
"Congratulations, Mr. Cole," said the voice of Roy Vance, from the ceiling. It sounded delighted. "That was most affecting. I've had several members of the audience in tears." A tiny pause. "I'm afraid it's two minutes past."
Ethan lifted his head.
"I did say ninety seconds. But I'm told you've been very good. We've kept it open. We'll give you a little longer."
He looked at the east wall.
The gate was still open. It stood there, a long way off, in its blaze of light. The car was still there. But the figure in the suit was no longer waving. He had got into the driver's seat, and shut the door, and sat there, a pale oval behind the glass. And on the lawn beyond the arch, quite small and clear in the glare, two other men had come into view. One was thick and bearded. One was thin. They stood side by side, in dark jackets, in front of a gray van, and the thin one was holding something that glinted. It was long, and flat, and had two barrels.
"I'm afraid it's time," said Roy Vance. "I do hope you've enjoyed yourselves."
A sound began, under the floor.
It was a low one, very far down, like a pot starting to boil. It came up through the soles of his boots. He felt it, in his teeth. A tiny blue flicker ran along the base of the nearest pillar, quick and bright, like a lizard, and went out, and another, and another, and a faint warm breath rolled across the floor, thick and sweet.
It's lit.
"Chris," said Ethan.
"I know."
"Can you stand?"
"I can't stand."
"Then you're going to be carried."
"Mr. Cole."
"Shut up. Put your arm round my neck."
He got him up.
It was like lifting a sack of wet sand. The boy was thin, but he was a dead weight, and he hung on Ethan's shoulder with his head back and his broken leg dragging, white and gasping and strangely tranquil. Ethan took the weight on his back. He put one arm round the boy's waist. He took one step, and another, and the whole floor was alive with little blue flames, running, leaping, chasing one another along the pillars, and the air shimmered, and from somewhere above him, high in the dark, came a long low whoosh.
He walked.
He did not run. He couldn't. He walked, with a boy on his back and a roaring in his ears and a cloud of black smoke beginning to roll along the ceiling, toward the east wall and the square of light. He went by feel. He knew the floor. He knew every pillar, every pallet, every crack. He had walked it ten thousand times. And as he went, with the smoke curling down about him and the heat on his face, a thought came to him, quite quietly, from nowhere, like a note struck on a piano in an empty hall.
This is the way out.
It's right there. It's been right there all along.
You just have to carry him.