Chapter 4
Page Two
He found a can of peaches on a shelf at ten to one.
It was behind a row of oil tins, in the side room of the pump house, where the bulb didn't reach. He opened it with the multi-tool. The peaches were very old. They tasted of the can. He ate them with his fingers, sitting on the iron grating with his boots off and his bare toes pressed against the cold floor, and he thought they were the best thing he had ever eaten.
The engine thumped. A drip fell somewhere in the roof and rang on the floor, once, in a long clear note.
He had not meant to stop. But his legs had stopped for him. For the first time in three hours he let himself feel how tired he was. It went through him in a long, heavy wave, from his neck to his heels.
Eight years old, he thought. She'll be asleep. She sleeps with one arm out of the covers, like she's hailing a cab.
He put his hand to his collar. The key lay against his breastbone on its loop of red string, small and heavy, and he'd been holding it through the cloth with his thumb, the way a man holds a coin in his pocket. He let go.
Then he remembered the paper.
He took it out of his pocket and unfolded it under the bulb. It was gray, and slightly greasy, and the edges had gone soft. Across the top, in plain type, there was a single line.
PAGE TWO. FOR RUNNERS WHO LOOK.
He read it with his mouth dry.
1. THE CHECK-IN.
At every check-in, your phone will tell the Hunters your exact position for as long as it is switched on. This is not a rule you can change. It is the heartbeat of the game.
2. THE PHONE.
Do not damage the phone. If a check-in is missed, or the phone is destroyed, you will forfeit the prize, and the Hunters will be released from all restrictions in their dealings with you.
3. THE WINNER.
A Runner who passes the gate at 22:00 is a Winner. Winners are collected by the staff.
4. THE HOUSE.
The House sees what it needs to see. It does not need to be among you to do it.
He read it twice.
At the bottom, in smaller type, it said, This page should be destroyed after reading, and under that, in ink, in a different hand, somebody had written three words with a ballpoint.
Don't trust anyone.
He looked at it for a long time.
Somebody put this in my phone. It was not the House. The House did not write in ballpoint. It was somebody who had handled the phone before it reached him, with a roll of tape and a small bad conscience. He thought of the woman at the table in the gray coat, who had told him not to hide in the first place he found. He thought of Pierce's hand, trembling on the roof of the car.
Collected, he thought. They don't say paid. They say collected.
It was a strange word for a prize.
At eight minutes to two, he put down the peach tin.
He had been staring at the line about the check-ins without really reading it. Every two hours. Ninety seconds. Within five minutes of the hour. He looked at his watch. The face was cracked, and the second hand jumped.
Two o'clock.
He took the phone out of the bag and held it in both hands.
It told them where he was. For ninety seconds. And then somebody in a green jacket would come and look at the place.
If I switch it on here, they come here.
If I don't switch it on, I'm out.
If I leave first, they find me wherever I am. It's the same thing.
He had been in the pump house for an hour. It had one door. It was a lovely little trap, and whoever had thought of it was a genius.
He sat with the phone in his hands, and he found that he had begun, in a flat unhurried way, to hate it. It was heavy, and gray, and quite dead. And a sentence came into his head, a plain one, such as a man says to himself when he is reading a wiring diagram.
The phone only knows where the phone is.
He looked at the peach tin.
It was a fat, squat can about the size of a coffee cup, with a ragged edge where the lid had been. He weighed it in his hand. Then he stood the phone in it. It fitted, just. He pushed it down with his thumb until it stood upright, with the dead gray screen looking up.
"Right," he said aloud.
It was the first thing he'd said to anyone in an hour. His voice sounded cracked and small.
"It doesn't say I have to stand next to it."
He heard himself, and felt a thin cold wire of excitement go through him. It said switch it on for ninety seconds. It didn't say where he had to be. They looked at a screen, and they saw a dot, and the dot was in a pump house, and they sent somebody to the pump house.
And the dot was a can.
He almost laughed. He thought of leaving a coat on a chair at a party. You slipped out the back and everybody thought you were still in the bathroom.
It might not work. They might have a rule.
It's not on the page.
Then it's not a rule till somebody writes it down.
He did it at two minutes to two. He held down the button and the phone woke, with a small shiver and a pale light, and the white numbers came up. 02:00. CHECK-IN. 01:29. He set it in the tin. The words came up, dry and polite.
POSITION RECEIVED.
He went out through the iron door at a pace between a walk and a lunge. The night hit him like a damp cloth. It was colder than before, with a thin wet wind off the water, and the stars were gone behind low cloud, and the canal lay flat and black on his left, with the lamp on the bridge swinging in a halo of fog. He did not look at the bridge. He took the other way, along the end of the building, through a gap in a fence, and into a lane between two high blank walls.
He had a map in his bag. He had looked at it once, in the car, by the glow of Pierce's dome light, and it had meant nothing. A pattern of gray and white, with a thick blue line round the edge. Cutler Row. Canal Lock. St. Brendan's. Fairway Foods. There was a hospital, or a place that had been a hospital, a hundred yards up the hill.
High ground. Lots of rooms. Not the first place they'd look.
He went up the lane at a fast walk. At the top there was a gap in a wall, and beyond it a wide ruined parking lot with weeds up through the tarmac. At the far end stood a long low building, three stories, brick, with rows of black windows, and a sign above the door so faded that he could read only the first word.
SAINT.
He ran across the parking lot.
He was on the roof of the annex at four minutes past two.
He had found it by luck, with his hand on a fire door that had rusted off its latch, and a stairwell going up and up in the dark, smelling of pigeons. It was a flat roof, tarred, with a low parapet, and a squat brick chimney in the middle, and a broken skylight like a mouth. He lay behind the chimney on his stomach with his chin on his arms.
From there he could see the whole of the lower town.
It was like looking at a map made of coal. The canal was a thin pale vein. The pump house was a squat black box beside it, with a faint glow in one slit where the door stood open. The footbridge was a little bar of light. Beyond them, in long gray rows, stretched the roofs of Cutler Row, and past those a vast area of waste ground with the rail embankment beyond. And over everything, on the far side of the dark, so tall that Ethan could not look straight at it, a single black chimney stood against the sky, and under it, a darker bulk with hundreds of windows, like a shut-down ship.
Don't look.
He looked at his watch.
Down there, in a can on the floor, a small light had burned for ninety seconds and gone out. He imagined the words going up through the iron roof, into the sky, across the dark country to somebody's screen. Position received. He lay with his face on his arm and thought about being wrong.
At eleven minutes past, three lights came on at the end of Cutler Row.
They came on all at once, in a line, small and white, bobbing as they moved. Flashlights. Three figures were coming down the lane toward the canal at a steady, brisk jog, in the businesslike way of men going to a job. They moved in a loose triangle. The one in the middle was taller than the others.
They reached the iron door. They stopped, and there was a short low murmur of voices, and then the door swung wide, and one by one, quite calmly, they went in.
For a long time nothing happened.
Then the tall one came out.
He stood in the doorway with his flashlight pointed at the ground. He was in a green jacket. Even from here, a hundred yards off, in the dark, Ethan knew him by the way he stood: head a little forward, weight on one foot, like a man listening for a creak. He turned slowly in a full circle. His light swept over the canal, the lane, the parking lot. It rose, as it turned, to the dark front of the annex.
It stopped.
It was a pale small oval, no bigger than a plate, trembling on the brickwork. Ethan did not breathe. The oval slid along the wall, from window to window, from sill to sill, and climbed. It came up the face of the building like a slow white insect. It reached the parapet.
It went over his head.
It was gone, as though a hand had wiped it away.
In the doorway of the pump house, the man in the green jacket had put his flashlight away. He stood with his arms folded, quite peaceful, looking up at the sky. After a moment Ethan saw his mouth moving, and heard, thin and clear across the dark, the faint sound of a man talking to himself.
"One set. One boot. Fresh. He's sat here for an hour. He's eaten a can of peaches." A pause. "No. He's kept the can."
There was a short silence.
"Oh, now that's good," said Jack Ford, with sudden warmth. "That's very good. A phone. In a tin. On the floor, by the engine. Switched on and left." He laughed, once, softly. "I'd like to have thought of that."
Another voice said something, young and anxious.
"No," said Jack. "Leave it where it is. A man's entitled to his phone. He'll be wanting it back." He took out the little stub of cinnamon and looked at it. "He's gone up the hill. He'll be in the hospital. I'd have gone up the hill."
He put it back in his mouth.
"We'll see him at four," he said. "Not before. Let him think he's got a head start."
Then he turned, and walked off into the dark, and the other two went after him, and the pump house was only a box again, with a faint yellow slit in its door.
Ethan did not move for twenty minutes.
He went back for the phone at twenty to three.
He went down the hill by the wall, and the drain, and the back of the old boiler works, with his hood up and the flashlight off. He stopped every twenty yards and listened. A fine rain was beginning to blow in off the water, and every gutter on Cutler Row had started to talk to itself. He came to the pump house at ten to three. The door stood open, as he had left it. A slit of yellow light fell across the cobbles.
He stood outside it for a full minute. Then he went in.
The engine was still turning, slow and steady. By the wall, the peach can lay on its side with a ragged edge toward him, as if somebody had picked it up and set it down again. He crouched. He looked inside. The phone lay in it, gray and dark. Nobody had touched it.
On the rim of the can, laid across it neatly, the way a man lays a pencil across an inkwell, there was a stub of cinnamon stick.
I was here.
I didn't take it.
It was a message, as plain as a note, and it made the hair rise on his arms. He did not touch the cinnamon. He took the phone, and slid it into the bag. And from a long way off, from the far side of the canal, thin and slow, so faint that he might have been imagining it, there came the first notes of an old tune.
He went out of the pump house at a run.
He found the laundry at twenty past three.
It was in the basement of the annex, down three flights of back stairs and along a corridor of cracked green tile. A pair of swing doors, with round windows, opened on a room the size of a school gym, low and cold and echoing, lit by a gray glimmer from somewhere high in the wall. It smelled of old soap. Along the left side stood a row of machines, huge ones, taller than Ethan, with riveted steel sides and round glass doors like portholes, and he stopped in the doorway and looked at them for a very long time.
"Milnors," he said.
His voice sounded odd in the big room. He walked down the row, trailing his fingers along the dusty steel. He put his palm against one of the doors. It was cool and curved, and heavier than a car door.
"Hospital washers. They built these to last forty years."
He put his ear to the metal, as he would have to a patient, and tapped it with a knuckle. It gave out a low deep note, like a bell in a well.
You could hide a person in one of these.
He pulled the handle, and it swung out with a long grating groan, and the drum yawned at him, round and black and empty, big enough for a man to curl in. He put his head inside. It smelled of cold steel and bleach.
"It's not meant to latch from inside," he told it. "But there's a safety spring, so you can't get shut in. If you take out the pin, and put it back the wrong way round, it holds."
Nobody thinks of a machine. A person looks for a person. They look in cupboards and under beds. They don't look in the equipment.
He did it by feel, with the flashlight clenched in his teeth and the little screwdriver in both hands, easing out a pin the size of a pencil lead from the safety latch of the first machine, and bending it a quarter turn, and slipping it back. His fingers knew the work. For twelve minutes he forgot everything: Pierce, the bridge, the old man with the flask. There was only the spring, and the pin, and the small bright satisfaction of a thing going together the way it ought.
He got in at ten to four.
It was not as bad as he had feared. The drum was smooth, and curved, and slightly warm, as if something in the walls still held a memory of heat. He pulled his knees up. He took off his bag and set it on his lap, and eased the door round with his foot until it closed. It clicked. The room vanished. In its place was a dim round circle of glass, and beyond it a pale smear of high gray window, and a long way off, a dripping tap.
He sat there in the dark.
He thought, for no reason, of the hospital laundry at Calder General, where his mother had worked, in the years before she left, when he was nine and she used to bring him in on Saturdays and let him ride the linen cart. He had loved the heat, and the noise, and the huge slow turning of the drums. She had said to him once, with her hand on the top of his head, Machines aren't scary, Ethan. It's only people that are scary.
He looked at his watch, by the faint light from the porthole.
03:58.
03:59.
04:00.
He pressed and held the button.
The little screen lit the inside of the drum a dim steel blue. 04:00. CHECK-IN. 01:29. It said POSITION RECEIVED, as it always did. And then, which it had never done before, a second message came up under the first, one slow line at a time, in the same white type.
NOTICE TO THE RUNNER.
RULE TWO IS AMENDED. A PHONE MUST BE CARRIED ON THE RUNNER'S PERSON AT ALL TIMES. A RUNNER FOUND MORE THAN TEN FEET FROM HIS PHONE AT CHECK-IN WILL FORFEIT.
THE HOUSE ADMIRES INGENUITY. IT DOES NOT ALLOW IT TWICE.
He read it twice. He lay in the curved dark with the light on his knees, and a small, odd, cold laugh came up in his chest and stuck there.
They changed the rules. Because of a can of peaches.
Somewhere, in a long gray room, a man was drinking something and reading the report of what an idiot in a pump house had done, and had said, Well, that won't do.
So they can do that. They can just say, from now on. It's not a game with rules. It's a game with a man.
It did not make him feel any better. But it made a thing clear that he had not understood before. Nobody's going to tell me what the rules are. I'll have to find out when they change. And he'd have to read every word, every time, to the bottom, because somewhere in the bottom would be the thing that killed him.
They came at four-ten.
He heard them first as a murmur, high up in the building, and then as footsteps on the back stairs, steady, easy, without hurry, and then as a swish of the swing doors. A flashlight beam came across the glass of his porthole, and slid on. It was white, and thin, and swung round the room like the arm of a lighthouse.
There were two of them. He could tell by the steps.
"Not a bad old place," said one.
It was a man's voice, nervous, young, with a slight tremor that he was trying to swallow. "Look at the size of these things. You could wash a horse in here."
"Mm," said the other.
It was an older voice, warm, a little dry. It was a voice Ethan knew. It was a voice that had said whoopsie on a bridge.
He stopped breathing.
"I don't like it," said the young one. "I don't like any of it. It smells like a school."
"It smells like hospital."
"Same thing." A creak of leather. "Dave. Can I ask you a question?"
"Of course, Chris."
"Does it ever bother you?"
"Does what?"
"You know." A pause. "Any of it."
There was a short silence.
"It's a job," said Dave, kindly.
"I know. I need the money, I'm not saying. My mom's in a place. I'm just." The voice cracked. "I saw you do the man on the bridge. I'd come up the other side. You said whoopsie."
"It's a habit."
"It's not a nice word."
"It's a gentle word. It's meant to be." Dave sounded faintly amused. "I'm sixty-three, Chris. I've been doing this for six years. A man has to have a style, or he's no better than a butcher."
"But he's dead."
"Yes."
"And you said whoopsie."
"It makes it easier," said Dave. "For both of us."
The footsteps began to move.
They came slowly down the middle of the room. A door was tried and rattled. A cupboard was pulled open and slammed. The younger man whistled through his teeth, nervous, off-key, and stopped. "It's a washing room," said Chris. "There's nothing here. Let's go."
"Let's look at the machines."
"What, in the machines?"
"Why not?"
"Because it's stupid."
"Humor me."
There was a squeal of metal. A great dull clang, hollow and booming, as a drum door was flung back on its hinges. Ethan's whole body went tight.
"Empty," said Chris, in a rush of relief.
"Try the next."
A second clang.
"Empty."
"Try the next."
Ethan heard the footsteps come closer. They came along the front of the row. They were three machines off. Then two. He could hear the boy's breathing now, short and shallow, and the slow, light, pleasant tread of the older man behind him, like a man strolling round an art gallery. The beam of the flashlight moved on the glass of Ethan's door, gold and clear, and the dust in it danced.
It stopped.
A thin bar of light lay across Ethan's knee, through the glass, and for one second he could see in the glow the dirty gray rubber of the seal and a tiny bright curl of a washing instruction stamped on the steel.
WASH 60°.
"It's shut," said Chris.
"Yes."
"They're all shut. It's an old latch. You can't get in a machine and shut the, can you?"
"I shouldn't think so."
"Then why are you."
"Because there's a smear on the glass," said Dave, mildly. "Here. At about the height of a man's cheek."
There was a very long silence.
Ethan held his breath so long that colored lights sparked across his eyes. He saw, with a clarity that was almost beautiful, the whole thing. The old man's finger, touching the glass. The little round circle of breath. A smear. He had put his face to the window to see out, just for a second, when the light went by. Oh, you idiot, he thought. You fool.
He put his hand on the latch of his own door.
He had no plan. He had a multi-tool, and a whistle, and a bag of cereal bars, and a heavy steel door that he'd rigged to hold from inside. But his fingers had closed on the handle, and he pressed it a quarter inch. It gave.
"Chris," said Dave.
"Yes?"
"Open it."
"What?"
"The door. I'd like you to open it."
"I don't want to."
"I know."
"What if there's, I don't want to."
"That's all right," said Dave. "You're allowed not to want to. But I'd like you to do it anyway. I'm a long way past opening doors myself. It's a young man's task."
"I can't."
"Chris."
"I can't." The voice was almost a sob. "There's a man in there. Isn't there? I can feel it. And then you'll, you want me to open it, so you can shoot a man in a washing machine."
"I want you to open a door."
"And then you'll."
"And then I'll do what's necessary," said Dave. "As I always do. It's a very quick business. He'll hardly know."
A noise. The boy's breath, going in and out. The creak of a hand on a metal handle.
Ethan closed his eyes.
He heard, as though it were a hundred miles away, the click of a latch. The long slow sliding rumble of a door beginning to swing.
He kicked.
He did it with both feet, hard, with all the strength of a body that had been cramped for twelve minutes, and the latch he had rigged tore out of its seat with a scream of steel. The door flew open and hit Chris full in the chest. The boy went over backward with a shout, and a flashlight spun away across the tiles and smashed into a wall. A pistol skidded the other way, quite forgotten. Ethan came out of the drum head first, in a kind of terrible slow roll, and hit the tile on his shoulder and rolled again. For a second the whole room spun. Then he was on his knees, with a hot pain in his arm, and the old man was standing five yards away with a gun in his hand pointing at the ceiling, and a look of faint, polite surprise on his face.
"Well," said Dave. "That's torn it."
Ethan did not think.
There was a bucket. It was a galvanized one, big, half full of dirty water, standing by the leg of the next machine. He saw it as he moved. He took it in both hands, by the rim, and swung it, the whole weight of it, in a flat arc, at the old man's face.
The water went first.
It hit like a wall, a great gray slap of it, and the old man gasped and put up an arm. The bucket came after. It struck him on the shoulder with a clang that knocked him sideways, and the gun went off, flat and loud, into the ceiling, and a piece of the plaster came down in a soft white rain. The old man staggered, and went down hard on one knee, with a hand to his shoulder.
"Oh," said Dave. "Oh, dear."
Ethan ran.
He hit the swing doors with his shoulder and went through. He was in the corridor, in the dark, in the green tile gleam, with the stair at the far end, and behind him the boy was screaming, Mr. Pratt, Mr. Pratt, are you, and a loud wet cough, and the small sharp snap of something being reloaded.
He did not look back.
He came out into the dawn.
It happened all at once. He went up the back stairs two at a time, along a passage that smelled of old cabbage, and out a side door into a loading yard, and the world turned from black to a thin lead-colored gray, as if somebody had opened a curtain. A pale line lay along the east. The air was wet and clean. Far off, over the rooftops, a rooster was crowing, absurdly, in a place where there could not possibly be a rooster.
He went over a wall. He went across a field of rubble. He went down a bank, through a hedge, and across a railway siding where a row of rusted trucks stood with their doors open, and he did not stop until the canal was in front of him again, and the lock, a great black stone box with iron gates, sitting across the water like a drawbridge.
He sat down on a bollard and put his head between his knees.
His shoulder was on fire. His right sleeve was wet, and he did not know whether it was water or blood. He turned his arm over, and looked, and it was only water, and a long gray smear of bleach, and a tear in the cloth.
He sat there a long time.
I hit an old man with a bucket.
It was the strangest thing he'd ever done. And then, without any warning, he began to laugh. It came up from somewhere deep, a place under his ribs he had not known existed. It was a long, loose, helpless, sobbing laugh. He bent over with it. He sat on the stones, and put his arms round his knees, and laughed until he could not breathe, with his face wet and his shoulders heaving, alone on the edge of the old canal in the first light.
When it had passed, he was quiet.
The sun had not come up. But the sky was a thin clear gold along the bottom, and a little pink was coming into the clouds. A mist lay on the water. The air smelled of mud and cut grass and, very faintly, somewhere, of frying.
Frying.
He lifted his head.
It was bacon, or sausage, or something close to it, a rich, greasy, warm smell, carried on a thin wind from the west. He looked along the canal, over the lock, to where the ground rose a little toward a bank of trees.
There were lights.
They were strung out across the horizon in a long unsteady line, yellow and white and orange, swaying a little. They came and went behind a row of old brick warehouses. As he watched, a van went by on a road he hadn't known was there, with its headlights on, and a second behind it, and a third. There was a faint sound under the dawn, a murmur, a drone, like a hive. A voice shouted. A bell rang. Somebody, a long way off, started up a generator.
It was a market.
He stood on the lock gate in the mist, and watched the first stalls going up on Quay Street, with their striped awnings and their trestle tables and their hanging lamps, and the people moving among them, tiny, bundled in coats, carrying boxes. A man hauled a crate of cabbages off a truck. A woman set out a row of birdcages. A boy in an orange hat walked by with a tray of tea.
People.
Hundreds of them. Real ones. With breakfasts.
"I think," said Ethan aloud, to nobody, "that I'd like some bacon."