Chapter 8
Mercer
It was the train that nearly gave him the idea.
He had come out of the town by the back way, across a mile of waste ground that had once been a marshalling yard and was now rust and thistle and broken concrete, and he stopped at the foot of the railway embankment because there was nowhere else to go. It rose in front of him, a long grassy bank about forty feet high, with a fence along the top. On the far side of it, though he had not said so to himself, lay the east end of the Yard. The trees of Harker Wood stood up beyond like a black wall. A pale wet light was beginning to go out of the sky.
It was ten to four.
He knew what he was going to do. He had known for about a quarter of an hour. But he stood on the cinders with his hands on his hips, looking up at the fence, and heard, in the distance, a long far-off murmur in the rails.
It came at five to four. A freight, forty wagons, rust-red and graffitied and open at the top, dragging itself along the embankment at about the speed of a walking man. It took a long time. He stood below it with his hair blowing, watching the wagons go by, one by one, with their gaping empty tops.
He had taken the phone out of his bag.
He held it in his palm, a heavy gray lump in its rubber case, and looked at it. It had been silent for two hours. In five minutes it would buzz, and he would hold down the button, and a small cold voice would say position received, and somewhere a man in a green jacket would take out a notebook. He thought of how easy it would be. Three steps, a flick of the wrist. The last wagon was coming now, a long flat one piled with scrap. It would carry the thing a hundred miles west, and every hunter in the Yard would follow it there.
They'd never find me.
I'd be out. They'd come and get me, like Pierce said. He did not know what out meant. He knew what the man on the bridge had been.
And I'd never know when they changed the rules. I'd walk into a room and it'd have a new lock.
"I've never missed a thing in my life," said Ethan.
It surprised him, how it came out. It wasn't a boast. It was a dry, tired, rather bitter sentence, and it hung in the cold air like breath. "I've never missed a shift. Never missed a Thursday. I've never once been late with a pickup, or a payment, or a call. I'm not clever. I'm not brave. I just don't miss things. It's the only thing I've got."
He turned the phone over.
"I'd like to throw it. Believe me. But if I do, I'll have lost the one thing I'm good at."
The last wagon went by. He did not throw it. He stood with the phone in his hand and watched the train go on, slowly, into the west, with its wheels clacking, a long red caterpillar in the thin gold light. Something in his chest let go a little, and something else tightened. It felt like putting your weight on the first board of a bridge.
He went up the embankment on his hands and knees.
It took a long time. The grass was slippery, and the fence at the top had been cut, years ago, and bent back, and he crawled through a hole the size of a dog flap and lay for a moment among the nettles with his cheek to the earth. When he got up, he was on a long gravel bank between two sets of rails, and the east lay at his feet.
He stopped.
It lay below him in the failing light, a great flat basin of ground, gray and green and brown. A road ran through it, a straight one, with a ditch on either side. Beyond the road there was a field of rough grass, and a row of poplars, and a wall. Beyond the wall, a long low range of roofs: sheds, workshops, a boiler house, a water tower. And above and behind them, rising out of the whole like a tooth out of a jaw, the huge square blackened bulk of the Mill.
It was six stories high. It had been built of red brick, and it was black now to the third floor, as if it had been dipped in tar. The windows were empty. Most of the roof had gone. The great chimney stood up beside it, a hundred and eighty feet tall, with a ring of white brick at the top, and the name in tall white letters running down the shaft, MERCER, faded, but not yet gone.
The wind blew. It smelled of wet ash.
The phone buzzed in his hand.
It was four o'clock exactly. He had forgotten, for a moment, where he was. He pressed and held the button. The small screen lit his face from below, and counted, and said the same thing as always. POSITION RECEIVED.
And then the screen did something it had never done before. It went on.
A MESSAGE FROM THE CLIENT.
He read it standing on the gravel with the wind in his hair, and the Mill in front of him, and the rails singing under his boots. It was short, and plain, in the same white type as the rest. But it had a different feel. It was like finding a handwritten line in the middle of a printed form.
Mr. Cole. You will know where to find me. Locker 14.
H.R.
He did not move.
The message went on lying on the screen, ninety seconds, sixty, forty. He didn't touch it. He looked at the two letters. He looked up, and over the dark fields, and the poplars, and the wall, at a thin black chimney with a name down its side. The wind had dropped. The whole country had gone quiet, as it does before a train.
H.R.
Reeves.
Helen Reeves.
The screen went dark.
"I know who she is," he said, aloud, to nobody.
It was a woman he had seen once, in a corridor. She had been in a dark coat, with a handbag. She had not looked at him. He closed his hand over the phone, and then, slowly, over the key on its red string, under his shirt.
It's Danny's mother.
He walked down off the bank on the east side, by a path of cinders, into the long grass of the basin, and the Mill was ahead of him, a mile off, getting no bigger. The light was going. A smoky violet had come into the sky behind the chimney, and the first bats had come out.
He walked, and he did not tell it to anyone. There was no one to tell. But it came up in him slowly, as such things do, from the bottom, and he let it, because it was dark, and because for seven years he had kept it shut, and there was a woman's two initials on a phone.
It was the second of November.
He was twenty-seven. He had been at the Mill for four years, on nights, doing maintenance. Belts. Motors. He kept the looms going. There was a new kid, three weeks on. He was nineteen. He was called Danny Reeves. He was very eager, and he followed Ethan about, and he called him boss. Ethan had told him not to. I'm not your boss, I'm a guy with a spanner. Danny had said, You're my boss, boss. He thought it was funny.
He brought a flask of soup. His mom made it. It was always something with lentils.
That night Ethan was tired. He had been on since six the night before. There was a cot in the break room, in the back, and they were not supposed to. He had punched his card out at eleven-ten, meaning to go home, and found that he could not drive. He was only going to sit for ten minutes. He fell asleep.
He woke to the alarm.
He couldn't think. He thought, it's the drill. And then he smelled it. It was electrical, in the dye house, and it had been going about ten minutes, and the whole east wall was gone. There was smoke in the corridor. It was black. He couldn't see his hand.
He ran for the door. And on the way he heard somebody shouting, on the loading floor. He went through. And there was a rack, a steel rack, floor to ceiling, with the bales on it. It had come down. And Danny was under it.
His leg. It had his leg. He was not hurt. He was talking. He said, Boss, thank God. I can't get it off. Ethan got hold of it with both hands. He pulled. It was six hundred pounds. He could not shift it an inch.
He tried four times. And the smoke was coming through the roof, with a roar. And Danny said, Go and get someone. Go on, get the lads. I'm okay. It doesn't hurt. Go, boss. Go.
And he went.
He ran out through the loading bay. The street was empty. It was one in the morning. There wasn't a car. He stood in the middle of the road with the smoke coming out of the door behind him, and could not think what to do. I'll call. And his phone was on the cot in the break room, where he'd left it.
He could have gone back. For the phone. For Danny. It was twenty minutes before the roof went. He knew that now. He had read the report. There was a window of about twenty minutes, and he could have broken a pane, and done something.
He stood in the road. And he thought, if I go back in, I'll die.
He got in his car. He drove home. He remembered a lot of green lights. He sat in the kitchen for forty minutes. Then he rang, from the landline. He said, There's a fire at Mercer Mill. He did not give a name.
They came. They did what they could. They found Danny at four in the morning. He'd been dead about an hour and a half. It was smoke. They said it was quick.
The next night, a man from the insurance said, Did anyone see anything?
Ethan said no. He said he had clocked out at ten past eleven, and been home by half past. His card was punched. Nobody knew he'd been asleep on a cot. He had said it, the very first time, to a man in a yellow coat, and after that it was true, because everybody had written it down.
He had sat in a corridor at the inquest, on a plastic chair, and seen her at the end of the row, with her hands folded. And he had thought, she'll look at me. She'll ask. And she hadn't. She hadn't looked at anyone. And he had thought, thank God.
Thank God she doesn't know.
The grass hissed round his knees.
It had got dark, quietly, while he walked. The violet had gone out of the sky, and left a smoky blue, and the first star stood over the chimney like a pin. A bat went by, close, and jinked, and vanished. The Mill was only a black shape now, a vast flat shadow against a lesser shadow, and from it came, very faintly, a sound he had not noticed before. It was a creak. A long, slow, dry, wooden creak, like a ship at anchor.
He had thought that if he ever said it, he would fall to pieces. He had pictured it so often: the knees buckling, the howl. It was not like that. It was like putting down a bag that has been in your hand so long that your fingers have grown round the handle. You put it down and you stand there and your hand stays curved.
She wants to see.
If I'd go back.
He took out the key and held it in his fist.
That's why it's me. Not because I did something terrible. Because she thinks I'm still the man in the road.
The cold room. The church. The roof. Every time they put somebody in front of me. He thought of four old women with chrysanthemums, and a boy with a gun and a mother who called him by his father's name. Somebody I could leave. And she's been in a room somewhere, watching on a screen, to see if I did.
He did not know. He did not know what he would do. That was the whole thing. That was what he had been running from for seven years. In the shower, at night, he had told himself a thousand times that he'd go back. Next time. I'd go back. And he did not know. He might stand in the road.
I'm thirty-four. It's the same man. He's here. He's standing in this field. He's got my feet.
And he's still thinking, if I go back in, I'll die.
He stood in the dark, with the wind in his face, and a long way off, on the far side of the town, a church clock began to strike. It rang out clear and thin across the roofs of the Yard, across the canal and the market and the cold room and the dead supermarket, and for a moment the whole dark country listened.
Six.
The phone woke in his hand. He pressed the button, and it said POSITION RECEIVED, and then, under it, a notice in the same white type.
NOTICE TO THE RUNNER. THE GATE IN THE EAST WALL OF THE MILL WILL OPEN AT 22:00 FOR NINETY SECONDS. THE RUNNER MUST BE THROUGH IT IN THAT TIME TO CLAIM HIS PRIZE.
He read it twice.
Four hours.
He looked at the Mill, a mile away across the dark fields, black on black, with its ruined floors and its broken windows and its single pale tower. He held up the key. It hung on its red string, small and heavy, in the starlight. The brass caught a little of the light, and the figures on the head, 14, shone for a moment like a tiny mouth.
Winners are collected by the staff.
Twelve blue drums.
He didn't know what was in the locker. He knew only that there was nothing else for him in this country now, but that, and a gate, and a van.
"I think I'd like to see what it opens," said Ethan.