Snow and Smoke

Elspeth

The clock under my arm strikes eleven.

I have forgotten it. I have forgotten, in the clean cold arithmetic of the last four minutes, that a walnut case the size of a loaf of bread has a Swiss cylinder in its belly and a mind of its own; that it was wound on New Year's Eve by a careful man; that it has struck every hour and quarter since Marcus left it in a corridor in Hudson. I am standing at the foot of the ten stairs in the pale light of the Orchard with my hand on the secret panel, and Hollis is on the fourth step from the top, coming down. And against my ribs, bright and thin and heartbreakingly clear, a little silver voice begins to sing.

Lit-tle lan-tern.

Lit-tle light.

Hollis stops.

I hear him stop. It is a small sound, the creak of a shoe on stone, and it falls into the music box tinkle like a coin into a fountain. I do not turn my head. I stand there, with my left arm clamped round the tartan rug and my right hand flat on the plaster, and the tune runs on, patient and sweet and fatal, to the end of its two lines, and stops.

"That's pretty," says Hollis from the stairs.

I push.

The panel swings. Cold air hits my face, and the smell of coal and brick and old water. I go through it with the lantern in my fist and the clock held to my chest like a baby, and I slam my shoulder against the wall behind me, and I hear it click into its frame. I do not stop to hear whether he has seen it. I run.

…

I have not run in eight weeks.

It is astonishing how much the body remembers. My legs go out in front of me and the stones come up and I take them in the lamplight, one, two, three, with my free hand trailing the wall for balance and the lantern swinging wild shadows across the bricks. The air is thick with damp. My breath roars. I count, because I have always counted, but the count is falling apart: twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and somewhere under it the other count, the Marrow count, three small quick strokes of a left forefinger, tap tap tap, tap tap tap.

Not now.

I clench my left fist round the rug.

Behind me, a long way back, I hear the panel scrape. I hear a grunt. I hear a man's boots, heavy and quick, and then a second pair, lighter, shuffling, and a thin voice crying out, "Mr. Hollis! Mr. Hollis, wait—"

Teague.

Of course.

He has brought a second man, as Conrad said. A little bald orderly with a bandaged hand and a mouth that smells of peppermint. A man who holds arms.

Sixty-one. Sixty-two.

The fork opens in front of me like a throat.

East is the boiler house. West is the Orchard. I have been down this tunnel three times and I know with absolute clarity which is which.

I take the east.

…

It is a different tunnel.

I knew it would be. The west passage was swept and dry and lined with new mortar; Kestrel's hand had been on it. This one has been left to rot. The bricks are black and furred with mildew. Water drips from the vault and runs in a thin sheet along the floor. Twice I put my foot down and it goes in to the ankle; once I fall to my knee and feel the stone take the skin. The lantern gutters. I curse it, aloud, in a voice that I don't recognize, and shield the flame with my hand.

It is a long way.

I count a hundred and nine paces and my lungs are fire. A hundred and thirty. The roof drops, and I bend. A hundred and fifty. And at a hundred and sixty-one the passage turns, abruptly, and the air changes: it is warm. It smells of ash. It stirs on my face with the breath of a great enclosed thing, alive, ticking like a clock.

There is a door.

It is an iron door, black, studded with rivets, with a wheel instead of a handle. Under its lintel, a red line of light.

I put my shoulder to the wheel and heave.

…

The boiler house is a cathedral to coal.

I have never seen anything like it. It is a great barrel-vaulted hall of blackened brick, forty feet high, lit from below by the furious orange glow of three furnace doors in the far wall. Pipes run overhead in a tangled forest, shuddering, sweating, ticking in the heat. The floor is a drift of coal dust. In the center, on a concrete plinth, squats the boiler itself, a vast riveted monster in a skin of asbestos, with a brass gauge on its flank and a wheel the size of a cartwheel. The noise is tremendous: a deep, steady, devouring roar, like surf, like the breathing of a god.

There is nobody here.

I stand on the threshold with the clock in my arms and my chest heaving and look across the ash-strewn floor to the great double door at the far end, set into the wall like a barn's, with a bar across it. The old coal gate. Below the boiler house. The east road. Beyond it, in the snow, a man in a gray car with the lights out is waiting for a package that I have brought.

I run.

I get as far as the boiler.

"Miss Dahlia," says a voice.

…

He comes through the iron door behind me, stooping under the lintel, with a lantern in one hand and a revolver in the other.

I should have known that he would be quick. I had run flat out for two hundred paces and he had walked them. He is standing in the glow of the furnace with the light behind him, and his big pale face is wet with sweat, and his coat is open. He has taken off his hat.

He looks tired.

I realize it all at once. It is not a face I have seen on him. It is not the blank, patient, professional neutrality of the man at the Quiet Room door. It is a heavy middle-aged face, rather sad, with a long jaw and gray eyes and a scar through one eyebrow; and it looks at me with a kind of weary regret, as a workman looks at a job that has gone wrong.

"I did say," says Hollis. "It's a long way."

I set the clock down.

I do it very slowly. I put the tartan bundle on the lip of the concrete plinth and straighten, with my hands out from my sides. The furnace glare lies hot on my face. I smell my own hair.

"Put the lantern down," he says.

I do.

"Now the other thing."

"What other thing?"

"The mitten. The left." He tilts his head. "I've watched you with that hand for two months, miss. You've got a way of keeping it behind you. I'd as soon see what's in it."

I open my fist.

It is empty. I show him the palm. And in the red light I see a little crescent of broken skin where my nails have gone in, and a faint trembling in the fingers, and I think, with a bleak detachment: he's right. I do keep it behind me. I've been hiding it for weeks.

"All right," says Hollis.

He lowers the revolver an inch.

"Now," he says. "I'm going to tell you how this goes."

…

I will not give his speech in full.

It is not an interesting one. He has the voice of a man who has delivered it before, in a dozen cellars, and who has no particular wish to dwell. He tells me that I am to go with him, back up the tunnel, to the car. That there will be no unpleasantness. That the doctor is detained. That a place has been found; somewhere clean, somewhere quiet, with a view. That it will be done gently.

"Like Bridget," I say.

He stops.

"Gently. Like Bridget."

"That wasn't me."

"No?"

"It was..." He hesitates. His eyes flick, a hairsbreadth, to the doorway behind him. "It wasn't gentle. I'll say that. It wasn't meant to be."

"Whose idea was it?"

"Miss."

"Whose idea was the cloth?"

"Miss, I don't think—"

"Hollis."

I say it quietly. I do not raise my voice. I use, instead, the voice I used on the chaise, on New Year's Eve, in the Orchard: the low, level, patient cadence of a person who is talking to a child that is asleep. I use the pace. I use the pause. I feel the words come out of me slow and warm and unhurried, like honey from a spoon.

"Who held her arms?"

Hollis does not answer.

His face has not changed. But behind him, in the iron doorway, at the edge of the furnace-light, there is a movement; and a small bald figure steps out of the tunnel's dark with a flashlight in one hand and the other, bandaged, hanging at his side.

"I did," says Teague.

…

He looks dreadful.

I have seen him every day for two months and I have never really looked. He is smaller than I thought. His head is a pink egg under the glare. His eyes, those little damp pale eyes, are rimmed with red and sunk in dark, and the moist lower lip trembles. He has not slept, I think, since Christmas. He stands in the doorway of the boiler house like a man in the dock.

"Mr. Teague," says Hollis, sharply. "Get back."

"I held her arms."

"I said get back."

"She was so small," says Teague. His voice cracks. "I held her arms. She didn't fight. She looked at me. She said, 'Eddie?' She knew my name." He is crying. The tears run down both sides of his nose into the corners of his mouth. "Nobody ever knew my name."

"Shut up."

"She said it like she was sorry for me."

I take a step.

"Eddie," I say.

He looks at me.

"It's all right," I say. "Eddie. Look at me."

I have never done this.

I have watched it done. I have read it in a book in the library in the middle of the night; I have lain on a chaise and had it done to me, forty times, in the dark. I have done it once, on a man who wanted it, to give him sleep. I have not done it to a man who is crying in a boiler house with a revolver pointed at the side of his head.

But I have heard the voice. I have heard it so many times that it has gone into my bones. Low, level, a hundred and twenty cycles to the second, unhurried as the tide.

"You haven't slept," I say.

"No."

"Not since the twenty-fourth."

"No."

"You close your eyes and you see her."

"Yes."

"Eddie. I want you to look at the fire."

"Don't," says Hollis.

"The big door. The one on the left. You see the light inside it. You see how it moves." I do not stop. "You've been so tired. You've been tired for such a long time. You can feel your eyelids. They're so heavy, aren't they? It would be so good to put them down."

"Teague."

"Just for a moment. Just till you've counted to ten."

"Teague!"

"One," says Eddie Teague, and his eyes go to the fire.

…

I have been told the human mind is a house.

Ambrose said it once, in the library, with his long fingers on the spine of a book. There are doors in it, Elspeth. Most are locked. A man may live for sixty years and never open half of them. But some are not locked. Some have been left on the latch, for years, by an oversight, because no one has ever been kind enough to knock.

Teague's door is wide open.

I feel it. I feel him go through it, step by step, like a man going down the cellar stair: two, three, four. I feel the rigid terror drain from his shoulders. I feel the breath leave him, long and shuddering, and the wet red mouth go slack. His eyes are on the fire, fixed, unblinking, enormous. The flashlight sags in his hand.

"Five," he says, in a voice like a child's.

"Teague, God damn it—"

"Six," I say. "Seven."

Hollis swings the gun.

He does it fast. He has been fast for twenty years. The muzzle comes round and up, and I see the black eye of it, and the white of his knuckle on the trigger, and I think quite clearly, with no fear at all: this is where it ends.

Then he hesitates.

It is half a second. It is the half-second that a man always takes when he has been trained not to shoot a woman in the face. His eyes meet mine, over the barrel, in the furnace-light. And in that half-second, in a small flat dreamy voice, Eddie Teague says:

"Eight."

And Hollis is not looking at me at all.

He's looking at the thing in Teague's good hand.

It's a flashlight. It is a long heavy rubber-handled thing, the sort that night orderlies carry, six cells, a foot and a half of steel. Teague has raised it. He does it slowly, in a trance, as a sleepwalker lifts a spoon. His eyes are on the fire. His lips move.

"Nine."

"Teague. Put it down. That's an order."

"Ten," says Teague.

And he brings it down.

…

It is not a heroic blow.

It lands on the back of Hollis's skull with a small flat sound like a mallet on a melon. Hollis grunts. His knees fold. The revolver goes off, once, in the air, with a crack like the end of the world; and the whole vault of the boiler house rings and shudders and lets fall a long soft rain of soot. The bullet buries itself somewhere in the roof. Hollis goes to his hands and knees. He shakes his head. He gets one foot under him.

Teague hits him again.

I do not watch.

I do the thing I have been doing since I was a girl: I find a number. I pick up the clock, and the lantern, and I count the iron rivets in the boiler's flank, one, two, three, up the seam, while behind me the second blow lands, and a third, and a heavy body goes down on the coal.

The lantern slips from my fingers.

I don't see it fall.

I hear it: a small tinkle of glass. A whoosh. A rush of heat on the back of my legs. I turn.

The lantern has burst on the coal-dust floor. The oil is on fire. It runs in a bright blue sheet across the black drift, and where it touches the dust, the dust catches: not in flames but in a quick silent flicker, a rippling shimmer, a blue and yellow wave that runs away from the lamp across the whole floor like a hand drawn over velvet.

I know what it is.

It is the thing every miner fears. It is a cloud of coal dust, finer than flour, hung in the dry hot air of a boiler house for a century. It needs only a spark.

"Eddie!" I scream. "Out!"

…

I do not remember the door.

I remember the bar across it, which I lift with both hands. I remember the weight of the double leaf, and the groan of its hinges, and the knife-edge of the cold that hits my face as it swings. I remember dragging a limp little man by the collar through an arch into a night of blowing snow. I remember the clock, still under my arm. I remember the sky.

It's white. It is entirely white. The snow is coming down in huge soft flakes out of a black sky, and the wind is rising, and in the glare of the open door behind me I can see the whole yard: the coal heaps, the cart-ruts, the black line of the wall, and, at the end of a long rough track, a pair of red taillights, very small, very far away.

Marcus.

Behind me, with a sound like a great door closing, the boiler house explodes.

…

It is not loud.

That is the thing I will remember. I had expected thunder. What I get is a low, deep, rounded whump, like a pillow struck with a fist, and then a sort of long breath, and a gust of heat that lifts me off my feet and sets me down in the snow on my hands and knees. I feel the ground tremble. I feel the clock in my arms, ringing faintly in its walnut case like a struck glass. I hear Teague give a small high cry.

I turn my head.

The coal gate is a mouth of flame.

It pours out through the open leaves in a roaring orange tongue, forty feet high, licking at the snow, and where it touches the flakes they flash into steam. Above it, the whole east end of the building has begun to glow. The roof of the boiler house is lifting. The slates slide. A long gout of sparks goes up into the night, turning, tumbling, and the snow falls through them, so that the whole sky is full of cinders and stars.

And behind it, rising above the burning roof, four stories up, I see the pale square of a window.

It's small. It's barred. It's the size of a book.

It lights from within, a dull red, like a coal.

I watch the Quiet Room go up.

I do not feel anything. I kneel in the snow with a stranger's weeping orderly on one side of me and a dead family's clock in my arms and I watch it burn: the white walls, the iron cot, the vaulted ceiling, the oak door from St. Brigid's with its carved cherubs and its brass plate. A line of Latin. Gentlewomen, 1887. It all goes in the fire, quietly, with a kind of grace.

Everything that falls is already broken.

I feel the tears at last. They are hot on my cheeks. They freeze at the edges.

"Miss," says Eddie Teague, from the snow.

"Get up."

"I don't..." He is staring at the flames. "I don't know what I did."

"I know."

"I killed him."

"Not yet," I say.

I get to my feet. I put my free hand under his arm and haul him up. He is very light, and very cold, and he smells of smoke and peppermint and fear. In the doorway of the burning gate, at the edge of the glare, something is moving on the floor: a long dark shape, dragging itself on its elbows toward the snow.

I look at it.

I look at it for the length of a held breath.

I think of a woman on the linoleum in the lamplight with her hair spread out and her cap off and a look of mild surprise.

"Run," I say to Eddie Teague.

"Miss?"

"Run. Up the drive. Past the lodge. There's a telephone at the gatehouse. You are going to ring the state police, and you are going to tell them your name." My voice is quite steady. "You are going to tell them what you did on the twenty-fourth. You will not stop talking until somebody writes it down."

"They'll put me in prison."

"Yes."

"I held her arms."

"I know," I say. "Go."

He goes.

He runs, in his clumsy way, a short bald man in an orderly's white coat, floundering through the snow with his bandaged hand held out in front of him like a thing he is carrying to an altar. I watch him until the darkness has him.

Then I turn, and I walk away from the fire.

I walk down the long rough track toward the red taillights, with the clock in my arms, and the snow in my hair, and the roar of the burning building behind me like the voice of the sea. I do not look back. I do not look at the dark shape in the gate.

I have never in my life left a column unfinished.

I leave this one.