Ghost in the Rain

The rain never stopped, so after a while Archie stopped waiting for it to.

Winter came to Ashmore City without announcing itself. The mist thickened and went gray at the edges. The neon signs on Larkin Street glowed through it like lanterns in a river, and the people hurrying below them turned up their collars and bent their heads, and none of them looked up at the third-floor window of Suite 4, where a light burned all night and a man sat at a desk with nothing to write.

He had stopped working the case. Not out of despair, exactly; despair would have been a feeling, and he was beyond feelings by then. It was only that there was nothing left to work. He knew the file by heart. He knew the corridors of the Ashmore Grand better than he had known any building he'd ever designed. He had walked the whole city twice, door to door, wall to wall, in every weather, and found no seam.

So he did what a man does when the work is done. He walked.

…

In the lab, the monitors had gone quiet.

Otis Brennan sat in front of them with his chin in his hand. For three weeks, lab time, he had watched four green lines run together across the screen, and then three, and then one. He had watched the three drive forward through the Dimension, steadily, in lockstep. Whatever it was that held them together, it was holding. He had no idea how. The fourth line, the one that had split away, lay flat on its own at the bottom of the display like a river in a drought, neither rising nor falling.

"Is he asleep?" asked Luca, from the doorway.

"Alive. Stable. Not asleep."

"What is he doing?"

Otis took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "I don't know. If I had to say, I'd say he's waiting." He paused. "Venn's line keeps jumping. Every time Archie's name comes up in the channel chatter, you can see it in the telemetry. They're asking for him. They don't know where he is, but they keep asking."

"They'll hear nothing."

"Can't we tell them?"

"No." Luca pressed a hand to his forehead. He looked ten years older than he had a month ago. "We're not allowed to speak to them. The Dimension is closed. If I could reach in and tell them he's all right, if I could reach in and tell him—" He broke off. "Fifteen years, Otis. Fifteen years I've been looking at lines on this screen."

Otis said nothing. He had never known what to say to Luca when he spoke of Matteo.

On the far side of the room, in the dark, William Cross was dictating a memo into his phone. He kept his voice quiet and very even. Cohort fragmentation confirmed. Subject Zero non-contributory. Recommend proceeding on three-subject data. Unit economics remain viable.

Then he stopped, and listened to the silence, and for a moment, almost against his will, he looked at the flat line at the bottom of the screen.

It was a strange look, brief and unreadable. It might have been regret. It might only have been arithmetic.

…

The bar was called The Last Note, and by midwinter Archie was a regular.

He sat at the far end of the counter in the same spot every night. Nobody bothered him. The bartender, a heavy, silent man with a face like a tired bulldog, brought him a rye and stood a moment at his elbow and said, Evening, Mr. Moran, in a voice that always sounded as if it were about to say something else. Then he went back to polishing glasses.

The room had its regulars, too. The nurse from St. Agnes', whose name turned out to be Bridie. The usher from the Orpheum Theater, who had a laugh like a hinge. A white-haired piano player named Fitz, who played on a battered upright in the corner and whose repertoire consisted of eleven songs, ordered by some law that Archie never worked out. On Thursdays, a rag-and-bone man came in out of the rain with his cart and drank a single beer in absolute silence, nodding to everyone. On Sundays, a pair of old sisters in black came in to share a sherry and argue over the crossword.

They were strangers. They were also, he realized one gray evening, the first people he had ever allowed himself to sit among without leaving first. He did not speak much. But he was there, and they let him be there, and now and then Bridie would slide a plate of fries along the counter without a word.

It was a kind of peace. He knew it was a poor one.

On the night of the first snow, Archie looked down the length of the bar and saw a man he'd never seen before.

…

He was sitting in the corner booth, in the shadows beyond the lamp.

He was tall, thin, and gray, in a wrinkled suit that might once have been good. A battered fedora sat on the table before him. His face was a kind of smear; Archie could not hold it. When he looked directly, the features slid, and when he looked away, the man came clearly back, in the corner of his eye, a long melancholy jaw, dark hollows round the eyes. A glass of whiskey sat in front of him, full. The ice in it had not melted.

He was looking at Archie.

Not through him, as the others did in the end, with the polite blank gaze of people who have a place to be. He was looking at him, the way a drowning man looks at a boat that passes too far away.

Archie's pulse began to beat in his ears.

It's him.

He did not move. He did not dare. He sat quite still on his stool, with his hands flat on the counter, and the man in the booth went on gazing at him, and slowly, the most delicate motion in the world, the man lifted two fingers from the table in a kind of salute.

Crane, Archie thought. Thomas Crane.

He said it aloud. He said it as gently as he could, a quiet word into the hush of the bar.

"Thomas?"

The man's eyes flickered. For a moment, a bare half-second, the smear of his face resolved, and Archie saw him: a man of thirty-eight, with a high forehead and a worn, humorous mouth, who looked as though he had once been the sort of person who laughed easily. His lips moved. He said something. Archie could not hear it. And then the lamplight shifted, and the booth was empty. The glass sat on the table, full, with the ice unmelted, and the fedora lay beside it.

Behind the bar, a damp cloth lay folded on the counter, and the heavy man who had always held it was nowhere to be seen.

…

Archie sat with it for a long time.

He understood, finally, what he was looking at. He had found the Guardian of Ashmore City, after all, in the very bar where he had spent a winter: the tired bartender who had never quite been a bartender, and who was, now that he let himself be seen, a missing man in a rumpled suit. And the Guardian had seen him, knew him, perhaps even wanted him.

And could do nothing. Because the lock needed a table of people. It needed a group, a chorus, a living, shouting, caring crowd, and Archie had arrived with one pair of hands.

He got up and crossed the room. The piano played. The snow fell past the window in slow white diagonals. He sat down in the booth, opposite the whiskey and the fedora, and said nothing at all.

For a long time they sat there together in the silence. Two lonely men. The ice in the glass did not melt, and the snow did not stop, and the piano went on playing its eleven songs one after another into the night.

At some point Archie found that he had taken a pencil and a paper napkin from the holder on the table. He did not remember deciding to. He only knew that his hand had begun to move, and that it was the first time in weeks that it had wanted to.

He drew them.

Venn first, because Venn was easiest: the big loose-limbed grin, the crutch swung up like a banner, the whole body tilted forward as if he meant to run through the paper. Then Jin, behind him and a little to one side, glasses glinting, one eyebrow lifted, nodding slowly the way he nodded when someone had finally said something sensible. And last, in front, a little apart from the others, Zoe. She was not smiling. She was looking out of the napkin, straight at whoever held it, with her large dark eyes full of a steady, patient light.

Ready?

He put the pencil down.

Across the table, Thomas Crane looked at the drawing, and then at Archie. His eyes were wet.

"They're good," he said, in a voice like the last of a candle. "Your friends."

"They are."

"Where are they?"

"I left them," said Archie.

The Guardian nodded slowly. He did not say I'm sorry, and he did not say It's all right. He only reached across the table with one thin gray hand and, very carefully, laid it over Archie's.

It was cold. It was the most human thing that had happened to him in a year.

…

In the spring, if there is such a thing in Ashmore City, the regulars at The Last Note noticed that a small drawing had been pinned to the wall above the corner booth.

It was done in pencil on a paper napkin, now yellowed. A tall boy with a crutch. A man with glasses. A girl with short hair, looking out. Under it, in a small neat hand, someone had written a line, and it was a long time before anyone troubled to read it.

I was wrong. I'm sorry. I hope you got through.

Beneath the drawing, in the booth, two men sat side by side and watched the door. One wore a gray suit. The other wore a rain-spotted trench coat. They did not speak much. They did not need to.

The rain fell. The piano played. Now and then the door opened, and a stranger came in out of the weather, and both men looked up, and both men looked away.

Nobody ever came through that was the right one. But they never stopped looking.

And above them, in the lamplight, the three small faces on the wall went on looking out at the room, and kept their own counsel, and waited for a friend who was not going to come.