Chapter 174: What the Town Was Called

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 174: What the Town Was Called

"Get up," Cole said.

It came out quieter than he meant, and not unkind, and he realised as he said it that he didn't want the man on the floor. Of all the things that had happened to him in eighteen months, a man who had not aged a day in forty years kneeling in front of him on a Ministry carpet, like a servant who had finally recognised the house was the one he wanted least.

Ansel got up.

He did it slowly, one hand on the edge of the table, the way a man gets up after kneeling in church for too long, and when he was standing he did not look at Cole. He looked at his own knee, at the carpet fibres on his trousers, as though they belonged to someone else.

"I've been doing this for forty years," he said. "Not once. Not to Marguerite, not to Voss, not to anybody. I didn't even kneel at my own mother's funeral." He brushed at the knee, once. "I'd like it understood that I don't know what that was."

"Neither do I."

"No." Ansel finally looked up. "No, I don't suppose you do. That's what frightens me."

Bellamy made a sound.

It was not a word. It was the sound a man makes waking up on a train, not sure which stop he's missed, and every head in Room 4B turned toward it.

He was looking at his own hands on the table.

"Aldous," Cole said.

The old man lifted his head.

"Yes," he said slowly. "Yes. That's — that's me. Isn't it." He frowned at the table. "There was a woman. In a kitchen. She used to say it like that. Like she was cross with me."

"She was," said Cole. "She's still there. You kept her."

Bellamy looked at him with the polite, puzzled face of a man meeting somebody at a party whose name he ought to know.

Then something moved behind it. Not much. The width of a word.

"You're the boy," he said. "From the café. You took the wall down."

"Four inches of it."

"Four inches." Bellamy's hands were shaking. "I'd written things down. Since then. I remember that I'd written things down. I had a — a book—"

Nobody wanted to tell him, so Reeve did.

He crouched by the chair the way he'd crouched in front of Corvin and said it plainly, because he'd learned that plainly was kinder.

"It's gone, Mr. Bellamy. The things in the notebook. Three weeks of it. He took it out." He glanced at Ansel and didn't look away. "You've still got your name. And the kitchen. That's all he couldn't make himself do."

Bellamy turned his hands over on the table.

"Everything I remembered," he said. "Since the café. The colours. The corridor. Thursday, four times. All of it."

"Yes."

"Gone."

"From you," Reeve said. "Not from the world."

Bellamy looked at him.

This text was taken from NovelPhoenix. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"Dana copied it," Reeve said. "Every page. Every fragment you wrote, she's got a photocopy of in a folder in our kitchen, in order, with the dates on. You can read it all back. Every word."

It should have been good news. It was, in a way.

But Cole watched Bellamy's face while Reeve said it, and saw the old man understand the thing Reeve hadn't meant to say: that he could read his memories now. Like a stranger's diary. In his own handwriting. And none of it would ever feel like his again.

"Thank you," Bellamy said to Reeve, very courteously. "That's — thank you. That's more than most people get."

Then he put his face in his hands at the long table in Room 4B, where he had sat on the panel for forty-one years, and cried without making any sound at all.

Ansel left the room.

Cole found him at the top of the stairs, standing by the window, looking down at the crowd across the road — still there, still filming, now watching Thomas Oduya standing against the door frame with his hands behind his back.

"Who sent you?"

"A letter." Ansel did not turn round. "Typed. No name. The same as it's always been." He took something from his inside pocket and held it out without looking. "This one came at seven this morning."

Cole unfolded it.

One line.

Finish by four. Or be finished.

"It's half past four," Cole said.

"Yes."

"So what happens to you?"

"I expect somebody will come and find me. Probably someone careful." Ansel's voice was mild. "I've tidied a great many people, Cole. I know exactly how it goes. It's very gentle. You don't mind, afterwards." He took the letter back and folded it into a small square, and then a smaller one, the way he'd folded a chip paper on a wall a year ago. "I've always rather envied them, the not minding."

"Come with us."

Ansel turned round at last.

"That's kind," he said. "And it's the wrong thing to offer, and you know it's the wrong thing. You've got a flat full of people who'd have every right to put me through a window."

"Then what are you going to do?"

Ansel looked out at the crowd again.

"Tomorrow's Thursday," he said.

Cole waited.

"I go somewhere on Thursdays. I have done for a very long time." He put the folded letter back in his pocket. "There's a woman I visit. She waters some flowers. She doesn't know me, and I don't know her name — I haven't for years, somebody saw to that. But I go, and I sit on the wall across the road, and I watch her water them."

He did not say where. He didn't need to. Cole had walked down a street once with a woman at a window box humming four notes and looking down the road every single time.

"I'd like to go tomorrow," Ansel said. "One more time. Before whoever's careful comes to find me." He smiled, very slightly. "I'd like to bring her a new watering can. The one I brought her last year has a crack in the spout."

They got home at seven.

Nobody said much at dinner, except Mia, who had her phone propped against the salt and was reading out loud whether anybody wanted her to or not.

"Thirty-eight's trending," she said. "Oduya. Everyone's moved him up their lists. Somebody's put him at twenty-two because he kept his word. There's a whole thread about it." She scrolled. "And now everybody wants to know who's thirty-seven, and whether they'll send them next."

"They won't," said Iris.

"How do you know?"

"Because I'm number seven," Iris said, "and I'd rather resign." Bellamy was asleep in Aldric's old room, with Dana's folder of photocopies on the chair beside the bed, unopened. Corvin was on the sofa. The Sixth was on the floor of the hallway where she'd been the night before, because nobody had told her she could have anywhere else and she hadn't asked.

Cole went out to the fire escape at nine.

Vesper came four minutes later, the way she always did.

She sat down beside him and kept quiet. The street below was quiet too. Across the road, in the flats above the chemist's, somebody still had a phone propped in a window, filming the building.

"It's after Tuesday," she said eventually.

"It is."

"Fen's all right. Mia's home. Everybody's back up the stairs." She pulled her sleeves down over her hands. "I said I'd tell you. What I understood at Agnes's."

"You don't have to—"

"I know I don't. I said that last time." She turned to look at him. "I'm telling you because you let your sister hold the phone, and you let Reeve decide about Corvin, and today you walked past a man on the steps without breaking his word for him. And I've been watching all of it, and I've decided."

"Agnes said the name of the town," Vesper said. "In the language. You were there."

"Four syllables."

"Four syllables. And you all heard a word. Something that sounded like a place." She was very calm. Her hands, inside her sleeves, were not. "I didn't hear a place. I heard what the word means. It came to me the way it always does — already meaning something, before I'd put it into English."

"What does it mean?"

Vesper didn't answer straight away. The light from the kitchen window lay across half her face.

"It's not a name," she said. "Not really. It's more like — a word you'd write in a column. At the end of a line in a ledger. The way you'd write it when something's been dealt with, and there's nothing left owing."

Cole went very cold.

"Vesper."

"The town wasn't called Kaelmoor, Cole. Not in that language. Not by whoever named it first." She held his eyes. "It was called Settled."

[End of Chapter 174]