Chapter 176: Four Hundred and Ten

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 176: Four Hundred and Ten

Ansel stopped in the middle of the road.

Not because he'd reached the kerb. He was three steps short of it, with the green watering can held out in front of him in both hands like an offering, and he stopped the way a man stops when he walks into a room and forgets what he came in for.

He looked down at the can.

He looked at the woman in the flowered dress, who was still turned toward him — who had, for the first time in forty-one years, turned away from her flowers.

And his face went politely, completely blank.

"He's doing it," Reeve said. "Cole — Bell's got his hand up. He's doing it to him. He's taking the—"

"Taking what?"

"Her," Reeve said. "He's taking her out of him. The crossing. The thirty-nine years. He's taking the reason Ansel came."

Cole moved.

He didn't wait for Reeve to call it. He went straight down the pavement toward the window box, toward the space Reeve had been staring at, where there was nothing — a pavement, a wall, some geraniums—

"Left!" Reeve shouted. "No — he's moved, he's behind the—"

Something hit Cole in the ribs.

He never saw it. He never saw anything. One moment he was reaching for an empty pavement and the next he was on the ground by the kerb with the breath gone out of him, the way it had gone on the bench outside the laundrette, the way it had gone the only other time in eighteen months anybody had put him down and kept him there.

He got up.

"Behind you!"

He turned. Nothing. Something caught him across the jaw from the other side and he went down again, onto one knee, tasting blood.

He couldn't hold it. He couldn't hold any of it. Every time he committed to where Bell was, the thought slid out of his head halfway through, the way a word slides away when somebody walks in, and he found himself standing on a pavement with his weight forward and no memory of why.

"Reeve," he said, on one knee. "Ansel."

Reeve looked across the road.

Ansel was still standing in the middle of it with the watering can held out, and his face was quiet and polite and almost empty. He was looking at the woman in the flowered dress the way you'd look at a stranger on a platform. Somebody you might have seen before, once. Nobody in particular.

"If I go to him," Reeve said, "I can't call for you."

"I know."

"You can't see him, Cole. Without me you're—"

"I know what I am without you." Cole spat blood onto the tarmac. "It's your call. Not mine. He's losing her right now. Your call."

Reeve looked at Cole on the ground.

Then at the empty pavement by the window box, where only he could see a man in a good coat smiling.

Then at Ansel, in the middle of the road, forgetting.

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He ran to Ansel.

He didn't ask this time. There wasn't time to ask, and Ansel couldn't have answered.

He caught Ansel's free hand in both of his and held on, and closed his eyes, and the whole grey dead street came into focus around him the way the café had come into focus, the way the Chamber room had — gently, completely — and Reeve went in.

It was not like Corvin. It was not wet paint.

It was like standing in a river. Bell was taking it out of Ansel as Reeve was putting it back, the same memory, the same thirty-nine years, pulling in both directions at once — and Reeve held on, with his eyes screwed shut and his nose already bleeding and his teeth gritted so hard his jaw hurt, and did not let go.

He could feel what Bell was reaching for. The crossing. The Thursdays. A wall, a woman, a window box. And underneath all of it, where Bell couldn't quite get his fingers — where somebody else had already been, long ago, carefully — a gap.

A name-shaped gap.

The one thing that had been taken from Ansel before Bell ever arrived.

And Reeve knew it.

He had known it since the fence. Since the first day in Kaelmoor, with his hand pressed to his temple and four hundred and ten names coming through the walls like conversations in the next room. He had heard every one of them. He had never been able to stop hearing them. He could hear them now — the whole town, every person it had ever been, pouring through him like a crowd through a door.

He found the one that fitted the gap.

"Cordelia," Reeve said.

Ansel's hand clamped round his.

The watering can nearly fell. Ansel caught it. He stood in the middle of the road with his whole face coming back — not all at once, not neatly, but the way ice goes on a river, in cracks, and then all at once — and he looked across at the woman in the flowered dress as though he had never seen anything before in his life.

"Cordelia," he said.

It came out of him like something he'd been holding in his mouth for thirty-nine years.

The woman at the window box stopped.

She had been humming. Four notes, round and round, the same four notes since 1985, never getting to the fifth.

She got to the fifth.

It was a small note. It sounded like the end of something. And then she opened her mouth, and for the first time in forty-one years, somebody in that town said a word out loud.

"Ansel?"

Ansel took the last three steps, and Reeve went with him, still holding his hand, because he did not dare let go.

Ansel did it without hurrying, the way he'd crossed the rest of the road, and he stopped in front of her with the green watering can held out in both hands, and she looked at it — at the sticker still on the side, at the new plastic — and then at him.

"The old one cracked," Ansel said. His voice was not working very well. "The spout. I noticed last year. I'm sorry it took me so long."

She took the can.

She held it the way you'd hold something you'd been handed at a station by somebody getting off a train.

Across the road, on the empty pavement, the smile went.

Reeve saw it happen — the only one who could. Bell's face in the grey light, the scar through the left eyebrow, the mismatched eyes. For forty-one years nobody in this town had been able to hold his face. And a girl who'd been frozen since 1985 had just said a name out loud, and all round her, very faintly, Reeve felt it: the whole careful forgetting that Bell had laid over Kaelmoor beginning, in one small place, to slip.

Bell turned toward him.

Not smiling. Not patient. And he came across the road straight at Reeve with a speed that nobody else in the street could even see — only Reeve, holding Ansel's hand, watching a man he'd described once in socks with a frying pan come at him in a straight line.

At the end of the street, Thessaly had one hand on the car door and could see nothing at all — a dead town, a woman holding a watering can, and two boys in the middle of the road with their hands locked, one of them staring at empty air as though it had a face.

She had never in twenty years felt so useless, and she stayed exactly where she was, because the one thing she knew for certain was that anybody else walking into that road would be one more person for Cole to keep track of.

Reeve didn't let go of Ansel.

He couldn't. If he let go, Bell would have Ansel's thirty-nine years in the time it took to fall over. So he stood there in the middle of a dead street, holding a stranger's hand, and watched Bell come, and did not move.

A hand closed round his wrist.

Not Bell's. Warm, and very large, and bleeding slightly at the knuckles.

Cole had got up off the kerb. He had crossed the road — Reeve hadn't seen him do it, hadn't heard him — and he had taken hold of Reeve's free wrist the way you'd take hold of a railing in a gale.

And Reeve felt it go through them both. The thing Ivor had said at a kitchen table: it spreads. The thing that had made a man in a café put his phone down and ring his mother. His own Conviction — the one that meant nothing, ever, could be allowed to disappear — going up his arm and through his wrist and into the hand that was holding it.

Cole went rigid.

He was looking straight at the space in front of Reeve. The space where Bell was, three feet away, coming in with one hand raised.

And for the first time in his life, Cole could see him.

[End of Chapter 176]