Chapter 178: Catching Up

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 178: Catching Up

Thessaly got to the boy first, because she was the only one of them who had done this before.

Not this, exactly. Nobody had done this. But she had spent twenty years walking up to frightened people in doorways, and she went across the road to the porch at an ordinary walking pace and crouched down at the bottom of the steps, so her head was lower than his.

"Hello," she said. "What's your name?"

The boy looked at her. He had a jumper on with a hole in one elbow and his knees were grazed, and they had been grazed since 1985.

"Danny," he said. "Danny Oyelaran. Where's my mum? She said wait on the swing. She said she'd be five minutes."

Reeve made a sound behind Cole.

He had his hand pressed to his temple — not hard now, not the way he had at the fence. Gently. The way you'd press a hand to a radio to hear it better.

"Oyelaran," he said. "Margaret. She's — Cole, she's the one Dana found. The woman who said no in 1994. On the consent form."

"She said no to something in 1994," Cole said slowly. "She'd have been—"

"Twenty-eight in 1985," Reeve said. "She's alive. She lives in a flat in the east of the city. She's got a bad hip and nobody's ever mentioned a son. Not on any form Dana's ever found." He looked at the boy on the porch. "He's who she said no for. Nine years later. She didn't know why she was saying it. She just knew she had to."

They were coming out of the houses.

Not all at once. One door, and then a second, like people coming out after a storm to see what's left. A woman in an apron with a tea towel over her shoulder. An old man in slippers — old, even then, even in 1985. Two teenage girls holding hands, in school uniform so out of date it looked like a costume. A man with a rake who stood at his gate and stared at the six feet of lawn he had been raking for forty-one years as though it had personally offended him.

Twelve of them. Then fifteen.

None of them said anything much. They stood on their front steps and looked at the street, and at the black rubble where the north end had been, and at each other — and then, one by one, at the four strangers in the middle of the road.

"Who are you?" said the woman with the tea towel.

Reeve looked at her.

"Sheila," he said gently. "You're Sheila Pratt. You run the café by the chapel. It's all right."

The woman went white.

"How do you know my name?"

"I've been hearing it for a month," Reeve said. "I'm sorry. I didn't know how to stop."

He went down the street and told all of them.

Cole watched him do it. Reeve walked from gate to gate with his nose still bleeding and his face grey, and stopped in front of each person, and told them their own name — quietly, the way you'd hand somebody something they'd dropped — and every single time, something in the person's face came back a little further.

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Harold Beckett. Jean and Alison Morrow. Mr. Idowu from the post office. Callum. Little Rosie with the bike.

He knew all of them. He had been carrying all of them since the fence.

Nobody in that town had said a name out loud in forty-one years, and a seventeen-year-old from a flat above a laundrette gave every one of them back, one gate at a time.

Cole rang Ivor from the chapel steps.

He answered on the first ring, which he had never done before.

"You're in Kaelmoor," Ivor said.

"How do you—"

"Because I've felt it from here. I felt something give way just before noon, and I've been sitting in my kitchen since then with my hands on the table, and I haven't been able to move them." A pause. "They're waking up."

"Yes."

"How many?"

"Fifteen. Maybe twenty."

Ivor was quiet on the line. Cole could hear him breathing — slowly, carefully, like a man who had been told bad news at a hospital and was waiting to be sure he'd understood it.

"Cole," he said. "Aldric woke two of them. In the winter of 1985, before he knew any better. He told me about it in 1991, at a funeral. He said they didn't last a week."

"What happened to them?"

"They didn't die of anything," Ivor said. "That's what he told me. There was nothing wrong with them. They just — caught up."

It was Ansel who found the dog.

He came up the street holding Cordelia's hand — he had not let go of it once since the window box — and stopped by the doorway where the dog had slept since 1985.

It was lying in the patch of sun where it had sat down an hour ago. On its side, with its eyes closed.

Its muzzle was white.

It had not been white when it stood up. Cole had seen it stand — a brown dog, stiff, but brown. Now the whole of its face had gone grey, and its coat was thin and dull, and its body under the coat was the body of a dog that had been very, very old for a very long time.

It wasn't breathing.

Cordelia made a small noise.

"That's Biscuit," she said. "That's the Carters' dog. He's only four."

Nobody answered her.

Cole looked at Cordelia.

She was twenty-eight. She had been twenty-eight since the night the sky did something nobody could describe. She stood beside Ansel in a flowered dress with a new watering can hooked over one arm, and she was beautiful in the way people in old photographs are beautiful — completely, without knowing it.

And at her left temple, where her dark hair was pinned back, there was a single thin streak of grey.

Cole was fairly sure it had not been there at the window box.

Ansel saw him look. Ansel followed his eyes to the streak of grey, and his hand tightened on hers, and he did not say anything at all, and his face did not change — and Cole understood that Ansel had seen it first, perhaps an hour ago, and had simply decided not to look away from her.

Cordelia put a hand up to her temple, as though she'd felt them looking.

"Is something wrong with my hair?"

"No," said Ansel. "It's lovely. It's exactly how you always wore it."

It was the gentlest lie Cole had ever heard anybody tell, and the man who told it had spent forty years making people forget things kindly, and had never once in all that time looked like this while he did it.

"How long?" Cole said, very quietly, into the phone.

"Aldric's two lasted six days," Ivor said. "The dog is the fastest. Dogs don't have forty-one years in them. People — people have more." His voice was steady and something underneath it was not. "A week. Perhaps a little more for the young ones. And at the end of it, they'll be the age they would have been."

Cole looked at the boy on the porch. Nine years old, with grazed knees and a hole in his jumper.

Fifty. He would be fifty. In a week.

"I did this," Cole said.

"No."

"Reeve gave her the name and I held Bell off and I let him do it, Ivor, it was my — the whole street's waking up because of me—"

"Cole. Listen to me." Ivor's voice sharpened for the first time in the whole conversation. "Every one of those people has been standing in the same five minutes for forty-one years. You didn't do this to them. You stopped it being done to them. And now the bill's come in."

Cole put the phone down on the chapel step.

The street was full of people now — twenty, twenty-five — standing at their gates in the thin sun with their names in their mouths, looking at a world that had moved on without them. Reeve was at the far end, sitting on a wall with his head in his hands. Thessaly had the boy on the porch steps, and the boy was holding her hand and asking her again where his mum was, and she was telling him the truth, slowly, one piece at a time.

Twenty-five people with a week. A café owner. A postman. Two girls in school uniform. A boy waiting on a swing.

And no way on earth to give them back forty-one years.

Then — very quietly, in his own voice, with no feeling in it at all, the way it had spoken outside a chemist's across the road from a Ministry building — something inside him said:

You could settle them.

[End of Chapter 178]