Chapter 133: The Man Who Came to the Lamp

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 133: The Man Who Came to the Lamp

The intercom crackled and a voice said, "I'd like to come up, please. I'm aware that's a lot to ask at this hour."

It was an ordinary voice. That was the first thing and it kept being the thing — no weight in it, no age, nothing that announced itself. A man asking to come up.

"Third floor," Cole said.

"Thank you."

He came up slowly.

Cole listened to it. Thirty-one stairs from the street door to the landing and he took them the way a man in his sixties takes stairs, one at a time, with a pause at the turn — and Cole stood at the door and did the arithmetic on that and did not like where it came out.

Four hundred years and he still has knees.

The knock was three and then nothing.

He was seventy, maybe. Grey, thinning, in a waxed jacket that had been reproofed rather than replaced. Reading glasses on a cord. He was carrying a canvas bag with a bottle in it and he had made an effort with his shoes.

"I've brought something," he said, "and I'd like you to say if that's wrong. It's a bottle. It's not drugged and I'd say that whether it was or wasn't, so I'm aware it's not worth much."

"Come in."

Thessaly was in the kitchen doorway. Dana was on the far side of the table with her back to the counter. Vesper was by the window, which Cole had asked her not to be and which she had done anyway.

The man took all of it in and did not appear to mind any of it.

"Sensible," he said. "May I sit with my back to the room? It'll be more comfortable for everybody. I know how this arrangement is supposed to work, I've been on the other side of it."

He sat with his back to the room.

He put the bag on the floor by his feet and his hands on the table, palms down, and waited.

"What do I call you?" Cole said.

"Whatever's easiest. Names have stopped meaning very much to me and I've had a great many."

"Pick one."

"Ivor," the man said, after a moment. "It's not the first. It's the one I've had longest and I'm fond of it."

"Ivor."

"That's right." He looked round the kitchen properly for the first time: the whiteboard, the honey jar, the eleven mugs, the pile of Dov's blankets on the end of the sofa visible through the doorway. "You've got a full house."

"Eight."

"Eight." Something went across his face and was gone. "I haven't had eight."

Cole sat down opposite him.

"You said you'd never gone to a lamp."

"I hadn't."

"Thirty years."

"Thirty-one." Ivor's hands stayed flat. "I've seen perhaps forty of them. Most were nothing — a person forgetting a light. Nine were real, and I knew they were real, and I stood across the road from six of those and went home."

"Why?"

"Because a lamp means someone is asking and it's safe to come," Ivor said, "and I have never once been somebody it was safe for. That's not modesty. Every person who lit one of those was hiding from an organisation I work for. Walking up to a window would have been the single cruellest thing available to me."

"And now?"

"Now I'm stopping, and I told you I was stopping, and this is the first lamp in thirty-one years lit by somebody who already knew what I was." He let that sit. "That's the difference. You lit it after the letter. You lit it knowing."

Vesper, from the window: "How do we know you're what you say you are?"

"You don't. And I'd rather not do the demonstration thing — it's theatre and it never proves the point people want it to." Ivor turned slightly to include her, which he did carefully, so the movement was slow. "I'll tell you what I can offer instead. I can tell you eleven things about the inside of Halvern Textiles that are not in any record, and one of them you'll be able to check with the old man you moved out of Ashfield last month, because he cleaned the second floor in 1991 and he will remember the colour of the doors."

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Dana said: "Green."

"Blue," Ivor said. "Which is what he'll tell you, and which is why I picked it."

Dana checked her phone. Halloway, at two-forty in the morning, replied within ninety seconds because he did not sleep either.

Blue. Horrible blue. Why?

Cole put both hands on the table.

"Ask me your question," he said. "That's what you came for."

"It is."

"Go on."

Ivor was quiet for a moment.

"Not yet," he said. "I'd like to answer some of yours first, because I'll only be able to ask mine once, and if I get an answer I don't like I'd rather I'd already paid for it."

So they asked, and he answered, for two and a half hours.

On what he actually does: he finds objects in houses. Nothing else, ever. He has no ability that touches people and has been offered one twice and refused both times, in 1809 and 1954, and he described both refusals in the same flat tone he used for everything.

On the organisation: the current one is the fourth. The first, he said, wasn't an organisation at all, it was eleven people and a set of habits. He would not say what they were called and said it wasn't a secret, only that the name would mean nothing and would make them sound grander than they were.

On Voss: "She came and looked in the drawer about twelve years ago and she didn't take anything, and I've thought about that more than she'd like. If she'd taken them, she'd have been reading my reports. She left them, which means she already knew what was in them, which means she'd been reading them somewhere else first."

Dana: "So she was the one reading them."

"Until 2015, when she stopped." Ivor nodded slowly. "That's your hole. You found it before I did. I only found out there was nobody at the other end because the man who sorts the post in Gessen retired and his replacement sent one back and I received my own letter for the first time in nineteen years."

On Kaelmoor: he had not been there. He was very clear about it. He had been asked to attend in 1985 and had refused, and that refusal was the second of the three he'd written down, and it was the only one he'd never explained to anybody.

"Why did you refuse?"

"Because the letter asking me said bring nothing and expect to stay," Ivor said, "and in three hundred and some years nobody had ever told me to expect to stay."

On Ray: this was the part Cole had been waiting two and a half hours for, and Ivor gave it without being asked.

"Your father came and found me in 2009. Nobody finds me. He did it by going round eleven house clearances in four years and leaving a note at each one, and the eleventh note was rude enough that I answered it."

"What did it say?"

"It said, I know you passed on the Marlow house because there was a child in it. I'd like to talk to the part of you that did that." Ivor's mouth moved slightly. "I have had a very long time and that is the only letter I have ever kept."

He told them the rest of it in order, because he said that was the only way it would make sense.

That Ray had come back four times between 2009 and 2014. That he had never once asked for help with the organisation, or for information, or for a name, and that Ivor had spent the first two visits waiting for the ask and had eventually understood there wasn't going to be one.

That in 2011 Ray had asked him a single question: if a man knew something was growing in his son, and knew that being near it made it grow faster, what would you tell him to do?

"And what did you tell him?"

"I told him the truth, which is that I had seen it four times in four hundred years and in three of those the man stayed and it went badly." Ivor's hands had gone tight on the table for the first time all night. "And he asked what happened in the fourth, and I said the fourth one left, and he asked whether it worked, and I said I don't know, because he left and I never saw either of them again, and that's the entire basis on which your father made his decision."

The kitchen was completely silent.

"He went away on a coin toss," Ivor said. "I want to be accurate about that. He went away because a man with four centuries and four data points told him one of them had walked out and he'd never checked how it ended."

Cole did not move for a while.

"Did it work?" he said.

"I don't know."

"You've had eight years."

"I've had eight years and no way to find out, because measuring it would have meant coming and looking at you, and I'd told him I wouldn't." Ivor finally lifted his hands off the table. "That's the answer to the question you've been wanting to ask since I sat down, and I'd rather you had it before I ask mine."

"Ask, then," Cole said.

Ivor took his glasses off and folded them and put them in his pocket, which was the only nervous thing he did all night.

"I have three years left. Possibly four. I'd like to say that's an estimate and not a complaint." He looked at the table rather than at Cole. "There is a thing I have been holding since before any of the four organisations existed. It is not power. It is not an object, precisely, and it is not information, and I am not going to describe it in a room with six people in it."

"Okay."

"Whoever holds it does not get to put it down, and it cannot be destroyed, and when I stop it will go somewhere, and it has gone somewhere four times before and each of those was worse than the last." He was still looking at the table. "Your father asked me to look after his boy and I said no, and I was right to, and I've thought about it every day for eleven years — not because I regret the answer. Because I have never in four hundred years been asked to do something for somebody rather than to them, and I was not able to do it, and I would like one chance at the other version of that before I stop."

He looked up.

"I'm not asking you to take it," he said. "I'm asking you to let me spend three years making sure it doesn't go to somebody worse. And I'd like to do it from where I can see you, because you're the only person alive it might safely go to, and because I have seen four people carry this and I would prefer the fifth to be someone who put sixty-one letters back in order."

Nobody said anything for a long moment.

Then Mia, who had come in eleven minutes ago and had been standing in the hallway where nobody could see her, said from the doorway:

"You want to move in."

Ivor turned round.

"I want to be near," he said. "I'm aware of how that sounds at two in the morning from a man with a bottle in a bag."

"You've got a bottle in a bag."

"I have. It's from 1961 and it's the only thing I own that I'd miss." He almost smiled. "I brought it because I have never once been invited anywhere, and I understood that you're supposed to."

[End of Chapter 133]