Chapter 139: What a Room Is For

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 139: What a Room Is For

The board came round in a flat arc and the Sixth got both forearms up and it broke them.

Cole heard it happen. So did everyone. A hundred and seventeen years of wrought iron against two human arms in a tiled room with a barrel roof, and the sound went up into the vault and came back down twice.

She hit the wall at the shallow end and slid and stayed there.

"Okay," she said, through blood. "Okay. That's — yes. All right."

Cole dropped the board.

It rang on the tiles for a long time.

"Where's the right room."

"You're not going to like the answer and I'm not stalling, I'm working out how to say it with a broken—" She stopped and breathed for a second. "Hah. Both. Both of them. That's genuinely funny."

"Where."

"There isn't one." She got her head back against the tiles. "That's the thing I came to say and then you did that, and I'd like it noted that I opened with the useful information and you still hit me with a diving board."

Thessaly had her weapon back up. "She's stalling."

"She's not," Ivor said.

He had come down the steps into the pool basin, slowly, at the age he actually was, and he stood in the shallow end looking up at the woman against the wall.

"Say it properly," he told her.

"Who are—"

"You've read my letters. Somebody has. Say it properly."

Something went over her face.

"You're the clearance man," she said.

"I was."

"You're real." And she laughed again, wetly, and it turned into a cough. "God. Nobody believes in you. There's a man in accounts who thinks you're a filing convention."

"There isn't a room," Ivor said. "Say it."

"There isn't a room. There's never been a room." She shifted against the tiles. "It's not a place. It's a person standing in a place, and when they go the place is just a place again, and that's why you stood outside three doors in four hundred years and found nothing on the other side. You were late. Every time."

Nobody said anything.

"Tromsø was a woman called Hedda and she died in 2016 and your composer got four months of her going." The Sixth's voice had gone thinner. "Lisbon was a man whose name I've never been told. This one — " she moved her chin at the plant room door, "— was here from 'fifty-three to about 'ninety-one, and I don't know what happened to them, and neither does anybody above me."

Cole's mark had not stopped burning.

"Then why are you here."

"Because somebody's using this one now." She looked at him properly. "Not a person in a room. Somebody's found a way to do it without one, and whatever they're doing, they're practising on you, and I was sent to find out how far along it was and I have absolutely found out and I would like to go home."

"Practising how?"

"The voice," she said. "In your own voice. You've had it, haven't you."

Cole did not answer.

"Yeah," said the Sixth. "That's how."

It started upstairs.

A sound like a strip light warming up, except all of them, at once, and the great dead fittings forty feet overhead went from off to on to too bright, and the glass in two of them cracked.

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Dana said, "Out. Everybody out."

And that was the moment it went wrong, because Aldric was not with them.

He had gone back into the plant room.

Nobody saw him do it. Afterwards Reeve would say he'd been at the door and then he hadn't, and Marek would say he'd been checking the conduit, and both of them would be describing about four seconds that they had spent looking at a woman with two broken arms.

He was standing in the middle of twenty feet by twelve of nothing when Cole got to the doorway.

"Aldric."

"It's the bracket," Aldric said.

He was not looking round. He had his hand flat on the concrete of the far wall.

"The 1953 conduit comes in and it doesn't come out. I said it went somewhere. It doesn't go anywhere, Cole, it stops — there's four inches of cable behind this and then nothing, and you don't run cable into a wall and stop unless — "

The light in the room came on.

The one that did not work.

Cole went in.

He would think about that later and never once regret it, which was, in the end, the only clean thing about the whole afternoon.

He got four steps and the air in the room changed — not pressure, not temperature, something worse, a feeling like walking into a house where a conversation stopped when you opened the door — and Aldric turned round with his hand still on the wall and his face was completely calm.

"Ah," he said. "There you are."

And it was not Aldric's voice.

It was Aldric's mouth and Aldric's tired old face and the voice was flat and unhurried and enormously patient, and Cole had heard it before — three weeks ago, from his own throat, saying not this one — and he understood everything about four seconds too late.

"Get out," Cole said.

"Which of you is asking?"

"Get out of him."

"I'm not in him." Aldric's head tilted, in a way Aldric's head had never tilted. "He's a doorway. That's all a person ever is. This one has been standing in the right place for about a minute and I have been waiting in this building since nineteen ninety-one."

Behind Cole, in the corridor, Vesper said his name.

Here is what the mark did.

It did not warm. It did not push. It came out — gold going through the fabric of his collar and up the side of his throat and across his jaw like something arriving rather than something switching on, and the whole room lit with it, and the thing wearing Aldric flinched.

It flinched.

"Oh," it said, in Aldric's voice, with real surprise. "You're the—"

Cole hit it.

He did not use Verdict. He could not have said why at the time and would work it out months later: Verdict corrects a thing that is wrong, and there was nothing wrong in that room, and the absence of anything wrong was the entire point of it.

So he hit it, with his hand, with every part of the door open, and the concrete wall behind Aldric came in.

Not cracked. Came in — a foot and a half of 1908 brick and 1953 render folding backwards into the ground behind it, and the four inches of dead cable whipping out of the dust, and the light that did not work going out for good.

And Aldric dropped.

He was alive when Cole got to him.

That was the worst part of it and it lasted about ninety seconds and Cole would have given nearly anything, afterwards, for it to have been instant.

"Did I — " Aldric's hand was moving, looking for something. Cole caught it. "Did I say anything? Out loud? I've got — there's a gap and I can't—"

"No."

"You're lying. You've got the face." He was not frightened. That was the thing nobody in that corridor was ready for. He sounded irritated, like a man who had left the oven on. "Forty-one years and I was a door. That's — honestly, that's about right."

"Aldric—"

"Don't. I'm not doing a speech, I haven't got the wind." His grip tightened once. "Tell Mia I did the plant room. The bracket. I found the bracket."

"I'll tell her."

"Tell her I was useful."

"You were useful."

"Say it to her, not to me. She won't believe you. Make her—"

He stopped.

There was no moment. That was the thing that would sit in Cole's chest for the rest of his life: no light going out, no last breath, no sentence finishing. A man mid-instruction and then a man not.

Cole knelt on a concrete floor in a plant room under a Victorian swimming pool holding the hand of the last caretaker of Kaelmoor, and above them, in the main hall, every light in a building with no power supply went dark at once.

Marek carried him up.

Nobody discussed it. Reeve went to take the other side and Marek said "I've got him" in a voice that closed the subject, and he carried an eighty-two-year-old man up a flight of tiled stairs and across forty feet of empty swimming pool and out through a chained door, on his own, and put him down on the back seat of the van rather than the floor.

Then he walked about thirty feet away and was sick behind a wall, and came back, and said, "Right. What do we do."

Dana was the one who answered, because Dana had done this part before.

"We don't leave him here," she said. "That's the whole of it. Everything else can be worked out tomorrow."

Vesper got to the doorway and stopped and did not come in.

"Cole."

He didn't answer.

"Cole, she's gone. The Sixth. She's—"

"I know."

"There's blood all the way up the steps, she can't have—"

"I know," Cole said, and his voice came out in a register that put Vesper's hand flat on the doorframe, and the gold under his jaw had not gone out, and it did not go out for another two hours.

On the way back, somewhere past the second roundabout, Thessaly pulled into a lay-by and stopped the van and turned round in her seat.

"Somebody has to say it before we get there," she said. "So I will. His sister's dead, he's got no one, and there is no version of the next four days where any of us calls an authority."

"He's a person," Reeve said.

"He's a person with no legal existence since nineteen eighty-four." Thessaly's hands stayed on the wheel. "I checked in October. I check everybody. I'm sorry."

Nobody argued with her. Nobody had anything to argue with.

"Then we do it ourselves," Cole said.

"Yes."

"Somewhere with a garden."

Thessaly looked at him in the mirror for a second.

"Yeah," she said, and started the engine.

[End of Chapter 139]