facility schematics were similar. There was the warehouse portion, then something sunk down in the back, and then much, much more below…
The guard stood up and smiled at them. “How are you today, Mr. Evans?”
“Fine, thank you. How is Little Women?”
“Oh, it’s excellent. Thank you for recommending it to me.”
“Well, I want to make sure the time passes for you, Henry. Metal as usual?”
“Yes, sir,” said the guard. “And, she, uh…”
“Oh, nonsense, Henry. Miss Fairbanks just wanted to make sure I made it in all right,” said Evans. “She won’t be going down to see.” He winked at her, then took out his watch and his wallet and handed them over, and then removed his spectacles and put on a pair whose frames were made of wood. He removed his keys, the change he had, and then his belt. Henry took them all and stored them on a nearby table.
“Keep an eye on them, Henry,” said Evans.
“Oh, I will, sir. Always do.”
Samantha found herself staring at the wall. Then she looked down at her hands and her arms. She could not explain it, but she felt some strange prickliness standing here, like an electrical field, but somehow deeper. It was as though this section of the building was different from what she had passed through, and perhaps different from any other place she had ever been. She felt she was in some boundary or somehow soft place, a border beyond which things changed imperceptibly.
She looked up to find Evans smiling at her. “This is where we part,” he said. “I had a lovely chat with you.” He leaned close and whispered, “You feel it, don’t you? Don’t you?”
“Yes. What is it?”
He shrugged, then laughed. “I can’t say. Company policy. Let me know how your inquiry goes, Miss Fairbanks! I’ll watch it with interest.” Then the little old man waved and walked off into the dark hallway. She watched as he vanished into the shadows and the sounds of his footsteps faded into nothing. Then she stood there, unmoving.
“Are you all right, miss?” asked Henry.
“What? Yes. Yes, I…” She trailed off, then took a step forward. Henry stood to block her way.
“No, no,” she said. “I don’t want to go in, I just wondered if you’d mind if I…” She gestured at the walls.
Henry looked at the wall and smiled. “Sure. I do it all the time.”
Samantha nodded faintly and walked to the towering cement walls. She placed one hand on the stone and for a moment was disappointed. There was nothing. It was just cool cement, like the street outside. But then she felt it, very faintly…
Vibrations. So low and deep they could barely be felt at all. She paused, then put her ear to the wall. She heard a low, steady, measured pounding, like some enormous machinery operating somewhere nearby, behind the wall or below the floor, something moving to a tempo she could not identify but felt she had known her entire life.
Then she sensed it. The flow around her. Something moving. Changing. As if whatever operated below was bending and changing the very structure of the world as though it were no stronger than any other metal found in the hills.
She listened for some time. Maybe hours, maybe minutes. Then Henry coughed and she awoke from her trance. She walked away, head held high, and went and had a coffee before delivering her package to the Evesden Police Department and returning home. But for some reason she avoided sewer grates and street vents, and would not go near the trolley stations.
When she came home she found Garvey waiting in the mezzanine of her floor, seated in a chair and playing with his hat in his lap. He looked up and then stood when she came near, and ran a nervous hand through his hair. He looked pale and weary, as though he had been up for days.
“Oh,” he said. “I wondered when you’d come home.”
“How long have you been waiting here?” she asked. “I was just at the station to drop off what we had on Skiller.”
“I haven’t been here too long. Sorry to make you go all the way to the station when you could have just held on to it.” He paused, then said, “Are you all right? Are you hurt? I missed you at the Hamilton. I wanted to check in on you.”
“My ears keep ringing,” she said, and she began to walk toward her apartment door. “And I may have sprained my wrist. But otherwise I’m fine. Much better than Mr. Hayes.”
“That’s good to hear,” he said, following her.
“I’m sorry for delaying your case, which it seems is what I was doing. I should have made Mr. Hayes stop once we had Mr. Skiller’s address and then given it to you, shouldn’t I?”
“That’s not what I’m here about,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure that you were okay.”
“Well, you can see that I’m fine,” she said, trying to believe it. She opened her apartment door slowly. The memories of the previous days bloomed in her head, the filthy, abandoned children and Hayes reading the goodbye letter as he sat upon the empty bed, and she badly wanted to think of something else, anything else. She looked at Garvey and saw he felt the same, perhaps. Blood was pounding in her ears, and she was reminded of the warehouse Evans had showed her, and the echoes in the deeps.
She entered and turned to him. “Why don’t you come in?” she asked. “You look like you’ve been awake for days.”
“That’s because I have,” he admitted. “I don’t even know what time it is.”
“Then why don’t you come in?”
Garvey hesitated. “I was just… seeing if you…”
He trailed off. She waited, but he did not say anything.
“Donald,” she said slowly and gently, “why don’t you come in?”
He looked at her, desperate and uncertain, and then nodded, still fumbling with his hat in his hands. He walked in and sat on her couch, and stared up at her earnestly. A cagey young thing, she thought, wearing years that lied about his true heart. Then, smiling slightly, she shut the door, and went to sit beside him.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Hayes lay in bed in the hospital, perfectly still. The nurses who looked in on him sometimes thought he was sleeping with his eyes open, but he was very much awake. He’d retreated deep inside himself and gone deaf to the outside world so that he could work in peace, slowly assembling his next move. He rifled his long and twisted memory for contacts and friends and reliable sources, for favors owed and debts unpaid and veins of information he could mine. Most of them were worthless, and these he laid aside. More troubling were the ones he started considering before remembering that they were not in Evesden at all, but belonged to some other city, to some sandy outpost or distant fringe country. He’d left them all behind long ago. And others that he’d summon up would turn out to be no longer in the world in any sense, having gone on dangerous voyages and never returned, or been laid low by a stray bullet, or met the noose and danced on the scaffold, or simply expired.
Most troubling of all were the people he remembered vividly, but could not recall meeting or having a conversation with. These, he figured, were not his memories at all, but were ones stolen over the years, mnemonic castoffs that’d somehow been caught within his mind. Sometimes he forgot he lived and worked mostly within a world of abstracts and dreams.
His work went slowly, and soon he realized he was distracted. What Garvey had said had nettled him, somehow. Garvey’s disappointment stung deeper for him than others’. As he’d come to know Garvey over the years of bleary cases and casual atrocities, Hayes had begun to feel the same admiration for him that a young boy does for his older sibling, even though Hayes was several years older than him. The way Garvey saw the world felt at once true and impossible, full of a sort of wisdom that had always been beyond Hayes. It was as if Garvey’s life was the way Hayes’s should have been, yet he had failed utterly at it, and now could only watch.
Most of it was that Garvey knew what Hayes could do, knew that Hayes listened to his thoughts, and simply did not care. The idea that someone could live so unashamedly and without self-disgust baffled Hayes.
