The water wasn’t deep enough. The hot tap was too slow, and now it had stuck. Heather turned on the cold with her left hand, keeping Kallie’s neck gripped firmly in her right. It was taking too long. She should have been struggling by now. Why was she so relaxed? It wasn’t a normal reaction. Her throat should have closed, she should have been sputtering and fighting for life. It was the worst thing that could happen. She needed the reaction; without it, Kallie wouldn’t gasp and suck water down into her lungs.
‘Why won’t you fight?’ screamed Heather. But even as she tried to tighten her grip on the neck of the limp, heavy body, she could feel it pulling away from her, back toward the wet floor. She had dreamed of the mural for so long, but now the exposed white faces were unnerving her, judging her.
Even at this crucial moment, Kallie was aware of the growing sound of water all around her. One of the candles on the floor guttered and fell over, its flame hissing out. Water was gushing from between the bricks in the chimney breast, where she had been striking them with the sledgehammer. One brick began to rattle, thin sheets of water spraying around its edges, until it was extruded from the wall and blasted to the floor.
The rest of the chimney breast came down easily. Heather was horrified to see that the wall of water extended halfway up the breach. Moments later, the icy torrent hit them both, throwing them against the far wall as the pressure loosened more bricks. All around them, the acolytes of the water room looked down, happy to accept their fate, to be condemned and redeemed beneath the absolving waters of the world.
47. INTO THE UNDERWORLD
‘No answer,’ said May, peering through the brass letterbox. ‘There’s someone home, though.’
‘How do you know?’ Bryant tried to hunch in beneath the shallow porch.
‘There are lit candles all over the place. You wouldn’t go out and leave them burning, would you?’ He turned his ear to the letterbox and listened. ‘I can hear water.’
‘Yes, it’s pouring down the back of my neck right now,’ Bryant complained impatiently.
‘No, splashing water, downstairs. My God, what is that noise?’
‘The river’s breached the basement. That does it-we have to break the door down.’
May looked at the front door in some alarm. ‘I don’t know whether I can.’
‘The wood’s older than our combined ages, it’ll have a spring-weight in the wall and a single Yale lock holding it shut. Get out of the way.’ Bryant pushed his partner aside and raised his shoe. He would have fallen backwards down the steps if May hadn’t caught him.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, let me. This is a woman’s job.’ Longbright appeared behind them. On the third kick of her steel-tipped boot, the lock popped open. They squeezed into the hall and headed for the stairs, flashing torches to the floor below, and saw water pouring from beneath the door of the bathroom.
Heather tried to hold herself upright and reach the door as the glaucous Fleet-water swirled and shoved around the room. The level was no higher than her knees, but the floor was now too slippery to gain a foothold.
The sound of the front door slamming back sounded above her. As she watched Kallie slide from her grasp and become submerged in the breached river, she felt no distress in knowing that her friend would drown. Where better to fill your lungs than here, watched by the watery corpses of those who had faced a similar fate? She stared up at the calmly floating figures revealed on the walls, the pale bodies of drowned acolytes welcoming their ancient gods, and felt suddenly glad to be leaving behind her own distress. The weight rising from her came as an immense relief. Someone else could take over the responsibility now.
Heather barely noticed the female police sergeant who dragged Kallie free. She didn’t even complain when May threw a bath towel around her shoulders. The burden of the Water House, and its terrible possession of her, had begun to wash from her heart, leaving her pure and free again, an innocent child. She smiled tightly, looking from one old face to the other, knowing that she would tell them nothing, for there was no longer anything left to tell. They would never know what she had been through, and without her testimony there was no proof.
She was safe at last.
Longbright laid Kallie’s body on the stairs and squeezed filthy water from her chest, breathing air into her lungs. ‘She’s fine,’ the detective sergeant called up the stairs. ‘She’s swallowed quite a bit, though. She’ll need shots.’
‘John, stay here with Janice. Try and get the women dried off and warmed up while they wait for an ambulance. I’ll meet you later.’ Bryant rose and gripped the bannisters, climbing unsteadily over Kallie’s body.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ asked May.
‘Tate’s opened the conduit between the canal and the house. That’s why the water is in direct contact with the basement wall, because the river Fleet runs behind it whenever the channel-the Prince of Wales Causeway-is used. He’s changed the path of the water. I’m going after him.’ Bryant didn’t look overly keen on the idea.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said May. ‘You’re not up to it. I’ll go with Bimsley.’ He turned to climb the stairs, but Bryant scurried on ahead.
‘Come back! You are absolutely not going down a sewer at your age, with your legs. The very idea!’
‘You need me. You can’t predict my mind. You know it never follows logical routes. You’ll be too sensible.’
‘Then I’ll just have to compensate for you not being there by thinking rubbish,’ warned May.
‘You don’t know where he is, but I have a good idea. Besides, I had the presence of mind to wear my waterproof long johns, which is more than you’re doing. I always said if anything happened to us we’d go down together. If we don’t get Tate tonight, we’ll have nothing. Look at the state of that woman downstairs, look at her eyes-they’ll get a doctor to say she’s unfit to stand trial. Is that what you want? For once in my life I’m not at all cold, and I’m coming with you.’
Accepting that winning an argument with Bryant was as likely as finding a tobacconist’s shop at the top of Everest, May gave in gracefully, and chased his partner up the stairs. They met Bimsley in the street.
‘What about getting Oliver Wilton to help?’ asked May as they headed toward the alley. ‘He knows how the system is routed.’
‘Only from above ground,’ said Bryant. ‘He’s a technician. It’s not the same as seeing the world from underneath the street. Besides, the unit couldn’t be responsible for his safety. We know Tate’s down there because he’s just re-routed the water flow. The system can be reconfigured by manipulating valves, but once the channels start to fill the power of the river becomes too great to reach them, and we’re having the heaviest rainfall in thirty years. But I’m betting there’s an overflow route, one that can be opened by high water pressure.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘An escape route; this level of flooding probably switches the largest channels. The bigger the conduit, the greater the volume of water passing through it, the more pressure it will exert. It’s a track-switching system that only gets fully tested to its maximum level every few decades. Tate used a junction-rod to clear a dry path for himself through the tunnels,’ Bryant explained. ‘He made the necessary changes, then waited for the water level to rise to the point when it would re-route to a high-volume shaft. I think one of its side effects was to put pressure on the basement wall of number 5. He explained the process to me; he even gave me a map, but we couldn’t follow it because of the rain. He wanted me to understand.’
‘Then why didn’t he simply tell you what was going on?’ May asked.
‘I don’t think he’s capable of explaining the full story to anyone, of why he was there and what has happened to him. How long has he been living on the street? Do you have any idea what that does to a person?’
