CHAPTER 7
Avery
◆
The inside face of my door had been painted too many times to count.
I went over all of it with my palm anyway, hinge side to strike, hunting a keyhole.
There had been a mortise there once. Somebody filled it with putty and painted over the putty.
The paint had sunk into the shape of the hole, so what I had under my hand was the outline of a lock.
There was no bolt on it, no chain, no thumbturn, and there never had been one.
On my second night here a man promised me a lock on my side of that door. He said it in plain words and did not decorate it, so I believed him. Nobody lied to me. The thing was meant, and then it was not done. There is no lever in the world a person can pull on that.
Up in the Ledger Room my transcript lay open on the desk with the third leaf in it.
The translation sitting in it is one I invented out of nothing.
Since the night on the mats in the Cage I had been telling myself I would go up and take it back.
I had not gone up. I had spent a rainy Friday being right about small things instead.
I emptied the jacket onto the bed, because a person about to do something stupid should take an inventory first. My phone.
A wallet with a bus card and two twenties in it.
A page in my mother’s handwriting, folded into eighths, which I did not open.
I have carried it since the funeral and I cannot read a line of it.
I put it back in the inside pocket. Then the key, small and cold and green in the teeth, with a squared bow.
The phone lit while my hand was on it. The number was one I did not know.
My brother’s name sat in the message, spelled right, with the number of a room after it.
There was no greeting and no signature, and nothing in it that a person could answer.
The clock at the top of the screen read 10:31, and I stood over it with my thumb above the reply box until the screen dimmed.
The east service stair has a camera at the half landing, and the bracket has been on that wall long enough to have a paint line around it.
I went down under it at the pace of somebody going to bed.
Hurrying is what a camera is for. At the bottom there is a steel door with a card reader beside it, and the old keyhole sits underneath the reader.
My key turned it. The door came off the frame with a soft knock of air. The reader chirped once and wrote a line into a log I will never be allowed to read. That was the part I could not take back, and I knew it while I was doing it.
The tunnel runs under the north path to the library and it is eleven minutes at a walk.
A man told me that in a tone that meant he had timed it himself.
What nobody told me is that the lights run on a timer cut to the same figure.
A person who keeps walking keeps the lights.
A person who stops finishes in the dark.
It smells of wet limestone down there, which is a clean smell and a cold one.
The path above ran water all day, and some of it came through the joints and got into my collar.
A tunnel that long carries sound forward, so my own steps came back at me out of the dark ahead.
The whole walk had the shape of somebody approaching.
Two hundred paces in, a brass plate is set into the wall at wrist height with a survey mark stamped 1911 into it. I stopped there, and I stopped because of my brother, which is how it goes with me. I stood with my thumb on cold brass and worked out what a room number from a stranger is worth.
The first bank went out behind me with a click.
Then the one closer to me. I ran. It is a bad tunnel to run in, because the floor slopes to the channel and the channel takes a stride out from under a person.
The banks kept dying in sets, and the dark came up my back at the speed of a walk I had already broken.
The last bank went while I was short of the door.
I put my left hand out for the wall and found the grating over the pump recess.
One bar of that grating is gone, and what is left of it is a stub with an edge.
At first it was nothing at all. Then it was hot and precise, and I could feel my own pulse standing up in the palm.
The door at the far end is wood, older than the tunnel, and it was not locked either. By then that was the joke I was living inside. I came through it into stack four with my hand closed and my sleeve going wet, and the reading lamp at the end of the row was burning.
Rook sat on the shelving step with his sleeves shoved past the elbow.
He is a man who is always doing something with his hands.
He taps, he turns things over, he takes a thing apart on a table while he talks across it.
His hands were doing nothing whatsoever, and that told me how long he had been sitting there.
“Nine feet to that door. Not locked. Staying that way.” He said it before I had my balance back, and he did not come up off the step.
“You have been sitting in a dark library with one lamp on,” I said.
“Longer than the lamp,” he said. “I brought a book down here and I never opened it.”
“Then somebody told you which door I would come out of.” I said it to the shelf beside his head, because that was easier than saying it to him.
“Somebody told me which door you went in at. The rest of it is a straight line, and I can walk a straight line.” Blood got to my cuff and dropped off the point of it onto the boards. He came three inches up off the step, then put himself back down and set his hands on his knees.
“I do not put my hands on anybody who has not asked. Still true while you bleed.”
“Stop triaging me and tell me what you knew.”
“Four days. That is how long he has been reading the door logs.”
“He has been reading them,” I said. “He has not been mentioning them.”
“He did not lie and he did not tell you. I cannot make those two sit together.” His jaw worked once on the last word.
“I can,” I said. “It is a lock with nothing on my side of it. It costs a man nothing to be honest about the thing he was never going to do.”
He turned his head, and the lamp got him from underneath. His eyes are moss-green, and they were doing something complicated.
“Say that again.”
“There is no keyhole on the inside of my door,” I said. “There is putty where one was going to go, and paint over the putty. I found it with my hand tonight, and then I came down here.”
“He does not lie,” Rook said. “He built a whole life out of not lying. The way he does it is by leaving a room before the sentence has an end on it.”
“Did you know about my door?”
“No.” He looked at the floor between his boots. “I put a work order in for your side of that door on the night you got here. It came back marked for review, and I let it sit, because other things were burning. The logs are his. The work order is mine.”
“You let it sit.”
“I let it sit.”
“Then we are going to be honest about what I have,” I said. “It is not a lock. It is a promise somebody made about a lock, and I have been sleeping behind a promise since my second night in this building.”
“I know what it is,” he said. “I am not going to talk you out of the word for it.”
I stood in the aisle with my hand closed and the blood going warm in the fold of it. Then I told him about the message, because it was going to come out anyway, and spending it beat losing it.
“There is a message on my phone from a number I do not know,” I said. “My brother’s name is in it, spelled right, and a room number after it, and nothing else.”
“Show me.”
“No. If I show you, it stops being mine before midnight,” I said. “It goes up two floors and comes back down as a decision somebody made about me while I was asleep.”
“That is true, and I am going to remember you said it to my face.” He put his hands back on his knees. “Copy it somewhere they cannot reach. Let me see it when you want me to see it, and never before that.”
“The room number is not one of ours.”
“The room number is not the point of it,” he said. “Somebody wanted you to know they can put a hand on him, and they wanted the knowing to land tonight.”
“It arrived at 10:31.”
“And your key went into the steel door at ten forty.” He took something out of his back pocket and turned it over once, and it was a hex driver with a blue handle worn pale at the grip.
“Give me the key, sparrow. They are pulling the core tonight.”
“Pulling it out of what?”
“Out of this door, and out of the steel one at the bottom of your stair. Both ends, one core each, done before anybody in this building eats breakfast. The tunnel is shut as of tonight, and it does not open again for you or for me or for the man who ordered it.” He went past me to the door I had come through, close enough that I got wet limestone and gun oil off him in the same breath.
He set the driver into the screw under the latch and turned it half around.
Two thin clicks came out of the wood, a quarter turn apart, and then the core slid loose into his open hand, brass and greasy and no bigger than my thumb.
“Day ten of ninety, and you changed the lock.”
“Yes.”
He did not tell me it was for my own good.
He did not give me the speech about the road and the rain and how far it is to anywhere from here.
He did not apologize for any part of it.
I put the copper key into his open hand, and then I folded his fingers over it myself, which is not the same as handing it to him, and both of us knew the difference.
“It is dead as of tonight, and I am the man who killed it,” he said. He pushed it down into the front pocket of his jeans. “Put that somewhere you can get at it later, because you are going to want it.”
“I am not going to have any trouble finding it. I have a good memory for the hour a door stopped being mine.”
“Let me look at the hand.” He put his palm out, open, and left it in the air between us.
“No.”