Eli March — Chapter 2: First Floor

The water took another step while Eli was still staring at his hand.

He scrambled up three stairs, sneakers squeaking, and only then looked around properly. The staircase rose out of a drowned nave. Far below, through dark water, he could see a tiled floor, pews tipped sideways, and the pale stone faces of saints looking up as if they'd been waiting a long time. Columns carved with fish and birds and things that were neither. High above, colored glass threw restless light across the walls whenever the water moved.

His phone was gone. His jacket was soaked to the waist. The coffee on the dryer felt like something that had happened to someone else.

Five little burns on the back of his hand. One glowed, the color of a dying ember.

"Day one," he said. His voice came back off the stone smaller than he liked. "Okay. Find stairs. Don't drown."

The bell rang again.

Somewhere above and behind the stained glass, something heavy and bronze swung once. The water climbed another step, neat as a ruler.

Eli started climbing.

The staircase hugged the inside of a massive pillar and opened onto a gallery that ran the length of the hall. Dripping stone. Empty niches. Doors set into the outer wall, most of them warped shut. One hung open on a single hinge. Beyond it, a corridor smelled of wet plaster and old incense.

He walked for a long time. The corridor bent and split and bent again. Ruined beds. A kitchen with copper pots floating against the ceiling. A chamber of ledgers whose ink had bled into soft gray clouds. In one alcove, a pair of boots left neatly side by side, salt-stiff, about his size. He did not put them on.

The bell kept ringing. Each time he looked back through a window into the nave, the water had risen another step. He started counting without meaning to. If a step an hour was right, this gallery had maybe a day before it went under.

He found the altar by accident.

The corridor opened into a side chapel, tall enough that his voice would have echoed if he'd used it. A stone table stood under a round window of clear glass. Outside: gray sky and the tops of other roofs, all half-swallowed by the same dark water. On the table: a rusted knife, a coil of rope, a tin cup, and a notebook swollen shut by damp.

Eli peeled the notebook free. The first pages were ruined. Further in, cramped pencil:

Day 3. Water at the choir loft. Don't sleep near the windows. It comes in quiet.

Day 4. Found the stairs behind the organ. They go up. Everything else goes down.

Day 5. If you're reading this, you already know. It takes you when it takes you. Leave something if you can. I couldn't.

No name. No Day 6.

Eli set the notebook back. His hands wanted to shake, so he wiped them on his jeans and made himself look at the rest of the altar.

Set into the stone at the center of the table, flush with the surface, was a disc of glass the size of a coaster. Deep bruised red. It threw a dull ruby glow across the knife and the tin cup. Exact same circle as the one glowing in a socket under his mother's house.

He put his fingertip on it. Warm, the way the steel plate in the closet had been warm.

The bell rang. The water climbed.

Eli took the rope and the knife. He left the notebook where it was. Then he went looking for a place that wasn't near a window.

He found a stone alcove off the corridor with no glass and a floor that was still dry. He sat with his back to the wall, the rope in his lap, and told himself he would only close his eyes for a minute.

He woke because his socks were wet.

The gallery outside the alcove was knee-deep. Dark water lapped at the threshold in small, patient waves. Somewhere in the nave, the bell was ringing again, and this time he heard it like a sentence he already knew the end of.

On the back of his hand, two marks glowed.

Eli stood up carefully, knife in one fist, rope over his shoulder, and looked down the flooded corridor toward where an organ had to be.

"Day two," he said. "Stairs behind the organ. Move."