Eli March — Chapter 3: Above the Tide

The gallery was already a river.

Eli waded out of the alcove with the rope over one shoulder and the knife in his fist. The water was cold enough to make his ankles ache, and every step sent a soft slap against the stone. Behind him, water spilled over the threshold of the alcove where he'd slept.

Stairs behind the organ, the notebook had said. An organ in a place like this would sit high, above the choir, where its sound could fill the whole hall. So he went looking for a way up.

It took him most of the day. The gallery split into side passages that ended in locked doors or drowned stairwells, and twice he had to turn back through water that had risen while he wasn't looking. The bell kept time over all of it. By the time he found the stair, the light through the high windows had gone from gray to a thinner, tired gray.

It was cut into the outer wall at the far end of the gallery, half hidden behind a toppled screen of carved wood. On the stone beside it, just above the waterline, someone had drawn an arrow in chalk. Next to the arrow was one word in hard, slanted capitals, the same hand as the chalkboard under his mother's house:

UP.

Eli touched the chalk. It came away white on his fingers. The same person had stood right here, with the same water rising behind them.

He climbed.

The stair was steep and slick and so narrow his shoulders brushed both walls. Halfway up, an iron ring had been hammered into the rock, newer than the stone around it. He looped his rope through it to haul himself past a stretch where the steps had crumbled, then pulled the rope free and coiled it back over his shoulder. Below him the real bell rang, and he heard the gallery water rise another step with a sound like a slow swallow. He didn't look down after that.

The stair opened onto the choir loft, into gray light and the smell of paper left out in the rain.

The loft ran along the back of the cathedral, high above the nave. Rain had come through the broken windows for years, and the floor was puddled and green with moss. At the far end the organ rose to the ceiling, a wall of pipes gone dull and spotted with age. It was the biggest instrument Eli had ever seen, and it was completely silent.

Between him and the organ were the nests.

There were dozens of them, built into the old choir stalls. They were woven from hymnals, soaked pages twisted into cups and tunnels, with gold leaf still clinging to some of the edges. Most were empty. A few moved.

Eli stopped at the top of the stairs.

Something small and pale shifted inside the nearest nest. Then a second one lifted its head further down the loft, and then a third. They were almost birds and almost something else. Their necks had too many joints, and their eyes were the flat gray of old coins. They watched him without any fear at all, the way you'd watch weather.

"Okay," Eli whispered. "I'm just passing through."

The nearest one opened a beak full of chewed paper and made no sound.

He edged along the rail with the nests on his left and the long drop to the nave on his right. Through the broken glass he could see the city, every roof a dark island, the water climbing the lower floors of each one. He looked over the rail once. The gallery he'd slept on was gone.

On the back of his hand, two marks still glowed.

He reached the organ. On its casing, at eye level, was another chalk mark in the same capitals: a single tally of five, and underneath it one word.

LISTEN.

He frowned at it. Far below, the real bell rang, and the water rose a step.

Then something answered it.

The sound came from above the loft, from the dark between the roof beams. It was a single bronze note, warped and wet, as if something up there had heard the bell every hour for years and learned to copy it. Every nest in the loft went still. Every pale head turned upward together.

On the back of Eli's hand, the third mark lit.

He didn't decide to move. His body decided for him. He squeezed around the side of the organ, where the pipes left a gap barely wide enough for him, and found what the notebook had promised: a narrow iron stair bolted to the wall behind the casing, spiraling up into the dark. A chalk arrow beside it pointed up.

Behind him the false bell rang again, and the whole loft began to rustle, like a congregation getting to its feet.

Eli grabbed the rail.

"Day three," he said. "Up. Go."