Eli March — Chapter 5: The Last Camp

The roof was a long pitch of black slate, and the wind wanted him off it.

Eli came out through the arch on his hands and knees. The rope dragged at his shoulder. The knife was still in his fist because he no longer knew where else to put it. Behind him the pages in the bell had gone still. In front of him there was only rain, and slate running up into the gray toward a ridge he couldn't see.

He worked along the gutter first, where a lip of stone gave his sneakers something to catch. Then the gutter broke off into open air, and he had to go up.

The slates were old. Two slid out from under his knee and went over the edge, and he never heard them hit the water. He lay flat with his cheek on the wet stone until his breathing came back. Four marks glowed on the hand that gripped the slate. The fifth sat dark at the end of the row, waiting.

Far below, the real bell rang. Day four.

He reached the ridge an hour later by the bells, and for the first time he saw the whole city at once.

It went on to the edge of the rain. Roofs and towers and domes stood up out of the dark water like the backs of animals, every one drowned to the same line. Nothing moved on any of them. There was no smoke anywhere. The cathedral was the tallest thing he could see, and that didn't feel like luck.

Where the ridge met a squat stone chimney, someone had made a camp.

Eli stopped with his hand on the chimney and looked at it for a long time before he went any closer.

A sheet of oilcloth was stretched from the chimney to two iron hooks hammered into the slate, the same new iron as the ring on the stair. Under it, loose slates had been stacked into a low wall against the wind. Inside the wall there was a ring of black soot on a square of tin, a blanket folded into a stiff salt-white block, and a pencil worn down to a stub no longer than his thumbnail.

Nothing else. No pack. No boots. No body.

"Hello?" It came out before he could stop it, thin and stupid in the wind. Nobody answered, and he was glad.

He ducked under the oilcloth. Rain drummed on it a few inches above his head. Out of the wind, the cold went from sharp to merely bad, and his whole body started shaking at once, as if it had been waiting for permission.

Rainwater had pooled in a sag of the cloth. He tipped it toward his mouth and drank until his stomach hurt, then sat down hard against the slate wall.

Someone had lived up here. Not long. The soot ring was small and the tin under it wasn't warped, so whatever fire they'd had, it hadn't lasted many nights. He thought of the notebook on the altar, under the water by now. Day 4. Found the stairs behind the organ. They go up. Everything else goes down.

This could be their camp. It could be someone else's. The notebook hadn't said anything about a roof.

He unfolded the blanket. It cracked like old paper, and something heavy slid out of the folds and into his lap.

It was a disc of red glass the size of a coaster.

It was the same deep, bruised red as the one set into the altar and the one glowing in its socket under his mother's house, and it was broken. A single crack ran clean across it, edge to edge. The two halves still held together, but only just. Light came through the break unevenly, brighter along the crack than anywhere else, like something inside was pressing on the weak place.

The rim was chipped all the way around. Small white scars marked the glass where a blade had worked at it. Somebody had pried this out of something. Somebody had wrapped it up, carefully, the way you'd wrap a thing you meant to carry.

Leave something if you can. I couldn't.

Eli turned the disc over in his hands. It was warm, as warm as the plate in the closet floor, and it didn't cool when the rain blew in on it.

What were you trying to do with it? He kept the question in his head, and the camp kept its answer.

The bell rang. He crawled out to the edge of the slate wall to look.

From the ridge he could see down through a gap in the roof, past broken battens, into the top of the belfry arch. He watched it through the afternoon because there was nothing else to do and because not watching seemed worse. The light went from gray to thinner gray. The rain eased and came back. Each time the real bell rang, he counted, and each time he made himself look.

At dusk the water came up the iron stair.

He didn't see it so much as hear it. The sound of the belfry changed. The salt hiss on the stone floor went soft. Then a black shine slid across the bottom of the arch and stayed there, flat and patient, lapping at the lowest step of the belfry. One floor below him. The bell still hung above it, salt-white, its throat still stuffed with pages.

The false bell heard the real one and asked.

Up here it was thinner, torn apart by the wind, but it still found his teeth. The almost-note. The waiting half. His jaw ached with how much it wanted the rest.

Eli pressed his lips together and held the cracked disc against his chest with both hands.

DON'T ANSWER.

He didn't. The warped note went out across the drowned roofs and nothing came back.

On the back of his hand, the fifth mark began to itch.

He watched it happen this time. The skin went pale, then angry at the edges, and then the mark lit, last in the row, a quick small burn that faded into a steady glow. Five marks, all of them lit.

The disc in his hands brightened along the crack, just for a moment, as if it had noticed.

Eli stayed very still under the oilcloth while the dark came down. The water sat one floor below him. The bell hung over it. He looked at the bell for a long time, and then at the broken red glass, and then at the bell again.

Five days. Not four. Not six.

Day five. He didn't say it. He closed his hand around the disc.