The Heartless Warden

Chapter 10: A Rational Explanation

He blinked, and the letters were gone.

He had not moved. One knee was still on the linoleum, his right hand was still flat on the floor beside the place where the last stroke had ended, and the rag lay where he had set it down, stiff and dry.

Where the letters had been, the kitchen floor was clean.

Not mopped. Clean the way a floor is clean when nothing has ever been on it. The gray ran to the baseboard in one piece, the light through the window over the sink lay across it whole, and the place in the middle of the room where the water had gathered and climbed into letters was the same gray as every other place.

He put his palm flat on it.

Dry. Not damp, not tacky, and not cold. He held his hand there and looked at his own fingers, then turned them over. Dirt in the lines of the palm. A crate staple had put a nick in his thumbnail. Nothing red in the beds of the nails, nothing under them.

He had not touched the letters. He had put his hand down beside them and counted to four and left them where they were. Now there was nothing to touch.

That was the part he could not put down. Writing on the floor he could file with the rest of the night and get to later. But water had come up out of the boards and made a sentence, and now the boards were dry to the hand.

He got up. His knee had stiffened and it hurt to straighten.

He went through to the front room. The table was still set: two plates, two forks, the food gone stiff and cold on them, the chairs pulled out and not pushed back. By the door the rack had three hooks on it, two of them bare, and his jacket on the third — wet through the shoulders, hung straight and square, the collar turned out to air the lining. He had not hung it that way. He looked at it long enough to be sure of what he was looking at, and left it.

He took the problem apart the way he would take apart a bad scene, standing in the middle of the room. He did it out loud.

The first was that he was tired. Three nights on the exam papers for the Wardens' entrance, no food to speak of, a cut on his temple. A tired man sees a coat over a chair and calls it a man. He does not see writing come up out of the floor and stay there, in lines, crooked, the size of a hand. He does not count to four before he touches it.

The second he did not say out loud. Two souls in one skull, pressed in on each other, something gone wrong where they were pressed. Not a wall coming down. A plate: a c***k you don't see until it won't hold soup. If it was that, the fault was in the reading and not in the room. The room had been empty the whole time. There had never been anything on the floor at all.

His stomach turned over and then pulled hard, and that was at least a problem with an answer.

He went back through to the kitchen. The bucket stood in the corner where he had put it, the seam split, and he did not look at the rim of it. On the board by the sink was a cooked sausage, cold, one end flattened where a knife had been laid across it. He picked it up and ate it standing, three bites, and licked the grease off the side of his thumb. First food since he woke. It went down and stayed down, and the room came back into focus around it.

The third was a doctor.

He put it together in the order it would go down on a form, because that was a size he could hold: Patient reports visual anomaly. No sleep. Recent trauma, left temple. Refer to psychiatry. He read it back to himself and did not like it. Too neat, and it did not explain the water.

He got as far as the doorway between the kitchen and the front hall.

It came back.

Not a sound. Not a step on the floor above. Being looked at. The same as it had been in the dark of the house last night, and in the dream: a house with the lights down and every seat filled and every face turned at the same angle to the same square of floor.

Elliot stopped with his hand on the doorframe. He had spent years in rooms built so that a thousand people could watch one lit square of floor, and the work had taught him how much of a room a man's back covers.

He did not turn around.

The gutter ran. The house ticked as it warmed. His own breathing, which was fine, which was even.

The back of his neck was cold, and his shoulders had come up around his ears, and he turned.

The front room was empty. Window light on the table, three walls and a fourth with the door in it. Dust in the corner. He looked until looking had gone stupid, and it did not stop.

He took his jacket down off the third hook and put it on. It was cold and wet across the back, and he did not care. He got his boots from the mat by the door and did not bother with socks.

The bolt was stiff. He pushed it back, the lock gave a small cheap sound, and he opened the door.

Cold came over the threshold and through the coat and in under his shirt, and he shook once from the shoulders down, hard, a rattle he could do nothing about. Snowmelt, he thought. It had rained all night, and today was going to be one of those mornings with a sun that did not mean anything.

He stepped out onto the stoop.

Sun up, low out of the east, flat and white. It lit the fronts of the houses on both sides of Winter Street and turned the windows into blank silver squares, and showed the ice in the ruts and the salt on the boards.

Above the roofs, the sky was full of blue ribbons.

They hung from one end of it to the other, suspended, like something under water. Blue like the inside of a flame, deeper where a ribbon folded over on itself. One of them ran behind the Hollis chimney and showed again on the far side of it. Others were so high up they were only a stain. Once he stopped moving his eyes there was no telling the near ones from the far ones.

They did not light the street. The morning went on underneath them in its ordinary gray and white, and they hung over it like something hung over a stage before the house opened.

Elliot stood on his own stoop in his coat and boots, in the cold, in the flat white light, with the taste of sausage still in his mouth.

"Jesus."

He said it quietly. There was nobody on the street to say it to.

He looked down at his hands, which had gone steady on him without asking, and then he looked back up. The ribbons were still there. The one behind the Hollis chimney showed on both sides of it.

A floor that had been written on and then had not been, and a sky with ribbons hanging in it in broad daylight. He had not gone looking for either one. Either the trouble was in the room or it was in him. Both answers led to the same door, and behind it was a man who would ask him questions and write the answers down.

He reached back and pulled the door shut behind him. The latch went home with a c***k that carried the length of the empty street.

Overhead, the ribbons did not move.