Book 1 Chapter 14: Home(Open)
Sunday arrived the way a cat arrives in a room, which is to say without announcement and with every intention of staying.
Ray woke to sun on the quilt, a goat's ear in his face, and the unfamiliar sensation of being somebody's pillow on both sides at once. Scarlet had migrated in the night until she was lying mostly on top of him, one knee hooked over his hip, her inky hand curled loosely on his sternum like she was holding a place in a book. Ruth, on the other side, had gone the opposite way and was lying in a perfectly straight line with her arms folded on her chest and her face turned toward the window, like a woman who had fallen asleep in the middle of being a statue.
Neither of them had moved in hours. Ray lay between them and did the thing he had promised to do, which was say it out loud, quietly, to the ceiling.
"I'm not getting up yet," he told it. "I'm noting that I could, and that I'm not."
"Good," said Ruth, without opening her eyes.
"You're awake."
"I'm resting. It's different." One gold eye opened a slit. "You were narrating at the ceiling."
"It's a rule."
"It's a wonderful rule. Keep going."
"I'm also noting that someone is knocking."
Someone was. It was a small, apologetic, rapid knock, the knock of a person who had practiced knocking in a mirror and still did not trust it, and it came from the door of the suite, and it was followed, a moment later, by a voice.
"Sir? Madam? Miss? It's Pell. I do beg your pardon. It's, ah, it's nine."
"It's what?" said Scarlet, into Ray's ribs.
"Nine, Miss. A.M. I'd have waited, but there's a, there's a matter."
"Is it a form?"
A pause on the other side of the door.
"It's a category," said Pell, miserably.
He had both shoes this time. Ray noticed that first, because he was in a state to notice small things, having spent three minutes finding a shirt that was his and trousers that were not on the goat. Pell stood in the middle of the sitting room with his round glasses fogged and his folders hugged to his chest, in a pair of brown shoes so brightly polished that they reflected the ceiling, and the look of a man who had been awake all night and had not enjoyed any of it.
"Steve returned them," he said, following Ray's gaze. "He did a very thorough job. I can see my own face in the left one. It's not a face I'd choose."
"Sit down, Pell," said Ruth, kindly. She had put a robe on over her nightdress, and had somehow made it look like a gown. "Have some tea. Tell us what the category is."
He sat on the very edge of a chair. Scarlet, in the black T-shirt with her hair standing up on one side and a pencil, again, behind her ear, curled up on the sofa across from him and regarded him over her knees with the bright wicked sympathy of a person who had been, until recently, a form's victim herself.
"The Household Registry," said Pell. "That's the matter. I'd like to say it's a small one. Madam Quill says it's a delight. I believe she's using the word in a technical sense."
"Go on."
"Every resident of the Abyme must be entered under a household. It's the oldest rule we have. It's older than the baths." He opened a folder with trembling fingers, and drew out a large sheet printed with little boxes. "There are five permitted classes. Single. Pair. Family, which is a pair or more with dependents. Guild. And Ruin."
"Ruin?" said Ray.
"It's for those whose households have, ah, come apart. It's mostly used for ghosts." He coughed. "I'm sorry. I'm trying to be clear. The difficulty is that the Hinge is entered as part of a Pair, the Pair being himself and the Consort, which was filed on Tuesday, and the Person, Class Two, is entered as Single. As of last night."
"And?"
"And the laundry has reported that, as of last night, the Single is no longer single in any sense that the registry recognizes." Pell closed his eyes. "I received four complaints. Two of them were in verse."
Scarlet put her face in her knees.
"The sign on the door is the problem," Pell went on, a little faster, as one speaks while the bandage is coming off. "It says Home. Under the old law, that's a declaration. It's what we call a binding word. If a resident hangs Home on a door and a person has slept behind it, then the registry is obliged to take note, and I've spent the entire night trying to find a class that fits, and there isn't one." He pushed his glasses up. "I tried Pair Plus One."
"That's a guest," said Ruth.
"That's what Madam Quill said. At some length."
"It's a very bad category."
"I know, Madam. I wrote it, at about four a.m., and I regretted it by half past." He pressed his hands flat on the folder. "I'm so sorry. I'd hoped to find something that would, that wouldn't make you feel like you were being filed. It's only that the old classes were all built for, for two. A pair, a family, a guild, they're all built on twos and the multiples of two. There's no class for three."
There was a short silence.
"There's a table," said Ruth, "with three legs."
"Madam?"
"It stands up better."
"I'm, I'm not sure that's a legal term."
"It will be," said Ruth.
Ray looked at her. She was sitting very upright in her robe, with her hands folded, and a small private smile was beginning at the corner of her mouth, the expression of a woman who had just been handed a very large and very satisfying piece of unfinished work.
"Pell," she said. "Is Madam Quill in the building?"
"She's in the lobby, Madam. She wouldn't come up. She said it was indelicate to approach a household before it had a name. She's, ah." He glanced at the door. "She's brought a stamp."
Quill was standing at the foot of the great staircase in the lobby, as small and straight as a hat pin, in a gray silk suit and a pair of spectacles on a chain, with a young clerk at either elbow carrying a table. It was a very small table. Somebody had put a white cloth on it and set out an inkpot, a stick of wax, a brass seal, and a plate of what looked like pistachio pastries, and she was standing next to it with her hands folded and the air of a woman waiting for a train she was very much looking forward to.
Ray had expected an audience. He had, for some reason, imagined a hush. What the Kagami Hotel actually gave them was about forty spirits who had apparently found urgent business in the lobby, among the potted ferns and the lacquered pillars, and who were all doing a poor job of not looking. There was a large round one in a bath-robe. There was a long gray spirit like a coat on a hook. There was a very small mouse in a waistcoat standing on another mouse's shoulders, pretending to read a newspaper that was upside down. And in the corner, with her chin on her fist and her eyes enormous, sat the damp little laundry spirit from the day before, who was plainly the author of the whole affair and was not at all sorry.
"Good morning, Hinge," said Quill. "Good morning, Consort. Good morning, Person."
"Good morning," said Ray, faintly.
"I do apologize for the crowd. I did try to ask them to leave. It's a hotel." She turned her pale winter eyes on Scarlet, and something in them warmed by several degrees. "I understand you have, in the course of one weekend, acquired a legal existence, a room, a position, a door, and a household. It's a very good weekend. I have clients who haven't done as well in a century."
"It's been a lot," said Scarlet.
"I'm sure." Quill picked up a sheet of paper from the little table. "I should say that I read your form. The whole of it. I've read a great many in my life, and I don't often have occasion to frame one."
"Pell said."
"Mr. Pell was extremely insistent." The old woman smiled, a small dry smile like the crease of a letter. "I've brought you the other half of it."
She turned the paper around.
It was the Household Registry. It was printed with the five classes, in the neat old type, Single and Pair and Family and Guild and Ruin. And at the bottom, in the margin, in her own clear fine hand, she had added a sixth box, and written beside it, in ink that was still faintly wet:
Class Six. Household of Three. To be known as: a PINKIE.
Ray stopped breathing.
"I'm told," said Quill, "that it's the name given to the hallway. I've submitted it to the Department as a precedent. Under the old law a thing may be named for the first structure it holds up. You built the structure, Mr. Ray. You stood it on a lantern pool of unspent hours, and your wife co-signed in a cornfield, and the girl who came out of the envelope walked the hall to the end and was let in." She cleared her throat. "It's a very sound precedent. I'm rather proud of it."
"It's a household," said Scarlet, in a tiny voice.
"It's a household of three, and it's recognized. The registry has no opinion of what goes on inside." Quill folded her hands. "It has only a view that three people who have said home and meant it are entitled to a box."
Nobody said anything.
Then the big round spirit in the bathrobe, over by the potted fern, began to clap.
It was a slow, damp, enormous clap, like someone patting a sofa. The long gray coat spirit joined him. Then the mice. Then a whole row of small round creatures in the doorway whom Ray had never seen before and was fairly sure had no hands, who clapped regardless, and a frog in a top hat wept openly into a handkerchief at the door. The laundry spirit in the corner leaped up on her chair and cheered like a person at a boxing match.
Ruth, beside him, had gone absolutely still. Ray looked at her. She was looking at the paper, and at the sixth box, and her face was doing something complicated and hard to name, a sort of astonished, grave tenderness, like an old river meeting the sea.
"I've never been in a box," she said, quietly.
"It's a good box."
"It's a wonderful box." She took a breath. "Is there a pen?"
There was a pen. Ruth signed first, in a long slanting hand that looked like grass in wind. Ray signed second, in the big careful scrawl of a man who has signed a great many delivery slips and no marriage documents. Scarlet signed last, slowly, with her tongue between her teeth, and at the end, after her own name, she drew a very small envelope, and looked at it, and laughed.
Quill pressed the seal into the wax.
It was a small sound, a soft tock, like a heartbeat. But a very long way off, deep beneath the lobby floor, deep beneath the baths and the long stairway and the pool of gray lanterns, something answered it. A bell began to toll. It tolled three times, low and warm and sweet, and Ray felt the note arrive in his chest and settle there, the way a hand settles on a shoulder.
"The hallway," he said.
"It's settling," said Ruth. "Oh, Ray. It's got a third rail."
"A what?"
"A, I don't know how to explain it. A keel." She laughed. "It was always a little crooked. A little leaning. I thought it was meant to be that way. And it was only waiting."
On the table, the pistachio pastries had gone a faint, unmistakable gold.
"Please," said Quill, looking at them with a slightly rueful smile. "It would be rude not to."
Scarlet's first day at work began at ten o'clock, in the lobby, at a table that somebody had carried in from the lounge and dressed with a green cloth.
She had been given a stool, a lamp, a drawer of pencils, a bottle of the black ink she liked and a sheet of door-paper she had been asked, gently, not to waste, and a list. The list was two feet long. It had been written by Madam Yabulba, in a heavy, slanting, ferociously impatient hand, and it said things like Bath 4: Mind the Step. Laundry: No Entry. and Third Floor Corridor: Please Do Not Feed The Wall.
"What's wrong with the wall?" said Scarlet.
"Don't ask," said Steve, who was standing at her elbow like an aide-de-camp.
"I'm asking."
"It's been very hungry, Miss, since the winter."
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she sharpened a pencil, with enormous seriousness, and began.
By noon she had done eleven.
Ray, who had been given a chair and a pot of tea and nothing in particular to do, sat across the lobby with a book on his knee and watched her work, and found that he could not make the words in front of him mean anything. It was the way she moved. She did not so much draw a sign as talk it into existence, in a kind of low muttering, half to herself and half to the paper, and he saw the lines come up from the surface as if they had been there all along and she was only introducing them to the light. Mind the Step was a small cartoon staircase with a wince on its face and a plaster across one riser. No Entry had a very small, severe, extremely polite hand on it, the palm held up, with a ruff at the wrist. Please Do Not Feed The Wall was, he was pretty sure, the best thing he had ever seen. It was an elegant, mournful, kindly-looking wall, with a pair of eyes, regarding a handful of crumbs and shaking its head.
And the signs, as she hung them, behaved.
He saw it happen by the foot of the main stairs, when she nailed Mind the Step to the post. The step beneath it looked, for a moment, almost embarrassed. And the guests who passed by it, a bear-shaped spirit in a nightcap, a pair of hurrying frogs, slowed, and glanced down, and carefully, politely, lifted their feet.
"It works," said a young spirit beside him, in tones of awe. She was a small thing in a gray apron, with a face like a clean plate. "The old ones never worked. The old ones just said no. This one asks."
"That's the idea," said Ray, with a surge of absurd, ridiculous pride, as if he'd drawn it himself.
All morning they came to look. It started with two or three, and then it was twenty, drifting past the table as if by accident, pretending to have business with the potted ferns. A big gentle spirit like a walking radish stooped over the table to watch her draw. A woman with a head like a lantern held up one of the rejected sketches and said, in a hushed voice, that she had not seen anyone do a kindly sign in two hundred years.
"It's only a drawing," said Scarlet, going pink.
"Nobody here says that about a drawing, dear," said the lantern woman, and patted her hand.
At about half past twelve a vast, slow, silty shape came through the front door and lowered itself, with a groan, into the chair opposite.
Ray looked up.
She was a river. That was the only way to put it. She had the shape of a very large old woman in a brown shawl, but the shawl was mud, and the hands in her lap were the color of wet clay, and where her face should have been there was the slow bright shifting of silt in water, with two small dark eyes drifting in it like pebbles. She smelled of rain and reeds and the slow cold bottom of a lake.
"Mrs. Alder," Steve whispered, in the tone of a man identifying a thunderstorm. "She's been in Room Nine since before the Ledger. She never comes down."
"Child," said Mrs. Alder, in a voice like water over stone.
"Yes?" said Scarlet, a little faint.
"They tell me you do doors."
"I do signs."
"I'd like one. For mine." The silt turned, slowly. "I have had four hundred years of people knocking. Not unkindly. They bring me news, and nets, and small dead birds, and apologies. I'd like to be left alone for one afternoon a year. I have not found a sign that says so without making people feel like they have done something."
Scarlet looked at her for a long moment.
Then she put down her pencil, and put her chin on her hand, and said, "What do you want it to feel like?"
The great slow face stirred.
"Like a blanket," said Mrs. Alder, at last. "Over a sleeping thing."
Scarlet nodded.
She drew it in six lines. Ray watched it happen. A low gray curve of water. A heap of reeds. A little round shape beneath a quilt of silt, sleeping, with one eye shut and a tiny smile. And beneath it, in very small, very soft letters, she wrote:
Quiet, please. Somebody's resting. It's been a long river.
She held it up to the lamp.
Mrs. Alder looked at it for a long time.
"Oh," she said, in a voice that had gone strangely small. "Oh, that's me."
"Is it okay?"
"It's the first thing anyone's ever drawn of me that wasn't a flood." The old silt eyes, drifting slowly, were wet. "Thank you, child."
She took the sign in both muddy hands and went away up the stairs, and for the rest of the day, at half past three, in the tall quiet corridor outside Room Nine, a small hush fell on the Kagami Hotel that lasted until sunset. The bellhops went by on tiptoe. The very radiators, Ray noticed, dropped their voices.
Scarlet watched her go with a pencil in her mouth and a stunned expression.
"I think I might be good at this," she said.
"I think," said Ray, "I've never been so proud of anyone."
"Shut up."
"I'm saying it out loud. It's a rule."
She threw a pencil at him. It missed. It was, he thought, the nicest thing that had happened to him all morning, and then he looked across the lobby, and saw that Ruth was not there.
He found her in the baths.
It was a little after two, and the great stone stairway was cool and almost empty, with the afternoon light coming in through the high windows and laying long bars across the water. He went down slowly, past the first pool and the second, with the gray hush of the lanterns rising before him, and she was sitting at the very edge of the old pool in her gray-blue dress with her feet in the water and her hands in her lap, looking at nothing.
He sat down next to her. He took off his shoes, and rolled his trousers, and put his feet in. It was cold. It was the pleasant cold of a creek in August.
"I'm sitting by you," he said, "because I noticed you left."
"I wasn't hiding."
"No."
"I only wanted a moment. I didn't want to make a thing of it."
"I'm making a thing of it. I'm sorry. I'm, I'd like to. If you'll allow it." He looked at his feet. "Is it the hour?"
"It's a little bit the hour."
"Okay."
"It's not even a bad one." She laughed, a small unsteady breath. "It's only. I was watching her, up in the lobby, and the two of you. With the sign. And the pencil. And she said something and you laughed, and you did the, the thing. Where your whole face goes soft. And I thought, I've been married to him for five days and I don't know how to do that."
"Do what?"
"Make you look like that."
Ray was silent for a moment.
"You do," he said.
"I don't. You look at me like I'm a weather system. You look at me like I'm a very beautiful thing that's going to happen to you. Which is lovely. Don't mistake me. It's exactly what I wanted." She wriggled her toes in the water. "But you look at her like she's a thing you made. And you did, in a way. And I can't ever give you that. It's, it's what the first one is for."
"Ruth."
"I'm not asking you to fix it. I'm only saying it. It's what the rule's for."
He thought about this for some time. Then he reached over, quite slowly, and took her hand out of her lap, and hooked their pinkies, and held on.
"I have something to say, and it's not a good answer," he said, "but I think it's the true one."
"Go on."
"When I look at Scarlet I see a thing I made, and it hurts a little, because I made her out of being lonely. I'm proud of her, and I'm sorry, both at once. It's tender. It's a bruise." He looked up at the long gray ceiling. "When I look at you, I don't see a thing I made. I see a thing that chose me. And that's, I don't know. It's a different sort of face. I didn't know I had it until you."
She didn't say anything.
"I look at you like I'm the luckiest man in the world," said Ray. "That's what it is. It's not weather. It's, I keep waiting for someone to come and tell me there's been a mistake."
"There isn't."
"I know. I'm only saying it's a different face. It's not less. It's the one I'd pick."
Ruth was crying a little, quietly, the way she did, with her chin up and her eyes shining.
"That was a very good answer," she said.
"I practiced."
"You did not."
"I did it in the bath yesterday, to the duck."
She laughed, with a hiccup, and put her forehead against his shoulder.
And at that moment a loud, cheerful, extremely wet noise came from the top of the stair, and Scarlet came pelting down the steps in a bath towel and her boots, clutching a notebook, with her hair on end and a piece of charcoal in her fist.
"I did a spreadsheet," she said.
"A what?"
"A spreadsheet. I kept a tally. I started yesterday. Of who sits by who." She skidded to a halt and held up the notebook. "I've been terrified I'd get it wrong, and nobody would say, and one of you would end up sitting alone at lunch and I'd be responsible. So I made a chart. It's got columns."
Ray and Ruth stared at her.
"Ray is on eleven," said Scarlet, in a voice of grave scientific authority. "Ruth is on nine. Me, I'm on ten. It's very close. It's well within the margin. But Ruth, I noticed you've been moved to the middle twice and the side three times, and I think that might be, I think there's a bias."
"It's a table," said Ruth, faintly. "I said. It's a table. With three legs."
"I know it's a table, I'm just saying, it's a table where somebody keeps getting the wobbly one."
There was a long silence. Then Ruth put her face in both hands and began to laugh, and laughed until she slid sideways off the edge of the pool and into the shallows with a splash. Ray went in after her, in his trousers, and Scarlet, appalled and delighted, dropped the notebook, and the towel, and jumped.
The old pool, which had held forty-three years of someone's unspent hours, received them without comment. It was shallow, and warm, and faintly gold. It rose in a gentle swell around the three of them as they sat in it, soaking and shrieking, and above them, on the soft dark air, the gray lanterns turned their little faces, one after another, and looked down. They were not gray at the edges anymore. A lot of them, Ray noticed, as he wiped the water out of his eyes, had gone the faintest, loveliest shade of rose.
"They're changing," said Scarlet.
"They're waking," said Ruth.
"What for?"
"I think," said Ruth, looking up at the lanterns with her wet hair stuck to her cheek, "they heard there's going to be a party."
There was, in fact, going to be a party.
It was Steve who told them, at about four, hovering at the edge of the lobby with an expression of sheepish delight, in a freshly pressed uniform and a very small paper flower pinned to his lapel. It was called the Evening of Open Doors. It happened once a year, on the first Sunday after the first Saturday of the month, and it was, he said, the only festival in the Abyme that nobody was able to explain.
"It's a, ah. A sort of welcome, Sir. The old story is that once upon a time, a very long time ago, the first household in the Abyme hung a lantern in their doorway so that anyone who was lost would know there was a place to come. And now everyone does it. Every door. Every house. Every bathhouse and noodle shop and laundry. We hang a lantern, and we leave the door unlatched, and in the evening we all go down to the river."
"What happens at the river?"
"Nothing, Sir." Steve smiled. "That's the point. It's the only night of the year when nobody wants anything."
"And the households?" said Ruth.
"Every registered household sets a boat on the water, Madam. With a lantern in it. In the household's colors." He hesitated, and went a little red. "I took the liberty of, ah, ordering a boat. Under the new class. I wasn't certain you'd want one."
"We'd love one," said Scarlet.
"The colors, Miss."
"What colors?"
"Whatever you choose."
She stood very still for a moment. Then she looked at Ray, and at Ruth, and a slow, wicked, very pleased smile spread over her face.
"I'm going to need the door-paper," she said.
It was a long, gold, extraordinary dusk.
They went down to the river an hour after sunset, the three of them, in a chain, with a goat, and the Abyme had been transformed. Every doorway in the city was lit. Lanterns hung from every eave and balcony and ladder, thousands upon thousands, in every color, red and amber and green and a hundred shades of violet, so that the whole hillside seemed to be breathing light. The bridges were strung with them. The streets ran with spirits in their best clothes, carrying paper cups of something warm that smelled of plum, and over the sound of the river there was a low happy murmur of music from a hundred different directions at once, a flute here, a drum there, a very old man in a corner playing a tune on a comb.
At the water's edge, on a long stone quay, a row of little boats had been drawn up in the lamplight, each of them no longer than a bathtub, each with a small cup of oil and a wick. People crowded round them. People were laughing. Somewhere a baby, or possibly a kettle, was shrieking with joy.
"There," said Steve, pointing.
Theirs was a small white boat with a green stripe round the rim, and in the middle of it, nested in a ring of straw, stood an empty lantern frame, waiting to be covered.
Scarlet had the paper under her arm. She knelt on the stones, and unwrapped it, and Ray saw, with a small catch of the breath, that she had done it already. She had done it in the afternoon, in secret, in the little green room. It was a single sheet of door-paper, pale and thin and faintly gold, and she had painted it in three colors, gold and green and a red the exact shade of a good tomato, in three long curving bands that twined round one another and met in a knot at the top.
"It's a pinkie," said Ruth.
"It's three pinkies. Look." Scarlet traced the knot with a finger. "It goes round and round. There's no end. I tried to make it so you couldn't tell whose was whose."
"It's beautiful."
"It's accurate." She was blushing furiously. "Don't look at me. Light it."
Ray lit it. He did it with a long paper spill from the quay, and a hand that shook very slightly, and as the wick caught, the paper took the light and glowed. It was a soft deep gold like the inside of a peach, with the red and the green twined through it in bright ribbons. It did not look painted. It looked, Ray thought, like the color of something that had been kept.
They set the boat on the water.
It sat there for a moment, small and bright and quite alone, turning slowly on the dark. Then the current took it, gently, as one takes a child by the hand, and it slid out into the river beside a thousand other lights, and drifted away down the long black channel of the Abyme, where the lantern of three was just one among all the rest.
They stood at the edge with their arms around each other, and watched it go.
"I'm going to cry again," said Scarlet.
"Go ahead."
"I'm so sick of crying."
"It's a good week for it," said Ruth.
And it was in that moment, as the little boat went out into the middle of the stream, that the light came down.
Ray did not see where it started. It came from the dark above the river, a tiny gold spark, no bigger than a firefly. It drifted down through the string-lit air, slow and careless, past a thousand lanterns and a thousand upturned faces, and for a moment he thought it was simply a spark off one of the wicks. But it did not drift like a spark. It searched. It went round and round above the water, a little spiral, like a thing trying to remember a smell, and then it settled, light as a breath, on the paper of the little white boat, and was absorbed into the gold.
The lantern flared. Just once.
Scarlet went rigid.
"That's him," she said.
Nobody said anything.
"That's the boy. That's the, the flame. The one that went up. Out of the envelope." Her voice had gone to almost nothing. "It's back."
"It never left," said Ruth, very quietly. "It only went to look for the rest of you."
Ray's hands were shaking. He did not know what to do with them. A boy of nine, in a sweater too big, asleep on a cold stone floor with a pencil in his fist, who had made a friend out of a crayon and had thought, as he drifted off to sleep, maybe you could stay. And the answer had come, years and years afterward, in a little boat on a river, in the shape of a lantern the color of a good tomato, with three pinkies woven round and round in it so that you could not tell whose was whose.
He found that he was crying. He didn't bother to pretend otherwise. And on his left a small cold hand slid into his, palm to palm, and on his right a long warm one hooked its pinkie round his own, and the three of them stood on the stone quay in a crowd of strangers and watched a small gold boat go out of sight round a bend in the river.
"Thank you," said Scarlet, to the water.
"For what?" said Ray.
"For staying, you idiot. Both of you. For being the kind of people who do."
"Always," said Ruth.
"Always," said Ray.
"It's a long word," said Scarlet, wiping her eyes. "I'm going to hold you to it."
A long way off, over the water, somebody began to sing. It was a high, clear, wordless thing, a spirit's voice, and one by one the others took it up, until the whole river seemed to be humming the same slow warm tune. In the little green room at the top of the stairs, a small sign hung on a door that was not latched, and a lantern burned beside it, and the lamp inside the room was lit, and waiting. And at the bottom of the Kagami Hotel, in the long dark deep of the baths, the gray lanterns that had been waking all afternoon gave a soft collective sigh, and rose.
They went home slowly.
It took a long time. There was a stall that sold roasted chestnuts shaped like tiny rabbits. There was a dancing bear. There was a bit where Scarlet got into an argument with a fox in a waistcoat about whether the third bridge was haunted, and lost. Ruth bought them all paper cups of the warm plum stuff, and drank hers with her eyes closed, with a look of such perfect, simple pleasure that Ray found he could not stop looking at her. By the time they climbed the long steps of the hotel it was late, and the lanterns above the door had burned down to a steady amber glow, and the lobby was empty and still.
The goat went to bed first. She had been very good all evening. She walked into the suite with her paper flower askew, climbed on the foot of the bed, turned round three times, and fell asleep with a sigh like a pair of bellows.
Scarlet stopped at the little green door.
She stood there for a moment, with her hand on the frame, looking in at her room. The lamp was lit. A hundred drawings were pinned to the wall, already, in a messy riot of charcoal and ink. On the shelf, among the pencils, stood a small, very ugly gray rock that Ruth had given her that afternoon, which Ruth said was a thousand years old and had once been part of a mountain.
"I think," said Scarlet, "that I'd like to leave the lamp on."
"For what?" said Ray.
"For later. In case I want to go and, to go and be a gremlin. Or to come back and find it." She smiled. "It's nice to have a place that's waiting."
"It'll wait."
"I know." She pushed the door to, almost closed, leaving the gap. "That's why it's nice."
They went into the bedroom.
It was quiet in there. The window was open, and the sounds of the festival drifted in from far away, thin and sweet, and the lanterns in the street cast soft shifting colors over the ceiling. Ray stood for a moment by the foot of the bed, in the dim, with his sleeves still damp from the pool and his heart going in his chest, and found that he did not, for once, have anything to say.
Ruth was looking at him.
She was standing by the window with the light behind her, and she had taken the pins out of her hair, which fell loose to her shoulders, brown and slightly wild, with a few small pieces of straw still caught in it from the quay. The gray-blue dress hung on her with an old comfortable softness. She looked, as she always did, as though she had just stepped out of a field in the last gold hour of a very long afternoon, and she was smiling at him, and at the girl beside him, with a kind of quiet radiant patience that made his knees weak.
"I'm going to say something out loud," said Ruth.
"Okay."
"I want you both." She said it simply, like a thing she had been carrying for a long time and was only now setting down. "I don't mean that in the sweet way. I mean it in the other way. The way I've been feeling since the roof, and the market, and this morning, with her feet on your shins. I'm six, I'm older than the first field. I know what that feeling is. I've watched it grow in the world for a very long time, and I thought I'd never want it for myself."
"Ruth," said Scarlet, very softly.
"I'm not asking you to rush. I'm saying it so it's said." She held out both her hands. "If you'd like to. If you'd both like to. I would very much like to be close to you tonight. All of you. In a way we haven't, yet."
Nobody moved.
It was Scarlet who went first. She crossed the room in three quick steps, in her enormous black T-shirt, with her hair wild and her eyes huge and shining in the lantern light, and took Ruth's face in both inky hands, and kissed her.
It was not a short kiss. It was not an awkward one, either, though it started off a little clumsy, with a bump of noses and a breathless, startled laugh. Ruth made a small sound in her throat, a soft surprised oh, and her hands came up and tangled in Scarlet's hair, and the kiss deepened, slowly, with a kind of grave, astonished sweetness, as if they were both discovering something they had known all along. The lantern light moved across them. Somewhere in the distance a drum began, slow and low.
Ray watched, and thought that he had never in his life seen anything so beautiful, and then Ruth reached out one hand, still holding Scarlet, and put it flat against his chest, and drew him in.
After that it was all hands, and breath, and warmth.
He would remember it, later, in pieces, the way you remember a dream: the cool damp cotton of a shirt against his palm, and Scarlet's laugh, muffled, against his neck. The scrape of her scar against his cheek. Ruth's mouth, slow and unhurried and a little sweet with plum, and the rough happy sound she made when he kissed her throat. The soft thump of a quilt hitting the floor. A pair of cold feet. Three people finding out, with a great deal of whispering and one genuinely tragic elbow, how to fit. It was not graceful. It was, in places, uproariously funny, and nobody minded. Every time one of them laughed, the others laughed too, and the laughter turned, in the dark, into something warmer and quieter, until the laughter stopped, and the only sounds in the room were the murmur of the river and the small, shaken, wondering sounds of three people who had gone a very long time without being touched, and were being touched now, tenderly, carefully, by two others who meant it.
At some point, near the beginning, the lamp went out.
Nobody noticed who did it.
On the hook by the door, in the dark, a small green book gave an exceedingly dignified rustle, and removed itself, with great composure, out through the window and onto the balcony, where it spent the better part of the night reading the stars with every appearance of finding them fascinating.
"I am an old book," it said, to nobody, after a while. "I have seen things."
The night went on.
It was very late, and the festival had long since died down to a few last drums, when Ray came up out of a drowse and found the world rearranged around him.
He was lying on his back. Scarlet was asleep with her head on his shoulder and a smear of ink, still, impossibly, across her collarbone, her breath slow and even against his skin. Ruth lay on his other side with her cheek on his chest and one hand resting over his heart, and she was not asleep. In the dim, her eyes were open, gold as lamps, looking up at him.
"Hello," she whispered.
"Hello."
"You were noting."
"I was?"
"You were saying it in your sleep. I'm noting that I'm happy." She smiled, a sleepy, crooked, thoroughly pleased smile. "Three times."
"I'm, ah. I'd like it on the record that I meant it."
"I know."
"I'm noting it again."
"Good." She put her head back down. After a moment she said, very softly, so as not to wake the sleeper, "Ray?"
"Mm?"
"I don't think I've been this happy since before there was a word for it."
He turned his head, and kissed her hair, and did not say anything. There was nothing he could add. Outside, the river ran on, and the lanterns burned, and the whole long gold Abyme turned slowly under the stars like a great sleeping thing, content.
And a very long way down, below the baths, below the lantern pool, below the foundations of the Kagami Hotel and the Ledger and every bridge in the city, in a long bright corridor that no one living had walked in a hundred years, a hallway hummed. It had been built out of loneliness and held together by a field and a drawing. It had stood on two doors for a long time. And now, in the faint light, with a tiny sound like a latch being lifted, it grew a third.
It was small, and green, with a lantern-shaped handle. And somebody, in small fierce handwriting, had already hung a sign on it.
HOME. (Open.)
