Day Two. Ice: half an inch.
The quiet woke me.
Not the knocks. Nothing from the wall all the rest of that night, and I'd lain there listening for it until the window went from black to the gray of a dirty sink. What woke me was that the lake had stopped. All night it had been pinging and ticking under the house noise, small sounds a long way off, like somebody out there setting a table. Now there was nothing. I lay with my eyes open and waited for it to start again, and it didn't.
I got up and looked out the window seat.
The lake had closed. Shore to shore, the whole of it, the open black water Gil had run his boat through was a floor now. No snow on it. No wind had come in the night to rough it up, so it had frozen flat and dark, and from up in the window it looked like the lake was still there, only holding its breath. The landing's yard light was off. Over there a truck was moving along the shore road with its headlights on, very small.
I was on an island. Yesterday I'd been on an island with a way off it. I said that out loud, to the glass, so I'd have heard it said.
Then the lake made a noise.
It started off to the north somewhere and came across toward me under the ice, a long note, rising, like a wet finger going around the rim of a glass, except the glass was a mile wide. It went up and up and ran past the island and away south and I could follow it the whole way, and when it was gone the quiet came back in behind it heavier than before. My arms had gone to gooseflesh under the long johns. Gil had said boom. That wasn't a boom. That was something trying out its voice.
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The shed was down the slope from the kitchen door, gray boards, a tin roof with rust coming through like freckles. Inside it smelled of gas and cold oil and mice. A little red generator. A hand auger, the long kind with a crank and a blade at the bottom like a spiral of steel ribbon. A fiberglass tape on a reel. A stack of flattened cardboard boxes against the wall, tied with twine. On a nail by the door, a red nylon bag the size of a loaf of bread with a rope coming out of the top. Throw bag. I took that first.
Along the back wall, on its side, an old wooden extension ladder, gray with age, the rungs worn down in the middle. Stenciled on the rail in letters you could still mostly read: HALDANE ICE CO. On the wall over it, a pair of iron ice tongs, rusted shut. They'd cut this lake into blocks once and hauled it up the slope and stacked it in sawdust inside the walls of the house I'd slept in. I thought about that more than I needed to.
I carried the throw bag down the dock and hung it by its strap on the last post, the one at the end, and tied the strap around the post so it couldn't blow off. Teddy rule. You never go near the water without a rope where you can reach it. I made that rule. I made it too late, which is how most rules get made.
Then I went back for the ladder.
It was heavy and long and caught on everything. I dragged it out of the shed and down the slope and onto the dock, and laid it down on the planks, and paced it out, heel to toe the first time and then walking, because I wanted to know. Eleven of my paces. Twenty-eight feet, it said on the end, in the same stencil. Eleven paces of ladder. I said it so I'd remember: eleven.
I slid it off the end of the dock, past the post with the throw bag on it, out onto the ice. Straight out toward the landing. It went out flat and easy, rail by rail, and the ice took it without a sound. When it was all the way out, the near end resting on the dock edge, I put the auger on my shoulder and got down on my belly on the ladder, and I went out along it hand over hand, rung by rung, the picks swinging under my chin and clicking on the wood.
I didn't stand on it. I wasn't going to stand on anything under four.
At the foot of the ladder I put the auger down and lay there a minute with my cheek on a rung.
The ice under me was black. Not dark. Black, like a window at night with the room light off, and so clear I could see down into it. Bubbles were caught in it, little silver beads, some of them in strings, as if something had been breathing out slowly when it froze. Under the bubbles was the water. Under the water was the dark. Morning light went down into that dark a few feet and stopped, and past where it stopped there was nothing, a nothing with depth to it. Forty feet, out in the middle. Thirty-nine degrees on the bottom.
I drilled. The auger went through on the third turn with a gulp, and water came up the hole black and welled out over the ice around the blade and started to freeze at the edges while I watched. I ran the tape down the hole and hooked the bottom edge and read it. Moved the hook around the hole and read it again. Again. Three readings, and you take the lowest. Half an inch, all three times.
I was pulling the tape out when something moved under my hands.
Pale. A long pale thing, below the ice, a foot down, maybe two. It came slowly from the left, from under the ladder, and lifted, and turned over in the current, and lay out flat, and moved away. A long pale ribbon of something. Hair, I thought, before I could stop the thought. Then I could stop it. Weed. Lake weed, bleached, loose from the bottom. They break off in the fall and drift.
I watched it go. It went slow. It didn't go away so much as down, out of the light, into the part of the lake where the light stopped. I lay on the ladder with my hands flat on the ice on either side of the hole, the cold coming up through my mittens into the bones of my fingers, and I didn't move until it was gone, and then for a while after.
Then I said what I'd come out to say.
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I was seventeen and Teddy was fifteen. It was the first week of December and there was a pond off the county road outside Superior where the kids from our end of town skated when it froze, and it had frozen, more or less, a few days before. We went out there after school, the two of us, with his hockey stick and a puck, because there was nothing else to do and our mom was working a double.
He stood at the edge and looked at it. He was a careful kid. People don't believe that when I tell them, but he was. He looked at it a long time, and then he looked at me, and he asked me. Is it okay?
I walked out on it. I stamped on it, twice, hard, with my heel, to show him. It held me. I said, It's fine.
It was two inches. I know that because the deputy who came out measured it after, and wrote it down, and I read it later in the report. Two inches. I was bigger than him. I'd been standing near the edge, where it was thicker. He went out to the middle with the puck, to show me he wasn't scared now that I'd said it, and it opened under him, and he went in, and I was on the bank screaming because I didn't have a rope, or a branch long enough, or anything. Nobody told me about picks or lying flat. I ran out to him and it broke under me too, near the edge, and I was in up to my chest and I couldn't get to him from there. A man stopped his truck on the county road. He got me out. Teddy was under by then.
Two inches.
That's all. That's the whole thing. I wear his coat because it's warm.
I said it into the hole. Just the number, and his name.
"Half an inch, Teddy. Nobody's going anywhere."
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My phone was on the tin shelf by the stove, charging, where I'd left it. I took it to the north window. I typed the report and read it aloud as I typed it. I log in twenty-four-hour time; old habit. The console runs on it and so did I, for four years, and you don't stop.
"Message to Wade. Ice: half an inch, black. Twenty-three forty, two knocks, my room."
That was all I gave him. That's how you do it. You give the minimum and let them ask.
He asked in under a minute.
Wall or floor? Near the chimney?
I read it out. Then I typed, and read: "Wall. By the radiator, next to the chimney, about knee height."
Pipes. The old line runs up beside the chimney.
And then, while I was still reading that one out loud to the kitchen:
Tell me every time.
I said "Copy," which is not something I'd said to anyone in six years. Then I stood there at the window with the phone in my hand.
He hadn't said anything about the ice. Half an inch, black, and he'd gone right past it to the knocks. I figured a man who'd lived on a lake his whole life didn't need half an inch explained to him.
He knew his house, though. Wall or floor. Near the chimney. I liked that in an owner. Most people, you ask them where the noise is and they say, I don't know, in the house somewhere. He wanted the wall and the height. He'd have been good on a console.
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I spent the middle of the day learning the house, because that was the job and because I couldn't stand the window anymore.
You do it like a dispatcher. Not where's the nice view. Where are the doors. Where do people go if something happens.
Front door, off the hall, onto a porch that faced the dock. Kitchen door, at the back, onto a little porch with a woodbox and a broom, and the path down to the shed. Those were the two ways out. Windows, plenty, but the ground floor ones were painted shut, all of them; I tried each one, and the paint held like glue. The cellar door, padlocked, off the kitchen. I put my ear to it. Nothing. Cold came under it, cellar cold, the kind with stone in it. Somewhere down there was the furnace, holding fifty-five like Wade wanted, and I couldn't see it or touch it or turn it up, and every radiator in the house was on its say-so.
The radiators ticked. All of them, all day, a little tick, then a longer one, as the hot water came up through them and went down. Cast iron, painted silver years back. I put my hand on the one in the front room and it was warm like old radiators are warm, not hot, just less cold than everything else.
The front room. The hall with the photograph, which I walked past without looking at, and then came back and looked at, and then walked past again. The bathroom upstairs, a claw tub with a rust stain under the tap the shape of a tongue. The big bedroom at the end of the hall: a double bed, a dresser with a man's watch on it and a hairbrush with short dark hairs still in it, a closet. I didn't open the closet. I didn't open the drawers. The air in there smelled of somebody, and I shut the door on it.
The girl's room I didn't go in. The door was shut. The H with the horse stickers. I stood outside it a while. The radiator was going in there, ticking behind the door.
The back stairs I looked up from the bottom again, like a ladder somebody else had left against a roof. Narrow, steep, painted brown. The third step was darker than the others and stood a little proud of them, as if it had swelled. Third step's rotten. I didn't touch it. I went around by the front.
I came back to the kitchen and wrote it all down. Rooms, doors, windows, which ones opened. Where the furnace was and that I couldn't get to it. Old habit. If you ever have to tell somebody how to get out of a house in the dark, you want to have walked it in the light.
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The second night it came at eleven fifty.
I was awake. I'd been awake on purpose, lying on my back under the geese with the picks on and the phone face down on the quilt so it wouldn't light the room. I'd been humming. I caught it after a while. I do that when I'm scared, and I do it badly, two notes, back and forth, no song. I stopped when I caught myself.
Two soft knocks.
Same place. By the radiator, low, at about the height of my knee if I'd been standing. Knuckle on wood. The second a little softer than the first.
I counted to ten this time, not sixty, and reached out and knocked twice back.
Silence. The same silence as the night before, the house going still all at once, every tick and creak and sawdust whisper holding off. I lay in it with my hand on the pine.
Nothing more came. I waited a long time.
At a quarter past one, I hadn't slept, and I did a thing I'd thought about doing all day. I reached out in the dark and found the wall and knocked twice first.
Two soft knocks came back. Right away. Low. Close enough to my hand that I felt the second one in the board.
I took my hand away and put it under the quilt and held it with the other one.
At ten past two, I was still awake. It came from below.
One metal bang.
Not in my wall. Down, somewhere under the house, deep, a single hard clang like somebody had dropped a wrench on a boiler. Then a hiss after it, long, thinning out. Then nothing. The radiator under my window gave a shudder and a tick.
That was when I got the two of them straight.
The bang was a pipe. Iron and water, low in the house, one hit, loud and dumb, and a hiss after like something letting go. It came when it wanted. It didn't care if you were there.
The other one was two. Always two. Soft. Knuckle on wood, at the height of a knee, in the wall by my bed. And it waited for me. It knocked, and then it waited, and when I knocked, it answered.
Different animals.
I got up and turned on the lamp and wrote them both down in the logbook, three columns, the way I'd write them for anybody.
Twenty-three fifty. My room, chimney wall. Two soft knocks. I knocked back. Nothing after. Zero-one-fifteen. My room, chimney wall. I knocked first. Two soft knocks back. Zero-two-ten. Below the house. One metal bang. Hiss.
I read them over, out loud, low. Then I sat on the edge of the bed with the logbook in my lap.
Tell me every time, he'd said. I'd tell him in the morning. All of it. The wall and the height and the floor below.
Before I lay down again I got the phone and went and put it on the tin shelf by the stove downstairs, to charge, because the battery was low. I didn't lock it. I never lock my phone. People ask about that. Someone might need to call nine-one-one off it, is the answer, and it's the only one I've got. I set it on vibrate. While I stood there it buzzed once, the low-battery warning, and it rattled against the metal of the shelf, a quick hard shiver, almost like the pipe. Almost.
Then I went back up the front stairs in the dark, past the shut door with the H on it, and got into bed, and lay there with the lamp off and both hands under the quilt.
Somewhere down below, the pipes ticked and settled. The furnace held its fifty-five.
The wall didn't make a sound. It didn't have to. I knew how to make it answer now.