Forty Crowns

Field journal of Iven Marlow, Provisional Witness, Merriton.

To whoever finds this: sorry about the handwriting.

Pit Nine. Second shift. Writing this on my knee by lamplight.

The dead men don't talk much. Sometimes they hum. If you stop working, they look at you, and if they look at you for long enough, they take you into the wall.

I've learned a lot of rules today. I'm going to write them all down, from the start, while I still remember them. I forget things. That's my other problem.

So. Back to yesterday. Sunday.

The man at my desk swore the bell had rung by itself.

"Midnight," he said. "The big bell at the Memorial. Three times. Nobody touched it."

"Did you see nobody touch it?"

"I heard it."

"From where?"

"From bed."

I wrote CLAIM: MEMORIAL BELL RANG BY ITSELF on the form. Under SOURCE I wrote HEARD IT FROM BED.

"Two crowns," I said.

"For a bell?"

"For telling forty people about a bell."

"It was more like twelve."

"Then you're lucky it's only two."

He paid. They always pay. Nobody in Merriton argues with the Rumour Desk for long, because the Rumour Desk is one of the reasons Merriton is still on the map.

They teach you this in school, right after the Great Catastrophe and right before long division. A lie that enough people believe stops being a lie.

It doesn't happen fast. One man saying the Memorial bell rings by itself does nothing. But if a whole street believes it, and their kids believe it, and their kids forget anyone ever made it up, then one night the bell really does ring by itself.

Then the street around it starts to change.

Then nobody can find the street.

We call those places False Lands. The Wardens go in and fight them. The Rumour Desk stops them being born. Mostly that means me, a rubber stamp, and a queue that goes out the door and down Tallow Street.

Pim has the desk next to mine. Between customers, he leaned over.

"Do you know why nobody ever robs the Rumour Desk?"

"Why?"

"Nobody believes we've got any money."

I laughed loud enough that Mrs. Odell looked up from the far end of the room.

Mrs. Odell runs the Rumour Desk. She's sixty or so, five feet tall, and she smokes the whole time she's awake. She has been here thirty years. She has never smiled at me. Not once.

She looked at us for a long moment. Then she said, "Next!" and went back to her paperwork, and the queue moved.

The new clerk, Dora, came by with the afternoon forms.

"Thanks, um," she said, and stopped. "Sorry. What was it again?"

"Iven."

"Iven. Right. Sorry. That's the third time this week."

"Fourth."

"You've just got one of those faces."

"A very forgettable one," I said. "I've been told."

She laughed and went away. People forget my name a lot. I don't take it personally. I've seen my face. It's fine.

The next man in the queue was Tobin Ashe, and I could guess why he was there before he sat down.

Tobin is eighteen. He works at Calloway's laundry in the Sumps, and his hands are always pink from the hot water. He passed the Doubt test at fifteen. He's a Provisional Witness, like me. He talks fast. He laughs at his own jokes before he reaches the end of them. When he's nervous he counts things out loud, and he's nervous a lot.

He's also my best customer.

"What did you do?" I said.

"Nothing."

"Tobin."

"Nearly nothing."

I pulled the complaint off my pile. Somebody at Calloway's had reported him. I read it, and then I read it again, because I don't sign anything I haven't read twice.

CLAIM: IVEN MARLOW WILL PASS THE PIT NINE TRIAL TOMORROW.

SOURCE: TOBIN ASHE. TOLD THE WHOLE LAUNDRY. TWICE.

I looked at him over the form.

"It's true, though," he said.

"It's a claim about the future. You can't spread claims about the future. That's one of the rules."

"It's not a rumour if it's going to happen."

"That's what every rumour says."

He grinned. Tobin has a big, honest grin. It makes fining him harder than it should be.

"How much?"

"One crown."

"You fined me two last time."

"Last time you told people the river was haunted."

He dug in his pocket and started counting coins onto the desk, out loud. "One, two, three, four..." They were pennies.

I knew what the pennies were. In the window of Fennick's on Coal Street there's a grey wool coat with big buttons and a collar that goes up past your ears. It costs twenty-two crowns. Tobin's mum, Ada, coughs every winter from November to March. Tobin has been saving for that coat for a year.

"Is this the coat money?" I said.

"Some of it."

"Where's the rest?"

He looked at me like I was slow.

"In your trial fee," he said.

I knew that. I wanted to hear him say it.

The Field trial costs forty crowns to enter. I had twenty. Two weeks ago, Tobin gave me the other twenty. When I tried to say no, he said he was betting on me, and the odds were so bad he'd get it back double.

It's in my notebook. Number fifteen. I owe Tobin twenty crowns.

"I'll pay you back," I said.

"You'll pass, and then you'll pay me back double."

"That isn't how betting works."

"It's how it works with you. You're lucky."

I'm not lucky. I didn't say so. I stamped his form, counted out a crown's worth, and pushed the rest of the pennies back across the desk.

He stood up. "Do you want to hear a joke?"

"No."

"Why did the miner bring a ladder to the pub?"

"Tobin."

"Because he heard the drinks were on the house."

I looked at him.

"That's terrible," I said.

"That's why it's good."

He was already laughing on his way out. At the door he turned round.

"See you on the train," he said. "Bring my money with you."

I walked home through the Sumps at six, the long way, down Canal Street.

The Sumps is the low part of Merriton, down where the river meets the harbour. It floods every spring. The houses are old and close together and the streets are narrow, and nobody lives there because they want to. They live there because it's what they can pay for.

On Canal Street there's a shop called Hobb's that sells meat pies out of a front window. You can smell them from two streets away. Pepper and gravy and hot pastry. I stopped outside, like I always do.

I had four pennies. A pie is eight.

I took out my notebook and checked number seven.

7. Favourite food: Hobb's meat pies, Canal Street.

I should explain the notebook.

Every Witness has some way to fight a False Land. Mine is called Contradiction. I say "That isn't true," and for a moment, one rule inside a lie stops working. That's all it does. It works about one time in five. The Wardens call that unreliable. It works better when I really mean it, and I almost never do. Mostly I'm just hoping.

When it does work, I lose something.

Never anything big. A street name. The colour of a coat. Once I forgot which way I like my eggs, and I had to try both ways to find out. Mrs. Odell was the one who told me to start writing things down. She said it without looking up from her desk. "If your power takes things, Marlow, keep a list of what it can have."

So I keep a list. Thirty things. The ones I'd hate most to lose, and a few I can't afford to. Sometimes I check them, the way you check a pocket for your keys.

The notebook is old. I bought it second-hand, I think, from a stall on Bridge Street. The back pages were already full of somebody's writing in faded brown ink. I've never read them. It felt rude. I only write in the front.

I put it away. I didn't buy a pie. I walked home with the smell of it on my coat.

The hostel is on Lock Row. It's a Warden hostel. The Wardens own it, and the people who live in it owe them.

Most of us don't have papers. Four springs ago the flood got into the records office on Dock Street and ruined nearly everything in it, mine included. The Wardens gave me a bed, a test, and a bill. The test was the Doubt test. I passed it at nineteen, which is late, but it counts. The bill is three years of service.

If I pass tomorrow, I get my Field license. A Field Witness is paid properly. A Field Witness can pay off his service in one year instead of three. A Field Witness can rent a flat in a part of the city that doesn't flood, with a door that locks, and nobody coughing through the wall at three in the morning.

The license and the flat are numbers twenty-three and twenty-four in the notebook. I wrote them in capitals the first time. I've never told anyone that.

The night warden, Mr. Pruitt, was in his chair by the front door with his newspaper.

"Evening, Mr. Pruitt."

"Evening, son."

I sat on the bottom stair, across from the hall telephone. It was Sunday, and it was ten to seven.

At seven exactly, the phone rang. I picked it up before the second ring.

"Iven?"

"Hi, Mum."

"You sound thin."

"You can't sound thin."

"You can. Have you eaten?"

"Yes."

"What?"

"A pie," I said. "From Hobb's."

That was a lie. Lying to your mother isn't against the law in Merriton. It probably should be.

"Good," she said. "Good boy. Are you sleeping?"

"Mum, I'm twenty-three."

"That's not an answer."

"I'm sleeping."

"Liar," she said, and laughed.

My mum has a laugh that starts small and then trips over itself, as if she's surprised by how funny the thing was. I've heard it every Sunday for as long as I can remember.

I told her about the trial. I said it was a mine, and it was the easy one, and I'd be fine. She told me to wear two pairs of socks. I told her I only had one pair. She said that was the whole problem with me, and laughed again.

"When I've passed," I said, "I'll come and see you. I'll get the train."

"You always say that."

"This time I'll have money."

There was a little pause on the line. Just a crackle.

"I'll put the kettle on," she said.

"I hate tea."

"I know you do," she said. "I'll put it on anyway."

Then she sang. She always does at the end, though I'm twenty-three and she knows it's embarrassing. It's an old song. Everyone in Merriton knows it. Your mum probably sang it to you.

Shut your eyes, my little one, nobody's lost at sea.

The boats come home by morning, and you'll grow up tall like me.

"Night, love," she said.

"Night, Mum."

I put the phone down and sat on the stair for a while. It's the best minute of the week. I like to let it finish.

Upstairs, I sat on my bed with the notebook on my knee and wrote at the bottom of the day's page:

Tomorrow: Pit Nine.

Then I lay in the dark and listened to the man in the next room cough.

Pit Nine is a coal mine in the Harrow Hills, an hour north by train. It closed sixty years ago after a collapse. The men who were down there never came up.

The story is that they're still working.

That's the whole lie, and after sixty years, it's true. There's a mine under the Harrow Hills full of dead men, still digging. The Wardens use it for the Field trial because it's old and quiet and mostly keeps to itself. You go down, you bring up one of their lamps, you come back. If the whistle blows, you look busy.

Everyone said it was the easy one.

I believed them. I work at the Rumour Desk. I should have known better than to believe something just because everyone said it.