Eternity Road

30

They tried to dose the door, but water poured through the bent frame. One of the lamps crashed to the floor and went out. “Not going to work,” said Chaka. She looked around wildly. “How high will it go?”

“It’s going to fill up,” said Claver.

“You sure?”

“What do you think happens every day in the other rooms?”

They were snarling at each other now, the joy of a few moments before turned to rage and frustration. They opened the door and, two inside and two outside, tried to lift it higher in its frame and shut it again. The water kept coming in.

Books and cabinets looked polished in the dim light.

Chaka was dose to panic.

“It’s the lake,” said Flojian. “It’s open to the sea, and the tide’s rising.”

“No way to stop it?” asked Quait.

Claver laughed. “Are you serious?”

Quait tore off his jacket and tried to jam it between the door and the frame. “Damn!” he said. “One of us should have thought—”

Chaka watched the water spreading across the floor. “What do we do? There must be something—”

“We can save a few.” Flojian splashed over to the nearest cabinet, opened it, and removed the top book. It was The Letters of Abelard and Heloise.

Quait looked around wildly. “We’ll save, what, twenty or thirty, and lose everything else?”

“Wait.” Claver was holding his lamp high, looking at a

shadowy ceiling. “There might be something we can do, at that.”

“What?” said Quait.

“Give me a minute.” He hurried up the stairway into the gallery. They watched his lamp move swiftly along the upper level, watched it hesitate, watched it eventually circle the room. His face was pale in its spectral glow.

“We’re wasting time,” said Flojian. He lifted out a second book. It was Chronicles of the Crusades, Being Contemporary Narratives of Richard of Devizes and Geoffrey de Vinsauf. Quait helped him load both volumes into his arms. Then Flojian turned and stumbled toward the door. “Open up, Chaka,” he said.

She couldn’t help laughing at him. “How are you going to climb up to the landing with that load?” The water was running over the tops of her shoes. “It’s coming in fast,” she said. “If we’re going to do something, we better get to it.”

“What’s to do?” asked Flojian. “Except to get out whatever we can.”

Claver’s light was still floating along the upper rail. He seemed to be holding a conversation with himself. “Yes,” he was saying, “no reason why not.” And, “I believe we can do it.” Abruptly, he hurried to the top of the stairs, grasped the handrail, and leaned out. “Start bringing the books up here,” he said. “And hurry.” Incredibly, he had taken off his shirt and was beginning on his trousers.

“Why?” demanded Quait. “The room’s going to fill up.”

“I don’t have time to explain things,” said Claver. “Just do it. Trust me.”

“We need to get out of here while we can,” said Flojian. “Or we’ll get caught.”

“There’s still time,” said Claver. His voice had risen, and it echoed through the room. “If you want to give it up, just say so and we’ll do it. But we might be able to save most of this stuff if you’re willing to try.”

They started by clearing bottom drawers, getting the books most immediately threatened by the rising water and piling them on top of cabinets, tables, benches, whatever offered itself.

The volumes were, of course, all hand-printed. They were heavy and awkward, some of them so large that Chaka would ordinarily have had to struggle to lift one. But her adrenalin was flowing and she performed feats in that hour that no one who knew her would have believed.

Claver hurried back downstairs. In the uncertain light, Chaka thought her eyes were playing tricks. He was naked. ‘Take off your clothes,” he said. “I need everybody’s clothes.” He retrieved Quait’s jacket from the door and dashed back among them. “Quick,” he said.

“I think it’s over,” said Quait, whose expression left no doubt he believed Claver had come apart.

“Just do as I say. And hurry.”

Chaka was already out of her jacket. “It’s going to get cold in here,” she said.

“What’s he doing?” asked Flojian.

“I’m blocking ducts, damn it.”

“I don’t get it,” said Quait. Nevertheless, he began to strip off his shirt.

“Oh,” said Flojian. “If we can make the room airtight, when the tide rises past the top of the door the air’ll begin to compress.”

“Very good,” said Claver, gesturing for Chaka’s blouse.

“So what?” demanded Quait.

“If we can form an air bubble, it’ll keep the water out of the upper part of the room.”

“What happens if it doesn’t work?” asked Chaka.

Quait slipped out of his clothes. He piled shirt, trousers, socks, shorts, everything, on top of Emil Ludwig’s Napoleon.

Flojian got out of his clothing quickly. He handed them over to Claver, glanced with considerable discomfort at Chaka, who was now equally naked, and turned away. Chaka would have liked to duck down in the water, but that kind of response felt somehow childish.

Claver ascended back to the gallery with his arms full of garments. Meantime, it occurred to both Chaka and Quait that Chaka’s hauling books upstairs wouldn’t be the most efficient use of her time. They’d gained slightly on the rising water, so they rearranged the tasking: She continued removing the lower volumes while Quait and Flojian carried them to the upper level. She rescued The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and Belzoni’s Narrative of Operations and Recent Researches in Egypt and Nubia and Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Two-Ocean War. She saved Caesar’s Commentaries and Babcock’s Waiting at the Station and Mulgrave’s Dusk at Mecca. She dropped Herodotus into the water.

“I think this’ll work,” Claver called down.

She saved Polybius and Thucydides and Voltaire and T. E. Lawrence and Fuller and Woollcott and Churchill. (Was it the same Churchill?) She slipped and went down hard with Livy in her hands. She stacked Xenophon on top of Prescott and Commager on Henry Adams. “Okay.” Claver’s voice seemed to come from nowhere. “We should be in business now.”

“Good,” said Quait. “We can use you down here.”

By then, Quait was the only one hauling books to the upper level. Working alone, Chaka had been losing ground and Flojian had diverted to help her get the remaining volumes out of the cabinets. That part of the job was almost done, but the water was rising too fast. It caught up to them and drowned a few volumes. Then it overflowed the tops of the tables on which the books were stacked and rose around the edges of The Chronicle of Novgorod and The Dawn of History and China: the Dragon Wakes and Roger Bacon’s Commentaries and a host of others.

They saved what they could, piling the books on the upper stairs and going back for more. The water reached Chaka’s shoulders. But she stayed with it, lifting volumes made even heavier by having been submerged, lifting them over her head and passing them up to Quait. Then she was swimming. But it all got too heavy finally and she had to drag herself out of the water.

“Time to go anyway,” said Quait. The water level had reached the top of the door. There would be less than a few feet of air left in the outside passageway.

Flojian handed up Plutarch’s Aldbiades and Coriolanus. It was too late for the rest. “I’m with you,” he said. “Let’s clear out.”

But Claver hesitated. “What’s wrong?” asked Chaka. “We’ve done what we can.”

“No,” said Claver. “I’m sorry.” He took a deep breath. “Listen, how badly do you want to save this stuff?”

They were all cold and they looked toward the doorway. The surface of the water sparkled in the lamplight. “What are you trying to say?” asked Quait.

“There’s no way to know how high the water will go. My guess is that it’ll rise to a point about halfway between the top of the door and the ceiling. If that happens, we’ll still lose most of this stuff.” Many of the volumes that had come up from the lower level had been piled on the gallery floor. “We have to get everything up higher. We have to clear the cabinets up here and put everything as high as we can get it.”

“Orin,” said Quait, “there’s no time to do that. If we don’t leave now, we’re not going to leave at all.”

“I know,” he said. He turned and looked at them and they could see that he was fearful. “Tell me what you want to do.”

Most of the staircase was now submerged. Only the top three steps were still clear of the water. “I don’t want to drown in here,” said Flojian. “Nothing’s worth that.”

“We won’t drown,” said Chaka, “if Orin’s right. Are you right, Orin?”

“Probably,” he said. “But I can’t guarantee it.”

For a long moment, they could hear only the gurgle of the tide. Quait looked at Flojian. “How about if you and I stay?” he said. “Two in, two out.”

“Forget it,” said Chaka. “I’m not going home alone.”

Claver nodded. “No point in my trying to leave, either. I couldn’t launch the balloon myself.”

There were roughly thirty cabinets in the gallery, which housed another hundred or so volumes. The gallery also had an ample supply of small tables. They pushed the cabinets into pairs and mounted the tables atop the cabinets. Then they began the arduous work of moving roughly three hundred heavy volumes onto the tables. They watched the water cover the doorway, submerge the last few stairs, and spill across the gallery floor.

By the time they’d got everything out of the cabinets, and off the cabinets, and piled up on the tables, they were hip-deep. But they had done everything they could.

“It doesn’t seem to be slowing down any,” said Chaka.

Claver folded his arms and tried to keep warm. “It has to,” he said. “Be patient.”

“How long’ll we be in here?” asked Quait.

“Turn of the tide. Six hours or so, I guess,” said Flojian.

They killed all but one lamp. This was Claver’s suggestion. He explained that he didn’t know how much air a room this size would hold, but that the lamps burned oxygen. On the other hand, no one was quite willing to sit in the clammy dark while the water kept coming up. So the single light was a compromise.

They clung together, trying to take advantage of body heat to ward off the numbing cold.

They talked a lot. Most of the conversation had to do with titles they’d seen and how they were going to get everything out of this room as quickly as they could when the water went down. Claver thought their best plan would be to leave everything where it was and return to Brockett. “This time,” he said, “I think there’ll be no trouble about getting a boat.”

“Going to be a long few hours,” said Chaka.

With nothing to do but wait, Quait tried to distract himself by perusing titles. One caught his eye: Notes on the Last Days, by Abraham Polk. He pointed it out to the others. “At least,” he said, “we’ll finally get the truth.”

The conversation wandered. Claver sat silent for almost twenty minutes. Then he said, “I think I know what happened to the first expedition.”

“I think we’ve found out,” said Quait. “They got caught by the tide and drowned.”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Claver. “The tides themselves are too slow. And we know they didn’t try to do what we’re doing.” Claver looked at the lamp and shivered. He cradled himself in his arms and Chaka sympathetically drew him closer to her. Quait thought he saw a smile glimmer on Claver’s lips, but it might have been a trick of the light. “No,” he said. “I think they found all these rooms in the same condition we found this one.” They saw no danger, as we saw none. The corridor was probably dry, so they’re less to be blamed for their stupidity than we are for ours. They broke into the library rooms, one by one. Fortunately, they didn’t quite get all of them. And they began removing the contents.

“There was one situation that was different from the rest, though. When they first came down the stairway into the central chamber, one of the four passageways was blocked by a door.”

“That’s not right,” said Flojian. “All the passageways were open.”

“When we got there, all the passageways were open. That’s because Rank’s people took the door down. And what did they find?’

“The lake,” said Quait.

“Eventually. But first they found another door.” Claver let them digest this, and then he continued. “According to legend, the Quebec came back to this place and tied up. If that’s true, there was a submarine chamber. I think the lake is that chamber.

“Something went wrong. Whatever system they had to keep the water level low inside the chamber failed. Maybe an outer lock got stuck so that it remained open to the sea. Anyhow, eventually the internal ventilation system got old and gave way. Once that happened, once the air could get out, tides began to rise and fall inside the chamber. Now, think about the corridor with the two heavy doors.”

Chaka thought about it and saw no light. Nor did the others. “I suspect it was designed so that one door had to be dosed before the other could be opened.”

“Why?” asked Chaka.

“Because if both doors are opened, we get the effect we just talked about. The water tries to match the water level outside. It rises or falls. Whatever.”

Quait still didn’t see that it changed anything. “So you’re saying they got caught in the rising tide? But you said earlier the tide’s too slow.”

“I don’t think they got caught in the tide. Not that way. If I understand Knobby’s story, the disaster happened more or less during high tide. But if the submarine chamber had broken down, the water would rise and fall each day with the tide.” He looked at Chaka. “If that were so, what would the condition have been inside the chamber when they broke through the second door?”

Chaka saw Quait’s eyes widen. “It would have been full of water.”

“Yes,” said Claver. “They wouldn’t have experienced the leisurely six-feet-per-hour rise or whatever this is we’ve seen. An ocean would have roared out at them. Trapped them all. Drowned them before they realized they were in trouble. Except perhaps for the one man who was up on the landing, hauling books.”

Flojian’s hand touched Quait.

“Not his fault,” said Quait.

Flojian scooped up a handful of water, and let it drain away. “He’d have been directing operations,” he said. “He’d have held himself responsible. For the death of six people. And the loss of everything here.’

For a long time after that no one spoke.

“At least we know,” said Chaka, finally. “Maybe now we can put it to rest.” Her breasts rose slightly as the water pressed upward.

“I don’t think this is working,” Quait said.

Flojian nodded. “We know.” he said. “But it’s starting to look as if nobody else ever will.”

Claver glanced again at the ceiling. “We need a way to measure it.”

“You don’t need to measure it,” said Flojian. “It’s still rising.”

“I hate to say this,’ said Quait, “but I think we ought to try to swim for it.”

They were at the far end of the corridor. By now it was full of water. “I could never make that,” Chaka said. “It’s too far.”

“Count me out, too,” said Flojian. “I wouldn’t get halfway.”

“We can’t just sit here,’ snapped Quait.

Flojian was bobbing slowly up and down in the water, shivering. “Maybe,” he said, “we should have thought of that before we agreed to stay in this rat trap.”

Chaka looked at Claver. “Orin, what’s going wrong?”

“There’s another duct or shaft somewhere. There has to be.”

They relit the other lamps and went looking. The midsection of the ceiling was just far enough away from the gallery to leave it in shadow. There didn’t seem to be anything out there, but it was hard to be sure. Quait swam out with a lamp. He kicked over on his back, raised the lantern, and saw the problem immediately.

Another duct, partially hidden by a beam.

It was centered precisely, but out of reach. There was still six feet of air space left between the water and the ceiling. “We’ll have to wait until the water gets higher,” he said. “Then we can try to block it.

“It’s already too high,” said Claver. “Keep in mind that plugging it won’t stop the rise immediately.

“We need a stick, said Flojian.

Chaka went back to the staircase, submerged, and tried to break off the handrail. When she failed, Quait went down and came back with a seven-foot piece.

But there were no more clothes. They recovered Flojian’s shirt and trousers from one of the other ducts, and Quait used the handrail to push them into the air passage. Within moments, he had sealed it. Meanwhile, the others looked for a substance with which to close the newly opened vent. Claver tried pushing a tabletop against it, but it didn’t work.

“We’ll have to use one of the books,” Flojian said finally.

Claver nodded. “Be quick. Try to find something that isn’t likely to be of practical value.

They picked one that had already been damaged, a biography about a person no one had heard of: Merejkowski’s The Romance of Leonardo Da Vinci.

Quait stood on a chair and wedged it in, jammed it in tight, and then they huddled together, listening to the sounds of the running tide.

The water crept past Chaka’s shoulders.

Embraced the line of her jaw.

Flojian had already climbed onto a cabinet. She joined him, but stayed low in the water because it was warmer.

Claver looked up at the books, stacked on tabletops now barely two feet above the tide. He placed the lamp on top of a stack and went searching for something he could use to gauge the water’s rise. Quait’s seven-foot piece of handrail leaned against a wall.

He recovered it, stood it up straight, and used a knife to mark off the depth. It was at about the level of his collarbone.

Quait moved close to Chaka. “You okay?” he asked.

She nodded. “Considering the circumstances,” she added.

Nobody said much. After a while, the lamp flickered out and they were in absolute darkness. For Chaka, that became the most fearful time of the entire ordeal.

But after a few minutes Claver’s voice cut through the general gloom: “I think we’re okay,” he said. “It’s still moving up. But it’s very slow.

“That brought a cautious “you’re sure?” from Flojian.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m sure.”

Chaka let out a happy yelp and embraced each of her companions. It seemed as if the water grew warmer. They splashed and cheered until Claver warned them they were getting water on the books.

“Damn the books,” said Quait. “We’re going to see daylight again.”