Chapter 3 Ten Years of Mud

The rain stopped at nine and the county men arrived at ten, and I spent the rest of the morning explaining a gate that had opened by itself.

The county men were called Gareth and Owen and they had been inspecting this dam since before I was born, and they walked the crest with their collars up and their notebooks out and they did not look at the water. They looked at the padlock, and at the key in my pocket, and at the control handle in the gatehouse, which was at the raised position with the safety pin still in it. A gate cannot lift with the safety pin in. I had put that pin in myself the night before. I told them so, and Gareth wrote it down, and Owen looked at the water and said the pressure must have done it, and Gareth wrote that down too.

Elin stood at the rail the whole time with her satchel against her chest. She did not say a word to them about yellow eyes or a compass that pointed south. She answered their questions about the crack in short, careful sentences and she said she would have her recommendation in writing by Friday, and then she watched them drive away down the dam road and she turned to me.

"The safety pin," she said.

"What about it?"

"It was in. You said so. A gate does not lift itself with a pin in."

"Then somebody pulled the pin."

"Who has the key to the gatehouse?"

"Me. Gareth. Owen. The county keeps a spare in the town hall." I counted them off on my fingers the way I had counted them a hundred times in my head already that morning. "The spare has not moved since 1968. I checked it last year when the intake screens were cleaned."

She looked at me with those green eyes and did not say what she was thinking, which was that the list of people with a key was short and I was on it and so was she, now, because I had left her alone in the gatehouse for four minutes while I checked the sluice readings.

"I am going back to the hotel," she said. "I am going to write my report and I am going to have a very long bath. And tomorrow I am coming back with my own padlock."

"Bring two," I said.

That was the last thing I said to her that day that was not a lie.

The afternoon went the way afternoons go on a dam. I walked the crest twice. I checked the intake screens and pulled a branch out of the west sluice with a boat hook. I sat in the site office and wrote out the gate readings in the ledger in my best hand, and I looked at the wall where the drawdown schedule was pinned, and I thought about the dates typed in county black, and I thought about the fact that the water had come back on the wrong day and the bell had rung and the compass had pointed at my house.

At six the day shift went home. At seven the evening watch came on, a man called Tomos who sat in the gatehouse with a thermos and a transistor radio and who did not walk the crest unless something exploded.

At eight I went home to the foreman's cottage, which is a small stone box on the western shoulder of the dam with two windows and a slate roof and a kitchen that smells of coal. I ate bread and cheese standing up. I listened to the radio for the shipping forecast. I washed my plate and put it on the rack, and then I stood at the kitchen window in the dark and looked at the reservoir, and the water looked back at me, black and flat and full of everything I had put under it.

At ten I went out.

The path down the western shoulder is not on any map of the dam. It is a sheep track that the county never bothered to close, and it drops through a stand of pines to a concrete apron above the old west sluice, the one that was decommissioned in 1931 and walled up in 1952. The county thinks the wall is solid. The county has never stood on the apron at night with a crowbar.

I levered the third stone out of the wall, the way I had levered it out every month for ten years. Behind it was a wheel about the size of a dinner plate, red with rust, and I put both hands on it and turned it the way my father had taught me to turn it, left then right then left, and the hidden sluice opened with a sound like a man clearing his throat.

The water began to go down.

It took four hours. I sat on the apron with my back to the wall and listened to it go, and the reservoir dropped a foot every hour, and at two in the morning the church roof came up out of the black the way a whale comes up, slow and wet and impossible. The rain had stopped and the moon was a day off full, low and white over the ridge, and the valley lay under it in the mud and the water in long silver strips like the veins of a leaf.

I took off my boots and my coat and my shirt and I folded them on the apron. I took the old key from the string around my neck, the iron key with the teeth worn down to stubs, and I held it in my fist and I walked into the water.

The cold hit me at the knees and then at the waist and then at the chest, and my wolf came up the way he always came up at the water, eager and unhappy, and I let him come. The shift is not a pleasant thing. It is a folding and a stretching, a breaking of bones that knit as they break, and the first time it happens to you it takes twenty minutes and the second time it takes five and by the hundredth time you are on four feet before you have finished your breath. I went down onto my paws in the shallows and shook the water out of my dark blond fur, and the world opened up the way it only ever opens for a wolf.

The reservoir smelled of mud and old iron. Under the mud it smelled of the church, of candle wax and wet stone and the particular dust of a place that has been shut a long time. Under that it smelled of the pack, of my pack, three hundred wolves gone into the water fifty years ago and their scent still in the walls, faint as a pressed flower. And under all of it there was a new smell, small and sharp, the smell of a hand I had held that morning. Pine and clean water and warm bread.

I ran the drowned street with the mud pulling at my paws and the moon on my back and the pack house growing at the end of it, three stories of wet gray stone with the chimneys standing up against the sky. The front door was shut. The front door was always shut. I had tried it in wolf form and in human form and with a crowbar, and it had never given an inch, and the pack house had stood in the mud with its mouth closed for ten years while I swam down to it every month and sat on its steps and talked to my father through the door.

I did not try the door tonight. I did what I always did. I went around to the east side where the garden had been, and I found the flat stone under the old pear tree, and I dug it out with my paws, and I took the trowel I kept there and I scraped the mud off my father's grave.

The grave is not a grave. My father was not buried here. He died in the town in 1948 with a heart that had given out and a mouth that had never told me what he had signed, and they buried him in the churchyard up the hill where the water has never reached. But this is where I keep him. A flat stone under a dead pear tree, with his name cut into it in my own hand, Owen Rhys, 1898 to 1948, and under the name the words my father said to me the night before he died, which were: keep the water down, boy. Keep the water down and the pack sleeps safe.

Ten years I had kept the water down. Ten years of hidden sluices and forged readings and nights in the mud with a trowel, and no one had ever asked me why the reservoir was always at thirty-one percent in the spring, and no one had ever come down the basin and found a village.

I lay down beside the stone with my chin on my paws and I looked at the pack house door across the drowned garden, and the door was open.

Not shut. Open. Six inches, then a foot, the black gap between the door and the frame widening while I watched, and the smell that came out of the pack house was not the smell of a place that had been shut for fifty years. It was candle wax and fresh water and a smell I knew from the tunnels under the chapel, the smell of the old Alpha's study and of my mother's hands.

And in the doorway, low down, there was a wolf.

It was small and gray and old, gray the way Megan's hair is gray, and it stood in the gap with its head down and its eyes on me, and I knew it. I knew it the way I knew my own paws. It was the old Alpha's wolf, the one that had gone into the water with him in 1924 and never come out, and it was standing in the open door of my pack house with the moon on its back.

I got to my feet. I made a sound, not a howl, something lower and more questioning, and the gray wolf looked at me and then it turned its head and looked back into the dark of the house.

The door opened wider. Something moved in the dark behind it. Something tall.

I shifted where I stood, and the pain of it went through me and I did not care, and I stood up in the mud of the drowned garden as a man with no clothes and no boots and the water running off me, and I looked into the open door of the pack house that I had never once got inside of.

"Da?" I said.

The thing in the dark took a step forward. It was not my father. It was a woman, gray-haired and straight-backed, with a face I had seen in the photographs in the chapel and a coat the color of old blood. She stood in the doorway of the pack house with the moon behind her and the gray wolf at her knee, and she looked at me for a long moment, and then she said, in a voice like a door opening on a cold room:

"You are late, Rhys. The water has been down for three days. What kept you?"