The Unopened Hour

Chapter 1: Ask the Only Useful Question

Chapter 1: Ask the Only Useful Question

The eleventh question on the list was about the door, and Osgar Ridder answered it politely, at an angle, and about something else, the same as the first ten.

Roland wrote the answer down anyway, and dated it, and then looked at the page and stopped writing.

Forty minutes. Eleven questions, four of them rephrased twice, and nothing on the page a magistrate would read as evidence. That list had worked in every room he had ever carried it into. In this one it was not working.

Then he looked up.

The netting shed had a lamp on a hook by the north wall, and the lamp had been burning forty-one years without touching its wick. His eye kept going back to that, and it was the least useful fact in the building. Two paces from the ice-hole a woman stood with a boat-hook braced at the height of a man's shoulder. She was holding it there and she wasn't tired. A man knelt at the lip with both sleeves soaked black past the elbow. A fourth had turned away from all of them, working a knot he had started before Roland was born.

None of them had looked at him once.

Dryness had begun around the twentieth minute and hadn't stopped since. It was the only clock the hour gave him, and it read nine minutes. His hand went to his belt for a flask that wasn't on it. Second time. Nothing crossed a seam in either direction — no water, no tools, no paper but what was already in his coat. Outside he had known that, and inside his hand kept forgetting.

Six hours after finding the seam, he had declared the hour aloud, and declared time charged in full and up front. Thirty days, gone before his boot came down on the shed floor.

Roland knew the day he would die, and he didn't look at it often. It had moved when he declared. Twenty-two thousand seven hundred and eighty-two.

A man in Halgate who stayed off the water and out of debt could expect ninety years. Roland had bought this hour at a rate he couldn't afford twice, and he had bought it for the list. What the list produced was eleven answers about a door.

Question twelve sat on the page below it. Describe the condition of the ice at the moment the search began. A good question. Asked of a tower controller about a runway, it would have come back answered in eight words.

He shut the notebook on his thumb.

"Ridder," he said. "What was the tide doing?"

Osgar turned around.

Nothing in the shed had moved because of him in forty minutes. Roland registered that, filed it, and let none of it reach his face.

"Making," Osgar said. "Two hours off the top of it. Less, maybe." His voice went carefully, one word at a time. "There's a set comes round the spit here that'll take a thing out under the ice and hold it against the stones till the ebb gives it back. Everybody down this end knows the set. You'd not want to be counting on it. You'd not want to be ignoring it either."

The pen was already moving.

Here was the first answer of the hour with a fact in it — a direction, a duration, a mechanism. All of it went down before he trusted himself to say anything else.

"You'll be wanting to know what I was doing on the ice," Osgar said.

"When you're ready."

"I'd come down from the house." The hands opened and closed at his sides, calluses in the wrong places. "I was talking to my girl before I came out. About a payment owed her, for her marrying." A pause ran on past where a pause should have ended. "Owed. That's the word I gave her. I don't know as it's the right one. Haven't worked out the right one yet."

That went into the notebook exactly as given, and nobody asked him to settle it.

---

The seam sat in the north wall behind the lamp, and it gave off cold air and the smell of a winter nobody alive had stood in. At three minutes, by his own judgment, Roland put his back near it. His tongue had gone to leather, and he kept his hands still.

"One more," he said. "The tide was making, two hours off the top. What were the four of you doing when it stopped?"

"We hadn't stopped looking."

Roland waited for the rest of the sentence.

Nothing more arrived, and nothing was being left out or decided. The answer was already finished, and the asker had simply not caught up to it.

"He went in at the far hole," Osgar said. "The one nearer the sluice. She said he'd come round to us on the set if we held the near one open, so we held the near one open." His chin came up at the woman with the boat-hook, who hadn't moved and wasn't going to. "We hadn't stopped. That's all it is."

Into the notebook it went, unchanged.

He had asked what the tide was doing. What he got back was about a promise. Both lines went in, one under the other, dated. No word went between them to make them agree. There was no such word, and he was not going to invent one at a rate of thirty days an hour.

Swallowing had stopped helping.

"Ridder. The payment. Who was it to?"

"My girl. Ilsa." Osgar was smiling at something a long way off the shed floor. "I was telling her the money would be there by—"

The wall was a wall.

Roland's palm lay flat on wet stone. The cold air was gone, and the smell of that winter was gone. No lamp burned anywhere in the dark in front of him.

An hour before dawn, he stood on the Coldhithe foreshore with his boots in standing water and coal-smoke coming down off the houses behind him. Nobody within a hundred yards. He took the flask out of his coat pocket, where it had been the entire time, drank about a third, and put it back.

Then he heard the wheel.

The tide-mill's wheel came round and went under and came round. All night it had been doing that. The wheel had run while he stood eleven wrong questions deep in a room with four people in it. It had run the whole forty-one years those four had held the near hole open. Tomorrow it would run whether or not he came back.

Roland watched it take the water and give it up and take it again. Thirty days had come off him to buy that hour. The wheel had paid nothing for the same hour, and it was still turning over the exact stretch of water four people were watching for a boy in.

It did not know that. Nor would it stop for it. Some morning it would be running at that same speed over him. The date was one he could name, which was more than any man on this coast could do, and it was no help at all.