Tinsman’s Lock
1

A cold snap had swept in overnight; when the breeze came up just before dawn, Simon could hear the brittle autumn leaves whispering to each other. A hundred, a thousand, ten thousand tiny conversations, all on the same subject: frost coming, death, a great falling.

Until then, enjoy the show, thought Simon, standing on the back porch with a blanket drawn over his bare shoulders. And what a show it was: the sun rising behind him; the dew sparkling on the brightly colored leaves and the grass, and turning even the cobwebs into strings of diamonds; the sunlight glinting off the still, dark green water of the canal; the dawn mist rising.

But on his way back into the house, Simon was startled from his reverie by the sight of a reflection in the glass door: tottering toward him, clutching a blanket around its shoulders like a refugee, was an unshaven, haggard scarecrow with eyes like two pee-holes in the snow. He winked at it; Grandfather Childs winked back. Shaken, Simon reached for the door handle; so did Grandfather Childs.


The last strands of the rope parted around dawn. There were no windows in the cellar, no visible cracks in the plank flooring overhead, but enough light had seeped in from somewhere for Linda to be able to make out the outline of the coral. Thank you, God, she whispered: of all the factors beyond Linda’s control over the course of the long night-the cold, the thirst, the pain, basically everything except the fear and the endless sawing-the one she’d spent the most time talking to God about was the coral. Please, God, let it be there when I’m ready.

And it was, coiled loosely and still sound asleep, to all appearances. Maybe it’s hibernating, she told herself hopefully, as she drew her right arm from behind her back, slowly, so as not to alert the snake, and in stages, because that’s the only way her stiff, sore shoulder would move. Maybe it’s hibernating and it will just lie there all day.

Yeah, right. Hope springs eternal. For your fucking throat. Frankly, Linda wasn’t sure whether the feat she had in mind could be accomplished even by a strong, healthy individual, but she was relatively certain that her chance of grasping the coral behind the head and hanging on to it until Childs returned was better than the chance that it would remain where it was.

As she waited for feeling and mobility to return to her right hand and arm-the fingertips of the left were an uncomfortable combination of numb and pins-and-needles-Linda thought about all the ways this could go bad on her. She’d seen how fast the coral could move; she knew she’d only get the one shot at it. If she missed, it would certainly escape; if she grasped it incorrectly, it might turn on her. She thought of Gloria. Unimaginable, to die that way, in pain, alone, gasping for air.

And even if she grasped it correctly, how long would she be able to hold on? If it were angry, if it thrashed in her grip? If she fell asleep, if her attention wavered for a-

No! She caught herself. This is where you came in, Abrootz. You can go around on that merry-go-round until Childs comes for you, or you can grab the bull by the, I mean the snake first catch the snake then worry about holding on to it but what if oh fuck just do it you sound like a Nike ad just do it oh fuck oh fuck oh-

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