LEGENDS

The Rookery has forty-four floors. The block says that on some nights its stairwell goes up a flight past the forty-fourth, to a landing with a light under a door.

Those who say they have climbed to it agree that it is a parish door, locked from the inside, and disagree about the number chalked on it. The Liftmen’s car stops at the forty-fourth, and the winders say nobody has ever asked it to go higher.

Whoever tells it in the Rookery’s stairwell puts on a Deacon’s voice for the last line, “In my Father’s house are many mansions” (John 14:2), and spits down the well of the stair. Every telling ends with FUCK OFF, LANDLORD chalked on the forty-fourth landing and someone horned butting the wall under it until the chalk runs red, and the block argues whether the door upstairs has ever answered. Those who say they reached it say the door was warm, and that something on the other side was kneeling against it, breathing through the keyhole in time with the Hum.

The Tanks say one bottle in the shed has never been empty since the first winter. It goes from hand to hand on the nights the farm runs short, and it lights one stove and one oven every time and comes back to the shed by Lauds.

Ines Okafor has read the tanks’ book to the Union Hall fourteen times, and the bottle is in none of them.

The Tanks rank it above the widow’s cruse in Kings, since the bottle lights keyed stoves and asks nobody to kneel for the gas. Whoever lights an oven from it says “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1) over the flame, spits and slaps a slab of Gadara’s pork on to roast, and the shed argues whether the spit is for the psalm or the shepherd. The shed says a sealed hand that lifts it blisters to the wrist, and the farm’s sealed wives cook on it with rags round their hands and say nothing at the hall.

Old Nod has had no Watcher since P+5. The Narrows say one walks them still as a man at night, very tall and very polite, who stops people at corners and asks the way to a street that is not there anymore, and thanks them by name.

Nobody in the Narrows has given it their name, and every one of them who tells the story says it used theirs.

The Narrows tell it to their children as a warning about manners. A Watcher, they say, is polite to the end. The Narrows keep a list of everyone it has thanked and cross a name off at each salting, and most of the list is crossed.

The Wards that face the White say that on clear nights children are seen walking into the stone, one behind another, and walking out of it at Lauds pale to the hair, and that they never say where they have been.

The Quarrymen, who cut into the White from below, keep a child’s shoe they found in a cut under a tower of the new money, white to the laces, on a nail in the station they work from.

The Wards tell it to their children as a warning against the White, ending with “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me” (Matthew 19:14) in the softest voice the teller has, so the child pictures every face bleached the same. The Quarrymen tell it as children who went in for a look and came back out, and hung a key on the nail by the shoe.

Pan tells of a room somewhere under the Burn whose walls are lined with keyed mesh and whose ceiling the Pillar has been seen to light, once, through a crack in the street above. Whoever sleeps in it, they say, wakes with their key gone silent and their name back in the Book of Life.

Every crew in Pan has looked for it to wall it up, and every one says it has found the wrong room.

Pan’s worst curse is may you sleep in the dry room. Crews who walled up the wrong room say they heard someone inside praying as the last brick went in.

The story in Blackgate is that on the fortieth day one Warden stood in Charter House while the board knelt round him, and that the light came down and left him standing, and that he walked out across the forecourt between the Wardens kneeling in it and went below the street.

Every recruit is told on the first night that he founded Blackgate, and that he alone of its officers kept the Warden’s badge on his coat.

Blackgate tells it to each recruit over a communion cup of rain gin and the recruit’s own blood, and the teller does the kneeling board as a row of arses in the air. Charter House has its own telling, in which the light passed over a man too small to bother with, told level, with the pity Wardens keep for goats. A recruit who fails the first night is walked to Gate 1 at Prime and left kneeling in front of it, and Blackgate says no recruit has needed telling twice.

The Ferrymen say that on the ebb, on still nights, a flat boat with no lantern on its stern pole poles out from the dormitories of the Flats past the Flotilla, and is not seen again before Lauds.

Nobody has seen who poles it, and every ferryman of the Deep End can name the night they last saw it go.

A ferryman who tells it puts out the lantern on his own stern pole for the length of the story, and the passengers sit dark under the Pillar with their lenses glowing and dare it to look. The Flats say the boat carries off what the Throne would want from the dormitories, the Flotilla says what He would spit out, and the ferrymen take silver on both. Those who have heard it pass say it sits low in the water, loaded, and that something under its tarpaulin sings the Hour’s psalm a step behind the Hum.

Thirty-one of the Hotel Splendid’s guests still live in the rooms they booked on the night of the Parousia, and the night porter keeps their keys on the board behind the desk. The board has thirty-two keys on it.

The porter says the thirty-second is for a room whose guest went out on the first morning to see what had happened and has not come back yet, and that he will keep it until they do. Nobody on the Row knows which room.

The porter keeps the thirty-second key polished, and a guest who asks about it hears that its owner went out to see whether God had really come, the best joke ever made in Hotel Splendid. The parishes say the guest saw and knelt in a row with everyone else, the Row says the guest went down the stairs for horns, and the key hangs there either way. The porter says the desk bell rings at 03:12 every anniversary, and that he answers it to an empty lobby with the revolving door still turning.

The Rialto has twenty-three films on the drive that was in the booth on the night of the Parousia, and it shows them in turn. The East Wards say that once a year, on a night nobody can name in advance, it shows a twenty-fourth.

Everyone who says they saw it describes a different film, and all of them say it ended. The projectionist says the drive holds twenty-three, and that he would like to see the twenty-fourth himself.

Every telling of the twenty-fourth film has a scene that would get the Rialto salted, a Seraph with its wings nailed open, the Wheel turning on a spit, a Deacon on his knees for a horned goat with a chrome cock, and the East Wards cheer whichever they heard. The projectionist keeps a front-row seat with a halo drawn on it in grease for any of the Faithful who dares. All of them say the last reel showed the house from the screen, every seat as they sat in it, with one seat more filled than they could account for.

Every window in the White is sealed with light. Longacre says that one is dark, high in a tower of the new money, and that from Compline to Lauds a candle burns in it, a point of flame in all that white.

The Quarrymen say the room is real, on a floor nobody has lived on since the forty days, and they have cut toward it from below for three winters.

Longacre tells it with John’s verse turned inside out, the dark shining in the light and the light comprehending none of it, and the Quarrymen chalk the reversed line on every face they cut toward the room. The White’s tenants prayed for three winters in perfect unison that the candle go out, and the tellers argue whether that is why it still burns. The Quarrymen who came nearest say the candle crosses the window at Matins at the pace of someone who cannot bend their knees.

The Weir has thirteen chairs, and the Lot sits in them. The Stones say that whenever the Lot has sat over a death, there are fourteen chairs on the sill in the morning, and nobody carried the fourteenth down.

It is a different chair every time, a kitchen chair or a stool or a seat out of a tram, and the families of the dead say they know whose house it came from. The Lot leaves it where it stands until the water takes it.

At the Weir half the Lot says the dead bring the chair down to hear their own price set, and the other half says it waits for the Throne to come down and be judged for once, by thirteen keyed with their wounds open. Both halves carve their filthiest word into its legs before the water takes it, and that is the one part of the story the Stones agree on. Whoever has sat in it says it is warm, and that from it the thirteen look like people already dead.

Past the embassies of the Courts, in the tunnels under the Burn, the story goes that two doorways stand bricked shut with keyed brick, and that there is no Court’s sigil over either. Every embassy’s people walk past them on the way to the booking hall without turning their heads.

Runners dare each other to knock. The ones who say they did argue over whether anything knocked back, and nobody who works in an embassy will say which tunnel the doors are in.

Runners who tell it knock twice on the nearest wall with a chrome knuckle and say “Lord, Lord, open unto us” (Luke 13:25) in a Deacon’s voice, and the room answers FUCK OFF, WE’RE KEYED. Who bricked the doors, and from which side, is argued at the Undertow every night, and the embassies’ people leave the bar when it starts. Runners who lay an ear to the brick at Matins say they hear the Hum on the far side, faint, and a crowd kneeling to it.

High Meadow says that in the first winter after the gates went up, a Warden who had chased a runner into one of its blocks lost him on the stairs, sat down on the twentieth-floor landing to get his breath, and found the landing sitting round him, and that the block heard his case there by candle from Compline to Lauds.

Every block in the Wards says it happened on its own stairs, and none of them agrees on the sentence. Some say the landing took his boots and some his gun, and the Kilns say it refused him its lamps, so that he went down the whole block in the dark.

Every block tells it with its own Warden, fattest in the Kilns and youngest in the Stones, and each swears he wept on his clean black collar when the landing read him “the wicked is snared in the work of his own hands” (Psalm 9:16). The parishes tell it as the persecution of a gentle officer by goats, and pray at Compline, in rows, for the stairs that held him. Every block that tells it keeps something it says was his nailed over its twentieth-floor door, a button, a bootlace or a tooth.

At 03:09 on the night of the Parousia Marta Ilunga entered on the charter’s roll a girl born at the Wards General eleven minutes before, the last person the charter ever entered. She is fourteen this year, and three girls of fourteen say they are her, one sealed in the Pews, one keyed in the Stones and one of neither mark at the Sidings.

Each of them tells the night her mother told her, and the three nights contradict each other. Marta Ilunga has met all three girls, and she has never said which of them she wrote down.

The sealed girl’s parish reads her “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee” (Jeremiah 1:5) at every telling and calls the charter’s last line a clerk’s vanity. The keyed girl has 03:09 tattooed down her spine and says the Throne arrived three minutes late for her, and the girl of the Sidings tells her night to anyone with a battery and lets them pick. All three girls say they wake at 03:09 every night of their lives, and all three say they hear a board humming that the Registry says has been dead fourteen years.