Entity story · 4 min read · Set in Ostmark ·
It Has Not Said What It Waits For
For twenty-two years a municipal cabinet has composed a new lullaby each night, the town has slept under it for eleven hours, and one clerk who hums along has begun to map where the singing is going.
The grey cabinet stands bolted to its pole at the centre of Ostmark, horns in a ring, with the cables climbing the clock tower behind it in a slow green wreath. At nine o'clock every evening the horns give one soft chord, flat by a hair, and the town lies down. This has been the arrangement for twenty-two years, since the noise complaint initiative of 1998, which was to have played recorded chimes and instead, by the second winter, had begun to compose.
The record-keeping is Walter Cundy's, originally by accident. He is a collections clerk at the town hall, thirty-four, and the local fault logs of the power company record, night after night, which speaker feed ran to which street, in order, with times; and because Walter was the junior officer whose signature the engineers required, the switching orders went through his tray for a decade, and he kept copies of everything, because he too was raised to keep copies of everything. The order is consistent. One house is sung to each night, then the next, in a sequence. Nobody has twice found the same melody across the eight thousand and more recorded. Each variation is built on the earliest sound its listener remembers, which Walter has checked against a form the clinic put round in 2011: a bell for the households raised near the chapel; a loom where the mill families drew breath; the knock of oars in a rowlock, for families off the water. His own house gets the rhythm of a treadle sewing machine. It began the year he told the clinic the truth about his first memory, and he no longer tells the clinic anything.
Walter does not sleep eleven hours. There are townspeople who do, ninety-six per cent in the studies, and the outward readings of their health are unimpeachable — the absenteeism nil, the local life tables climbing, the whole town's children's coughs settling overnight like weather. Walter hums. Quietly, at his kitchen window, on the old hymn tunes, with the lights low, in the tone of a man thinking. Whatever the singing is doing fails on anyone who hums along. The hummed-to keep waking. He has never told the clinic this either.
What first brought him to the map was a gap more than a sound. There are houses the horns never reach — nine of them, in his count of the switching orders since he began. He has been to the daytime door of two. Pearl Addy is in one: sleeps her eleven hours, wakes fresher than the spring, keeps a tidy ledger of her own, talks about fine dreams of water. Nothing is wrong with her. That is the part he finds hardest to write to his supervisor, who has asked why a junior clerk is going around the town at tea time asking about sleep.
Her window, Pearl's, is the last in the sequence every night. Walter plotted the sung houses in delivery order on a plan of the town, and the sequence is a path. It starts at the chapel end and works through the terraces, street by street, and it always ends along the water: the last houses in each sequence, every night, are the houses nearest the river. Beyond the last sung house the path continues, out of the built town, down the slipway grass, to the hole in the bank where the old bridge went in — the bridge that came down the winter of the flood, before the Misprint, whose stones are still in the water at low tide if you go and look.
The Engine does not sing past the last streetlamp. It cannot. It has never tried, as far as the Company's meters can tell, to reach the water; it just arranges the last notes of every night in that direction, house by house, in the order they are sung, for twenty-two years of nights, and every night it stops one house short of the bank, and waits out the hours it does not fill, and begins the chord again at nine.
Walter files his reports. He states the facts of the path without drawing the obvious, because the obvious is not actionable and he is a clerk. But he stands at the slipway on Saturdays, on the stones of the old bridge with the oars knocking somewhere behind him in memory, and looks down at the tide, and thinks about the nine silent windows and the one address in the sequence that has never been sung to at all, in twenty-two years — the one the path has been laid for, if it is laid for anything. He does not know what sleeps there, or why, or what it is being sung toward. That is what he keeps in the tray, unsigned.