At eight seventeen on Tuesday morning, Elia Noll's daughter arrived dead in a wicker laundry cart.
The cart came down the tiled ramp by itself, squeaking once at every turn. Elia heard it from the washroom and called, “Leave the shoes on,” because the drivers always removed shoes they thought were muddy, and shoes were the easiest part of a person to mix up.
No driver answered.
She wiped soap from her hands and pulled back the cart's canvas flap.
June lay inside in her yellow school coat, nine years old and small enough that her knees did not reach the end. A triangle of toast showed from one pocket. Her dark hair was wet. A tram ticket clung to her cheek, though the morning had been clear when she left home.
Elia put two fingers against the side of the child's neck. Cold. Still.
She had watched June leave thirty-seven minutes earlier. The girl had complained about arithmetic, swallowed half a cup of tea, and forgotten to kiss her mother because she was busy trying to put both mittens on with a piece of toast in her mouth.
Elia lifted the tram ticket. Under it, June had a pale crescent near her eye.
“Hal.”
Her voice passed through the washroom, the ironing room, and the little chapel where the city sent people who had died somewhere it chose not to go.
Hal Vey appeared in the doorway with the furnace rake in one hand. He had worked belowstairs for twenty-six years and had acquired the grey, patient face of a man who expected every door to bring him extra work.
He looked into the cart.
“You saw her alive?”
“At seven forty.”
“Spoke to her?”
“She said arithmetic was invented by people with lonely children.”
Hal touched the toast in the pocket. “Sounds alive.”
The counterfactual dead came to Belowstairs most mornings. A bricklayer who had stepped left instead of right. A bride whose train had caught beneath a bus in a street where, in the chosen city, the driver had braked in time. Once, six copies of a butcher arrived together, each killed by a different knife from his own rack. Elia washed their clothes, sewed what could be sewn, and laid them out before the noon fire took them. Families never came. Nobody mourned a road that had closed before they walked it.
Children were rare.
Your own child was impossible.
The second June arrived at eight twenty-one. She wore the same coat. A spoon protruded from one sock, and blue cake icing filled the lines of her palms.
The third had soot in her hair.
The fourth smelled of pears. Her coat was dry, her feet were bare, and a small silver fish had died in the cup of her left hand.
At eight twenty-six, the school called.
Elia answered beside four dead daughters while Hal dragged folding screens from the chapel.
The voice on the telephone asked whether June was ill. She had not entered the school gate. Her teacher had checked the lavatories and the courtyard. Elia said she would call back. She kept the receiver against her ear after the line went quiet.
Another cart squeaked down the ramp.
Elia ran for the back stairs. Belowstairs occupied the basement of an ordinary neighbourhood funeral home, under a florist and across from a bakery that burned the bottoms of its Tuesday buns. At street level, delivery bicycles rattled over the drain covers. Somebody argued over the price of leeks. Tuesday went on above her.
The back door would not open.
Elia put her shoulder against it. The brass latch turned, but the door had become as deep as a wall. Through its little pane she saw a woman lift a paper bag of bread, check the sky, and walk away. Elia struck the glass. The woman did not turn.
Hal reached the landing without hurry. He was carrying a folded sheet.
“Move.” Elia pointed at the latch. “It knows you.”
“It knows the count has started.”
“My daughter is missing outside.”
“If she were outside, this would open.”
Elia hit the pane again. “You said most likely.”
“The house is surer than I am.”
She grabbed the sheet from him and pulled until a corner tore. Hal let her. The rip made a plain domestic sound, the same sound as a school shirt giving way at the elbow. Elia stood with the torn cloth in both hands while another cart knocked gently against the bottom of the ramp.
“Open after noon?” she asked.
“If the fire counts a chosen body, every door in the city may open onto a place where she never was.”
Elia dropped the sheet and went back down.
By nine, there were twenty-eight Junes. By ten, there were one hundred and sixty. They occupied the chapel pews, the ironing tables, the passage beside the flower cooler, and every clean cart in the building. When the floor filled, the chapel borrowed another tiled aisle from somewhere under the street. The florist's stairs stayed in the same place. Hal laid the girls shoulder to shoulder on sheets. Elia kept finding familiar knees beneath unfamiliar damage: nettle welts, frost whitening the lashes, a bruise shaped like a small wheel, yellow feathers caught in a hood.
None of the injuries were bloody. Whatever force had killed them did not come through. Small marks did.
One June held seven blackberries between her teeth.
One wore a paper crown printed with the words MAYOR FOR TEN MINUTES.
One had tiny mushrooms opening along the rubber soles of her boots.
At ten forty-three, the last cart arrived.
Hal counted again using shirt buttons moved from one saucer to another. Three hundred and twelve.
The building settled around them. Pipes ticked inside the walls. Far below, the noon furnace warmed through brick and iron, early as always. The chapel doors gave a small inward knock.
“Tell me what this means,” Elia said.
Hal filled the kettle. He always filled the kettle when an answer required both hands.
“More than a hundred of one face means the present was pulled into the count.”
Elia caught his sleeve. “Where is June?”
Hal looked toward the chapel.
“Here, most likely.”
“These children are dead.”
“The house makes everything cold. Saves arguments with the fire.”
“Which one?”
The kettle muttered. Hal turned it off before it boiled.
“The chosen body was pulled in behind them. At noon the city burns every road in this building. If we leave her here, it may decide she was a road too.”
“If I find her?”
“Remember how. The furnace will ask.”
The clock over the sink read ten forty-five.
Seventy-five minutes remained.
Elia pulled the wicker cart closer and started with the first child.