The second one came in two days later and he came in backwards, hauling something.
The bell rang.
Rurik came out of the back with a box of napkins under his arm, and there was a man in the doorway with his heels dug in, dragging a stretcher over the threshold one-handed, shouting instructions at somebody outside who was not helping.
“Lift the end, lift it, you’re scraping him—”
Dain came through the door after him holding the other end.
His arm was in a proper sling now, strapped across his chest, which Rurik noted, because a man does not put a hand he has stopped trusting back in a sling unless he has caught it doing something and wants it where he can watch it.
He was carrying the furniture like somebody who had lost an argument several streets back and was now just carrying furniture.
“This is Brother Ansel,” Dain said.
“I have made an error.”
Brother Ansel was maybe twenty-five and built like a door, with a shaved head going out at the sides and a robe that had been brown and was now several colours.
He got the stretcher down onto the floor, straightened up, looked around the ground floor, and inhaled.
“Oh,” he said.
“Hi,” said Rurik.
“Welcome in, first hour’s free if you’ve—”
“It’s cold.” Ansel turned all the way around.
“It’s cold and there’s no ice house and there’s no draught and the light’s coming off the ceiling, it’s coming off the ceiling with no lamp in it, Verrow, you said it was cold, you did not say the light—”
“I said the light.”
“You said it badly.” Ansel had got to the mezzanine rail with his eyes and gone up, and his mouth stayed open.
“How many.”
“Four thousand,” Dain said, with the weary precision of a man who had now got the figure confirmed and had been repeating it for a day and a half.
“Four thousand.”
“Sir, is he okay?
On the stretcher?”
“His name’s Wick and he’s got a crushed foot and a fever and the surgeons’ tent went up with the chandler’s row, so he’s been lying in the open in the heat since yesterday morning.” Ansel said all of this without taking his eyes off the shelves.
“Verrow says you have cold.
Cold is what I need.
Cold and shade and water that hasn’t stood.”
“Then you’re in the right place.”
“I know I am,” Ansel said.
“I’ve known since the door.
Do you understand that the door let me in?
I’ve walked that street since I was nine.
There is no building there.
There is a building there and there is no building there and I am standing in it.”
“Yeah, that’s—”
“This is a threshold site.” Ansel finally looked at him, and his whole face was lit up like a man at a fair.
“You have a threshold site on Marrow Street and a woman standing in the corner who hasn’t moved since I came in and I want to make it extremely clear that I am not going to tell anybody, because if I tell the chapter house they’ll send an assessor and an assessor will close it, and I would rather die—”
“Okay.”
“—than have it closed—”
“Okay.”
“—so I’m going to help you carry him upstairs and then I am going to sit down and you are going to explain the light.”
Rurik stood holding a box of napkins.
He had spent ten months, most of a second mortgage, and the entire contents of a retirement account trying to get one person to be this excited about the inside of his building. This story is hosted at novelping.com.
“Third floor’s cooler,” he said.
“There’s a chair.”
They got Wick up the stairs with Ansel at the head and Dain doing what he could one-handed and Rurik taking the middle, and they got him into the reading chair by the window with his foot up on a board game box, and Rurik came back down with three glasses and the ice bucket.
Mira was at the window table.
She had the cards out of the box and laid in rows across the whole four-seater, sorted by something, and she had been sorting them since before the stretcher came through the door.
“That one talks,” she said.
“He does.”
“He has been here a quarter hour and he has told you more about himself than you asked for.” She moved a card from one row into another.
Up on the third floor, through the rail, Ansel was standing in an aisle with his hands hovering over a shelf like a man warming them.
“He did not ask what you are.”
“No.”
“Nobody has asked what you are.”
Rurik set the bucket down.
There were thirty or forty cards laid out between them and he still had no idea what the sorting was for.
“They’re asking what the building is,” he said.
“I’m the guy behind the counter.
Nobody asks about the guy behind the counter.”
Mira turned her head and looked at him, which she did not often do, and did it for long enough that he started restacking the glasses.
“No,” she said.
“They do not.”
Up on the third floor, Brother Ansel pulled a volume off the shelf, opened it to the middle, made a noise like a man who has been struck, and sat straight down on the floor of the aisle with it.
He did not get up for three hours.