The Dam That Drowned Us

The water had been down for three days when I found her, and the mud still held the cold of the reservoir like a held breath.

I had come down the maintenance stair at first light, the way I did every morning of the drawdown, with a lantern in one hand and the ledger of gate readings in the other. The stair was iron and slick with green, forty-two steps down the face of the dam, and at the bottom the valley opened out the way it always did when the water let go of it. The church first. Then the chapel roof, gray slate and a crooked cross. Then the street, a long crooked line of it running east toward the pack house, and the pack house itself at the end of that line, its chimneys standing up out of the mud like fingers.

Ten years I had been coming down those stairs. I knew the valley better than I knew my own face. I knew which stones came loose after rain, I knew where the old road ran under the silt, I knew that the mud in the eastern quarter was soft enough to swallow a boot. I had mapped the whole drowned place in my head with the patience of a man who has nothing else to do with his nights.

What I did not know was that a woman would be standing in the middle of it.

She was fifty yards out, east of the church, where the street widened into what had once been a square. She had a satchel over one shoulder and a coat the color of wet slate, and her hair caught the first light the way copper wire catches a lamp. She was turning slowly on the spot, one arm out, the way people do when they are trying to get their bearings, and her boots were sunk to the ankle in the mud.

My lantern went up before my sense did. "You. Stay where you are."

She turned. Green eyes, very direct. A face that had not expected to be shouted at and did not care for it. "And you are?"

"Rhys. I run the dam." I came down the last steps and started across the basin toward her, and the mud pulled at my boots with every stride. "You are standing on a construction site. Nobody is supposed to be down here during drawdown."

"I know." She did not move. "I am the one who wrote the safety notice."

That stopped me for a moment. "You are Elin."

"Dr. Elin, yes." She pulled one boot free with a wet sound and set it down again. "I sent the letter about the inspection. You are the foreman."

"I am the foreman." I got close enough to see her properly. The copper hair was not a trick of the light; it was the real color, thick and a little wild from the wind on the dam crest. Her coat was good wool but old, the elbows shiny. There was mud on her cheek already, a streak of it, and she had not noticed. "The letter said you would arrive on Friday."

"It is Friday."

"It is Tuesday."

She looked at me the way a doctor looks at a man who has misread his own chart. "It is Tuesday. I came early. I wanted to walk the basin before anyone could tidy it up for me." She looked past me at the street. "Nobody told me there was a village down here."

There it was. The question I had spent ten years learning to answer badly, and now it had arrived in a slate coat with copper hair.

"There is always a village under a reservoir," I said. "That is what a reservoir is. A village with a lake put on top of it."

"I know what a reservoir is." She said it without heat. "I have inspected nine of them. None of them had a street this long, or a church that size, or that." She pointed with her chin, and I did not need to follow the gesture to know what she meant. The pack house. Three stories, stone, the front porch gone but the door still shut. The door was always shut.

"That is a farmhouse," I said.

"That is a manor." She pulled a notebook from her satchel and flipped it open, and the wind took the pages and she caught them with her thumb. "The 1902 ordnance survey shows a single farmstead here. One building. Not a street, not a chapel, not a village square." She looked up. "Either the survey is wrong or someone has been building down here."

"The survey is wrong."

"And the villagers?"

"They left before the flood. 1924. There is a plaque in the town hall with all their names."

She wrote something down. She wrote it slowly, and I watched her pen move and thought about how many people had stood in this mud over the years and asked me nothing at all. The truth was the water had come in 1924 and taken a village the county had written down as two farms and a mill. The truth was that three hundred wolves had lived in that street and the flood had been arranged to hide them, and my father's name was on the paper that arranged it.

I did not say any of that. I said, "You should not be down here alone. The ground is bad. There are voids under the eastern quarter."

"I noticed." She stamped one boot, and the mud gave a wet sigh. "That is why I am here. Your dam has a settlement problem, Mr. Rhys. I read it in the last three survey reports. Whoever has been filing them has been very careful with the language."

"Careful is what they pay me for."

"Careful is what they pay me to catch." She closed the notebook. "Show me the crack."

"Which crack?"

"The one on the eastern buttress. The one your reports describe as cosmetic." She started walking before I answered, heading east along the drowned street with the confidence of a woman who had read a map in her hotel room and memorized it. I fell in beside her because there was nothing else to do. Her boots made a sucking rhythm in the mud, and mine answered it, and the church passed on our left with its door hanging open on the dark.

"You are from the university," I said.

"The water board. I am on loan from the university." She stepped over a fallen lintel without looking down. "I grew up in the town, actually. Downriver. My grandmother had a house on the old road."

I kept my face still. The old road. My old road. "Which road?"

"The one that runs along the valley floor. It is under the water now, of course. She used to tell me stories about it." Elin smiled at the mud ahead of her, a private smile. "She said the valley had a village in it before the flood, and that the village had a name nobody used anymore. She said the name was not on any map."

"What name?"

"She never told me. She said I would find it myself one day." Elin glanced at me. "I was six. I thought she was being mysterious. Now I think she was being careful, which is a different thing."

We had reached the buttress. The dam wall stood over us, gray and immense, and the crack ran down it from the crest like a scratch in a table, narrow at the top and wider at the base. I had been watching that crack for six years. I had put my hand in it in 1968 and found the wall cold and sound behind it. I had put my hand in it again last winter and found it a finger wider, and I had written cosmetic in the report and sent it up the chain and slept badly for a month.

Elin ran her fingers along it. "This is not cosmetic."

"It is surface."

"This is a shear plane. Someone has been cutting." She pressed her palm flat against the wall on one side of the crack, then the other, and frowned. "The stone is dressed on this side. Look at the tool marks. This is not a fracture. This is a doorway that somebody filled in and then tried to hide by calling it damage."

The wind came up the basin and brought the smell of the mud with it, and under the mud there was something else, something old and familiar, and my jaw ached at the hinge. I looked at the crack and I looked at her hand on the stone, and I thought, she is going to find it. Ten years, and she has been down here three days and she has already found the door.

"You have a good eye," I said.

"I have a good education. There is a difference." She stepped back and took out her notebook again. "I am going to recommend a full structural review. I am going to recommend it in writing, today, to the water board and the county and anyone else who will read it. If this dam is unsound, there are four thousand people downstream who need to know."

"Four thousand people need the dam to hold."

"Those are the same thing." She looked at me then, and her green eyes were steady and tired and not unkind. "You have been filing reports on this wall for years. Did you really think a crack like this was cosmetic?"

I did not answer that. I was looking past her.

She had set her satchel down on a stone while she examined the wall, and the flap had fallen open, and inside it, on top of the notebooks and the pencil case and the folding ruler, there was a brass compass.

It was old. The brass was worn to gold at the edges where thumbs had worried it for a hundred years, and the glass was clouded, and the needle was not pointing north.

The needle was pointing at the pack house.

I know a compass needle when it points at a thing it should not. The pack house lay southeast of us, and the needle lay southeast, and the north mark on the dial was turned a full quarter away from the ridge. It was a survey compass with a rotating bezel. Somebody had set the bezel wrong on purpose.

"Where did you get that?" My voice came out lower than I meant it to.

Elin followed my look and then looked back at me, and for the first time she seemed uncertain. "It was my grandmother's. She left it to me. Why?"

"Compasses do not point at houses."

"This one does." She picked it up and held it flat on her palm, and the needle swung a little and settled again, and it settled pointing southeast, at the pack house, at the shut door and the three chimneys. "It has always done that. My grandmother said it points home." She turned it in her hand. "I thought it was broken for years. Then I got it repaired in Cardiff and the man said the mechanism was perfect. It is a very good compass, Mr. Rhys. It just does not want to go north."

The mud under my boots seemed to tilt. Ten years, and the needle had been pointing at the pack house since before I was born, since before the flood, since the night my father signed the paper that put the water over the valley. A compass that points home. A grandmother with a house on the old road. A village whose name was not on any map.

"Your grandmother," I said. "What was her name?"

"Gwen." Elin said it lightly. "Gwen Pryce. She died last spring."

The wind stopped. I do not mean it dropped; I mean it stopped, the way a sound stops, and in the silence I heard the water in the reservoir above us settle against the dam with a long low groan, and somewhere far off in the drowned street a door banged shut.

The pack house door. Three hundred yards away, shut tight for fifty years, and it banged once like a fist on wood.

Elin heard it. Her head came up. "What was that?"

I was already moving, my boots tearing out of the mud, my hand out to push her back toward the stairs. "Up the wall. Now. Go."

"That was a door. There is nobody down here but us."

"Go up the stairs, Dr. Elin."

She did not go. She stood her ground in the mud with the compass in her hand, and the needle was trembling now, trembling and swinging, and it did not point at the pack house anymore. It pointed at me.

"I am not going anywhere," she said, "until you tell me why your eyes just went yellow."