Tenth Man

by Tamara Sheehan

Chapter 9

A long way off, a fog horn was sounding its deep, resounding call. The air was growing thick with the smell of seaweed and salt, with exhaust fumes captured in the still air. Saul heard the sleepy grumbling of trucks taking cargo across the bridge, hidden by the fog. The air was cold, chilling his wet clothes, shocking him into wakefulness.

Saul crouched at the tunnel entrance, listening to Toven’s slow, uncertain passage. The beach was vacant but for him. The Janion stood dark and silent, the fingers of the tide leaving driftwood and kelp offerings at its feet; the concrete sea wall that ran like a silver ribbon along the shore was empty.

Despite, or perhaps because of the emptiness, he whispered to Toven. “You’ll have to leave your coats. They make you too big to fit through. Go on, we can get them later.”

His voice seemed piercing and thin after the reverberating echoes of the tunnels, and was swallowed up by the sounds of the sea.

Toven hesitated a long moment by the grate. Then he went back down the tunnel and into shadows. Saul waited, half afraid that the other man had changed his mind, begun the trek back to his subterranean lair. But footsteps returned. His silhouette emerged, pressed hard against the curving pipe and keeping, as if welded to them, in the shadows. His eyes gleamed like points of light when he crouched before the grate.

Saul was shocked by Toven’s smallness. Without the coats he was half his former size, and shivering out of proportion to the chill in the air. His long, thin hands folded around the rusting bars, as if gripping might steady them, his teeth chattered.

Immediately, Saul was grateful for the lateness of the hour, the darkness and the privacy. Toven’s white limbs were swathed in a filthy tee shirt, a pair of torn, stained jeans were like a dirty skin on his legs. His cadaverous, pointed face was tense.

He slipped through the grate easily, turning his head to protect his pointed nose. Then he stood, panting, holding the bars of the grate, staring inwards at the tunnel, suddenly unwilling to let go.

Saul waited. He let his eyes rove over the Janion while Toven shivered and let go of the bars, slowly and deliberately, one hand after the other.

“There.” Saul said in a whisper. He watched the other man from the corner of his eye, waiting for Toven to bolt, to scramble back into the hole and vanish for good. But he did not.

Toven wrapped his arms around himself and stared around him. Gradually his breathing settled. He bent, hand out stretched, crouching to see, to touch, the spiky grey grass, the closed-up yellow poppies that dotted the slope and stood between beachwood trees. The poppies fell to pieces in his hand.

“I’d forgotten all the space.” Toven said to no one in particular. “So much space.”

Even Saul felt unease. After the dark and finite space of the tunnels the world seemed hyper-real. The sea extended into fog uniform and unending. He stared out at it, tried to make out the shape of distant mountains.

A noise called his attention back. Toven was laughing, euphoria tinged with hysteria. He threw back his head, oily yellow hair a matted cascade that fell below his shoulders. “I’m outside! Outside!” He shouted, in a voice was swallowed up by the sea. “Outside!”

Saul swallowed his anxiety, again glad for the darkness, the stillness of the city, the shortness of the trek, if not to cover the appearance of his companion, to cover his bizarreness. “Ready to go?”

Toven nodded, thin chest heaving. “Ready.”

They set off along the causeway, Saul awash with vicarious anxiety, as furtive as Toven. He steered them toward Veteran’s Walk. There, garden paths would be cool and dark, overhung with growth and vines, like some organic rendering of a tunnel. He bounded up the concrete steps toward it.

From behind, Saul heard Toven’s footsteps stop. He turned and looked down at the small man.

Toven was staring out at the sea, as if suddenly hypnotized by the mass of grey and black. Predawn light was making the sky grey and white. Ships lined the horizon, the doleful fog horn sounding.

“All right?” Saul asked him.

“I had forgotten,” Toven said to him in a voice not entirely calm, “how much space there was out here.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll get you into the apartment before it gets light.”

He set off again and heard Toven following.

To be continued...