The Lock-Keeper's Second Sight

• Chapter 1: The Dark Sluice
• Chapter 2: Echoes in the Silt
• Chapter 3: Iron and Steam
• Chapter 4: Whispers from the Deep
• Chapter 5: The Surveyor’s Pegs
• Chapter 6: A Ribbon in the Weeds
• Chapter 7: The Towpath Phantom
• Chapter 8: Murk and Mortar
• Chapter 9: The Missing Bargee
• Chapter 10: Lanterns in the Fog
• Chapter 11: Sins of Blackwood Basin
• Chapter 12: What the Current Carries
• Chapter 13: The Navvies' Camp
• Chapter 14: A Cold Reflection
• Chapter 15: Secrets in the Sedge
• Chapter 16: The Draining Gauge
• Chapter 17: Voices Beneath the Keel
• Chapter 18: The Sinking Ledger
• Chapter 19: A Shadow on the Siphon
• Chapter 20: The Widening Cut
• Chapter 21: Bone and Brickwork
• Chapter 22: The Lock-Chamber’s Truth
• Chapter 23: The Floodgate Opens
• Chapter 24: The Final Draw-Off
• Chapter 25: Restless Waters
• Chapter 26: The Quiet Pound

The water in the deep chamber never quite slept, but on October nights, it turned thick as treacle and black as boot polish.

Enoch Hale stood on the oak balance beam of the upper gate, his boots slick with river-slime and fallen elm leaves. Down below, twenty feet into the stone pit, the cut churned and gurgled. A single paraffin lamp hung from the iron gallows-post by the cottage, throwing a sickly, swinging oval of orange light across the surface. To anyone else—to the boatmen who cursed him when the water was low, or the canal company directors who audited his ledgers once a quarter—the water was merely an unpleasant necessity. It was three feet of silt, five feet of liquid draft, and a dead dog floating near the lower sill.

To Enoch, it was a ledger written in ink that refused to dry.

He leaned his weight against the beam, the seasoned timber groaning against his shoulder as the heavy paddle slid down into its iron frame. The rush of water killed the silence, a sudden, concussive thrum-thrum-thrum that vibrated straight through his wool trousers into the bones of his knees. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and looked down into the dark sluice.

It started as it always did, with a pale curling in the foam.

Most men saw bubbles when the paddled water churned. Enoch saw hair. Long, fine strands of it, pale as dried reed-grass, uncoiling from the shadow of the culvert wall. Then came the pale curve of an elbow, resting gently against the stone mortar as if waiting for a tea tray, followed by the blurred, smudged oval of a face that had no business being under six feet of murky canal water in the autumn of 1842.

"Not tonight, gel," Enoch muttered under his breath, his voice dry as coal dust. "I’ve two fly-boats to lock through before midnight, and the lime-barge is stuck on the bar at Mile Eight."

The face didn't listen. It never did. It drifted upward through the boiling brown water, suspended in the turbulence, its eyes wide and glassy, staring through Enoch as if he were nothing more than a passing cloud. The vision lasted only three heartbeats before the froth drowned it out, resolving back into scum, duckweed, and an old cotton bobbin.

Enoch rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. His second sight was getting worse with the damp. The old doctor in Devizes had told him five years ago that it was a touch of the marsh-shakes, brought on by night air and cheap gin, and had prescribed a course of blue pills and a dry flannel binder. Enoch had bought the flannel and thrown the pills in the cut, where they had promptly dissolved without revealing a single secret.

He stepped off the balance beam and walked the narrow brick cope toward the cottage. The wind off the Wiltshire downs carried the sharp, burnt-sugar smell of wet ash and coal smoke, but beneath it lay a newer, colder scent—the smell of freshly dug clay and iron rails.

Three miles east, the navvies were cutting the Great Western line through the chalk hills. Every morning, Enoch could hear the rhythmic thud-clack of their pile-drivers, a steady drumbeat signaling the end of his world. The canal committee was already panicking. They were cutting tolls, firing lock-keepers, and letting the towpaths fall into briars and rabbit holes. A rumor had reached the basin last week that the railway company meant to drain the entire stretch from Devizes to Semington, fill the cut with stone, and lay double iron track straight over the top of Enoch’s cottage.

If they drained the pound, the water would go. And if the water went, Enoch didn't like to think about what would be left sitting in the mud at the bottom of the chamber.

A low horn sounded from the darkness toward the bend, three short blasts—a fly-boat coming in fast, expecting an open gate and a clear channel. Enoch grabbed his boat-hook from the wall of the cottage, kicked a wedge under the lower paddle-rack, and stepped back out into the drizzle.

"Lock! Lock!" a voice shouted from the gloom. It was young Jemmy, driving for the Fly-Boat Company's Swift.

"Hold your horses, lad!" Enoch bellowed back, his voice echoing off the brick chamber walls. "The bottom gates are shut, and I’ve a mind to keep 'em that way till you learn to blow that tin horn without sounding like a dying goose."

The narrowboat glided out of the darkness, her long black hull cutting the scum with hardly a ripple. Her oil lamp shone brightly on the painted roses and castles of her cabin doors. Jemmy, a lad of sixteen with coat-sleeves six inches too short for his red wrists, tossed the braided cotton strap over the mooring post with practiced ease.

"You're slow tonight, Mr. Hale," Jemmy grunted, taking a turn around the timber head. "Master says we’re an hour behind on the Manchester butter."

"The butter can wait, but the water won't," Enoch said, walking the plank to help pull the gate. "The lower sill’s leaking like an old boot. I had to clear three bushels of gravel out of the culvert at noon."

"Won't matter much by spring," the lad spat onto the towpath. "My uncle says the iron men are coming through Blackwood by Martinmas. They’re buying the whole line. Said they’ll buy the water just to turn it into steam for their engines."

Enoch didn't answer. He laid his shoulder to the balance beam, feeling the dead weight of the water on the other side. The gate creaked, resistance giving way inch by inch until the dark water inside the lock merged with the dark water of the pound.

As the Swift eased into the stone lock, its timber sides scraping the mossy brickwork, Enoch looked down into the narrow gap between the boat’s hull and the masonry.

The water there was compressed, dark as pitch, and still as grease. In the narrow reflection between the boat’s gunwale and the wall, he saw it again. Not the pale girl this time, but something heavier. A silver pocket watch, its glass cracked in a spiderweb pattern, suspended in the water three feet below the surface. Attached to it was a thick gold chain, winding down into the mud like a little brass snake.

Enoch reached out with his boat-hook, plunging the iron prong into the chill water toward the chain.

"What are you fishing for, lock-man?" called the master boatman from the stern of the Swift, leaning on his long tiller. "Lost your bacon?"

"Just checking the culvert for drift," Enoch lied, dragging the hook through the empty water. The iron point met nothing but cold liquid and slippery moss. When he pulled the hook out, the tip was bare, dripping clear water back into the dark cut.

The watch was gone. But Enoch knew the shape of it. He’d seen that watch before, thirty years ago, resting in the waistcoat pocket of old Squire Blackwood—the man who had built the basin, owned half the parish, and walked out into the fog one November night in 1812, never to be seen again.

"Get her through, Jemmy," Enoch said softly, stepping back into the shadows where the lamp couldn't catch the sudden shaking of his hands. "Get her through before the water turns."

The tail-lights of the Swift dissolved into the mist that hung low over the western reach, leaving Enoch Hale alone with the drip of the lock-paddles and the heavy, damp silence of the canal bank. The smell of the coal smoke from the boat’s stove lingered on the water, a greasy skin of soot that drifted in the wake. Enoch stood on the brick coping, his fingers curled tight around the ash-pole of his boat-hook. His palms were slick with sweat despite the October chill.

A silver pocket watch with a cracked face. A gold chain like a brass snake.

He had not thought of Squire Arthur Blackwood in twenty years, not since the search parties had finally stopped dragging the canal and the local magistrates had written the old man off as a suicide or a runaway to the Americas. The canal had been young then, its banks raw and red with clay, the gravel fresh on the towpaths. Enoch had been a mere assistant keeper, a lad of twenty with strong shoulders and no dread of the water. He remembered the Squire well—a hard, dry man who looked at the canal not as a miracle of modern engineering, but as a very large ditch designed to move his private coal from the pits at Radstock to the lime-kilns of Wiltshire.

Enoch walked slowly back to his cottage, his boots squelching in the mud. The cottage was a small, stone-built hexagon, tucked into the elbow of the lock-gate, its small-paned windows clouded with saltpetre and river-fog. Inside, the grate was nearly dead, a single eye of red coal winking from the gray ash. He did not light a candle; he knew the shape of his room by touch and by the scent of old wool, damp plaster, and the pickled herrings he kept in a crock by the larder.

He sat on his three-legged stool, his knees groaning in sympathy with the timber lock-gates outside. His mind, like the lock-chamber, was filling with cold, heavy water.

"Thirty years," he muttered, reaching down to unlace his boots. "Thirty years since the old man went into the fog."

The date was precise in his memory because it had been the year of the great frost, when the canal had frozen three inches deep from Semington to Wootton Rivers, and the coal-barges had been iced in like flies in amber. Squire Blackwood had left his hall on a Tuesday evening, carrying a leather portmanteau and wearing his heavy beaver-skin coat. He had told his housekeeper he was walking to the Blackwood Basin to meet the fly-packet for Bath. He had never boarded the boat. The next morning, his hat was found floating in the reeds near Mile Nine, but the canal was already freezing over, and by the time the ice broke three weeks later, any tracks on the towpath had been washed away by the winter rains.

Enoch set his boots by the hearth. He reached behind the flour-bin and pulled out a small, flat wooden box. Inside, wrapped in a greasy rag, was a brass telescope he had bought from a stranded sailor in Bristol twenty years ago, and a bundle of old canal company circulars. He turned the papers over, searching for a blank scrap, and found a pencil stub in his waistcoat pocket.

He wrote three words on the margin of an official notice concerning the theft of timber from the wharf: Watch. Chain. Mud.

The second sight did not work like a memory. It was more like a stain that had soaked deep into the fabric of the water, visible only when the light was flat and the mind was quiet. Some waters were clean; the chalk streams that fed the canal from the downs were bright and empty, showing nothing but trout and water-crowfoot. But the canal itself was a collector of things. It was a slow, artificial artery that gathered the sweat of the navvies, the refuse of the towns, and the small, dark secrets of the people who lived along its banks.

The girl’s face he had seen earlier—that was young Martha Finch, who had drowned herself in the lock in the summer of '36 after the blacksmith's apprentice had gone off to the wars. Her presence was light, almost sweet, like the smell of elderflowers in July. She did not want anything but to float in the foam of the sluice, her hair uncoiling in the current like weeds.

But the watch was different. The watch had a weight to it. It had dropped straight to the bottom, and it had stayed there, buried in the silt, until the vibration of the railway workings three miles off had begun to shake the bed of the canal.

Enoch lay down on his narrow pallet bed, but he did not sleep. Every time his eyes closed, he heard the steady thud-clack, thud-clack of the pile-drivers. They were driving iron-shod pine piles into the marshy ground near the old wharf, preparing the foundations for the viaduct that would carry the iron road across the valley. The ground was trembling. The canal, which had sat in its clay cradle for fifty years, undisturbed and silent, was being shaken by the shoulder. The water was uneasy.

By dawn, the mist had turned to a fine, driving rain that needled the skin. Enoch was out before the light, his wool coat stiff with grease and grease-paint, his lantern swinging from his hand. The canal was grey as slate, its surface pockmarked by the rain.

He walked down the towpath toward the Blackwood Basin, a half-mile wide widening of the canal where the coal-barges used to turn. It was a desolate place now. The old stone warehouse, once busy with clerks and weighing-machines, was empty, its roof-slates slipping like old teeth. The timber-wharf was overgrown with docks and nettles, and three old wooden coal-flats lay rotting in the shallows, their ribs showing through the green water like the skeletons of great fish.

Enoch stood on the old stone wharf, looking down into the basin. The water here was deeper than in the canal itself, nearly ten feet in the center where the dredgers used to work. It was turbid, stained brown by the peat drains from the high ground.

He leaned over the low stone wall, his face inches from the wet masonry.

"Come on, then," he whispered to the water. "If you’ve got something to say, say it before the iron men fill you with slag."

The water did not move. The rain fell into it, making thousands of tiny, expanding rings that crossed and recrossed each other until the surface was nothing but a gray blur. But as Enoch watched, a change occurred in the light. The brown water seemed to thicken, turning the color of cold tea.

A shape began to form under the surface, not three feet down, but deeper, near the very bottom of the basin where the silt lay thickest.

It was not a face this time, nor a watch. It was a boot. A heavy, square-toed riding boot of fine calfskin, but now green with weed and split along the seam where the water had rotted the linen thread. The boot was not empty. It was upright, planted in the mud as if its owner were still standing there, waiting for the horse-drawn coach that would never arrive.

Above the boot, the water was too murky to show the rest of the figure, but Enoch could see the faint, white outline of a shinbone, pale as birch bark, showing through the split leather.

Enoch drew back, his breath coming short. He looked up and down the towpath. The world was completely empty. The only sound was the distant clink-clink of a hammer on stone from the railway works, a mile away but sounding as if it were inside his own skull.

"Squire," Enoch said aloud, his voice flat against the rain. "You didn't go to Bath."

He walked to the edge of the basin where the old timber-slide entered the water. It was here that they used to launch the small maintenance punts. He needed a boat. He could not dredge the center of the basin with a simple boat-hook from the wall; the water was too deep and his arms were too short.

The canal company’s old work-punt, the Gudgeon, was moored under the willow trees near the overflow weir. She was a clumsy, square-ended beast, twenty feet long and built of thick oak boards that had soaked up so much water over thirty years she sat only three inches above the surface. Enoch unchained her, the rusted iron links clanking against the padlock with a sound like dry bones.

He stepped into the punt, the wet wood slippery under his boots. He took up the long ash pole, its iron fork well-worn by years of pushing through mud and gravel, and shoved off from the bank.

The Gudgeon moved slowly, her flat bottom scraping over the submerged weeds. The water here was choked with water-milfoil and bladderwort, the long, green tresses wrapping around the pole and clinging to the timber sides like wet fingers. Enoch poled her out toward the center of the basin, where the water turned from green to that deep, oily black that indicated the old dredging channel.

He stopped the punt directly over the spot where he had seen the boot from the wharf wall. The rain had eased slightly, but the wind was rising, blowing in gusts off the downs and wrinkling the water so that the reflection of the sky was broken into a thousand gray fragments.

He lowered the pole into the water. It went down five feet, six feet, seven feet, before the iron fork met the soft, yielding resistance of the silt.

"Nothing but mud," he muttered.

He raised the pole a foot and shoved it down again, harder this time. The iron point struck something solid. It was not the soft give of the mud, nor the hard, clinking ring of a stone. It was a dull, heavy thud—the sound of iron striking seasoned oak, or perhaps something denser.

Enoch held the pole still, his hands feeling the vibrations that traveled up the wood from the bottom of the basin. The water was cold, and the chill seemed to flow up the ash-shaft directly into his arms, stiffening his elbows and making his teeth chatter.

He leaned his weight on the pole, trying to feel the shape of the obstacle. It was broad and flat. He slipped the pole along its surface—two feet, three feet, four feet. A box? A chest? Or the side of an old sunken boat that had never been recorded in the company’s books?

He worked the pole under the edge of the object and pried upward. The Gudgeon rolled slightly, her gunwale dipping close to the water as Enoch threw his twelve-stone weight against the ash shaft. The mud at the bottom of the basin held the object with a greasy, vacuum-tight grip. For a moment, nothing moved but the bubbles of marsh-gas that rose to the surface, smelling of rotten eggs and dead leaves.

Then, with a sudden, sucking gulp that Enoch could hear even through seven feet of water, the mud let go.

The object rose an inch, then two. Enoch shifted his grip on the pole, trying to leverage it higher, but his foot slipped on the wet deck of the punt. He fell forward, his chest striking the gunwale with a force that knocked the wind from him, and the ash pole slipped from his fingers.

It did not float. The old wood was so waterlogged that it sank like a stone, its white end disappearing into the black depths of the basin with a single, bubbling sigh.

Enoch lay on the wet floorboards of the punt, his ribs throbbing, gasping for breath. The rain was falling again, heavier now, washing the sweat from his forehead. He looked over the side.

The water where the pole had gone down was boiling with mud. Great, dark clouds of silt were rolling up from the bottom, turning the black water into a thick, brown soup. In the center of the disturbance, something was rising.

It was not the boot, nor the watch.

It was a hat.

It was a beaver-skin hat, its brim wide and stiff, the fine fur long since rotted away to leave nothing but the gray, felted base. It rose slowly through the water, spinning on the current like a dead leaf, until it broke the surface three feet from the punt’s side. It sat there for a moment, riding the ripples, a heavy, sodden thing that had no business floating after thirty years in the mud.

Enoch reached out with his bare hand and scooped it from the water.

The felt was cold as ice, and it smelled of old ditch-water and dead fish. Inside the crown, the silk lining had rotted to a greasy black shred, but there, pinned to the leather sweatband, was a small brass token. Enoch wiped the mud from it with his thumb.

It was a token from the Devizes Union Bank, dated 1810.

He sat on the thwart of the punt, holding the wet hat in his lap, while the wind drifted the boat slowly back toward the willow trees. The rain was running down his neck, but he did not feel it. He was looking at the water.

The mud was beginning to settle again, the brown clouds sinking back into the depths, but as they did, Enoch saw the outline of the thing he had pried loose with his pole.

It was a large, iron-bound chest, its wood black as coal, its heavy brass lock green with verdigris. It lay on its side in the silt, its lid slightly jarred open by his levering. Inside, visible through the narrow gap where the wood had shrunk from the iron straps, was something pale and white, like the clean ribs of a sheep.

And beside it, floating in the water that filled the open corner of the chest, was a long, dark ribbon of silk, its edges frayed and floating in the current like a tiny eel.

The Gudgeon bumped gently against the willow branches, her journey ended. Enoch did not move. He sat with the dead man’s hat in his hand, his eyes fixed on the black water of the basin, while the distant clack-clack of the railway pile-drivers sounded like the ticking of a very large, very old watch that had finally begun to run again.