The Lock-Keeper's Ward at Dusk

• Chapter 1: The Silent Sluice
• Chapter 2: Rust and Riverweed
• Chapter 3: What the Gates Caught
• Chapter 4: The Silver Oval
• Chapter 5: The Lock-Keeper's Ledger
• Chapter 6: Lanterns on the Towpath
• Chapter 7: A Face in the Silt
• Chapter 8: Voices She Cannot Answer
• Chapter 9: The Midnight Barge
• Chapter 10: Beneath the Timber Beams
• Chapter 11: Cold Water, Cold Blood
• Chapter 12: Whispers in the Fog
• Chapter 13: The Manor Beyond the Reeds
• Chapter 14: A Tongue Deprived
• Chapter 15: Footsteps in the Mud
• Chapter 16: Secrets in the Siphon
• Chapter 17: The Pale Apparition
• Chapter 18: Broken Keystones
• Chapter 19: Signs in the Sawdust
• Chapter 20: The Weight of the Chain
• Chapter 21: When the Level Drops
• Chapter 22: Dark Current Rising
• Chapter 23: The Keeper’s Confession
• Chapter 24: The Final Siphon
• Chapter 25: Unbroken Surface
• Chapter 26: The Quiet Dawn

The water did not hurry, because water in an artificial ditch has nowhere better to go. It lingered between the moss-slicked ashlar walls of Lock Number Nine, thick as mutton broth and the color of an unpolished penny, gathering willow leaves and dead beetles while it waited for someone with a windlass to grant it permission to fall eight feet into the lower pound.

Effie sat on the heavy oaken balance beam of the upper gate, swinging her heels against the timber until her boots struck the wet wood with dull, rhythmic thuds. She was fourteen, or perhaps fifteen—the parish register in Market Drayton had burned the winter she was found in a coal scuttle behind the Black Dog tavern, so her years were an estimate based on tooth wear and reach. Her reach was long enough now to crank the rack-and-pinion paddles without standing on a box, which was the only measurement that mattered to Jonas.

Below her, the weir muttered its endless, sour grievance. It was October of 1923, and the world beyond the marsh was supposedly roaring with motor cars, women with sheared hair, and gramophones that played frantic brass tunes, but none of that noise had penetrated five miles of peat and stagnant backwater. Here, sound traveled differently. When a horse slipped in the clay three miles north on the towpath, the iron shod shoe clinked against the limestone verge and the ring of it skittered across the water’s skin straight to Effie’s ears. She knew the dry, coughing bark of the gamekeeper’s terrier long before the man himself appeared through the alders; she knew the sluggish rattle of an ungreased axle on the coal barges before they rounded the bend at Dead Man’s Sike.

Having no voice of her own made her an excellent listener. People who could talk spent half their lives waiting for the other person to finish so they could begin again, but Effie merely absorbed what was given. Her throat worked fine for swallowing cold porridge or coughing when the damp chimney back-drafted into the lock cottage, but when she opened her mouth to make a sound, nothing came out save a dry, fluttering rasp, like a moth beating itself to death against an oil lamp’s chimney. The parson had called it an affliction of Providence; Jonas called it a blessing, mostly because it meant nobody argued with him about how much tallow belonged on the gearing.

Jonas stood thirty yards away on the lower apron, a man whittled from hawthorn and stubbornness. He wore a coat of boil-washed wool that had turned the slate-green of pond scum, pinned at the throat with an iron nail where the top button had failed in the Queen’s jubilee year. He was scraping grease from the sluice collar with an old horn spoon.

"You're idling, girl," he said without looking up. His voice sounded like two flat stones being rubbed together to kill a gnat. "The Wanderer will be through by five, unless that drunken fool Higgins has run her into the mud at the aqueduct again. Paddle’s stiff on the heel post. Take the can."

Effie did not sigh, because a sigh was an audible waste of lung, but she slid down from the balance beam with deliberate slowness. Her wool stockings were damp at the calves, where the reeds had whipped against her during the dawn walk to check the culvert screens. The earth here never fully dried; it yielded underfoot like an old mattress, weeping cold brown moisture into the treads of her lace-up boots.

She retrieved the iron can of mutton fat from the stone shelf beside the cottage porch. The cottage was a squat, whitewashed cube with thick walls and tiny, squinting windows that faced the canal like the eyes of a suspicious pig. It smelled permanently of fried salt pork, boiled cabbages, and the sour peat that Jonas burned in the hearth to spite the coal companies. "They want fourpence a hundredweight for their leavings," he had spat more than once, pointing his pipe stem at the heavily laden boats passing his doorstep. "Let 'em drown in it. The bog gives heat for the sweat of cutting it."

Effie walked the narrow stonework of the lock chamber wall. A slip here meant an eight-foot plunge into dark, churning water, where the undertow from the bottom ground-sluices could pin a grown man against the sills until he turned the color of lard. Jonas had never taught her to swim, considering it an unnatural practice that only encouraged carelessness. "A boatman who swims," he had told her when she was small, "just takes twenty minutes longer to die than one who don't. Keep your feet on the granite and mind the grease."

She knelt by the southern heel post, where the massive vertical oak timber pivoted in its cast-iron cup. The wood was black with age and rot, slick with a fine pelt of green slime that smelled like river mud and iron filings. She worked the tallow into the collar with her bare thumbs, smoothing the chilled fat into the grooved iron until the metal drank it. The work was mindless and comforting. The greasy film stayed in the pores of her hands for days, keeping the biting autumn wind from chapping her skin to bleeding.

Down the cut, the water suddenly twitched.

It was not a wave, exactly, but a slow, rhythmic swelling of the surface, as if the canal had taken a deep breath beneath its scum of duckweed. A cluster of yellowed alder leaves that had been circling in a lazy eddy twenty yards above the gates paused, hovered, and then began to drift slowly northward, backward against the meager current.

Effie froze, her thumbs deep in the tallow.

She stood up, wiping her palms down the thighs of her canvas apron, and looked north along the towpath. Nothing moved. The reeds, tall and dry as broomstraw, stood rigid against the grey sky. No horse appeared around the curve; no towline dripped across the butterburs. Yet the water continued to rise against the upper gate, creeping half an inch up the mossy stone with a thick, sucking sound that sounded terribly like a tongue coming away from the roof of a dry mouth.

Jonas noticed it too. He ceased his scraping with the horn spoon and leaned against the timber lever, his rheumy blue eyes squinting into the gloom of the middle afternoon.

"Higgins wouldn't be working the paddles at the middle pound," Jonas muttered, more to the canal than to Effie. "He hasn't the back for it, and the boy’s too small to shift the ground gear alone. Who’s drawing?"

Effie shook her head. She pointed toward the culvert.

The sound came a second later: a low, resonant groan from deep within the brickwork below their feet. It was the complaint of the submerged culvert—the subterranean tunnel that bypassed the lock chamber to feed the lower reach when the weir ran dry. The culvert had been plugged with heavy timber boards since the great flood of 1911, when half the embankment had slipped into the marsh and nearly taken the cottage with it. The canal company had never paid to clear the rubble, preferring to let the water spill over the surface weir instead.

Yet something down there was drawing. Effie could feel the vibration through the soles of her boots—a steady, hollow drumming that set the lime-mortar between the stones to buzzing.

"Get the crowbar," Jonas commanded. The indifference had vanished from his posture. A lock-keeper did not tolerate mystery in his water levels; an unmeasured inch in the upper pound could drown a cargo of dry grain or ground an iron barge on the gravel shoals near the limekilns, and the company docked three shillings from his quarterly stipend for every hour the navigation was blocked.

Effie sprinted to the tool shed behind the wash-house. It was a lean-to built of split larch, smelling of creosote, rat poison, and wet hemp. She seized the four-foot iron bar from its brackets and hauled it out, the cold metal biting through her sleeves. When she returned to the lock edge, Jonas was already down on his knees by the sluice pit, peering into the rectangular black mouth of the ground gear.

The water inside the brick shaft was not falling. It was backing up, swirling in a violent, counter-clockwise funnel that dragged chips of bark and grease-balls down into the dark.

"Something’s jammed the clough," the old man said, his breath sour with the salt herring he had eaten for dinner. "It hasn't seated. If the gate won't drop, we'll lose the head of water before the evening packet arrives. Give it here."

He took the iron bar, shoved it down into the dark recess of the gearing, and leaned his weight against it. Effie watched his jaw set, his few yellow teeth grinding together behind cracked lips. The iron struck wood below with a solid, water-muffled thunk. He wrenched it to the left, trying to catch the lip of the submerged oak paddle and lever it down into its groove.

The bar gave a violent kick. It was not the sluggish resistance of floating timber or the gritty slide of caught gravel. The metal struck something with a wet, elastic resilience that nearly tore the bar from Jonas’s gnarled hands. The old man gasped, his boot slipping half an inch on the damp flags at the chamber’s brink. Effie lunged forward, catching him by the rough cloth of his sleeve and bracing her weight against the iron handrail that guarded the walkway.

"Blasted thing," Jonas wheezed, recovering his balance with a snarl of irritation that did not entirely mask the tremor in his fingers. He pulled the bar up an inch. "It ain't silt. It’s too heavy for silt. Some scoundrel’s thrown an old mattress in the cut above the bridge. Or a dead calf."

Effie looked into the black square of the sluice pit. The funnel of water had broken; in its place, the water was rising in sluggish, bubbling heaves, bringing with it an odor that did not belong to the marsh.

It was not the honest, bitter stench of ditch mud, nor the sharp chemical reek of the tannery waste that sometimes drifted down from the works at Nantwich. It was sweeter than that, faint and oily, carrying a cold, fatty trace that reminded Effie of the tallow can if it had been left out in the rain to spoil for a fortnight.

"Take the long hook," Jonas ordered, thrusting the crowbar into her hands and reaching for his tobacco pouch with fingers that still twitched from the shock. "The grain boats won't wait on us. If Higgins has to tie up in the basin overnight, he’ll spend the company’s coal money on gin and blame me for the delay. Clear it out, Effie. Hook it up to the surface so we can see what the devil we're dealing with."

The boat hook stood ten feet long, an ash pole tipped with a vicious iron spike and a backward-curving barb, polished bright by years of dragging drowned sheep, sodden sacks, and drifting driftwood from the lock mouth. It was heavier than it looked, weighted at the end by the ironwork.

Effie carried it to the edge of the pit. The sky above had darkened to the shade of wet slate, the clouds pressing low and heavy against the flat rim of the horizon. A light drizzle had begun to fall, prickling the surface of the canal with thousands of tiny, concentric rings that blurred the boundary between water and air.

She drove the hook down into the black water.

The iron point sank two feet, three feet, until the ash shaft vibrated in her hands with the drag of the submerged culvert. She swept it in a slow, wide arc, feeling for the obstruction that had choked the gate.

For three passes, she found nothing but the brick floor of the channel, the iron tip screeching against the masonry with a noise that set her teeth on edge. Then, on the fourth stroke, near the corner where the masonry turned toward the lower basin, the barb caught.

It did not hit stone. It sank into something soft, dense, and yielding with a soft, subterranean give that traveled up the grain of the ash pole and settled directly into the bones of Effie’s wrists.

She leaned back, digging her boot heels into the mossy joints of the flagstones, and pulled.

The pole bowed. Whatever lay at the bottom of the sluice did not want to come up. It was heavy with the weight of the water, anchored by its own waterlogged mass or tangled in the ironwork of the old clough. Effie set her jaw, her small muscles bunching beneath the faded cotton of her bodice. She gave a sharp, levering jerk, using the stone lip of the pit as a fulcrum.

Down below, something parted with a wet, tearing sound.

The resistance eased, just enough for the hook to rise. Effie hauled it hand over hand, her palms sliding on the wet ash timber, her eyes fixed on the murky circle where the bubbles continued to break.

First came a bundle of black cloth—heavy, ribbed silk, bloated with water until it looked like the carcass of some flattened sea creature. It rose through the greenish gloom like an unholy flower blooming from the silt, trailing ribbons of fine, rotted lace that drifted on the current like drowned spiders.

Jonas stepped closer, the unlit clay pipe forgotten in his hand. "What’s that? A lady’s cloak? Who the blazes drops good broadcloth down a ground-drain?"

Effie did not answer—she could not, and would not have even if she possessed the voice. She kept pulling, her breathing loud and ragged in the quiet dusk.

The silk broke the surface first, weeping streams of foul, stagnant water back into the pit. And then, tangled within the iron crook of the hook and wrapped in the dripping folds of the dark cape, came the rest of the obstruction.

It was not a calf.

It was an arm—pale, long, and hairless, the skin the terrible, curdled white of a peeled turnip. The fingers were curved into a rigid, claw-like cup, their tips stained dark as ink, as though they had spent their final moments scratching desperately at the unyielding brickwork of the submerged culvert.

The ash pole nearly slipped through Effie’s numbed fingers. She caught herself on the edge of the pit, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped crow, her wide grey eyes locked on the white thing that bobbed once, twice, in the greasy foam of the lock gate.

The arm did not sink again, even when Effie let the weight of the ash pole drop against her knee. The buoyancy of waterlogged wool and foul air kept it hovering just below the film of grease, turning lazily in the eddy like a pale compass needle trying to find north.

Jonas took three distinct, wooden steps backward, his boot heels grinding into the lime mortar between the flagstones. His face had taken on the greyish tinge of skimmed milk that had turned in the pantry. For a man who had spent forty years prying swollen bullocks, bloated hounds, and the occasional drunken bargeman out of the Shropshire Union Canal, he looked remarkably unenthusiastic about the task at hand.

"Steady," he said, though Effie had not moved an inch. He was speaking to his own knees, which seemed inclined to buckle beneath the skirts of his boil-washed coat. "Keep the hook set, girl. Don't let her drift down into the sills. If she gets caught behind the lower miter, we'll have to drain the entire reach to get her out, and the company will dock my pension until Kingdom Come."

Effie leaned her small weight against the ash pole, the rough wood pressing hard against her breastbone. Her muscles burned with the strain. The water was stubborn; it had possessed this thing for days, perhaps weeks, and it relinquished its grip only an inch at a time. Between the pale flesh of the forearm and the dark, rotted cuff of the sleeve, the canal had deposited its usual tributes: a thick collar of bright emerald riverweed, slick and hair-like, intertwined with the brownish flakes of iron rust flaked off the old sluice gratings. The weed smelled of crushed snails and stagnant mud, a sharp, bitter greenness that did not quite cover the cold, lard-tub reek that had risen with the disturbance.

Jonas took his tobacco pouch from his pocket, looked at it with absolute incomprehension, and shoved it back into the greasy depths of his coat. He wiped his palms on his trousers.

"It's a woman," he said. He said it with the slight resentment common to men whose tidy, mechanical afternoons have been entirely ruined by the untidiness of human mortality. "Ain't no barge woman, neither. Barge folk don't go about in black silk with lace cuffs. That stuff costs four bob a yard in the draper's shop at Whitchurch."

Effie did not need his appraisal of the cloth to know the creature had not belonged to the boats. The fingernails, though torn and embedded with black grit from the canal bed, were filed into neat, oval curves beneath the dirt. They were not the broad, flattened spades of women who spent fourteen hours a day hauling hemp check-lines and kicking the rudders of seventy-ton coal flats.

She tightened her grip on the ash shaft, her knuckles whitening against the grain. With her free hand, she made two swift gestures toward the cottage: a thumb jerked over her shoulder, followed by an open palm raised against the slate-grey sky.

"Aye," Jonas spat, understanding her immediately. "Go fetch the tarp from the coal house. And the long hauling-rope with the spliced eye. Not the hemp one—the sisal. The wet rots the hemp. Quick now, before Higgins comes chugging around the turn with his engine coughing like a consumptive donkey."

Effie did not run, because running on wet masonry was the quickest way to end up beside the lady in the water, but she walked with a long, swift stride that ate up the distance to the cottage. Her calves were burning, her soaked stockings cold as ice against her skin.

The coal house leaned against the eastern gable of the stone cottage, half-smothered under a blanket of dark ivy that rustled with mice whenever the wind stirred. Inside, it smelled of dry slack, creosote, and the sour wool of an old horse blanket Jonas had abandoned there after his last gelding broke its leg in the frost of 1918. She found the tarpaulin folded beneath a stack of split ash logs. It was heavy, stiff with dried linseed oil and blackened with coal dust, smelling strongly of dead fish and rancid fat. She dragged it out, the coarse canvas scraping against the rough stonework, and grabbed the thick coil of sisal rope from its wooden peg.

When she emerged back into the fading daylight, the mist was rising from the canal bed in thick, curling ribbons that looked like steam from an open kettle. Lock Number Nine sat in a hollow between two low drumlins of glacial clay, a stagnant pocket where the autumn fog pooled long before it touched the open pastures of the valley. Through the gloom, the figure of Jonas was merely a dark, crooked pillar planted on the lock edge, motionless save for the rhythmic puff of grey smoke from his pipe. He had found his matches after all; fear, Effie knew, always made him hungry for tobacco.

She dropped the tarp and the rope at his feet with a wet thump.

Jonas did not take his eyes off the water. "She's heavy," he murmured around the chewed stem of his clay pipe. "Soaked through. The clothes alone must weigh two stone. If she's got lead weights in the hem, she didn't fall in by accident."

Effie crouched by the edge of the pit, her skirts gathered tightly between her knees. She peered down through the murky surface.

The iron barb of the hook had caught in the deep folds of the cloak, just beneath the collarbone. As the water settled from their initial hauling, the black silk billowed slightly in the faint back-current from the weir, drifting open like the wings of a drowned beetle. Beneath the heavy cloth, something shifted in the mud-tinted gloom.

It was not lead weights that gave the skirts their terrible stillness. It was the way the limbs were tangled in the old ironwork of the bypass culvert. A length of ancient chain—the sort once used to secure the safety paddles against poachers and barge-boys—was wrapped twice around the bundle of wet fabric. The iron links were crusted with decades of rust, thick and orange as dried ginger, but where the chain met the cloth, the rust had been rubbed away, leaving bright, greasy streaks of fresh grey metal.

Someone had pulled that chain recently. Or someone had tied her to it.

Effie looked up at Jonas, her brow furrowed, and pointed with two stiff fingers toward the submerged chain. She mimicked the turn of a key, then held her wrists together before her chest.

Jonas scowled, his thick grey eyebrows drawing down until they shadowed his eyes. He leaned down, squinting into the gloom, his mouth tightening until his lips disappeared into the yellow stubble of his chin.

"Hush that," he said sharply, though she had made no noise. "Don't you go thinking things you've no business thinking, Effie. The canal takes what it takes. A loose chain off an old barge can snag on anything drifting down from the basin. You know how the trash settles near the siphons. An old crate, a drowned ewe, a dead tree—the current wraps the iron round 'em all the same."

Effie stared at him. His tone had that specific, hollow flatness he used whenever he spoke about the parish authorities or the inspectors from the canal office at Chester. It was the voice of a man who believed that noticing trouble was the exact same thing as inviting it inside to sit by the fire.

"We have to get her out on the flags," Jonas continued, his tone turning brisk and hard as an iron bolt. "We can't leave her in the chamber. Higgins will be here in twenty minutes. If he sees a floater in the lock, he'll run to the lock tavern at Grindley Brook and tell every drunkard with an ear that Number Nine is choked with ghosts. I won't have the police tramping their great boots through my vegetable patch, ruining the late leeks and asking where I was on Tuesday night."

He bent his stiff back and took the ash pole from her hands. His boots slipped slightly in the mud, but he planted his heels and grunted, throwing his shoulders into the lift.

"Take the rope," he wheezed, his breath puffing white against the darkening air. "Make an eye around the wrist. If the silk gives way, she'll drop straight to the mud sill, and we'll never see her till spring."

Effie did not like the feel of the rope against her raw thumbs, but she did as she was bid. She shook out the stiff sisal, worked a running noose into the end, and crawled to the very brink of the ashlar masonry. The stones here were cold, covered in a slimy pelt of liverwort that soaked through the knees of her coarse stockings. The smell was stronger now—a sweetish, damp rot that seemed to coat the back of her throat like mutton grease.

She leaned down, her balance held by the sheer habit of ten years spent walking the slippery margins of the cut. With a quick, practiced flick of her wrists, she dropped the loop of rope over the pale, upturned fingers.

The cold of the flesh met the sisal with a muffled scrape. The water around the hand was freezing, numbing Effie’s fingers to the bone within three seconds of contact. She pulled the line taut. The rough fibers bit into the swollen white wrist, biting deep into the sodden silk of the sleeve. The dead hand did not resist; it allowed itself to be cinched like a bale of damp hay, the stiffened fingers curling slightly inward as the rope tightened.

"Hold her fast," Jonas commanded, straining against the ash pole. "On three, Effie. Lift with the back, not the arms, or you'll rupture your spleen."

They hauled together.

The sound that rose from the water was awful: a wet, sucking gasp, like an enormous boot being pulled free from three feet of estuary mud. The canal seemed reluctant to let go of its prize. The surface of the sluice pit churned with brown foam and bits of rotted hemlock, the iron hook groaning as Jonas levered it against the granite coping stones.

Slowly, inches at a time, the body came up.

The black cloak broke the water first, heavy and dripping like a slaughtered seal. Underneath it was a dress of fine, dark blue wool, ruined now by the orange stain of rust and the foul black grease of the lock floor. The torso was slender, almost delicate, but the weight of the water in the petticoats made it feel as though they were dragging an anvil from the deep.

Then the face cleared the water.

Effie froze, her hands slipping an inch along the sisal line.

It was not a face that had belonged to the water for long. The skin was pale as tallow, untouched by the nibbling minnows or the eels that infested the weed beds below the bridge. The cheeks were round, the nose straight and small, though the lips had pulled back slightly from the teeth in an expression of dreadful, frozen surprise. Her hair was thick, dark brown, and long, plastered across her forehead and neck like a nest of dead river snakes, woven through with the pale green threads of duckweed.

She could not have been more than twenty. She looked, Effie thought with a sudden, painful clutch in her ribs, like the daughters of the gentry who occasionally rode their sleek, tall horses along the bridle path on the other side of the alder screen, laughing at things that made no sound to Effie’s ears.

"God Almighty," Jonas muttered, and this time there was no anger in his voice, only the flat, superstitious terror of an old peasant who had seen the boundaries of his narrow world violently broken. "It's the lady from the Hall."

Effie looked at him sharply, her throat working with a dry, useless click.

"Never mind that," Jonas said, catching himself and glaring at her through the gloom, though his eyes were wide and watery. "Heave, damn you! Heave her up onto the flags before the line snaps!"

Effie set her boots against the mortar joint and leaned her entire weight backward. The rough sisal bit into her palms until she felt the hot sting of torn skin, but she did not let go. Jonas gave a tremendous, grunting wrench with the ash pole, his knuckles white, his coat sleeves straining against his stringy arms.

With a final, sickening squelch of displaced mud, the body rolled over the stone edge and landed heavily upon the flagstones of the lock chamber.

The impact made a wet, heavy sound that seemed to carry far down the silent reach. A pool of black canal water immediately began to spread from beneath the skirts, carrying with it little chips of rust, broken willow leaves, and the cold, unwashed smell of the silt.

For a long moment, neither of them moved. The lock was utterly silent save for the steady, mournful trickling of the weir thirty yards away and the rhythmic, distant chug-chug-chug of an oil engine coming from beyond the dark bend at Dead Man's Sike.

Higgins was coming.

"The tarp," Jonas barked, his voice cracking with a sudden, frantic urgency that Effie had never heard in him before. "Cover her up, Effie! Throw the bloody canvas over her before he rounds the willow spit!"

Effie dropped the rope. Her palms were burning, marked with deep, red indentations from the rough sisal, but she scrambled across the wet stones and dragged the heavy tarpaulin over the body. The coarse, oil-stiffened cloth fell over the pale face with a dull slap, hiding the wide, startled eyes and the weed-tangled hair. She tucked the edges beneath the heavy skirts, working with frantic, mechanical speed, her heart hammering against her ribs like a bird caught in a chimney.

As she tucked the corner of the tarp near the woman's neck, her hand brushed against something hard and metallic that lay tangled in the torn folds of the dark silk collar.

It was not a button, and it was not a link of the old bypass chain.

Effie’s fingers closed over it instinctively. It was cold, far colder than the canal water, and remarkably smooth. A small, heavy oval of metal, hanging from a snapped loop of delicate chain that had bitten into the dead woman's flesh.

"Effie!" Jonas hissed, his eyes fixed on the bend in the canal where a pale lantern light had just begun to flicker through the bare branches of the alders. "Get to the upper paddles! Wind 'em down! If Higgins catches us with the levels drawn, he'll know something's wrong with the water!"

Effie shoved the small, cold object deep into the pocket of her canvas apron, burying it beneath her grease-rag and the scrap of chalk she used for tallying the coal boats.

She rose to her feet, her legs shaking beneath her skirts, and ran toward the iron balance beam of the upper gate. Her breath came in short, raspy gasps that tore at her throat, the dry rasping sound mocking her inability to scream.

Behind her, the lantern light on the towpath grew brighter, casting long, distorted shadows of the alders across the greasy surface of the water, while beneath the black canvas on the stones, the drowned woman lay motionless, leaking the dark mud of Lock Number Nine back into the cut.