A sample from
Lamps in Every Window
The first woman to come to my inn came up the hill on a door, with four strangers carrying the corners and her tail hanging off the end.
It was ninety-eight degrees in Tempe at ten after six on a Tuesday morning in late June, and the electrical room on the second floor of the job was the only place on the site that was any cooler, because somebody had left a portable AC unit running in there all night with the door shut. I knew that because I was the somebody. We had a gear lineup to land that week for a dental office going into the old bank space, and I'd wanted the room dry when I got there.
I had my pouch on and my hard hat in my hand. I'd checked the panel schedule against the drawings, found two breakers the engineer had swapped, circled them on the schedule in pencil, and written them up on the back of my hand in Sharpie as well so I wouldn't forget to yell about it. Then I opened the door to go find the super, and stepped through it, and the air hit my face like an open freezer.
The floor under my boots was slate. The door behind me, when I turned around, was a narrow plank door in a stone wall, and there was nothing on the other side of it but a coat-hook and more wall.
I stood still. Nineteen years in the trade had taught me that first: when I didn't know what I was looking at, I didn't touch it yet.
The room was maybe twelve by fourteen. One window, small, deep in the wall, with frost grown across the inside of the glass in fern shapes. Grey light came through it, low and flat, the kind you get late in a winter afternoon. Shelves on one wall stacked with spools of dull reddish copper wire, heavier gauge than anything I'd pulled in a while. And on the wall facing the window, set in a frame of dark wood, a slab of slate about four feet wide by three high, with twelve round sockets cut into it in two rows of six.
I knew what that was before I knew anything else. I'd spent half my life in panel rooms, and I knew a panel when I saw one, whatever it was made of.
Five of the sockets had something in them. Fist-sized lumps of glass, or what looked like glass, each sitting in a cup of black iron. Two of them glowed, a steady pale blue-white you could have read by if you held the page close. The other three were cloudy, with cracks running through them, and their light came and went in a slow, uneven pulse, like a fluorescent tube on a bad ballast. The other seven sockets were empty and dark. Out of the top of each socket a thumb-length bar of the same glass ran up into the slate, and above that a channel cut in the stone carried a strand of that reddish copper away along the wall and into the plaster.
I held my arm up to look at the glow, and that's when I saw my own forearm. I'd had my sleeves rolled to the elbow for the heat. In that light my skin, which the Arizona sun has turned the color of a saddle over the years, looked grey-brown and dead, like something left out overnight. The pale band where my watch sits showed up white as paper. My watch said 6:11.
I pulled my sleeves down and buttoned the cuffs.
My phone said 6:11 too, and no service, and it was not going to say anything else useful. I put it back in my pocket.
Then I did what I'd have done on any job I'd been sent to without a walkthrough. I went and looked at the building.
The door out of the panel room opened under a staircase into a long hall, and the hall was the size of a high school gym if a high school gym were built out of grey stone and heavy timber. The ceiling was beamed and high. Light came in through a row of tall windows down one side, and every window had a stone niche set in the wall beside it at shoulder height, and in every niche sat a lamp: a round cage of iron around a globe of the same glass as the things in the panel. All of them dark.
In the middle of the floor there was a round pit lined with stone, maybe eight feet across, with an iron hood hanging over it on chains, and the hood went up through the roof in an iron flue. That was the only flue I'd seen. The floor around the pit was swept. The whole floor was swept, every board and flag of it, and there wasn't a cobweb on a beam.
I'd seen abandoned buildings. This wasn't one. It was a building somebody had cleaned for a new tenant and then not turned the heat on.
The kitchen was off the end of the hall, with a big iron range against one wall that had no firebox door on it, which bothered me until I looked underneath it and found a copper lead going into a plate set under the iron. No firebox because no fire. Somebody had built an electric range, more or less, except whatever ran it came off that slab in the back room. The pantry beyond had sacks of flour, a crock of salt, salt pork in a barrel of brine, dried beans, crocks of lamp oil, and a stack of wool cloth in bolts, grey and brown and a dark green, tied with string. All of it fresh. The flour didn't have weevils in it. I checked.
Upstairs there was a gallery running around three sides of the hall, and eight doors off it. I opened all eight. Eight rooms, each with a bed frame and a rope mattress-net and a chest, each with one window and one niche and one dead lamp, each so cold my breath hung in front of me. Downstairs, past the panel room, there was a room with a stone floor and a big stone tub sunk into one corner, and a long drain cut in the slate, and nothing else in it at all. On the other side of the hall, at the east end, a room with two narrow beds and a long table and shelves of empty jars with handwritten labels I couldn't read. That made ten rooms somebody could sleep in, if anybody could stand to sleep in them.
There were no fireplaces in any of them. I went back up to the gallery and looked out of a window at the roof line, which was slate and whole and had a skin of snow on it, and the only thing sticking up through it was the hood flue over the hall.
So the whole house was heated off the panel. Floor plates, like radiant heat, and the lamps in the niches for light, all of it fed through that copper in the walls. One room full of supply and a building full of load. I'd wired a hundred buildings laid out on the same idea. I'd never seen one where every circuit was off at the same time and the main still had power on it.
Out the hall windows the ground fell away to the south-east. Below the house there was a yard with a stone wall around it, a stable, a lean-to shed and a pair of gates onto a road that ran along the hillside, left to right, and out of sight both ways into pine. Past the yard the slope went down a couple of hundred yards to a dark opening in the hill, a mouth in the rock with snow drifted at its lip. I didn't like the look of it and decided I'd go see what it was some other day. Beside the road, just past the gates, there was a squared stone post with something carved into its face. I couldn't read it from there.
The light was going. Out there, the sky had gone the yellowish grey that comes before snow.
I went back down to the hall and tried the obvious thing. There was split wood stacked in a bin by the pit, so I laid some in the pit, small stuff on the bottom, and took out the butane lighter I carry for heat-shrink and put the flame to it. It caught. It burned a minute, smoked up into the hood like it was supposed to, and then went out. Not burned down. Out, as if somebody had put a lid on it. I tried again with some shavings and the same thing happened, and the third time I watched closely and saw the flames lean down flat toward the stone and die there, like they'd been pressed.
That was when something lit up between me and the pit, at eye height, with nothing holding it there.
[LANTERNWELL — Ruin] [Keeper: Glenn Hollister (bound)] [Rooms fit for a guest: 0 of 10] [Hearth: cold]
It hung in the air about a foot and a half out from my eyes, pale and square-edged, and didn't move when I moved my head. I read it top to bottom the way I'd read a panel schedule somebody else had filled out. A name for the building. A name for me, spelled right, which I didn't care for. A count of rooms that agreed with mine, and said none of them passed. A status on the one piece of equipment I'd just failed to start.
"What do you mean, bound?" I asked it.
It had no answer. The light stayed where it was. After a while it went away by itself, the way a screen goes to sleep.
I'll be honest that I sat down on the edge of the pit for a few minutes after that. I thought about my sister in Mesa, who I was supposed to help move a couch on Saturday, and who was going to call me twice and then get mad. I thought about the super, who'd find my truck in the lot and my hard hat gone. I thought about the dental office, which was going to get its gear landed by somebody else.
Then I thought about the cold, because that was the thing that was going to matter in about two hours.
Item one, heat. I didn't have to fix the whole house tonight. I had to make one room warm enough to sleep in, and the stone room had the biggest plate under it, from the size of the copper I'd seen going in under its sill. One room. Then supper, then everything else.
I went back to the panel and got out my non-contact tester. It's a pen-shaped thing that chirps and lights when it's near a live conductor, and I had no reason to think it would know what this stuff was, but it was the tool I had. I held it to the copper coming off the first of the bright cores, and it chirped, fast and steady. I held it to the copper off one of the cracked ones and it gave me a slow chirp that came and went. So the stuff ran close enough to current that my tester would talk about it. That was the best news I'd had since six o'clock.
The stone room's lead, as near as I could tell from where its channel went, came off a seat in the bottom row with one of the cracked cores in it. I held the tester to that copper and it barely woke up. One tired chirp, a long gap, another. Not enough to warm a floor. Not enough, probably, to get through plaster at all, because when I followed the channel out of the panel room and held the tester to the wall, it said nothing.
So I tapped, using a screwdriver handle, and listened. The plaster over solid stone gave a flat, dead sound. The plaster over the channel, where they'd cut a groove for the copper and filled it back, was a hair hollower. I started at the panel room door and worked along, knock, knock, knock, marking with a carpenter's pencil every time the note changed. The channel ran along the hall wall at about knee height, turned the corner under the stair, ran on along the back wall, and dropped down to the floor at the stone room's doorway. I paced it. Forty feet, give or take. Somewhere in that forty feet there might be a break in the copper, and there might be ten, and I had no drawings, a cracked core on the feed, and a tester that went quiet the second I put plaster between it and the wire.
By the time I'd finished pencil-marking it the windows had gone blue, and then dark, and the only light in the hall was what leaked out of the panel room door from those two good cores. I got out my headlamp and then didn't put it on. I didn't know how long I was going to need that battery, and I could see enough to walk.
I was standing in the panel room with my hand on the slate, thinking about which seat to rob to feed the stone room and whether I was about to blow something I didn't understand, when I heard boots outside.
More than one set. Crunching on snow, coming up the slope fast and uneven, the way people walk when they're carrying something heavy between them. Somebody swore. Then a man's voice, loud and hoarse, from down at the yard gate.
"Hello the house! Is anyone in there? Hello!"
I went out through the hall and pulled the main door open, and the cold came in around my legs like water.
There was a lantern at the gate, swinging. By its light I could see four figures coming up through the yard, two tall and two short, the short ones not much more than four feet and bundled up so all I could see was a snout and a pair of eyes catching the light. Between the four of them, at the corners, they carried a door. A plain plank door, off its hinges, held flat like a stretcher.
There was a woman lying on it under a blanket. Dark hair in a heavy braid, one bare arm hanging off the side. And off the far end of the door, where her legs should have been, a long slate-blue tail hung down nearly to the snow, and swung, slack and heavy, with every step they took.
End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.