The telephone rang six times before the worker noticed it.
He stood on the far side of the bridge with one hand resting on the van’s open bonnet. The river moved below us, black between the concrete supports, carrying the four-three rhythm in its current. Each ring from the house beyond the fields arrived a fraction late, as if the sound had to travel through something denser than air.
“Someone should get that,” he said.
Rachel tightened her grip on my hand. “No.”
The worker looked at her, then at me. He was perhaps forty, with a square face reddened by cold and a fluorescent jacket stained at the cuffs. The ordinary details made him more frightening than any figure from the village. He had a chipped thermos on the van roof. A clipboard lay on the passenger seat. A road-maintenance logo had been stitched above his breast pocket.
People like him belonged to a world where a ringing telephone was an inconvenience, not an invitation.
“You said you needed a lift,” he said. “I can take you as far as Carrickmore. If the van starts.”
I glanced back at the bridge.
The telephone stopped.
The silence afterward was worse. The river kept moving, the wind worried at the bare branches, and somewhere under the concrete the pulse continued, too low to hear directly but strong enough to make my molars ache.
“Try the van,” I said.
Rachel turned to me. “Mark.”
“If we stay here, the route has one object to work with. If we move, it has more.”
“That isn’t an argument for moving.”
“No. It’s an argument for choosing the object.”
The worker had begun watching us with the cautious concern of someone deciding whether two strangers were injured or merely difficult. “Is there a problem?”
“There’s a phone ringing,” I said.
He glanced toward the distant houses. “I heard it.”
“It may ring again.”
He shrugged. “Phones do that.”
Rachel gave me a look that said the explanation was too close to a lie. I had no better one.
The worker wiped his hands on his trousers and climbed into the driver’s seat. The van rocked under his weight. He turned the key.
The engine clicked once.
Then again.
The sound came from the starter, but underneath it I heard the same interval I had measured in the stones: four dry impacts, three, and a gap. The dashboard clock flickered between 03:17 and 00:00 before settling on 10:42.
Next
At the abandoned pumping station, Mark and Rachel must keep Declan from answering the Shepherd’s question about the songs while discovering what the river has carried into the empty building.
The van smelled of wet fabric, diesel, and peppermint. A portable radio sat in a cradle beside the steering column. Its display was blank, but the speaker grille gave a faint intermittent hiss. I put my fingers against the casing. The vibration was not electrical noise. It came in groups.
Four.
Three.
Pause.
I pulled my hand away.
Rachel remained outside. She had wrapped the broken recorder in its dishcloth and tucked it beneath her coat, as if hiding it from the landscape might still matter. Her face had gone pale, but she did not look toward the river.
“Try it again,” I said.
The worker turned the key.
This time the engine caught.
It started with a deep cough, then settled into an uneven idle. The radio crackled. A voice spoke through the static.
“Where are you going?”
The worker froze.
The voice was mine.
Not the voice from the recorder exactly. That recording had carried the flattened consonants and room tone of my old field notes. This was my voice as it sounded now: strained, breathless, with the slight rasp that had developed after the receiving. It asked the question from the radio, then repeated it through the van’s open doors and the bridge behind us.
Where are you going?
The worker looked at me. “Was that you?”
I reached for the radio and pulled it from the cradle. The cable came free with it.
The question continued.
“Where are you going?”
The speaker was no longer making the sound. It came from the van’s ventilation system. The air vents breathed my words toward us in little bursts, each one separated by the four-three pattern.
Rachel climbed into the passenger seat. “Drive.”
The worker did not move. “What is this?”
“A fault,” I said.
He stared at me.
“A serious one,” I added.
That satisfied him less than I hoped. He looked down at the dead radio in my hand, then at the telephone poles beyond the bridge. “I need to report the van’s location.”
“Don’t use the phone.”
“I wasn’t going to use a phone.”
He pointed to a black handset mounted beneath the dashboard. “That’s the work line.”
The line rang.
It rang inside the van, inches from my knee.
The worker flinched so hard his shoulder struck the door. Rachel reached across him and pulled the handset free before he could touch it. The cord stretched, thin and dark, down through the dashboard.
The ringing stopped.
For one clean second, the van was quiet.
Then the handset whispered.
Not words. Breathing.
I heard the intake of my own breath from the night in the circle, when the stones had contracted around my boots. I heard Rachel say my name. I heard Bríd warning us to walk together. These were not recordings from one place. They had different reverberations, different distances. The Shepherd had collected them as relationships, as routes between voices.
Rachel shoved the handset into my hands. “Break it.”
I struck it against the door frame.
The casing split. A black wire curled out like a root.
The dead receiver said, very clearly, “Mark.”
The worker made the sign of the cross.
That small gesture changed him. Until then, he had been deciding whether we were dangerous. Now he understood that danger had entered his van before we had.
“Get out,” he said.
Rachel did not argue. She opened her door.
I stayed where I was.
Outside, the bridge waited. The river waited beneath it. The road led south, and the telephone poles marked a direction the Shepherd could use. If we left the van, the worker would remain with the damaged line and the sound we had brought into it. If we stayed, we made him responsible for carrying us.
Neither choice was clean. That was the point. The route did not need a willing person. It needed a connection.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
His hand was still on the steering wheel. “Declan.”
“Declan what?”
“Why?”
Because names were doors. Because the ledger had never needed more than a surname. Because I had watched the Shepherd turn identity into a handle.
I could not tell him any of that without giving the thing another sentence to retain.
“Because I need to know who’s driving,” I said.
“Declan Sloane.”
The van’s engine changed pitch.
It dropped beneath hearing, into the range the stones had used. The floor began to vibrate. Four pulses ran through the pedals. Three returned through the steering column.
Rachel looked at me. Her eyes were steady now.
“We take the van,” she said.
Declan stared at her. “You just told me to get out.”
“We need to leave the bridge.”
“You said the vehicle was faulty.”
“It is.”
“And you want to drive in it?”
“No,” she said. “You do.”
He almost laughed. The sound caught in his throat when the broken handset repeated it from the floor.
I looked through the windscreen. The distant telephone had started ringing again. This time the sound came from every house along the road, one after another, travelling toward us. The first ring began near the fields. The second came from the next cluster of roofs. Then the third, nearer. The sequence was not random. It was laying a line in front of the van.
I took the damaged handset and dropped it into the footwell.
“Drive north,” I said.
Declan shook his head. “Carrickmore is south.”
“Then north.”
“There’s nothing north except Black Hallow.”
I looked at Rachel.
She had heard it too: beneath the engine and the ringing, a low pressure gathering in the direction of the village. The road behind us was open, but the road ahead had already been named by the worker’s destination.
If we drove south, we would give the Shepherd Carrickmore.
If we drove north, we would give it Black Hallow again.
Rachel reached for the dashboard and switched off the ventilation. The van’s fan wound down. The four-three pulse remained in the metal.
“Neither,” she said.
Declan’s expression hardened. “There’s no third road.”
“There is,” I said.
I pointed toward the narrow service track running beside the river, half-hidden by reeds. It was not marked on the worker’s map. It followed the water east, away from the poles and houses, toward a stand of alder trees.
“Where does that go?” Rachel asked.
Declan looked through the windscreen. “The old pumping station.”
“Is it occupied?”
“No.”
“Then that’s where we’re going.”
He stared at the track. “The bridge is the only maintained route.”
“Good.”
The telephone ringing reached the bridge.
The van’s doors locked themselves.
Declan twisted the key, but the engine had already chosen its direction. The wheels turned toward the southbound road. He fought the steering wheel, boots braced against the floor.
I grabbed the handbrake. It rose without resistance.
The brakes were gone.
Not failed. Gone.
The van began to roll.
Rachel seized the wheel beside Declan and hauled it toward the river track. The tyres struck the verge. Mud sprayed across the windscreen. We lurched off the road as the telephones rang together behind us, one vast descending note.
For a moment the van pointed directly at the alder trees.
Then, from the back of the vehicle, my voice said, “We came to hear the old songs.”
Declan heard it.
He looked at me in the mirror.
“What songs?” he asked.
I had no answer that would not become a path.
Rachel gripped the wheel until her knuckles whitened. “Don’t ask him anything,” she said.
Ahead, the river bent east. Beyond the reeds stood the abandoned pumping station, its windows black and its door hanging open.
The van rolled toward it with the brakes dead, the engine humming in four-three time, while behind us every telephone on the far side of the bridge began to ring for the same listener.