Turn 7 of 7

You take off your jacket and put it around her shoulders. She flinches at the touch and then does not, and her hands come up to pull it close with the automatic gratitude of someone who is cold and does not care where the warmth comes from. The jacket is absurd on her, nylon and zip over hand-loomed wool, and she looks down at it without comprehension and then up at you with something that is not comprehension either but is close enough.

"Jonathan was rebuilding the mill," she says, and her voice is quiet now, the shaking gone out of it, replaced by something more dangerous — a stillness, a clarity. "He was rebuilding it because he'd found something in the foundations. He wouldn't say what. He said it was better if I saw it myself, and he was particular about the bridge because — because the bridge was where the old culvert ran, the one that fed the millrace. He said the water had a path, and he'd found where it went, and he didn't think they should drown the valley, he thought it would come back through the stone. He was laughed at for it. He was very particular and he was laughed at."

She looks at the water, and you look at it too, and you understand at last what the reservoir is. Not a thing that was built. A thing that was holding something down. The drought has loosened its grip, and what was held is coming back through the stone the way Jonathan said it would — up through the road, through the bridge, through the silt and the two hundred years of silence. The mill wheel she heard turning was the water remembering its old path, the culvert, the race, and Jonathan had found it and tried to tell someone and the valley was drowned anyway.

Headlamps appear on the ridge road above the reservoir — two of them, moving slowly down the track. A car door opens and shuts, and a torch beam sweeps across the exposed cobbles. A man's voice carries across the still air, calling out to ask if anyone is down there, and behind him, slower, an old man picks his way down the slope with a lantern that throws steady yellow light. The old man is Pell, you think — Old Pell, who grew up on the shore, whose grandmother told him the lake would give it back. He has been waiting his whole life for this, and he is not surprised, and he is not afraid. He comes down to the water's edge and he looks at Marget on the bridge and he takes off his cap.

"You'll be wanting to come in out of the wet," he says, and his voice is kind and ordinary and it does not waver. Marget looks at him and something in her face breaks open — not grief, not relief, but the simple recognition of being spoken to like a person who is here and real and present. She steps off the bridge onto the exposed road, and the stone holds her, and Inspector Roe reaches the bottom of the slope with his clipboard and his explanations and stops walking when he sees her. He does not have an explanation. He stands there with his mouth slightly open and his torch aimed at the ground, and you know that whatever report he writes will not contain what is happening here.

You walk with Marget up the slope, and Pell walks beside her on the other side, and she does not look back at the water. At the top of the ridge she stops and turns and looks down at the emerging village — the bridge, the church tower, the roads coming clean of silt, the rooflines of houses that have been dark for two centuries. The wind has shifted. There is rain in it, the first real rain in months, and you can smell it coming across the valley. Marget feels it on her face and closes her eyes.

"Will it go back under?" she asks.

You look at the sky. The drought is breaking. The reservoir will rise, and Nether Hallow will sink again, and you do not know what happens to the returned when the water comes back. But Pell is already answering, his voice steady and certain, the way a voice is when it has rehearsed this moment for seventy-eight years.

"Then we'll be here," he says. "We'll be here when it lets you out again."

The rain begins, light at first, then heavier, and it falls on the bridge and the church and the old road and the three of you standing on the ridge. Below, the reservoir darkens and dims as the ripples take it, and the ruins of Nether Hallow begin their long return to the deep. Marget pulls your jacket tighter and turns away from the water, and you walk together toward the lights of the shore houses, and Pell's lantern swings gently with each step, and the rain comes down on the lake that kept a village for two hundred years and is letting it go, piece by piece, person by piece, back into the air.