The Fulling Wall

Roxie Ward was forty-three years old and had spent most of that year cutting confetti for other people's celebrations, which felt like a metaphor she refused to examine too closely. She worked out of a rented unit behind the flea market in town, feeding stacks of tissue paper into a hand crank cutter, and every October the local theater troupe ordered enough cannon loads to bury her in little pink rectangles until her fingernails smelled like dye for a week. It was honest work. It was also, at eleven at night, incredibly boring.

So when Julio Banks called her up and said, "You are coming to the organ recital, right? The one at the old mill? I am introducing you to someone," Roxie said yes mostly to get out of the unit, which still had confetti dust in the corners from the spring order.

"Who am I meeting?" she had asked.

"Lesley. You will like Lesley. Or you will find Lesley exhausting. There is no in-between, I have tested this."

"What does that even mean, Julio?"

"You will see! Saturday. Bring a jacket, it gets cold out there."

It was Saturday now, and it did get cold, and Julio had already vanished into the crowd by the organ, because Julio owned a karaoke bar called Voz Alta and could not resist a crowd with music in it. The recital was held in the garden behind the old fulling mill, this ruined limestone thing up the hill from the town of Arraiolos, and the organ itself was some enormous Baroque contraption hauled outside once a year so the whole village could sit on folding chairs and pretend they understood fugues. Roxie did not understand fugues. She understood scissors and tissue paper and, occasionally, men who turned out to be disappointing.

She understood the last one about as well as anyone could. There had been a sound technician, seven years ago, backstage at a production of anything with confetti in it, and it had been brief and warm and it had ended the way those things end, with a shrug and a casserole dish returned full. She was not heartbroken about it. She was just tired of the same small rotation of available people, tired of the little scripts everyone performed, tired of knowing exactly how the second date would go before the appetizers arrived.

What she wanted, if she was honest with the ceiling of her bedroom at two in the morning, was to feel experienced again. In the sense of experiencing things. Not just older.

So she left the folding chairs, and the fugue thinned out behind her, and she walked around the side of the mill to look at it properly, because Julio had told her some nonsense about it being four hundred years old and she figured she should at least glance at it before going home.

The doorway was just a doorway, a tall dark mouth with a lintel worn smooth, and she stepped through it mostly out of curiosity and a little bit of spite toward her own boring life.

Inside, the organ went quiet. Not gone, just far away, filtered through three feet of cracked limestone, so the music turned into something muffled and underwater. Roxie stood in the dark and let her eyes adjust and thought, well, this is a ruin, great job, Roxie, very adventurous, and then she heard the thudding.

It came from the far wall. A dull, heavy thud. Then a pause. Then two thuds. Then a pause. Then three, faster.

It was rhythmic. That was the strange part. Ruins did not usually keep time.

"Hello?" she called, and her voice went up into the roof beams and came back down with cobwebs on it. The thudding did not stop. It did not even stumble, which felt almost rude, like the mill had decided she was not important enough to interrupt itself for.

"You hear it, then?"

Roxie jumped so hard she nearly took out a support post. A shape unfolded itself from a dark corner, a woman, early forties at most, wearing a canvas jacket with about eleven pockets and holding a thermos like a weapon she had chosen peace over.

"Sorry! Sorry, I did not mean to sneak. People do that around me, it is a curse of the profession," the woman said. "You are Roxie, yes? Julio's friend? I am Lesley."

"You're the historian," Roxie said, getting her heart back down out of her throat. "Julio said you would be exhausting."

"Julio says many things! Some of them are even true." Lesley grinned, and it was a good grin, crooked and unbothered. "Come here. Stand by the wall. Do you hear the rhythm?"

"I hear something thudding, yeah. Is it a machine? Some pump left running?"

"No machine. Come, put your ear to the stone, low down, where the lichen is. Not the moss, the lichen, it is dryer."

Roxie looked at her. "You want me to put my ear on a wall in an abandoned building."

"I want exactly that, yes."

"There could be spiders."

"There are definitely spiders. They are more scared of you than you are of them, which is a lie people tell, but in this case the spiders are actually quite timid." Lesley crouched by the far wall and patted the stone beside her. "Come on. This is the good part of the evening and Julio always leaves before the good part."

The organ moaned somewhere behind the wall, some slow passage, and Roxie figured that a woman with eleven pockets and a thermos was probably not the most dangerous thing she had done this year, which said more about her year than about Lesley. She crouched down and put her ear to the stone.

The wall was cold and a little gritty, and through it, under the distant organ, came the thudding, much closer now, like a heartbeat in a mattress. Thud. Pause. Thud thud. Pause. Thud thud thud.

"It is the fulling rhythm," Lesley said, crouched beside her, her voice dropped low like they were in church. "This was a fulling mill. They cleaned and thickened wool here. The big wooden hammers, the stamps, they lifted and dropped in sequence, all day, and the rhythm you hear was famous. People say you could hear it across the valley."

"There's no hammers in there now. There is no anything in there now."

"Correct. And yet." Lesley let the word sit there. "Listen again. Count it."

Roxie listened. Thud. Pause. Thud thud. Pause. Thud thud thud. And then it started over, and somewhere around the second repetition she noticed something she did not want to notice, which was that the pauses between the beats were about the length of her own pulse. She put her free hand on her wrist and counted, and the wall thudded, and her heart answered, and for one weird shivery second the two lines matched up like the mill was keeping time with her chest.

"Okay," she said, sitting back on her heels. "Okay, that is. That is a little strange."

"Ha. Most people say nothing. They nod politely and go back to the organ. Julio said you might be different. He said, and I quote, she cuts confetti for a living, she has an appetite for the strange."

"He said that? That's a nice way of saying my job is weird."

"It is a lovely job. I have considered it." Lesley sat down fully on the dusty floor, apparently unbothered by what this would do to her jacket, and took a sip from the thermos. "Do you want to hear the story of this wall? The old one? It is not in any of the guidebooks, because the guidebook people think it is nonsense, which is their loss and my gain."

"Is it a true story?"

"It is a true story in the way that matters, which is that people lived by it for three hundred years." Lesley patted the wall. "Sit. It takes five minutes and the cold comes up through the floor, so decide fast."

Roxie sat. The floor was indeed cold and her jacket was indeed inadequate, but the thudding had gotten under her skin somehow, that patient rhythm, and she wanted to know what it was knocking about.

"So," Lesley said. "The millers here, the men who ran the stamps, they had a pact. Not with the river and not with the lord of the manor, both of whom you would expect. With the echoes. The mill was loud, right? Stamp after stamp, dawn to dusk, the whole valley full of it. And the old belief was that all that sound did not just scatter. It went into the walls and it pooled there, and the walls got, for lack of a better word, hungry. Full of everything anyone ever felt while the hammers were falling. Grief, joy, arguments, weddings heard from a distance. And the echoes would give it back, but only if you asked properly."

"Asked properly how?"

"With a rhythm. Your own rhythm. You tap, or you breathe, or you put your hand or your ear or, later, more than that, against the stone, and you match the mill's old beat, and if the walls like you, they answer." Lesley's eyes glinted in the thin light from the doorway. "The millers kept the true rhythm secret. They passed it father to daughter sometimes, which annoyed everyone. And the last miller, when the mill closed, she was a woman by then, 1931, she swore the echo pact would hold as long as somebody kept the count."

"Kept the count," Roxie repeated. "That sounds ominous and also kind of sexy, which I did not expect."

"Everything about this mill is a little bit sexy if you squint," Lesley said cheerfully, "but that comes later in the story, and you will want to be sitting down for it, and you are, good, so."

Lesley reached into one of the many pockets of her canvas jacket, and Roxie counted at least four pockets being patted before the right one was found. Out came a small object wrapped in a handkerchief, and the handkerchief was unfolded with the kind of ceremony usually reserved for crown jewels.

"So here is the part the guidebooks really would hate," Lesley said. "This is the key to the rhythm. Or rather, this stores the key. The rhythm itself was never written down, right? But the last miller, the woman, she left things behind when the mill shut. And one of the things she left was this."

It was a leather passport holder, cracked and dark, the kind of brown that had gone almost black at the edges. There was a stamp on the front, faded, and some letters that might once have been gold. Roxie leaned closer. The stamp said something in Portuguese, and under it, a number.

"A consulate?" she said. "Somebody's passport holder?"

"A foreign consulate, yes. The story goes that a consul, some minor official from somewhere cold, visited the mill in the 1920s and forgot his holder on a windowsill. Or left it on purpose, depending on which version you like. And the last miller took it, and she kept things in it, and by the end, the only thing she kept in it was the count."

"The count of the rhythm? Like, written down?"

"Inside. There is a slip of paper in the lining. I have never taken it out," Lesley said this with real pride, like a woman announcing she had never once peeked at her own Christmas presents. "Taking it out would end the pact, I think. Or maybe nothing would happen and I would just be a person holding a slip of paper. But the point is, the holder holds it. The holder is the key."

Roxie looked at the thing. It did not look like a key. It looked like something you would find in a drawer at your grandmother's house and feel vaguely sad about. "Can I touch it?"

"You can do more than touch it," Lesley said, and here her voice changed, dropped, got careful. "That is actually the whole next part of the story, so listen. When somebody keeps the count, they need a vessel. Something that held the miller's hands, her pockets, her days. The holder has been passed to keepers for a hundred years. The keeper before me was an old man named Simão, and before him, his mother, all the way back. And when I touch the holder while the rhythm is running, I feel it. The mill. Everything the walls pooled up."

"You feel it how? Like a memory?"

"Like a cold heat. That is the only way I can describe it and I have tried, believe me, I have tried on many people."

"Many people," Roxie said, and then wondered why she said it that way, and then decided not to wonder.

"Not like that. Well. Sometimes like that. But that comes later too." Lesley held out the holder across her open palm. "Here. Hold it flat in both hands, near the wall, and let the rhythm find you. If nothing happens, nothing happens, and we go back out and drink Julio's terrible sangria and that is the end. If something happens, well."

Roxie took the holder.

It was lighter than she expected and the leather was soft in that way old leather gets, soft like it had given up being stiff a long time ago. She held it in both hands the way you hold a bird, and for a second, nothing. The organ outside rolled through some big chord, the thudding kept on, thud, pause, thud thud, and she thought, well, that is that, nothing happens, sangria it is.

Then the cold heat came up through her palms.

That was the only way to describe it, Lesley was right, it was cold and it was heat at the same time, which should be impossible, and it went up her wrists and into her arms and it made her gasp, actually gasp, out loud, in a dusty mill at twilight. Her whole chest felt opened up, like someone had unzipped her. The rhythm in the wall got louder, or she got closer to it, she could not tell which, and for a moment she felt something enormous and patient on the other side of the limestone, paying attention to her.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that is. Wow. Okay. Wow."

"Told you," Lesley said, and she sounded delighted and a little breathless herself, and she had moved closer at some point, Roxie realized, close enough that their knees were almost touching on the cold floor.

Roxie looked down at the holder in her hands and the letters on the front seemed darker than before, or maybe that was the light. "It feels like the mill is looking at me. Is that mad? That sounds mad."

"It does not sound mad. It sounds like the walls like you." Lesley reached over and put her fingertips on the back of Roxie's hands, right on the holder, and the cold heat doubled, and Roxie shivered so hard the holder rattled against her rings. "There. Now you are holding it with me. Do you feel that?"

"I feel everything. I feel like I drank four espressos and also like I am about to fall asleep. Is that normal?"

"Completely normal. Simão used to say the holder tells you the truth about how you feel, which is always both things at once." Lesley's fingers were still there