Eren Tal didn’t believe in voices in the plumbing. In his forty years in the timber and wheelwright trade, he had heard pipes whine, scream, hammer, and whistle like dying pigs, and in every single instance, the cause was air bubbling blast, worn valve packings, or water hammer caused by a careless lockman dropping a water gate board too fast. He knelt beside the lead basin with a three-foot solid steel sounding rod in his hand, determined to prove that the mystery was nothing more than high-pressure rebound.
The stone floor was freezing, the damp cold piercing his woolen trousers at the knees. He pressed the rounded brass ball of the sounding rod firmly against the lead pipe’s mounting pipe rim, resting the flat eight-sided end directly against the mastoid bone behind his right ear. He closed his eyes, shutting out the visual world, allowing his hearing cortex to process the raw clockwork shakes of the earth.
The sound signed name was complex. He heard the deep, oceanic roar of the Gray Rush surging against the harbor piers. A massive, ninety-cycle bass note that never ceased. Overlaid on that was the sharp, metal clatter of the town pump house on the North Terrace, three miles away. And then, woven between the two, came the stuttering pulse that Pella was tracking. Thump... Thump... Thump. A deliberate, four-second interval. Then three short, sharp taps.
