Roddon: The Marrowdyke Level, Book One
For eighty-nine years, six fen parishes have held the water in their drains at a level nobody will write down.
The pumping station at Marrowdyke burns the fuel of a machine that shifts four cubic metres a second, and shifts barely one. Head office wants it costed. They send Alma Setchell, who grew up eleven miles away, left at eighteen, and has spent twenty years becoming very good at exactly this.
It takes her four days. The pumps are perfect. The fault is a discharge gate padlocked a third open - set by hand, kept that way across two generations of keeper, re-set in secret after the last refurbishment. She writes it up in twenty-two pages with four photographs, adds a careful recommendation that somebody find out why before anybody touches it, and sends it.
The Board cuts the padlock on a Friday morning. The pumps run properly for the first time since the war. The water in the Marrowdyke Level begins, at last, to go down.
The fen has been sinking for three hundred years. Drained peat meets air and wastes away - a centimetre and a half a year, patiently, without malice - and everything buried in it has been sinking too. Everything except what the water was holding.
Now the ground is going down past it.
RODDON is a horror novel about drainage: about competence, institutions, and the particular dread of being the generation that let something go. There is no monster in it. There is a water level, a padlock, an iron post driven to the clay in 1868, and a parish that agreed to something in 1937 and then made very sure it could never be written down.
Book One of a three-book series. The story continues in FREEBOARD.
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