Nacht - The Dredger

 "No matter how long I am here, this place refuses to feel real. It is less like a dream and more like those games children play with each other, pretending to be police and criminals. It is as if every window held no one behind it, only a stage curtain and a wall. But I think I know better. I think this is no dream, no game... and that this city is real."

I work as a dredger at the riverbank... usually payed and fed in donations by those who live in the area. Nacht has no hansoms, so there goes my old career. I feel some days as if I wish to peel my own face off. Anyways. The river that runs through the southern district has different names depending on who you ask, what group or what people.  A fair chunk of the water in the city comes through there, so they need people like me to pull things up that people shouldn't be drinkin'. Things like rusty mugs, old shoes, bits of animal fur, all decaying now... and bodies. Its not a secret that Nacht tends to create... bodies. All kinds of bodies. If ya stick your ear to the ground you can always hear, every day, about somebody dying. You listen too much it'll make you all low and down. Make ya think things about your own life that will get you down. About how no one ever seems to leave the city, about how you might never even try. And don't think it hasn't come to mind... Someone seeing my face in that river some day. It has. Despite the aching I know that's there, I don't mind no more.

But you pull all kinds of things up from that river... and I don't just mean bodies. I've pulled up swords, umbrellas, chests fulla' soggy documents, mast heads, entire windows, skeletons of things I can't put a name to, and several failed suicides. A few have asked me to take them home. But they're always cold to the touch. It ain't worth the risk. That's one of those things the constables suggest i'm best off not telling anyone. Like the night lights, candle glows that can be seen under the water past midnight, and sometimes, on frosty nights, I swear I hear her singing. I see hands clutching candles beneath the water. And I ain't told nobody. Not even Kemper when he drinks with me. Not like many folks want to drink with a man who's hands touched bodies. Not for long, anyways. Always curiosity. But it fades quick, even among the most ghoulish of the constables.
Their government is new, anyways. Second one I've seen since I found my way to the city. But this place is older, far older than I think any of them realize. I've pulled up french helmets I saw in books as a boy, wax tablets in old languages I sold to a librarian.... I've pulled up fragments of books of the bible I've never heard of... roman jewelry... It makes me wonder sometimes. Wonder about what it all means. Wonder about how. Then I hear about that Librarian going missing, about the pastor I gave the fragments to killin' his wife... I think about the voice I heard when I dredge up Molly Dickson, the whisper that said "Put her back." and I look behind me and there's no one there... and I stop thinkin' about it.