The Scream at the End of the Hall

The red lamp went out when he was halfway down the corridor.

It didn't flicker. It simply stopped, as though a thumb had pinched the flame, and the darkness that closed over the hall was so total that Cassian stood still with one hand flat against the wall and wondered, for a stupid second, whether he had gone blind.

Then his eyes began to find the gray.

A thin, sourceless gray, the color of dishwater, leaking in from nowhere. It was enough to show him the long stone throat of the hallway, the dim rectangles of the doors, his own hand pressed to the wall. It was enough to show him the breath coming out of his mouth.

White. Thick as cigarette smoke.

It had been cold before. This was something else. The temperature had dropped the way a stone drops down a well, all at once and with no bottom, and the air had a taste, a metallic, coppery bite at the back of the throat that he had smelled once before. On his first night. Standing outside the gate. Like someone ground a rusty iron bar under cold running water.

Walk, he told himself. Just walk. Go back to the room.

But his feet carried him forward, toward the east end, because the voice was louder there.

Hospes veni. Hospes veni. Hospes veni.

It was Albert's voice, and it was not. The pitch was Albert's, the nasal edge, the little crack on the high note. But the rhythm was something else. Slow and patient, each syllable laid down like a stone on a grave. Whoever was speaking had learned to speak a very long time ago and had not once been in a hurry.

The hallway bent to the right at the end, where the cloister door opened onto the rain and the east stairs climbed into black. Cassian reached the corner and put his shoulder against the cold stone, and slowly, a hair at a time, leaned out to look.

Albert Sterling stood at the foot of the stairs in his nightshirt.

His feet were bare. His glasses were gone. Without them his face looked naked and young, stripped to a boy's bones, his eyes half-lidded and unfocused, and his mouth moved around the words with a stiff mechanical care, like a puppet being worked from above. A thread of drool hung from his lip. He wasn't walking. He was standing absolutely still, arms hanging at his sides, swaying very slightly, and he was facing the stairwell as if someone were standing at the top of it and calling him by name.

Nobody was at the top of the stairs.

Cassian's mouth had gone dry. Get him. The thought came sudden and clear. Grab him by the shirt and pull him back to the room. Don't wait for midnight. Don't wait for anything.

He took a step.

The light in the corridor changed.

It was the smallest thing. A shiver in the gray, the way the surface of a pond shivers before a hand breaks it. And in the same instant the air behind Albert thickened and folded, and something stepped out of the wall of dark.

It had been standing there the whole time.

That was the first thought, absurd and total: it's been standing there the whole time and I looked right at it and didn't see. It was very tall. Tall enough that it had to stoop, a bowed shape wider at the shoulders than a man's and narrower at the hip, thin as a coat on a hook. It wore something long that hung without moving, no color, no texture, like a shadow that had learned to stand. And its head...

Its head was wrapped.

Layer on layer of cloth, gray and stained and wound so thick and tight that no features showed through, not a nose, not a mouth, not an eye. A smooth blind knot where a face should have been. The cloth seemed to breathe. It rose and fell, rose and fell, and the sound that came out of it was not the sound of one person breathing.

It was a crowd. Dozens of lungs, old and young, fast and slow, a rasp and a wheeze and a wet bubbling gasp and the thin shallow panting of a small child, all pulling air at the same time through the same wrapped blind head. The sound filled the corridor. It crawled under the doors. It was the worst thing Cassian had ever heard in his life, and he had heard his father's boots on the stairs.

A long gray hand came out of the cloak.

It was too long. The fingers had one joint too many. It settled on the back of Albert's neck with the delicacy of someone testing fruit, and Albert's chanting stopped mid-syllable.

His whole body went rigid.

His eyes came open. Wide. Wide as dinner plates, the whites showing all the way around, and Cassian watched the sleep burn off his face and the terror pour in behind it, total and animal and clean. Albert drew a breath that scraped like a saw through wet wood.

He screamed.

It was a sound that had no business coming out of a human throat. It went up and up and ripped open at the top, and the stone walls threw it back and forth until the whole building seemed to ring with it. Doors rattled in their frames. Somewhere behind a wall, a girl or a very small boy began to sob. And not one door opened. Forty rooms full of boys lying rigid under their blankets, hands over their ears, obeying.

Albert twisted in the gray hand like a hooked fish, kicking, clawing at his own throat. The thing didn't hurry. It simply lifted. His bare heels left the floor.

"Help me!" His eyes were rolling, wild, searching the dark. "Somebody—please—"

And then they found the corner.

They found Cassian.

For a second the two of them looked at each other across twenty feet of stone, and Cassian saw recognition hit Albert's face like a slap. Not hope, not yet. Only the stark disbelief of a drowning man who sees that the shore is not empty.

"Cassian!"

He screamed the name. He screamed it clearly, each syllable carved out, each one a nail driven in.

"Cassian! Cassian, help me! Cassian!"

The wrapped head turned.

It turned slowly, all the way, the way a sunflower tracks the sun. The thick gray cloth rose and fell, rose and fell, and the dozens of breaths in the hallway hitched, broke apart, and came back in a single drawn-out gasp, a hundred throats inhaling together.

It had no eyes. It had no face. And it was looking straight at him.

Cassian could feel it. A pressure that settled over his skin like a hand laid on his whole body at once, cold and curious and weighing. He knew with a certainty that went down to the roots of his bones that this was not the first time it had looked at him. That something that lived under the chapel had been turning in its sleep for three weeks, ever since a bus dropped a boy at a gate, and that it had been waiting for this. For him to come and stand in front of it.

It knows my name.

Somewhere in the back of his skull, a calm voice spoke, in the tone of the old slaughterhouse trick his father had taught him with a pig on the line: Don't look away. Don't blink. Don't let it see you move first.

Albert's feet kicked, kicked, kicked. His mouth was wide. Cassian could hear the bones in his neck creaking under the long gray fingers.

His own heart was slamming so hard his vision shook. His legs felt filled with sand. A part of him, a big, shrieking, sensible part, had already turned and was halfway down the hall, running for Room 104 and the blanket and the dark. The Night Law said don't open that door. Ronald said don't answer when it calls. The old man in the library said, I have seen plenty of kids vanish.

And Albert Sterling, who called him a butcher, who sneered at his father and laughed at his clothes, hung in the air with his bare feet pedaling nothing and looked at him with his naked, nearsighted eyes.

It would take about four seconds to reach him.

It would take less than that to be gone.