Two Days

The six o'clock bell rang, and Albert's bed was empty.

Cassian had known it would be. He had lain awake the rest of the night watching the gray square of the window turn paler, and he'd rehearsed his face for the morning the way you rehearse a lie for a policeman. Blank. Tired. Bored. A kid who got sick and went to the bathroom and didn't see anything.

It was harder than he expected.

The blanket was smoothed. The pillow stood stacked at the head. The little ceramic jar and the leather satchel and the heirloom prayer book were gone, and the corner of the room looked scrubbed, as if it had been waiting years for someone to notice that it was empty.

Ronald stood motionless in front of the bed with one boot in his hand.

"He's—" Ronald started.

"Transferred." Karl was already dressed, already knotting his tie in the shard of mirror above the washbasin. His voice was smooth as polished wood. "His family had an emergency. Someone came for him before dawn."

"There's a washout on Route 9. No car could've—"

"Fisk."

The word cracked across the room like a whip. Ronald's mouth shut. Karl set the tie, smoothed it, turned around, and for one second Cassian saw the face behind the face: bone-white, hollow under the eyes, the pupils huge and black. Karl had not slept either. He looked like he'd been hit by a truck and was standing up only through force of manners.

"Transferred," Karl said again, quietly. "That is all any of us know. That is all any of us are going to say. Do you understand me?"

Ronald nodded. He put his boot on. His hands were shaking so badly that he missed the eyelet twice.

Cassian didn't look at Leo's bed. He didn't have to. He could feel the boy lying there with his face to the stone, awake, listening, and the word he'd mouthed in the dark sat in the room like a stain on a tablecloth.

He walked out into the corridor with the others. He kept his gaze straight ahead. Down the long gray hall, past the bathroom, past the east end where the cloister door stood closed and perfectly ordinary, a plain oak door with a brass handle and a puddle of rain on the threshold. Nothing there. Not a mark on the stone.

It was only when he stepped out into the courtyard, into the watery morning light, that he noticed the shadow.

The sun was low behind the chapel. Every student crossing the gravel threw a long thin shadow across the stones, a gray finger pointing west. Cassian looked down at his own and stopped.

It was longer than the others.

Not by much. The difference was barely a foot. But the shadow of a boy of five foot eight should not reach the stairs of the library when the boy himself was standing by the fountain, and it should not lie along the ground so heavily, with such a deliberate, listening stillness, as though it belonged to something taller.

He lifted his hand. The shadow's hand lifted a half-second later.

A half-second.

He put his hand in his pocket and walked faster.

…

He found Pike at noon.

The old man wasn't behind the counter. He was in the stacks, in the dim narrow aisle where the biographies ended and the church histories began, pushing a trolley of returned books with an air of tremendous concentration. When Cassian came around the corner he went still. Then he went on shelving, one book, two books, three, a man trying to look like part of the furniture.

"Mr. Pike."

"Not now, Hale."

"Something happened last night."

"I don't want to know."

"I called from the bathroom." Cassian kept his voice flat and low. "I know what you said. I know. But Dana had called twice, and my mom—my mom woke up, Mr. Pike. She woke up. I couldn't wait."

The old man's hand stopped on a spine.

"I heard them come in," Cassian said. "The Prefects. They washed their hands with salt. They talked about Albert Sterling, about how he'd touched something and they had to take him down to the chapel at midnight. They said the Hand had come." He swallowed. "Before they could, something else got him. In the hallway. It had... a covered face. It was tall. It breathed like a crowd. Albert called my name, and it looked at me."

Pike set the book down on the trolley with great care.

Then he turned, slowly, and Cassian saw the old man's face, and the sight of it frightened him more than anything that had happened in the hall.

Every drop of color had left it. The wrinkles stood out in deep dry furrows. His lips had gone gray. Behind the cracked reading glasses his clouded eyes were round and wet, and they were not looking at Cassian. They were looking just past his shoulder. At the air behind him. At something about a foot behind his left ear.

"It said your name," Pike whispered.

"Albert said it."

"It said it back."

Cassian hadn't told him that. His heart gave a hard slow knock against his ribs.

"How did you—"

"Go away." Pike's voice cracked. "Go away, kid. Please. I can't help you. There's nothing I can do, nothing anyone can—" He fumbled in his vest pocket and drew out a crumpled five-dollar bill, one of the ones from Cassian's earnings, and pushed it into Cassian's hand, folding his fingers around it. His own were icy. "Take it. Take your money. I don't want it. I won't lend you the phone, I won't lend you anything, don't come to the library, don't send anyone, don't—"

"Mr. Pike, please—"

"I have a granddaughter." It came out of him like something torn loose. "In Charleston. Seven years old. I've got a picture of her in my vest. Do you understand? I've been here forty years and I've kept my head down and my mouth shut because there's a girl." He staggered back a step, and his heel caught the trolley, and the books slid and tumbled across the floor with a sound like a rockslide. He didn't pick them up. He stared at the five-dollar bill in Cassian's fist and he would not, would not, would not look at his face.

"I'm sorry," he said. "God help me, I'm sorry."

He turned and went, hunched and stumbling, down the dim aisle and out of sight, and left the books lying where they fell.

Cassian stood in the dust-smelling silence with a five-dollar bill in his hand.

Nobody's going to help me.

It was a plain thought, almost calm. He examined it from several sides, as he'd examine a cut, and found it was true.

…

The second night came on a Sunday.

All day, Cassian felt people sliding away from him. It wasn't dramatic. There was no pointing, no whispering. A boy in the lunch line stepped back a half pace when Cassian reached for a tray. A teacher's gaze skated over him in class, then flinched, then skated again, as though uncertain what it had seen. Karl had stopped speaking to him altogether. Ronald, who had never in his life been able to hold in a sentence, ate his soup in silence at the far end of the table with his shoulders hunched around his ears.

Only Leo looked at him. Only Leo, across the dining hall, with the same tired, steady, mourning stare.

An hour before the seventh bell Cassian went to the bathroom, because he could not stand the smell of the room and needed to wash the sweat off his face. The red lamp in the corridor was lit again, steady, as if it had never gone out. The long room was empty. A line of dark windows. A row of brass taps, a cracked mirror above the center basin, silvered and flecked with age.

He turned on the water. It ran rust-colored for a moment, then clear. He cupped his hands and splashed his face, once, twice, and stood gripping the edge of the basin with water running off his chin.

He raised his head and looked at himself.

The face in the mirror was gaunt. The bruise at his temple had faded to yellow. There were purple smudges under his eyes, and his lips were chapped, and his dark hair stood up in tufts. He looked like a kid who hadn't slept in a week.

He looked, he thought, dully, like someone already half gone.

Behind his left shoulder, the stall doors stood in a neat row.

All of them were closed.

He frowned. They had been open when he came in. He was sure of it. He'd noticed the last door with its warped hinge hanging open an inch, like a mouth.

Cassian's gaze slid slowly along the mirror's cracked silver, along the row of green-painted doors reflected behind him, to the very last. It was shut. It had been shut quietly, with the iron latch slid across.

Who closed it?

The cold arrived without warning.

It poured up out of the floor and wrapped his ankles and climbed his legs. The water running from the tap slowed, thickened, stiffened into a thin spiral of ice that hung in the air between the faucet and the basin, and his reflection's breath fogged the glass in a ragged white bloom.

Something stood behind him.

He could see it in the mirror. Not in the room: in the glass. It stood where the stalls should have been, a tall wrapped shape bowed beneath the ceiling, head bound in layers of gray cloth, long hands hanging down past its knees. Perfectly still. It was so close behind him that the folds of its robe touched his shoulder-blades in the reflection.

The room itself was empty.

He could feel the weight of it on his back. He could hear it, a thousand lungs breathing in and out through the cloth, slow and satisfied, and at the center of the sound the single voice, soft and patient, saying the thing it had practiced over two nights in the dark.

Cassian.

His own lips were bloodless. He could not move. His hands were locked on the basin as if frozen to it.

Cassian.

The mirror fogged.

It happened slowly, from the edges inward, a white crawling frost spreading across the silvered glass, hiding the stalls, hiding the shape, hiding his own face. For a moment, in the last clear patch, he saw the wrapped head tilt, as a curious animal tilts its head. Then the glass went white.

And a finger drew, slowly, on the other side of the frost, a long wet line that began at the top and drew itself down.

It was the shape of a hand.

An open hand with five fingers. The ring finger was slashed through.