Backs Turned

In the morning he looked under the bed.

He did it with his heart in his mouth, on his hands and knees on the freezing stone floor while the others were at the washbasins. The space was dark and narrow and smelled of old straw. Nothing there. No rat, no nest, no animal. Only dust, and the cold iron slats of the frame, and on the underside of the nearest slat, a few inches from where his head had lain, four faint parallel scratches in the rust.

Fresh. Bright. Curved like the strokes of a claw.

He sat back on his heels and stared at them for a long time.

Then he got up, smoothed the blanket over the straw, and went to breakfast.

…

On Thursday he tried the library.

It was empty at lunch hour, which was wrong. At that hour the stacks usually held a few students, a monitor or two, some pale freshman pretending to read. Today the high arched room was silent as a crypt. Dust motes turned in the shafts of light. The doors of the carrels stood open and vacant, and the radiator at the far end ticked and sighed to itself.

Pike sat behind the oak counter with a ledger open in front of him.

He did not look up.

"Mr. Pike."

Nothing. The old man's pen moved across the page, steady, slow, dragging a line of figures down a column. His shoulders were rounded. His hair, which Cassian had always thought of as gray, looked white.

"I need the phone," Cassian said. "Ten minutes. I'll pay double. I just need to talk to Dana."

"No."

"I have money. They gave me—"

"No."

"Mr. Pike, please. It's been a week. My mom doesn't know where I am—"

"I said no, boy." The pen stopped. The old man did not raise his eyes. "The drawer is empty. The phones are gone. I put them in the river on Monday."

Cassian stared at him.

It was a lie. He could tell by the way the old man's hand shook on the pen. But it was the kind of lie that comes out when a person has decided he is not going to be a person for a while. A flat, careful, wooden lie.

"They came," Cassian said. "Didn't they. On Monday."

Pike said nothing.

"What did they say?"

"They didn't have to say." The old man's voice was barely audible. "They stood in the door. That's all. Silas Ward and the Deacon. They stood in the door and looked at me, and I haven't been able to eat since." He lifted his head, finally, and his clouded eyes were wet. "I'm being watched, boy. Every hour. I can feel it, like a hand on my neck. I can't help you. I can't."

Cassian slammed his palm on the counter.

The crack echoed in the vaulted dark. A book slid off the edge and thudded to the floor. The old man flinched, his whole thin body, as though he had been struck.

"You said you were just an old man with two ears," Cassian said. His voice shook. "You said you didn't rip off a kid calling his mom in the hospital. Was that all it was? Just something you said?"

Pike's mouth trembled.

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

It was the same thing he had said in the stacks that first week, with the same broken breath. But this time he did not run. He sat hunched at the counter with his head bowed and his hands clasped on the ledger, shaking like a leaf, and he did not look up again, and Cassian understood that he was being asked to leave.

He left.

At the door he turned back once. The old man was still bent over his ledger. The sallow lamplight made a halo of his hair, and Cassian saw, with a sudden heavy ache, that he was weeping without a sound.

…

By Friday, the notice was on the wall.

It wasn't a notice, exactly. No one had written anything. But it was understood. In the dining hall that morning, when Cassian came to sit at the end of the table where he had sat for a month, Ronald Fisk was not there. He was at the far side of the room, among a knot of younger boys, with his back to the door. Cassian sat down alone with his bowl.

A Prefect came by and stopped behind his chair.

"Hale." The voice was pleasant, almost sympathetic. "You've been reassigned to the end table. The one by the kitchen door. It's quieter."

He looked at the table. Two stained benches pushed against the wall beside the swinging door, where the cooks banged in and out all day. Nobody sat there. Nobody ever had.

"Who reassigned me?"

"I'm only the messenger." The Prefect's smile didn't reach his eyes. "Take your tray."

He took it.

It was a small cruelty. Smaller than most. But it carried the weight of something larger, a quiet, measured withdrawal that moved through the school like a draft through an old house. He felt it all that day. A boy in the corridor who had once nodded to him now stared at his shoes. A teacher in Latin class said "Mr. Hale" and then moved on without a bow, without a flicker, without anything. The cook who had begged him to eat the roast pork pushed a bowl of cold gruel across the counter at arm's length and looked at the ceiling.

The boots, he noticed, had been taken back. His old sneakers sat at the foot of his bed again, stiff with grime.

"Hale."

It was Ronald's whisper, at his elbow, in the stairwell outside Room 202. The boy had come up behind him so quietly he nearly jumped. Ronald's round face was pink and miserable. He kept looking over his shoulder.

"I can't sit with you," he blurted. "Okay? They told me. The Prefects. Tessa Quill came to my bed on Wednesday night, she just stood there. She said if I talked to you, if I even looked at you, I'd be on the Red List by Christmas." His voice dropped to nothing. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. You were nice to me. You were the only one who ever listened. I'm a coward, I know I'm a coward, I just—"

"It's okay."

"It's not." Ronald wiped his nose on his sleeve. His eyes were swimming. "You didn't do anything. You were just honest. I can't believe they'd do this to you for being honest." He grabbed Cassian's hand, quickly, squeezed it once, hard. "I'll look out for you. Where I can. I swear."

He was gone before Cassian could answer, a short plump figure scurrying down the stairs, shoulders hunched.

Karl was less kind.

He didn't say anything, which was worse. He watched Cassian carry his tray to the end table at dinner, and a thin, satisfied, wholly unamiable smile crept onto his face. It was the smile of a man who has found the last piece of a puzzle. He raised his glass in a tiny, mocking salute and drank.

Only Leo looked at him with anything like feeling. Across the dining hall, over a bowl of untouched soup, his dark eyes held Cassian's for a moment, and there was a sorrow in them so deep and so old it made Cassian's chest ache.

You knew, he thought. You knew this was coming.

Leo looked away.

…

The punishment came on Saturday night.

It came in the form of a note slipped under his door, folded in three, in a tight black hand: Mr. Hale. You were observed outside your room after the seventh bell on Thursday evening. Report to the Dean of Student Discipline at the ninth hour.

He read it standing at the foot of his bed with the cold creeping up his legs.

He hadn't been outside. Not on Thursday. He had gotten up once, in the dark, because his throat was raw and the water jug was empty, and gone as far as the basin by the door. Ten feet. Fifteen. He had stood there with his hands cupped and his heart in his mouth, listening to the scratching beneath his own bed.

They watched me do that.

Someone was watching the whole time.

At the ninth hour, Ms. Dunmore was waiting in the corridor with a bucket, a brush, and a lantern.

"The east corridor," she said. "Both sides. The stone must be clean by the sixth bell."

"That's three hundred feet."

"Two hundred and seventy." The bulging eyes flicked to his face and away. "You may begin."

He knelt.

The water was ice. It bit his fingers raw within minutes, and the stone beneath his knees seemed to suck the heat out of him through the cloth. He scrubbed in long arcs, working backward down the hall. Ms. Dunmore stood at the far end with the lantern held high, ten paces off, a gray figure in a gray dress, and did not speak.

The hymn came up, as it always did.

He tried to ignore it. He scrubbed, and rinsed, and scrubbed. The lamps along the corridor were dark. The only light was the thin yellow circle thrown by Ms. Dunmore's lantern, which seemed to shrink as the hours passed. He was aware of the corridor stretching away behind him, blacker with every foot he cleaned, and of the cold that had settled across his shoulders like a hand.

Around the second hour, he heard it.

Scritch.

It came from the wall. Not the floor. The wall, a few inches to his left, from somewhere inside the thickness of the stone. Slow. Patient. A clawed hand drawing itself along the other side of the mortar.

Scritch. Scritch.

He stopped scrubbing.

Down the hall, the lantern light wavered. He looked up. Ms. Dunmore had turned her face away from him, toward the wall, and her free hand was pressed against her mouth. He could see her shoulders rising and falling with quick, shallow breaths.

She hears it too.

"Ms. Dunmore," he said.

"Keep working."

"It's in the wall."

"I said," and her voice cracked, the flat monotone breaking apart for the first time since he had met her, "keep working, Mr. Hale."

He bent and scrubbed. The scratching moved along with him. Four feet. Six. It kept pace on the other side of the stones, matching him stroke for stroke, as though some quiet gray thing were sliding along the inside of the wall, keeping him company.

Around the fourth hour, she left.

He didn't see her go. He only noticed that the circle of lantern light had grown smaller, and then that it had vanished. He looked up. The corridor was black. At the far end, a pale square of window; nothing else. She had put down the lantern on the floor, and left it burning, and gone.

Alone.

He was alone in a dark hallway at three in the morning with a bucket of freezing water and a thing in the wall.

He did not run. That was the strange part. He knelt there on the wet stone and felt the thing in the wall pause directly behind him, a foot from his spine, and he understood, with perfect cold clarity, what he was being shown.

Friday, they took my table. Saturday, they took the boots. Tonight they took the lamp.

They're taking it back. All of it. Every bit of the covering that was over me.

He had stood in a study and told a kindly old man no, and the old man had said, I cannot promise what the valley will do. He had not understood that this was not a threat. It was a prediction. It was a gentle, sorrowful statement of the way things worked: a door held open, a door closed, a draft that came in when the warm hand was withdrawn.

The scratching resumed. Slow. Hungry. Closer than before.

Cassian lowered his head to the wet stone and scrubbed, and scrubbed, and did not stop until the morning bell.