Whispers at Catechism

On Wednesdays, they read aloud.

It was the one hour of the week when the Law bent. Every room in the Boys' Dormitory emptied into the long study hall off the cloister at half past five, and every boy took his place on a hard oak bench, and Mr. Calloway or another teacher stood at the lectern and read, in a voice like a man reading his own obituary, from a thin black book called The Valley Catechism. The boys read the responses. They said them together. They said them in the dull, cadenced monotone of those who have said something so often it has stopped being words.

Who spared us?

The Valley spared us.

Why were we spared?

Because we kept the boundaries.

What do we owe?

We owe our silence.

Cassian had said them a dozen times, in the first weeks, with his lips barely moving. He had thought it was nothing. A school ritual, a bit of gloom to match the architecture. Now he sat in the back row of Room 104's benches, in his silver-collared cloak, and every response was a thumb on a bruise.

Why were we spared?

Because we kept the boundaries.

Because we fed it, he thought. Because someone fed it.

The room felt different to him now. The smells were the same, old ink and candle grease, boiled wool, but the faces had changed. Boys glanced at him sidelong, then away. The ones near him had shifted fractionally along the bench, leaving a gap. He felt like a candle in a dark room: the center of every pair of eyes, and the cause of every flinch.

"Hale."

A whisper, at his elbow.

Ronald Fisk had worked his way along the bench with the stealth of a tank, and now sat pressed against his arm, eyes darting toward the lectern.

"I'm not asking," Ronald breathed.

"Don't."

"I'm just saying. I saw you come back last night. At three in the morning. You were white as a sheet. I'm not asking you what happened. I'm only saying that if there was something, you could tell me. I wouldn't tell a soul. I swear. On my mother."

"Ronald."

"You were out for hours. Did you see anything? Is it true about the pit? Because Aldous said—"

"Ronald."

"—said it's a hole down in the floor, a real hole, with bones on the bottom and a, a kind of light—"

"I said drop it."

It came out sharper than he meant. A boy two seats down looked over. At the lectern, Mr. Calloway's voice faltered for half a beat and then carried on.

Ronald flushed to the roots of his hair.

"Sorry," he whispered. "Sorry. I'm just worried. You're my friend, Hale, and you look like a ghost. I only want—"

"What do you want?"

"To help."

"You can't." He kept his eyes front. "Nobody can."

The bench creaked. Ronald sat very still. Cassian could feel the hurt rising off him like heat from a stove, and hated himself for it, and could not stop.

Why were we spared?

Because we kept the boundaries.

"Mr. Hale," said a voice from the aisle.

…

The Deacon had come in so quietly that no one had noticed.

She stood at the end of the row with her hands clasped in front of her and her key ring silent at her hip. The study hall had fallen into a hush that was almost tangible. Mr. Calloway stood frozen at the lectern with his book open. Every boy was staring fixedly at his own knees.

"You are talking during Catechism," said Deacon Thorne.

"Yes, ma'am."

"You are disrupting a younger student."

"He asked me something."

"I did not inquire whose fault it was." Her gray eyes rested on him, calm and cold. "You are one of the Chosen, Mr. Hale. You are expected to set an example. To the extent that you do not understand what this room is, and why, I would suggest you hold your tongue until you do."

"I'm sorry."

"Are you?" A brief, bleak twist of the lips. "I imagine you will be."

Cassian felt Ronald flinch beside him.

"For disrupting the Catechism, a week of service. You will report to the chapel at four each afternoon and clean the floor of the nave and the vestry. You will be supervised. You will not speak to anyone while you work. Is that clear?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Mr. Fisk." The Deacon's head turned a quarter inch. "You will not speak to Mr. Hale during the hours of service. You will not follow him. You will not ask him questions. If I hear that you have, I will see to it that you spend the winter with a bucket in your hand. Do you understand?"

Ronald gave a strangled squeak. "Yes. Yes, Deacon."

"Good."

She turned and walked out. Her black skirt whispered on the stone. Behind her, the room let out its breath, and Mr. Calloway cleared his throat and said, with a trembling attempt at briskness, "Page forty-one. Response eleven," and a hundred voices took up the chant.

What do we owe?

We owe our silence.

On the end of the bench, in the corner by the window, Karl Brandt sat with his hands folded in his lap and a look of exquisite mildness on his face. When Cassian glanced at him, he mouthed, with a little smile, Tough luck.

…

The overseer was the boy with the seam of a mouth.

His name was Wade Harlan. He was seventeen, tall and bony, with a long solemn face and a habit of speaking only when addressed. He sat on a stool by the door of the nave on Thursday afternoon with a book open on his knee and a lantern at his feet and did not once look up. He had brought a flask of tea. He drank it noiselessly.

Cassian knelt on the flagstones with a brush and a bucket of gray water.

It was surprisingly clean. He had expected filth: dust and bones, the thick crust of years. Instead the floor was swept and scrubbed almost to whiteness. The only dirt lay in the carved rings, the seven concentric furrows that spread out from the dais, and those had a way of refusing the brush. He scoured one with all his weight and the stain only darkened, soaking deeper, as if the stone were drinking it.

He stopped looking at them.

By the third afternoon, the work was routine. His knees ached. His hands cracked. The chapel was silent except for the swish of the brush and the occasional rustle of Wade's page. Sometimes, from far off, he heard the sounds of the school: a bell, a shout, the thin cry of a gull. They seemed to come from another world.

On Friday, Wade stood up and stretched.

"I'm going to the lavatory," he said, to the air. "Five minutes. Don't touch anything."

"I won't."

The door thudded. Cassian was alone.

He sat back on his heels. The chapel hung around him in the red light, the long table, the dark bell, the empty circle. He listened to the silence. It was nothing like the silence of the dormitory. This one had a depth to it, a listening quality, as if the walls were holding their breath.

His eyes went, of their own accord, to the low door on the left.

Don't.

He picked up his bucket and went through.

The vestry was as he remembered. Cold, windowless, smelling of beeswax and mildew. The heavy cabinet. The folded vestments in neat gray stacks. And at the center of the floor, black and square, the slab of iron with its great ring and its dinner-plate lock.

He knelt at the edge, as though to scrub.

Up close, the scratches were worse. They covered the stone for a foot in every direction: long furrows, jagged gouges, short desperate nicks. Some were so deep he could lay his finger in them. Some looked fresh. The iron itself was marked, too, along the seams, with a pale shine where something had rasped at it again and again.

Fingernails, he thought. They're fingernails.

And then, near the edge, almost hidden in the shadow of the cabinet, he saw the tally.

It was a row of marks cut into the stone. Short, even, vertical lines, each the width of a thumb, cut with a blade, the way a prisoner marks days on a cell wall. They ran in clusters of seven, each cluster set off from the next by a gap. He bent closer, the candle in his fist, and counted the clusters.

Seven clusters of seven.

Forty-nine.

The edges of the cuts were worn smooth by time. Old. Very old. Cut by a hand long dead, a hand that had measured something exactly and wished to keep the number.

Beside the old tally, set a little apart, was another. Fewer marks. Perhaps a dozen. They were sharper, rawer, the edges still crisp. The strokes were uneven, cut in haste with an unsteady blade. And under them, so small he nearly missed it, scratched with the point of a nail or a pin, were two letters.

E. M.

He stared at them.

The flame of his candle trembled. He didn't know why his hand was shaking. He didn't know what the letters meant. But the back of his neck prickled, and the scar in his palm began to throb in time with his pulse, and he felt, in some dim animal place, that he was kneeling at the edge of a grave.

Forty-nine.

He had read that number somewhere. Or heard it. He could not remember where.

He put the candle down.

He should not have done it. He knew he shouldn't, even as he did it. But the cold was rising through his knees, and the scratches on the iron seemed to pull at his eye, and an unreasoning curiosity tightened in his chest like a fist. He lowered his head.

He laid his ear against the iron.

It was colder than ice. It burned his cheek. For a moment there was nothing but the hollow roar of his own blood. Then, beneath it, very faint, very far, he heard a sound.

In. Out.

In. Out.

A slow, vast, placid breath. Not a crowd this time. One. A single set of lungs, so enormous that the draw of it moved the air in the tiny room. The iron under his ear shivered with the rhythm. The tally marks seemed to swim. Far, far below, in the darkness beneath the stone, something was lying on its side with its great wrapped head turned toward him, listening to the boy listening to it.

In. Out.

In.

He jerked away.

The candle had gone out. He knelt in the dark with his hand clamped over his mouth, and the rhythm went on in the floor like a heartbeat. And then, from the doorway behind him, Wade Harlan's voice, mild and slightly puzzled:

"What are you doing in here?"