Two Roads

It was past one when he came back to the dormitory.

The corridor was black. He walked it slowly, with his arms held a little away from his sides, as if they belonged to someone else. The cloak, folded over his arm, was stiff with drying stains. He had left the knife on the linen cloth in the vestry. He had left his boots at the chapel door. His feet, in their wet socks, made no sound on the stone.

Behind the doors, forty rooms lay silent. They had heard the screaming. All of them. For three hours the roosters had shrieked into the night, a muffled howl rolling down the hill, and the boys in their narrow beds had lain with their hands over their ears and listened to the thing that fed on the other side of the valley.

None of them had made a sound. But he felt them, as he passed, lying in their blankets, wide awake, holding their breath.

He pushed open the door of 104 and went in.

…

There was a basin by the wall.

He filled it from the pitcher and stripped off his shirt and washed. The water was ice. It bit his skin like needles. He scrubbed his arms to the shoulder, his hands, his nails, the creases of his palms, until the skin was raw and the water in the bowl had gone a thin rusty pink. He changed the water and did it again. And again.

It didn't help.

He lifted his hands to his face. He smelled them. He turned them over in the dim gray light from the window, and they were clean, they were red and clean and scoured, with the scar standing out white across the heel of the right. And they still smelled. Faint and sweet and coppery, in the cracks of the knuckles, under the nails. The smell of the kill floor. The smell of the Hearth. It had gone into the skin.

He put his hands under the cold water and held them there.

Behind him, in the dark, the room was awake.

He could feel it. Four boys lay rigid under their blankets, none of them asleep. Ronald was crying: a thin, wet, hiccuping sound, stifled in the pillow. Karl lay on his back with his eyes open; Cassian could see the gleam of them on the ceiling. Albert had curled into a ball with his face against the wall, shivering so hard the bed frame hummed.

Nobody spoke.

There was nothing to say. They had smelled him when he came in. The sweetness. The salt. The dark rich animal odor of what he had done, that clung to his hair and his clothes and the air around him like a second cloak. They knew exactly what he was. They had known it for a week.

He dried his hands on his trousers. He lay down on his bed in the dark, still in his damp undershirt, and stared at the ceiling.

He did not close his eyes.

If he closed them, he saw it. The white small body. The red thread across his palm. A dove's round bright eye.

Forty-nine.

And under it all, in the stillness, the sound that wouldn't stop: a faint, falling, tinkling sound, bright as a coin in a well.

The last bone. Landing on the stone.

…

A shadow moved by the window.

He did not turn his head. He felt the weight settle on the edge of his bed, a slight dip of the straw, the creak of iron, and the room went very still. A small cold presence sat down beside him in the dark. Not touching. Near enough that he could smell the faint chalk-and-woodsmoke scent of a boy who kept to the corners.

For a long time, Leo said nothing.

Cassian lay motionless. He did not look. He had learned that if you looked too quickly, Leo vanished. He had to be allowed to come in his own time, like a wild thing to a hand. So he lay with his eyes on the ceiling and let the silence stretch, and listened to the boy's quiet breathing.

"You did their part," said Leo.

His voice was low, hoarse, hardly more than a breath. It was the third time in two months that Cassian had heard him speak. It was the first time he had ever said so many words at once.

"Yes," whispered Cassian.

"All of it?"

"All of it."

A pause. The straw shifted.

"Then you've kept your side." Leo's tone was flat, careful, as if each word had to be set down on a narrow ledge. "They'll leave you alone, now. For a while. The first night's the worst. You'll sleep. It will pass."

"Will it?"

No answer.

He turned his head, finally.

Leo sat on the edge of the cot with his hands in his lap. In the thin gray light from the window his face was white and fine and very tired. The dark eyes rested on Cassian's. They were wet. They were enormous. And in them was an expression Cassian had never seen there: a terrible raw tenderness, such as one feels for something that is about to be destroyed.

"If you want the truth," said Leo, "find Pike."

Cassian's breath stopped.

"If you don't..." The boy's throat moved. "If you want to sleep. If you want to eat, and call your mother, and let it go by. Then don't."

"Leo—"

"Don't ask me why." He lifted a hand, quickly, as though to ward off the question. "I can't. I can't tell you. I've tried a thousand times." The corner of his mouth shook. "It's the only thing I can say."

"You've been trying to tell me since September."

"Yes."

"You left the handkerchief. And the notes. And the bread."

"Yes."

"Why?"

Leo said nothing. For a long moment he looked at Cassian, and the look was one Cassian would remember for the rest of his life: a look of enormous, unbearable, patient hope, such as a drowning man feels who has seen a rope.

Then he rose.

He went back across the room to his own bed, silent as a ghost, and lay down with his face to the stone, and did not move.

…

The bell sounded the hour.

Two o'clock. A single low DONG from the chapel, so soft it might have been a heartbeat. The hymn had long since died. The corridor was silent. Even the rain had stopped. In the whole dark valley, nothing stirred.

Cassian lay on his back with his hands folded on his chest.

Two roads.

He turned them over in his mind, slowly, like stones in a river. It was something he had learned in the plant: when a thing has to be done, look at it from both ends.

One. He closed his eyes.

He did what Leo had said he could. He stayed quiet. He ate the good food and wore the good cloak and let the nights go by, six more of them, singing the song, standing in the ring. On the last he watched Albert Sterling walk into the light, and watched the light go out. Then he went home. Or he stayed. It did not matter. He had been kind to his mother. He had been kind to himself. He had lasted. He had learned how to hold his face.

He would be good at it, in the end. That was the thing. In a year it would not hurt. In five he would not remember. In ten he would be a man in a white stole, with his father's hands and a stranger's eyes.

Two. He opened them.

He got up. He found the old man. He asked. And Pike, who had a granddaughter in Charleston and a drawer full of burners and a face like a man waiting for a blow, would tell him whatever he knew. Where the thing had come from. Who had made it. Whether it could be unmade. And at the end of that road there was only the dark: a cell, a locked door, a boy in a white robe. His mother, in a house with no windows. Edward's laugh, coming out of the telephone. Everybody ate.

He knew what it would cost.

He lay in the cold and weighed it, and the weighing made his chest ache.

She's safe, he told himself. Right now, she's safe. She's got a room with a view, and a doctor, and a bed. She's laughing at crosswords. You can keep her that way. All you have to do is sit down.

All you have to do is forget.

He lay very still.

And out of the quiet, from the place beneath his ribs where the warmth lived, came a small hard voice that did not sound like his own.

You can't.

You can't unhear the bone.

He opened his hand.

On his palm, in the dark, the scar lay pale as a thread. It was cold. The skin around it was tight and prickling. He closed his fingers over it. And in his ear, as faint and clear as if it were falling in the room, the last bone dropped, and rolled, and rang.

He did not sleep.

He lay watching the window turn from black to gray, and the two roads lay before him in the dark, and he had not yet chosen.