The Replaceable Hand

"The Hand can be replaced," said Tessa Quill.

She said it on the fourth day, in the cloister, in the flat bright voice she used for facts. She was not talking to Cassian. He had come round the pillar with a stack of Catechism pages under his arm, and she and Karl Brandt were standing in the angle of the wall with their heads close together, and neither of them had heard his boots on the wet flags.

He stopped where he was. He did not breathe.

"It has happened before," Tessa went on. "Nineteen eighty-six. The Hand sickened and the Rector found another. It's not in the rubric. It's in the old Rector's notes. A Hand is chosen by the blood, not by the boy. Any child of the trade will do, if the knife is placed in his hand and the words are said right."

"Any child of the trade," Karl repeated softly.

"Any."

"My father runs a feed store."

"That isn't the trade."

"No," said Karl. "But my grandfather kept hogs."

A silence. A drop fell from the gutter and burst on the stone.

"I only want you to understand," said Tessa, "that it isn't personal. Hale is useful. He is also unstable. If he fails, if he sickens, if he runs, the Society will need a second. A boy who has already learned the order. A boy who has been very careful to be seen, and to be quiet, and to wait."

"I can be quiet."

"I know you can."

Cassian stepped back into the shadow of the pillar. He went the long way round, through the kitchen yard, and did not stop walking until he reached Room 104. He sat on his bed with the pages still under his arm and read the same line four times.

Amo, amas, amat.

I love, you love, he loves.

He did not feel angry. He was surprised to find that. What he felt was a small, shameful lightening, a loosening, as if someone had cut a strap he had been carrying across his chest. If Karl wanted the knife so badly, let Karl have it. Let someone have it. Let it be somebody else's turn.

He sat there with that thought a long while.

He didn't like himself very much for it.

…

Karl did not come back to the room that night.

Cassian knew, because he lay awake, because since the breathing had come back he lay awake every night with his eyes open on the ceiling and Latin running in a loop behind his teeth. The seventh bell rang. The lamps went out. Ronald turned over twice, whimpering. Albert slept like a drowned thing, flat on his back with his mouth open. Leo, by the window, did not sleep at all, and Cassian knew it by the way the dark in that corner stayed so still.

At half past eleven, the latch clicked.

Karl's cot creaked. A soft scrape of boot on stone. A slow draft crossed the room as the door eased open and eased shut.

Cassian lay and counted the seconds. At sixty, he heard another sound.

The sound of Leo's bed.

He turned his head. A shape sat up in the corner, thin and pale in the window light. It did not move toward the door. It sat, with its hands gripping the blanket, and its face was turned in the direction Karl had gone, and in the faint gray gleam Cassian saw that its mouth was open. As if it wanted to call out. As if it had been trying to call out for a long time.

Then the shape lay back down, very slowly, and turned its face to the wall.

Don't, thought Cassian. Whatever it is. Don't ask.

He closed his eyes.

Amo. Amas. Amat.

…

Afterward, he pieced it together from what he had been told and what he had heard. He never learned it all. He told himself he did not want to.

Karl Brandt had been watching the chapel for four nights. He had learned the Deacon's rounds. He had learned that the vestry cabinet was opened at nine, and locked again at ten, and that the Deacon, who slept badly, took her tea in her office with the door ajar. He had learned that the Hand's knife was brought down from the Rector's study each evening and laid on its linen cloth beneath the cross, and not collected until morning prayers.

It lay there, in the dark, unguarded. A bone-handled blade on a white cloth.

Any child of the trade.

He must have stood a long while outside the chapel door. Cassian could see it, afterward, when he closed his eyes: the round glasses glinting, the lips moving. Rehearsing what he'd say if caught. I came to pray, Deacon. I couldn't sleep. A boy who had always known the right word to say.

The door was not locked.

That was the part he turned over, later. The door of the chapel stood unlocked at midnight, with the candles burnt down and the nave all shadow. As if it had been left that way. As if someone had known.

He went in.

The cold must have met him at the threshold. The smell, the iron and clay. He walked down the nave on tiptoe with his hands out in front of him, and the dark thickened as he went, the way water thickens when you wade into a pond, and the red glow from the slit windows did not reach the floor.

The knife lay under the cross.

He picked it up.

…

Cassian heard the scream at ten past midnight.

It was short.

That was what stayed with him afterward. Not how loud it was, but how brief. It came from across the lawn, thin and high, a boy's scream, cut off in the middle like a rope cut with a blade, so quick that he was sitting up in bed with his heart in his mouth before he understood he had heard it. Then silence. Then, very faintly, a sound like a great door closing a long way underground.

In the room, nobody moved.

Ronald had stopped breathing. Albert's eyes were wide open in the dark. At the window, Leo lay with his face to the wall and his fists pressed against his mouth, and his shoulders were shaking, once, twice, in a long silent spasm.

Cassian lay on his back.

In.

Out.

Below the floor, a vast slow thing breathed. It was louder than he had ever heard it. It was full, and deep, and somehow content, like a cat after a meal.

Amo, he said inside his head. Amas. Amat.

He said it until the window turned gray.

…

At morning prayers, the Rector stood in his place beneath the cross with his hands folded on his stomach, and spoke in his sweet, tired voice about the harvest and the first frost.

"I regret to tell you," he said, at the end, "that young Karl Brandt has been taken ill. A fever of the chest, very sudden. His father has been telephoned. A car came for him at dawn." He sighed. "He went home sick. We shall pray that he recovers."

Nobody asked a question.

Nobody looked at Karl's empty chair at the end of the second pew, or at the glasses folded neatly on the seat. Somebody had put them there. Somebody had laid them with the arms crossed, the way you leave a thing for the dead.

Tessa Quill sat very straight in the front row. Her face was white as paper. She stared at the cross and did not blink, and her hands, lying in her lap, were clenched so tight the knuckles showed like knots in a rope.

She did not look at Cassian.

He didn't look at her.

…

He went to the chapel after breakfast to carry the linen.

It was his duty. He did it every morning: the knife, the cloth, the basin. He went in at the side door with the sun just clearing the east wall, and the nave was cold and empty and smelled of nothing but candle wax and damp wool.

The knife lay on the altar rail, laid straight, the bone handle polished.

Someone had cleaned it.

He took it up. He wrapped it. He turned to go, and his eye fell on the door, the great oak door at the end of the nave, the one through which the Chosen entered at night.

There was a mark on it.

At about the height of his shoulder, a little to the left of the iron ring. A handprint. Small. A boy's hand, the fingers spread wide, pressed flat against the wood as if its owner had been trying to hold the door shut. Or to push it open.

It was dark. Not the red of blood, not brown. A dense, glossy, tarry black, with a faint sheen, as if the wood had drunk the print in and given nothing back. Where the fingertips had pressed, the grain was burnt. A thin film of frost lay over the whole of it.

He stood a long time and looked at it.

He thought: I could ask.

He thought: I could go to Tessa and say, what happened to Karl? I could say, you told him it could be replaced, and I heard you. I could go to the Deacon. I could go to the Rector. I could go to Pike.

He thought of his mother in the walker, in the bright rehab ward, taking her slow steps down a corridor with a view of the garden.

He thought of Daniel's voice. Anytime, son.

He put out his hand. He did not touch the print. He laid his fingers an inch from it, and felt the cold come off the wood like breath off a window. Then he drew them back, and tucked the bundle under his arm, and walked out into the morning, and shut the door.

He did not ask.

That evening, at supper, the gray table closed over the gap where he had sat, like water over a stone, and nobody mentioned Karl at all.