Elias Marsh

The machine took a long time to wake.

Cassian pulled off the canvas and found a squat beige monitor, a keyboard yellowed with age, and a switch on the back that clicked like a knuckle. The screen bloomed slowly into a dull green glow. White letters crawled across it. A cursor blinked in the corner, patient as a pulse.

BLACKTHORNE ACADEMY LIBRARY — CIRCULATION

ENTER SURNAME:

He typed M, A, R, S, H.

The machine thought about it. A fan whirred. Somewhere inside, a disk ticked and ticked. Then the screen filled with a list, and he ran his finger down it until he found the line.

MARSH, ELIAS J.

He pressed Enter.

A record unfolded. It was sparse, the way such records are, a dry skeleton of fields. A student number. A dormitory, East Wing, Room 104. A date of entry. The next field made him stop.

AGE AT ADMISSION: 15.

Room 104.

He looked at it a long time. Then he moved the cursor down and found the last line. It read, in capitals: TRANSFERRED. 14 YEARS PRIOR. No reason given. No forwarding address.

"There's a photograph," Pike said, behind him. His voice was thick. "Press the function key. The one with the little picture."

He found it. The screen flickered, and an image came up, grainy and green-tinged and slow to resolve. A boy. Fifteen, narrow-shouldered, in the Academy's gray blazer, standing against a white wall with his hands at his sides. Brown hair, badly cut, falling across his forehead. A pointed chin. And eyes that looked straight out of the screen with an alert, rueful, ironical brightness, as if he'd just been told a joke and was waiting for the end of it.

He was smiling. It was an awkward smile, crooked, a little embarrassed, the smile of a boy who has been told to say cheese and has never found it easy.

He looked like someone Cassian might have shared a desk with.

He looked, with a small shock, like someone who might have been his friend.

…

"Open the loan history," said Pike.

Cassian did.

It ran down the screen in a long unbroken column. Dates, call numbers, titles. He had expected a handful. There were hundreds. Every few days, sometimes every day, for a stretch of seven months, Elias Marsh had borrowed a book, and brought it back, and borrowed another. The call numbers were not the ordinary ones. They began with the letters of the old collection, the ones in the basement, the ones kept behind the green door.

Cassian cross-checked. He took down a volume from the pile. He ran his finger down the register. It was the same book.

Every volume that Elias had taken out had notes in red.

"Seven months," said Cassian slowly.

"Yes."

"He read the whole room."

"He read everything." Pike had sat down heavily on the stool. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with the back of his wrist. "He was a clever boy. Too clever. He couldn't leave a thing alone. He came in the first week with a question about the chapel, and I said it was a Georgian building, and he said, no, not the building, the sound. The hymn. What was it about? Why did they sing it? And I said, 'Run along, son.' But he kept coming."

"Why did you let him?"

"Because he talked to me." The old man's voice cracked. "That's all. That's the whole of it. Sixty-odd years I've been in this trade, and there were never more than three boys who spoke to me like I was a man. He was one. He asked how my knees were. He asked about my granddaughter. He wanted to know what I thought of the book he was reading. Nobody does that."

Cassian said nothing.

"His mother was in hospital, in Tulsa. He used to look at the clock when he thought I wasn't watching. One night I lent him my telephone. The one I keep in the drawer." Pike pressed his hand over his mouth. "Fifteen minutes. He wept on it. I turned my back so he'd have some privacy. When he was done he put the phone in my hand and said, Thank you, Mr. Pike. You're the first person here who's been kind."

"And then?"

"And then I gave him the key."

…

"He wanted to see what was in the cellar," said Pike. "I told him no. He said he'd go anyway. I thought, better with a key than a crowbar. So I took it to the village locksmith myself, and had it cut. I told myself it was nothing. A boy, a library. What harm could come of books?"

He stared at the floor.

"He came down here every night after lights-out. For seven months. And one evening in the spring he came to my desk, white as a sheet, and said, Mr. Pike, I think I know what they're going to do. I said, 'Who?' He said, 'The Rector. The Chosen. It's not what they say.' He asked me to hide something for him. A folded paper. I put it in the lining of a book. I didn't look at it."

"What did he do?"

"He went to the chapel. That was the night of the fourth of the Vigil. I never saw him again."

Silence.

"They say he was transferred," said the old man. "His mother wrote. A letter, typed. Thank you for the care. She never asked where he'd gone. She never came." He gave a ragged laugh. "I have often wondered if she was ever told anything. Or if she just received a bank draft."

"And you?"

"They came for me in the morning. Miss Dunmore, and a Prefect. They put me in the isolation room for two days with bread and water, and asked me again and again what I'd given him. And I said I'd given him nothing. And on the third day they let me out, and said, Abner, we trust it won't happen again. And I said no, it wouldn't."

His face twisted.

"And it hasn't. For fourteen years I have kept my head down. I have not looked at the chapel. I have not looked at the boys. I have lent them nothing. I have said nothing. And every autumn I have heard the roosters, and I have said, It isn't my business."

He lifted his eyes.

"It's a terrible thing, to find out that you're a coward after sixty years of believing otherwise."

…

Cassian reached for the last notebook.

It was a thin one, bound in black cloth, lying at the very bottom of the pile under a volume of sermons. He had almost missed it. The cover was warped with damp, and when he opened it, a smell of cold iron rose from the paper.

It was a journal. The last entries were dated in March, fourteen years back. The handwriting was the same neat upright script, but looser, hastier, as if the writer had been running.

He read.

It's all here. The Ledger of Names is kept in the vault below the chapel, in a cabinet of black wood. Every Seal since 1893. Every Hand. It's the only record. It binds them. It's what holds the Guest to the bargain. If the Ledger burns, the bargain breaks.

The rite must be read backwards on the seventh night, from the last word to the first. Not just spoken. Meant. Reversed, in sense as well as sound. The Hand must refuse to offer. Without a Hand the Guest cannot feed.

I think there are two other things I need.

He turned the page. Then he stopped.

The next leaf was gone.

He ran his thumb down the stub. A ragged edge of paper, torn, not cut. He turned further. The next was gone too, and the next. He counted the stubs in a growing cold.

"Pages forty to fifty-two," he said. "Torn out."

"Yes."

"Who did it?"

"I don't know." Pike's voice was thin. "He had it with him when he went to the chapel. It was found on the library step in the morning. Like that."

Cassian bent his head. He thought of the red ink running through the margins of a hundred books, and of the one who had written it, who had known everything except how to keep it secret. A boy who had come down these stairs every night with a key in his pocket. A boy with a crooked smile, in Room 104.

Pike got to his feet.

He did it slowly, with a hand on the table. He walked across the room to the nearest shelf and drew down a battered hymnal, and slid out the back board from its cover. Behind it, flat against the cloth, lay a small folded square of paper, brown with age.

He held it out in a trembling hand.

"The last page," he said. "The one he gave me to hide. I've kept it fourteen years." He swallowed. "I never dared read it."