Caught

He had the page unfolded on the table and half copied when he heard the key.

It was a small sound. A scrape of iron in the lock of the green door, up the stairs, at the far end of the passage. Then another, a bolt drawn back. Then footsteps.

Cassian's pencil stopped.

Pike had gone the color of ashes. He stood with one hand on the back of the stool, and his mouth opened and closed, and no sound came. The boiler ticked in the dark. Down the stairs, slow and measured, came two sets of feet: one heavy, one light.

"Abner?" said a voice. It was a woman's voice, mild, almost sweet. "Abner, I know you're down there."

Deacon Thorne.

"Quick," breathed Pike.

He moved with a speed Cassian wouldn't have thought him capable of. He snatched the notebooks off the table and shoved them into Cassian's arms. He seized the folded page, crushed it into the boy's fist, and closed his fingers over it. He hauled him by the elbow through the green dark, between two high shelves, to a slot where the stone wall met the shelving and a boy of fifteen could just fit if he turned sideways.

"In. Quiet. Not a breath."

"Pike—"

"Run," whispered the old man. His eyes were huge. "When they've gone, run. Don't come back. Not for me."

"I won't leave you."

"You will," said Pike, with terrible gentleness. "You'll do what I should have done. Go."

He gave Cassian a shove.

…

The gap was narrow and cold. Cassian pressed himself against the stone with the books crushed to his chest and his face turned to the aisle. He could see the lamp, and the table, and the green door standing wide. He could see Pike straightening his vest.

The old man walked out between the shelves with his hands at his sides. He walked as a man walks onto a stage, with his chin lifted and his knees unsteady. He reached the end of the aisle just as the two women came through the door.

Deacon Thorne came first.

She was in her long black dress with the black key at her belt, and her face was calm, and white, and tired. Behind her came Ms. Dunmore, large and gray-haired and square, in a green cardigan, with her hands clasped before her and no expression at all.

"Good afternoon," said Pike.

His voice cracked on it.

"Abner." The Deacon smiled with great sweetness. "What a pleasant surprise. I thought you'd be at the desk."

"I was doing inventory," said Pike. "Of the old stock. It's, it's been years. There's a good deal of damp. I thought I'd check the spines."

"By lamplight."

"The overhead's gone."

"How diligent of you."

"I only—"

"There were two sets of footprints in the dust." Her voice did not change. "On the stairs. Coming down."

He opened his mouth. He closed it.

"I wonder who else was here," said Deacon Thorne, mildly.

…

"Nobody," said Pike.

The Deacon looked at him.

She looked for a long time. She looked at the lamp, and the table, and the cleared space where the books had lain. She looked at the old man's shaking hands, and the sweat on his forehead, and the pallor of his lips. She did not look into the dark between the shelves. Cassian, pressed to the stone not twelve feet away, heard his own pulse hammering in his ears and thought it must be audible through the whole of the room.

"Abner," she said, very low. "We have been friends for thirty years."

"Yes."

"I held your hand when your wife died."

"Yes. You did."

"I do not wish to hurt you." Her voice was soft as wind in a keyhole. "I have never wished to hurt anyone. You know that. But there is a certain order of things. A promise. You made a promise, Abner, fourteen years ago, when we spoke of the Marsh boy. You gave us your word that it would never happen again."

"I know."

"Then you will understand what it means that I find you here."

His shoulders sagged.

"You've forgotten our understanding," said the Deacon, with enormous sorrow. "I am so sorry."

She nodded to Ms. Dunmore.

The big woman moved forward without haste and took hold of the old man's arm, above the elbow, in her thick red hand. She did not grip. She simply held it, as one holds the arm of a child at a crossing. And Pike, who had spent forty-one years among the books of this room, looked down at the hand, and then at the Deacon, and then, once, very briefly, in the direction of the shelves.

He smiled.

It was a small smile, shy, a little proud. It was gone in a breath.

"Mind my glasses," he said, and let himself be led away.

…

Their steps went up the stair. The door closed. A key turned. And then there was nothing but the buzz of the green lamp, and the thin, tinny ticking of the boiler in the dark.

Cassian stayed in the gap.

He didn't know for how long. His legs had gone to water. The books were an iron weight against his ribs, and the edge of the folded page was cutting into his palm. He stood there with his forehead on the cold stone and his eyes shut, and waited for his heart to stop, and for the dark to stop spinning.

I should have gone out. I should have said something. I should have stood beside him.

You will do what I should have done.

At last he opened his hand.

The page lay crushed in his fist. It was damp with sweat, and creased through by fourteen years of folding, and the writing on it was tiny, cramped, and slanted to the right. It ran from the top margin to the foot without a pause, the way a person writes who has very little time.

He did not read it.

He couldn't. Not yet. He pushed it into the inside of his coat, against his chest, and held it there.

Overhead, a very long way off, the school bell began to ring for the afternoon classes.

He listened to the footsteps die away.