Out of the Dark

He went through the door.

He did not decide; his legs did it. One moment he stood on the threshold with the iron under his hand, and the next the frozen floor had slammed up against his boots and the green light was all around him, and he was running. Twelve feet. Eleven. The cold hit him like a wall of water. It went into his teeth, his eyes, the marrow of his bones. His lungs locked. He ran on through it with his mouth open and no breath in it.

The thing turned its head.

He saw it clearly, then. He would see it for the rest of his life, in the dark behind his eyelids, on the edge of sleep. It was taller than any man. It stooped under the dome, bent at the waist like a heron, and its long limbs were as thin and gray as winter branches. The cloth about its head was swollen and wet and moved, in slow breathing swells, as if something under it were chewing. Its hands hung nearly to the floor. Each finger had one joint too many.

It stood two paces from him. It did not touch him.

"Hand," it said.

It was not a voice. It was a hundred voices, laid one on another. A child, a woman, an old man with a rasp. They spoke together, and a little apart, so that the word seemed to come from every corner of the dome at once and then settle into the center of his skull.

"Hand of ours. Come."

The scar on his palm burned.

He did not stop. He passed so close to it that the cold took the skin from his cheek and the stench of the kill floor closed his throat. His eyes watered. He reached Ronald, and the boy was a block of ice, stiff and white and quite silent, his feet an inch off the stone, his eyes rolled up in his head till only the whites showed. Cassian caught him by the collar of his nightshirt.

And pulled.

…

Ronald weighed nothing.

Ronald weighed a ton. He came away from the thing's attention with a jerk, like a nail drawn from a plank, and fell against Cassian's chest, and his arms flailed. His mouth opened in a scream that made no sound. His nails raked Cassian's face. He thrashed and kicked and twisted, a slippery, hysterical, bone-thin creature, and Cassian had no hands to spare. He got an arm under the boy's armpits and hauled him backward.

"Stay," said the voices, gently.

He kept going.

"Hand."

One foot. Another.

"Hand. Where are you going?"

It was almost kind. It had the sad bewilderment of a host whose guest rises to leave in the middle of a meal. Behind him a long dry rustle began, the sound of a vast cloak trailing over stone, and the frost spread wider on the floor, creeping after his boots.

He did not look round.

He hit the door with his shoulder. It swung. He dragged Ronald through the gap into the passage, and the green light went out as if a hand had closed on it, and they stood together in the pitch dark, panting, with the thing's breath on the back of his neck.

He ran.

…

He did not remember the tunnel.

He remembered the weight on his arm, and the stuttering flashlight he had somehow switched on again, and the frost-slick brick whipping past in the beam. The steps. The turn. Ronald's heels dragging, his head lolling, his hands as cold as a corpse's in Cassian's fists. Somewhere behind, down the long throat of the passage, a sound followed them: not a footstep, not a cry, but a slow vast intake of breath, such as comes before a word is spoken.

He reached the shaft.

He didn't know how he got Ronald up it. He remembered shoving, and swearing, and a bracket tearing the skin from his knuckles. He remembered pushing the boy's limp body up before him, one bracket at a time, with his own back against the rock, and the dark below him, and the breathing rising up the pipe like a flood. He remembered the grille. He remembered cold air that smelled of coal, and the dirty ordinary light of the boiler room, and his own hands scrabbling on the floor.

He lay on his back on the stone with his chest heaving and Ronald across him like a dropped sack.

He looked at the ceiling. It was low and black and dripped. It was the loveliest thing he had ever seen.

Nothing followed them out.

…

It was a quarter of an hour before Ronald moved.

Cassian had propped him against the furnace wall, with the blanket from the boiler man's cot wrapped round him. He rubbed his hands, his feet, his face. He slapped his cheeks. He said his name. He said it again, and again, in the low urgent voice he had used to the calves at the plant, and Ronald's eyes, which had been open the whole time and fixed on nothing, shifted by degrees and rested on his face.

"Ronald? Can you hear me?"

The boy's lips parted.

"It's me. It's Cassian. You're all right, you're out. It's the boiler room. We're upstairs."

Ronald looked at him with a dreamy, mild attention.

Then he smiled.

It was a sweet smile. It was the smile of a child who has been told a good joke. Cassian felt every hair rise on his body. The boy's lips were moving, soundlessly at first, shaping a pattern. And then a sound came out of them. A small high quavering hum, wandering, a little flat.

Venite, hospes...

"No," said Cassian.

...ad mensam nostram...

"Ronald, no. Stop."

...mensa parata est...

The boy sat against the furnace, wrapped in the blanket, with his eyes fixed on the wall. He hummed the hymn. He hummed it through, from the first line to the last, in perfect time, and when he reached the end he began again. His face was serene. A tear ran down his cheek, and his lip trembled, but he went on smiling, and went on, and went on.

Cassian put his arms round him and held him.

…

The nurse found them at dawn.

She was a plain, quick, sensible woman in her fifties, called Mrs. Abbott, who came on duty at six and who was not, so far as anyone knew, a member of anything. She stood in the door of the boiler room and took in the scene in one glance: the half-frozen boy, the other boy with the torn hands and the bleeding cheek, the open grille. Her face went hard.

She didn't ask a single question. She said, "Get him up." She said, "Can you walk?" She said, "Good. Don't say a word to anyone, and I'll tell them it was a sleepwalk."

She wrote it on the infirmary sheet that morning in her round, upright hand.

Fisk, R. Admitted 6:10 a.m. Severe shock. Cause unknown. Non-responsive to speech. Observation advised.

Ronald did not say a word to her.

He did not say a word to anybody. Not that day, nor the next, nor in the weeks and months that followed. He sat in the infirmary bed and hummed, and stared, and when they spoke to him he smiled with a sweet vague courtesy, and went on humming. For a very long time he did not say anything that was a sentence. The doctors, in time, gave it a name. It was a long name and it explained nothing.

Cassian stood at the foot of the bed, in the gray light, with the bandage stiff on his cheek.

I'm sorry, he thought. I'm sorry. I was too slow.

But he had gone in. He had gone in, and the door had not closed behind him, and that was a thing that no one could take from him. He turned the thought over, very carefully, like a smooth stone. It did not feel like pride. It felt like a small hard light, a coal in a cold grate. Something that would burn if he fed it.

In his pocket, the packet in black oilcloth was damp against his ribs. He closed his fist round it.

Two more nights.