The Price of Wanting

Karl Brandt went down on the sixth night.

Cassian understood afterward that he had been meant to. Everything had been arranged for it, as a path is cleared for a cart. It was Friday, the thirtieth of October. The hymns that night were long and fast, and the Chosen swayed in the circle with their eyes shut, and Cassian, standing at the table with his hands folded behind him, felt the Rector's gaze rest on him from time to time with a mild, steady, patient interest, like a man weighing a hen.

He knows I was down there.

He could not prove it. But he felt it. He had felt it all day, in the Deacon's glance across the refectory, in the way Silas Ward fell silent when he passed. They knew. Somehow, they knew that someone had been down the shaft. They did not know who.

Or they did. And were waiting.

When the bell rang and the Chosen filed out into the black cold, he walked back to the dormitory alone, in a fever of thought, and did not notice that the lamp over Karl's bed was out, nor that the blankets lay in a tidy heap.

…

He noticed at one in the morning.

He had lain down in his clothes. The breath in the dark, the slow breath of the room, had a strange unevenness in it, and he lay and listened, and slowly understood that there was one fewer sleeper than there ought to be. He sat up. He looked at the bed by the wall.

Karl's pillow was smooth.

He was on his feet before he thought. The flashlight was in his coat. The coat was on its hook. He took both, and stepped over Albert's outflung arm, and Leo's bed beside the window was empty too, but this was no time to wonder, and he went out and shut the door as softly as a thief.

The corridor was black.

He didn't need prints. He knew. He ran along the stone with his hand on the wall, down the stair, through the dim hall, and through the cloister, and he knew with a cold dread in his stomach what he would find.

The boiler room was open.

The grille hung wide. And on the floor beside it, glinting in the beam, lay a pair of round-lensed spectacles with one arm bent.

…

He went down faster than he had the first time.

He didn't count the brackets. He dropped through the shaft in a scraping rush, with the light jouncing in his teeth. The cold rose to meet him. At the foot he landed hard on his heels and went sprawling, and rolled, and came up on one knee in the brick passage, listening.

Silence.

The great slow breathing was close tonight. It was everywhere. It was in the walls. It beat against his ears like a second heart, and each time it drew in, the light in his hand dimmed to a brown thread, and each time it let go, the light flared again.

He ran.

The passage unrolled in the beam. Damp brick. Black niches. The heap of rags, and he saw now, with a lurch, that it wasn't rags but a very old coat, withered with mold. The turn. The steps. And, far ahead, in the dark beyond the range of his light, a sound began.

It was a voice.

It was a boy's voice, high, fast, bright with a terrible hope. It was chattering. It was saying something in a rapid breathless gabble, over and over, the same few words, and as Cassian drew nearer, he made them out.

"—only want to speak. I only want to talk. I have a, I have a proposal. The Hand is, the Hand is unreliable. I'm better. I'm more, I'm much more suitable. I've read the whole, I can recite the entire, I know all of it, I know the rite, I know the Latin, I—"

Karl.

The iron door at the end of the tunnel stood wide open. Green light fell across the floor in a long wedge. Cassian reached it and flattened himself against the wall.

…

Karl stood in the middle of the chamber.

He had his back to the door. He was in his school clothes, in the blazer and tie. He had combed his hair. In his left hand he held a small black book, and in his right, held out in front of him at arm's length, he carried a candle, lit, which shook so badly that the flame streamed sideways. His glasses were gone. Without them he looked very young.

Before him, on its pedestal, stood the ebony cabinet.

The doors of it were open.

Cassian saw inside. A shelf. And on the shelf, in the guttering light, a book as big as a family Bible, bound in black leather gone shiny with handling, with a clasp of tarnished silver. Its pages were gray.

The Ledger.

Karl had found it. He had actually found it. A small iron key stood in the cabinet's lock, and Cassian knew whose belt it had been lifted from. Nobody noticed Karl. He had opened the cabinet, and taken it out, and now stood with the candle in one hand and his other hand, with that little book, stretched toward the shadow above him like a man holding out a gift.

"I am the right one," Karl said. His voice was high and cracked. "Not Hale. You've been deceived. He's, he's a thief, he's a butcher's brat. He doesn't even believe. I believe. I've always believed. I've given you all my, I've given you everything. Look. I've brought you the book. I'll give it to you. You can have it back. You only have to, to take me instead."

Above him, the darkness gathered.

It came down slowly. It was less a shape than a leaning, a weight. The candle flame bowed toward it, and went blue, and shrank. The green light faded. The cold in the chamber thickened until the air seemed to crystallize.

"Karl," said the voices.

It was almost tender.

"Yes!" He fell to his knees. "Yes, I'm here! I'm here, I'm yours, I'm so, I'm—"

"Karl Brandt." A rustle, as of many mouths. "You came without leave."

"I came to serve."

"You came to take."

"No—"

"You touched what is ours."

"I only—"

"You wished," said the Guest, "to be chosen."

A pause. Karl's shoulders shook.

"We hear you. We have always heard you." A great sigh rippled through the room. "We shall choose you now."

Something long and gray slid out of the dark and curled round the boy's head, as gently as a hand.

…

"Karl!" Cassian screamed.

He didn't know he had moved. He was in the doorway, with his arm flung out, and the cold struck him in the chest. He saw Karl's face turn toward him in the last light of the guttering candle, white and round and blank with astonishment, as a child's face turns when it is called. His mouth made a little o.

Then he screamed.

It was a scream that went on, and on, and rose through the dome in a shriek that cracked the stone. The candle fell. The Ledger fell from his arms, and lay open on the floor, its gray pages fluttering. The green light flared, brilliant, and went black.

And in the dark, something crunched.

It was not loud. It was a small, wet, final sound, like a knuckle cracking. The scream stopped in the middle of a note.

Silence.

Cassian stood in the doorway.

He had no breath. He could feel the cold crawling up his legs, and he could see nothing at all. The darkness was complete. In it, close by, he heard a slow vast sigh, and a faint wet noise like a mouth at its meal, and under it all, small and crystalline, something falling on the stone and rolling.

A pair of cufflinks, he thought. Silly. They were Karl's, silver, with a K on each.

He backed away.

…

There was a figure on the stair.

He saw it as he turned. It stood at the top of the worn steps, ten yards up the passage, with a lantern in its hand, and the yellow light fell on a pale narrow face and cropped black hair. Tessa Quill had come down. She must have followed Karl, to keep him in sight.

She was staring past Cassian into the chamber.

Her face was white as bone. Her mouth hung open. The lantern in her hand was shaking so violently that the light danced on the walls. She looked at the wedge of dark behind him, and at what was in it, and her eyes were huge and dilated and fixed. A thin whimper escaped her.

"I didn't," she whispered. "I never meant—"

Then she dropped the lantern.

It smashed. Burning oil ran across the flags in a river of blue flame. She turned and bolted, and her boots rang on the steps, and the sound went up and up the throat of the passage and died.

He did not follow.

He stood in the flickering light. Behind him the Guest was still, and quiet, and replete. Before him lay the spectacles of a boy who had wanted something very badly.

…

In the morning, Rector Kell stood on the dais and said that Karl Brandt had been taken ill.

"A fever of the chest," he said, in his sweet, tired voice. "Quite sudden. His father has been telephoned. He went home last night."

Nobody asked.

Cassian stood in the rank with his eyes on the floor and his jaw locked. Beside him, Albert had gone gray. Behind him, Ronald's empty place. At the end of the row, Karl's chair, with nothing on it. They had not even taken the trouble to move it.

He was not surprised. That was what frightened him. The anger rose in him, clean and cold, but there was no shock in it. He had known it would happen. He had known it the way you know that a dropped stone will land.

I could have stopped him.

I couldn't.

A hand touched his sleeve.

Leo stood at his elbow. He was pale, and there were purple smudges beneath his eyes, but his voice, when he spoke, was low and absolutely steady.

"Now you understand," he said. "What it costs. To want."

Cassian turned to look at him.

"It always finds the place," said Leo. "The little hole. The crack where something's missing. And it puts its hand in." He looked at the empty chair. "That's what they're all afraid of. Not the dark. The wanting."

Cassian said nothing.

But he thought of a key in a boy's hand and a boy's shaking voice saying, I'm good with keys. And he thought, with a chill, of another voice, a man's voice, deep and level on a long-distance line. They wanted you. Everybody ate.

What is my crack? he wondered.

Where would it put its hand in me?