Leo Speaks

"My father," said Leo, "is Gregory Vance."

He said it at four o'clock on Saturday afternoon, the last day of October, in a storeroom behind the old library that smelled of ink and mice. It was a narrow room with one window, high up, filmed with grime. Crates of obsolete textbooks stood against the walls. On an upturned box between them a candle burned in a saucer. Leo sat on a stack of atlases with his hands between his knees. Cassian sat opposite him on the floor.

The words fell into the silence like a stone into a well, and neither of them moved.

Cassian had known. He had half known since the roof, since the first week, perhaps since the handkerchief. He had turned the fact over in his mind a hundred times without once looking at it directly. But when it was said aloud it was something new, and he felt the floor of the world shift a little.

"The Headmaster."

"Yes."

"You're his son."

"I was never supposed to be here." Leo's voice was hoarse. He kept his gaze fixed on the candle. "Nobody was meant to know. He told them I was an orphan from the state home. He changed my name. For two years I've sat in the back of his classes and he's never once looked at me."

"Why?"

"Because he's afraid."

The candle flame bent.

"I can say it now," Leo whispered. "I don't know why. I think because Karl's gone. Because something's changed. I felt it break this morning, when I woke up, like a fever." He lifted his hands from his knees and looked at them in wonder. "Or perhaps I'm just too tired to be frightened."

…

He told it slowly.

The Headmaster had come to Blackthorne fifteen years ago, a young man with a doctorate and a bad conscience. He had inherited the post from an old man who died in his sleep. In the first week, he had been called to the Rector's study, and shown a book, and told what it was. He had refused. He had walked out. And three days later his wife, who was seven months pregnant, had been found unconscious at the bottom of a flight of stairs.

"She lived," said Leo. "The baby lived. It was me."

"They did it to scare him."

"They didn't have to do it." He smiled thinly. "The thing that lives under the chapel doesn't need hands. It only needs a, an agreement. He went back to the study that night and signed. He's been signing ever since. Every year he signs, and every year it holds his family in its, its—" He made a gesture with his fingers, a closing. "That's the clause. If he ever speaks. If he ever acts. If any of us leave the property, or tell, or try to stop it. Both of us. His wife and me."

"Leo."

"I'm telling you what I know. I'm not asking you to say anything."

Cassian shut his mouth.

"When I was eleven," Leo went on, "I found his notebook. He kept it in the desk at home. Every night after supper he'd go into the study and write. I thought it was a diary. One evening he left the key in the lock, and I opened it." A shiver. "It was all there. The chapel. The Vigil. The names of the children who'd gone. Nine pages, in a column. Dates. Cause of death, in his handwriting. Fever. Fall. Heart."

"Nine?"

"In his time." The candle guttered. "I read it all in one night. I read it again. And in the morning, I went downstairs and ate my breakfast and said nothing. I was eleven. I did that for two years."

"Then why did you come?"

…

For a long time Leo did not answer.

Outside, a bird shrilled once and was silent. The light in the high window had gone to the color of weak tea. He sat with his hands clasped, looking at nothing, and the line of his jaw was tense.

"I don't know," he said at last.

"You must."

"I don't." He gave a short, dry laugh. "I'm not a good person, Cassian. You've got the wrong idea. I was a coward all my life. I was afraid of the dark. I wet the bed till I was nine. When my father beat the dog, I hid in the wardrobe and put my fingers in my ears. I'm not brave. I'm not noble. I'm not anything."

"You were on the roof."

"I was shaking so hard I couldn't stand."

"You gave me the key."

"That was—" His voice failed. He swallowed. "I don't know why I did it. I just knew that if I didn't, I would hate myself till I died. I couldn't have borne to watch another one. When I was thirteen I asked to be sent to a school. Any school. My father said no. I said I'd run away if he didn't. He wept, and then he went to the study and spent a night with the notebook, and in the morning he put me in the car and drove me to the gates and said, Don't use my name."

"Did he know?"

"What I was going to do? No." The corner of Leo's mouth quivered. "He thought I'd be safer if I was near. That I'd be watched. He didn't think I'd do anything." He lifted his eyes. "I didn't think so either."

Cassian looked at him.

A small, serious boy in a baggy blazer. A pale face. Dark eyes. A mouth that did not know how to smile. He had slept three feet away from him for a month and had never once guessed what he carried.

"I'm glad you came," said Cassian.

Leo bit his lip hard. His eyes shone.

"Don't," he said. "You'll make me cry."

…

"Now," he said, wiping his face. "The work."

He drew a flat, battered notebook from inside his blazer. It was bound in dark green cloth and tied with a cord, and a small brass lock hung from the cover. The lock had been forced. He laid it on the box beside the candle and opened it at a page marked with a slip of paper.

"My father's. I took it in September. He doesn't know." He turned it round. "Read."

Cassian bent over it.

It was a page of Latin. Close-set, neat, written in a firm clerical hand, ruled into two columns. The left was the rite as he knew it: Venite, hospes, ad mensam nostram. The right was the same, but written in a different ink and read from bottom to top, the last word first, the first word last, so that the lines marched backward down the page. In the margin, a note in English: Reversal must be sense as well as sound. To refuse in meaning what was offered in meaning. And underneath, underlined three times, Hand must NOT consent.

His heart was beating hard.

He put his hand inside his coat and drew out two things. The first was the crushed folded page that Pike had hidden, its red ink faded to brown. The second was the packet in black oilcloth. He unwrapped it with careful fingers and laid out the sheets.

Pages forty to fifty-two.

They laid them side by side on the box. They moved the candle. Leo's breath hissed through his teeth.

Pike's last page said: The Hand's refusal breaks the offering. A broken offering breaks the night. But the night is only broken if the Ledger is burned in the same hour, by a living hand, with the rite spoken backward.

Elias's torn pages said: Burn it in the vault. Not elsewhere. It must be burned where it was written. The fire must be lit from the Guest's own red candle, the one that never goes out.

And Leo's father's notebook said: Backward reading, line by line, as set down.

They fit together.

Three halves of a single sentence, each useless alone, which, set edge to edge, made a whole. Cassian sat with his hands flat on his knees and stared at them. He felt a wave of something dizzying and strange: a slow, enormous pleasure, as of a lock turning. It was the feeling of a boy at the plant who has found, after hours of fumbling, that the stuck chain will come free.

"It can be done," he said.

"Yes."

"On the seventh night."

"Tonight." Leo's voice shook. "It's tonight. It has to be."

"Burn the Ledger in the vault, with the red candle. Read the rite backward. And I, I don't pick up the knife."

"The Hand must refuse." Leo met his eyes. "That's the part I can't do. Only you."

Cassian nodded slowly.

"What does it do," he said, "if it works?"

"It lets go."

"All of them?"

"I think so." Leo's eyes were enormous. "I think everyone it holds. The Seal. The family. Me. My father. The whole school, the town. Everything."

"And if it doesn't?"

The boy was silent a moment.

"Then it's very angry," he said, quietly. "And we're standing in the room."