What Albert Gave

They came for Albert early.

It was not yet nine. The seventh night of the Vigil was meant to open at midnight, with the bell and the long procession; and Cassian and Leo, who had planned their evening to the minute, were still on the east stair, in the shadow of the buttress, when they heard it. A step on the gravel. A murmur. The scrape of a lantern.

They looked at each other.

"Too soon," breathed Leo.

"Something's wrong."

They went to the window. In the yard, under the lamp, five figures were moving across the frost toward the hill. Silas Ward went first, with the iron key swinging at his belt. Tessa Quill walked behind, her gray cloak pulled tight, her face turned from the light. Between them walked a slighter figure in a white robe, with his hands bound before him with a cord.

"Albert," said Cassian.

"They've changed it." Leo's face was bloodless. "The Guest. It's restless. Since Ronald. Since Karl. They think it'll be quieter if it's fed sooner." His fingers closed on the sill. "If they get him in there, it's over. There's no more time."

"Then we stop them."

"How?"

Cassian did not answer. He was already running.

…

They reached the chapel steps as the party reached the door.

He came round the corner of the buttress at a sprint, with Leo at his heels, and the lantern light fell on his face and Silas Ward looked up and swore. It was a short flat obscenity, quite unlike his usual pale-eyed composure. The three behind him stopped.

"Hale," said Silas. "Go back."

"Let him go."

"You don't know what you're doing."

"I know exactly." Cassian was breathing hard. He planted himself on the third step with his feet apart, between them and the door. "I'll stop you. All of you. I swear I will."

"With what?" said Tessa.

She stepped forward. Her cold small face was calm. She had recovered, he saw, from whatever she had seen in the passage; she held herself with all her old clipped precision. But her hands, folded before her, were clenched white. "You are a boy with no weapon. You are one against three. And the Guest is awake." She drew a breath. "I'd go back to bed, Hale. While you still can."

"She's right," said Silas, tonelessly. "It's not a game."

Cassian looked at them. At the tall pale boy who had never had a friend. At the girl with the cropped hair who had walked into a nightmare and out again. At Albert, between them, small and still, with his wrists tied and his head bowed, in a robe the color of milk.

They're afraid too, he thought.

It changed nothing.

"Albert," he said.

…

The boy lifted his head.

He had no glasses. His eyes were swollen and red-rimmed and very bright. His face was a long white oval in the lamplight, and it did not seem to be afraid. It looked, rather, thoughtful. Like a boy hearing a lesson.

"Hello," he said.

"They can't make you."

"No."

"You don't have to go in."

"I know." Albert looked down at his hands. The cord had left a red ring about each wrist. "But if I don't, it'll take someone else."

"Let it."

"Who?" The corner of his mouth lifted. "You? Ronald? The little ones from the first form? There's a boy in the infirmary who can't speak. There's an empty chair at the Gray Table. It's already taking them." He raised his eyes. "I read your face the other night, on the roof. You're going to try something. Aren't you?"

Cassian said nothing.

"It's all right. I don't want to know." Albert smiled, a little, crookedly. "I only want to know it's possible. That it isn't going on forever."

"It's possible."

"Good."

He looked at Cassian. Then he looked at Leo, who stood white-faced at the foot of the steps, and nodded to him gravely, as one nods to an acquaintance across a room. Then he looked at the great oak door, with its iron ring, and past it, at the dark.

Something moved behind the door.

They all felt it. A pulse in the air, a pressure against the ears. The lantern flame bent over, trembling. From inside the chapel came a low, long, slow sound, such as a vast animal makes in its sleep. It was waking. It had been waking for days. Now, at last, it knew that the table was laid.

"Silas," said Albert softly. "Cut me loose."

Silas stared.

"Please. I'd like to do it with my hands."

…

For a long moment nobody moved.

Then Silas Ward put out one long white hand, and drew a small knife from his sleeve, and sawed through the cord. It fell. Albert rubbed his wrists. He flexed his fingers. He turned, and looked at the three who had been his companions, and there was nothing in his face now but a wide, shy, rueful calm.

"I hate you," he said to Cassian.

"I know."

"I really do. But you're the only one who ever came for me." He took a breath. "You couldn't have known it would matter. That's why it does."

Then, before Cassian could move, he put out his hands, palm to palm, and shoved.

It was a clumsy push, a boy's, with the whole weight of his body behind it. It caught Cassian in the chest. He staggered back, and his heel slipped on the frosted step, and he went down on his back on the stones with the air driven from his lungs. By the time he had rolled over, Albert had slipped past Silas's grasping hand, and shouldered open the door of the chapel, and gone in.

"Albert!"

The door swung to behind him. It did not close. It hung half open on blackness.

…

They ran after him.

All of them. Silas first, with the key flashing, then Tessa, then Cassian clawing to his feet, with Leo at his side. They burst into the nave. The great space was dim, lit only by the single red lamp over the altar. The pews stood in ranks. The floor-rings shone like wet scars. At the far end, under the vaulted arch, the iron door of the Hearth stood open, and from it a darkness was welling up, slow and thick, like water from a spring.

Albert stood in the middle of the ring.

He had turned to face the dark. He had drawn himself up straight. His hands were held out in front of him, palms up, the way a child holds them out for a gift. The white robe hung about his thin frame like a banner. And he was singing.

It was the hymn. But it was not the hymn. He sang it slow, and low, and all wrong, in the wrong key, with the stresses on the wrong syllables, a boy's thin cracked treble ringing off the stone. Venite, hospes. Cassian had never heard it sung so badly. It was the loveliest sound he had ever heard.

Above him, the darkness leaned down.

"Albert, no!" shouted Cassian.

The boy glanced back over his shoulder.

He smiled at Cassian. It was a clear and gentle smile, such as one gives a friend at a railway station. And then the darkness closed upon him, tenderly, as a hand closes on a flower.

It did not seize him. That was what Cassian understood in the half-second before the world went white. It did not take him. It was given. Albert had walked into it of his own accord, with his hands open and his heart open, and the thing that waited had never before in a thousand years been offered anything freely. For an instant it did not know what to do.

The chapel bell cracked.

It was a sound that went through the walls. It was a note of such enormous, crystalline wrongness that the glass shattered in every window and fell in a glittering rain on the pews. A line of black split the great bronze from lip to crown, high up in the dark, and a shriek came out of the split, long and thin, like a wire drawn through the sky. The Hearth belched. The floor heaved. The candles blazed up and out.

In the roaring dark, a hundred voices screamed.

It was the Guest. Not a hymn now, not a murmur. A scream of rage, of terror, of an unspeakable and ancient confusion. It poured through the nave like a flood. Silas was thrown against a pillar. Tessa dropped to her knees with her hands over her ears. Leo had thrown himself across Cassian, shielding his head, and the stones were rocking under them.

And through the howl, thin and clear and close, Cassian heard one more thing.

A voice. A boy's voice. Soft, and a long way off, and very near.

Cassian.

It said his name once.

Then the dark closed over it, and it was gone.