Goodbye in the Dark

"Get Ronald," said Cassian.

Leo stared at him.

"The infirmary. Mrs. Abbott is there. She'll help, she isn't one of them. Take him out. Take the little ones, take anyone you can find. Get them off the hill." He spoke quickly, quietly, with his eyes on the black door behind the altar. "Use the kitchen gate. You know the track. It comes out on the Dewitt road. Wake the village if you have to."

"No."

"Leo."

"No. We were going to burn it. We had a plan. I read the backward words for a week—"

"If it fails, they all die."

"If you go down there, you die."

"Yes."

He said it simply. It was a plain fact, laid on the air between them like a tool on a bench. Leo's mouth opened and shut. His eyes filled. A wild, dangerous light came into them, and he caught Cassian's coat in both hands and shook him.

"You can't! You don't have to! There's the other way, you said yourself you'd try, you said—"

"I know what I said."

"Then why—"

"Because there are three hundred kids in this building," said Cassian, "and I've only got one try."

Leo let go.

He stood in the wreck of the nave with his hands hanging empty. A shudder went through the whole length of him. His face was the face of a very small boy.

"You have parents," said Cassian, more gently. "You have a father who's somewhere in this building right now, praying it won't find him. A mother who's never been allowed to hear your name. If this fails, they go too. You told me that." He breathed. "If I do this, you get to live. You and Ronald, and all of them."

"It isn't fair."

"No."

"It isn't fair!" Leo's voice cracked into a sob. "You're the only person who ever—"

"I know."

"I'll go," Leo said. His whole body was shaking. "I'll go. I'll do it. But I'm not going to say goodbye. I won't."

"Fine."

"I mean it."

"Fine," said Cassian, and found, to his surprise, that he was smiling.

…

He wrote the letter on the back of a hymn sheet.

He found a stub of pencil in the choir stalls and a clear corner of the vestry bench and wrote by the light of the single lamp. His hand was steady. The words came easily, which surprised him; he had expected to struggle, to cross out, to tear up. Instead they came out of him one after another, plain and short, in the voice he used to speak to her on the telephone.

Mom,

I'm going to be away for a while. I'm not sure how long. Don't be scared. I'm all right and I did this because I wanted to. Nobody made me. I need you to know that, because later people might tell you something else.

I met some kids here. One of them was named Albert and he was braver than he looked. Another is named Leo. He'll bring you this.

I'm sorry I lied to you on the phone. I never wanted to. I'm sorry about Dad. I'm sorry about all of it.

You used to sing when you cooked. I don't remember what. It was an old one with a lot of verses. I can hear it right now. It's the only thing I can hear.

Be happy. I think you will be. Daniel's good. Let him be good to you.

I love you. I have always loved you.

Cassian

He read it through once.

Then he folded it small, and put it into Leo's hand, and closed the boy's fingers over it.

"Mom's in Mercy Hospital in Ottley," he said. "Ask for Nurse Dana. Give it to her. Don't give it to anybody else. And if she asks what happened, tell her I..." He stopped. "Tell her I got a scholarship."

Leo gave a broken laugh.

"I'll tell her you got the best one in the world."

…

He stood a moment alone at the head of the nave, looking down at his hands.

They lay in front of him, palm up, in the dim red light. Large, square, scarred at the knuckles. Hands that had broken a boy's nose in a corridor. Hands that had cut the throats of forty-nine small living things. Hands that had steadied a thin boy on a ledge, and dragged another from the dark.

He had thought, once, that they were his father's.

They were not. They were his. They were the only thing about himself that he had ever been certain of, and he looked at them now, on the last night, with a feeling that he could only call tenderness.

You were good for something, he told them.

In the black mark at the center of the right palm, a small warmth pulsed.

He closed them.

Behind him, in the cold, Leo was waiting at the door, with the letter against his chest. He did not say goodbye. He stood in the opening, a small straight figure against the paler dark, and lifted his hand, and held it there. Cassian lifted his own.

They stayed like that for the length of a breath.

Then Leo turned and ran.

…

The little door behind the altar stood open.

Cassian went through it.

The stair went down in tight turns, steep, damp, with a rope for a rail. The roaring rose to meet him. It came up the stairwell like heat from a furnace, and the walls shook, and flakes of plaster rained from the vault. The air grew colder with every turn. His breath turned to smoke. By the thirtieth step it hurt to breathe, and by the fortieth he could see his own face reflected in the black rime that glazed the stone.

He counted. He had always counted. Forty. Forty-one.

Forty-nine.

The stair ended in a landing, and the landing in an arch, and through the arch lay the vault.

He stopped on the threshold.

It was the round chamber he had seen from the door. The pedestal, the open cabinet. The green light was gone. The room was full of a swirling, lightless, formless, enormous dark, and in the center of it, on the floor, a heap of gray cloth and white hair lay curled against the wall. The Rector. A pace behind, the Deacon knelt with her key held out in front of her like a cross, and her lips moving, and her face as bare as a skull.

Neither looked up.

Out of the dark, the voices spoke.

"Seal," they said.

It was almost gentle.

"Seal of ours. Where is our Seal?"

He took a step into the room. Then another. The cold wrapped round him like a hand. He felt his heart beating, slow and heavy. He felt the black mark burning. And he lifted his chin, and drew a breath that went down to the bottom of his lungs, and said in a loud, clear voice that did not shake at all:

"Take me."

The dark went still.

"Take me," said Cassian. "Here I am."