Down

PREVIOUSLY: Cassian and Leo pieced together three halves of the same sentence: Elias Marsh's torn notebook pages, Mr. Pike's last page, and the reversed rite from Leo's father's notebook. On the seventh night Albert Sterling walked into the dark of his own accord, the bell cracked, and the mark of the Seal passed to Cassian when Albert said his name. The pact is broken, the Guest is loose, and the Rector has fled underground. Cassian has chosen not to give himself. He will try to break it.

…

"Not that way," said Leo. "The altar stair is theirs."

They went out through the shattered vestry, across a lawn full of glass and screaming boys, and into the east wing by the kitchen door. Behind them the chapel was lit from within, red and flickering, like a lantern with a fire in it. The roaring had not stopped. It rose and fell in long slow waves that made the ground shiver and the chandeliers in the dining hall ring against one another like bells.

In the infirmary, a single lamp burned.

Mrs. Abbott met them at the door. She was in her coat and her sensible shoes, with a canvas bag over her shoulder, and she had already, Cassian saw, begun to move the beds. Two first-formers sat wrapped in blankets on a cot. Ronald lay on the one by the window, humming, with his eyes wide and clear. She looked at the two boys, at the dirt on their faces and the iron in their eyes, and she did not ask what they meant to do.

"I'll get the little ones out," she said. "Through the kitchen gate. I've a friend in the village with a van."

"Thank you."

"I'm doing it for the children." Her voice was hard, but her hand, laid for one moment on Cassian's arm, was kind. "You're to come back up those stairs alive, young man. Do you hear me?"

"I'll try."

"That is not an answer."

"No, ma'am," said Cassian. "It isn't."

She snorted, and turned away, and began to lift a child onto her hip.

Cassian bent over the window bed.

Ronald looked up. The mild unfocused eyes found his face, and rested there. A little color came into his cheeks. His lips parted, as if to speak. Then they closed, and curved, and the humming went on.

Tell him, Cassian thought. Tell him it's all right.

"Ronald," he said. "I'm going to make it stop."

The humming faltered.

Then it went on, unchanged, but the hand lying on the blanket opened, slowly, and turned its palm up, and Cassian took it and held it a moment, and put it back.

…

Leo had not let go of the green notebook.

He hugged it to his chest as they crossed the cloister, and he held it in both hands as they ducked through the boiler room door, and when they came to the grille, he was still clutching it, white-knuckled, like a man hanging onto a rail in a storm. In its cloth cover, under the forced brass lock, was his father's whole life.

"Do you want me to carry it?"

"No."

"You could drop it."

"I won't."

"Leo."

"I won't." He drew a breath. "I've never had anything to hold onto. This is it."

They went down.

…

The shaft was colder than before.

Frost glazed the brackets and bit through their gloves. The rock walls sweated and glittered. The air was thick with a sweet, rank, spoiled smell, and each time the great breath drew in, a gust went up the shaft past them with a whistle, and each time it let go, a gust came down. They climbed in the pause between, with the beam of the flashlight bobbing off the wet.

At the bottom, they stood in the brick tunnel with their breath smoking.

The tunnel was changed.

The mold had spread. It hung in white veils from the roof. The heap of rags, the old coat, was gone; in its place lay a smear of something black and shining. The air hummed. And all along the walls, glimmering in the beam, were marks Cassian had not noticed before: scratches, cut into the brick with a blade or a nail. Tally-marks, in fives. Letters. Initials. Dates, going back and back.

They were names.

Hundreds of them. They ran along both sides of the passage at the height of a child's reach, thick as ivy. J.B. 1893. Thos. Wickes 1900. W.H. 1914. Some were cut deep and some were barely a scratch. Some were just a line, a cross, a hand. Cassian swept the light over them, and then stopped, and swept back, and read one, and read it again, and walked on very slowly, not looking at the others.

They were the Seals.

Every one. Every boy given. Every boy who had been marched down this tunnel with a candle in his hand, and who, in the last long minutes before the dark, had found a way to write his name on a wall.

"They knew," whispered Leo.

"They always knew."

"Why didn't—"

"Because no one would listen."

He walked on, and the names went by on either hand, and the dark pressed close.

…

The iron door stood open.

It had not been closed since the night of Karl. Beyond it, the chamber breathed. The green light was dim now, a sullen glow like the coals of a fire gone out, and the round room was empty of everything but the cold. The Rector and the Deacon were not here. Their voices came from far above, echoing and thin, down the throat of some other stair: a thin old man's wail, a woman's urgent murmur. They had gone to the Hearth. They were trying to placate it.

That gives us time.

Cassian went in.

The cabinet of ebony stood open on its pedestal, as Karl had left it. Its doors hung askew. A small iron key stuck out of the lock. And on the floor beneath, where it had fallen from a boy's arms, lay the Ledger.

Someone had put it back on its stand.

He looked at it. The great book rested open on the pedestal under the dome, as though it had been waiting. It was bigger than he had thought: a thing like a family Bible, bound in black leather gone soft as skin. The clasp of tarnished silver lay undone. Its pages were gray, and thick, and closely written. Names. Hundreds. Thousands. Line after line after line, in ink the color of dried blood, in dozens of different hands, running down the leaves in a long dark column, with dates in the margin, and, against each, a single small cross.

And at the very bottom of the last page, where the ink was still bright and wet, one more. Sterling, Albert. A line had been drawn beside it, not yet crossed.

He did not touch it.

At the foot of the stand, in an iron dish, a stub of thick red candle burned with a small steady flame that did not flicker in the draught. The Guest's candle. The one that never went out.

"Cassian."

Leo had gone to the foot of the pedestal. He was kneeling on the stone with his torch in his hand and his face turned down. Cassian crossed to him.

On the floor, at the base of the stand, lay a scatter of small pale things.

Bones. Little ones. Vertebrae, a jawbone, the curve of a rib. They lay in a loose heap against the stone, gray with age, swept into the corner as dust is swept. Beside them, a rotted lump of gray wool, matted and green. A sweater, he saw, a boy's sweater, with a hole at the elbow. And above it, scratched into the base of the pedestal in thin, shaky, upright capitals, with the point of a pen:

ELIAS M. WAS HERE

Cassian shut his eyes.

He did not say anything. He stood there, and it seemed to him that the room was very quiet, and that for the first time in many weeks the great slow breath had stopped, as if the thing above, too, were listening. He thought of a boy with a pointed chin and a crooked smile. He thought of an upright, careful hand in the margins of a hundred books. He thought, You got here. You got all the way here.

And now I have.

He opened his eyes.

"I'm sorry it took so long," he said, to the floor.

Behind him, Leo opened the green notebook with unsteady fingers. The pages rustled. He found the place. His voice, when it came, was thin and strained and very young.

"It's time."