Take My Hand

He took it.

It was small and cold and rough with chalk, and it closed on his own with a grip that hurt. Leo pulled. Cassian rose from the step, and his knees held, and the two of them went down the chapel stair together and across the lawn at a run, with the singing at their backs.

They did not speak.

The grass was white and crisp and rang under their boots. The wall of the kitchen garden rose before them, black against the sky, and the cold frames lay in rows like open graves. Cassian had been here before. He knew the path. He knew the gate. But everything looked different in the dark, narrower, shabbier, as if the place were a stage set and the paint was peeling. He ran with his head down, and Leo's hand in his, and the breath sobbing in his chest.

The gate was shut.

It stood in the hedge, small and rusted, with moss on its hinges. Leo fumbled in his pocket and brought out a key, the same black hand-cut thing that had once lain in Cassian's palm. He did not say how he had got it back. He fitted it into the lock. It resisted, and he wrenched, and it gave.

The gate swung open with a long rising shriek.

They both froze.

The shriek went out across the valley, high and thin, a gull's cry, a child's. Behind them, in the chapel, the singing stopped.

"Run," said Leo.

…

The track went down through the pines, steep and black.

They ran it blind. Branches whipped their faces. Roots caught at their ankles. Leo went first, with the canvas bag banging on his hip, and Cassian came behind, one hand on his shoulder, and neither of them spoke or looked back. The cold was a knife in the lungs. Somewhere above them, a bell began to toll, a single note, slow, deliberate, wrong.

Come back.

He heard it in his head. It was not loud. It was a murmur at the very edge of his hearing, soft, urgent, tender, like a child's voice calling from a bedroom down a long dark hallway. Cassian. Come back. Don't leave us. We're lonely.

He gritted his teeth.

Don't answer.

Cassian. It's cold. Why did you go?

Ronald's voice. A thin hiccuping sob in it. He knew it, and it knew that he knew, and it pressed upon him from every side, soft, sweet, insistent, pulling at his sleeves, his hair, the hollow of his chest. His feet began to slow. His hand tightened on Leo's shoulder, and Leo twisted round in the dark, a pale face, a gleam of eyes.

"Don't stop!"

"I can't—"

"You can!" Leo seized his wrist and dragged. "You can, Cassian. Run. It's just a voice. It can't touch you unless you let it."

"He's calling."

"I know!"

"He's calling me, Leo. I shut the door on him. I shut—"

"I know."

"He's—"

"I know!" It was a sob. "I know. Do you think I can't hear them? Do you think I haven't heard them every night for two years? I hear them, Cassian. All of them. I hear them now. I hear Albert." His fingers dug in. "And I'm still running. So are you. That's all there is. You hear it, and you run."

Cassian let out a breath.

He nodded.

They went on down the hill.

…

The stream was at the bottom.

They crossed it without stopping, wading to the thigh, shoving through the black water with their arms held high. It was colder than anything Cassian had ever known. It struck his bones like a hammer. They climbed the far bank on hands and knees, gasping, soaked, and dragged themselves into a thicket of dead fern, and lay there.

The singing was gone.

It was perfectly quiet. A little wind rattled the dry stalks. The stars showed through the branches. Far up the hill, so far that it might have been a trick of the eyes, a single window glowed red in the black.

"Do you hear anything?" Leo whispered.

"No."

"Nor do I."

They lay side by side and stared at the sky.

"We should keep going," said Leo, after a while. His teeth were chattering. "There's a road. A truck goes past at four."

"I know."

"You know?"

"I've heard of it." Cassian's mouth twisted. "A friend told me once."

Leo laughed, a small breathless sound, and put his wrist to his mouth. The laugh broke. He turned on his side, his shoulders heaving, and Cassian lay beside him in the bracken with the cold seeping through his clothes and did not touch him and did not look. After a time the shaking stopped.

"Sorry," said Leo.

"Don't be."

"I thought I'd be braver."

"You were."

"I wasn't."

"You came down that hill with me," said Cassian, "in the dark, with them singing in your head. I'd say that's as brave as anyone's ever been."

Leo said nothing.

He lay with his face turned up, and in the starlight Cassian saw that tears were running steadily from the corners of his eyes into his hair. He didn't wipe them. After a while he said, in a very small voice, "Thank you for taking my hand."

"Thank you for holding it out."

They rose together, stiff and shaking, and went on toward the road.