Page 37 of The Headmaster’s Binding

I sat in the study with the minute-book open and did not read it. A folder. A chit. A card. And beneath the three, unshelved since noon, the sitting I had not convened. Each of the three had a shelf, and I had shelved each of them inside the hour of its arrival, and now, at half past nine, they came down off their shelves together and stood in front of my desk like a deputation. A missing folder is an error. An unordered requisition is an error. A cancelled tea is a courtesy. I have run this college too long to believe in three errors keeping company on one day. Separately they were clerical. Together they formed a warning I could not yet translate, and a man who cannot read a warning in his own college has a duty to go and stand where it was written.

I took the minute-book as a pretext. The review is suspended; there are three signatures wanting; a Headmaster may knock on a door at ten o'clock with three signatures and be dull about it. I crossed by the west door and the lit side of the quad, which is the route I advised. The gatehouse was dark as I passed, which it is not at ten, and I logged the dark gatehouse and kept walking, because a man can carry only so many lamps in one evening. Corbett took me up its stair smelling of stone and other people's suppers, and I stood in front of his door and knocked.

Light lay under the door in an even bar. His lamp, the yellow one. I knocked and the light did not move, no shadow crossed it, no chair scraped, and I stood listening to a silence with a lamp on inside it, and knocked again, and said his name, once, at a volume I had no wish to explain to his neighbors. I kept my knuckles against the wood for the space of four breaths, listening for any of the sounds a living flat makes around a lamp: the floor's report, a page turned, the small career of a cup on a saucer. The building offered me its pipes. Nothing answered. Nothing moved.

I went down to the porter's desk, which is unmanned at that hour, and used the house telephone, and rang his set. Through the earpiece and two floors of stone I could hear it, doubled: the near ring and the far one, above me, in the lit room. It rang the way a telephone rings in an empty coat. Eleven times. I counted, and I record that I counted, and I have no explanation to enter beside the number.

There is an account a man begins to run at such moments, and I declined to run it. He walks at night; the whole term says so; the gatehouse book is full of him. He was out being himself somewhere on the ground with his collar up and his notebook in the inside-left pocket, and his lamp was on because his lamp is always on, and in the morning the review would gain its three signatures and I would say nothing about the eleven rings. I built this account crossing the quad. It was well built. I have built nothing better all year.

I went home the long way, by the service lane, because the lane was dark and fast and I wanted the college's back corridors between me and my own front door. Past the buttery. Past the store where a green bicycle stands under a sheet. The lane runs below his window, and I did not look up at it, on discipline, until I had to turn at the corner, and when I looked up the light was burning exactly as a light burns in a room where a man is marking essays, and no shape crossed it, carrying a cup or anything else.

Twenty more steps brought the chapel range up on my right, and its small deep window.

The candle on the small room's sill was burning.

I stopped in the lane. There is no sitting in any diary this station keeps; there is nothing below the college tonight but the standing dark; the room behind that window has one key, and the key was in my pocket, and I could put my hand on it through the cloth. A week ago I left that room dark on purpose, and entered the purpose in this record. The flame stood in the deep of the sill at twice its proper height, white at the crown, absolutely still, burning with the discipline of a thing that has been given its instructions.

I had not lit it.

Chapter 17

Thomas

They took me on the cloister walk, between the second lamp and the third, and the whole of it cost them maybe four seconds. I want that in the record, whatever this record is now: four seconds, no scuffle, no drama, the fountain still running its one dark thread behind me. Professionals. Whoever they were, they had done it before, and my whole body understood that before my brain got a vote.

I'd been good for six days. That's the joke I keep snagging on. Ballard said be boringly visible, so I taught, I ate my dinners in hall, I marked essays in the annex with the good radiator until half nine like a man with nothing in his notebook but notes. I was forty yards from my own staircase. An arm came across my chest from behind, high and hard, and a cloth came over my mouth and nose, sweetish and cold and wrong, nothing from a laboratory, something their rites used, and I got one syllable out into the wool of somebody's sleeve. Somewhere at my ear a voice said, "Now," quietly, no hurry in it, and here is the part I have gone back for a hundred times and never once retrieved: I knew the cadence. Or the cologne. Something at the edge of it was filed in me already, someone's aftershave or someone's way of laying a word down, familiar the way your own hallway is familiar in the dark. It was there, and the cloth was there, and the two facts went down together into the same hole, and I went with them.

* * *

Cold woke me. Stone-cold, the specific cold of stone, coming up through my shoulder blades and the backs of my thighs like the temperature of the college's actual opinion of me.

I was lying on my back on a slab with my arms out wide and my ankles apart, and I couldn't move any of the four of them, and when I turned my wrist against whatever held it, it gave the small gummy creak of tape. Duct tape. Silver, wide, the same roll that lives in everyone's junk drawer. They have whatever they have down here, and they went to a hardware shop for me. My mouth was taped too. I found that out trying to say a word I'm glad nobody heard.

Okay. Think. Item one: breathe through your nose; the tape's only over your mouth. Item two: those candles are floating. Item three: item two is impossible. Item four: revisit item three when not taped to an altar.

I did the breathing. In for four, hold, out for six, which I learned years ago from a pamphlet about public speaking. And I made myself do the thing I do, because it's the only thing I've ever done: I counted.

Forty candles. Some on ledges, some on iron stands, and six of them, six, standing on the air itself at the height of a mantelpiece, burning with their flames dead level while the dark went up past them into a vaulted stone ceiling. The light didn't reach the walls everywhere. Where it did: old ashlar, damp-stained, and pale lines drawn on the floor around my slab in unbroken curves, and grooves in the stone under the lines, worn deep, older than the paint that sat in them. Somebody has been drawing this figure so long they've worn it into the floor. That thought arrived very calmly, as the worst ones do.

And I knew the air. That's the thing I'd tell you first if you were here, which for your sake you are not. I'd met this air before, eleven steps down behind a door marked PLANT, the night it spiked me behind the eye and took my hour and put me back at my desk with a wet shoe. Cold that doesn't move, thick at the bottom like the bottom of a well. Water stood somewhere off in the dark. I could smell the flat mineral cold of it. There is standing water over the fourteenth step from October to April; a man told me that once, in an office, in another life, to frighten me, and it worked, and it was working now. I was below the college. I was in the place at the foot of those stairs, the place that takes your hour and sets you back at your own desk with the lamp on, and this time there'd been no headache and no nosebleed and no defense at all.

It didn't argue with me this time. I'd been signed in.

And it was still Thursday. It had that much in common with the rest of my life. I lay there taped to stone and the sum I never ran came and ran itself: the appointments are Thursdays, the intervals are shortening, I can see thirty-six hours out, it's dated and it's signed, and never once, in a whole term of lists, in three notebooks' worth of columns, did I put my own name in one. I'd charted the college's appetite like it was somebody else's weather. There's a word for a man who does that. It was taped to a slab, learning it.

There were people in the dark. Six of them close, inside the light, and more behind them. I could hear the more, cloth and breath, a cough swallowed somewhere off to my left. The six wore robes the color of the dark and masks with no faces, smooth ovals, nothing where everything should be, and I looked at each one in turn looking for a build I knew, a stance, a pair of glasses, anything, and got nothing, and the nothing was the point. People wear masks for you, not for themselves.

Four of them held wands.

I knew the length. Fifteen inches of dark wood. I'd seen one put out a bank of candles once, through wired glass, the way a hand smooths a bedsheet. Now there were four, held at rest with a surgeon's looseness, and past the nearest shoulder a shallow metal bowl came drifting through the air at chest height, unhurried, level, like it was being carried by a careful waiter who had stepped out of existence, and settled itself on the slab's corner by my hip with a small competent clink.

What in the fucked-up Harry Potter⁠—

The thought didn't even get to finish. It's still back there somewhere, unfinished, my last complete piece of before.

A voice came out of the dark. Not from a mask, from everywhere at once, out of stone built to move sound, and it had been worked on, flattened, ironed free of anybody, and it said:

"Too nosy for your own good, Dr. Mercer. Now we'll make good use of you."