Page 38 of The Headmaster’s Binding

I said something back. Taped to a slab in a cellar full of floating cutlery, I attempted a rejoinder, and the tape ate it, and behind one of those smooth ovals somebody may know that my last act as a free man was mouthing a joke nobody will ever hear. It was about the candles. It wasn't my best work.

Nobody laughed. Nobody moved either, for a moment, and in the moment I did inventory, because terror with nowhere to go turns into procedure: exits, none visible; a stair somewhere beyond my crown, going up to a door I'd never seen open; six figures close and more in the dark, four wands; my wrists, taped; my mouth, taped; my assets, a wristwatch and a habit of counting. People have gotten out of worse. I couldn't name one, but the sentence helped, so I said it again, and while I was saying it the four wands came up, all together, the way bows come up in an orchestra.

Then they started, and the jokes stopped arriving.

* * *

I can only tell you what it was like from the inside. From the inside, this is what it was like.

The chanting wasn't words, or it was words the way rain on a roof is percussion: shaped, patterned, meaning nothing to the man under the roof. It went around the circle of them and didn't stop for breath, because they took breath in relays, and all forty candle flames leaned in at me at once, every one, like iron filings finding north, and north was my chest.

And then somebody opened a tap in the middle of me.

That's the nearest I can get, and I've had time since to look for nearer. Behind the sternum, dead center, a tap, a drain, a valve, turned by a hand I couldn't see or feel, and things began to leave. Not blood. Nothing a chart has a word for. Warmth went first, but warmth is the wrong word too; call it the thing warmth is about. Every kept feeling I had filed all term started coming up out of its drawer and going.

And here's what I need the record to hold, because it's the worst fact I own: it was gentle. It lifted everything the way you'd lift a sleeping child off a sofa, slow, considerate, taking the weight as it came, and my body's whole animal answer was gratitude, some drugged stupid warmth like the second before sleep, and one cell of me at the very back stood screaming at the rest: this is what happened to Leah. This is the four minutes. This is why they say thank you at the door.

The first things it took were his.

I felt them go the way you see luggage go down a carousel and away: item one, the hands. Item eleven, which never happened, which I never struck, whatever I told myself, which was there anyway, filed, warm, mine. Eleven seconds under a white lamp in the rain. The laugh in the quad I'd have sworn on. A palm's worth of heartbeat through cold wool, a week old, still ringing. It drank those first, and somewhere in the dark a masked voice said one syllable in a tone I understood with my skin: more than they expected. More than they'd metered for.

Then it went wider. June asking the true thing with her chin up. Toby's serifed B's on a Post-it treaty. Elena counting my lies across a table, because counting is how she loves. A key worked off a ring and held out without one question. A tired man in a diner turning a photograph right way up, gently, like a card he'd already lost on. It took them in no order, with no malice either, and I felt myself starting to stop being about anything, and understood, from the inside now, the fact of the day room: he isn't empty. He's been spent.

And the cell at the back of me, the last one at a desk, did the last sum of the term: Micah showed up early and polite, and it took everything, and afterward somebody folds your hands. They fold your hands, left over right, tidy, in a day room upstate, and at ten to four your face keeps an appointment the rest of you has left, forever. That's the bottom of this drain. That's where the tap empties out.

I did not consent to be a jug.

I don't know a better way to write what happened next. There was no decision; there was no anywhere to decide with, but everything left in me that was still mine turned around at the lip of the drain and went the other way, all of it, at once, and it turned out there was more of me than anybody had measured, months of it, a whole term pressed down and shut in drawers, and it went up like a match dropped into a granary.

Light with no source. That's the first thing. Not the candles: the air itself went white-gold from the inside the way a struck bell must feel sound, and the pressure in the room reversed, out of me instead of into, and the chanting shredded, and I heard, through stone and my own roaring, bodies hit things. Masked figures went over and away like furniture in a flood, one clean off his feet into the dark, wands loose and rolling, and the shallow bowl left the slab's corner sideways and rang off a pillar like a shot. The six standing candles dropped out of the air. And every one of the forty guttered down at the same instant, not out: blue. Forty small blue teeth, the color flame goes when it's burning the wrong thing.

The floor cracked.

I heard it before I felt it, a note, deep, like a cathedral clearing its throat under the county, and the slab shuddered under my spine, and along the old worn grooves, along the lines a century of hands had painted and repainted, the stone opened. Not wide. It didn't need wide.

And the cold came up.

I'd met the little cold, at the door of it, on the stairs, the cold that stands still. This was the owner of that cold. It came up through the crack and it ate the sound of the room, every sound, my own roaring included; not silence, subtraction; the scream two figures over from me turned into a shape a mouth was making, and the room went to a picture of itself. And the attention I'd felt all term through floors and doors, the interested dark at the foot of stairs, the thing lights and locked doors and one whole college's architecture had been arranged around: it wasn't below me anymore.

It was at the crack, and it was feeding, on the flood coming out of me, and the flood was everything, and when everything ran out it would take the jug, and I knew all three of those facts like a hand knows a stove, without one word involved anywhere, and what was left of me was going toward the crack in a long bright ribbon and I couldn't even hear myself go.

Then a shape came the wrong way.

Everything in that room was moving away, crawling, dragging, gone; one figure came in, over the pale lines, which I understood even then you do not cross, into the reach of it, robe snapping in a wind that wasn't wind, and it came to the slab and took the smooth oval off its face with one hand, and it was him. Of course it was him. I'd have known the hands.

Say it plainly, Mercer. Even here. Especially here: the hands were item one, September, the first entry in the first list, and they were the last thing my eyes got given while there was still a whole me to give things to.

Adrian Thorne stood over me in the blue light with the mask hanging from his fingers, and his face was a thing I had never seen on him and have seen every night since: a careful man arriving past the end of careful. And he was shouting. At it. Into the crack, into the cold, full sentences, formal, no contractions, grammar deployed like a man arguing with weather, and I couldn't hear one word, the cold ate them all, and it didn't matter, and I watched him understand that it didn't matter. I watched a man run out of doctrine at the exact speed of the ribbon running out of me.

What he did then, he did the way he initials a minute. Coat sleeve up an inch. Knee onto the slab's edge. And his palm came down flat on my sternum, over the drain, on the place where one week and one whole life ago my palm had been flat on his, and the sound came back on.

All at once, like a door of it: his voice, mid-sentence, close now, close to my face, and he said eleven words.

I counted them. Counting was the last thing I owned, and I spent it there. Eleven words in his own voice, not the ironed one, not the Headmaster's, and I could not keep one of them; they went through me and left no copies, and on the last of them the whole night changed direction.

The ribbon stopped.

And then there was somebody else in here with me.