17. Thomas
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."
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.