17. Thomas #2
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.
That's the sentence. I've had nothing to do since but look for a better one, and there is no better one.
Behind my sternum, in the drained hollow where the tap had been, another soul arrived, whole, slotting in like a hand into a glove built for it, like the space had been kept, and it was enormous, and it was ordered, corridors and ledgers and locked drawers of it going back further than me in every direction, and it was terrified.
I felt the terror the way you feel someone shaking through a wall you're leaning on. Enormous and ordered and terrified.
And holding.
Holding me the way you hold a door against a storm, shoulder set, feet planted, no plan past the holding.
The cold came for the crack in me and found him standing in it, and it pulled, and he held, and the stone under us made its bell note again, and he held, and nobody asked me.
I want that in the record too, last, because it's the truest thing in it.
There was no time to ask and there was no me left to ask, and both of those things are facts, and neither of them is the same thing as asking.
He poured himself into the doorway of me without asking, to keep the storm out, and it was the end of every drowning and it was a hand closing around my whole life, both, the same act, no daylight between them.
And through the wall of him I could feel what the terror was made of. It wasn't the dark. Ordered things fear disorder; I'd have bet the notebook on it and lost. The terror was about dropping me. All of it, the entire freight. A soul the size of a college, afraid in exactly one direction.
The room went far away. The blue went down to almost nothing. Everything I had was one sensation wide, and the sensation was this: under my own heartbeat, half a beat off it, another one. Steady. Braced. A man's weight against a door.
Some doors get held shut. Some get held open. I went out before I could tell which one I was.