Page 17 of The Headmaster’s Binding

Here is what I did Wednesday night instead of sleeping, because I don't sleep the way I used to; I get up at two and stand at the dark window and run my checks like a night nurse. Fog: level on the lawns, present, correct. The closed building: dark, all floors, no moving light, thirteen nights running now. Service lane: empty. It's not a hobby. A hobby is something you could stop.

And at fourteen minutes past two, technically Thursday, the checks failed, because the dark at the bottom of the building had the wrong depth in it.

The service door. It's recessed, down two steps, a wired-glass panel at head height, and it has been padlocked every night since the night security walked me through the building; I know because checking the hasp is on my circuit, the way the fog is on my circuit. I stood at my window looking at a rectangle of dark that was deeper than the dark around it, and then I put a coat on over what I sleep in and went down my three flights and across the lane, and I want it noted that at no point did any part of me argue. That's new. That's worth an item of its own someday, what this place has done to my sense of proportion.

The padlock hung open on the staple, hooked by its own curve, like a coat on one finger. The door stood off the latch by an inch.

I did not go in. Credit where due: the man who walked into a whisper in a cloister and a sealed building's paperwork did not walk through the open door at two in the morning. I went to the wired glass instead, and I put my face to it, and through the mesh I could see a corridor, and at the end of the corridor an inner doorway standing open, and through that doorway a room where the dark was moving.

Candlelight. That was the first reading: a room full of candles, dozens of them, on stands, on the floor, banked like a church gets banked for a vigil, in a building whose every window has been dark for thirteen nights, in a building that is padlocked and empty and CLOSED — ROOF VOID on the campus map. That alone was worth the trip. That alone would have rewritten my week.

Then a figure crossed the doorway. Dark clothes, no face from that angle, one arm out. And in the hand, a length of dark wood, maybe fifteen inches, and the figure passed it over the banked candles the way you'd pass a palm down a bedsheet, one motion, unhurried, wrist-deep and smooth.

The flames lay over flat and went out. All of them. One pass. A roomful of fire, and it didn't gutter and it didn't smoke; it laid itself down flat and the room went from vigil to void in the time it takes to say one, two, three, because that's how long I had it in view. Three seconds. I've timed worse things; I'm confident in the figure.

"Fuck," I said, to the wired glass, at almost no volume, with great sincerity.

Then I was a man in pajama bottoms standing at an unlatched door twelve feet from whoever holds the wood, and my body did the arithmetic before I did. I walked. I did not run. Running is evidence; a woman in a green scarf taught me that. I walked up the lane at the pace of a man walking back for milk he forgot to buy, and up three flights, and turned my key with a hand that took two tries at it, and stood in my dark kitchen listening to my own heart perform.

The word. Standing there, I made myself say the word, because refusing to say it wasn't skepticism, it was cowardice with a better tailor.

Wand.

I auditioned every other noun in the language first, believe me. Dowel: dowels don't. Conductor's baton: conducts nothing but musicians. Candle snuffer: a snuffer has a cap and touches each flame, and this touched nothing, and there were dozens. I ran the physics twice. There is no tool, no gas line, no trick draft, no fire-suppression system on this earth that puts out a bank of separate flames in one smooth pass with a stick, without smoke, without sound. What I watched has one name, and the name comes from books we shelve as fiction.

The drug-market theory died at 2:14 a.m. Thursday, of causes it never saw coming. Nothing about a market needs a wand. Nothing about anything needs a wand. Wands don't exist.

Write it down, Mercer. That's the job now.

* * *

I sat at my desk until four with the lamp off, because the lamp felt like a broadcast, and I had Elena's number on the screen and my thumb over it for a while. Played the tape forward, the way I do. What I'd say: I saw a wand put out forty candles in a sealed building. What she'd hear: the new hire, the one who left his last job through a hearing, is seeing things at 2 a.m. That's not a conversation. That's the first exhibit at a competency review.

And under that, the truer reason, the one that had nothing to do with protecting me. The scarf woman got looked at for whispering. June got four looks and an hour of silence for a bicycle. Every person I'd let stand near this thing had paid a toll for it, small so far, small so far, and whatever the tariff was on a wand, I wasn't putting anyone else's name on that invoice. Not Elena's. Not the cohort's.

I put the phone face down. Then I turned to a fresh page, and at the top of it, in block capitals, pressing hard enough to emboss the next three pages, I wrote a new heading.

THINGS THAT ARE ACTUALLY HAPPENING

Not theories. Theories get two columns and a decent burial. This page is for the other kind of entry, and the rule of the page is: plain statements only, no explanations attempted, because every explanation I've built so far has been a smaller box than the thing I put in it.

One: a light moves in a closed building, and has gone down past a floor that isn't on the plans.

Two: pages get razored out of bound books, and names get scratched out of tables, and nobody ever identifies the hand holding the razor.

Three: a second-year cried in my office for four minutes and left without her reasons, lighter, and said thank you.

Four: the registry record I checked is missing at least one person, and the man who keeps it knew before the computer screen finished loading.

Five: at 2:14 this morning, a wand put out a roomful of fire the way a hand smooths a bedsheet.

I checked the list once more. It held. That was the bad part. I'd have paid real money for it not to hold, and then I wrote the last line, the operational one:

Six: nobody would believe me, so nobody gets asked to.

* * *

Friday, I almost didn't check my pigeonhole, because Fridays were for minutes and catalogues, and then I checked it, because I check things.