Page 26 of The Headmaster’s Binding

Item forty-one: the game is older than everyone playing it. Wes learned it from the year above, who learned it from the year above that. Nobody can name the inventor. The graduate students of this college have been voting on the building for longer than anyone can source, which means the evidence has been coming in for longer than anyone can source.

Item forty-two: they'll vote on the fog, but not on him. The fog is the college's. Micah is theirs.

* * *

I didn't go back to the east-range service door that night. I want that on the record: Friday me had three glasses of red wine on board and better sense than Sunday me, who had neither.

Saturday I marked essays and told myself I was still deciding. Sunday at two a.m. I did the circuit I've done every night since the security walk, past the lawns, down the service lane, and stopped at the recessed door with the wired-glass panel, and took out the multitool, because the deciding had apparently happened somewhere without me.

Here's the thing about the padlock on that service door: it's a good padlock. It's a terrible hasp. The hasp is held to the frame by four brass screws, and the frame is oak older than the college's photographs of itself, and old oak holds paint better than it holds threads. Sixteen minutes of quarter-turns with my coat sleeve over the metal to keep it quiet. The padlock never opened. It rode down into my pocket still locked to its hasp, defeated on a technicality, and at 2:26 by my watch I was standing inside the corridor I'd only ever seen through wired glass.

Dust. My flashlight, half-shuttered by my fingers. The inner doorway on the left, and through it the room where I watched a wand put out fire in September, and the room was bare. No candles. But the sills carried rings of old wax, pale circles on the stone, and I counted forty of them and made myself stop counting, and under each ring the stone had the polish stone gets from attention, the way the front pew wears smoother than the back.

The PLANT door is under the main stair, right where security's flashlights didn't go. Fist-sized padlock, dusty, except the dust on the staple was wiped in a band, the way metal gets wiped by use. I had the multitool out before I saw I wouldn't need it. The padlock was doing its job. The mortar had quit doing its. The staple came out of the wall like a tooth out of an old man, and the door swung at a touch, and behind it there was no plant.

There was a stair going down. Stone, narrow, treads worn to a sag in the middle, and cold air coming up it in a slow, steady spill, and the dark at the bottom wasn't the dark of a room. It was the dark of a distance.

My watch said 2:43. The notebook was in my coat pocket and my heart was going like a man running downstairs, which is what I was about to be, and I started down, counting out loud in a whisper, because the count was the only thing in that stairwell that belonged to me.

One to seven: cold, ordinary stone. On seven the air changed, the way it changes in a cave mouth, and I noted it, one more anomaly for the collection.

On eight, the headache arrived. Arrived is the word. Nothing built. Between step seven and step eight a spike went in behind my right eye, from the inside, the exact shape of a nail.

On nine there was warmth on my lip. I put my fingers up and they came away dark in the flashlight's beam.

On ten the flashlight seemed to be working harder for less, and I remember deciding, with the last committee still meeting in my head, that I would go to fifteen and stop.

On eleven I said it out loud. Eleven.

* * *

The clock over my office door said four minutes past four.

I was sitting in my own chair, at my own desk, with the lamp on. My coat was buttoned, one button off true, all the way down. The pocket where the padlock had ridden was flat. Empty. Buttoned. The blood on my lip had dried to a crust that cracked when I opened my mouth, and I know it cracked, because when I understood where I was, I said a word to the empty room, and it wasn't a clever one.

Here's what I have. I have step eleven, in my own voice, in a whisper. Then I have the grain of this desk six inches from my eyes and a lamp I don't remember lighting. Between those two frames there is nothing. Not darkness, not blur, not the smeared half-memory you get from wine. Nothing, spliced clean, the way the gatehouse ledger was razored: an hour and twenty-one minutes, out of my head, and the editor didn't even leave a stub.

And I have this. My left shoe is soaked through. Shoe, sock, trouser hem, to the ankle. My right shoe is dry. I remember eleven dry steps. Somewhere on the far side of the splice I stood in water deep enough to fill one shoe, and then I crossed two hundred yards of college, and passed the porter's lodge, and climbed the Letters stairs, and sat down in my marking chair, and lit my lamp, and none of it happened to anyone I have access to.

Toby's essay was on top of the marking stack. I turned it over and wrote on the back of the last page, because it was in reach and my hands weren't up to anything that involved a pocket.

Things that are actually happening. Entry eight: the building defends itself. It doesn't call security and it doesn't send a letter. It takes the hour you were using to trespass and it keeps it, filed somewhere quiet.

Entry nine: I got eleven steps and a wet shoe. Leah Brandt got a four-minute cry she can't account for. I've spent a term thinking I was investigating what this college does to its students. As of four this morning, I'm one of them.

Chapter 12

Adrian

Croft knocked at the Lodge at ten past six on Monday morning, before the kettle, which has happened four times in nine years, and none of the four was ever good news. He had the service-door padlock in one pocket, still locked to a hasp with the screws taped neatly to the plate, recovered from the foot of the plant stair, set out square in the middle of the bottom step the way the building sets out what it has finished with, and he held it out to me on his open palm with the particular ceremony of a cat presenting a bird to a doorstep.

"The plant door," he said.

I was dressed and across the quad before the fog had finished deciding what to do with the light. The east range keeps its own ledger; I am the only man on the ground who can read it, and reading it is a matter of standing at the head of that stair with a hand flat on the stone and the patience to be told. It told me what it always tells me, which is magnitude and duration and nothing else, the way a scale remembers a weight. One visitor. Taken at seventeen minutes to three. Concluded after eighty-one minutes.

Concluded. The stair does not injure; I want that understood by no one, because I intend to explain it to no one. The stair concludes its visitors. It has concluded curious porters and one Victorian antiquarian and, in my nine years, nobody, because in my nine years nobody has reached it. It sets the visitor down somewhere he can be found by his own life, and it keeps whatever interval the walk required, and there is no appeal, because there is no court, because there is no memory. That is the whole mercy of it, and the whole of what it costs.

The prints began wet at the range door and went two hundred yards. Left foot only. Croft walked me along them without a word, the two of us pacing a line of single wet crescents down the service lane and across the gravel to the Letters stair in the gray of the morning, and I did the arithmetic I did not want. There is standing water over the fourteenth step from October to April. The prints do not lie about depth; the shoe had filled.