Chapter 32: The Second Face

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a Chapter in which a boy is gently told he is wrong, close this book now. Dear Reader, here is a riddle to carry into the classroom. What can you reserve for someone, at no charge, for as long as you like, at a price that rises every hour? Do not say a seat. The seat is only where it sits.

Room Eleven had been a supply closet, a chapel and a gym of sorts, and it carried itself like a building that had never forgiven anyone for any of them. Colored light fell through a stained-glass window and lay across the tiles. In the middle of the floor, a drain watched the class arrive, like a small and patient eye.

This was how the Academy solved things. When it needed a room, it took the nearest one. When it needed a teacher, it took the nearest adult.

Blod Sac had been suspended for three weeks for failing to handle one twelve-year-old, and his Combat 101 sessions had been broken up and scattered across the timetable like dropped marbles. This Wednesday’s marbles had rolled into Dr. Nox Elor’s room, on top of his regular students, and nobody had asked Dr. Elor how he felt about it. He had accepted it the way a river accepts a bridge.

Arthur had been the first to arrive.

He had chosen a seat in the third row, on the aisle, with a clear view of the door. He had put his bag on the chair beside him, and then, after some thought, moved it to the floor, so that the chair would look like exactly what it was: waiting. Beyond it, by the window, was the seat she liked, in the best light in the room.

The first person to come near it was a thin boy with goggles pushed up on his forehead.

"Is this one free?"

"Taken," said Arthur.

"By whom?"

"Hadjer. She’s late. She probably got stuck doing something."

He heard himself say it, and it sounded perfectly reasonable. That was the problem. By the third time he said it that morning, it would sound less like a fact and more like a prayer. Hope has a cheaper cousin, who dresses just like it and arrives at the same parties. Arthur had mistaken him for family.

The boy shrugged, took the seat across the aisle, and began unpacking his pockets.

His name was Tucker Keel, and he had the kind of face that looked permanently on the verge of a discovery, and the kind of pockets that looked permanently on the verge of a fire. He was a gearhead from House Star, and he built things for the same reason other people bite their nails. Out of the left pocket came a screwdriver. Out of the right came a coil of wire and a half-eaten granola bar. Out of the inside of his jacket, with a certain ceremony, came a gadget the size of a toaster, with a speaker that had very clearly once been a doorbell.

"Don’t touch it," he said, to no one.

"What is it?" said Carter, sliding into the seat behind Arthur.

"A ghost scanner." Tucker sounded wounded, as if he’d been asked what his own hands were. "Version nine. I taught it to ignore Mr. Fred. You can’t have a scanner that goes off every time the teacher floats by. It’s like training a dog to ignore the postman."

The scanner gave a small, polite chirp.

Tucker frowned at it. "It’s been doing that all week. Near him, mostly." He nodded at Arthur. "It pinged twice at lunch last Thursday. Right beside you. I’ve recalibrated it three times, and I finally decided it’s just broken."

"Probably," said Arthur, and kept his face perfectly still, which is harder than it sounds.

"I mean, it says there’s a ghost within ten feet of the third row." Tucker held up the little screen. "And the third row is you. Obviously that’s wrong."

"Obviously," said Carter, in a voice with no expression whatsoever, and Arthur felt his stomach turn over slowly, like a fish in shallow water.

The scanner chirped again, a little louder. The door opened.

It opened all by itself, with a faint, polite shiver, the way a door does when it has been asked by someone who would rather not be seen asking. Then a small, pale, glowing boy in a very large cardigan drifted through the gap, about a foot off the floor, with flour on one sleeve.

"Sorry," said Mr. Fred. "Wrong room."

Arthur’s head had already come up. His face had already done its small, hopeful thing. And then it was only Mr. Fred, and his face did the other thing, and he looked back at the board as if he had been interested in it all along.

The door shut.

It opened again, four minutes later. "Muffin delivery!" said Mr. Fred, and set a muffin in front of a startled girl who had not ordered one. It opened again. "Just checking for a draft." Again. "I think I left my glasses in here," said Mr. Fred, who was wearing them.

Each time, Arthur looked up. Each time, his hope rose by about an inch and fell by exactly the same distance. Each time, in some far corner of his mind that had not been taken hostage by the door, a small, tired voice said: Mr. Fred’s excuses are getting worse.

He was too busy being disappointed to be alarmed.

The truth, which Arthur did not have the room to consider, was this. Mr. Fred had a detector. It was small, brass, and the size of a pocket watch. It lived in his cardigan and had been ticking, faintly and without any particular pattern, ever since the last time he saw Arthur. Somewhere in this building there was a second ghost, and he had told nobody, because a school full of hunters is not a place where one says there is a ghost in the building out loud. So he had decided to find it quietly, in a hundred small, innocent trips past a hundred small, innocent doors.

Finding it was the hard part. The signal came and went like a radio station on a long road. It was there, and then it was nowhere. Every time he was sure of the room, it slipped sideways. He searched the third row the way a man searches for his glasses when they are sitting on his head, and for all that, it never occurred to him to look at the boy.

On the fourth opening, Arthur took out his phone under the desk.

No new messages. Delivered. He put it away. He took it out again. In the clan app, one gray line sat unchanged: Hadjer — invitation pending. He put the phone away.

The door opened. It was no one. A draft.

At the front of the room, a pair of dark eyes in a bandaged face had been watching the small, blue glow under the desk for some time.

Dr. Elor was very tall and very thin, and he had been wrapped, with the care of a gift nobody had been brave enough to open, in several miles of linen. A tweed waistcoat lay over the bandages. A pocket watch hung from it. He smelled of old paper and cool stone, and he moved with the unhurried calm of a man who had never in his life been late for anything, since he had been present for most of it.

He was supposed to be teaching history. But combat was not his subject, and he declined to pretend otherwise. "I have watched a great many battles," he had told the class when they came in. "Always from the wrong side. I would be a poor guide to the right one. So we shall do strategy, which is the study of what to do before anyone gets hurt."

He set a chessboard on the desk, an old wooden one with heavy ivory pieces, and laid out a position in about ten seconds, without looking at it, the way a man sets out a knife and fork.

"White is losing," he said. "There is exactly one way out. Who can tell me what it is?"

A girl in the front row put up her hand. "Sacrifice the queen. Then the rook is free, and the king reaches the back rank."

"That’s stupid," said Tucker, without looking up from the scanner.

"It’s the answer."

"It’s stupid. The queen is the most useful piece on the board. She goes anywhere. She does everything. You don’t throw away your best piece to save your worst one." He waved a screwdriver for emphasis. "That’s like unplugging the generator to save the lamp."

"A queen who wins nothing," said Carter, behind Arthur, quite flatly, "is a pawn with a good reputation."

Somebody laughed. Somebody else shouted, "Trade a rook!" The room began to split, as rooms do, into two camps, each convinced the other had missed something obvious. One side said you protect the strongest piece at all costs. The other said that the strongest piece is only as strong as the game she is still in. Voices rattled like pans in a sink. The stained-glass window turned slowly from red to orange.

Dr. Elor let it run for a full minute, with the faint pleasure of a man watching his own experiment work.

"You are both right," he said, at last, and the noise fell in on itself. "That is what makes it difficult. The queen is the most useful piece on the board. And she is also the only reason you are about to lose." He turned his head, slowly, toward the third row. "Mr. Specter. Which side are you on?"

Arthur looked up. The phone was in his hand, under the desk, glowing very faintly against his knee.

"Sorry, sir?"

It was a small moment, and nobody laughed. Dr. Elor looked at the phone for a while. He was an old man, older than the building, older than the stained glass in its window, and he had been taught in a stricter age that this was rude. It was rude. A boy glued to a screen while the teacher spoke was a small insult, and he had weathered a great many larger ones.

But he was not looking at the rudeness. He was looking at the face. It was the face of someone refreshing a window where the answer is not coming, and it was a face he had seen once before, in a mirror, a long time ago.

"I am not angry," said Dr. Elor, quietly, so that only the third row could hear. "Put it away, Mr. Specter. Stay after the bell. We shall talk."

The queen you would die to save is the one that kills you;

the move you cannot make is the one that frees you.

The bell sounded like a cough in the hall.

Chairs scraped. Tucker left, with the scanner under his arm, still muttering. Carter paused at Arthur’s desk for two seconds and raised his eyebrows in a way that meant I’ll be outside, and went. The room emptied. The colored light slid across the floor, over the drain, over a gloved hand setting the pieces back into their rows.

"I did not keep you for the phone," said Dr. Elor. "The phone is rude, and I would be failing my profession if I did not mention it, so I have. Consider it mentioned. But what I saw in your face was not rudeness, and I did not like it. That is why you are still here."

Arthur stayed standing. "It’s nothing."

"That chair beside you has been taken since I walked in. By whom?"

"A friend. She’s late. She probably got held up."

"How late," said Dr. Elor, "is a person who is not coming?"

Nobody laughed. The drain gurgled, somewhere deep in the pipes, as if it had been about to.

"I shall tell you a story," said Dr. Elor. "I only do one thing well, and it is this. May I?"

Arthur said nothing, which was the nearest thing to yes that he had.

"I knew a clockmaker," said Dr. Elor.

"He lived on a small island with his wife, his two children, and a dog named Tock, and he was a happy man. He fixed watches for the whole village. He talked to every clock he repaired, and he apologized to the ones he had to open. If you had asked who was the gentlest man on the island, people would have said his name before you finished the question."

The light had begun to cool. It lay on the floor in long, blue bars.

"One morning, the dog dug something up in the garden. It was a cube of brass and glass, small enough to hold in two hands, and it ticked softly in a language that was not any language. He turned it over. It seemed to turn back." The bandages shifted, faintly. "It could bend time. Only a little, at first. An hour that lasted two. A burnt loaf, unburnt. And he was a clockmaker. He had spent his whole life listening to time, and here, at last, was something that listened back."

Arthur’s mouth had gone dry.

"So he began to stay late in the workshop. Then he began to stay in it. His wife left his dinner on the step. His children knocked on the door, and then stopped knocking. The dog stopped coming to the door at all, which is the kind of sign a man ought to notice. And the whole time, a small voice in his head said, so warmly, so reasonably: Ten more minutes. Ten more minutes, and it will be perfect. Then I will come out, and everything will be better."

He turned a bishop over in his glove.

"One night, his wife asked him for ten minutes. Only ten. At the table, with the children. He said, after this one calculation. She waited an hour. Then she took the children and the dog and left. Not for a night. For good. She went to a safer island across the water, and she left him a note, and he did not read it for three days."

He set the bishop down.

"I want you to hear this part clearly, Mr. Specter, because for a long time he told it the other way. He told it as if they had been taken from him. They were not taken. They left him. And they were right to. A man who is never at the table has already left the family. They only made it official."

The drain gurgled, somewhere under the floor.

"Two days after they left, a huge flood hit the island where they were staying. It swallowed the whole place. Nobody survived. The island he lived on, the one they had left, was not touched at all."

Arthur stared at him.

"Do you see? If he had given them ten minutes, they would have been at his table, on dry ground, alive. That was the cruelest part. He did not lose them to the flood. He lost them to ten more minutes, weeks before the flood ever came."

For a while, the only sound was the faint creak of the old stained-glass window settling in its frame.

"When he finally read the note, he read it standing in the wreckage of his own workshop. He did the only thing he knew how to do. He picked up the Cube. He told himself it was not too late, that time, of all things, could be reasoned with. If he became strong enough, he could go back and fix it. And the voice said, so gently: A little more power, and it will all be over."

"The Cube ran on something. It ran on life, drawn out of living things. He took it, a little at first, from the dying. Then from the sleeping. Then from anyone. He told himself it was a debt, and that he would repay it once he had fixed everything. For two hundred years he wandered, collecting it, and he put down every rule he had ever lived by, one at a time. Each time, the voice said the same thing. Ten more minutes."

"It has been ten minutes for two hundred years, Mr. Specter. That is the whole trick. Obsession never lies about where you are going. It only lies about how far away it is."

"When he finally looked into a mirror, he did not know the man in it. Hungry. Flat. A stranger wearing his face like a mask someone had left on. He had thought the dog stayed away because it was old." Dr. Elor’s voice did not change at all. "He took a new name, because the old one no longer fit. Nox. And when Time finally got tired of being cheated, it kept him, and wrapped him up, and left him in this body, which is the only polite way to put it."

Arthur looked at the gloved hand on the board. At the bandages. At the pocket watch, which had not, he realized, been ticking.

"The clockmaker’s name," said Dr. Elor, "was Noximilianus."

Nobody breathed.

"I’m the one who broke the clock."

It was a very long time before anyone moved.

"How many messages did you send last night?" said Dr. Elor. He asked it the way a doctor asks a question he already knows the answer to.

Arthur did not answer.

"I am not asking in order to shame you. I am asking because you already know the number, and you should hear it said in a room with nobody else in it."

He looked at the floor. At the drain. At the colored light falling over the toes of his shoes.

"Thirty-one," he said. "Maybe thirty-two."

"How many were answered?"

"None."

"How many since you woke up?"

He did not say. He did not need to. The phone was in his hand again, and he had no memory of taking it out.

"One more time," said Dr. Elor, softly. "Does it sound familiar?"

It did. Arthur thought of a porch. He thought of a phone ringing in an empty house, and a voice, his own, saying exactly that. He thought of a man tied to a tree, so loyal to a view that he had never noticed he’d stopped living, and who had said, near the end, with something like wonder, I never noticed.

At the time, Arthur had thought it was the saddest thing he’d ever heard. It had not occurred to him that it might be a description.

"It is very easy to mistake for devotion," said Dr. Elor. "From the inside, they look identical. But devotion keeps the door open. Obsession stands in it." He folded his hands. "I am not telling you to stop caring. I am telling you that caring for a person and chasing one are different animals. One lets the other breathe. She has not stopped existing, Mr. Specter. She has only stopped answering. From a distance, those look the same."

Arthur’s voice, when it came, was small. "Did you get them back?"

There was a long pause. Dr. Elor’s gloved hand rested on a single white pawn at the edge of the board, and it was some time before he moved it.

"That," he said, "is a lesson for a different day."

He tucked the chessboard under his arm.

"Go to your next class if you have one. Put the phone in your bag. Not away. In the bag. If anyone is looking for you, they will find you. And if no one is, then you will have learned something, in either case."

Arthur stood a moment longer. Then he slid the phone into his bag, zipped it shut, and heard the faint metallic clink of it landing among his books.

It was the first time in two days that he hadn’t known what the screen said.

Carter was leaning against the wall outside, arms folded, and did not ask.

"Don’t," said Arthur.

"I wasn’t going to."

"You were going to hit me."

"I was going to think about it." Carter fell into step beside him. After a few paces, in the low voice of a man commenting on the weather: "He’s right, you know."

They had reached the end of the hall when something floated out of a doorway ahead of them, at about the height of a ten-year-old’s head. It was small, and pale, and had flour on its sleeve.

"Oh!" said Mr. Fred. "Hello. Just checking for a draft."

"There’s no draft," said Carter.

"There isn’t, is there? Muffin?" He held out a plate with great warmth. Arthur took one. In the cardigan pocket, something small and brass gave two quick ticks, like a tongue against teeth.

Mr. Fred looked at the empty corridor behind him. Then he looked at the boy in front of him. And for a moment, a little too long, he did not look away.

A door held open is a kindness shown;

a door you stand in is a wall of your own.

TO BE CONTINUED...