I’ll tell Poole, then I’ll go. Get my good boots on. A hat. Then I’ll go. I’ll get help.
Decided, he starts plodding his way back toward the orphanage.
When he hears a voice.
“Help!”
It’s faint. Very faint. As if the wind itself is calling, pleading . . .
He spins around, confused. He sees nothing but snow.
He looks toward the shed but sees no one. The doors to the orphanage are likewise empty, open wide and barren.
“Help us!”
And suddenly, it clicks.
Oh my dear sweet Jesus.
The hole.
The children.
He forgot, and that’s the truth. With the ceremony, and the horror of what happened, he simply forgot about the two boys out here in the cold, going on nearly a full day now.
He shuffles through the snow in the direction of the hole, flakes obscuring his vision. He can’t locate it. The whole damn yard is covered in at least a foot of snow, maybe more, and the wind is picking up now, the flakes no longer drifting downward, but shooting sideways past his eyes. His cheeks and ears feel the burn of the storm’s breath.
“Boys!” he yells. “Boys! Talk to me so I can hear ya!”
For a few seconds, there’s nothing but the sound of wind.
Then: “We’re here! We need help!”
Johnson takes a few strides forward, spins to look at the barn, the fence separating the road from the field, trying to get his bearings.
Straight ahead, it should be straight ahead.
He stumbles forward, trips and drops to a knee. Listens.
“Boys? Yell louder!”
“Here!” cries a buried voice. “It’s Ben, Brother Johnson! There’s something wrong with Ben!”
Bartholomew.
Johnson takes three more giant strides, then his leg sinks to just below his knee. His foot hits wood. “Boys!”
Now the voice is clear, muffled only by a couple feet of snow. Right below him.
“Johnson! Get us out of here! We’re freezing! Ben is sick. I think . . .”
Johnson begins scooping away snow. He finds the rope, the outline of the door.
“。 . . I think he’s dying!”
“I’m coming!” He finds the iron handle of the trapdoor and yanks it upward. A pitch-black square opens within the thick white blanket. He leans down on hands and knees, sticks his face near the opening, looks for signs of life. “Boys?”
“Johnson? Can you see us? We’re here!”
Johnson leans lower, his head now level with the wooden platform. He sees nothing but darkness and hard-packed dirt.
“Bartholomew?”
The response is a whisper, so close to his ear he can feel the cold breath on his neck.
“I’m here.”
Something strong grips the cloth of his chest and yanks him down through the opening, into the cold dark.
*
The view from the orphanage is bleak and colorless. A blur of new snow continues to fall on the empty yard.
The wind whistles and whispers, sings its own secret song.
Leafless trees beg and crack, succumb to the will of the oncoming storm.
The sun is a blind eye, a cold disc of white in a forlorn sky.
Of life, there is no sign.
39
DAVID AND I MANAGE TO CALM MOST OF THE KIDS DOWN.
Finnegan was the hardest.
In the end, he just sat on his cot, cross-legged, staring at the door. Willing his friend to materialize. The rest of the kids are shaken, but not to the point of hysteria. Some, I can tell, even find it exciting. As if it were a game, all this murder.
Once everyone is relatively ordered, we make an official head count.
Fourteen boys.
“So we’re missing . . . what?”
“Eighteen,” I say, mentally trying to categorize names and faces into groups.
Who’s dead? Who’s alive?
Who’s still out there, hiding, plotting murder?
Ben and Bartholomew, I realize with a pang of guilt, are still in the hole. They’ve missed it all. Are there others, outliers, hiding? Has anyone tried to run away? Impossible to know. But important.
“Where’s Poole right now?” David whispers to me, agitated and probably as frightened as I am. “Or Andrew? Where are the damn adults?”
I shake my head. Adults . . . or what’s left of them. “If White is definitely dead, then we have one very big problem.”
“Okay, what?”
“That the adults are badly outnumbered. Which means it might be on us to fix this.”
“Oh, to hell with that,” David says, his frustration boiling over. “I’m just a kid. And so are you.” He points to the room. “And so are they. Let the priests figure out this mess.”
The priests. I promised Andrew I’d return, and I must go help him . . . but I’m disordered, confused. Who can I trust? What if there are more boys in the hallway, or downstairs? Are they all in on it? Are the rest of us nothing but lambs waiting for slaughter?
“Who do we know for sure is, you know . . . dangerous?” I ask, ignoring David’s protests for now. I make a point to keep my voice low. I don’t want to frighten the others.
David thinks. “Simon, obviously. Sorry. And, well . . . Terrence. Samuel, for certain. Who attacked you in the hall? I didn’t bother to turn around, carrying Thomas . . .”
“I’m pretty sure there were four of them,” I say, thinking of the faces. It happened so fast. “I kicked one,” I add lamely. “Auguste.”
“Auguste? The Frenchy? Jesus . . .”
I nod. “Byron clocked the one who jumped me with a meat hammer, might have killed him. The same kid who stabbed me in the shoulder.”
The wound hurt but, upon inspection by David, it proved to be superficial. Byron took a look and shrugged, noting only that it had likely been done with a table knife. The idea of being stabbed with cutlery made me numb with sick fear, but I tried my best to keep a brave face.
“Anyway,” I continue, “I didn’t get a good look at the others. But no one you mentioned was among them, which puts their numbers near ten, I guess. Plus, we know Jonah is on their side. That one was always plotting with . . .”
I stop, seeing a new light on all this. A black spark.
“What?” David asks, looking worried.
“。 . . with Bartholomew,” I say.
It hits me then. It’s as if a key is turned in my head, unlocking something I somehow knew, deep in my heart, to be true.
I recall the strange events of that night. The violence, the screams, the laughter. The gunshot and then, moments later, the doors blasting open, as if a horde were bursting through.
The fallen cross.
Yes, I’m absolutely sure of it now. He is behind all of this.
The dead man.
Somehow, that man—his arrival, his bizarre death—is the root of everything that’s happened since: the strange gatherings, the personality changes. Rebellion.
Murder.
But there’s more. I recall David’s story of the dead grass. The sense of a pervading, continuing rot which the dead man left behind. A poison . . .
And now another name drifts into my head. The change in him the most dramatic of all. The quiet one, now the schemer. The silent one, now the voice.
One boy at the center of it all.
Bartholomew.
I need to talk to Andrew. I need to sort out what it all means.