Chapter 6 The Ritual

The circle was larger than the hall had been, or smaller, or the same size and simply closer—Cole could not tell anymore, and he had stopped trying to tell. The room no longer obeyed the rules of rooms. It obeyed the door. The white figures stood in a ring around a central space, and in that space the ground was not ground but the same warm flesh-stuff as the walls, and it pulsed with the chant. The chant was not words. It was breathing, many people breathing together on one rhythm, and it pulled at Cole's chest the way a current pulls at a swimmer, inviting him to fall into step, to breathe when they breathed, to think when they thought. He refused. He planted his feet on the warm floor and made himself breathe his own breath, at his own speed, and the effort of it was like holding a door shut against a wind. Around the ring's edges stood the ones who had already been taken—their faces blank, their hands at their sides, patient as furniture—and Cole looked at them and knew, with a slow cold certainty, that some of them were the faces he had seen in the town. The man who sold him gas. The woman who had handed him his key at the motel. They stood where they had been put, and they did not move, and they had not moved, Cole understood, in years. In the center of the circle stood one of the faithful, a woman in a white robe, her face slack. The chant rose, and the door opened in the floor beneath her—not a hole, not a stair, but a widening, a place where the floor simply stopped being floor and became a dark that looked back up—and Cole watched the woman step into it. She did not walk. She was not pushed. She stepped, of her own accord, the way you step off a curb, and the dark took her, and the ring breathed out together, and when the dark closed over her face Cole saw her expression for the last time. It was not terror. It was not relief. It was the look of a woman who had been waiting a very long time for a door to open, and it was the most peaceful face Cole had seen in years, and that peace frightened him more than any scream could have. "That was Lena Marsh," the reflection said, at his elbow, in his own voice. "You know her name from the files. The night clerk. The first one to go." Cole did not look at it. He watched the place where the floor had opened, watched the floor knit itself back together, seamless, warm. "You killed her." "No," the reflection said. "We gave her what she asked for. Lena came to us grieving and adrift. Her father had just died, and the world had become a place where she was alone in it. She asked the door for a way out of being alone. The door gave her that." It paused. "She is not dead, Mr. Cole. She is in there. She is the most together she has ever been. You will meet her, when you open." The chant went on. One by one, the ring brought forward another figure, and Cole watched them step into the dark the way the woman had stepped, and each time the ring breathed out together, and each time the floor healed itself, and each time the reflection told him a name from his files. Pete Sutter, the machinist, who had gone looking for his wife. Grace Owusu, the nurse's aide, who had wanted to know what her brother knew. Samuel Pike, the dying logger, who had gone in to die cleanly. Alma Reyes, the dentist—and here the chant faltered, for the first time, and the floor did not take her, and the reflection's voice went thin, and Cole saw the woman caught in the doorway, half in and half out, her face flickering like a bad signal. "She was a mistake," the reflection said, and there was something almost human in its voice, almost tired. "She never wanted to go. We tested her with the mark, and the door reached for her faster than we expected, and she got stuck. The willing pass over in their own time. The taken get caught in the doorway, hollow, their faces left hanging there like curtains." It looked at Cole. "That is the whole of our crime. We do not take people. We open the door. What the door takes, it takes." Cole wrote nothing down. He had no notebook here, no pen, nothing but his hands and his memory, and he understood that the door was counting on that—that a man without a pencil is a man who can be made to forget. So he made himself remember instead, the way he had remembered a hundred crime scenes before he had ever learned to write them up: he looked, he named, he filed. Alma Reyes, caught in the doorway. The five, taken one by one. The hollowed ones standing at the edges like tools set down and forgotten. He would carry it all out with him, if he carried anything out at all. Cole had stopped listening. The chant had found his rhythm. He realized it without realizing it, the way you realize you have been walking in step with someone for blocks without noticing, and he was breathing with the ring, in and out, in and out, and the room had grown warm, and his hands were loose at his sides, and there was a part of him—a deep, tired, honest part—that wanted, very much, to step into the dark and be finished. He bit the inside of his cheek. Hard. The pain was small and real, and it held him, and he made himself say the names again, out loud, in a whisper no one in the ring seemed to hear: Lena, Pete, Grace, Samuel, Alma. He had not saved them. He did not know if they could be saved. But he was not going to hand the door his own name while they were still in there. The chant stopped. The ring turned, all of it, every white figure in the circle, and they faced him with their blank, patient faces, and the dark in the center of the floor turned with them, and the reflection said, in his own voice, softly, almost kindly: "Now you." ---