The inside of the chapel tower had been described to him by Marco Salatino, the varsity crew coxswain, who had bragged about catapulting water balloons off the top of the tower until one of the balloons shattered a lamppost light and twisted its metal enclosure and Marco realized what would happen if a balloon actually hit a person. Marco had loaned the keys to Hutch, who wanted to bring his girlfriend Lily up here when it got warmer. Hutch had vowed to let Marco hit his pinky toe as hard as he could with a hammer if he ever made a copy of the keys. That’s how too many people would start going to the chapel tower, and then the lock would get changed. But Ben had seen the keys go into the pencil drawer of Hutch’s desk.

To keep his balance Ben decided to climb with his hands down on the stairs in front of him, and so he started up like that, twisting around the stone spindle of the staircase with his hands in the cold dust and tiny loose pebbles.

Very quickly he lost track of his progress. He had a while before Chapel would start—two and a half hours, maybe—and so he didn’t move too fast. He got tired of crawling and lifted one arm to stroke the outside wall to try to find a railing, and for a moment it seemed that he would fall back into the twisting space behind him.

But his outstretched hand met a rope, and as he took hold he heard it lift the many iron loops that anchored it into the wall. He stood and began to climb.

He imagined the substance of the tower disappearing and his body hovering exposed in the air. He stopped briefly to recover from the dizziness of going around and around.

And then the rope railing stopped with one last iron hoop, and he came up from the floor into the carillon room, which was about the size of a two-car parking garage and lit by vertical slatted windows. The wooden apparatus of the carillon itself looked like an enormous mantis trying to conceal itself as a loom.

He walked over to the player’s seat and looked down at the keyboard of wooden dowels. In the light now he could just see his breath. The bells for the carillon and for the clock weren’t in this room, and Ben guessed they were one or two levels above.