The night class, p.13
The Night Class, page 13
He searched for Jodi, and Willy and Rose and Fruggy Fred, but he didn’t see any of them in the parlor, the dining room, or the alcoves. Howard Moored said hello and gave Caleb’s arm a paternal squeeze. The din drowned out Shishka Bob, and Cal felt as though he’d lost another friend.
Iggy Geotz swung over as Cal passed the bar. Iggy hugged him wildly and said, “Another?”
“Excuse me?”
“What’s that on your breath? Scotch? Gin? On the rocks?”
Jesus, God, he never knew so many of them could put this much liquor away. Cal wanted a shot desperately. He swallowed hard. The university made them all etherize themselves. “No.”
Iggy shrugged and banged bottles and ice buckets so that they chimed rude melodies. He won a quick tug-of-war with a short priest when they both went for the same bottle. Iggy swore, returned, and said, “Pip-squeak bastard tried to shut me out. I thought they only drank wine, goddamn highbrow Jesuits.”
“But—”
“Teaches a night class in socio-theology, always trying to steal my student base away.” The priest kept throwing him nasty looks. Iggy spun to shake a fist, and Cal made a play for an open corner of the room. Iggy stopped him, though, sticking out his arm on a level with Cal’s throat, like he was trying to clothesline him. “You haven’t shown me your projected thesis. I’ve been meaning to ask you about it. How’s the work coming along?”
“It’s killing me,” he said, putting the emphasis in the right place, and hoped his chuckle cut it. “Have you seen Jodi?”
“Who?”
“Jodi, my lady.” Iggy knew damn well who Jo was. Why was everyone pretending they had no idea who she was? “My girlfriend.”
“Oh, yes, the blonde who used to wait outside class for you? No, I haven’t seen her tonight. For some reason I was under the impression the two of you were no longer an item.”
“Of course we’re still together.”
“My mistake.”
What did his professors pick up on that he was missing? She was all right; she had to be all right. For the first time he smiled, dry lips catching on his teeth, forming an inert grin. “You’re another fucking prick, Iggy.”
He spun away and looked at a multimirrored wall, edged in white marble and surrounded by the repeated ad infinitum flames of candles. Motion in the glass caught his eye, and at the middle of it was a daub of whirling black.
A shade waiting for him as if summoned by his grin.
Fruggy Fred’s whispered words resounded clearly.
Caleb stared at the ghost of Sylvia Campbell.
Circe.
Except it wasn’t. He blinked and refocused, which took everything he had, and saw Lady Dean standing at the top of the staircase behind him.
Their gazes met in the mirror, and he forced himself to raise his chin so he didn’t look whipped already. She crooked her finger, beckoning him to follow.
Her lips were set, showing him the way. Oh boy. Lady Dean drifted down the stairs, threading through the crowd with all the litheness of a ballerina, not letting anybody touch her. He moved. Julia Blanders approached him again, then noticed the lady’s trajectory. “Whew,” she breathed, “maybe I was wrong about you, Cal. Maybe you’ll make it after all.”
“How about if I just give you a boot in your ass?”
She laughed and wafted from him as if dust.
Lady Dean stood drop-dead gorgeous, decked in a tight-fitting black dressing gown with a dazzling diamond choker, mouth as crimson as the bathroom tiles. Conversations stopped dead as men in the vicinity went numb in her presence; you could hear the starched collars creaking as heads turned.
Her hair had been brushed in a high-arcing sweep that tumbled over one side of her face, a style similar to that worn by Sylvia Campbell in the sketch folded inside his wallet, and inside his skull. It would be extremely bad to get those two confused in his mind at this late point of his obsession.
“Cal, I’m so pleased you could make it,” Lady Dean said in that toneless voice. He wasn’t certain if he should call her Clarissa. He knew that would be overstepping his bounds—especially now that he was going to leave. Her face, for all its beauty, was merely a delicate mask of flesh held in place by a tight array of muscle. It looked ready to drop at any second. He could imagine her features on the floor, broken like dashed porcelain.
“Thanks for having me,” he told her.
“My, you’re dressed ravishingly. I don’t believe I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing you in a suit before. Let me stare at those healthy red cheeks for a moment. You look positively…cherubic.”
He had never been called cherubic before, and he didn’t like it. He tried to keep the growl out of his throat but didn’t do too good a job. “Thank you. Have you seen Jodi?”
“Your lovely girlfriend is in the parlor, chatting with my husband about the latest developments in medicinal psychotherapy.” Thank Christ she’s all right! “Or so they were only a few minutes ago.” So now the lady had no problem remembering who Jodi was. She touched his wrist without the delicacy that most people inclined to touch wrists in conversation will offer. “Though I wasn’t at all sure if you would be in attendance tonight.”
“I apologize for being late.”
“Oh, don’t be silly.” She pulled the empty glass out of his hand, which he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “It appears you need another drink. Please allow me to make you one.”
“No, thank you. I’ve had enough.” He saw the other men watching him, avoiding eye contact, either jealous or simply wishing him luck. He wondered how many had been in this position before, and who had survived and how they did it. Maybe none of them.
“You seem to be at a loss for words tonight, Cal.”
“No,” he answered, struggling to come up with something but already having lost the words.
She reveled in his discomfort, but he didn’t blame her much. It was the sort of weakness you looked for in other people. He figured he would have gotten a kick out of it too, if only there had ever been a time he held such authority. Perhaps she waited for him to compliment her, but in a weird fashion he knew it would only make him look foolish, making frail comments like the rest of them. He continued to scan for Jodi, but he could really only see Lady Dean.
“Would you like to dance?” she asked. “Regardless of the fact that I’ll be known as a philistine, I’ve already changed the radio station to something a bit more classical. I enjoy it so.”
“Dance?”
See, there it was again. He couldn’t finish a sentence.
“Yes. Dance. Whereby we sway about to music, standing close together with arms about one another, preferably. Dance.”
It stopped him. “Wait a minute.”
“Yes?”
“You just made a joke?”
She nodded, and rivers of veins in her neck pulsed beneath the diamond choker. “Cal, let me ask you. Are you aware that you’ve never directly addressed me by any appellation?”
Now there was a proper word. “Appell—”
“That you’ve never once said, ‘Mrs.’ Or ‘ma’am’ or even ‘Clarissa’ or anything at all?”
He knew it, all right. “I’m sorry.” Again with an apology. He half-expected her to come back and hit him with one of the Yok’s Pshaw, young master, don’t be sorry. He wasn’t, he truly wasn’t, so why did he keep saying he was?
“Don’t be. I find it mildly refreshing.”
“Why is that?” He didn’t fall for it and say her name. There was no reason to change tonight.
“I don’t know. I just do. Please dance with me.”
“All right,” he assented, and wondered how much he was empowering her in doing so.
She led him out of the dining area. They wandered past the pip-squeak priest, who stared at her with a feral glare that would cost him big time in the confessional. Lady Dean paced Cal down through another hall, moving under the starlit skylights toward the back of the house. They kept going and going, receding farther into her realm. He followed like a puppy.
They passed the double set of glass doors and a large antique breakfront filled with Dresden figurines. The house appeared to be rippling now, the shadows crawling like fog around his feet. They came to those type of iron gates that close off corridors for no reason, black railings that fit in with the Spanish decor and velvet matadors that everyone found so delightful in the ’70s. Whoever had decorated this place didn’t know exactly where or when he lived.
Cal slipped on spilled wine and skidded to a stop on the tile. Lady Dean twisted into him. She smiled a genuine smile this time, carnivorous in its duplicity. It scared the shit out of him.
She shut the gates behind them. His breath seeped from him.
“Dance with me,” she implored.
Teach me. Forgive me.
“Where?”
“Here.”
“But there’s no music.”
“Yes, there is.”
She stepped forward and kissed his neck, her arms locked down and tense at her sides, which surprised him, with her nails hooking on the hem of her gown. She breathed into him, lifting her skirt now over her knees, raising it still higher as he witnessed the slow spread of thigh. He watched with such intensity that his vision grew bright along the edges. The widening extent of flesh was too much like a growing pool of blood. Caleb stepped away and got hung up in his overcoat. She pushed. He fell back heavily against a door. She shoved her face into his throat and sucked and licked.
“Let’s go to bed. Dance with me there.”
“Ah, hey now, listen—”
She held his shoulders against the door and slid her heavy breasts across his chest. His father’s tiepin angled to one side as her tongue started swabbing him somewhere near his Adam’s apple, and she didn’t stop until she’d licked up to his earlobe. Then she did it again, and again, and once more. He had balled his fists and kept looking at her body, thinking of where he should hit her. Everything was wrong. Or maybe everything just wasn’t wrong enough.
“Say my name,” she told him.
He couldn’t give in. Names held power. “No.”
“Say it.”
“No.”
“Clarissa. Do it.” She laughed, but there was nothing alive in there. “Do it, Caleb.”
The blushing fire in his face embarrassed him even more, as his hard-on strained and he began to sneer at himself. So much of him wanted to go out with this bang. Her breathing slowed and grew harsher. Her movements became snakelike and explosive as her writhing curves bucked against him in all the proper places. Clarissa undid his tie and yanked the first two buttons off his shirt, biting his chest hair. Cal tried to back up—maybe to get away or maybe just to get better positioning—but he was already up against the doorknob. His arms were plastered out against the frame as though he were stuck on a whirligig with his sister again.
“Dance,” Lady Dean purred.
“Don’t,” he whispered, without strength, without the slightest resolve to do anything he could put a name to. He still wanted to slug her; perhaps that was a good sign, perhaps not. How, exactly, had it come to this? He looked at the new flesh of his palms and wondered if he had the willpower to slap her, or whether he’d immediately begin to bleed once more. She moved closer, her hips on top of his, as he clumsily took her in his arms and pressed his mouth over hers, trying to consume her in one swallow and then be done with it.
She teased and pecked. “Yes.”
“Why?” he asked. “Why?” And then he couldn’t say even that.
She laced fingers with him and motioned for him to grab her breasts. He lifted his hands and looked at them again, knowing somebody was dead and not caring so much right now. He didn’t want the sex but got off on the affirmation, the validation that he existed, even here in this awful place. She brushed her thighs against his wrists and touched the doorknob.
It turned and he scrambled backward, falling through the open doorway. Laughing loudly with little yipping barks of malignancy, she dropped on top of him and drove him down hard. They hit in a tangle on the bedroom carpet. He stared up at her as she straddled him. The lady moaned.
Caleb groaned, and so did Circe.
Someone else moaned.
It was a painfully familiar sound, so well known that it took a second to place. He spun and looked at the bed.
You can die.
You can die and come back in the same second, and just not want to be alive anymore.
“Oh my Christ,” he whimpered.
“We’re just in time,” Clarissa told him.
In time to see Jodi lying naked with silver strands of saliva draping her tits, a swell of red rising on her belly, two small scratches at her neck. A look of intense pleasure redefined her face, filling it with bliss, her tongue lolling farther than it ought to be able, unleashed with mad gratification.
Jo’s body heaved as if giving birth, a cadaver looming above her: bones came grating together above her, fingers like spiders working at his woman, a mouth veering, twisting, and curling into a crazed smile that just kept going on and on and on, with so many teeth they didn’t seem to start or stop in the jaw.
Bodies bucked and slammed together, both of them grinding in perfectly timed thrusts that proved this had happened many times before. Her blond hair everywhere, layered like a wreath set down at the feet of her love, as the dead struggled to please the living, feeding on eternal misery, that skeleton grinning in rictus, turning now to stare straight into the dying eyes of Caleb Prentiss.
Everything became very red.
Chapter Eleven
Sanity is highly subjective.
Like anything human, it’s flawed and malleable, resting but not always sleeping, quiet in coma but never silent, and always altering.
You know you can kill, so at least you’ve learned something. It hasn’t been a complete waste. Even as your mind races and your nose begins to burn with the sex stink, and you try to paddle away on the carpet, but a weight holds you firmly in place. Knowledge is power.
Fury made him its own. With his spine wracked by a single prolonged shiver, Cal lay there on the floor considering the black and white patterns of the bedspread, the drenched pillowcases, lampshades askew, all that sweat dripping down a bare ass he knew so well, the coitus-tangled hair curling in every direction.
Caleb’s muscles decomposed into jelly, until he was paralyzed with his head weighing more than his life. It kind of felt good, actually. Everything gave out at once and he dropped back to the floor with a thump so that he wouldn’t have to watch anymore.
Within a few seconds, though, somehow his body became his own again. He gave one great shirking mental heave. The rage shifted inside him like an animal crawling up from a lower depth. It cuddled against him and died—and its rot changed into something as fluid as fuel and as solid as sharp carbon. Rose was so right about what this moment was equivalent to. It couldn’t have hurt worse if they’d slit his throat.
He could almost hear the tips of knives sinking into his flesh until there wasn’t much left to cut. The sensitivity receded into a dull ache that left him with nothing but cold reason and clarity.
We had plans to go to the carnival tonight. There were never any invitations sent. That’s why the others aren’t here. This is a private party. Hand-picked attendees. The ass-kissers, the cock-suckers. Blinking twice, he was alarmed to discover he had no tears. Oh wait, there they were. And this was why Jo didn’t want me here tonight, why I was prodded to go out and get drunk. His pulse slowed, sweat drying across the back of his neck.
Where’s Rose? Was she here somewhere, outside in the snow, watching his defeat? Did she think he deserved this for what Willy had done to her? Had she followed so that she too could understand the meaning of academia? The red sheen of his sight thickened. He viewed the room through a pair of eyes he didn’t own.
These revelations took him perhaps three seconds longer than it took Jodi to finish trembling from orgasm with the dean.
You knew this time had to be coming, though. You’re smarter than this and the signs have been there. If not in your subconscious, then at least in the ephemera, the slow glide of the dead flowing across everything you’ve seen and done today. Today has been special. Today you’ve been shown that you are not that special. You’ve been brought into the fold.
Clarissa continued kissing him. Nerves ran riot under his skin, but at least that was natural. Alive with tension, his hands clenched and un-clenched of their own accord. Jo grabbed the corner of the sheet and wiped the dean’s face, and finally noticed Cal crying on the floor.
Come, you spirits. He eased Lady Dean aside and got up, watching Jo’s body twitching with guilt, sexed and unsexed. But really sexed. Her gaze drained like a dead battery.
Jodi gasped like a hooked fish, hyperventilating now as her mouth worked without sound. She started sobbing, or something like that, and her groaning became a low crooning that built to a choked wail. It wasn’t loud enough; Cal waited for her to really get into it—and then she was screaming, but not very loudly. The dean ought to give her a gold star for this, that wasn’t asking too much. Jo’s lips trembled without meaning while she cried, backing away further until she was cramped at the top of the bed into a little huddled ball, as if Caleb had come this far just to kill her. As if he hadn’t already been killed.
The lady’s hands found him again. She’s played this game many times before, he thought. She’s brought others here to them, other students, other teachers.
Trying to snap Jo out of hysterics, the dean pulled her to him, enveloping her in bone, wrapping his inhumanly long arms around her waist. They looked like they could go around her three or four more times. It was something incredible to watch, grotesque yet fascinating. Cal could not possibly imagine ever seeing an uglier naked man.
He’d always halfheartedly believed that she occasionally slept with other guys; he could more or less live with the concept so long as it remained unconfirmed. To find that it was true, in this way, with his…foe…whatever the hell the dean was—his own girl with his enemy, now that hit the heart. His cut-and-dried ethics had already laid down in the dirt, waiting to be buried. If he’d had any in the first place. Jo stared at him as the dean shushed her and smothered her face with the wet slurps and nipping teeth of an animal that needed to be put down.
