“Me,” Fruggy Fred whispered.

  “But…but…” The barbs pulled in his throat. He did his best to mimic Fruggy Fred’s monotone, swallowing his panic. “You’ve been coming into my room to sleep here, haven’t you? While I’ve been out?”

  “I—”

  Take it easy. Slow, slow, don’t jar him loose. You just had to go inside. “Where are you?”

  “I’m—”

  “Are you in your room?”

  “No.”

  “Where then?”

  “Here.”

  “At the radio station?”

  “Here.”

  “Where are you? Come on, you can tell me.”

  He could just see Fruggy lying there, sweating in bed and lost all the way down in his own head. Fruggy Fred groaned a little, his tongue slapping hard against his teeth as he sobbed, “I’m in Hell.”

  Caleb eyed the wall, understanding. Yes, you certainly are. We all are. Beneath the stain lay a girl with her hands splayed over the edge of the mattress, strands of her hair puffed against the exhalations of her brrr noises, looking nearly as slain as any other murdered woman who’d slept in his bed.

  “What is it, Fruggy? What else is Sylvia saying?”

  Only the hint of a sound lost in a lolling rush of air. “…”

  “What?”

  After nearly a full minute there came the same wafting sound, “…” Cal held his breath and concentrated, focusing. He closed his eyes and tried to reach backward into the darkness of his skull. After another minute he felt his lungs ready to burst but still kept digging himself inside as far as possible, like going into the grave. His ears burned trying to catch the tail of Fruggy’s message from the other side of sleep.

  “…ock…”

  Cal took a deep breath and did his best to keep from panting. “Yokver?”

  Only silence.

  Without deciding whether he believed what he was thinking, if it might be the truth, he asked, “Did the Yok kill her, Fruggy?”

  Something broke within Fruggy Fred then; a lessening of pressure, perhaps. His sleepwalk persona seemed to suddenly grow more accustomed to acting in the body. “I talked to her, Cal.”

  “Yes.”

  “I did what you told me.”

  Jesus, God, which one of us is more crazy?

  Caleb’s heart twisted to one side, the implications sending chills rippling across his back. Melissa sighed. He thought he saw a shadow outside his window but realized it was only his own jerking motions, as the cord wrapped tighter and tighter. “What did she tell you?”

  “She only wanted an education.” Fruggy Fred seemed to find that funny, the slightest edge of laughter coming on. “Lied to her. Killed her.”

  “Why?”

  In the recesses of that inflectionless voice crept heartache and awful sorrow. “She taught them.”

  “What did Yokver do with her?”

  “She’s still so strong,” he wept, as much as he could now. “She won’t leave me alone.”

  Cal rubbed his face in frustration. “You’ve known about her all semester long, haven’t you? You could smell it too.”

  “I—”

  “Since you came in here on that first day and fell asleep on my bed, in the spot where she died. You knew. She’s been trying to get to me through your dreams, hasn’t she, Fruggy?…hasn’t she?…and you’ve been calling to let me know.”

  “…”

  “You know we’re insane.”

  “I know that, Cal.” Fruggy snorted as he cried. “Angels dream.”

  “Oh, Christ.” Caleb’s legs wavered, and he held on to the desk for support. He looked over and watched Melissa Lea dreaming, and saw his own hand moving in his line of vision as if it were no longer a part of him, touching her lightly on those moist lips. “What does she dream about?”

  “She says she dreams about you, Cal.” The emotion became stronger in his voice as Fruggy came closer to stirring. “Don’t go back there.” And again, as if imploring, terrified, screaming and awake, “…ock…!”

  Fruggy Fred grunted in pain.

  There was the sound of thick splashing.

  The phone went dead.

  Caleb’s hands began to pour blood.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Professor Yokver’s house, like the man himself, stood with enough scorn to raise bile.

  The moon cast something other than light down upon it. You could feel the infection. Diseased trees grew unchecked over the front yard in quilted, cross-hatched, cancerous patterns. Branches jutted like twisting spears, lancing the sky, scraping into the broken, snow-stuffed rain gutters, and driving down against a roof full of loose shingles. The lawn was an assemblage of gullies and ditches, the perfect place for hiding bodies. Even the snow looked fake, too many shades off from being white. The house was a disgrace, but that didn’t matter much. The dean kept Yokver close, but not too close.

  Cal stood in the street, his tie still tight and straight, the London Fog flapping. From this spot he could see all Professor Yokver’s darkened windows: the grungy brass knocker and the weather vane reeling. Turning a half-step to the right, he looked down the block and saw the far-off lights still burning in the dean’s bedroom. All the luxury cars were gone from the area: the mayor, the school board, the other officials who influenced the university had been sent home well fed and sated.

  Jodi was still in there.

  His father’s tiepin weighed heavily upon him. The man had quit school at sixteen, and Cal should have followed suit. Worked in a sheet metal factory, joined the union, started putting into Social Security, punched a time card for forty years. Right now loading beef in a meat locker for the rest of his life sounded swell.

  Cal had grabbed the cotton balls and Ace bandages and bound the stigmata before the wounds sprayed too much all over his room. He’d been careful not to awaken Melissa Lea, even while tying knots in the bandages with his teeth. He left her snoring in his bed and pulled the blankets over her shoulder, kissing her on the forehead, like the brother he’d never really had the chance to be.

  Blood proved blood.

  Fruggy Fred was dead.

  Numbness prevailed. His sister was talking to him again, brandishing a crucifix, her habit undulating. He watched, knowing what was about to come, as the rat heads bit their way out of her torn robes. She teetered this way and that in the wind, struggling to stay up but beginning to bend beneath the weight of the crucifix as the rats ate through her. He watched, fascinated but a little leery of the obvious symbolism, until she moved off, dragging Christ in the dirt. It probably wouldn’t be such a bad idea to see a psychiatrist one of these days.

  He wished the soul of Sylvia Campbell would put in another appearance; she only had to show up for a second, give him the good word. Anything; a silver outline whisking past the porch, a banshee shriek urging him on. It would have helped. Siren song lamenting, the moon goddess throwing stones. Anything.

  But the red-mouthed Circes were gone and he was alone, standing beyond the curb staring at Yokver’s house. The Ace bandages worked better than he’d expected, soaking up the blood and stanching the stigmata. Considering how long it took to heal the other times, he was sure the holes in his hands had already nearly finished closing. He heard the bells ring five. He’d be out of here by dawn.

  Drifting, he shut his eyes and thought about what a long day it had been. If, in fact, these hours only comprised one day, and not his complete existence. Something had come full circle in that amount of time, beginning and ending in the push of birth to death. Maybe it was him; maybe it was only a nightmare that was him.

  So what was he supposed to do now? How did it all fit?…Could the screaming puppet truly be a murderer, or had he heard Fruggy wrong?…Cal waited, hoping to see the Yok scurrying back from wherever he’d left Fruggy Fred’s massive body, his hands wet with mud. Sylvia Campbell had wanted an education and died for it. Fruggy had told him that and died for it. Someone else had been killed, he knew, but Jodi was safe and would be forever. Caleb wished he was back in his coffin.

  The light in the dean’s bedroom blazed in the distance, mocking him with impunity.

  Even after all the vomiting he could taste the Four Roses he’d slammed back in the Owl, and could still hear Candida Celeste asking him with extreme annoyance, What is your problem, you asshole? He sniffed the breeze, catching evergreen and mint fragrances. A few crackling leaves rolled in the gutter.

  Caleb unwrapped his hands and let the bloody cotton wads and bandages fly into the street. Wind carried them across the frozen ditches until they flailed into the trunks of gnarled trees, waving like streamers. His palms were perfect again, lifelines back in place. He slowly walked to the curb, echoes of his footsteps snapping but soft as the clicking of poker chips.

  Stepping up Professor Yokver’s snow-covered sidewalk, he moved toward the house. No footprints in the snow of the front yard. Bushes leaned forward scratching at his coat, leaving ice crystals against the back of his neck. He searched for signs of murder and found none. Gazing at the brass knocker engraved with the name YOKVER, he put his hand on the doorknob and turned it. At first there was a slight resistance, but he forced it and heard the lock rattle free. Cal walked in.

  He slipped through the darkness, not caring which direction he took. A light was on down the hall. Carefully picking his way around the furniture, padding like an animal, his breathing became shallow. He could feel the rage lurking in his chest, just waiting to cut loose.

  Odors here were outrageous: eggs and sausage, cabbage and boiled ham, as well as lilac room freshener and useless pinches of potpourri. He couldn’t smell Fruggy Fred’s corpse. Either the Yok had no sense of smell or he enjoyed the wild fusion of stench. It must’ve excited him, reminding him of whorehouses and the stinking long hallways of the specialty clubs, the backrooms of the strip joints where the lap dancing ran to five hundred bucks a throw. Cal could just see him in this place, grading papers and setting up a course outline, sniffing and humming.

  A noise from another room.

  A book closing with a deliberate thump.

  Cal’s nostrils flared. He tried to take in the whole house, dissecting the scents to discover clues in the air. Mirrored reflections of his movements brought his gaze to an antique cabinet. Yokver, the lady, the dean—they all liked to look at themselves. Cal understood that PHILO 138 was designed for some other purpose than to teach ethics. To weed out the weak, and take advantage of whatever flaws could be discovered. To gather together the creamy next generation of useful children. They rooted out Jodi’s incessant need for perfection and put it to use, laying claim to her distress. Educating her. If she’d ever mentioned it to him, could he have stopped it from happening? Would he have even tried?

  The light from the room threw a yellow glow into the corridor.

  Cal proceeded to the doorway.

  Slowly rounding the corner, he glanced inside: a study, shelves bulging with books and statuary. His temples throbbed painfully, his eyes attracted to the burning ersatz oil lamp with the green metal shade. He checked sidelong from there until he saw the glint of pearly teeth. They were set in a sick smile that wolfishly leered at him from behind a desk. Yokver lifted a gun from his lap.

  Cal nearly burst out laughing.

  A gun, right? He couldn’t believe it.

  “What is good?” Caleb asked. The window in back of Yokver afforded a nice view of the dean’s house, the bedroom as bright as if it was on fire. “What is evil?”

  With a frown, Professor Yokver said, “You were almost finished, too.”

  Sometimes you just wanted to roll around on the floor hugging your sides while you laughed until you passed out, and then when you woke up you wanted to do it again.

  Cal’s lips melted into a rough smile. “Finished, huh?” He supposed it was true, one way or another. “I admit it, I really have learned a lot from you today.”

  “Yes, but like most repressed, maladjusted orphans you walk through life discarding each profundity you chance to find.”

  “Low blow, Yok.”

  The gun wavered with a displeased gesture. Maybe Yokver was serious and maybe he was just playing a wild card. The guy definitely had an obscene need to fantasize. So did Cal. No wonder they’d been drawn together into this match; it was bound to happen.

  The Yok didn’t have his glasses on. He didn’t need them. “You were a perfect candidate.”

  “I see.”

  “Afterward you would have been offered a position at the university.”

  “In what capacity?”

  “As a professor of humanities. As an instructor.”

  “And I flunked?”

  “Yes, unfortunately.”

  Leave it to Yokver to keep going on like this. Unfolding the master plan, not even realizing how ridiculous he looked and sounded. You could stand here all day just shaking your head and smirking, but eventually, if you wanted to get anywhere, you had to fall into the same dialogue.

  “I suppose this is when I sneer at you and shout, ‘You’re insane.’”

  “Not necessarily.” Yokver waved the gun aimlessly, the ponytail bobbing. “You see, poor boy, you’ve been going steadily mad for some time now.” A laugh escaped from one of them. “We’ve all gone through the process.”

  “Uh humm. Process?”

  “The learning process. The creative process. The shattering, and the promised ascendancy.”

  Cal nodded. “Oh, that process.”

  “You would have made an excellent teacher.” The Yok grew more exuberant, putting a little flourish in his wrist as he wagged the gun, as though needing Cal to understand the concepts that would be illustrated by his demise. He looked like he wanted to get up and run around the room like a ballerina, one of those chicks who throw rose petals all over the place.

  “Kill me,” Cal said, “but for Christ’s sake don’t make me listen to you.” Statues of literary icons faced him from all over the room. A bust of Poe with a raven on his shoulder, somebody who might’ve been Nietzsche, maybe Kafka, framed portraits of Flannery O’Connor, Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski. They’d seen their share of corruption and depravity too. Cal spoke calmly, knowing already how it was going to end. “You make it sound like it’s acceptable to do what you’ve done, using students just because some of them are scared or lonely, or weak or simply young. Or just really dumb, like me.” It was okay to admit it because now he saw the light. “The dean took advantage of Jodi’s fear to hold a lock on her grades. That’s not the creative process. Call it what it is: extortion. There’s nothing brilliant in it. You’re all just a bunch of pimps.”

  “Not so.”

  The Yok smiled, and slung himself forward as if to give another exhibition of how there was no such thing as movement. Papers fell to the floor, and two bookends that formed a bust of Shakespeare teetered at the edge of the desk.

  Yokver had played the role for so long that it had become a part of him. He probably couldn’t even distinguish anymore between himself and what he had created, what had been built around him by the lady and the dean. Anywhere else and the Yok would’ve simply been a degenerate in a dirty bookstore, poring over pictures of chicks with dicks. Watching the girls in the glass booths, pumping quarters in so he could get off thirty seconds at a time, talking into a microphone and telling them to spread, play with a plastic banana. Here, though, they put him to good use. A position of respect and authority, where he could squeeze brains until they bled black juice. The efficiency, at least, could be respected.

  “I was wrong to think you were a clown,” Cal said. “I realize my error now.”

  But the thing of it was that Yokver truly remained a clown, one of those nasty ones that come after you in your nightmares. You just know that for every ten jesters in the world there was one lunatic hiding behind the grease-paint just waiting to bury the steak knife in your eye.

  “Yes, too late, I’m afraid. All the more tragic, too late. I had to peel away the outer layers. All that dead skin left behind on you.”

  “The scales falling from my eyes?”

  “That was the hope.”

  Cal pursed his lips and looked down at himself. “To expose what stands before you now.”

  “Well, the plan went slightly awry. You’re much more neurotic than I ever could have imagined.” Yokver chuckled, but Cal could hear the fear. “You see, poor boy, you were already on the verge of either suicide or progressing into a sociopath. The game revealed this deficiency in you too late, alas.”

  Cal didn’t mind the word game. It was accurate enough, and he could try to think a move or two ahead now. “Where do you people get off the psycho train?”

  “See here, poor boy—”

  “Stop calling me that. Where’s Fruggy Fred?”

  “I don’t know to whom you are referring.”

  “You wouldn’t lie to me now, would you?”

  “No, there is no purpose.”

  “Then I’ll ask you an easier question—”

  “Tut, I am becoming bored.”

  No, he wasn’t. Look at the way he was swallowing. Yok was trying desperately to seem ready, to go all the way with this, but it was only the act he cared about, not the commitment. In another five minutes he was going to be on the floor crying. “How did you know I’d be coming here tonight?”

  “I was informed of your failure to perform up to Clarissa’s expectations, and of your unwillingness to accept the, ah…” A snigger now that started low and shallow and wound up sliding off the deep end. The gun did a bit of a jig in his hand. “…position that was offered to you. It made perfect sense that an aberrant like yourself would seek to cut down all his demons in one fell swoop.”

  Cal almost wanted to talk about demons for a while, get out a notepad and list and number them, get all the names straight. He never thought for a moment that Yokver wouldn’t answer all his questions. “Why did you kill Sylvia Campbell?”

  “I found her, the lovely creature, and gave her the identity by which you evoke her, allowing her entrance into the university.”

  “What a guy.”

  “I inducted her among us.”

 

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