Sneaking into the library didn’t even count, really, but Cal still didn’t like the idea of going into the basement during the morning. Nervous pressure knotted his shoulders. This venture hooked into his imagination. He had started thinking about his sister again, and that was never a good sign. He glanced at his hands but kept moving. A subtle but intense sense of fear stung his midriff as he left the dorm and crossed the wide back lawn. Frigid February air cooled his face.

  He couldn’t quite figure out how he’d started this affair with a dead stranger or where he expected it to take him.

  The more he hoped to put circumstances into words, the increasingly morbid his thoughts became. You knew it was getting pretty bad when you even noticed it yourself. Caleb always tried to be wary about slipping too far over the side, wondering about the predisposition in his genetic makeup. Was that inside him? The need to crawl into the bathtub with something sharp?

  Walking the path as the sky roiled like white gauze tearing, he thought, They lock people like you in the wards and rubber rooms.

  Adding, after a time, Yeah, they do, but they always let us out again.

  If Jodi had known about his thesis she would have slapped him with a string of appalling psychological names and phrases—Obsessional Neuroses of Spatial Taboos, Anxiety-Hysteria Polarity, Ego and Urination in Dream States, Free-floating Castration Cathexis—or worse. She’d make him the star subject for one of her abnormal psych papers. She’d start interviewing him on tape, and make him look at ink blots shaped like the asses of teenage girls. They’d get some notice, do a run on local cable television, the morning shows, and then take it on the road. He could tour the country in a cage while she wore a top hat and held a lion tamer’s whip, and after the show he’d lie in the corner on top of a pile of hay and try to get kids to throw him unshelled peanuts.

  Clearly, he’d gone too far to quit. The thesis had grown into a book, and the book had taken on a bizarre afterlife of its own. That musty room hidden in the twisting dark bowels of the library’s storage basement tunnels had become a part of him, and so had the girl.

  The breeze blew harder, and Cal pressed his hands deeper into his pockets, grabbing fistfuls of torn lining and his folded notes and papers. The clock tower chimed once.

  9:30.

  Sylvia Campbell was dead at the age of eighteen.

  Murdered six weeks ago during the winter intercession, in Caleb’s room, under the window where she’d moved his bed, probably so she could sleep comfortably without the heat of the radiator keeping her awake. Caleb didn’t mind the hot air on him all night long, but for some reason he’d left the bed where she’d put it.

  Who were you?

  For convenience sake the university left only two dormitories open full-time during the intercession, enough to house the 400 students who took the winter courses offered during the five interim weeks between the fall and spring semesters. Cal had been thinking of quitting school or switching dorms or doing some damn thing to face off against the world. He moved out and placed his possessions in a storage closet, wondering if he’d ever be back: all the stuff he wasn’t taking with him over the Christmas vacation break.

  In four years he’d never had the same room twice—it was part of what he needed to make him feel like he was actually doing something with his life already—but in his last semester they’d allowed him to keep this one. He didn’t want it, but they’d never bothered to assign him another. The intercession placement program would allocate a different student to his room for the length of the session. It sounded like a lot of trouble, but he never thought about it too much.

  Why did you lie?

  The day before Christmas Eve, about an hour after his last final, he’d kissed Jodi good-bye and taken off, telling her he would be staying with a high school friend in Montana for the vacation. He had no high school friends, in Montana or anywhere else, but he didn’t want her to pity him the fact, and worse, certainly didn’t want to spend a month with her family. He left with the idea of wandering the country a la Kerouac, maybe, doing some damn thing, and hoping not to run into any serial killers out there. He thought he might still be filled with adolescent enthusiasm and aspirations left over from puberty; it seemed he would never get over it.

  Hitching along interstate highways, he learned that even truck drivers of the day were reluctant to pick up hitchhikers. Cal didn’t blame them. He eventually wound up renting a Mazda and scurrying past all the places he thought might’ve looked interesting. Somehow he’d gotten trashed out on the West Coast for two weeks when he’d planned on visiting New England. The Mazda broke down in Arizona and he found himself in the back of a pickup with about fifteen Navajos. They let him off in a town called Blue that was maybe fifty yards long. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing.

  His binge drinking had started when he was fifteen, but he’d been sober for a couple of years, or thought he’d been. He couldn’t recall even taking a pull, but his breath smelled like rum all the time now.

  The silky embrace of failure had found him again and was laughing loudly: through the scrub grass it hid in wait behind the Ma-and-Pa grotesqueries and cactus tourist attractions, riding the cripple-winged foals and two-headed calves. It took him another week to hit the California beaches, and his sweat stank like mash whiskey. Writing when he wasn’t too weak and sunburned to find the keys of his laptop, most of his disks had already melted. His hair had been bleached to a dull shade of sand.

  He woke up in the middle of January with two sprained knees and shards from a busted bottle of 151 Rum embedded in his hands after a fall down an embankment outside Sparks, Nevada, that left him in traction for three days. The nurses ignored him and the doctors treated him with a careless disregard, almost nobody bothering to say a word to him no matter what he asked. Most of the journey he couldn’t remember, and what he could he wanted to forget.

  The long haul ended with Caleb on crutches, bandaged and limping up to Jodi’s dilapidated front porch. Her brother Russell was flipping through black-and-white photos, chuckling to himself. Johnny had four stolen Toyotas parked side by side at the edge of the woods where he was painting them all lemon yellow with a brush and a bucket. The retarded babies crawled and mewled in the yard; her belligerent father and drunk mother threatening to shake shotguns in Cal’s face. He liked the attention. Eventually they let him camp in the backyard where he babysat a hydrocephalic kid every afternoon. Jo didn’t ask too many questions. In its own fashion, that had been the best and worst part of it all.

  Nearly healed—so far as his legs were concerned—he returned to school to discover his walls had been freshly coated a ratty peach that didn’t do anything to conceal the fact that someone in the corner of his room had died very badly. The place smelled like the crusty scabs in his hands even with the windows wide open and the room freezing, giving it a meat locker feel.

  As he’d gazed at the stains, Willy had come in to ask about his trip to New England. He could only stare at the wall.

  In a way, he was still staring at it.

  Caleb turned his face into the gnawing wind as he came out of the field.

  9:43.

  Torn wads of pocket lining filled each of his sweating hands. Jodi would be crushed when she found out the carnival would be shut down tonight due to the snow—she’d been talking about it for the past week, filled with an almost giddy whimsy he’d rarely seen in her. It sort of scared him. Perhaps what had attracted him in the first place was that overly serious side of her, giving him something to latch on to when he needed to balance out.

  It was a relief to discover their gentle rapport was still there though, sometimes, and that he didn’t always have to love her against the tide of their inevitable parting.

  “Win me a stuffed animal?” she’d asked yesterday.

  What else could you say except, Sure, of course. He’d never won a stuffed animal for a girl before and couldn’t get over it, thinking, How could I have forgotten to do something like that? Every guy should win a pretty girl a toy at the carnival at least once in his life. He’d have to do it. Knock over the cans, toss the rings, float the Ping-Pong ball, and win the pink elephant. He just hoped that wasn’t the same way her father had met her mother.

  Caleb jogged down a sharp slope that swept into a gully and came to a crumbling cobbled path at the north side of the library. Grabbing hold of the chain-link fence surrounding the back of the building, he hefted himself up. Cold metal seared his palms.

  If you walked in the front door on the other side of the library, you’d have to pass through the security system turnstile before you got to the book checkout counters, microfiche machines, and reference desks on the first floor. The basement doors, three of them, were kept locked.

  Because the library and student union were interconnected by a transverse bridge, built into the side of a steeply inclined hill, Cal was already below ground level back here. Several dorms were erected in the same fashion, the campus filled with promontories and gradients, copses and meadows fairly wild in some areas. The lush countryside was a main selling point in the school brochures.

  Climbing, he watched the students passing before the windows above him. At the top of the fence he swung his legs over, ready to leap down, but in the middle of vaulting his coat snagged a barb and he was thrown off-kilter. He briefly wondered if maybe he’d been drinking again without realizing it. Spinning, he heard something rip, and the worst of his two bad knees painfully cracked sideways. He yelped and came down on a mound of frozen earth.

  “Hey!” someone shouted.

  With his heart bucking, Cal felt like an idiot for the complete lack of coiled-muscle, cougar-like agility he’d just displayed. Jesus Christ, Fruggy Fred climbed three floors of an entire dorm covered in vegetable oil and never lost a toehold. Maybe he should give lessons, start Cal off smothered in margarine, showing him how to shift his weight, plant his feet just the right way.

  “Hey!”

  Goddamn, what was going on now? He felt the soft touch of the dead coming for him again. He snorted like a horse, angrily, trying not to bite through his tongue. Caleb’s imagination hadn’t let up for the last half hour, and he thought for sure the CIA, Mossad, or the seven angels from Revelations had gotten the drop on him as he heard the voice calling.

  Veering, Cal saw the girl who’d winked at him in his ethics class this morning leaning casually against the fence. “Hey,” she said, pulling a grimace. “You okay? That looked like it might’ve hurt.”

  “Yeah,” he told her. “Sure. I’m fine.”

  She stuck her fingers through the chain link and wriggled them at him.

  Dark hair bobbed around her cheeks to frame her face perfectly. They called it a heart-shaped face in mysteries from the fifties, and he wasn’t about to argue with it. She was an attractive brunette, petite, with pouty lips and large brown eyes that dominated her features. She had a beauty mark at the corner of her left eyebrow that made him notice her gaze even more. No matter where you tried to look, you were drawn right back to it. When she blinked her long lashes swiped the air with a mentally audible whip-crack. Her voice was a little rough, with some flint in it, so that you definitely knew you were being talked to.

  “What are you doing over there?” she asked.

  “Uhm…”

  “That was a heck of a flip you just did,” she said, and giggled deep in the back of her throat, where it counted.

  “Learned everything I know from the Flying Walendas,” he said, hoping he wasn’t scowling. He forced his brow to straighten out, making sure he didn’t squint, and added, “But not the dead ones.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, that’s good, I suppose.”

  Cal was unsure of what she might read from him. “Don’t tell me that class was let out early today.” It would’ve ended only ten minutes ago. There was no way for her to get across the quad in that amount of time. “And Yokver likes to keep the show going to the very last minute.”

  She shrugged, and the hair flapped at the hinges of her jaw. “Can’t care about that anymore. It irritates me the way he plays to the audience like that. I walked out after you did.”

  That genuinely surprised him. “Really? I thought everyone else loved the Yok’s class.”

  “I don’t think any of us actually like it. He doesn’t say much of anything at all.” She pursed her lips, and wet them absently with her tongue until they glistened, trying to come up with an answer. It was undoubtedly the kind of move the Yok would have liked a great deal, as sensuous as Candida Celeste’s pink fingernails plucking at her blouse. “It’s a simplistic class and appeals to people who don’t feel like thinking much before noon. Count me guilty.”

  “Me too.” It was true.

  “I guess I felt the same way you did the whole time and just never cared enough to budge. He just wants bodies in front of him, doesn’t matter who they are or what they might have to add. It’s a damn waste. But the system make it so hard to switch classes, and by then apathy takes hold, and you start thinking the hell with it. Easier just to sit there and zone out, figuring that you got a dog of a course.” Her breath blew out in small white puffs of steam that reminded him of Snoopy’s balloon thoughts. “You’re lucky you didn’t break your neck. You tore your coat to pieces. Just what are you doing over there?”

  The beauty mark drew his stare. “I thought this might be a shortcut into the student union.”

  “Nope,” she said. “It’s a dead end. There’s no back door over here. You have to go around the other way, over the hill.”

  “So I see now.”

  Cal yanked his ripped coat closed, making sure his notes were in place, and climbed back over the fence. He took his time for both ego’s sake and because his knees were wracked. Landing next to her, she held up an invisible score card. “An inspired performance.”

  He took a bow and she clapped politely, the comedy not quite there yet although they were both trying. She had one of those smiles you couldn’t help but smile back at, no matter how foul a mood you were in. That could drive you nuts if you wanted to sulk; that was real power.

  He stuck out his hand. “I’m Caleb Prentiss.”

  With a gasp she grabbed his wrist and pulled him in too close, jutting forward until her nose touched his. What? He parted his lips for a kiss, frowning, wondering how they’d jumped all the way to this so quickly. His tongue hung loose in his mouth.

  She said, “‘Calvin! Well, Mis-tah Prentiss, now I can see what your dire urgency is about. Eh? Eh? Hmmm? Hmmmmmm?’”

  He burst out laughing, more like braying, sounding strange and idiotic, but at least it was funny. She fell back against the fence chuckling, took his hand and said, “My name is Melissa Lea.”

  “Fine impersonation. You could be the Yok’s daughter.”

  Brushing a black curl from her mouth, she said, “I am.”

  Whoa, my goodness. It stopped him hard. He gagged on nothing, and the flush of humiliation crawled along his neck. Wind blew turgid bits of air up his nose as he stammered to speak, but wait, hadn’t she…?

  “Don’t have a heart attack,” Melissa Lea said. “I’m only kidding. My last name is McGowan. What’s the matter? Ease up a little.”

  He had to try. “That was sort of a nasty trick.”

  “Professor Yokver has really got you spooked, huh?”

  Why hadn’t he seen her before today? Why didn’t he recognize her? Had the Yok bent him so far out of shape?…was he truly that fragile when you got down to it? “I don’t remember you ever saying much in class, Melissa.”

  “Did anybody?”

  She was right. Nobody ever spoke much, not even the frosh who acted like he actually cared about the ethics class. “No.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d heard nothing but rave reviews about him from other people, and how it was supposed to be such an ‘easy’ grade. That should’ve been the tip-off. They told me he’d been voted the most popular professor for the last six or seven years, but after the first few meetings I figured out that the exhilarating PHILO One-thirty-eight was going to drag my already crummy GPA into the gutter. By then I was stuck, and he wouldn’t let me leave no matter how much I asked.”

  “And the dean wouldn’t let you out either.”

  “No, he wouldn’t, and I don’t know why. I think that man pisses me off more than Yokver. There’s something about him…the way he looks at people. There always seems to be something else on his mind, you know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like he’s not even listening. It gets to me on occasion.”

  Cal felt it too, whenever he had to deal with the dean. They walked back toward the open field. With only the hint of a sneer, her smile drifted and became a sensual suggestion. He thought so anyway.

  “So,” Melissa said, “when I heard you speaking your mind during that little tête à tête this morning, it just snapped things into perspective for me, and shook me out of my complacency. I mean, to realize I’m paying for this. I’ve just been kind of wandering around for a while. I’ve been thinking of transferring and might just take the chance on going someplace else.”

  “Where?”

  “Who knows? I’m not sure.” She kept up the smile, but her face had darkened—transferring to a new university could be worse than immigrating. It would be like entering a new country where you were the outlander all over again, and needed to learn a new difficult language, a different set of rules. It kept him from going. “Now I’ve got to get back to my room and finish off a paper on Spenser’s ‘Lines on his Promised Pension’ for Professor Moored.”

  “An English major?” he asked.

  “With a Spanish minor, comprendes?”

  “Got it. Spenser. I never liked him much.”

  “Me neither. Nobody does, so maybe the professor won’t be stuck having nine other papers on the same subject, the way he will with ‘Kubla Khan,’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ and ‘The Raven.’”

  Howard Moored was particularly fond of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which nobody ever wrote about because they were all deceptively similar. Cal wanted to talk to her about it, lend her some books, give her a few insights, but now, suddenly, she seemed to be in a rush, and he felt as if he were keeping her. “Good luck with it. Nice chatting with you.”

 

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