The Faculty Club

26

“Why don’t you tell him the joke?” Humpty Dumpty said. “Maybe he’ll thank you.”

“Enough,” Bernini snapped. “Remember your deal.”

I kept turning those words over and over in my head. We were missing something. Something that was right there, hanging in front of us.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that we had everything we needed to save ourselves.

Miles was spread out on the comforter of the shabby bed in our shabby motel room. He was mindlessly twisting his Rubik’s Cube-scramble, solve, scramble, solve. Miles wasn’t quite what they called a speed cuber, but he did go to a few conventions in high school, where math nerds, sci-fi fanatics, comic book collectors, and other of our fellow virgins would commune to break international cube-solving records. The fastest people today could solve a scrambled cube in fifteen seconds or less. Amazing how the world changes-it took Erno Rubik, the Hungarian mathematician, an entire month to solve his own cube for the first time.

“Why don’t you tell him the joke? Maybe he’ll thank you.”

Why would I thank him?

Miles was the only action in the room. We were holed up, stuck in a holding pattern. Scramble, solve, scramble, solve. His fingers were large but nimble.

Sarah was watching him too.

“How do you do that?” she finally asked.

Miles looked up, surprised, as if we’d woken him from a particularly deep dream.

“This?” He held up the cube.

“Yeah. How do you do it so fast?”

“It’s not that hard, really. The secret is the middle square. It never changes. Once you see the middle square, you know what color that side has to be. Everything else turns around that. From there, it’s just pattern recognition, clockwork.”

That’s when it clicked. The whole thing.

Why don’t you tell him the joke?

What was our middle square?

It had to be the dead professor who wasn’t dead. Everything turned around him.

It occurred to me: what if we had the wrong middle square? What if our clues didn’t fit together because everything flowed from the middle square-and we had the middle square totally backward? We saw red and thought it was blue…

The whole puzzle fell into place, like water molecules snapping into ice.

“Oh my God,” I said, and they looked at me. I told them everything. I couldn’t see my own expression, but I saw it reflected in their faces.

I saw fear.

Immortality was one thing.

But this?

For our sake, I hoped I was right. And so help me, I hoped I was wrong.

There was only one way to find out.

I hadn’t been to Nigel’s apartment since the night of his dinner party, and that felt like another lifetime. I walked up the steps to his brownstone. It was almost four in the morning, and the cold was so intense, so harsh, that my nose and throat burned every time I took a breath. The streets were perfectly still. I hadn’t seen a soul on my way over. And believe me, I was looking-for any shadowy figure that might be in the vicinity.

I was surprised to see a light already on in Nigel’s window. The doorbell echoed through his apartment. Lights flipped on from room to room, closer and closer, and then footsteps came my way. Nigel opened the door. He was fully dressed and didn’t seem at all surprised to see me. That, I think, was the moment I knew just how stupid I was. Why didn’t I just chain myself to the bell tower in the center of campus, with a sign that said hey secret evil club: come and get me! But this was the only way. We had to know. I told myself that and heard another voice, that class clown in the back row of my brain, calling out obnoxious comments. It was Arthur Peabody’s voice, and it said: Now or later… they’ll get me.

There you go. Now or later. Let it happen.

Wise words from the late, great Humpty Dumpty.

“Jeremy,” Nigel said pleasantly. “Come in.”

We passed the dining room to the last door in the hallway, the only one I hadn’t been in before. On one end of the room was Nigel’s bed, a canopy with four elegant spiral posts; at the other was an oak desk, next to a limestone fireplace with a roaring fire. Behind the desk were rows of books. I sat in the leather chair he indicated and started scanning the bookshelves. I found what I was looking for easily enough-it was part of a set-the antique he’d shown me on the first day of school, a leather-bound collection of political essays. The one he’d wanted to give Daphne in his crazy quest for her affection. The one I’d talked him out of giving her, back when I was giving love advice to Nigel even though I wanted Daphne. Back when altruism and friendship seemed like virtues to me. Well, the book was there, anyway. At least he listened. I also saw, perhaps too late, that the phone on his desk was off the hook. It was an old-fashioned phone with a rotary dial and a vertical shaft like a lamppost that cradled the receiver. But not now. Now the receiver was sitting facedown on his desk, and the first thing he did when he sat down was lift it up to his mouth.

“I need to go now,” he said into the phone, looking at me. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Quite.” He smiled. “I will.”

He hung the phone up.

“Who was that?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“No one,” he said, smiling back at me.

The clock had started. Fine. Fuck the clock. Fuck whatever was waiting for me on the other end of that call. Right now, it was just me and Nigel. I couldn’t rush this. It was a dance. A magic trick, even. And I wasn’t going to get caught with a rabbit halfway out of my sleeve. Not tonight.

I was going to take my time, because that was the only way.

Nigel stared at me, waiting for me to say something. I stared back. His desk was covered with books, and he appeared to be writing a paper or even a book in longhand. There were stacks of handwritten pages, with cross-outs, marginal notes, insertions, all in the same urgent script. Not a computer in the room.

Stress is an amazing thing-an hour ago it was bringing out the worst in me, and now it was bringing out the best. When I spoke, my voice didn’t crack. It sounded deeper and stronger than it had in weeks.

“Is it everything you hoped it would be?” I asked him.

Nigel didn’t flinch.

“Is what everything I hoped it would be?” he asked with a straight face. “Law school, you mean?”

I reclined in my chair without taking my eyes off his. I aimed for just south of angry and repeated, very clearly: “Is it everything you hoped it would be?”

He gave me a dead-eyed stare, raising his eyebrows.

“Yes,” he said. “Everything and more.”

“I’m happy for you.”

“What do you want, Jeremy?”

“Nothing, Nigel. I don’t want a thing.”

Take it slow.

“So why are you here?”

“I think you know.”

Easy, I thought. Less anger, a little more hurt.

“We used to be friends…”

Nigel sighed. His guard went down just a hair. But not the coldness that was just behind his eyes. The people on the other end of that call were still coming, and he knew exactly what they’d do to me when they got here. And he didn’t care.

“I know,” he said. “We were.”

“I helped you. That’s the part that kills me. I helped you.”

He rubbed the dome of his head.

“What do you want me to say?”

Okay, swipe one:

“That night in the library, you were a mess. Didn’t even know how to read a case. I helped you. What a fool I was!”

Let it sit.

Reel him in.

“Did you come here to insult me?” Nigel said, pushing away from his desk. “Tell me I’m stupid? That I don’t deserve whatever it is you think I have?”

Good. Keep his eye off the ball.

Then the wagon jumped the tracks.

“I got you something,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I ordered it a while ago. It just came. I was going to give it to you at school. But since you’re here…”

He gave a little sarcastic shrug.

I needed to get him back on track. Time was running out. They were coming. And he was stalling me. But I couldn’t show fear. I couldn’t let him see what I was up to.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything. Just take it.”

He paused. He waited me out.

“Where is it?” I asked finally.

“Over there,” he said. “Under the bed. In a box. Go get it.”

A chill went up my spine. We weren’t in the dorms after all, we weren’t even on campus-but my mind was spinning like an out-of-control clock, and I couldn’t help but wonder: Was there a hatch under his bed? Another link to that maze that seemed to connect everything in this town? I imagined myself walking to the bed. Getting down on my hands and knees in the plush carpet. Peeking under the edge of the bed, seeing only black. Reaching my hand under, feeling around in the soft darkness. The strange fist with the knife gliding out, chopping my hand like a master chef working down a carrot. Another hand grabbing into my hair, yanking me under the bed, swallowing me down into the hole.

I was starting to sweat. I doubted Nigel could see it yet, but maybe he could smell it. Maybe he could smell the fear.

Now or later, I thought.

I stood up.

I went to his bed. He was watching from behind me. I could feel it. He didn’t say a word. I had a sudden image in my head. Not my life flashing before my eyes. Just a single memory. My mom, holding that envelope in hand, that letter of acceptance. Baby, she said. She dropped the mail all over the floor.

I knelt down. It was dark under the bed. The only light in the room was the fireplace, crackling over by Nigel. I lifted the comforter and tried to see under the bed. Where was the box? I couldn’t tell-it was pitch black in there. I reached in and felt for it. My fingers touched woolly carpet.

No hand with a knife slashed out at me.

My fingers felt the edges of a cardboard box. I sighed. The ground below me suddenly hardened and felt more solid, more comforting. I pulled the box out and carried it back to Nigel’s desk.

“Open it,” Nigel said.

I hated this. He was running out my clock. But the whole gambit depended on flow. He couldn’t see what was coming. I had to follow the rhythm.

Inside the box was my article. Nigel had paid some company to bind it in a nice leather cover. It was thin, but it looked grandiose, important. I felt a flash of pride. On the cover, my name and the title were embossed in gold letters.

It was a stroke of luck.

I looked at the article for a second, ran my fingers down the smooth leather.

“This reminds me,” I said-easy now-“of the day we met each other.”

I smiled at him, and he smiled back with that joyless, thin smile. I shook my head and even laughed, tentatively. “You were going to give Daphne that beautiful book and ask her out.”

“She said no, of course,” Nigel said, grinning.

“Well, at least she got a nice book out of it.”

“Yeah, lucky her,” Nigel laughed.

My stomach dropped three stories.

The center square… the center square…

Why don’t you tell him the joke? Maybe he’ll thank you.

Nigel wouldn’t be thanking anyone, because Nigel-the Nigel I once knew-didn’t even exist anymore.

I took off so fast I’m not sure he knew what happened until I was out the door. I heard him yell after me, then pick up the phone and shout into it.

I skipped down the steps of his brownstone three at a time and almost fell head over heels down them.

Everything fit.

Our center square had been wrong. The professor planning his own “death,” the one I met face to face-we had assumed his obituary was a cover, a hoax to hide the fact that he was already immortal. I guess I’d pictured a bunch of three-hundred-year-old men living in a cave somewhere, pulling the strings and ruling the world. But that wasn’t the center square at all. His “death” was a hoax all right, but not in the way we thought.

Because there were two ways to be immortal, really. You could make your body live forever. Or, you could jump ship when your body was about to give out…

Three new spots every year.

Three new students, the best and brightest, initiated into the V &D.

What was the central ceremony of voodoo? What had Isabella told us?

Not immortality but possession. The loa mounts the horse.

What if someone found a way to use voodoo-someone from outside the culture-in a way it was never intended? I thought of Mr. Bones, in his office with artifacts from around the world. A pushpin in every inch of the map! How many continents had they searched for their path to eternal life?

My God-what had Bernini said to me in his office? It had seemed so strange at the time. How tall are you? Good bone structure. Can you guess the last time we elected a shorter than average president? It was inspired. If you lived forever in your own body, you had to hide. But this… stealing a new body every generation… How many centuries to amass wealth? How many turns to be president? You could build dynasties. Empires.

The loa mounts the horse: his mind, your body.

A line of the most brilliant people in the world, waiting to cheat death, over and over… And every year, a line of fresh students, clawing past each other to be initiated. What fools! Victims of the world’s most exclusive faculty club. And I’d been queuing up right along with them, placing my head on the chopping block with a big hopeful smile… But I didn’t make the cut, did I? And that’s when Humpty had said, Tell him the joke. Maybe he’ll thank you. Yes-thank you for not taking my body, my life. (But maybe, just for a second, did I feel a crazy pang: what was so wrong with my body anyway?)

I had to get back to Miles and Sarah.

But then I saw him. Across the street, walking toward me with his head forward. The road was perfectly empty, silent except for that figure cutting a quick path in my direction. I tried to scream, but my throat locked up. I was blowing air. I felt it streaming from my lungs, but no sound came out-just a weak hiss.

I took off running, away from the man.

At the far end of the street, I saw another figure step out of the shadows and come toward me, at the same fast clip. I cut down a side street that ran between two rows of brownstones, beautiful old homes. I hit a patch of black ice and slid wildly, knocking into some trash cans that broke my fall but slammed my arm and shoulder, stinging like hell. Pure adrenaline was driving me now. Somehow I jumped up and kept running. I risked a look behind me and saw the two men converge and move toward me, side by side. Not running so much as loping toward me with long strides. I was thirty feet from the end of the block. Once I got there it was a major intersection with at least three ways to run. If I could just make it far enough ahead of them, I could lose them. I willed myself to run faster. Twenty feet. Fifteen. And then my heart stopped as another two figures appeared at the end of the street. They blocked the exit. Silently, they started moving toward me.

I did the only thing I could. Without thinking, running on pure instinct, I broke left into an alley and tore down it faster than I’ve ever gone in my life.

It was claustrophobic; lightless except for a thin strip of starry night above me.

Then I saw what was waiting for me at the end of the alley, and I realized they hadn’t been chasing me. They’d been herding me.

Three figures stood at the far end of the alley, blocking the path, not moving, waiting.

Between us was an open manhole. A small wisp of water vapor curled from the black circle. They were closing in behind me. I tried to stop but I was running at a speed that sent me slipping and sputtering on patches of ice. And then some sort of primitive math took over-four behind me plus three ahead equals fuck it, take the hole. So I stopped trying to brake and let my hands shield my head and I jumped through the hole, feeling it slam my shoulder on the way down, feeling the empty air, a pale blue disc pulling away until all my senses were pulled to the wet slamming under my feet. I hit the ground and felt the shock run through me.

I picked myself up. There was a burning in my leg, but I could walk. At first, all I heard was the trickling of water. I shook from adrenaline and cold. I was standing in a small gentle stream. I watched water an inch deep move in a current over my shoes. Every twenty feet or so, grating slits above me let in faint street light.

In that dim glow, I saw the figure, ten yards away, cloaked and hooded, staring at me.

He was tall. There was a slow heaving in his shoulders, a calm low breathing.

He took a step toward me, then paused.

I couldn’t see his face. He said nothing, made no noise.

He took another step forward.

I willed my legs to move. They wouldn’t.

I want to see his face, a crazy voice inside me offered.

Another step. Deliberate. Methodical.

Move, I hissed to myself.

Nothing. Glue legs. Useless, wet, and dead.

The steps came faster then, the stride long and precise. Each step smacking into the thin stream under our feet.

Move. Move!

Now he was charging me.

Without stopping he reached a hand into his cloak, and it came out a moment later with a metallic ping. When his hand returned to his side, there was a long blade pointing down from it.

I moved.

My legs popped out of their paralysis. I took a few steps backward and then turned and ran like hell.

Every step splashed. The water, the stone, the slits of light, it felt like a tomb, and I wondered if I was a ghost who hadn’t gotten the memo yet. My side was screaming-one of those “stitches” you get in high school gym from switching between walking and running. A voice, low and seductive, whispered in my head: You could just stop. It won’t hurt. Now or later. Come on, it’s easy.

I didn’t stop. I pushed through the stitch and it went away. But the hooded man was closer. I don’t know if my legs were giving out or if he was warming up, but I heard his splashing steps faster and nearer. His blade must’ve scratched the wall-I heard a ching! Was he raising it? Was that the sound of the blade up over his head? As I ran, what kept coming into my head was an image of Sarah, standing in that shaft of light at the top of her stairs, her eyes brilliant and hazel brown, almost gold, just after she’d been crying. I wanted to see her again. That’s all I knew. I had to get out of this tunnel. In a straight chase, he would catch me.

The brain is an amazing thing. It wants to live. You know that garbage about how we use only ten percent? Well, I think that other ninety is roped off for moments like this. I heard everything, saw everything. I ran past a gutter and saw the water running into it, and just above, too minor to be noticed by a ten percent brain, I saw the small painting of two eyes on the bricks over the drain. That drain led somewhere. And somewhere was better than here, because I was about to die.

I stopped on a dime and threw myself backward, my hurt leg screaming, aiming low for his ankles. It was a direct hit and he went forward over me, his cloak whipping across my face. It smelled musty. I dove toward the drain, kept my head down, and grabbed the inside and pulled myself through.

I fell into a crawl space, deep in water. There was a ladder, and I took it up. I pulled off a panel and threw it hard down into the shaft, onto the head of the figure who was pulling himself through the gutter below. Light poured out through the opening behind the panel, and I dove into it.

My hand came down on a wall to steady myself, and I felt a searing pain. It was a hot water pipe. I was back in the steam tunnels. I took off down the hall.

Would it have been too much to ask that the panel-not heavy but not light either-might have stunned the person when I slammed it down the shaft onto his head? Knocked him out cold? But it hadn’t. As if in slow motion, I saw his long pointed hood come through the panel into the tunnel. Then his spindly arms unfolded like spider legs and bootstrapped his long body through. The knees unfolded into the hall and he was at full height.

In the light, I could finally see him. A pointed hood and scarlet robes. His face hidden behind a crude mask carved out of wood. Pointed bark teeth, like some hungry demon. Rough triangular cheeks. The wood painted stark white, with streaks of orange and purple around the eyes and mouth, like an eighty-year-old whore out for one last john.

The Puppet Man, I thought.

Then ping, and the blade was back at his side, pointing down.

He started the relentless walk toward my execution.

I wanted daylight. I cut right and left, found ladders and took them up, and when I couldn’t find a single damn open door I finally saw a panel like the one Humpty had shown me. I pried it off and dove into a smaller tunnel that seemed to slope up. I took it until it leveled out and just kept going, and my heart sank, just absolutely broke, when I saw the dead end ahead.

I spun around to backtrack, and he was there. I saw his bright mask at the far end of the tunnel.

There was nowhere to go.

I turned on my back, eyes on him, and started sliding myself backward. If he came close, at least I could kick at his face, maybe smack that wooden mask into whatever soft or skeletal nose was hiding behind it. But I knew that was crazy when I saw the reach of his long thin arm extending that blade toward me. My leg was no match-it would only make a nice little shrimp on the skewer.

I had to stay out of range. I kept sliding backward, gaining speed. The wall was coming closer behind me but what could I do? That knife was hideous-long and covered with markings. He was gaining on me. It slashed closer and closer. I didn’t think. I just slid faster and faster and let the wall come. The blade was so close-it slashed my shirt. I went faster, faster, faster-knew the wall was seconds away and maybe God at least I’d knock myself unconscious before the end and the pain and then I felt the wall slam into me, an instant of explosion and tearing and then I felt cold air sweep around me and I was falling, falling through the air and then there was a great explosion below me, a mushroom cloud of wood and dust and a terrible cracking, stripping noise.

I saw a starburst of yellow flashes as my head hit something and then my vision dimmed and cleared. I looked on either side of me and saw that a long wooden table had broken my fall and exploded under me. I was in a dining hall of some kind, long rows of oak tables in a vast room. I looked above me and saw a wall of hundreds of portraits-dozens and dozens of oil paintings of old white men. And in the center, high above me, was one empty frame, the shreds of a portrait flowering out from the edges. Leaning from the empty portrait was the Puppet Man, clutching the frame and peering out, the blade still in his hand, the face still masked, blank and demonic. He seemed to be sizing up the jump. He turned his dark eyes right at me, and I felt the hollowness sweep through me. Then he disappeared back into the frame.

I stood up, slow and shaky, and limped out of the dining hall as fast as I could, out the exit and into a quiet campus that was just starting to wake up. There was a dim strip of blue on the horizon, under a purple sky. I had no doubt that in half an hour, a crowd of students would marvel at the soon-to-be-legendary Smashed Table Prank and wonder which fraternity had the balls to pull it off.

And I had no doubt that above them, the frame would not be empty-in half an hour, there would once again be a perfect wall of unbroken portraits.