The Horned Man

CHAPTER 7

The next day I went into the department office at lunch time to get my mail. Amber was there, working the photocopier. She looked at me drowsily. Her eyelids seemed literally weighted down by their brush of thick, cornsilk-colored lashes. For a moment I thought we might not have to speak. But under the surface torpor of her expression, a keener attentiveness began shoaling up toward me, and I felt once again the familiar agitated sense of having to account for myself as I stood before her.

‘Listen, I -’ I blustered, ‘I haven’t had a chance to – to read your thing yet…’

‘Oh no problem.’ Her voice was remote but soothing, like a phrase of otherworldly music drifting by on a breeze. She turned back to the photocopier.

There was a note in my mailbox. It was unsigned, and the words were in Latin:

Atrocissimum est Monoceros.

I didn’t know what it meant, but its obvious hostility (a tauntingly opaque follow-up, I assumed, to last night’s more crudely visceral assault) broke on me like a whiplash out from the dark, and I felt almost physically stung. I looked over at Amber; I wanted to say something, to whinny out an aggrieved protest and hear the reassurance of another human being’s sympathetic outrage. On reflection, however, I realised Amber would hardly be an appropriate recipient for such an appeal. I stood there in silence, dazed, regretting for a moment (even as I acknowledged its importance) this unremitting obligation to hold oneself in check. I was gazing at her back: the obverse of the gold coin of herself. Wings of fine down caught the light at her long neck. Her shoulders were trim and straight in the soft blue sheathing of her top, crisscrossed by the ocher halter of her brushed cotton dungarees. Her willowy figure barely curved at the hips, almost as expressive as her face of things yet to awaken into the full articulation of themselves.

She turned around, catching my eye before I could look away. I felt sharply annoyed with myself – not for failing to take evasive action fast enough, but for ogling her like that in the first place. I was about to leave the room when I heard her say softly:

‘So you did know Barbara.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You did know Barbara Hellermann.’

‘No…’

‘But you were in Portland with her.’

Amber’s blue-sleeved arm pointed languidly over to a poster on the notice-board. Distantly alarmed, I strolled across the room, as nonchalantly as I could.

The poster was for a week-long, interdisciplinary graduate seminar on Gender Studies, at Portland State. Among the fifteen or so guest lecturers listed were myself and Barbara Hellermann. Looking at it, I felt a distinct but as yet unlocatable feeling of danger, that I see in retrospect was my first intimation of the large antagonisms I had unwittingly aroused.

‘What’s this doing up here?’ I said. ‘It’s three years out of date.’

‘I have no idea.’

‘How strange. Well perhaps I did meet her. I don’t remember.’

‘She was my teacher here in my junior year.’

‘Oh.’

I was about to tear the poster down, when I thought that might strike Amber as odd. Instead I merely shrugged my shoulders and left the room.

Later, when nobody was there, I went back and discreetly removed the poster. Taking it into my office, I examined it closely. It looked genuine enough, not that I would have been able to tell if someone had forged it.

Perhaps, I thought, it had been left up there on the notice-board all this time, and Amber pointing it out to me today, the very day after I had learned of Barbara Hellermann’s murder, was merely a chance event; the kind that occurs when you learn a word you’ve never come across in your life, only to hear it repeated in an unrelated context almost immediately after. And perhaps, in that case, Barbara Hellermann really had been in Portland when I was there, and I simply hadn’t taken note of her. There had been an organised dinner, I remembered, and a muddy walk through a forest of wild salmonberries and Douglas fir to a spectacular waterfall above the Willamet. I had given my paper – part of a mini-symposium entitled ‘Engineering the New Male’. Other than that we’d been left to our own devices. I wasn’t very sociable – I spent most of my free time on the phone to Carol (who only wasn’t with me because she was so afraid of flying she never went anywhere she didn’t absolutely have to go), and wishing I was back in New York with her. So it was possible that Barbara had been there, and that we simply hadn’t registered each other. Possible then, that the poster was genuine, and that it had been up on the notice-board for three years without my taking it in. Possible.

Nevertheless, I brought the poster home with me and threw it into the incinerator.

After that I took my old prep school Latin dictionary down from its shelf in the living room and translated the note. At once I found my investigation (as it had unequivocally become by now) of Trumilcik lurching in an altogether unexpected direction.