Richard Aldiss began his second lecture with a question.
“Which one of you found the man in the dark coat?”
Tonight the television sat atop a sea-green rolling cart labeled PROPERTY OF JASPER ENGLISH DEPT. The chalkboard was marred with palmerased equations from an earlier class. The temperature had dropped to a record low outside, and the cold pressed in. On the screen the murderer slowly blinked, waiting for a response to his question. When no answer came, he raised his hands palms up, as if to say, I’m waiting.
“I was too busy with my research,” a student toward the back of the hall finally answered. Daniel Hayden was a pale, unhealthily thin boy who wore his sandy hair down over his eyes. He never seemed to look at you when he spoke. He was not brilliant the way many of the others were. Instead of the cliquish way some of the nine moved about campus, Hayden kept to himself. He did not see himself as special; he did not try to dominate the others with his knowledge of books. In fact, few of them even knew Hayden was an English major until he appeared in the night class, wearing a Pavement T-shirt and torn blue jeans. In his front jacket pocket he always kept a rolled-up paperback novel.
“And what kind of research would that be, Mr. Hayden?” Aldiss asked.
“Research about you. About the things you did.”
The professor didn’t flinch. “You shouldn’t be doing that.”
Hayden grinned. “Don’t you want to know what I learned?”
Aldiss extended his hands, palms out: Humor me.
“There’s a true crime book about your case. It’s called The Mad Professor. Have you read it, Dr. Aldiss?”
“No.”
“I read it last night. All of it. I couldn’t stop. I had to know exactly what you did before I came to class again. The author—he believes you are evil. That you might be a genius but your mind did something to you. Changed you somehow. A lot of them say the same thing.”
“Them?”
“Your enemies. Those who believe you shouldn’t be teaching this class.”
“And what do you believe, Mr. Hayden?”
“I believe . . .” The boy faltered. His gaze fell away, down to the notebook that was still unopened on his desk. “I believe you were a bad man,” he went on, his voice barely a whisper. “You did some very bad things. You hurt people, destroyed lives. All the information is out there. The professor-killer. The genius-murderer. They call you the Bookman.”
Aldiss nodded firmly. Then he said, “Well. I didn’t want to speak to you about this, but if research is being done without my knowledge, then it appears that we must. Let me only say this: I am guilty of sending two girls to their graves. I spend every night in this institution thinking about the troubled man I was as a young professor at Dumant University. And all I can say to you is that the mind is a locked room, conscience is the key, and some of us threw away the key a long time ago.”
“Are you sorry?”
Hayden again. And in that instant the students saw, for the first time, what their professor was capable of. His annoyance at the boy turned to something else, something like rage, hot and vile just at the corners of his eyes. In the very next second it was gone.
“ ‘Sorry’ is just one word among many, Mr. Hayden.”
“But you murdered two people! You killed two innocent women and you arranged those books around their—”
“No one knows the entire story of what happened at Dumant,” Aldiss said. “No one will ever know. For me to say that I am sorry”—the word spat into the microphone before him—“would be to go back and relive my crimes, and I am not about to do that. Not here, not now.”
For a moment, it appeared Hayden had said all that he was going to say. But then he raised his gaze to the television one more time and said, “There were just the two, weren’t there?”
Aldiss blinked, calmly, as if he had anticipated this very question.
“The victims they know about,” Hayden continued. “The two grad students—you’ve never killed anyone else, have you?”
The professor swiped a hand over his mouth and said, in a voice that was as sharp as glass, “I will not be interrogated by a student.”
With this the boy relented. He nodded, more to himself than anyone else, and placed his copy of The Coil on top of his notebook. Then he stood up and began to make his way to the television screen. There he paused and said something to Aldiss, something no one else in the class caught because his back was to them, and he walked out the door.
For a moment no one spoke.
When Hayden was gone the professor said, his voice even and calm, “And then there were eight.”
There were uneasy laughs. Someone coughed nervously. A few of them chattered just to hear the noise of their own talk. After a few seconds Aldiss hushed his students by putting one long, pale finger to his lips: “Shhh, class.” Silence descended.
He shuffled the notes that were in front of him on the rickety prison-issue table and said, “Now, who discovered the name of the man in the dark coat? Who solved the riddle?”
For a moment no one spoke. Then, from the middle of the lecture hall, a girl slowly raised her hand.
* * *
Alex had debated whether to say anything. Hadn’t Aldiss just told them that he was guilty? Hadn’t he confessed to the two murders right there before his class, with nine live witnesses and whoever else was watching the damn TV to hear his words? She thought about the book, so carefully hidden in her desk drawer back at Philbrick Hall. Of the strange and tantalizing message there. Richard Aldiss is innocent. Do not tell a soul you have seen this. Perhaps she should remain silent, act as if she had never even found the thing at all.
No.
To say nothing would be to possibly let an innocent man die in prison. Perhaps this admission of his guilt was part of the trick. Part of Aldiss’s master plan. She knew if the book and its hidden message were real, then Aldiss was counting on her. Relying on her to follow the clues . . .
Down the rabbit hole.
She raised her hand.
“Ah, Ms. Shipley,” Aldiss said, no hesitation at all in his eyes or his voice. “Tell the rest of the class what you found.”
Does he know? she wondered. Can he possibly know that I checked out the book? If so, then how is he so calm?
“The man in the dark coat,” Alex said now, trying to find her voice. Her tongue felt thick, misshapen. “His name was . . .”
“Please go on.”
“The man’s name was Charles Rutherford.”
The professor smiled. Despite herself, Alex felt a rush of pride.
“The encyclopedia salesman?” someone behind her asked. Melissa Lee had a reputation at Jasper, both for being blazingly intelligent and for inciting a sex scandal that had been weaving its way through the lit faculty for the past two semesters. She wore all black, heavy layers of it, and her hair was streaked with alternating patterns of light and dark that made her look vaguely animalistic. Her face was death-white, a style the students at Jasper had begun calling Goth. Her eyes were painted black and her ears flashed with silver studs, and a sardonic smile always played upon her dark purple lips. Her T-shirt tonight read KILL A POET. “But Rutherford’s a nobody. A pawn. He was dead a year before The Golden Silence even appeared, but they still slap his photo on the books because no one can be sure about the role he played. How did she . . .” Lee glared at Alex, and Alex merely smiled.
“That’s the whole point, Ms. Lee,” Aldiss said. “Rutherford became a flashpoint for the Fallows scholars exactly because he was so improbable a suspect. First, he died of a brain embolism in 1974. One year later, the second Fallows novel was published. There was also the problem of his clean-cut, square, midwestern image. At first, when the search for Fallows began, many believed that the Rutherford photograph was nothing but another trick. More misdirection. But as the scholars began to search for Rutherford, they found something very interesting.”
“He was a writer.”
Aldiss looked out at the class and found the one who had spoken. “That’s right,” he said. “Very good.”
The boy was the football player, Jacob Keller. He was sitting just to Alex’s right, and she glanced over and found his eyes. He nodded at her. Cute, Alex thought, in a smart-jock sort of way. She had seen him around campus with a few of his teammates, had spotted him down at a bar called Rebecca’s a few times, sitting at a back table and tracing blocking patterns with his fingertips on index cards. Now Keller leaned over and whispered, “Me and you, Shipley, we’re his pets now. The only question is where they’ll find our bodies.” Alex stifled a laugh, and when she looked up she saw that Aldiss had heard. He was looking right at them, and her heart caught in her throat—but the professor only smiled.
“Charles Rutherford was indeed writing a book,” Aldiss finally continued. “They found pieces of the manuscript in his briefcase after his death. But it was a strange book, nothing like the stuff Paul Fallows would become famous for.”
The professor looked down at his table, shuffled through more of his notes, and then came up with one sheet of paper.
“Or was it?”
A quick movement, and then the professor’s form was eclipsed on the screen, replaced by a yellowed document he had held up for the camera. One rumpled page, years old from the look of it, arteries of age running through the sheet like the whorls on a palm. Alex read what was written there, saw that the font was that of a typewriter. The page was heavy with bubbled mark-outs and grayed correction tape. It appeared to be—How strange, she thought. It was an encyclopedia entry.
“Rutherford was writing his own encyclopedia?” said a boy in back. This was Christian Kane, the slight boy with the denim jacket. Kane was the class auteur; he wrote Stephen King–esque short stories and published them in the Jasper College literary magazine, The Guild. Kane fashioned himself after the famous French artisans, with upswept silvering hair and oxford shirts and colored scarves. His stories were so bizarre and violent that many wondered if he didn’t live a secret life, if he hadn’t somehow gleaned firsthand knowledge of his macabre subject matter back in his Delaware prep school.
“That’s right, Mr. Kane,” Aldiss said. “He had just begun the volume when he met his demise. Just a few entries. As you see, he was still in the A’s. But this encyclopedia—it was so much different from the Funk & Wagnalls he was selling door to door. This book was unusual. It seemed to be about Charles Rutherford himself, about his own experiences, the things he did and the people he spoke to every day as he sold his wares. At first, the line between this amateurish, navel-gazing writing and the labyrinthine, puzzles-within-puzzles writing of Fallows is clear. But as the scholars began to dig deeper, they saw that Rutherford’s encyclopedia was itself a kind of puzzle.”
“How do you mean?” Michael Tanner asked.
“I mean Rutherford seemed to be playing a game. A game with himself, maybe—but then again maybe not. Look at this.”
Aldiss held another sheet up, this one much like the first. The paper looked so old and used that Alex felt as if she might be able to smell the must wafting off of it.
“This is one of the last entries. A, Albridge. A tiny description of a town follows that heading. Albridge, Iowa—population two thousand. A nowhere town not far from where Rutherford lived and worked. But what’s unusual is when you look at a map of Iowa—”
“It doesn’t exist.”
Keller again. Alex saw how quick he was, how he beat everyone in class to the answer. Whereas her mind, so tediously slow, moved much more carefully. Deliberately. She found herself looking at Keller again, glancing over and willing him to catch her eye.
“Albridge, Iowa, is indeed fictitious,” said Aldiss. “It was not on any maps at the time and still isn’t. In his ‘encyclopedia entry,’ Rutherford claims he was there. That he sold encyclopedias to a few residents. That he ate in a small diner near the town square. But none of that was real. And so, armed with this information, we must ask a greater question.”
For a moment the class remained silent, hyperaware. They hung on Aldiss’s voice. He was moving them toward something now, drawing closer to a connection between Charles Rutherford, the dead man whose image had appeared on the books, and Fallows himself. The only sound in the lecture hall was the electronic hum and crackle of the television.
“Why?” Alex asked.
Aldiss looked at her with knowing eyes. Eyes that seemed to pick up everything in their path, to notice everything. Eyes that had once belonged to a young, clearly handsome man. But now they looked as if they contained too much, like when she refilled her mother’s sugar bowl at home and some of the granules poured out on the table. That was it, Alex thought: there was some of the professor pouring out, overflowing through the screen itself.
“That’s right, Ms. Shipley,” he said now. “The question is ‘Why?’ Why would Charles Rutherford make up the small town of Albridge, Iowa? Why would he claim he’d spent his days there? The only solution is that Rutherford was playing a trick on someone. That his encyclopedia wasn’t an encyclopedia at all but rather a—”
“A novel,” said Sally Mitchell in her too soft, too sweet voice.
Aldiss didn’t respond; he only grinned, pleased that these nine (No, Alex reminded herself, we are eight now) special students were moving so fast.
“But there are always problems with the Rutherford–is–Paul Fallows theory,” Aldiss said. “The obvious one being that the man was dead when the second book appeared, which blew the whole thing out of the water. The photograph on the book jackets—it meant nothing, the scholars claimed. It had been a joke. Another play by Fallows in the game.”
“Did anyone at least go to Iowa and check it out?” Lewis Prine asked.
Aldiss nodded. “The scholars got to the Rutherford widow, of course. When the second and final novel, The Golden Silence, appeared, we—they had to know. And so yes, they flocked to Iowa. Sometimes they would just sit outside the house where Rutherford had once lived.”
“Jesus,” Melissa Lee muttered.
“Some of them gathered the courage to speak to his widow. At first she was polite, but then she saw how obsessed they were. To know. To put the mystery to rest. And she became angry. She and Charles Rutherford had a son, a young boy who was so ill that he had to be institutionalized for a time, and she had to think of his safety. This Fallows character, this crazy writer—he was not her husband. He could not be. She scolded them, drove them off any way she knew how, called the local police on them. Soon they drifted away and left the poor woman and her boy alone.”
The class thought about this. Frank Marsden, his lashes still thick with mascara from rehearsals for Richard III, asked, “So Rutherford, your ‘man in the dark coat’—there is no chance that he is really Paul Fallows?”
Aldiss said nothing at first. The students sat silently, waiting, the red-eyed camera mounted in the corner of the room recording everything. “I am not ready to answer that question,” Aldiss said at last. “There are indeed connections between the two men. Connections that it has taken me twelve years to uncover. It is so very difficult to work with the resources this prison can offer, but I believe I am finally close to the answer. Very close. I have discovered things about Fallows that I never knew when I was outside these walls.”
With that Aldiss paused, and everyone in the class sat forward.
“With the help of a few of my trusted colleagues,” the professor went on, “including my old friend Dr. Stanley Fisk, professor emeritus at Jasper, I have uncovered new information. Information that no Fallows scholar has seen.”
“What kind of information?” Alex asked breathlessly.
“Documents, mostly. But also clues hidden inside the two novels. Clues that you, students, will be following as this class goes forward. But these clues will not be given to you. You must earn them. This is a classroom of higher learning, after all, and in any good class the strong rise to the top. I will give you what I have discovered, but only if you earn your keep.”
“Where do we start?” asked Michael Tanner.
“You have already begun. By solving the first riddle you are on your way to uncovering the writer’s true identity. But know this: I am not Paul Fallows, as some of the more sensationalist literary critics have come to believe.” Again the professor laughed and the class followed suit, but theirs was stilted laughter—they had done the math, of course. It was definitely possible. “Also know that you will go nowhere without the knowledge of who Charles Rutherford was, and of the shining city he came from. The trail begins with him, and that is where we will continue on our journey.”
* * *
They spoke then about The Coil. The opening scenes in Manhattan, circa 1900. The voyage of the woman named Ann Marie as she moves from Iowa and learns her purpose in the world. The novel was one of manners: Ann Marie comes to discover that the culture even of the greatest city in the world is not accommodating of an educated, self-assured woman. Everyone in the classroom had seen this kind of novel a hundred times before—but Paul Fallows put his own stamp on it. This book was different. There was something intense about Ann Marie’s rise, something almost destined. A covert, sustained violence thrummed just beneath the surface of the book. At one point in their assigned fifty pages Ann Marie brings the novel’s antagonist—a ghost-pale, misogynistic lawyer named Conning—into the Chelsea brownstone where she lives with an elderly uncle. After trapping the man on the second floor of the cluttered, multiroomed house, she retires to the parlor to sip Twinings with her uncle.
Aldiss kept them riveted the entire time. He led them deep into the novel, weaving in and out of the obvious symbolism and the more indirect passages, talking about the book as if it were a breathing thing. He read pages aloud, bringing his voice up an octave to impersonate Ann Marie in such an exacting way that each of them would hear his voice when they read the book in their dorms that night.
At the end of his lecture he was out of breath, sweat glistening on his brow. Alex watched the man, amazed at how much meaning he had been able to wring from the text.
“So,” the professor said, glancing at the egg timer he kept on his table. There were only a few minutes left. “For next week, the following fifty pages of The Coil and any more on Charles Rutherford you can find. I would suggest you begin by taking a look at his hometown: Hamlet, Iowa. Such an interesting place. And of course there are so many references to Iowa in Fallows as well. Now, are there any questions for me?”
Alex watched Aldiss. She knew her time was running out, and he had given her precious little to go on. He’d told her nothing about what to do next, where to turn. If she was going to follow the message inside the book, then she needed help from him. But how? What questions to ask, and how to phrase those questions without the rest of the class—Do not tell a soul you have seen this—catching on?
Ninety seconds left. Ninety seconds until the feed was cut.
“No questions, then?”
Sixty seconds. She imagined Aldiss, his long walk back to his cell, those two faceless guards leading him, the bars closing him in. The professor’s life, shadows and words and the agonizing screams of other caged and damaged men. His excitement about finding something, uncovering new information, and all it had led to was this. A silent lecture hall, a scared girl. Alex imagined his disappointment in her, his anger.
Richard Aldiss is innocent.
Thirty seconds.
Go on, Alex. Say something.
Twenty seconds, and—
“What’s in Hamlet?”
Aldiss looked at her. The professor’s gaze changed, turned more serious. More intense. It was as if information was being passed only to her. As if she and the professor had entered into a conversation apart from the other students. She had the sensation that the lecture hall had fallen away and she was staring at the television screen in an empty, electric-blue room.
“I suggest asking my friend Dean Stanley Fisk,” Aldiss said. “He can tell you a lot about Hamlet.”
And with that the feed was cut and the professor faded out once again.
* * *
After class she walked home through the driving snow. In the distance, over the bowl of the west campus, the ice-heavy trees seethed in the dark. The campus was dead at this hour. No traffic crawled up Rose Avenue, no other students walked across the frozen quads.
Alex walked ahead of her classmates, rushing across Harper’s Knoll, the geographic center of campus, then down the hill at the administrative building called the Tower where the dorms sprayed out in a web of low-slung architecture. You could hear the freshmen boys whooping from here, could see smoke pouring out of the chimneys at the Greek houses. This is where I want to be, she found herself thinking when she made this walk across campus every evening. This is what I want to do with my life, to be a part of this. To teach literature at a place just like this.
“Do you trust him?”
She turned. It was her neighbor, Keller. He wore a down coat with a rabbit-fur hood, a patch on the chest that read JASPER COLLEGE FOOTBALL. He walked deliberately, his weight breaking through the snow, the crunch of his steps echoing off the Tower, which was now to their right.
“Aldiss?” Alex asked.
“Mmm.”
“Do you?”
He said nothing.
“He doesn’t look like a murderer,” she said.
“Murderers have a look?”
Alex smiled. “Manson did. Dahmer. Crazy eyes. Aldiss isn’t crazy.”
“Crazy like a fox, maybe,” he said. “Look.”
Keller showed her something. Caught in a security light, flattened by his palm so the wind wouldn’t yank it away, it was a piece of notebook paper. Tick marks, thirty or forty of them, tumbled out toward the right margin.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“The number of times he’s lied.”
She looked up from the page. “And you know this how?”
“It comes from football. You block a guy, he shows you with his eyes what he’s going to do. This is what being an offensive lineman is about: going in the direction that the other guy goes. It’s a series of reading lies. Over and over and over again I do these little polygraph tests.”
“So what, you have blood pressure cuffs on Aldiss? The security in Rock Mountain must be lax, Keller.”
His turn to smile. “I’m serious. There are lots of things this guy does. In football you get good at knowing where to move before the play even happens: your man will look down, look off. He’ll say something to you across the line of scrimmage and his voice will break. These little . . . tells, you know.”
“And Professor Aldiss. He has tells.”
“A lot of them, just tonight.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means he knows who Fallows is,” Keller said. “He just can’t get to him. We’re like his legs. His legs and eyes. But to just give us the guy’s identity—that would be cheating. So Aldiss is leading us on, and we’re falling into it. That’s what these ‘riddles’ are about. Little pieces of the puzzle, one by one, until we know who really wrote those books. But there’s something else.”
Alex looked at him. “What?”
“I don’t know.” The jock shook his head, snowflakes wetting his cheeks. “I haven’t figured that out yet, but I’m working on it.”
Alex glanced off. Philbrick Hall was just ahead, the largest girl’s dorm at the college. She saw the silhouette of a girl on the top floor, stretched in a window, reading. She heard the squeal of someone’s telephone, and she thought of her sick father. Wondered when that call would come.
“Maybe you’re right,” she told Keller. “Maybe Aldiss is lying. Maybe he does know exactly who Fallows is and he’s playing this game with us. But I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
“And why is that?”
“Because,” she said, “I like playing games.” And I like to win.