Rice had trouble finding the little house. In all his years at Jasper he had never visited Aldiss out here, even though the house was only a few miles from campus. Too busy, he told himself, too much of a course load. The truth was he’d heard stories about the professor, stories that made his skin crawl.
He got lost in a town called Burnaway and stopped to ask an old man at a gas station. The man was all jowls and lean muscle, and Rice stood back so that he would not have to smell him. This part of Vermont was unknown to him. He would have rather been up the coast, maybe at Harvard—it couldn’t have been that difficult to win a professorship there, not if people like Shipley were doing it. The man smeared something over his windshield and then wiped it away, and the glass burned blue.
Rice knew he’d need to ingratiate himself, get on the old man’s level. He started dropping his g’s, felt the pang of superiority course through his veins.
“You know where the professor lives?” he asked the man. “It’s gettin’ a little late and I need to be gettin’ back to campus soon. Just thought I would come up to see if I could—”
“You mean Aldiss. The smiling one.”
The old man wrung water out at his feet, then swept around to the other side of the car. Rice caught the scent—tobacco and sweat and heat. He would have been fine staying at Jasper for the rest of his days and not getting into this. But there were things to do, a task now. There had been a second murder this morning. His time was running out; everyone’s time was. He felt his stomach constrict and belch out something hot.
“Try Route 2,” the old man said. “Right at the red barn up at Mansfield, then the road dies away. Take the gravel up the hill and you’ll see it in the distance. Little house on the hem of the woods up there. But be careful.”
“Careful?”
“That Aldiss is a mean one. People tell stories. All the time they do.”
Rice thanked the man and left the way he’d come, the old map tumbled and destroyed in the seat beside him, thinking about leading the professor to Black, pushing him through a threshold and calling out to no one in particular, Got him. I finally got him.
He was so lost in the reverie that he almost missed the turnoff.
* * *
A darkness had fallen over the house, a kind of disrepair. Like everything else, this was symbolic. As Rice approached up the little gravel road, he saw the house as a mind, withered and soft and gone. How simple this would be.
He got out of his car. A basic screen door, its edge flaking with blue-gray paint. A lake in the back. The simplicity had shocked him even before. Aldiss seemed more complicated than that. But here he lived, in this nothing place, with the locals. With the stinking and putrid common, with those who had no business even standing in a room with a man with the sort of intellect Aldiss possessed.
Why? Rice asked himself. Why here?
Smirking, he knocked on the screen door.
The thing bounced on its hinge. Noise shot out into the house, rattled around inside the place. Darkness thrummed.
“Professor!” Rice called. “Professor Aldiss, it’s Dean Anthony Rice from Jasper College. I’ve come to ask you a few questions about what is happening on our campus.”
Nothing. He stepped back, looked around the side of the house. The trees ruffled in the wind. The grass, dead and torn and uprooted here and there, its black underbelly exposed, tickled. Beneath him were the skeletons of flowers in an old trellis.
“Professor Aldiss!” Rice called again, louder this time. “I really need to talk to you. It’s urgent. Michael Tanner has been dead for three days now and now Lewis Prine has been—”
Something moved inside. A tiny shift of light, silver against his cheek.
“Professor Aldiss?”
He waited. Five seconds, ten. Fear pricked up in the back of his mind and he swallowed it down. Nothing to be afraid of here, Rice said to himself. Nothing but an old man who has chosen to live with the locals. Nothing but a has-been, a relic. Gathering strength, he knocked again. The screen door bumped, revealing a fraction of space next to the jamb. That was it. That fraction, that slice of interior. He could if he wanted to, Rice told himself. He could. He should.
His heart hammering now, he opened the screen door and went inside.