The first thing she noticed was the light.
It was a bleeding light, a slow strain of whiteness on the walls. Otherwise the classroom building was pitch-dark. Alex climbed the three steps in the vestibule and then turned the corner into a long corridor. When she did she saw a man. He was crouching just in front of her inside that pool of security light. Aldiss, she thought. But no. It wasn’t the professor.
It was Matthew Owen.
“He’s hurt,” Owen said. “Get someone.”
Alex looked down. Owen’s hand was on Keller’s back. Keller lay on the floor, motionless. Injured. There was nothing in Alex’s mind but confusion. Why was the nurse here in this building? What the hell was going on?
“Matthew,” she managed to say, her tongue thick and clumsy. She looked at him, tried to place him here. “What are you doing?”
“I saw Aldiss running away from the house,” he said breathlessly. “I followed the professor in here and found Keller like this.”
“Where is he, Matthew?” she asked. “Where’s Aldiss?”
“I don’t know. I lost him in the hallway, but he’s still here. In the building.”
She took a step toward Owen and looked down. There was a gash on Keller’s head, and the nurse was applying pressure to the wound. She saw how he looked at Keller, how concerned he seemed about the other man. It’s time to stop, she told herself. This is not the night class. This isn’t part of Aldiss’s game. He’s trying to help.
Seeing her relax, Owen nodded. “Aldiss hurt your friend. I need help. Can you help me, Alex?”
Slowly, carefully, she knelt beside Keller. She listened to the shallow keen of his breath, running her fingers through his hair as Owen inspected the wound. The hall was quiet.
“We’re in danger here,” Alex said. “The professor—he’ll come back for us. For me.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Owen said without looking up. There was something distant about his voice. Something almost detached.
“What are you talking about? He’s here, Matthew, in this building. You said so yourself. He’s going to come back and—”
“Shhh,” he said, pressing harder, dark blood trickling out around his fingers.
Alex stood up. “Well, I’m going. I’m the only one who can convince him to turn himself in. Stay with Keller until I get back, okay?”
She began to move into the darkness. She knew her way through this corridor, even though there was little light. She’d walked here in her dreams many times.
She moved down the hallway, keeping close to the wall. Emergency lighting bled onto the floor, and she followed the grid with her hands on the cold stone. Counting steps, her heart roaring in her ears, she felt the terror replaced by a hopeless inevitably. Three steps, four. Before she could take another something stopped her. A slight hush from behind, a flit of shadowy movement. She stopped, listening. Go back. Go outside and get Black right now. This isn’t your job, Alex. But it was. It had been hers since the beginning, since she’d found the book and its hidden message. Now she had to finish it.
Another step, and again something made her hesitate. Footsteps? She turned around and—
—everything exploded into whiteness. She stumbled back against the stone wall, an arm blocking her vision. A powerful flashlight had been aimed directly into her eyes. She saw a man’s legs approaching, his dark shoes softly vibrating the tile beneath her. The upper half of him was invisible, sheared away by the manic light. Owen? Aldiss? She had no way of knowing. The world had simply winked out. “What are you doing?” Alex shouted, her voice a panicked and warbling screech.
No response. The man drew closer.
Her vision swam, tiny pinwheels spinning behind her lids. She blinked madly, her eyes watering, and felt the man there, in her space. Felt his heat. Smelled him. She still could see nothing but his dark slacks. There was something familiar about the way he stood, about the cant of his posture. But before she could figure out what it was the light pressed forward, blotting everything out again.
“Who are you?” she said.
No sound. He kept the light high. There was a kind of controlled violence in it; that light could have been a knife. An axe.
“Professor, is that you? It’s over, Professor. They know all about you, about what you’ve—”
Closer now. The light was almost pressed against her face. The bulb touched her cheek, stinging her skin. She slapped him away but he restrained her, pushed her back into the wall. And it was then, as he moved his hand toward hers, that the light shifted. Was knocked upward the slightest degree. And beneath it, in her blurred vision, she saw the man’s face.
“Matthew.”
“I only want to talk to you,” the nurse said. “Just stay there.”
Things were moving in her mind. Conclusions, connections. “Aldiss . . .” she managed.
The light remained. The figure behind it, silhouetted by the beam, stiffened. “I already told you, Alex,” he said. “The professor is somewhere in this building. He’s hiding from us.” There was a mechanical quality to his voice now.
Could Owen be the one? Alex thought. But how could that be? Aldiss said to look for someone who was part of the night class. And yet here she was, trapped in the hallway, the wild light still flooding her vision. As she backed away from him Alex thought of what she knew about Owen, of all the things she’d seen from him the last two days.
He was a nurse who’d left his old job after a falling-out of some kind. Now he stayed with Dean Fisk, lived in the mansion, learning its secrets.
She remembered the card Aldiss had given her: The Procedure has begun. Everything they say, everything you hear could be part of the game. Trust no one.
Another memory: Dean Fisk in his study saying, But Matthew tells me that he sees them playing it on his walks across the east campus . . .
“Alex,” Owen said now. “Keller needs help. He’s bleeding badly. Aldiss hurt him.”
A thought. A seed of something. A reason. Everything became clear in that one second; everything was revealed in that fraction of no-time: the reason Owen was here. The reason he’d come to Jasper College to care for Dean Fisk.
She looked at the man. Then she said, her eyes steady and her voice level, “Why are you doing this to us, Matthew?”
Owen’s hand wobbled slightly; the light danced. Silence.
“You said you were brought here by the college, but that isn’t true, is it? This is a job you coveted for a long time. You’ve been waiting for this moment.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Alex,” Owen said, “but you really need to—”
“You killed them,” she went on. “You killed Michael Tanner, and then you put Melissa Lee in the lake to frame Aldiss. It was you all along.”
Owen took another step, the light shifting erratically. Alex listened for movement outside Culver Hall. Nothing now but the howl of the wind. She shut her eyes again.
“It’s not what you think,” he said. “Just listen to me now. Listen, Alex—”
A memory descended, fitfully: Iowa. That morning in Iowa inside the Rutherford house. She realized for the first time how much she wanted to be done with it now, to be free of the night class and Paul Fallows and all the rest of it. To finally have it behind her.
“You killed them,” she said again.
“No, you killed them, Alex.”
Alex froze. “What are you talking about?”
“When you went to Iowa you set in motion all that would happen,” Owen said. “You ruined the game for everyone else.” He made that face again: that sour, childlike face that said to her, This is happening whether you like it or not. “Now I am going to win it once and for all.”
He grabbed her. Grabbed her by the hair and pulled her out of the screaming light. And it was then that Alex saw the nurse’s face up close; she saw what was strange and familiar about him. That thing she could not place before. It was the eye, Owen’s one blue eye visible while the other remained hidden in shadow. Below the eye was the patchy down of his beard, pale skin reddening in the cold beneath it. She remembered Aldiss during one of his seizures, the camera jostling just enough to reveal a face behind him. Yes—she had seen Owen before.
It ends, she thought as the light fluttered and began to seep away. It ends like this. Like this. Like this.
Aldiss had been right all along. The killer was part of the night class.
Matthew Owen had been one of Richard Aldiss’s prison guards.