AT THREE O’CLOCK IN the morning, Gregor Demarkian, unable to sleep, got off the couch he had been lying on in the suite he was not supposed to be sharing with Bennis but was and went to look out the window. Bennis was behind the closed door of the bedroom, dead to the world. Even the acid smell of her cigarette smoke had faded hours ago. Gregor’s back felt as if it had been worked over by a curling iron for days. This was the guest suite in Constitution House, the best apartment in the building according to Tibor. It was on the fourth floor and looked out over Minuteman Field to King’s Scaffold.
At this hour of the morning, the campus was dead. There were no students wandering back from late study in the bowels of the library, no stray drunks reeling in from roadhouses out of town. Gregor had never seen a college campus so peaceful in the dark. He kept thinking that one good look at the Halloween decorations ought to change the atmosphere for him, but he couldn’t see any Halloween decorations. There were only the ominous lumps of logs rising up against the Scaffold and the straw man pumpkin head at the top.
He didn’t know how long he had been standing there at the window before he realized what he was looking at. Five minutes, ten minutes, a minute and a half: he found it hard to keep track of things when he was this tired. His gaze swept back and forth across the top of the Scaffold, back and forth, and finally it stopped.
There was somebody up there, prancing back and forth, doing God only knew what in the harsh light of a moon that looked like it ought to belong to another planet.
A bat.