THE CALL CAME IN at five o’clock, while Dr. Alice Elkinson was still sitting at the desk in her office, pretending to correct papers under the light of a flex-stemmed reading lamp. The papers were spread out across the gouged and battered oak surface in neat little paper-clipped piles. The stem of the lamp had been pulled all the way over and pointed down, as if it were an examination light in a mad doctor movie of the 1940s. Alice was wasting her time either staring out the window at Minuteman Field or looking up to the wall beside her, where her degrees hung in thin-edged dark wood frames, protected by glass that had been recently polished. Usually when she worked she pinned her hair up, or tied it back with a scarf. Now it was hanging down over her shoulders like a curtain of blond threads. Every once in a while she picked up her red marking pencil, turned it over in her hands, and put it down again.
It got dark early here in October, but not this early. Through the window, Alice could see figures moving back and forth through a half-grey light that looked like ash. She could hear them, too: laughing, giggling, faking sounds of menace and surprise. It was all so different from Berkeley—or even from Swarthmore, where she had started. It was all so different from what she had imagined it to be. For some reason, thinking through to the rest of her life when she was still an adolescent, she had imagined herself in tweed skirts and cashmere sweaters and pearls, under Gothic arches. It hadn’t occurred to her that she would have to read through papers with titles like “The Effects of Capitalist Structural Paranoia on the Work of Benjamin Franklin.”
Idiot.
She started to pick the papers up and put them in a single pile again—that was beginning to feel like all she had done with this day, stacking papers and unstacking them—and as she did she felt the phone next to her arm begin to hum. The phone system was new and didn’t work very well. Even the most rudimentary of the equipment seemed to come on line with an anticipatory growl, like a malicious computer. Alice raised her hand over the receiver and waited. Somewhere at the back of her head, she was counting mentally to three without really knowing she was doing it. There was something about the hum of the phone that was like the ash-gray of the air outside. It boded ill.
Idiot, Alice thought again.
The phone rang and she picked up, saying what she always said, thinking she must sound tired or out of sorts or both. God only knew, she felt both.
“Dr. Alice Elkinson here.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line and then a cough and then another pause. The second pause went on so long, Alice began to wonder if she had caught an obscene caller in the act. There were boys on campus who did that sort of thing, phoned at random and hoped to get a girl’s voice. All the phone numbers on campus were on the same exchange and nothing else in the area was. Alice had heard the talk at Faculty Senate meetings: the boy, the voice, the pause, the realization at the other end of the line that this was a mistake, the faculty was too quick to call security. Then there would be a click and a dial tone. It was the sort of thing that made Alice Elkinson’s skin crawl.
Idiot, she told herself, yet again, yet again, and the word echoed through her skull like a Ping-Pong ball in a cloud chamber.
She was just making up her mind to hang up when another cough came, and then a gargling sound that was surely someone clearing his throat, and then a voice,
“Dr. Elkinson? Dr. Elkinson, this is Chessey Flint.”
Alice had been so sure that the next thing she was going to do was slam the receiver into the cradle, she had to make a conscious effort to freeze her arm.
“Chessey?” she said. “Chessey, are you all right?”
Another pause, another cough, another gargle. Something seemed to be going on in the background: cars passing, small animals creeping out to greet the approaching dark. How could she possibly know something like that? Halloween must be getting to her.
“Chessey?” Alice said again.
“Yes,” Chessey said. “Yes. Dr. Elkinson. I’m here. I’m sorry.”
“What’s wrong?”
What’s wrong? Alice wasn’t sure, but she thought she heard Chessey laugh, not a good laugh, low and bitter.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Chessey said, “not now.”
“Then what is it?”
Pause, cough, gargle. Pause, cough, gargle. Pause, cough, gargle. It was maddening.
“Listen,” Chessey said, “Dr. Elkinson? I’m out here on the Boardman Road. On the way to Hillman’s Rock. Do you know where that is?”
“Yes, Chessey, of course, I know I—”
“I thought you would, because of the hiking. Dr. Elkinson, something’s happened—”
“What?”
“To me.”
Halloween, Alice Elkinson thought, closing her eyes. What was Chessey Flint doing out on Boardman Road?
“Chessey, listen to me, are you alone?”
“I am now.”
“What does that mean, you are now?”
“I’m bleeding, Dr. Elkinson. I’m sitting in this phone booth and I’m still bleeding and I don’t know what to do. I have to get out of here—”
“No,” Alice said. “Don’t get out of there. I’ll come with the car. Where on the Boardman Road?”
“At a gas station.”
There were two dozen gas stations on the Boardman Road. The road weaved in and out among the rising hills. Sometimes it seemed to be supported by gas stations. It was the longest and worst possible route to Hillman’s Rock. It was ten uninterrupted miles of curves and technological blight.
Alice was already reaching for her coat, bending over nearly backward, stretching until she thought it was going to break. The phone cord was short and the coat was all the way across the room, on the rack next to the door. Alice got hold of the coat and yanked it toward her, not really caring that the rack fell over in the process, hitting the floor with the hard ripping sound of splintering wood.
“Chessey, stay where you are. Don’t move. Do you understand me?”
“I have to move,” Chessey said. “I’m going to faint.”
“Chessey—”
But there was nothing at the other end of the line, nothing at all. Alice thought about running down the hall to one of the other offices and calling 911. With the phone line open like this, somebody might be able to trace the call. In the meantime, she could get in her car and start the search herself. Then she heard the one sound she hadn’t wanted to hear, had been afraid to hear ever since Chessey had said that she “had” to get out of there. Somebody hung the phone up.
Alice Elkinson looked down at the coat in her hand and then out the window, at Lenore circling way out over the campus someplace, circling widely and without regard for the darkening evening. Then she plunged her hands into the right-hand pocket of her coat to make sure her keys were there and headed for the door. At the last minute, the part of her she didn’t like resisted. There couldn’t possibly be a worse time to have to go hauling out to the Boardman Road. The resistance came and went in a flash, drowned by Chessey’s voice and a click on the phone.
Dial tone.
Going down the darkened corridors of Liberty Hall, it felt to Alice Elkinson that her life had disintegrated into something uncontrollable, into crises without number.
STANDING AT THE WINDOW in the living room of her apartment in Constitution House, Dr. Katherine Branch was also watching Lenore circle above campus, but unlike Alice Elkinson she wasn’t making a big deal out of it. In spite of her attraction to witchcraft and some of the more esoteric aspects of the women’s spirituality movement, Katherine Branch had never been a particularly fearful or even mildly superstitious woman. Halloween had never meant any more to her than a lot of nonsensical, intrinsically sexist fuss on campus. Technically, she was supposed to be out there now, leading the coven in a procession to King’s Scaffold. They had planned for weeks to hold an exorcism against light in front of the effigy before the bonfire was lit. Instead, she was standing here, still in jeans and turtleneck and sweater, holding two impossible arguments at once.
One of those arguments was with Vivi Wollman, who was sitting on the couch just as she had the other day, but not as she ought to be. Not only was Vivi not dressed for the coven, she wasn’t dressed for anything Katherine could make out. She was wearing a skirt and a pair of stockings not opaque enough to be called tights, but dark enough to look dirty. She had had her hair permed into tight little curls and her face plastered with paint. Katherine couldn’t decide if Vivi looked more like she’d done the plastering herself or gone into town to have herself made up by Babs DeMartin at the Belleville Beauty Palace. Whichever it was, the effect was unrelievedly awful. Vivi Wollman trying to look like a woman was worse than ludicrous.
The other argument was with Evie Westerman, who had rung up just about three minutes ago, while Katherine was telling Vivi to come to her senses. In some ways, the call had been a relief. It had at least distracted Katherine from the fact that she was failing miserably with Vivi, and was probably destined to go on failing. Christ only knew what had gotten into the stupid fool. Unfortunately, the call from Evie was not entirely a relief. Katherine had had Evie in her Principles of Feminism class Evie’s junior year, and Katherine had thought at the time that the girl had the capacity to turn herself into a world-class bitch. Well, now she had. Olympic quality.
“I am no longer willing,” Vivi Wollman was saying, “to ruin my career, my present and my future by the bloodsucking selfishness you’ve decided to label ‘feminism.’ ”
Vivi Wollman. Evie Westerman. The similarities in the names made Katherine’s head spin.
“Just a minute,” she said to Vivi. “I’m on the phone.”
“I don’t want to keep you on the phone,” Evie Westerman said. “I just want to say my piece and get off.”
“I wish you would say your piece,” Katherine said. “I haven’t got the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
Vivi had got up off the couch and started pacing. Her skirt fit badly. Every time she moved, the seams rode and twisted against her hips, the button placket at the back buckled.
“For Christ’s sake,” Katherine told her, “fix that thing, will you? You look like you’ve stuffed your underwear with mutated worms.”
Vivi came to a stop in the middle of the floor, threw her hair back—it didn’t work; that hair was permed stiff—and said, “I don’t know what it is you think you accomplish by insulting me, Katherine, but I’m telling you right now I’ve had it, I quit, and I’m not going to take any more.”
“If you weren’t going to take it anymore, you wouldn’t be here,” Katherine said. “Jesus Christ, Vivi, where do you think you’re going to go?”
“Vivian,” Vivi said. “That’s my name. Vivian.”
“What I’m talking about is you,” Evie Westerman said. “Yesterday. Up in the shed where they keep the tools for fixing cars. Up in the parking lot.”
Lenore had made her circuit and was coming back at Constitution House, cawing and cawing, screaming really. Katherine closed her eyes against the sight—it was amazing how distracting that damn bird could get—and tried to think. Vivi had gone into a full-force pace, back and forth, back and forth, practically bumping into the walls. She was working up a real head of steam. Katherine kept expecting to see smoke pour out of her ears, the way it did out of Sylvester the Cat’s when Tweetie Bird trounced him again.
That was what Vivi looked like. Sylvester the Cat. Same short-legged, pear-bottomed figure, only shorter.
“Look,” Katherine said into the phone, “I still don’t understand what you think you’re—”
“Of course you do,” Evie Westerman said. “Gregor Demarkian is looking for someone who was in that shed yesterday, messing around with the soldering equipment.”
“I was not messing around—”
“Yes, you were,” Evie said. “I saw you. I’ve been sitting right here for the last hour, thinking about whether or not I ought to tell Demarkian about it.”
“Evie,” Katherine said, “where are you?”
“In the Finger Lickin’ Bar and Grill.”
“Where in God’s name is that?”
“On the other side of Belleville from campus. Out on Route Fifty. It’s a roadhouse.”
“I’d guessed that, Evie.”
“I think you ought to be here, too,” Evie said. “I think you ought to get here right away. Because if you’re not here by the time I finish my beer, I’m going to get back into my car, drive back to campus, and go straight to Gregor Demarkian. And you in that shed isn’t the only thing I’m going to tell him about.”
“Evie—”
“There’s also you and a certain bat suit. And you and a certain pair of buckets of lye. And you breaking into Dr. Crockett’s apartment and Dr. Elkinson’s apartment and—”
“Evie.”
“I’m going to hang up now,” Evie said. “Then I’m going to go to the bar and order that beer. Don’t be late.”
The phone was hung up with a smash so hard and so loud, it made Katherine wince.
On the other side of the room, Vivi had stopped pacing and taken up leaning against the windowsill. Her posture was terrible. Her spine was made of spaghetti and everything slumped. Katherine stared at her in exasperation. Anyone else on earth would have had the sense to get out of here minutes ago. Anyone else would at least have had the sense to be getting out of here now.
“If you think I’m going to let you get away with this,” Vivi said, “if you think I’m going to let you fob me off with a lot of pious platitudes and abusive bullshit—”
Katherine walked over to the closet, opened it up, and grabbed her coat. She didn’t have time right now to think about how many times she had played this scene, or with how many people. She didn’t have time right now to think about anything. It didn’t matter a flying damn that her entire history seemed to come down to confrontations like this one, wars fought on worn carpets with women who didn’t have the sense God gave a kangaroo.
Women.
Her coat was a heavy green parka filled with goose down and stitched to look like puffy waves of soap on chemically polluted waters. She threw it over her shoulders and said,
“Vivi, the best advice I can give to you is put your head in the toilet bowl and flush.”
Then she left.
FOR KEN CROCKETT, THE only thing on earth at this precise moment in time—five thirty on Halloween, sharp black splinters of clouds against a grey-dusk sky—was fire. He knew it shouldn’t be. He had known ever since five fifteen, when his phone rang and he’d heard Jack Carroll’s voice, low and threatening, spelling out what he had to do. He had told Jack he had written the directions down on the back of an envelope, and that was true. The envelope was sitting right there in his apartment on the narrow strip of end table next to his phone. Ken distinctly remembered covering it with ink. He even remembered holding down the edge of it with the knuckles of his left hand, while the fingers of that hand were still wrapped around the hem of the bat suit he had found on his closet floor, just as Katherine Branch had said he would.
“We’ve got to talk,” Jack Carroll had said to him. “You do realize that, don’t you, Ken? We’ve got to talk.”
“Yes,” Ken had told him. “I suppose we do.”
“I can’t just walk away from something like that and pretend it never happened. Do you understand that?”
Yes, Ken had thought at the time. He did understand that. What he didn’t understand was what he was supposed to do about it. Sometimes he didn’t understand what he was supposed to do about himself. Was it some kind of psychosis, not wanting to be what you so obviously were, what you couldn’t do anything to change? They had been up at the top of Hillman’s Rock that clay and getting stupid. It was much too late in the afternoon for them to be that high up and still be sure they could get safely down. The sun had been melting into the trees behind them in a flare of red and gold. Even with evening coming on, it had been oddly hot. Jack had taken off his down vest and unbuttoned his flannel shirt. And he—
But he couldn’t remember what he’d done. That was the problem. He could never remember what he’d done when he got himself into a spot like that, and the spots were coming more and more frequently lately, especially with Jack. Ken walked around these days feeling flayed alive.
“I’ve been thinking about going to the Dean,” Jack had said on the phone today. “I’ve been thinking about it for over a week. I don’t think it makes much sense.”
“No,” Ken had said. “I don’t think it makes much sense, either.”
“I couldn’t come up with any sane idea of what I’d tell the Dean. But I can’t just sit here driving myself crazy with it, Ken. You must know that.”
“Yes,” Ken had said. “I mean no. Of course not.”
“I want you to come out here right now, okay? Neutral territory. Where we can talk.”
There were men at Berkeley and Chicago and Yale who walked around with lavender scarves tied around their throats. There were men in Washington and Los Angeles and New York who bought apartments with their lovers and were buried together under linked headstones engraved with the poetry of passion and AIDS. They were on the lip of the third millennium and there was no sense, no sense at all, to the way he was behaving.
Except, of course, that there was. He was not any of those men. He was Dr. Kenneth Crockett. He didn’t live in any of those places. He lived here, in Belleville, Pennsylvania, where every member of his family since the year 1692 had made his home and his life and his name—and that name definitely had not been fag.
“Ken?” Jack had said. “Look. I’m up at the cabin. I’m going to leave in a few minutes.”
“Where to?”
“Not to campus. I don’t want to talk on campus. I thought I’d go over to Harrison’s in Chelton and have a steak. Can you meet me there?”
“Now?”
“Yes, Ken, of course now. I have to be back in time for Demarkian’s lecture. I have to introduce the man.”
“Oh.”
Ken had looked at his clock automatically, seen the time, seen Jack’s point. Harrison’s was a good half hour away by car, no matter how hard you pumped the gas pedal. He felt himself start to sweat and closed his eyes against the rain of salt that poured into them.
“Jack? Look, right now—”
“It’s got to be now, Ken. It’s got to be.”
“But—”
“I’m going to leave right now. Meet me at Harrison’s.”
He had looked down and seen that the bat suit was bunched and knotted in both his hands, trailing across his face, wound around the telephone receiver. He had been pulling and twisting it while he talked and he hadn’t even noticed. Then he had heard Jack hang up without saying good-bye and he had let the receiver fall to the end table. It had seemed like much more than he would ever be able to do to put it back in its cradle.
In San Francisco, there were entire neighborhoods full of nothing but men like him. In New Orleans, there was a section of the city with its own place on the tourist maps, celebrating everything he thought he wanted to forget. Even Minneapolis, Minnesota, had a temple of the masculine all its own, where men who were what he was didn’t have to hide.
And he was here.
He looked down at the bat suit now and told himself to get on with it. He was in the basement of Constitution House, standing next to the incinerator. He was all ready to go. All he had to do was throw the damn thing in there and make sure it caught.
Fire.
At the last minute, he got the tin of kerosene off the shelf on the west wall and dosed the bat suit thoroughly. Then he threw it into the black cast-iron tank and watched it flare.
He knew what came next, what always came next, just when the pain got so bad he thought he was going to shred into blood and skin and bone in the blades of it.
He was going to start to get angry, and once he started he wouldn’t be able to stop.
He was going to be ready to kill someone.
IT WAS FIVE THIRTY-FIVE, and up in Chessey Flint and Evie Westerman’s room in Lexington House, Jack Carroll was trying to open a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne. Evie Westerman had given him explicit instructions about what he was and what he wasn’t supposed to do. It was apparently the height of stupidity to pop a cork on a bottle of anything quite this expensive. Evie had even gone into just why it was this expensive, but Jack hadn’t been listening to her. The phrase “vintage years” always reminded him of old women who wore white lace gloves to lunch.
Over on the more neatly made of the two double beds, Chessey was sitting cross-legged in a pair of jeans and one of his shirts, looking happily disheveled but a little guilty.
“Do you really think we should have done all that?” she asked them. “I think that was a really awful thing I did to Dr. Elkinson.”
“I don’t,” Evie said. “I think you were brilliant. I didn’t know you had it in you. That makes two things I didn’t know you had it in you for over the last two days.”
“Oh, that,” Jack said. “I knew she had that in her. What did you think the problem was?”
Evie made a face. “In my opinion, it was a case of pathological nostalgia for the fifties. But what do I know?”
“Got it.” Jack waved the cork triumphantly in the air and reached for one of the glasses Evie had set out along the desk. They weren’t what he thought of as champagne glasses—they were narrow and tall instead of wide and squat—but Evie had assured him that they were what champagne glasses were really supposed to be, and she should know. He poured the glass he was holding full and handed it to Chessey.
“To all the brilliant things only I knew you were going to be,” he said.
Chessey frowned at him. “Still—” she began.
Evie snorted. “Look, what we had to do was get them off campus and out of the way for at least an hour and a half each, right? And we did it, right?”
“You bet,” Jack said.
“Still,” Chessey said.
“Still nothing,” Evie said. “I say we ought to be knighted by the Queen. Except that we don’t have a Queen. Never mind. I’ll think of something.”
Jack poured the second glass full and handed it to her. He saw her point. He even believed in it more than he believed in Chessey’s. He did have to give Chessey one thing.
It was not only an awful thing she had done to Dr. Elkinson, it was a thoroughly shitty thing he had done to Ken Crockett.
Necessary or not.