The next morning, Professor Lear climbs the staircase that leads to the top floor and beyond. There, in the black turret that sticks up high above the rest of the College, lives an ancient man he wants to interview. Edward Emeritus had been the headmaster at the College on the Moors for sixty years. Griswold is eighty himself, though one wouldn’t know it when he is whipping a boy, his few wisps of white hair flying up, spit coming from his mouth below his hooked red nose as he whacks children with blood-drawing roundhouse strikes accomplished with more flare than the best blows of the boys’ bats on the cricket field. He had spent nearly all of his six decades at the college waiting to succeed the old man. But in a sense he never did, for the legend of Headmaster Emeritus lives on, so much so that he is allowed to stay in the college, kept there in that room above everyone else’s, his counsel sought on every issue until just the last few years.
Lear is breathing heavily by the time he reaches the great man’s room. There is no answer to his knock. For an instant Lear wonders if Emeritus has expired. The old man’s one hundredth birthday was toasted the previous year, though he had been too frail to come downstairs. In fact, no student currently at the college can be certain to have ever seen him, and most professors, Lear included, haven’t spoken to him in years. Lear gently pushes open the door.
And there the old headmaster is—sitting at his desk with his back to the door, staring out over the moors, mumbling to himself, still wearing his robes. Lear needs him to be sane, not perfectly sane, not bright with awareness and suspicion, but somewhere in that unguarded state that very elderly people reach, almost as if they were between sleeping and life, in their own sort of dream.
“Headmaster Emeritus?”
The old man keeps staring out the window, muttering.
Lear walks around so he can be seen. His presence doesn’t startle the ancient man in the least.
“Yes, my child, have you come to be whipped?” Emeritus speaks in explosive bursts in a thin, hoarse pitch.
This man had been the king of whippings. He made Griswold look like an amateur. Though his body is withered and shrunken today, his face fallen as if it is beginning to melt, his hands, resting on his lap, are as big and powerful as ever. He is said to have left scars on some students that will last lifetimes.
“Sir, it is Professor Hamish Lear.”
“Oh. Oh, Lear. Yes, I recall you, young man. Are you settling in nicely?”
“Sir, I have been here for forty years now.”
“I see.”
“I have a few questions for you.”
“Questions!” The old man tries to get up, but he can’t and falls back into the chair. “Questions about discipline? Do you have a problem I must straighten out? Send me the boy!”
“No, sir, there is no boy involved.”
“No boy! But how can this be?”
“I want to ask you a few questions about the history of the College on the Moors.”
“Yes, well, I was the headmaster there, my boy.”
“Smooth sailing?”
“For the most part, yes, thank you for inquiring.”
“No problems? Nothing suspicious happened during your tenure that you still think about?”
“Well, there was the case of the murdered boy.”
Lear feels the blood drain from his face. He is glad that the old man can’t see well. He doesn’t want to talk about this and there is no reason to now. The boy Emeritus has just spoken of was precious to Lear, though he hasn’t mentioned him (or what happened) to his grandchildren and certainly not to Edgar Brim.
“He wasn’t murdered. There was nothing suspicious about it.”
“Well, killed, at least. Erasmus Scrivener was his name, a lovely boy, had a deformed foot, if I recall correctly. I never had the pleasure of whipping him, not once. He didn’t need it.” The old man is sad for an instant, but goes on. “He was a genius in literature. A man named Lear, who taught him, told me that.”
“That would be me.”
“You! No, no, can’t be; he is a young man.”
“Scrivener committed suicide, sir, nothing more.”
“Ah, yes, that was what they said. The prints of his boots led to the lake.”
Scrivener had been Lear’s prize student in the days when he taught literature. He had often secretly veered from the curriculum and taught modern works to his classes. He remembers even instructing them on the writings of Poe. They loved those stories—the tale about the man who pulled his wife’s teeth while she died, another about a boy who killed an old man because he didn’t like one of his eyes, and of course, the poem about the ghastly raven.
“You are Lear, for certain?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Has your arm healed? That was one nasty business. A wolf, was it not? Wolves are rarely seen here.”
“Yes … a wolf, sir.”
“The boy died while you were on sabbatical getting well, did he not?”
Scrivener had indeed died when Lear was away. It had pained him even more than the loss of his limb. He had done nothing about it, and there had been something to do. He had been afraid.
“It was suicide, sir, the police were sure.”
Though there are few lakes on this part of the moors, the one in question, Loch Blue, is about a mile to the north. It seemed obvious that the boy had walked out there alone and perished in the freezing waters. A few prints were clear the next day, leading up to the edge; no remains were ever found. He had been a happy boy from a loving family and with excellent prospects; he had no reason to despair. Lear still sees Scrivener sometimes these days, in his nightmares.
He needs to change the direction of the conversation, get directly to the point he has come to investigate. The old man is nodding off.
“Sir, were you to want to hide somewhere in the college, where would you do it? Are there any old, secret places that no one else knows about?”
“Hide? Why would I do that, young fellow? That sounds like an impertinent question. Are you an impertinent boy? Are you here to be whipped?”
“Could you hide anywhere in the walls?”
“No, my boy, they are solid throughout the building, no exceptions. But there is another place, one that is a different story indeed, one with potential! Were I that Brontë woman who wrote those dreadful novels—”
“There were three Brontës, sir.”
“The one who wrote that modern nonsense for moral reprobates about that lunatic woman, insane as a rabid dog, kept in that hidden apartment in that dreadful gothic mansion—”
“Jane Eyre?”
“That’s the one! If I had a lunatic, whom I wanted to hide, I’d—” He pauses. “Not that I do, young man.”
“I am sure you don’t, Headmaster.”
“I do not, you scoundrel, you can be sure of it! I am hiding no lunatic woman on these grounds! Do I make myself clear?” He made a motion to get up again, but fell back.
“Headmaster, I am—”
“Do you doubt me, young man? I HAVE NO LUNATIC WOMAN HIDDEN AWAY!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you here for a whipping?”
“Where would you hide her?”
“Why, in the cellar, you fool.”
The cellar. It’s really only Usher who ever goes there, braving it to fetch bottles from its wine racks. The moans that seem to come from it at night are just the winds blowing low across the moors. If something were there, would Usher not see it?
“There’s a hidden room down there,” says Emeritus. Lear has never heard this. He leans forward. “A catacomb! Come even closer, Griswold, for I can only tell you this. It is an old secret passed down from the previous headmasters. I thought I wouldn’t tell you. There is no need for you to know. It would just scare the boys. But since you are here—” He notices the moors through the window and completely nods off, snoring like he has a bass trumpet in his mouth.
“Sir!”
He comes awake with a start.
“Are you here to be whipped? Take down your trousers, underclothing and all!”
“The room in the cellar, sir?”
“Oh, no one knows about that, boy. Why would I tell you! You are impertinent. Down with your trousers!”
“You would hide your lunatic woman where, sir?”
“If I had a lunatic woman! I am not saying that I have! Are you accusing me?”
“Yes, sir, I am. Tell me about the room or I shall expose you.”
The old man pauses and examines him. “I do not have such a woman, but if I did I would put her at the far eastern end of the cellar where they built an ice room when the college was constructed in the 1590s. A fine school for boys, mind you!”
“They made an ice room? Because it was cool down there?” Lear thinks this strange because the college has an ice room deep in the ground just outside the gates.
“But it wasn’t cool, lad, no.”
“It wasn’t?”
“It was as hot as hell, sir, as the devil’s own home, so they filled in the doorway to it! And that is why no one knows it is there! You can see it if you search, though no one would dare to do that these days even if they knew it existed. It is filled in with modern cement and stones. Though I hear there are holes.”
A room in the cellar, thinks Lear. He has what he needs.