An Academy for Liars

Chapter 35

When classes began, Lennon decided to pay Sawyer a visit at the Fincher Library, where he worked as an apprentice to the head archivist. Because of that apprenticeship, Sawyer was one of the few people on campus with unfettered access to the files of every student that had ever studied at Drayton. Which meant that Sawyer could tell Lennon where Claude had departed to upon his expulsion, assuming he was willing to help her.

The Fincher Library—named after the head boy of Drayton’s inaugural class—was widely known to be the second-most-haunted building on Drayton’s campus (the first being Logos House). While the school’s official stance was to eschew any belief in the paranormal, its founder, John Drayton, was a paranormal enthusiast, and was said to have hosted a number of drunken séances in the library. Drayton himself didn’t believe in ghosts, but he found it highly entertaining to watch feebleminded paranormal enthusiasts succumb to their own anxieties.

Lennon, like Drayton, didn’t believe in ghosts, but she did believe there was something strange about the Fincher Library, something in the atmosphere there, like the charged quality of the air just before a thunderstorm. The library was about as grand as the rest of the campus, but with its looming cathedral ceilings and polished stone floors it looked more like an art museum. Nothing in the space invited touch or exploration. There were few desks or chairs, and the books themselves—old but impeccable and packed tightly on the shelves—may as well have been behind glass.

Upon entering, Lennon walked up to the front desk, where Sawyer stood behind an archaic monitor, the screen throwing a harsh glare across his face.

“Have you heard about Claude’s expulsion?” she asked him. It was the first time they’d spoken since he returned to campus the night before.

“Of course I heard. It’s all anyone can talk about.”

“Claude told me he thought Dante killed Benedict,” said Lennon.

“Claude says a lot of things, especially when he’s drunk and angry.”

“But does he lie? In your experience?”

Sawyer paused for a beat, considering. “Not intentionally. But he’s grieving and sick and confused. I wouldn’t put too much stock into anything he says, given his state.”

“So you think there’s nothing to it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then what are you saying?”

Sawyer heaved a sigh, shuffled some papers that were already mostly in order. “I’m saying that when you spend enough time around here, you learn not to involve yourself in the messes of other people. Nothing good comes of it.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Lennon. “And on that note, I was hoping you could pull Claude’s file for me? I need his most recent address.”

“Lennon—”

“I just need to ask him about something he said before he got kicked out.”

Sawyer, staying true to his beliefs about not sticking his nose where it didn’t belong, didn’t ask for particulars. “You should really leave that alone.”

“I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important. Come on, please? For a friend?”

“Who’s the friend in question here? You or Claude?”

“Both of us,” said Lennon.

He considered the request with his head bowed. “Fine.”

The archives beneath Fincher Library were strange and cavernous, like a whale’s belly or the skeletal interior of some primordial beast. The ceilings were low enough that anyone over six-three would have to duck a bit to keep from bumping their head. The walls were bathed in a flickering, jaundiced light, and the narrow alleys that ran between the bookshelves were so long that the perspective warped a bit when Lennon gazed down them. Even when she squinted, she couldn’t see the far wall. “Holy shit—”

Sawyer shushed her. “Keep it down.”

He led her through one of the narrow alleys between shelves, muttering softly to himself as he went. When it became apparent that they were alone, he relaxed some, taking the time to point out some of his favorite offerings stored in the archives: a letter penned by John Drayton’s mother, wherein she relays home remedies to treat a winter cold (boiled turnips, tallow poultices, mustard with raw onions). A scarred Ouija board that John Drayton was said to favor during weekly séances. A log of all of the school’s expenditures that featured a number of strange items, like several sheaves of horsehair, a set of dentures, several miles’ worth of thick nautical rope, and other oddities.

“We keep the newer student files at the back of the archives,” Sawyer explained, leading Lennon to the back of the collection, where the shelves were steel instead of wood and the files themselves were crisper, the papers stark white instead of yellowed with age. He began to scan through them, still muttering to himself. “One of the archivists told me she updated Claude’s file just after he left, so it should be here…”

But as Sawyer walked deeper into the newly updated parts of the archive, Lennon stalled in front of a dark cabinet with many drawers. One of those drawers was just ajar, and when Lennon pulled it open it was almost as though someone had persuaded her to do it, the motion detached from her own mind.

Within—behind a sheet of glass—was an arrangement of bones so strange and warped that the species of the creature they belonged to was virtually indistinguishable. But on closer inspection, Lennon saw that the bone shards were human. There was the curve of a skull cap. A rib cracked in half. A small scattering of shattered teeth.

“Oh my god. Who is this?”

“One of Drayton’s boys,” said Sawyer, visibly disturbed. Not looking at her. “First generation, most likely.”

“What the hell happened to him?”

Sawyer blinked quickly, recovered himself. He slid the drawer firmly shut. “Someone must’ve rearranged things over the summer. This cabinet isn’t even supposed to be here—”

“ Sawyer. How did this happen to that boy? Was he beaten? Run over by something? I don’t understand—”

“He pushed himself too hard,” said Sawyer. “Or he was pushed. It’s hard to say. When persuasion is practiced incorrectly, the power of a person’s will can turn on their own body. It’s like an autoimmune disorder, almost, wherein the immune system attacks the—”

“I know how autoimmune disorders work. My mom has one. What I’m asking is how the hell did persuasion become this?”

“It was a seizure, probably. His muscles spasmed so tight around weakened bones and ligaments that they broke. There are records of Drayton’s earliest boys falling ill, their bones turning brittle from the effects of persuasion, so that when they seized—sometimes for days at a time—they suffered fractures and other injuries. In one case, a boy was said to have snapped his own neck in the throes of a days-long convulsion.”

“Is that like a worse version of what happened to me? The day I first came here?”

Sawyer shook his head. “Not quite. These boys were different. In a letter to his family physician, John Drayton wrote that one of the boys who’d died was still…moving.”

“What do you mean, ‘moving’? Like decomposing?”

Sawyer shook his head, looking drawn and pale. “It was just a few hours after his death, allegedly. John wrote that the room where he died echoed with the cracks of breaking bones. Even though he wasn’t alive, his will was still ravaging his corpse. Like it was possessed by something.”

“I thought John Drayton didn’t believe in ghosts?”

“But it wasn’t a ghost,” said Sawyer. “At least not in the conventional sense.”

“That’s horrifying,” said Lennon.

Sawyer didn’t disagree. “Look, that was then, and this is now. Over the years we’ve learned more about persuasion and how to practice it safely. No one dies like that anymore. No one is pushed that far beyond their limit, or even allowed to push themselves that far. I would know. Student records are kept here in the library. I key them in myself. What happened to some of Drayton’s earliest students is tragic, but stuff like that just doesn’t happen anymore.” He said this as if to absolve himself.

They were quiet for a long time. The silence between them only broken when Sawyer pulled Claude’s file. “Here,” he said, and he handed over a thick leather folder.

Lennon flipped it open. Within, there were the expected things, birth certificates and scans of old passports, transcripts from high school and college. But it was the other things that surprised her. The extensive doctor’s notes dating back decades, the family photos, and faded Polaroids of Claude as a kid. There were even a few crude drawings in crayon, depicting a stick figure family, each person spaced oddly apart. An assortment of plane tickets and dividend checks and tuition statements and transcripts from a Catholic preschool somewhere in Mississippi. On the following page, therapy notes from a session years prior outlining Claude’s “antisocial tendencies” and “combative approach to discussion.”

Lennon stared down in awe and horror. It was an entire life flattened and put on paper. It felt wrong to even look at it.

“Do you keep one of these for each of us?”

Sawyer nodded. “We update them roughly once a semester to include final grades or new contact information in the event that someone graduates or leaves, like Claude did.”

Lennon paused to jot down Claude’s most recent address on a slip of paper. It was a residence somewhere in Manhattan, which surprised her. Given Claude’s rich southern accent, she’d been expecting to find him on a plantation somewhere deep in the south. “So you have one on me?”

“Of course.”

“What’s in it?”

“Why are you so sure I looked?”

“I know you looked. Why wouldn’t you?”

Sawyer rolled his eyes. “You’re not half as interesting as you think you are,” he said, which Lennon noted was decidedly not a no .

“What if I asked you to pull Dante’s file? Could you do it?”

“No. That information is…restricted.”

“Why? Because he’s a professor?”

“No…I can access the files of professors too.”

“Then why is Dante’s restricted, specifically?”

“Why don’t you just ask him yourself?” said Sawyer, exasperated. “The two of you are close. I can’t imagine he’d refuse you.”

“Then you have a flawed idea of who he is and how much I matter to him.”

“My condolences,” he said flatly and without a hint of sympathy.

Lennon narrowed her eyes. “You know something. Don’t you?”

The flush on Sawyer’s cheeks deepened from red to an almost ashen purple. He didn’t look at her but didn’t deny anything either. “I’m not doing this with you.”

“Why not?”

“Because his file basically doesn’t exist.”

“What? Why?”

“I don’t know,” said Sawyer. “I only found out because Claude came in asking questions a few days after Ben’s death. He kept demanding Dante’s file, and I was worried he’d lose it if I didn’t hand it over. So I offered to look for it—just to appease him, keep him quiet. But when I found Dante’s file there was next to nothing in it. Just a slip of paper that said the contents were redacted.”

“Did Claude ever say why he wanted it in the first place?”

“He was drunk and, honestly, less than lucid, so I’m not entirely sure what he was after. But he was determined, and he became furious when I couldn’t find it. I even tried to ask the other librarians if they knew why his file was redacted, and they didn’t have a clue. Or if they did, they wouldn’t tell me. All I gathered was that the redacted files are kept in the vice-chancellor’s private library. She’s the only one who has access to them.”

Something twisted deep in Lennon’s stomach. Feeling sick, Lennon nodded and tucked Claude’s address into the pocket of her trousers. “Thanks for all of this. I’ll tell Claude you said hi when I see him—”

“Not so fast,” said Sawyer. “If you’re going to see Claude, I’m coming with you.”