9 THE MASQUERADE GROTESQUE
9
T HE M ASQUERADE G ROTESQUE
The paramedics questioned us first, then administration. The process took several hours and mostly comprised prompts such as Did you notice Professor Kolesnik struggling? Was he choking? Coughing? Wheezing? Did he speak to you? Are you okay? Do you need to sit down? Do you need a glass of water?
Yes, to all the above. I was a hallucinatory kind of tired. My shirt was still speckled with blood, and there was a smear of it down my wrist.
Esther St. Roche, chair of the Fine Arts Department, was our main point of contact. She wouldn’t let us out of her militant line of sight for the entirety of the afternoon. We had to sit in the stiff chairs outside of her office until the paramedics had long since loaded him in the back of an ambulance, until the only evidence that anything had ever happened were my stained clothes.
Amrita told them that I was the one who had found him, because I was mostly incapable of putting together words. St. Roche fixated on me after that—she wanted to know exactly what he had done, if I noticed him eating or drinking anything, if I believed he may have taken any medication, if Kolesnik had mentioned illness earlier than that day. I answered honestly: I didn’t know. It was obvious that my responses weren’t what St. Roche wanted to hear. She was a stocky woman, probably around my mother’s age and height, but so broad and severe that she carried the aura of a dutiful knight. She crouched by my chair when she talked to me, so I could see all the ways her face changed with what I told her. A disappointed frown, a furrow of the eyebrows, teeth biting down on the inside of her cheek.
Administration let us go back to the Manor a little after dinner had officially ended, so my women ate like scavenger animals out of the fridge while I watched, my mouth all sandpaper and sourness, head pounding. Every loud noise was startling. I kept hearing that scream.
And though the image wouldn’t leave my head—Kolesnik’s cheek smashed against the stone, spit foamy and white at the corners of his mouth, eyes rolling, hands scrabbling at his chest—there was also a horrible, devouring part of me awestruck by the potential of what had occurred. I was afraid to open my mouth and let something unforgiveable seep out.
We gathered around the table in silence. Their hunger made a mountain of carrot sticks and hummus and microwaved pita and chopped apples. No one tried to force me to eat anything, though I knew they wanted to. But we didn’t know how to broach what had happened.
Caroline’s phone buzzed face down against the table, a bright edge glowing around it. A second later, so did the rest of ours. We looked in unison.
The first half of the email announced what we had expected. It was with the heaviest of hearts that the Rotham School announced the passing of the legendary professor Gabriel Kolesnik, in a sudden and unexpected tragedy. Grief counseling would be available as requested. Accommodations would be made for his thesis students along with updates for what to expect throughout the rest of the academic year.
Then, below that, came the unexpected part: despite the loss of the tradition’s founder and the absence of his legendary Boar King costume, the school planned to go through with tomorrow’s Masquerade Grotesque. To postpone such an event would be like dismissing the influence of a brilliant mind like Kolesnik’s on Rotham’s legacy and culture, St. Roche’s email read, and we plan to honor this celebration as a vigil for the professor.
“Wow,” Finch said finally. “They’re still throwing the boogeyman convention.”
“Good. If I wasted all that time on my costume when I could have been in the studio, I would have pitched a fit,” Caroline sighed.
“Okay, priorities,” Amrita said. “They’ve probably just already paid for caterers and don’t want to deal with hosting another vigil later on.”
We fell into silence. I read the email again and again, as if I might find a secret message between the lines intended just for me—St. Roche saying you did this, you did this, you did this, it’s your fault, his blood is on your hands. The prickling pain in my temple worsened.
“Are we going to talk about it?” Saz the mind reader asked, twining a strand of her hair around one finger, the glitter from her eyeshadow dusted over the tops of her cheeks as if she’d cried out the shine.
Amrita drank deeply from her glass of water before saying, “About what?”
“Come on, you know what. Are we going to talk about our part in this? How we hexed him and basically wished his death on him?”
I could taste Caroline’s blood everywhere, everywhere, everywhere.
“We have no part,” Finch said, “because there is no it . Old people get sick, and they die.”
“He was completely fine last week,” Amrita said quietly. She was staring at her hands, pulling grapes off the vine and dropping them back into their plastic package.
“Fine? He blows a quart of blood out of his nose every class.”
“Blew,” Caroline corrected.
“Oh, fuck you,” Finch snapped.
“Finchard.” Saz frowned, tugging at the strand of hair in agitation now.
“ Sarah .”
Saz rolled her eyes. “I’m asking a valid question! We cursed him, and he died a week later. You’re telling me that’s a coincidence?”
“We are not responsible for an old man having a heart attack. It was a wrong-place-wrong-time kind of thing, and it sucked, but we tried our best to help him.” Some of the severity slipped from Finch’s tone as she said, “I mean, we can all agree that bleeding on hamburger meat is not the same thing as murder, right?”
Caroline snorted a laugh but didn’t say anything, just cut her eyes in my direction. I was afraid that my heart was beating loud enough for the rest of them to hear it.
“Okay,” Saz started. “I’m not saying that it was our fault. I’m not. But if it was ... didn’t he deserve it?”
The pit in my stomach dropped another nine levels, to some perfidious circle of hell. Because he did deserve it, didn’t he? If he had found it so easy to reach for Caroline, what else could he have done over the years? If our ritual and its subsequent hex caused his violent death, then what reason did we have to feel guilty about it?
I kept a fingertip pressed to my temple, trying to quell the dull roar, and flinched when Caroline’s fingers caught my hand and gave it a squeeze.
“He was a self-absorbed dick who thought he could treat women like objects,” Caroline said firmly. “He deserved it.”
Silence enveloped us again. Amrita ate her neutered grapes one at a time. Caroline kept a grounding hand on me.
Amrita cleared her throat. “Does this mean we still have to write thesis papers?”
“What, so he can grade them in hell?” Caroline asked.
“Caroline, you dog,” Saz gasped, a smile forming. She pressed her lips together to kill it. “You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.”
Caroline grinned and bared her teeth. “We’re not speaking ill. We’re talking shit.”
“Oh, Christ,” Amrita said, sliding a hand over her eyes. But her mouth curled up at the corners just slightly.
Saz let the smile break through. “Okay, new hex idea. We saddle his soul with an eternity of burning somewhere subterranean.”
“He’s probably in the waiting room for hell as we speak. Sitting next to, fucking, I don’t know, Beetlejuice.”
“Nah, he’s being tortured by Cenobites in the Hellraiser dimension. He’s kicking it with that one who has big nasty teeth.”
“Chatterer. Get it straight.”
They were all talking over one another. Saz looked at me and grinned. “Look! You made Jo smile! She’s smiling because Kolesnik’s in hell!”
“Stop,” I begged. I had to pin my hand over my mouth to hide my nervous cackle.
“We are such bad people,” Finch said, but she couldn’t stop laughing, and I loved when she laughed like that, the uncontrollable roll of it soaring high and happy, the way tears fell with her joy. “We are so fucking awful!”
“Awful!” Caroline echoed, slapping her hands against the table. “Horrific! Monstrous! Horrendous!”
“Awful, awful, awful!” The rest of us chanted, giggling now—we couldn’t remember what had been funny about it. Saz tipped back in her chair, and when the leg wobbled and deposited her onto the kitchen floor, we laughed harder, hands on our stomachs, incapable of caging that joy.
I’d go back there, if I could. Just to that moment at the table, the lamplight hot and close, their laughter taking root in my heart, their delight disguising my guilt and leaving it somewhere deeper to fester. I’d go back to the way they banished the seed of fear in me. How they transformed it into power instead.
Even knowing what we had done. Even knowing the ways it would change us down the line. I’d go back, and I’d live in that moment forever.
Classes were always canceled on the day of the Grotesque, but that Halloween was far more solemn than any of the three I’d experienced previously at Rotham.
Finch stayed the night, and we kept ourselves up for far too long, as if sleeping might cement the day’s events in stone. I was afraid to be alone in my bed. Somehow, without vocalizing that fear, they understood—we dragged mattresses down the stairs and fit ourselves like sardines on the couch.
We woke to a desolate campus. In those first bleary moments, I nearly forgot what had unfolded the day before. But there was an email from Moody waiting on our phones that instructed us with what to expect for Friday’s critique. She’d be taking over Kolesnik’s role and operating as our sole advisor; no more Wednesday classes in Slatter, no more uncomfortable office hours, no more charismatic Kolesnik at the front of the lecture hall. Senior painters would be under the influence of Moody’s opinion alone, an idea that intimidated us. But it was better than starting from scratch with a stranger.
We tried not to focus on what the rearrangement might mean for our ranks as potential Soloists. Instead, we spent the day working on our Grotesque costumes in the living room atop our makeshift beds, fine-tuning the last details as we pregamed with cheap liquor and cran-grape juice, dressing ourselves up and admiring the gruesome effects on each other’s faces.
“If it wouldn’t be so obvious, I’d drive out to the cornfield and don Kolesnik’s boar suit myself,” Saz said as she painted her eyes in her handheld mirror, the sweeping lines of black turning her corvine. “But now that we have proof the ritual worked, I’m never touching that thing. I don’t want to risk screwing it up.”
“ Proof is a big word,” I said, guilt rising in my chest. Amrita dabbed concealer on my jaw and tsked at me for moving.
“Hey, it’s not like he can curse us back,” Caroline said, the words shapeless as she held her mouth open to line her lips.
“I’m not worried about him. I’m more concerned about whatever higher power we currently have on our side,” Saz answered.
“In Kolesnik’s case, I think the higher power was a rogue blood clot.” Finch’s mask was pushed back to show her face and all the color Amrita had dusted across it—cool deathly greens and specks of orange around the eyes. The mask had the huge, membraned wings of an insect, thorax sloping down the bridge of her nose. There were eye holes cut in the delicate forewings. When she pulled it down over her face, you could see all the places she had painted replicas of her own eyes across the papier-maché, until it was hard to distinguish which ones were real. Beside her, Saz’s mask lay faceless on the ground, a barrage of black feathers interspersed with six different piercing beaks. It was heavy as fuck. I didn’t know how she planned to keep it steady on her head all night.
Amrita was dressed in all white, her dark hair coiled at the nape of her neck. Her mask was a crescent moon with the cheeks and lips molded from clay. Jewels and stars hung from the jutting jaw of the moon—they twinkled when she moved, catching candlelight and tossing beams around the living room.
And Caroline looked magical—she’d sewn a swan with a long neck that coiled around her throat, the head resting at her collarbone when she wrapped and pinned it in place. She painted a red heart across the entirety of her face, rendering her harlequin and coy, her hair slicked back with little curls gelled against her forehead and around her ears.
The ram’s head I created made me feel disgruntled against the rest of them. Fat horns curled at my temples in an imitation too like the Boar King’s tusks for comfort. I had painted them to emphasize dimensionality—stripes of gray shaded with warm beige nestled in the rough faux fur I had painstakingly glued to the mask’s frame. It covered my face down to the end of my nose and mostly obscured my eyes, upon which Amrita layered dark shadow. The pupils were cut out for me to see through, and my mouth was exposed beneath the furred edge of the mask.
Music lilted, a playlist of Saz’s consisting of mostly the Cramps and the Cure. They talked over one another, fighting to hear each other above the music and the melding of voices. Half the time their yelling couldn’t be deciphered as conversation or the lyrics to “Boys Don’t Cry.” Amrita and I sat together in comfortable silence as she dusted more powder around my eyes. The furrowed focus on her face was so endearing. I tried to lean into her distraction.
“You won’t even be able to see any of this under the mask,” I mumbled. She took my chin with sure hands and smeared a plummy black over my lips, the lipstick tacky and smelling of something artificially sweet.
“You’ll be able to see that ,” she declared. “Sexy.”
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Don’t you dare. You look beautiful,” Amrita said, clutching my face harder. “Say it.”
“ You look beautiful,” I said petulantly. But I meant it—I couldn’t take my eyes off the soft, exasperated way she smiled back at me. There was gold glitter all over her. Her eyes were a big affectionate brown, the kind of warm I could sleep in.
“You know what I mean,” she scolded, and squeezed my cheeks between her fingers. “Say it back to me.”
Her scrutiny made me hot all over. I swallowed and tried to imagine what she saw when looking at me. The pale and peaked corners of my face. The bloody mar on my bottom lip where I had chewed for too long. Dark circles that showed even past concealer. Brown hair brushing my shoulders, in desperate need of a cut or dye or anything to make it feel like less of an afterthought.
“I look beautiful,” I whispered obediently.
“Better,” she said, smile growing. “I almost believed you.”
The Masquerade Grotesque was held in the atrium every year. The name made the room sound fancier than it really was—it had been a greenhouse constructed near the garden when the school first opened, and now the glass structure was mostly devoid of plants and used for benefit events when the administration raised money from devoted alumni. For the Grotesque, they decked it out with string lights and tables swathed in black tablecloths. Sculptures and busts were given masks of their own. As we walked from the Manor, appearing like five end-time omens, the typically spooky atmosphere inside the atrium now became sepulchral. Someone had decorated the walls with streamers of black and red cloth. Fake candles glittered on the table, and early aughts pop classics puttered out of a tower of speakers on either side of the hall.
The plinth in the center of the atrium bore a blown-up “In Memoriam” poster of Kolesnik’s face, propped in his empty chair. It was clearly cropped from the faculty photo hanging in Banemast. The magnification gave his appearance a kind of Stanley Kubrick stare, grainy eyes piercing us as we stepped past the main doors.
“Jesus,” Finch said, voice muffled behind her insectoid mask. “That’s ghoulish.”
In years past, Kolesnik would typically already be waiting in his designated seat with the Boar King’s hood pulled over the thinning hair on his head. It was a place of honor—as the founder of the tradition, back in his first years as a Rotham professor, the school always revered him with that elevated throne. It made getting drunk and grinding on each other incredibly difficult when he sat in that panoptical position.
“We need to get trashed to deal with that looking at us all night.” Caroline tapped her chest just below the swan’s beak, fingernails clicking against a metal flask in her bra that she’d been swigging out of.
Up to this point, campus was barren and mournful. With all classes canceled, the only students out and about had been the ones heading to Banemast to eat. The lawn had remained empty, trees swaying in the breeze and dead leaves whipping cyclonic across the sidewalk. Now all of Rotham was concentrated in one charged spot. The crowded atrium hummed with rising voices—the masks made it nearly impossible to tell which of them were faculty and which were students. Our trained eyes, however, were a little better at picking up on the signs; the faculty masks were mostly reserved in their wildness, and some professors recycled their uniforms year after year. Professor Fujioka always wore the same porcelain sparrow mask with a long worm hanging from its beak, glazed a sickly pink. Same with Professor Bervoets, who framed her head with a birdcage every Grotesque, colorful parakeets resting on the bars within. And St. Roche had taught a course called Puppets and Performing Objects before she became our chair. Her costume consisted of a doll’s face, with strings sewn into her clothes all the way down to her wrists where she could tug on the lines to make its jaw open and shut.
It was the kind of event that made my parents raise their eyebrows when I told them over dinner what unfolded in my time at school, how my classes went, what the faculty was known for. “The man dresses up as a Boar King ?” my mother would ask in horror, twirling spaghetti around a fork. And then my dad’s disbelieving echo: “You said she teaches puppetry ?”
I was pleasantly half-drunk enough from the concoctions Saz plied me with to feel some of the dread of the past two days melt away. Amrita loaned me a dress, and I was stiff in it as we hovered near the doors—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d put on something with a skirt. It left me feeling exposed, goose bumps prickling up my legs, the horns on my head heavy with the weight of plaster and fur. The mask smelled like acrylic paint and the dusty chalk of newspaper and glue, the eye holes barely big enough to see much more than what was directly in front of me. I had to turn my whole head to see anything outside of my peripherals that wasn’t horn.
Someone tapped a microphone. The sound reared hot and shrill, and the music abruptly stopped. I twisted to get a glimpse of the dais where Kolesnik’s image sat. St. Roche stood beside it, obscured by a ceramic smile, her doll’s expression placid from the top of its finely molded hairline to the jut of its chin.
“This momentous occasion is dimmed by our institute’s loss,” St. Roche began, feedback half obscuring her words. “Professor Kolesnik dedicated his life to the Rotham School. As a student, he was the Soloist of the class of 1975 and went on to have an illustrious career that would have extended far into his life had he not experienced this abrupt and tragic end. We are grateful for what he gave our school, both as an incredible professor and a creator who formed enduring traditions such as tonight’s thirtieth annual Masquerade Grotesque.”
The atrium echoed with microphone static. Glasses clinked distantly. The lights gave a flicker, power struggling under the demand of hundreds of tiny bulbs.
“Is someone crying ?” Caroline whispered beside my ear, holding my shoulder as she avoided the hook of a horn. Now that she’d said it, I could hear sniffling. I shrugged, feigning indifference. But the nerves in my stomach didn’t mix well with the alcohol. It was eerie to look at St. Roche standing before us, the lips of her mask never moving as she spoke, its unblinking eyes boring through me no matter where I pointed my gaze.
“We mourn together,” St. Roche’s doll said. “We honor the life of a great man. And tonight, we continue his tradition in the hopes of inspiring many years of his legacy to come. It has broken our hearts to lose Professor Kolesnik, especially in the wake of his priceless Boar King costume disappearing. Again we ask that if you know anything of its whereabouts, that you share your knowledge with your advisors. Until then, we will honor his position with a moment of silence and our deepest condolences. As a reminder, counseling services will be available to all. Please enjoy your evening. This is a celebration of life and of the craft Gabriel Kolesnik so revered.”
She fitted the microphone back into its stand. The photo of Kolesnik kept on smiling as a synthy ’80s beat picked up. Everyone tittered, uncertain of how to start partying.
“Well, that was morbid. Who wants a drink?” Caroline asked, pointing around our group. The painted heart parted over her lips when she spoke. “Finch and I will get us something. Ginger ale? Spiked?”
“Sounds good to me!” Saz sang, hooking her hand in mine. “We’ll be dancing, come find us!”
The room had filled out. Now Saz had to tug us through the crowd, her hand clutching my left and Amrita linked to my right. We wove past clownish wigs, an oversized Queen of Hearts playing card molded to fit a face, a plasticine horse head that looked like it came from Spirit Halloween. Saz procured us a spot close to a dry fountain in the center of the room, where Kolesnik’s picture was mostly hidden by a cherub with its empty pitcher spilling no water into the basin. Pennies littered its dusty belly. The music was poppy and loud, and even with the echo of St. Roche’s speech, the atrium was already growing hot with movement. Amrita spun me around, the chin of her moon bumping my shoulder every time we swayed. The stars glittered like a chime. Someone dressed as Joan of Arc jumped around behind her—I kept catching glimpses of a crown of thorns and three-dimensional tears spilling down the cheeks.
“Stop thinking so much and try to have some fun!” Amrita yelled over the speakers. I just nodded, letting her lead. I didn’t feel capable of raising my voice to answer.
Caroline interrupted us with two cups in her hands, hips already swaying. She was ethereal under the fairy lights—the swan around her neck looked as if it could lift its head and nuzzle the heart of her face.
“Drink up,” she encouraged. I let her lift the cup to my lips and took a sip before she turned to do the same for Amrita.
Finch filled the space Caroline left behind, her hand landing on my hip and pulling me into her as Saz sang along to Mariah Carey. There was something so funny about the clash of “Fantasy” and the resounding echo of Kolesnik’s memorial speech. I started to giggle, chest bubbling with rising lightness, heartbeat echoing in my ears. I let myself meld into Finch’s touch. We always danced on each other—all of us, without abandon—but it was never anything beyond the pleasure of movement. Still, Finch’s hold on my waist and the way her thigh slid between mine as we moved had something coiling within me, a buzz of energy that started in my belly and prickled all the way up my spine. The ram’s head kept me safe by obscuring my eyes, allowing me to watch her unabashedly. I liked the way her mask entangled with her hair, strands snagging on a wing. I liked the cool shadow it cast over her. I liked the exposed strength of her shoulders with the straps of her top digging into them, necklaces glinting along her collarbones with every sway. I liked the way the eyes on the mask’s wings seemed thrilled by my gaze, coyly urging me on.
Every Grotesque unfurled like this—a jejune start building into a feral race to jump the highest, sing the loudest, get the drunkest. At a certain point the faculty would give us our floor or lean into it themselves. There was an unspoken permission to get as messy as we wanted, until someone threw up in the fountain or shattered a pane of the atrium’s glass walls and St. Roche would send us all home.
I bounced between them, eyes shut, bass so loud I could feel it rattle in my jaw, hands over my head, mask bobbing back and forth, Amrita’s skirt flouncing around my hips, goose bumps rising on my thighs. Fingers brushing the small of my back, the curve of my shoulder, the fat of my hip. The touch made me so hungry. My body kept angling toward it, seeking more. When my eyes slit open behind the ram’s head, I caught phantasmagoric images: Phoebe and Veda dancing side by side, Phoebe shrouded in crinkling iridescent plastic and all of Veda’s exposed skin painted with shadow puppet shapes. Each twist of her body revealed a new hand outline—a rabbit hopping, a bird taking flight, a fox biting down.
There was Caroline spinning Saz around with one hand, Saz laughing every time she collided with Amrita, crow wings shaking with the movement and seamlessly blending into her blunt dark hair where it wasn’t streaked with pink. And Finch—I couldn’t find Finch. I slowed, seeking. I was unsteady on my feet. I shouldn’t have taken that drink from Caroline. What was in it? She wouldn’t give me something I couldn’t handle, would she? Not without asking. Of course not. So why did I keep seeing flickers of shadow, blips in the glowing lights?
“You okay?” Caroline yelled from my right, the heart wrinkling when she frowned.
“Where’s Finch?” I shouted back. My cup sloshed when someone jostled me. “What did you—what was in this drink?”
Her frown deepened. “I don’t know, Finch fucked off somewhere. And the drink is just rum, Jo. Do you need to go home?”
I shook my head, though I wasn’t sure I was telling the truth. “I’m just gonna get some air,” I said, and I was pushing my way through the sea of coyotes and stars and spiders and cornucopias before any of them could stop me. Kolesnik’s eyes followed me everywhere I went—I looked back once and found them on me, granular and heavy.
Outside smelled like the dead of fall. I prickled with cold. Leaves blew down the promenade between groups of people milling and laughing, masks abandoned for the contradiction of a cigarette and fresh air. Lampposts cast gold circles every few feet, and I followed the path down to the garden, past Lysander Gate, through the rows of naked bushes.
Most of the garden was empty, save for a few stragglers. But past the benches and the hedges a figure stood down by the pond.
“Hey,” I called, voice wavering. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Hey, Finchard!”
The water rippled behind the person’s outline. It was a dark, gibbous shape, head bent low, the arms held around itself. The moon was too thin to give it any real definition.
I pulled off my mask and held it against my chest. I waited for the figure to move. I wanted it to be Finch, waiting for me to find her. But the shape didn’t answer or turn to acknowledge me. It gave a violent quiver as the breeze blew by. And slowly—quietly—I heard it begin to wail.
It was the same pained cry Kolesnik had released on the day of his death. That desperate croaking of a body unable to draw in breath. The silhouette rocked and howled, its edges indistinct, the shape of its back arching with each inhaled cry. It panted raggedly. The heaving sound was so loud that I thought I was closer to it than I was—when I took a step forward, I realized I was still standing among the sculptures, lamplight faint against my back, the moon an orange fragment.
“Kolesnik?” I called, like a terrified child staring at the cracked-open closet door and waiting for it to swing wide. The shape hunched low to the ground and tipped its misshapen head toward the clouds. Two jagged shapes protruded where a mouth might sit. A boar’s tusks, waiting to gore.
Panic froze me where I stood. Part of me was afraid of the faint possibility that it really was an animal, rearing and snuffling against the ground, something raised in the woods and waiting to be fed. That was the reasonable terror. The rest of my dread belonged to the idea that what I was seeing wasn’t real. That it existed for my eyes alone. Now I wanted a witness. Proof that this thing, whatever it was, had been called to life by our hands. Because it looked so real . I felt that I could reach out and touch it. That it was looking for me.
“What are you doing out here?” Finch called, and the sound of her voice called me back to myself and away from the sight of that creature. I turned and found her sitting on a stone bench. She’d taken her mask off, her makeup all smudged, the insect wings splayed faceless on the seat to her left. And to the right sat Thea, her hand perched horribly close to Finch’s thigh, a rabbit mask pushed to the top of her head and long, floppy ears hanging down her back.
I turned back to the water. The mass was gone, and the water rippled beyond where the apparition had stood.
“Jo,” Finch called again, “are you alright?”
The amused judgment on Thea’s face seared me with embarrassment. I shook my head, fuzzy with drunkenness and delusion and a pounding fear that wouldn’t let go of my heart no matter how many deep breaths I sucked in.
“I’m fine,” I said, and I left them there with my ram mask hooked between my fingers, heading back to the Manor on my own. I didn’t look to see who followed me. I didn’t look to see if anything would follow me at all.