CHAPTER SIX
“ARE YOU DRESSED?” JAMES SOUNDED brash, injudicious, he teemed with rare excitement. He loved to break into the office of the registrar.
“Yeah.” Elliott fitted his gray hoodie over his college tie. He needed to figure out what to do about his erratic hair, it’d become wayward overnight, but it had to wait as anxiety snaked through his chest. “I am dressed.”
Elliott followed after the upperclassman.
Their soles crunched through the titian leaves on the campus lawn, a scathing wind clawing through their jackets like a bestial creature, forewarning the impending bludgeon of winter.
The high mountain airs battered the throat.
The low, plunging temperatures of the prairies froze the breath.
The sound of the nearby Marlborough Mountains was a primitive beast that lurked impatiently for winter for its sacrifice.
Ahead of the pair, there was the visible campus–an imperious circlet of dark-hued gothic architecture structures for erudition.
The crowning middle structure held the honored amphitheater, replicated after Thysdrus, the largest Ancient Roman amphitheater in Africa, which was built to seat 35,000 citizens.
The sordid history didn’t matter to the institution, nor the fact that the Roman Empire had forcibly colonized several African cities and territories.
Their paganic history was not different than the Romans.
A professor of Elliott’s once exalted with glee, the Nubians made fine gladiators!
Think of Terentius as well, he was an exceptional playwright as a former African slave in the Roman Empire.
Of course, the African slaves in Ancient Greece were just as delighted to be slaves.
Behold, the wonderful fabulist Aesop! The furthest structure was the science annex, situated next to the groundskeeper’s brick-laid home that had a chimney already billowing smoke for his dear wife, for the groundskeeper spent the long, punishing winters ahead maintaining the College.
The visible campus was impossibly small. One could cross it in only one short march.
Beneath its sight, however, the concealed campus seemed to stretch the length of a city-state for miles and miles without end.
A boundless expedition of passageways. There were restricted regions not even Elliott had seen with his own eyes.
He’d never been permitted to board The Underground Reagan Railway.
The URR was restricted.
Elliott nodded to the head groundskeeper, Mr. Fletcher, who returned a weary nod back, his chin braced against his chest and his hands shoved in the pink autumn mittens that his loving wife made for his arthritic fingers.
Mr. Fletcher was an odd sight to behold, a massive man that was giant in stature, tromping through the dried-out lawn in his dark trench coat with the baby-pink knitted mittens.
As they entered the science annex the pair wove between masses of students in sterile-white lab coats, elastic gloves, and protective eyewear for the fall exams. Their oxfords were trimmed with mud and twigs from yesterday’s rain.
The air was stained with the stench of sulfur and bleach, stinging their eyes as they headed through the dissection tables with desiccated toads and dusted chalkboards.
Elliott swallowed. There were more students than he expected at dawn. The low alkalinity of the volatile mixtures and chemical compounds spread vapor among the whispers and murmurs as James Wilde led a path through the throng of examination students. “Oh, it’s James!”
“James! I loved you in The War of Alexandrius.”
“Will you play Claudius again this year?”
The young men were swarmed with smitten admirers.
James Wilde had risen to mild fame with his protean recitations.
He had only become an actor because his father hated the theater.
He was the pride of the ancient philosophy department and admittedly the only student worth watching in the hours of terror on the fateful night of the winter solstice.
It took well over six minutes to break free from the swell of students crushing them with interest.
A sophomore girl wiped her eyes. “You were incredible as Claudius. I cry my eyes out every year. I bawled just thinking of your death scene.”
Collectively, their attention felt claustrophobic, closing in on the pair. Everyone had seen them, Elliott feared. “We could be expelled, if we’re seen in the office of the registrar now.”
James smirked, amused that Elliott was still concerned about punishments after all these years. “Then we better not get caught.”
“How did you even hear that someone ran away from the College?”
“Professor Winston drowns in a pint of vodka before class. You should’ve seen him yesterday,” James replied with a cold countenance. “The old man sobbed how every year a poor bastard ruins their life. What the hell does he know about ruining your life?”
If any student was found escaping the AEscwulf gates, the head professors commanded their peers to pin them on their knees in front of the College and brand their chest or temple with the paganic recreant mark for everyone to witness their cowardice to the winter deity.
One heard the victims’ screams for hours.
However, the pain was regarded as a necessary madness.
The provost proclaimed that it was the madness induced at the ceremony that had ascended them close enough to divinity to appease the solstice with blood and rites.
That was why Plato’s Phaedrus had become the treasured favorite for the recitation.
In ancient times, it was believed that divine madness was given as a gift by the gods.
Madness was art and, analogously, art was madness.
To reach one’s highest madness, and by extension reach the gods, one must be ‘driven out of their minds by the muses.’ A dark madness achieved through agony.
In Phaedrus[1], Socrates expanded on the concept of madness and the provost spared no expense to enforce the tenants:
From Apollo, the prophetic madness. The gift of prophecy, oracles, divination.
From Dionysus, the ritual madness. Initiatory madness, religious ecstasy, insanity.
From the Muses, the poetic madness. A Bacchic frenzy of songs, dances, and poetry.
From Aphrodite, erotic madness. Amatory obsession, pursuits of pleasure, sensual rapture.
Above all, the professors were fixated on madness from Apollo.
It was a divinity that education couldn’t teach.
Prophecy that transcended pedagogy. Madness was superior to sanity, in their eyes, therefore the mind needed to be obliterated.
A perfect pain so intense that it was purification of the soul.
A cleanse.
A proper offertory appropriate for the solstice.
If only Elliott had known then that the lives of every student would be altered completely that winter…If only he could’ve somehow prophesied the grief to come, maybe it could’ve all ended differently…
A scream broke through the laboratory.
Without warning, a second scream met the first, then, to everyone’s shock, a third scream leapt into the chorus of cacophonous agony.
There had never been three victims at a time before.
Three students attempted to run away from college all in the same night?
A girl wept silently in the corner, dragging herself down the wall.
Before Elliott could draw breath, one final shriek came with terror.