CHAPTER EIGHT
“TENTīGō?” DIDN’T WE JUST HAVE sex?
A distinct, smoked voice startled Elliott from behind in the philosophy department labyrinths.
James smirked at him. Are you excited to see me?
Elliott translated the words in his head. ‘Erection. Impatient to have sex.’
Elliott’s cheeks burned with slight embarrassment as a few seniors laughed when they strode past, reveling in their last week of October lectures.
James was only kidding, but Elliott hid the registration paperwork in his backpack before James could see it in the dim dark.
Elliott blew out his match. “I wasn’t looking for you, James. ”
James flickered his eyes over the philosophy department’s cavernous aragonite walls and damp subterranean dusk of the hibernaculum, then back at Elliott. “Sure you weren’t.”
His ears scorched. “Really, I wasn’t.”
“I believe you. I wander thirty meters below the earth to the philosophy registration desk all the time myself.”
The concealed campus was a Daedalean convolution of underground labyrinths.
The passages were as tightly complex and concatenated as Gorgon knots and while the philosophy and political students had the privilege of lecture halls nearest to the ground, the students of the arts and music had to plunge deep into the sightless dark several dozen meters underneath the ground.
The concealed campus was structured after the hibernacula of bats.
Far more important than that though–it was Samhain, which meant a multitude of activities–the churches were full to capacity with sudden believers; the myriad libraries were empty of scholastic readers; the lecture chambers were deserted of several drunk students; and the parties were raging all weekend.
“Dinner tonight?” Elliott asked as a distraction from his unzipped backpack. He removed the hood of his second-hand cape he’d purchased from the town bargain store.
“Don’t you have dinner with Hazel?”
“I think we broke up.” Elliott grimaced, his letters were unreturned, the bouquets burned.
“Was she pissed because she realized she’s a copy of Halle?”
Elliott ignored him. “Do you want to come to dinner with me?”
“Better than dinner, there’s a rager in the Common Room for juniors and seniors.
” James was already heading to his early lectures, and Elliott fell in step beside him, relieved he left the matter alone.
With James’s waxen torch, they traversed through the serpentine, tortuous trenches of the concealed campus.
At the top of the grand staircase, Elliott left on his own down towards the art chambers. “See you later for the party.”
As the students of the arts peregrinated through the underground lecture chambers, the curls of slow-burning tobacco were overpowered by pungent ancient resin and waxen torches.
The cavernous corridors were impossibly crepuscular, and Elliott always needed a few seconds to adjust his sight to the subterranean dark.
Everyone wore expensive, knee-length, well-cut capes in the hibernacula, lest they earn themselves bat excrement on their scholar attire with the stench of urine.
However, their basalt-black capes made it even harder for Elliott to see the undergraduates.
Distantly, he could hear the screeches and rapid flight of northern long-eared bats preparing for hibernation in their colony.
As always, he’d forgotten his torch in the labyrinths, but as he flickered his small lighter from his pocket, someone blew it out. Hazel Scott snapped at him. “Which girl were you sleeping with last night?”
Elliott’s cheeks burned. I was in bed with James. Hazel never understood that Elliott and James fell in each other’s beds without thought, it simply happened. She couldn’t comprehend why James was important to him. “I’m really sorry, Hazel. I bought you flowers to apologize–”
“I’m done this time.” She glared over the flames of her own torch. “I’m not Halle, but you could at least pretend you’re not thinking of her when you’re on top of me. You disappeared.”
“It’s not about Halle,” Elliott insisted. Anxiously, Elliott scratched the back of his head. “I swear–”
I killed my own teacher. Elliott couldn’t bring himself to tell any of his past girlfriends about it. He couldn’t open up about the worst thing he’d done in his life. Only James knew.
“You don’t even believe that.” Hazel slammed a therapy pamphlet against his chest. “Don’t you notice a pattern with your exes—Halle, Harmony, Hazel? Get help, Elliott.” Her voice cracked on the last syllable.
Elliott tried to explain, but he collided into someone else in the caliginous dimness.
Professor Hexley grasped Elliott by the shoulders to steady him, and he steered him like a ship. He raised his bronze torch above their heads, lest they both caught on fire. Smoke swirled onto Elliott’s shoulder from the older man.
Hexley had forgotten to extinguish his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, the same way he’d forgotten to shave, his fine jawbone swathed with stubble.
Elliott blustered an apology, mortified to accidentally ram into a professor, and he squeezed past him into the lecture chamber, inhaling a lungful of decades-old dust and myrrh imported from the isles of the Mediterranean.
The dust settled warmly beneath the amber lighting of the chamber.
Elliott found the furthest tier in the back to nurse his hands.
The older students congregated near the pit of the bronze dais and the twenty-year-olds smoked relentlessly into the chilly air to settle their nerves.
A few juniors brought in tiny bottles of brandy to take the edge off their migraines.
Everyone had heard about the punishment.
Elliott rested onto a stone ledge in the fourth tier. A couple of diligent girls read through the conspectus before the lecture beside him, while a set of rambunctious boys at the front replayed Monday’s hockey game against the Minnesota Wild to entertain themselves.
The lecture chamber next to theirs was a life drawing course where a nude man and woman sat with an expression of interest as they were painted or sculpted, meanwhile Elliott’s hands were searing his nerves apart. He prayed beneath his breath that it wasn’t a practicum day.
As Elliott gazed forward, he focused on Professor Hexley, a distractingly handsome man, young enough to pass for a graduate student, if you never peered too closely at the wrinkles in his lineament.
There were a few silvered hairs in his stubble.
He was the kind of teacher that didn’t care if you sauntered in fifteen minutes late, or if you missed an entire morning of class to cure a legendary hangover.
To everyone’s astonishment, he was one of the few professors that deeply despised the hiemal tradition.
The guilt existed in the bruise-toned hues beneath his brown eyes.
He was profoundly inebriated that morning. He’d reeked of cognac when Elliott first collided with him and now, even four tiers away, Elliott could still smell the spirits on him.
Professor Hexley must’ve heard of the seven students that attempted escape and the gore of their punishment. Hexley’s dark brown skin was creased with remorse.
Any other week, he was well-ordered, disciplined, and put together with acute attention to detail.
However, he’d left behind his tie, or perhaps he’d spilled coffee on it and therefore needed to discard it, because he’d certainly drenched his crinkled shirt in espresso, his sleeves rolled to his elbow.
As if he’d missed his mouth completely, he was soaked through, much to the disdain of the secondary professor.
Professor Perrineau opened his pert mouth, but Professor Hexley raised a hand to silence him. “Let’s get the winter over with.”
Disgruntled, Professor Perrineau fastened his ascot, sitting perched at the edge of the burnished dais like an ostrich, before Perrineau couldn’t bear it anymore and like a nagging spouse, he dried the unshaved stubble of Professor Hexley face with a satin handkerchief.
An intimate moment that belied their animosity.
“You know how they already regard men with our complexion, Hexley. Keep it together.”
“I’ll wear an ascot next time to appease the respectability politics of a death ceremony.” Hexley glanced down at the silk around Perrineau’s neck.
“It’s not respectability politics, it’s dignity.” Professor Perrineau’s eyes sharpened. “They’re waiting for any excuse to call us incompetent. You were a prodigy once, that’s why you were hired, remember that.”
After it was apparent that Hexley wouldn’t bother to change his shirt, Perrineau quietly thrust a set of papers into his hands.
“Fine. Here is the conspectus. Debate how many penises are in the Bayeux tapestry of the Norman conquest of England for all I care. I can’t stand to be seen with you when you’re in a disordered manner. ”
“Perhaps you should’ve sent my replacement with a philosophy professor like I formally requested.”
“I tried. None of them wanted to deal with your compassionate sentiments, except Helmut. We warn you every year not to infantilize these students. They’re not your children, they’re adults.
They’ve made their decision.” Professor Perrineau gazed down his thin nose at Hexley’s wilted collar, then Perrineau glanced over the art students.
“These infants of yours wouldn’t last a moment with the philosophy professors as it stands, anyway. ”