CHAPTER TEN
“SNEAKING IN THE PRIVATE STUDY?” Someone asked behind Elliott the next afternoon of Samhain weekend. The voice echoed on the aragonite walls of the hibernaculum, disturbing the colony of bats that fluttered over Elliott’s head. Ear-splitting screeches jolted his spine.
Elliott nearly jumped out of his skeleton and dissolved into the floor in the philosophy department.
It was James Wilde. Again. It was the second time he’d caught Elliott attempting to turn in the exit paperwork into the department mailboxes.
James delivered a conspiratorial smile. “New interest in philosophy, Elliott?”
Before Elliott could speak, James blew out his small match.
As the professor assistant, James’s private study resided beside Professor Wulfram’s end of the pedagogic cave. James sipped from his monogrammed JVW IV mug. Elliott pretended to read his name in order to give himself time to think of an excuse. James Vallen Wilde IV.
The Stygian depths of Samhain night darkened the sky, fine mist submerging the visible campus in translucent fog, wading over the manicured grass like ferrymen of the underworld.
However, thirty meters below ground, James exuded the playboy charisma of Bruce Wayne.
He was dressed in a sharp tuxedo of Gotham refinement.
Elliott fixed his swirl of dark hair over his polished, square-framed Clark Kent glasses. The Superman emblem of Elliott’s shirt burned beneath his skin. It was the second night of Hallowe’en parties for the weekend.
Elliott felt kinship with Superman, who lost his parents, raised by someone else, suddenly far from home, and surrounded by folks different from him. He wished he could fly out of there faster than the speed of light. However, he was trapped.
James illuminated his face with the flame of a primitive torch.
For their inside joke, Elliott was supposed to respond, Arrēctus?
You want to have sex with me seven times a day now?
He’d seen James six separate times that afternoon alone to hang out before dinner, this was their seventh.
Except, Elliott hid the forged transfer papers in his backpack.
He’d hoped to insert it into the metal mailbox to be sent as if it already had approval from Wulfram.
Wasn’t James supposed to be in the Kierkegaard lecture on Monday?
Didn’t he always prepare for them in the Exeter Athenaeum on Sundays?
“Arrēctus?” Elliott remarked at last, as though he had nothing to hide. As though nothing was wrong. “We should make the seventh count.”
“Per os?” James smirked in response. By mouth?
“If you buy me dinner first.” Elliott replicated his smirk. “The dirt and sweat and stamina will be a pain.”
James remarked with a wink, “A little dirt never killed anyone, Elliott. I promise to be gentle with you.” He lowered the timber of his voice as Bruce Wayne. “Dulcius ex asperis[5].”
Sweeter after difficulty.
Elliott grinned, but he grimaced at the last second.
Torrid heat blazed over his cheeks from the torch’s thermal fire.
Damn it. He couldn’t keep it together. He needed to turn in the paperwork.
“What do these words mean?” Elliott asked to distract himself instead, pointing at the mammoth philosophy tome under James’s arm.
His scribbled notes were esoteric–?πιστ?μη–μυστικ?, ??ρ?.
Without warning, James’s face darkened, and he set the tome aside. He covered the burgundy-stained edge of a few cryptic words: Elixir vitae. Panaceum. “Nothing.”
“Is that blood?–” Elliott swallowed, staring at the stain on the aged parchment.
“Paint. It’s for Plato’s Protagoras.” James checked his wristwatch, he quoted something Elliott couldn’t grasp. “‘Creation begets creation.’”
That wasn’t from Protagoras. Elliott knew very little of Plato’s dialogues, but he knew that. Why was James lying to him?
As Elliott inhaled James’s aftershave, he thought of Socrates in Protagoras.
‘What of his beard? Are you not of Homer’s opinion, who says youth is most charming when the beard first appears?
[6]’ Protagoras believed virtue could be taught, something James declined to believe. Why was he reading Protagoras now?
“Who’s in there?” A second voice filled the deep abyss of the mineral cave. Elliott nearly flatlined.
Thankfully, it wasn’t Professor Wulfram.
“Oh, James, it’s you.” A teenage girl with bright blue eyeshadow and massive blow-out hair with amber-dyed strands dumped her book bag onto the ground. She was Elliott’s little foster sister. “Quick, I need your help with my Spice Girls costume.”
“Are you Spooky Spice?” James locked his recondite tomes in the cabinet when he thought Elliott wasn’t looking. “Rich Girl Spice?”
“It’s Scary Spice and Posh Spice, Grandpa.” She hopped up on the chamber desk so he could fix her mini skirt and boots for the music video costume. She lowered her hooded cape she borrowed from James. “I’m Scary Spice.”
“You’re the least scariest girl on the planet.” James hung his torch above her on the receptacle.
“I’ll bite you.” She grinned at him. “You’ll change your mind then.”
James was glad to see her smile. Kitty Evers was an unauthorized high schooler on the college grounds, but they snuck her in every year for Samhain.
As he sutured the skirt, he hoped that her academy friends hadn’t abandon her that time.
Kitty had sleepovers at their dormitory, and they stayed up late watching illegal MTV tapes on the Common Room television.
For years, Kitty struggled to keep friends because of them.
Everyone knew about the car crash of Arthur Newton.
As minors at the time, their names were redacted by law from the press.
No one knew who’d been driving that night, who’d been involved, what led to the gruesome death.
But Banebury was unbearably small and close knit, the news spread and the gossip couldn’t be contained for long.
Did your brother hit him with a truck in a prank gone wrong? Did he run over him twice?
It was on purpose, wasn’t it?
“I’m the designated driver since I’m the youngest. I can’t drink.”
James propped her oversized boots on the table so he could fix the string laces.
He balanced her socked feet on his lap. “Don’t feel pressured to drive.
” He felt his throat close around his words.
“Hallowe’en is capitalistic and consumerist, if you don’t want to, you don’t need to participate.
Remember, that ‘the revolution won’t be televised’–”
James always quoted Gil Scott-Heron.
“I know–‘the first revolution happens in the mind.’” She tossed a candy corn at him. James caught it in his mouth. She said softly, “I don’t mind driving. Not everyone who gets behind the wheel has an accident. You need to forgive yourself for what happened to you. You’ve never forgiven yourself.”
That last comment made James’s mouth flatten in a hard line. Even though she was a high school student, that was the best skill set of Kitty Evers–she was rarely wrong about him.
James remembered when she was a precocious child with stuffed kittens she slept with at night, reading Freud and Maslow before bed.
Mrs. Ledgerman didn’t tolerate coloring books and children’s stories.
However, Kitty preferred to read the Bowen family systems theory to understand the family she might’ve had.
The foster experience she lived through.
Kitty seemed to view right into his soul. James hated it. He was relieved when she changed the subject.
“Are you the receptionist today?” She asked, fastening his silken tuxedo bow tie. Typically Cormac Smythe handed out stale peppermints, if you left him alone. He took two hour smoke breaks.
“Elliott forgot his art badge,” James lied for Elliott as Elliott emerged from the metal mail slots, successfully submitting the forgery. Kitty’s face brightened at the sight of Elliott.
She knew Elliott like she knew the freckles on the back of her dark brown hands. She twisted her lip in confusion. “You left your badge in the…philosophy department? What were you doing all the way out here?”
Elliott stammered. “Thought I might look everywhere.”
“Let me help.” Kitty hopped down and retrieved the badge for him in his back pocket without even needing to break eye contact. She always knew where he kept everything. “The philosophy department is weirdly dark, but there are easier places to take a nap–”
“Thanks, Kitty-Kat.” Elliott flushed hard enough he felt his collar warm.
However, Kitty frowned at the blood stuck to his bandages.
“Are you having the nightmares again? Is that why you’re forgetting your badge?
” She hugged him afterwards, in case he needed it.
Elliott went silent. James rolled the highly processed candy corn over his tongue.
Neither of them made eye contact. Neither of them exposed their minds in the hypogean department.
Kitty tilted her head, trying to decipher what might be wrong with the two of them that day. They were eerily quiet. Avoidant. Furtive.
Kitty gasped suddenly. “Wait. You heard the rumor, didn’t you?”
Kitty walked in stride with the young men to the refectory. She remembered why she even stopped by. “Rumors about the honorarium are everywhere. I should’ve told you.”
Elliott knew already. “There were seven runaways that were caught.” A circuit of chill coiled Elliott’s spine. The honorarium was a fate far worse than the provost’s symbol.
The honorarium was the yearly victim chosen for death.
James carefully shut the miarolitic granite doors to the liquor-speckled professorial doors, as if it might have ears. “Who are the seniors sending to their watery death this year? Do either of you know?”
“No one mentioned your name, thankfully.” Kitty held his hand as they departed.
Beneath their feet, the sinuous underground passage staircase was scorched from the great fire of 1881.
In the hibernacula, the humid cavern passageways were formed with sedimentary limestone, partially replaced with imported aragonite.
Around them, the bats went dormant in its caliginous crevices.
“It’s alright to be scared, if you’re worried–”
“Death would be a mercy for what I deserve. I’m not worried.
” James was solemn for once. The entrance of the hibernaculum was blanketed in remarkable stars above the night air as though Jean-Francois Millet painted the pinpricks by hand himself.
However, James could not appreciate its beauty, he frowned. “Who is it this year, Kitty-Kat?”
Dread arrested Elliott’s attention, waiting for the hammer to fall. Kitty whispered, glancing behind her at the concealed campus’s clandestine entryway to ensure no one was near enough to overhear her. “Finch.”
“Finch Hudskin?” James looked as if his heart stopped functioning. He let go of her hand. The ill were chosen this year.
Elliott felt his intestines plunge, seconds before the bile burned up his throat, and he vomited in the professors’ lavatory.
Elliott grew up with various lung infections, needing pneumonia treatments for most of his young life, due to the weak lungs he’d been born with.
If it hadn’t been for the kindness of neighbors to share donations, homeopathic remedies, and antibiotic medications with him, he might not have gained the strength to live on.
He had been lucky to be taken in by the caretaker of an orphanage who didn’t send him to work in the welder fumes.
Finch was not.
Their peers knew Finch was ill, rapidly deteriorating with lung disease–and therefore, they would send him early to death.