CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
JAMES SWALLOWED A SCOTCH ON the rocks to drown the panic.
As Elliott slept in his hotel bed, bundled beneath the sheets, James went through Elliott’s belongings. He needed to know every thread of thought inside of Elliott’s head. He wanted to know how he had been. He had to know how Elliott felt.
He didn’t expect the letters.
Elliott had a stack of letters from a stalker.
Lucien Claude Montclair was the bravest among us.
His actions were the very symbolism of the hibernal ceremony–sacrifice.
He will be fondly remembered. The cabal had handwritten to Elliott directly in an encrypted letter.
James recognized the recondite Cervidae insignia.
What greater sacrifice than of one’s life for another?
Let us honor him. Return to AEscwulf College.
A miracle had occurred. Deus ex machina, the letter rejoiced. A god from the machine.
However, that was not a god. That was not an act of benevolence. It was dated on the New Year in January of that year. The same night that Professor Ilaria had arrived at James’s dormitory with the knowledge of the homicide.
“What is this?” James demanded, waking Elliott out of bed, rousing him out of his restive sleep. “There were letters from AEscwulf College?”
“The College pardoned me.” Elliott had held onto the letter for months.
“Pardoned you?” James repeated, feeling his heart abandon his chest. Did Elliott truly believe them? Nothing the institution did was for altruism. “You can’t trust their response. Everyone still believes the burnt remains are yours, Elliott. For fuck’s sake, that’s what they need to believe.”
Elliott rose out of bed. The letter meant Elliott had more time with James before he confessed everything.
The letter had informed Elliott of the address of the hotel James had been in, even the exact room number with a complimentary elevator credential.
That was all that mattered to him. “The provost offered to issue a statement that Lucien walked into the fire to spare my life. That as a Mormon, Lucien couldn’t bring himself to end someone’s life, and therefore, he sacrificed his own.
His selfless act symbolized ‘the virtue and purpose’ of the sacrifice ceremony. ”
He was right. That was the content of the letters.
James had gone numb when he read the first letter welcoming Elliott Taylor Archway back to AEscwulf College to resume his undergraduate degree. Elliott would need to enroll in his missed spring classes in the summer term. All of it sounded banal and mundane.
The second letter welcomed Elliott to attend a vigil in memory of Lucien Claude Montclair, his own attempted murderer. Now hailed as a self-sacrificial humanitarian.
What was happening was blatantly evident.
Professor Ilaria was orchestrating another one of her machinations.
At best, she was trying to slither herself into James’s good graces by any means necessary.
She was publicly attempting to reconcile with him.
She even managed to convince the cabalistic college to suppress the homicide scandal before the firestorm of the media could learn that Lucien was killed.
The homicide was reframed instead as an act of symbolic self-sacrifice. The glory of the winter solstice.
The very divinity of the ritual.
Lucien Montclair would be seen as the most devout ritualist of them all.
There was a third letter welcoming Elliott to a banquet in Elliott’s honor on behalf of the theater department.
To commemorate his survival. All at once, James recognized the swirling, grandiloquent handwriting of the letters.
He confirmed who had sent the letters. She was watching James.
Behaving as though she were a deity who saw all.
“No, Elliott. You’re not going back.”
“I have to return–” Elliott insisted. “I sabotaged the hibernal ceremony–”
“You’re not returning to the College. You’re not going to that banquet. You will refuse.” James ripped apart the letter and he snatched his woolen coat off of the door hinge. He was going to murder her. “You’re not exposing yourself to the public. If I have to row you to a foreign country, I will.”
Elliott persisted, “Think of the spring recitation of the Peloponnesian War.” Sickeningly, Elliott sounded exactly like the letters that wrote of the great historian Thucydides. Exactly like her. “Think of The Rise of Alexicacus, when the Athenians fell ill throughout the Plague of Athens–”
“Listen to me, Elliott.” James held onto his shoulders, tightly. He had to make himself clear. “I am not Apollōn. I am not Alexikakos. You are not an infantryman in the Peloponnesian War. You will not attend.”
For years, Elliott and James had poked fun at Professor Ilaria bestowing James with the epithet, laughing whenever she referred to James as Alexikakos in reverence.
The hypocorism was murmured in endearment and idolatry.
She even referred to herself as his Athena–the goddess of wisdom, craft, and war.
As always, he was Apollōn himself. The diverter of evil.
However, what Elliott didn’t understand was that Professor Ilaria actually believed that she was mythical and powerful, interfering with the lives of everyone around her.
She’d devised Elliott’s execution.
She plotted the cold-blooded murder of Finch.
She was the conductor of torture.
The academe of AEscwulf was a breeding ground for tyrants, exploiters, paraphiliacs, and reprobates. All of it was concealed in a surreptitious cabal that lured vulnerable young men, like Elliott. They were psychological tormentors.
James was lured after an incident of vehicular manslaughter.
Elliott was lured after an incident of ritual homicide.
They weren’t welcomed out of altruism, they weren’t mentored from a place of philanthropy, it was draconian manipulation.
In Professor Ilaria’s deplorable mind, her power was divinely given. She was wise Athena granting mercy to her protégé–her Alexander the Great.
In Antiquity, Alexander the Great carried the head of Athena on his gold staters. Alexander the Great financed the temple of Athena by the architect Pythius. He dedicated himself to Athena. He worshipped her after his victory at the Granicus River.
Professor Ilaria was not his wise Athena.
She was his subjugator.
James parted his mouth to finally mention that he was initiated into a cabal that conducted dark human research and forbidden alchemy.
However, he struggled to find words to explain it wasn’t about the alchemy, it was political extortion.
It was to blackmail the students early in life before their future political path, and thus retain power over them.
Keep them reined in. Thus, if the students were willing to engage in dark interests with the cabal members, then they could be trusted to remain silent on illegal invasions, foreign government interference, and economic corruption.
Thereby, the system remained anatomically intact.
The pledges even damaged their own bodies in order to prove their fealty and to be inaugurated in their illicit league.
Everything else was pretense. The Greco-Roman and Anglo Saxon rites and traditions were bastardized with impunity.
Winterthur was not Anglo Saxon in origin, but rather Old High German.
?interfyllet was the word for winter full moon by the Anglo Saxons, never a deity.
The Ancient European histories, cultures, and rituals were solely to lend legitimacy to their degeneracy.
Beneath it all lied the flawed belief of eurocentricity as the epitome of civility.
All of it was a mirage of aesthetics and nomenclature in order to maintain the appearance of erudition.
The mentees were recruits.
The mentors were handlers.
The cabal members were perpetrators.
The concurrent cabal archons and polemarches were the leaders.
All of the explanations bulked against his teeth. Instead of the two young men airing everything between them, all the secrets and omitted lies, they held their tongues. James could see how dearly Elliott missed him in his eyes, how innocent he still was, and it tore him apart. “Never mind.”
James set down his coat. He poured two glasses of champagne and toasted to Elliott.
He faked a smile. “Welcome back, Elliott. Happy birthday.”
James told himself that it wasn’t the first time the elected honorarium was spared. Professor Malcolm Hexley was a selected honorarium that had been spared after his twin brother had taken his place in the winter ritual. Elliott was another spared honorarium.
“Thank you, James. I can be with Kitty now, I can’t believe it.”
Professor Ilaria is trying to replace me with you. She wants you in her debt. James clenched his teeth, wishing he could force out every dark truth of his profane history so that Elliott could understand that this wasn’t a gift. He couldn’t be with Kitty in the same way ever again.
Professor Ilaria found a more malleable protégé.
She was going to psychologically damage Elliott, right in front of James.
She might concoct methods to torture Elliott in retribution for James’s insolence. Anything was an inimical possibility with her.
The internecine power friction between them would destroy them both. Therefore, one of them had to cede power first. For Elliott’s sake, James had to surrender to the olive branch of mercy. A declaration of war was his first instinct. However, instead, he would reconcile with the woman he loathed.
“I won’t be a burden on Knox anymore,” Elliott rasped with gasps with relief. It finally occurred to him he didn’t have to return to the cold, windowless garage, kept outside of civilization. “I’ve been a burden my whole life. I’m finally free.”
His words ignited anger in James’s chest.
“You were treated as a burden. There’s a difference. You were never a burden, Elliott.” He forced him to look him in his eyes. “You are no one’s burden. Do you understand?”
Elliott smiled upon him, and James’s heart was arrested. At that moment, he would’ve done anything to keep that loving gaze in his eyes. Warmth plucked beneath James’s skin. The concentratedly sweet gaze of Elliott seized him. The heavenly mismatched eyes that enraptured everyone’s soul.
James hadn’t been in Elliott’s presence in months. He’d forgotten how close to magic it felt like to gaze upon Elliott.
Elliott believed anyone and everyone. Elliott trusted the wealthy students of AEscwulf College–because he truly believed that everyone had good inside of them. He trusted the faculty of the College with the same incurable optimism.
He trusted Séverine Ilaria because she was in a position of authority. He’d been indoctrinated to always put his faith in authority.
James felt a thread of guilt that he’d led Elliott into a dark path with him. A dark education in deception and blood.
He vowed to himself he wouldn’t ruin Elliott’s life again. If you perform an act of satisfying solatium for your slight, then you will be forgiven. You’ve been my muse. Decide well.
For Elliott, James decided he would plead for forgiveness to her on the first of September.
He would spare no expense. September first was the very start of the autumn trimester, when everyone would return to campus, when everyone would witness him declare in an obsequious, adulatory monologue how much he loved his mentor.
James assumed he had more time to appease her.
He was gravely mistaken.
Far more dire than that, Elliott had finalized his plan to meet with the reporter. On July thirteenth, he would confess everything and atone for his past at last. He would be freed. He decided he would spend his last summer with James.
A decision that would decimate them both.