Quoth the Raven(15)

Tibor turned into the quad and walked slowly toward Constitution House, through the crowds, through the gossamer spiderwebs, through the ambushes of plastic bats and sateen ghosts and rubber balloon jack-o’-lanterns. Someone in one of the quad dorms was playing music on a stereo system through his windows. Tibor recognized the piece as something called “Monster Mash,” which both Donna Moradanyan and Bennis Hannaford liked.

“Hey, Father,” a boy in a Count Dracula suit said, “you got your costume ready? You coming to the bonfire dressed as Lucifer with a tail?”

“I’m coming to the bonfire dressed as myself,” Tibor told him, wishing he knew who the boy was. “I’m too old and too tired to go running around pretending to be the Devil.”

“What about your friend, the great detective? Is he going to come in costume?”

“I don’t think so,” Tibor said, and blushed.

“I hope he talks about blood a lot in his lecture,” the boy said. “It would be absolutely rad.”

Tibor didn’t know what it meant to be “absolutely rad,” but he didn’t have a chance to ask. Everybody on the quad seemed to be dancing to the “Monster Mash” song. A girl in a space helmet and electric pink tights chugged up and nabbed his boy, and they both disappeared.

It was, Tibor thought, just as well. He still felt a little guilty about what he had pulled on Gregor, asking him up here at first just to the Halloween party, to keep him company, and then dumping this lecture on him. Tibor had no idea how Gregor felt about lectures, but he could guess.

The book bag was hurting his shoulder, so he readjusted it. Then he got started again on his way to his temporary home. When he got to the center of the quad he looked up reflexively and saw Lenore above his head, circling and circling, her caws drowned out by the pounding bass of the music around him. Lenore was nearly tame. She never went circling through the air like that, agitated and angry.

There was something else that was strange, and he didn’t like it either. He hadn’t seen the Great Doctor Donegal Steele all day. He thought he ought to consider it a blessing—Donegal Steele was probably the first man Tibor had honestly hated since he left the Soviet union  —but he couldn’t. There was something so fundamentally wrong about it, it made his flesh crawl.

Lenore and Donegal Steele.

Tibor turned down the path that led to the front door of Constitution House. It would be all right, he told himself, because Gregor was coming. In just two days, Gregor would be on campus and everything would be fine.

When Tibor had Gregor with him, everything always was.





Part One


Wednesday, October 30

While I nodded, nearly napping,

suddenly there came a tapping,

As of someone gently rapping,

rapping at my chamber door.

—E. A. Poe





One


1


LIKE EVERY MAN WHO has ever been part of an American police force during the month of October, Gregor Demarkian was ambivalent about Halloween. In principle, he tended to like the idea: a holiday for children, stripped of its religious baggage decades ago, dedicated absolutely to silliness and sweets. On Cavanaugh Street, both the silliness and the sweets were particularly in evidence, because the adults insisted on getting in on the act—not cynically, as the adults had in so many of the cities Gregor had lived in over the course of his career, but with a childlike lack of psychological complication Gregor found astounding. There was Howard Kashinian, the perennial juvenile delinquent of Gregor’s grammar-school class and now President and Chief Executive Officer of one of the largest stock brokerages in Philadelphia, standing out on the corner of Cavanaugh and Muswell streets, dressed as a clown. Howard had a brand-new, never used, industrial-size plastic garbage can beside him, filled with Halloween candy that he passed out to anyone who asked. Lots of people asked, too. It was Wednesday, October 30, and the children were out of school in favor of a teachers’ meeting. Some of them had put on paper masks and gone to stand around Howard. Some of them had come barefaced, in their inevitable jeans and sweaters. All of them seemed to have brought their mothers. The mothers stood on the fringes of the crowd and munched away on sugar pumpkins and candy corn. Then there was Lida Kazanjian Arkmanian, the Most Beautiful Armenian Girl of Gregor’s adolescence, now grandmother to a dozen small children and mistress of an enormous town house at number 48. What Lida was doing was what Lida was always doing these days, cooking. So was Lida’s best friend from high school and best friend still on Cavanaugh Street, Hannah Oumoudian Krekorian. There was supposed to be a party in the basement of the church for the smallest children on Halloween night, and Lida and Hannah intended to be ready. Finally, there was old George Tekemanian, aged eighty-six, occupant of the ground-floor floor-through apartment in Gregor’s building. The party in the church basement might be for small children, but old George was getting ready for it, too. He was teaching himself to bob for apples. In principle, there was no reason for Gregor to be uneasy about Halloween on Cavanaugh Street. In principle, Cavanaugh Street was an Eden where the serpent had been headed off at the pass.