Quoth the Raven(21)

“Krekor,” he said. He looked at the van and frowned. “You did not drive yourself, all the way down here from Philadelphia?”

“Bennis is in the back with the food. And it’s funny, but I keep thinking of us as coming up here from Philadelphia.”

“You have been traveling south, Krekor.”

“I know. But we’ve also been traveling up.” Over at the van, the side door slid open and Bennis Hannaford jumped out, holding one of the picnic baskets in her arms and staggering under its weight.

“We’re never going to get all this stuff where we’ve got to go,” she said, “not unless that’s a lot closer than I think it is. Hello, Father. Is there a college less than a mile from here, or should I have brought my hiking shoes?”

“Tcha,” Tibor said. “Your hiking shoes would have been appropriate, because so many of the people here hike. And climb mountains. And jog. It is very remarkable, Bennis, this is such a place of peace, such a place of rest, and nobody ever stops moving.”

“Right.” Bennis put the picnic basket back on the floor of the van and walked over to them. If it hadn’t been for the way she moved, they might have taken her for a college student herself. She had none of the slackness of skin, none of the distortions of body, that time and gravity visit on most people by the age of thirty-five. It was her sophistication and apparent self-confidence that was off, both too strongly settled and too deeply felt to belong to an adolescent.

She drew up to them, shoved her hands in her pockets and asked, “Is there a college around here somewhere? Is there anything?”

“Over there,” Tibor said solemnly, pointing away from the shack across a long flat expanse of ground that seemed to go nowhere. “What do you see?”

“Something orange,” Bennis said doubtfully.

“A pumpkin,” Gregor said.

“A jack-o’-lantern,” Tibor corrected them. “You see it from the back, so you can’t tell it has been carved. That is the top of King’s Scaffold there, King’s and the jack-o’-lantern is the head of mad King George. You know that they burn every year the effigy of King George?”

“I’ve heard of it,” Bennis said, doubtful again.

Gregor tsked at her with impatience. “It’s famous,” he told her. “At least, it’s famous in the state. There was some fuss a few years ago, the state Environmental Protection Agency tried to shut it down, the Governor practically had to call out the state militia.”

“Dr. Katherine Branch,” Father Tibor said.

“Who’s Dr. Katherine Branch?” Gregor asked him.

“The lady who started the fuss. She is a professor in the program in which I teach, Krekor, a very strange lady. She says she is the reincarnation of a witch.”

“Well,” Bennis said, “that’s perfect for Halloween.”

“For Halloween, Bennis, yes, but she does not confine her silliness to Halloween, if it is silliness. She is not a woman I like very much. There is another woman, Dr. Alice Elkinson, and her I do like very much. And a man. Kenneth Crockett.”

“Doctor?” Gregor asked.

“Oh, yes, Krekor. Here they are all doctors, except me, and I have what they call, what they call—”

“An equivalent,” Bennis said.

“Yes, Bennis, that is right. An equivalent. How they can possibly think I have an equivalent, considering how I studied, I do not know. Perhaps they think stubbornness under torture is educational. But it is as I said. Here they have only doctors, even in the most minor of teaching positions, which I think is a mistake. A doctorate is a degree for research. Here we do very little research. We teach.”

“You write,” Bennis pointed out.

“Yes, Bennis, I write. I write so much these days, I think I have diarrhea of the pen, to change an expression a student of mine explained to me the other day. I like my students, Krekor. They are very—enthusiastic. Very energetic. Uneducated to a point that is criminal, you understand, and in complete ignorance of history, but we do what we can about that.”

“Right now I think we ought to do what we can about these picnic baskets,” Bennis said. “Hannah and Lida packed them this morning, and they weigh a ton. We’ve got to get them to your room somehow, Tibor. I couldn’t just bring them back to Philadelphia.”

The three of them turned to look back at the van. Its side door was still open. The picnic basket Bennis had carried forward still sat on the carpeted floor just inside the door. A new wind was rising, even stiffer and chillier than the last, ruffling their hair and their clothes and the loose asphalt shingles on the roof of the shack.