Quoth the Raven(23)
“Good Lord,” Bennis said. “That’s very realistic, isn’t it?”
“The pile has gone too high for you to see its hands,” Tibor told her. “You can see them if you try. They give it all away.”
“I’m glad something gives it away,” Gregor said.
“Just a minute, Krekor. It is that boy there in the bat suit that we need. I will be back.”
Tibor darted into the crowd. Gregor returned his attention to the effigy, dodging visual interference from costumed revelers beneficent and malign: an Alice in Wonderland, a Devil with pitchfork and horns, a Little Red Riding Hood, a walking zombie from Night of the Living Dead. Everybody seemed to be carrying crepe paper streamers and confetti. Everybody seemed to be dancing to music that existed only inside their heads. Gregor kept having to beat back the nauseating suspicion that they all had the same music inside their heads. Finally he got momentarily clear of the crowd and caught a clear look at what he wanted: the effigy’s hands, white gloves badly stuffed with straw, much too small for anyone but a child.
“Tibor was right,” he said to Bennis Hannaford, who was standing just behind him. “Once you see the hands, the illusion’s broken. The hands are so wrong, you start to see what’s wrong with the rest of it.”
“That’s nice,” Bennis said. “I’m too damned short to see the hands.”
“Take my word for it. It’s not just the hands. The shoulders are two different sizes. The arms have lumps in all the wrong places. There isn’t any neck.”
“There isn’t a shred of mental stability on this entire college campus.”
Gregor had often thought there wasn’t a shred of mental stability on any college campus—but this wasn’t the time to bring it up, and Tibor was coming back. Coming with Tibor was a man—given his enormous size and muscularity, Gregor refused to call him a boy—in head-to-toe black, his hair and face and neck encased in a mask-hood, his arms and shoulders attached to a broad cape that looked like wings when he moved. Gregor looked at Bennis and Bennis looked back.
Tibor hopped to a stop in front of them—Tibor always hopped when he was excited—and pulled on the edge of the man’s cape.
“Bennis, Krekor,” he said. “This is Mr. Jack Carroll. Mr. Carroll is a student of mine.”
The man in the cape hesitated, then reached up and pulled the hood off his head. Now that he could see his face, Gregor had to give, Tibor his description—this was a boy, although not as boyish a boy as most of the others around him. If Gregor had been sizing up Jack Carroll for a possible job in the FBI, he would have said: very bright, very poor, working his way through.
Jack Carroll had the black hair and blue eyes and fair skin of a certain brand of Irishman. When he shook Gregor’s hand, his grip was as strong as a steelworker’s.
“Mr. Demarkian.” He took Bennis’s hand. “Miss—”
“Hannaford,” Bennis said faintly.
Gregor shot her a look that said: This boy is ten years younger than you at least. Make sense.
Tibor was still prancing up and down, antsy. “Well,” he said. “Krekor, Bennis. Mr. Carroll has agreed to help us, you see. He will go to the van and get the picnic baskets—”
“If you don’t mind,” Jack Carroll said, “I’ll send Freddie and Max to get the picnic baskets. You know Freddie, Father. He’s the one who wrote the paper comparing James Madison to Chingachgook.”
“Tcha,” Tibor said. “This Freddie, he is a nice boy, but he is here because he has no other place to be. Yes, Mr. Carroll. Freddie and Max, this is fine. Listen to me, Krekor. When I like their work, I know to call them by their last names. When I don’t—” Tibor shrugged.
“I’d do it myself, but I’m supposed to be organizing a torchlight parade that goes off tonight. The witch’s parade, Father. You remember about that. It was Dr. Branch’s idea.”
“Mr. Carroll has a problem with Dr. Branch,” Tibor said.
“Everybody has a problem with Dr. Branch,” Jack Carroll said. He turned around to look up at the effigy and the students who surrounded it. Two tall ladders had been placed on either side of the pile of logs, but they weren’t tall enough. The students who stood on top of them, being passed logs like the end men in a bucket brigade, were tossing heavy pieces of wood into the air. Sometimes the pieces of wood landed on the pile and stayed there. Sometimes they bounced off and rolled down into the crowd. “That’s getting dangerous,” Jack Carroll said. “I’ll have to tell Mike to start loading from the top.”