Quoth the Raven(29)

“I don’t know where Katherine’s gone. She went stomping out of here, saying she knew exactly what to do about the arrival of the police state. Or words to that effect. I expect to find her boiling eye of newt and toe of frog in the middle of the quad. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’m fine, Alice. I love you.”

“You sound depressed,” Alice said. “Never mind. I love you, too. Hurry back.”

“I will.”

The phone went to dial tone in his ear. Ken reached around with his left thumb and shut the power off.

It was funny, but it was true: Alice always seemed to be half-right about him. He wasn’t depressed, exactly. He was sort of floaty, the way he got when there was too much in his life he had to deal with immediately and not enough information coming in about how he ought to act. He went to the edge of the porch and looked down into the trees, into nothing, into a place where there was neither Halloween nor Donegal Steele. Ken didn’t mind Halloween much—after all these years not merely at Independence College, but in Belleville, he had learned to live with it—but Steele had been on his mind for days. There didn’t seem to be any way to get him off.

If he had had to put a name to it, he would have said that Alice was just too innocent. She didn’t understand why Maryanne Veer was upset at Steele’s absence, or why Katherine Branch and Vivi Wollman were upset at the prospect of a visit from the police. He, on the other hand, understood both these things far too well.

The very idea of them made his blood run cold.





3


IT WAS NOON BY the time Jack Carroll and Chessey Flint came downstairs from Chessey’s room, and by then the living room of Lexington House was full of students in heightened states of exasperation. It was at times like these that Chessey realized how little, different college was from high school. What was supposed to be happening here was a snake dance, across the quad to the dining hall. It went off every year. In theory, anyone at Lexington House could have got it going at any time at all. What was holding it up was the rigid economy of campus status. Among the classes, seniors were more important than anyone else. Among the seniors, Chessey and Jack were more important than anyone else. The categories were so thoroughly ingrained and so deeply felt, they were paralyzing. These were grown men and women here in the living room of Lexington House, twenty-one and twenty-two year olds who were supposed to leave campus in less than eight months to go out and conquer the world. They were hanging around on sofas and love seats, waiting for the Most Popular Girl and the Most Popular Boy to lead them in a bunny hop.

She was not, Chessey knew, being fair. She was much too rattled to be fair. In the face of what the last few minutes had proved to her to be true—that Jack had changed; that he had changed toward her specifically; that he had changed toward her sexually most of all—all this stuff, these crepe paper streamers and plastic ghoulies and satin costume masks that squirted blood and water at the touch of a string, seemed like so much lunatic nonsense. They had read Poe’s Masque of the Red Death last year in her Nineteenth-Century American Lit course, and suddenly Chessey thought that that was what this was like, a not very benign exercise in group torture. Usually, when she came down from her time with Jack, she felt high. There was something exhilarating about not quite having sex, about letting him touch her when she knew the completion would be postponed. At the moment, she just felt terribly wrong, as if she had done something inexcusable.

As if, in her virginity, she had become imprisoned in the pointless and inane.

Chessey was looking through the crowd for Evie Westerman, hard to find with so many girls dressed identically in satin pumpkin costumes. Jack touched her on the shoulder and she jumped.

“Are you all right?” Jack said.

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

You’re the one who doesn’t look fine, Chessey thought. She didn’t say it. She was too frightened to say it. Instead, she went on looking for Evie and said while she was doing it, “Why don’t you get the dance started on your own? I want to talk to Evie for a minute.”

“Evie’s over there by the punch bowl. I think she’s got it spiked.”

Evie was most definitely over there by the punch bowl—and she probably had got it spiked. She had her mask on top of her head instead of over her face and her gloves tucked into the neckline of her pumpkin dress.

“Go talk to Evie and I’ll wait for you,” Jack said.

“It might take too long.” The last thing Chessey wanted was Jack waiting for her. “Go ahead, all right, please? I’ll catch up to you at lunch.”