Quoth the Raven(37)

“Dear God,” Bennis Hannaford said, “will somebody please shut her up?”

“Never mind about shutting her up,” Gregor said. What he had been afraid of was beginning to happen. Miss Maryanne Veer had fallen to the floor, and the rest of them were converging on her, throwing themselves at her. There were things that needed to be done and done quickly, and a roadblock of bodies was going up that could become impossible to penetrate at any moment. Gregor grabbed Tibor by the shoulders and spun him around, so that he was facing the cafeteria line and the door out. “Go,” he said. “Call 911. Ask for an ambulance and the police. Tell them we’ve got an attempted murder by lye.”

If Tibor had been thinking clearly, he would have protested. There was no way to know, now, whether what they had was an attempted murder, an attempted suicide, or some kind of gruesome accident. Because Tibor was thinking no more clearly than any of the people now clotting up the center of the room, he took off at a brisk trot without asking questions. Gregor turned to Bennis and said, “Go get some milk. Lots of milk. As much as you can carry. Bring it to me when I get in over there and then go back and get some more.”

“Milk?”

“Don’t ask stupid questions, Bennis. Just go.”

Bennis went. The clot in the center of the room was pulsing, sending up waves of sound that weren’t words and weren’t music but had something in common with both. Dr. Elkinson had stopped screaming and begun crying hysterically instead. She kept altering sobs with wails, sobs with wails, so that she sounded like a defective police siren.

“We’ve got to make her vomit,” someone in the crowd was saying. “We’ve got to force her to bring the poison up out of her system.”

Gregor pushed through two young girls, students, whose skin was tinged with the whitish-green of incipient nausea. As he forced himself through the second layer and into the still empty but smaller circle of the center, he saw one of the girls turn away and bend over. He wedged himself into the open space next to Miss Maryanne Veer’s body and dropped to his knees.

“For God’s sake,” he said, “whatever we do here, what we can’t do is let her vomit.”

“Who’s that?” someone in the crowd said.

Bennis pushed through, her arms full of those small waxed-cardboard cartons of milk that seem to be sold only in school cafeterias. She had at least thirty of them. She dumped them on the floor next to Gregor and stood up again, looking a little wild.

“Is that what you wanted?”

“More,” Gregor said.

“More?”

“Just in case.”

Bennis whipped around and ran off again. Gregor looked up and tried desperately to judge the character behind the faces he saw. Dr. Elkinson was in no shape to help anyone with anything. She had fallen out of the crowd and collapsed into a chair. Gregor could see the top of her head, bent and shuddering, between the shoulders of a student dressed as Leonardo the Ninja Turtle and the shoulders of another student dressed as Snow White. That was part of the problem, the way all the students were dressed. The face Gregor most wanted to see was that of Tibor’s friend, Jack Carroll. He remembered that the boy had been dressed as a bat, complete with hood, but there were two bats in the crowd, both complete with hoods. Gregor hadn’t paid enough attention to the way the rest of the boy had looked to be able to determine if either of these bats was the one he wanted. He didn’t want to call out the boy’s name, either—although at that moment he couldn’t have said why. There was just something about it that felt damned wrong, maybe even dangerous for the boy, and Gregor had to go with that. He didn’t have the time or the inclination to work it all out.

“I know who that is,” someone in the crowd said. “That’s the man who’s giving the lecture about crime.”

Gregor examined the faces before him, the ones he knew and the ones he didn’t know. The ones he knew were few in number and not always attached to names. There was Dr. Elkinson in her chair, yes, but there was also the pretty, blond, athletic girl hanging on to one of the bats. She was dressed as a pumpkin and her face was streaked with tears. Gregor had seen her on the quad when Tibor had been leading them to the dining hall for lunch. She had been part of a whole line of girls dressed as pumpkins, and she hadn’t looked happy even then. Gregor mentally rejected her services out of hand—not only was she too upset, she wasn’t strong enough—and went back to his search. Finally, he came to rest on Dr. Kenneth Crockett, upset, even horrified, and hanging back as far as he dared, but blessedly still in control of himself.