Quoth the Raven(41)

Up at the other end of the cafeteria line, at the doors that led to the foyer and the front of the building, the medical people had arrived. Gregor could see what looked like hundreds of them crowding in beside the Swedish meatballs and the roast beef au jus.

“What the hell,” one of the men back there said. And then a low, twangy voice cut in from deep in the ranks and said, “Let me through. Just let me come on through.”

If the crowd heard the men at the door, or even noticed they were there, they gave no indication of it. They seemed to have run out of pumpkins. What was raining down now was an eclectic collection of Indian corn, cardboard masks, crepe paper, and ball-point pens. The debris hit the bodies on the floor and bounced off of them without making any impression Gregor could see. Dr. Katherine Branch and her friends—six of them, Gregor counted, obsessively, six of them—lay absolutely still and absolutely silent, as if they were dead.

Down in the cafeteria line the twangy voice was droning on and on, on and on. “Let me come on through. Let me come on through. Let me come on through.” Gregor strained to see who it belonged to and caught only the movement of men in firemen’s uniforms and medical whites. Then the ranks of official rescuers parted, and a small man stepped into the room. He was old, and fat, and faintly ridiculous, dressed up in a Stetson hat and a khaki shirt. He could have been a Halloween reveler costumed as a good old boy Texas sheriff—except that he had a real Colt .45 in the holster on his hip, and there was something about his eyes that made Gregor think he wouldn’t be afraid to use it.

The crowd paid no more attention to the man in the Stetson hat than they had to anyone else since the ruckus started. The man in the Stetson hat looked them over, walked to the edge of Katherine Branch’s prostrate circle, and drew his gun. Then he pointed it at the ceiling and fired.

Well, Gregor thought, in the dead silence that followed, that got their attention.

The man in the Stetson hat looked pleased.

“Now what the hell,” he bellowed, “is going on around here?”





Part Two


Wednesday, October 30

Eagerly I wished the morrow;

vainly I had sought to borrow

From my books surcease of sorrow—

sorrow for the lost Lenore—

—E. A. Poe





One


1


THE CHIEF PARAMEDIC WAS a young man, neither as experienced or as self-controlled as he should have been, and when he got to Miss Maryanne Veer’s body he was held up for seconds by the sight of Bennis Hannaford’s face. Then the spell was broken, and Gregor saw an older man come forward and take the latest of the milk cartons out of Bennis’s hand. The older man was older only in a relative sense. He might have been somewhere between thirty-five and forty. From the way he held himself and the way he moved, in quick economical chops that were like controlled spasms, Gregor was sure he had gotten his medical training in Vietnam. Bennis moved back, and Jack Carroll moved back in the other direction. Even the chief paramedic showed a little deference to this older one, who was the only person anywhere near the body who seemed to know what he was doing.

On Gregor’s side of the room, near the cash register and the cafeteria line, the man with the gun was getting organized. He had put the gun back in his holster—his shot hadn’t made a hole in the ceiling or left a mark of any kind on it, so Gregor assumed he was using blanks—and then gone to each of the women lying on the floor and tapped them on the shoulders. The women had sat up and then stood. Now they were milling around in a group near the wall, looking ridiculous—which is the only way they could look, given the way they were dressed. It was funny, Gregor thought, but while all the craziness had been going on, he had imagined the room to be dark, even though it couldn’t have been. Bright sunlight streamed through the dining room windows. It was a fine fell day at the end of October, bright and hard and cold, perfect weather for a bonfire. If it stayed this fine until midnight tomorrow, Independence College would have one of the most spectacular effigy burnings in its history.

The man with the gun was going down the line of women in black, asking their names and writing them down in a stenographer’s notebook. Some of his men were doing the same thing with the rest of the crowd. Gregor noted with approval that the man with the gun was not as much of a rube as he appeared. He had left the foyer door bottled up by a large, complaisant-looking young man in a makeshift deputy’s uniform. Unless someone wanted to take the risk of jumping out of one of the broad windows into the quad, nobody was going to go home without having his vital statistics put down on paper.

The man with the gun finished with the women, shook his head slightly—Gregor didn’t blame him for that; those women must have been hell to talk to. Now that they were trying to behave like normal people, it was easy to see they were all high as kites—and then turned, almost knocking into the center of Gregor’s chest. The man with the gun was barely five feet eight and Gregor was tall, the way a certain segment of the male Armenian population gets tall, with a few layers of fat and muscle, but mostly fat, to mitigate the height. The man with the gun tilted his head back, stared straight into Gregor’s eyes, and said, in that hillbilly twang,