Quoth the Raven(47)

Of course, Katherine could have chosen better, too. She could have brought them both back to her own apartment, instead of here. It was just that that hadn’t seemed like a very safe choice, after what had happened to Miss Maryanne Veer. Katherine couldn’t for the life of her figure out why that had been so. She didn’t expect anyone to put lye in her own food, especially not at home. Like most of the rest of the faculty who lived in Constitution House, she kept almost no food on the premises. She didn’t expect Sheriff David Markham and his men to come bursting through her door like a SWAT team, either. She couldn’t imagine them doing it and she couldn’t imagine what they would do it for. Maybe she was having some kind of reaction to the hashish she had never had before.

She reached for the robe Vivi had laid out for her—wraparound and made for a man; there was something to think about—and drew it around her. Then she stepped through the bathroom door into the cramped back hall and said, “Vivi?”

In the kitchen, the sounds of coffee making and domestic neurosis came to a halt. Katherine waited for Vivi’s answering call, but it didn’t come. Neither did the renewed sounds of coffee making. The silence in the apartment felt as thick and opaque as mayonnaise.

Katherine walked down the hall, through the tiny living room, across the dining ell and into the kitchen. Vivi was standing at the sink, with her back to the rest of the apartment, looking at the plain white stoneware coffee cup she was holding in her hand.

Katherine got to the archway and stopped. “Vivi,” she said again. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” Vivi let the coffee cup drop into the sink and turned around. In the interests of efficiency, Katherine had let Vivi take her shower first. Vivi now looked “normal,” in the sense that she was not in black and had no greasepaint on her face. Beyond that, she was a study in the problems of the hashish solution. Her pupils were dilated. Her face was flushed in places and dead white in others. She was sweating. She pointed across the room to the two-person table shoved into the corner and said, “There it is. I got it. But Katherine, don’t ever ask me to do anything like that again.”

“It’s because of the anointing,” Katherine said mildly. “I don’t think I mixed the ointment right. I put in too much of everything.”

“It has nothing to do with the goddamned anointing, Katherine. It has to do with the police. They were all over Miss Veer’s office, in case you haven’t guessed.”

“What did they do when they saw you there?”

“They didn’t see me there.”

“How did you get in?”

“I went straight to the chairman’s office. Through the window, if you really have to know. With all the rest of the nutsiness going on on campus, nobody even noticed. Then I got that damned file and got out. I wish you’d look at it. I’d like to think I risked my job, my professional reputation, and my neck for something more important than one of your hashish fantasies.”

Actually, Katherine thought, she didn’t have hashish fantasies. The same drugs that made everyone else see visions only made her feel dull and nervous. Even LSD—which she had tried once in the 1960s, because the man she was sleeping with had tried it, and because she believed in men in those days—had done nothing more than make her light-headed and nauseated. Still, Vivi didn’t know that, and Vivi was angry with her—not only because of the file, but because of the hex. Vivi hadn’t wanted to have anything to do with that hex, and in retrospect she probably thought she had been right. Katherine couldn’t see it that way. You couldn’t remain passive in the face of an all-out assault on your integrity. You couldn’t remain passive, period. Passivity was what had been turning women into robots for the last 6,000 years.

Katherine sat down at the table, opened the file, and paged through it. There wasn’t much in it, and she hadn’t expected there to be. It was labeled “Feminist Approaches To,” which was short for “Feminist Approaches to the American Idea,” and it contained three single-page course proposals she had written herself, two syllabi she had also written herself, and a thin sheaf of faculty after-course effectiveness evaluations. The evaluations were routinely bad. One of them—written, of course, by Ken Crockett—called Katherine’s course in the History of Women in Colonial New England “an exercise in the glorification of sexual organs over reason.” The one that hurt was by Alice Elkinson. It called Katherine’s course in the Feminist Deconstruction of Witchcraft “a concerted effort to indoctrinate students in the moral superiority of a state of permanent victimhood.”