Quoth the Raven(61)

Jack Carroll was staring at him in astonishment. “Mr. Demarkian, what are you talking about?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Gregor said, “but when we’ve made one right I will know that. Will you do it?”

Jack Carroll would do it, but it was clear he thought Gregor Demarkian was crazy.





Five


1


WHEN DR. ALICE ELKINSON told Dr. Kenneth Crockett that she wanted to come down to his apartment for the night, rather than having him come up to hers, he found it only a minor inconvenience—usually, he would have found it a major pain in the ass, and protested. Alice had one of the three apartments in this building with full kitchens. Ken only had a cooking alcove, like Father Tibor’s and Donegal Steele’s. The problems came with breakfast, which Ken always wanted to overeat, and which he didn’t like going to the cafeteria for. Alice was remarkably accommodating about breakfast, considering how she operated in the rest of her life. Sometimes, her willingness to cook for him surprised Ken beyond reason. Ken often told himself that that was what he loved about her, her surprises, the fundamental contradictions in her personality—even though some of those contradictions made him nervous. He often told himself that she would be perfect if she would only rid herself of her fickleness. Alice was always hating someone one minute and loving him the next, or vice versa. It made Ken wonder about what was going on between the two of them, and how long it would last. So far, it had lasted five years without a serious break. When he got very, very nervous, he told himself he ought to be satisfied with that.

The other problem with having Alice come to him, rather than his coming to her, had to do with the staircases at Constitution House. In order for Alice to get from her apartment on the fourth floor to his on the third, she had to go down the north staircase all the way to the ground floor, wend her way through a series of hallways to the foyer, wend her way through another series of hallways to the south staircase, and come all the way up again. He had to do the same to get to her—but for some reason he always seemed to be able to do it faster. It took him about ten minutes to get to Alice’s apartment. It took Alice about forty to get to his. Waiting for her after she’d said she’d be right over sometimes made him crazy.

Now it was ten o’clock on the night of Wednesday, October thirtieth, and Ken Crockett had other things on his mind.” Alice coming to his apartment, and the time it would take for her to actually get there, were even useful in the short run. He’d meant to spend his day in reasonable tranquility. Going up Hillman’s Rock this morning, he had imagined himself over the course of the coming afternoon: having lunch with Alice, reading de Tocqueville under the shade of the pine trees behind Constitution House, maybe taking Alice out into the quad after it got dark and getting her to dance. The attack on Miss Maryanne Veer had put an end to that—but the attack wasn’t all that had put an end to it. He had come back to his apartment all jangled, not having expected to come back to it at all after that mess in the dining room. Alice had been such a wreck. Ken had been sure she’d want him with her. When she hadn’t, he’d been more than put out. He’d been positively angry. It was as if she thought of him as some kind of teenage Good-Time Charlie, desirable for the giggle times but not much use for anything other than that. He’d walked around and around the campus, skirting the Halloween festivities in a mood so sour he thought he was turning into Katherine Branch and Donegal Steele, kicking trees. Then, when he had finally gotten himself calmed down, he went back to Constitution House and found—the package.

At the moment, the package was lying on Ken’s coffee table, undone, its papers spread out across the glass surface like used cocktail napkins at the end of an overlong party. When his doorbell rang, he was just picking one of those papers up and turning it over in his hands. He’d been doing that by then for two hours, even though the papers were nothing but lists with various items marked in red. He kept reading the marked items, shaking his head, and reading the marked items again. The whole thing was so damned silly he didn’t know what to do with it.

This time, with Alice jabbing and pounding at the bell, he didn’t bother to read anything. He put the paper down and got up to let her in. On his way to the door he checked his watch. It had taken her twenty-one minutes to get here. It was a record.

She was leaning against the wall next to his door, dressed as if she were about to go out on a climb—or as if she’d just come back from one.

“Hi,” she said. “I’ve calmed down. Have you?”