Quoth the Raven(89)

But he couldn’t remember what he’d done. That was the problem. He could never remember what he’d done when he got himself into a spot like that, and the spots were coming more and more frequently lately, especially with Jack. Ken walked around these days feeling flayed alive.

“I’ve been thinking about going to the Dean,” Jack had said on the phone today. “I’ve been thinking about it for over a week. I don’t think it makes much sense.”

“No,” Ken had said. “I don’t think it makes much sense, either.”

“I couldn’t come up with any sane idea of what I’d tell the Dean. But I can’t just sit here driving myself crazy with it, Ken. You must know that.”

“Yes,” Ken had said. “I mean no. Of course not.”

“I want you to come out here right now, okay? Neutral territory. Where we can talk.”

There were men at Berkeley and Chicago and Yale who walked around with lavender scarves tied around their throats. There were men in Washington and Los Angeles and New York who bought apartments with their lovers and were buried together under linked headstones engraved with the poetry of passion and AIDS. They were on the lip of the third millennium and there was no sense, no sense at all, to the way he was behaving.

Except, of course, that there was. He was not any of those men. He was Dr. Kenneth Crockett. He didn’t live in any of those places. He lived here, in Belleville, Pennsylvania, where every member of his family since the year 1692 had made his home and his life and his name—and that name definitely had not been fag.

“Ken?” Jack had said. “Look. I’m up at the cabin. I’m going to leave in a few minutes.”

“Where to?”

“Not to campus. I don’t want to talk on campus. I thought I’d go over to Harrison’s in Chelton and have a steak. Can you meet me there?”

“Now?”

“Yes, Ken, of course now. I have to be back in time for Demarkian’s lecture. I have to introduce the man.”

“Oh.”

Ken had looked at his clock automatically, seen the time, seen Jack’s point. Harrison’s was a good half hour away by car, no matter how hard you pumped the gas pedal. He felt himself start to sweat and closed his eyes against the rain of salt that poured into them.

“Jack? Look, right now—”

“It’s got to be now, Ken. It’s got to be.”

“But—”

“I’m going to leave right now. Meet me at Harrison’s.”

He had looked down and seen that the bat suit was bunched and knotted in both his hands, trailing across his face, wound around the telephone receiver. He had been pulling and twisting it while he talked and he hadn’t even noticed. Then he had heard Jack hang up without saying good-bye and he had let the receiver fall to the end table. It had seemed like much more than he would ever be able to do to put it back in its cradle.

In San Francisco, there were entire neighborhoods full of nothing but men like him. In New Orleans, there was a section of the city with its own place on the tourist maps, celebrating everything he thought he wanted to forget. Even Minneapolis, Minnesota, had a temple of the masculine all its own, where men who were what he was didn’t have to hide.

And he was here.

He looked down at the bat suit now and told himself to get on with it. He was in the basement of Constitution House, standing next to the incinerator. He was all ready to go. All he had to do was throw the damn thing in there and make sure it caught.

Fire.

At the last minute, he got the tin of kerosene off the shelf on the west wall and dosed the bat suit thoroughly. Then he threw it into the black cast-iron tank and watched it flare.

He knew what came next, what always came next, just when the pain got so bad he thought he was going to shred into blood and skin and bone in the blades of it.

He was going to start to get angry, and once he started he wouldn’t be able to stop.

He was going to be ready to kill someone.





4


IT WAS FIVE THIRTY-FIVE, and up in Chessey Flint and Evie Westerman’s room in Lexington House, Jack Carroll was trying to open a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne. Evie Westerman had given him explicit instructions about what he was and what he wasn’t supposed to do. It was apparently the height of stupidity to pop a cork on a bottle of anything quite this expensive. Evie had even gone into just why it was this expensive, but Jack hadn’t been listening to her. The phrase “vintage years” always reminded him of old women who wore white lace gloves to lunch.

Over on the more neatly made of the two double beds, Chessey was sitting cross-legged in a pair of jeans and one of his shirts, looking happily disheveled but a little guilty.