Gods of Aberdeen

by Micah Nathan

  At 7 A.M. the following Tuesday I walked alone across the Quad, toward the H. F. Mores for my first day of work study. The Quad was a large square of lightly wooded land left between the triad of buildings—Garringer, H. F. Mores, and Thorren—and the paved road that wound through campus.

  The library smelled like old, cracked leather and antique wood. Its vestibule was carpeted in threadbare Persian rugs, framed by an ornately carved archway, leading into the main room with fifteen-foot corniced ceilings, and couches and chairs scattered about. A massive desk sat about ten feet from the entrance against the wall on my left. Tall rows of books, narrowly spaced apart from one end of the room to the other, dissolved into darkness. I walked to the desk, boards creaking under my feet.

  An open book lay atop the scratched and faded surface of the desk, flat by virtue of its own weight, the pages thick as if made of linen. The text was written in Latin, in beautiful Cyrillic script, illuminations framing the page: green vines, blood-red roses, a maze of thorns curling around a small man in the upper left corner. He was entwined, every limb trapped, his mouth open, his one free hand clutching a stone from which beamed golden lines. The text contained only a formula, some chemistry experiment involving acids and minerals. It was the last line, however, that caught my attention:

  “Experto credite, sic itur ad astra. Sed facilis descensus Averni.”

  Believe one who has had experience, it read. Such is the way to immortality, though the road to evil is easy.

  I turned to the next page, smooth rustling of the paper breaking the silence. There was a piece of yellowed paper inserted in the spine, like a bookmark. Someone had written on it in shaky, uneven script, and the ink was faded, as if very old:

  “Fiat experimentum in corpore vili.” Let experiment be made on a worthless body.

  A metal gate screeched like the cry of some monstrous bird. I straightened up, startled, and turned my head toward the dim recess of the bookshelves that lined the wall. I only saw the faint outlines of books fading back into unlit rows.

  “Hello?”

  I felt ridiculous, shouting a greeting in a vast, silent room. A cloud passed over the sun and the library became dimmer still, outlines becoming ghostly and blurred. I put my work-study papers on the desk and hurried back to the entrance, glancing behind me. Before I closed the door I heard something tapping from within the darkened building, like a cane rapping on the wooden floors.

  My first class later that morning was in Thorren. Dr. Tindley’s room was a medium-sized lecture hall, the seats arranged in an ascending semicircle with a podium at the front and center. The colors of the room were brown and orange with gray carpeting, and when Dr. Tindley walked in he blended with the surroundings, in both voice and dress. He spoke with a clipped British accent, and had a sparse reddish beard, little round glasses, and a patch of white curly hair. His suit had probably been expensive at one time, but now it was a dated dark yellow and brown plaid print. His knit tie was flipped over, and a coffee stain marked the thigh of his wool pants. He picked up the black mug he had carried in and slurped at it.

  “For those of you who had Dr. Rupprecht last year, I’m Dr. Tindley…” He sounded bored by his own voice. “As is my policy, I will be distributing an assessment examination today. It is not only for new students, who may have been placed into this section prematurely”—he glanced at me, then looked away—“but for all of you, who may not have kept up on summer readings. Please consider that today’s exam is not a part of your course grade. I issue it for your benefit alone.”

  I finished the exam ahead of everyone else, and handed it to Dr. Tindley, who read my name on the sheet and beckoned me to follow him toward the door.

  “I don’t believe I’ve seen you before,” he said in a dramatic whisper. “Are you a freshman?”

  “Yes,” I whispered back.

  He nodded, as if all was understood. “I see, well, Eric is it? Yes, well then, I have some space available in both my 101 and 201 class. Would you like me to reserve a seat for you?”

  “I think I’ll be fine here, Dr. Tindley,” I said, still whispering.

  His mouth formed into a small o, then he straightened up and pulled the bottom hem of his jacket. “Very well. We shall see by tomorrow.”

  On Wednesday, Dr. Tindley introduced us to his student assistant, Arthur Fitch, whom I recognized as the student I’d seen last week stumbling out of the library. Art handed out our placement exams, and two words were written at the top of mine: Excellent work. Halfway through the hour Dr. Tindley called upon me to translate a particularly tough passage from Virgil. Two other students had tried and failed, but I had little problem with it. For the remainder of the class Art kept looking at me. When the hour ended I quickly left.

  That night I ate dinner in the Paderborne dining room with two freshmen who lived across the hall from me: Kenny Hauseman, a skinny, soft-spoken kid with a wandering eye that made me uncertain which one to look at while he was talking, and Josh Briggs, whose pimply forehead was hidden behind blond curly hair. Josh’s brother Paul was a senior at Aberdeen. I’d heard the entire Briggs family were Aberdeen alumni.

  I asked Josh if he knew of Art Fitch. “Of course,” Josh said, snapping off a celery stick in his mouth. “Everyone knows Art. He’s like a genius. My brother was in a chem class with him last year. He said Art was hilarious. Always arguing with the teacher, bringing weird books into class. I guess one time Art stole all this shit from the chem lab and the teacher thought he was using it to make drugs in his bathtub.”

  “Was he?” I said.

  Josh chewed loudly. “Who knows. He ended up paying for all the stuff he took. No one really cared. Art’s folks are loaded, so you know how that goes. Speaking of money”—Josh liked to tease me about being poor—“how’s that work-study thing going?”

  “I’m in the library,” I said. “Working for Mr. Graves.”

  “Mr. Graves is a devil-worshipper, you know,” said Kenny.

  “It’s true,” Josh said. “There’s a grave of sacrificed pigeons in the woods behind Kellner.”

  I had only been at Aberdeen a week, and already I’d heard the rumors about the thousand acres of heavily forested land owned by the school. There was supposedly a marijuana farm of epic proportions hidden somewhere among the towering pines and dense thicket, genetically engineered marijuana stolen from a government lab. Some tales were more believable than others—midnight professor/student trysts, fraternity orgies, druidic rites performed on summer solstice.

  Josh picked at one of the pimples on his forehead. He winced and withdrew his hand. “Newell Nichols saw the grave,” he said.

  “That’s right,” Kenny said. “During freshman orientation Newell went hiking with a couple of his buddies, and they found it.”

  “Maybe Newell lied,” I said.

  Josh shook his head. Kenny glanced up at Josh’s forehead, then turned to me.

  “Come with us,” Kenny said.

  We walked past the H. F. Mores and toward Kellner, the honors and graduate student housing on the edge of campus. Its tall, rectangular shape was like a sentry outpost on the border of some village. Lit rooms speckled the dark brick, outlines moving around inside. I thought briefly of Art, whether he lived on campus, or if, like those impossibly cool upperclassmen and graduate students I eyed from afar, he had taken a place in downtown Fairwich.

  Josh stopped at the edge of the woods, hands on his hips. Kenny and I looked back at him, his round head lit from behind by the half-moon. A gust of wind rustled through the knee-high weeds we were all standing in.

  “I don’t think this is a good idea,” Kenny said. He had his hands stuffed into his pockets and his shoulders hunched up. His hair blew in the cool wind.

  Josh turned to me, as if I was suddenly in charge.

  “Are you guys scared?” I said.

  They both shook their heads. “We’re just cold,” Josh said. “But whatever.”

  “Yeah,” said Kenny. “Wha
tever.”

  We walked about a hundred yards into the woods, our shoes threshing through thick weeds until trees towered overhead, and where their limbs spread nothing lived beneath, so that the forest floor was soon a soft bed of rotting pine needles and the furled remains of old leaves. The forest canopy was broken in some spots, through which moonlight trickled, barely lighting the dark floor. We walked on, and Josh suddenly stopped and pointed ahead.

  “That’s it,” he said.

  I walked forward and bent down, and there they were: dead pigeons, piled into a shallow trench lit by moonlight, blanketed with sticks and leaves.

  “What do you think?” Kenny said, whispering, standing near me.

  “Disgusting,” I said. I could smell their little plump gray bodies rotting. The smell reminded me of the Dumpster behind the Stulton tenement, especially during the summer, when the odor was so bad you could almost see it.

  “It’s satanic,” Josh said. He bent down and picked up what looked like an old crumpled beer can.

  “Why would Mr. Graves sacrifice pigeons?” I said.

  Josh chucked the can. It clattered off a tree trunk. “I don’t know,” he said. “To conjure up the Devil, I guess. What else do Satanists do?”

  I stared at the grave and shuddered. “What should I do?” I said.

  “About what?” Kenny said.

  “About my job at the library,” I said. “I can’t work for a Satanist.”

  “Quit,” Josh said. “My brother can get you a job at Edna’s Coffee Shop as a busboy. He’s best friends with the cook.”

  “But it’s work-study,” I said. “If I quit I lose my scholarship.”

  “Well, what do they expect,” Josh said. The wind gusted and he shivered. “There’s got to be something in the school charter about not having to work for a fucking devil-worshipper.”

  I didn’t sleep that night. Instead I sat at my desk and read my textbooks straight through until morning, until the rain that had been perched over campus for three days straight started again, and then I headed for the library.

  When I saw Cornelius Graves for the first time, he wasn’t the villain I’d imagined, but a hunched, decrepit old man with a sprig of white hair. He held a large stack of books in one arm and a cane in the other, shambling out from the rows of bookshelves. He moved toward me, yellowed eyes staring blankly, cane rapping in front like a blind man’s. His mouth hung open. I couldn’t see his legs or his feet, because his robe dragged along the floor.

  He moved so close to me I could feel his breath, and then he craned his head up and squinted. White hair sprung from his nostrils and his ears. His wrinkled skin was draped over his bones like an old sheet over antique furniture. He looked like he was melting.

  He pointed to a sign posted on the wall above the desk. It showed the library hours.

  “Come back in an hour,” he said.

  I found my voice. “I’m Eric Dunne, sir,” I said, backing away slowly. “I left my papers for you on Monday.”

  He put his hand to my chest and I stopped.

  “Did you get my papers?” I said.

  He unloaded the pile of books on his desk. “Your papers,” he said. His voice was dry and weak. “Eric Dunne.”

  He sat down, rested his head on his hand, and clutched the green copper pommel of his cane. A pendulous, tarnished silver cross hung from a chain around his reedy neck. The library was silent except for the patter of rain hitting the slate roof, and outside I saw thick storm clouds hanging low, just above the treetops. A gust of wind spattered raindrops against the windows.

  “My books interest you?” he said, tapping a closed book lying on top of the pile on the desk. I recognized it as the one I had looked at Tuesday.

  “I’m sorry, sir?”

  “This one, here…you read from it. Tuesday.”

  “Oh, that,” I said. “It just caught my eye. I apologize.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Mr. Graves sat there, wheezing. He looked like he could die at any moment. Instead, he licked his lips and cleared his throat. “My mother had a saying,” he began. “Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait. A favorite maxim of Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon…Mother said he whispered it to her during dinner one night, at that time when General Lafayette was a brash boy wearing the cap of a revolutionary.” He cleared his throat again. “Do you speak French?”

  “A little. I took a year in high school.”

  He looked deeply disappointed. He leaned forward. “Who sent you?”

  “I’m here for work study. The papers I left you—”

  “I threw them away. I was not consulted.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Eh? Sorry again? Why are you always apologizing? Who sent you here?”

  “Dr. Lang,” I said, stammering.

  “Henry tell you to watch me?” Cornelius rapped his cane on the floor. “I do as I please.”

  A clap of thunder rumbled close by. Cornelius opened a book and made as if he were reading. He terrified me, but I couldn’t leave. How could I tell Dr. Lang I’d already been fired?

  “I need this job,” I said.

  Cornelius looked up, hands resting on the open book.

  “You need this, eh? Not want, but need, is that it? I hear the children talking of need all day. All their actions spring from these phantom needs, so why should you be any different?”

  He waved his hand at me as if he couldn’t care any less. “Shelve these books and stay out of my sight.” He motioned to the stack on his desk, and then turned away.

  I took the books and ducked into the first row of shelving, trying to calm myself, my face hot with anger and embarrassment.

  I met with Dr. Lang later in the afternoon, at the usual spot, seated across from his wide desk while he reclined awkwardly in his chair. He had a cup of coffee and a half-eaten croissant spread onto a napkin, which was on top of a neatly stacked pile of papers. Dr. Lang had offered me a job as an assistant, and we agreed on a schedule of two days per week, any days of my choosing. I don’t know what exactly I was supposed to do, and even now, years later, as a professor myself I can’t say what I actually did for Dr. Lang. It all fell under the category “administrative” but other than stuffing faculty mailboxes with letters and making photocopies of syllabi, I don’t remember doing much work.

  “You must go back,” Dr. Lang said, when I told him about my encounter with Mr. Graves. “If the bursar discovers you have reneged on your scholarship conditions, it will affect your ability to attend Aberdeen. I suppose I could intervene on your behalf, but I really don’t see the need.”

  “But Mr. Graves doesn’t want me there.”

  “All the same, you must go back.”

  “Maybe you could say something to him…”

  His withering look provided my answer. The other half of the croissant disappeared within the pit of his mouth.

  That night I looked up Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon. He was a French philosopher who had advocated a society governed by technocrats, one in which poverty would be abolished and replaced by rationalism. He published several books, including De la réorganisation de la société européenne. He was considered a radical in his time, and he died in Paris at age sixty-five from a burst appendix.

  Cornelius said his mother had spoken with him at dinner. If youth only knew, if age only could, Claude had said to her, speaking of Lafayette, the same Marquis de Lafayette who had kept company with Thomas Jefferson and La Rochefoucauld. Cornelius was, if nothing else, senile; Claude-Henri died in 1825. For what Cornelius said to be true, he would have to be more than one hundred and fifty years old.

  Over the next week my days and nights fell into a routine. My insomnia returned but I didn’t care. Because I was on academic scholarship I was already obsessing about my grades, and I was convinced that if I got anything less than an A, Dr. Lang would ship me back to Stulton. So I studied almost all the time.
I studied and I slept, and when I couldn’t sleep I’d study some more.

  Once my classwork was finished, I’d go for long walks around campus, exploring the buildings. There was Kellner Hall, beautiful Romanesque done in red brick, and at the edge of campus I found the Waithe Center, the athletic facility, built almost entirely of glass. I learned that Garringer Hall had been a Catholic church before Aberdeen converted to a four-year school, and a janitor told me the rest: the church was the first building on the land, later owned by a priest, Father Garringer, who deeded the building to Aberdeen’s founder, Ephraim Hauser, in 1901. Remnants of Garringer Hall’s old form still existed, however; the first ten rows of pews served as seating during presentations, held on a raised stage where the transept and altar used to be. Student organizations placed their tables along the sides of the nave, where the chapels had been. In midday multicolored light filled the hall, filtering through the original stained-glass windows, and local legend claimed the spirit of Father Garringer roamed the halls at night, angered that his church was no longer.

  At dusk I’d leave my room and sit by a tree in the Quad and listen to the comforting noise of students milling around, tossing Frisbees and footballs, making plans for the weekend. Sometimes I’d see Art striding across the Quad with a short kid who looked my age, and Art would be talking excitedly the whole time while the kid listened with his head down and his hands clasped behind his back. Once I saw Art walking with a beautiful woman in a long gray skirt. He was talking and talking, as he did every time I saw him, oblivious to the stares and head-turns the woman left in her wake.

  Wednesday Latin class had Art filling in for an absent Dr. Tindley. Art stood at the podium and ruffled a stack of papers. “Dr. Tindley told me to inform you that Friday’s quiz is postponed until Monday,” he said. Murmurs of relief rippled through the classroom. “And so we’ll begin where Dr. Tindley left off last time. Please open your Aeneid to Book Six. Arnold…I believe it was your turn to read.”

  Arnold Ewen was a short, pudgy junior with a patchy goatee and drug-reddened eyes. He sat in the back row and fell asleep often, and I didn’t understand how he’d made it into Latin 301. He looked up at Art and held his notebook close to his chest.