Gods of Aberdeen

by Micah Nathan

  Later that day, Dean Richardson called the first of what were eventually to be three press conferences. I attended the first conference, held in Garringer’s chancel, and I stood in the back of the room while students chattered excitedly and the press propped their batteries of microphones upon the long table. Questions ranged from provocative (Is it true that Daniel Higgins was missing for a full week before the school did anything about it?) to scandalous (Is there any evidence that drugs may have played a role in his disappearance?). I had never actually seen Dr. Richardson before, and he looked much different than what I’d imagined—he was short and slightly built, with salt-and-pepper hair and a sickly pallor that suggested either lack of sleep, frazzled nerves, or both. He was obviously unaccustomed to such mass attention, and he ended up sounding so defensive the press had a field day in the next day’s papers: Of course we took reports of Mr. Higgins’s disappearance seriously; all such reports are given full and immediate attention…I highly doubt that Mr. Higgins’s disappearance has anything to do with illegal substances whatsoever. Aberdeen College is a drug-free institution, and I resent such implications…

  I left after about ten minutes, and ran into Howie on my way across the Quad. I had tried to avoid him, but he spotted me and lumbered over, nearly tripping on a patch of ice.

  “Eric, my boy…” He smiled sadly and slapped me on the back. His silver flask stuck out from his black jacket pocket. “I hope you’re a bearer of good fortune for this poor soul,” he said. His hair stood up at odd angles and he was in need of a shave.

  “I haven’t heard anything new,” I said.

  “So it goes, so it goes. Ah, hell.” Howie leaned on my shoulder and looked up, toward the gray sky. “You don’t suppose anything has happened to Dan, do you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, kicking at a chunk of ice. “I don’t know why people keep asking me.”

  Howie tousled my hair. “You look like someone who would know, that’s all.” He backed away and stood with his hands on his hips, like he was about to make an announcement. “Here’s what I say: Dan’s gone too far this time. I bet you he’s just like Huck Finn, waiting for his own goddamn funeral so he can strut in and shock the hell out of everyone.”

  “It was Tom Sawyer,” I said.

  “Huh?” Howie frowned.

  “Tom Sawyer,” I said. “Tom Sawyer walked in on his own funeral.”

  “Right…” Howie scratched his face. “Well, I’m off. Got a date with a shower and a razor. You haven’t seen Art around, have you?”

  I shook my head.

  “You don’t suppose he’s at Ellen’s?”

  “Why do you ask?” I said.

  Howie shrugged. “No reason. Except it seems the whole fucking house is gone missing. Hope to God you at least stay put. Vaya con Dios,” he said, and he walked away, unsteadily, hands in his pockets and jacket tail ruffling in the cold wind.

  I did finally see Art, in the most unexpected of places—the St. Michael’s parking lot, later that afternoon. I’d taken a cab to visit Cornelius, but the receptionist told me that Mr. Graves had been released that morning.

  “But last time I was here—”

  “Yeah, I know.” She shook her head and laughed, a loud, honking sound. “He said he needed to go back to work. What could we do? We can’t keep him here against his will. To tell you the truth, honey, he didn’t look any worse leaving than when he came in.”

  I wandered into the parking lot, flipping up my coat collar against the bitter cold, and spotted Art exiting the hospital through a side door. At first I didn’t recognize him—he wore sunglasses and a ski cap pulled low—but then I saw his station wagon and so called his name and ran over.

  “What are you doing here?” he said immediately. He took off his sunglasses and looked around.

  “Visiting Cornelius. They said he’s been released.”

  “Is that so.”

  “Yeah. Are you okay?”

  Art walked away, toward his car. “If you want a ride to campus I’m headed there now,” he said. “Otherwise, I’m sorry, but I don’t have the time to chat.”

  I followed him. “What’s going on?” I said, but Art refused to answer until we got in his car. Once inside, he locked the doors and took off his hat. His face was red from the cold and he looked like he hadn’t slept all night.

  “I think he’s following me,” Art said, peering out the windows.

  “What?”

  “Dan,” he said, and he started the car. “I think he’s following me. I saw him again. Maybe it was him…this morning, walking past Edna’s.”

  “Didn’t you see the news?” I said. “The police said that alfalfa farmer is delusional.”

  Art pulled out of the parking lot slowly. “Yes, I did read that in the paper. It’s good news for us. I was afraid if that theory didn’t go away the feds might get involved. Kidnapping is a federal offense, you know.”

  “How much sleep have you been getting?” I said.

  Art didn’t respond. He wore a faded, tattered Aberdeen sweatshirt and jeans, and he smelled sour, like unwashed clothes. It was strange to see him like that.

  He rubbed his eyes. “I had a CAT scan this morning. Killer headache all night, real bad, not like my usual migraines. It felt like someone was taking an ice pick to my temple. I thought maybe it was an aneurysm. That’s how my grandfather died, and his brother, and…well, wait a second.” He paused. “No…no, his brother died of a ruptured aorta.”

  We headed back toward campus, driving down freshly plowed Main Street. I watched people window-shop, the kids and their moms, students, old men shuffling along with their old wives. I wondered how many times I’d walked past a murderer on the street. Maybe I’d even talked to one; someone bagging my groceries or a bus driver admonishing me for not having exact change. Maybe they’d even had a couple of bodies back at their respective apartments, hacked up and dripping gore into the bathtub, lying in a jumbled pile, heads and hands and feet, red-slicked torsos, eyes wide and staring, specks of blood dotting their faces…

  Enough.

  “You might want to stay away from campus,” I said. “The place is swarming with reporters.”

  On the horizon I saw snow rolling in from Stanton Valley in a gray sheet, dark clouds dangling leaden tendrils. Fairwich was silent—dreary, static, the torpid calm before the storm.

  “I want to show you something,” Art said, glancing in his rearview. “What’s that you said about the reporters?”

  “Campus is filled with them. They’ve set up some kind of bivouac just outside the gates—I heard that Dean Richardson threatened to charge them with trespassing if they didn’t get off the grounds.”

  “Okay. Then we’ll go around back. We can park near Kellner. Have I ever told you about the Aberdeen tunnels?”

  Aberdeen’s tunnels had supposedly been used as storm drains, secret passageways during Prohibition (rumor had it that Aberdeen’s former priest, Father Mullen, was the proprietor of Fairwich’s only speakeasy), and they also served as an emergency holding center during the infamous 1968 “Paderborne Riot,” in which two freshmen were trampled to death during a scuffle between Fairwich police and undergrads protesting America’s involvement in Vietnam. No one really knew why the tunnels existed and what they’d originally been built for (they extended to all major buildings on campus—Thorren, Paderborne, Garringer, Kellner, and the H. F. Mores), but, like the forests surrounding campus, they’d taken on a sinister mythology. The tunnels were allegedly home to secret societies and satanic rites, coupled with more frivolous legends, like the existence of the genetically miraculous “Brooklyn White” strain of marijuana, native to New York sewers and tunnels, spawned from decades of panicked drug dealers flushing their goods down the toilet.

  Of course, no one I knew had ever actually been in the tunnels, and that’s because there wasn’t much to see. When I finally got my first look, walking with Art from Kellner to Thorren in what appeared to be an abandoned sto
rm drain, I saw nothing more than cracked cement floors, cigarette butts, and rusted ladders leading to sealed manholes. No spray-painted pentagrams or crushed beer cans or even dimly lit corridors; instead, fluorescent tubes stretched from end to end, casting flickering light over the dirty white walls.

  “They’re service tunnels,” Art explained, kicking a discarded metal clamp, watching it skip and clatter across the floor. “Sometimes during the night, if you find the right spot above ground, you can put your ear to the dirt and hear carts rumbling around, people talking…Each one of these tunnels leads to a basement. The chem students use them if they’re at the Thorren labs after hours.”

  We turned at an intersection and found ourselves in a smaller tunnel, with candy bar wrappers and small potato chip bags lying in crumpled balls on the dusty floor. There was a wide, gray door at the end of the tunnel, about fifty feet ahead, with a metal handle like one from an old refrigerator. Someone had written on the door in black marker: Snorin’ Hall.

  Art stopped suddenly, and put his finger to his lips. His other hand grabbed my shoulder.

  “Listen,” he said, his eyes widening.

  At first, nothing. Then, a hollow clapping, like footsteps, far away, coming from which direction I couldn’t tell.

  “That’s him,” Art said. “I told you, didn’t I?”

  I peered down the tunnel, toward the intersection. A moth fluttered up to the fluorescent lights. “It could be another student,” I said.

  The footsteps continued their pace, measured, coming closer. They were soft, scraping, like sneakers on a sandy floor.

  “We should be safe in Thorren,” Art said. “I don’t think he’d come after us.” He looked down the hallway again. “He wouldn’t want to risk being seen.”

  Thorren’s basement halls were dryer than the tunnel, constructed of cement blocks painted white, with caged lightbulbs at evenly spaced intervals and glowing red EXIT signs both above the tunnel door and at the opposite end. The air smelled like cold sulphur.

  We passed by several doors, and then Art stopped and took out a key. “Fifty bucks a month,” he said, looking down either end of the hall. “I pay the janitor to let me use this room.”

  He led me into a surprisingly large space: low ceiling, checkered tile floor, black countertops with silver gas spigots, lined up four rows deep. There was a sink at the end of each row, and empty metal shelving screwed to the walls. A chalkboard, cracked down the middle, was set against the far wall, remnants of writing (numbers and chemical diagrams, it looked like) still visible in ghostly lines upon its black surface. Only a single strip of lights worked, toward the back.

  “What is this place?” I said, running my hands along the closest countertop. Dust piled up along the edge of my index finger.

  Art unzipped his coat and stuffed it into one of the wall shelves. “The administration tried to improve their science and technology departments a while ago. Dr. Cade said they added something like ten new labs, and lured a couple of MIT professors, but nothing ever came of it.”

  “I wondered where you moved your operation,” I said. “The attic was empty.”

  Art nodded. “It’s for the best. Can you imagine if the police decided to search Dr. Cade’s? How could I possibly explain what I’m doing? They’d think I was crazy.”

  “I thought maybe you’d given it up,” I said. “After what happened.”

  Art looked at me with disappointment.

  “I had a setback,” he said.

  “A major setback,” I said.

  “True…” Art ducked behind one of the counters. I heard him rummaging through a cabinet. “Although with things as they are, it looks like maybe I wasn’t wrong, after all.” He stood up, holding a jumble of tubes and trays.

  “I don’t see any cats around,” I said, acidly. “At least you’ve made some progress.”

  Art shook his head. He continued to set things up, plugging in tubes, positioning beakers and flasks, setting out a row of baggies, each containing a different colored powder. “I don’t use them anymore,” he said. “Only in the beginning, when I was searching for any kind of small success.” He pulled a book out from under the counter, some large, dusty tome with faded gilt lettering on the cover, and dropped it onto the countertop.

  “I know you think I’m crazy,” he said. “But have you ever seen someone crazy put so much time into one singular pursuit? Crazy people are all over the place.” He threw his hands in the air. “Always bouncing from one thing to next. Not me. I’m like a fucking laser. I focus on that one…single…point.”

  He tapped the dusty tome with his index finger. “You know nothing of the work”—he jabbed the book with each word—“and the time, and the dedication, and the sacrifice required for all this.” He stopped and looked down. His finger curled and his hand just lay on top of the book.

  “Do you remember my lecture on Book Six of the Aeneid?” he said.

  Of course I did. It made me sad to think about it. That was way back in Dr. Tindley’s class, before any of the madness that had enveloped us all.

  “I’m prepared to sacrifice anything for the greater good,” Art said, quietly. “Even if it means losing everything that’s important to me.”

  He looked at me then, and at once my anger faded. Just as Art could shut down, showing the ultimate poker face, he could also open up, instantly, revealing all. And I felt I could suddenly see it: the fatigue, the fear, the uncertainty, the guilt. My anger turned to pity. How could I have been so callous, I thought. And now, I realize, how could I have been so incredibly stupid. He didn’t deserve my pity. I didn’t deserve my pity.

  He went back to work, taking out his glasses from his jeans pocket and slipping them on. “I talked to the police this morning,” he said. “Before my CAT scan. It was terrible. Stifling hot office, bad coffee, the cop assigned to me had the worst breath.” He shuddered. “They asked me if Dan was involved in drugs of any kind. I laughed, can you believe that? I didn’t mean to. It just seemed so silly, Dan being involved in drugs. It was hard enough getting him to take a drink.”

  “What else did they ask?” I said. I bit my thumbnail, became aware I was doing so, and stopped, but not before ripping off a thick strip that made my thumb bleed.

  “It was strange. I was there of my own free will, of course, but I got the sense I couldn’t leave. Not that they would’ve done anything, but it was as if I had to answer all their questions or else it would be suspicious. They asked about the last time we saw him. Remember what we told the cops that night?”

  “Of course I do. He left for some errands.”

  “They asked me to elaborate at least ten times. ‘What kind of errands? What was he wearing? Did he say when he was coming back?’ Thank God I remembered what he wore on the night of the…accident…”

  “Jeans,” I said. “And a green wool sweater. And his favorite pair of shoes, those brown oxfords.”

  “Was that it?” Art wrinkled his brow. “Are you sure it wasn’t a blue sweater?”

  “Positive.”

  “Hmm.” Art lit a Bunsen burner. “I didn’t tell them the color of the sweater. Those are the details they get you on. The small stuff. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but it was like they wanted me to contradict myself. They kept asking me if I was absolutely certain about the time he’d left, and I told them no. Why would I have been? If it wasn’t important at the time…Those are the questions you have to watch out for. Liars give too many details.”

  “Do you think they’ll question me?” I couldn’t imagine keeping my composure under such circumstances. Dealing with my own inner voices of accusation was enough.

  Art shrugged. “It would make sense. I just don’t know when they’d do it.”

  “Would you get me the flask marked H2SO4, please,” he said, pointing to the metal shelving on the far wall. He adjusted the Bunsen burner flame and swiped his forearm across his forehead.

  I’d be lying if I said some part of me wasn’t expecting D
an to burst into the room before I reached the wall.

  One part vitriol, two parts cinnabar, one part powder of Algaroth. Calcine until all that remains is a mass of gray. Apply to this with an open flame a quantity of heat sufficient to change the gray to crystalline white. This may then be scraped into a powder, dissolvable within any liquid, and through ingestion of a few grains all disease will be expurgated, both curable and incurable, known and unknown, and life may be prolonged indefinitely until the good Lord deems otherwise.

  “The Malezel book has been a huge help,” Art said, tapping a small amount of coppery powder into a crucible. “But you still have to sift through the Christian allegory, as well as the traps set up within the texts. Sometimes authors would give directions for a poison, instead of the antidote, or vice versa. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, thought he’d found the formula for the Greek anodyne nepenthe, but after giving it to his daughter for her labor pains, she died.”

  Art showed me much that afternoon, including the notes he and Dan had been working on, their progress over the past year, the mistakes and the minor successes they’d had. It was, if nothing else, an impressive show of perseverance. They’d covered nearly every region of the world, from Chinese formulas for the ill-fated aurum potable to Sendivogius’s lapis philosophorum. One particular experiment—trying to isolate what chemicals had been used in theriac, a universal antidote first discovered in Bologna—involved more than five hundred different combinations, and yielded nothing in the end. “Just a foul-smelling stew,” Art said.

  It was a strange scene, watching him mix and separate and pour, burning off powder in acrid-smelling puffs of smoke and boiling milky fluid in the crucible and catching the condensation with a bell jar. And all the while he made small talk about our plans for the future and another possible trip he wanted to take in the summer, to Venice, perhaps, or Mykonos, with Ellen and Howie tagging along, and maybe even Nicole, as if there were nothing wrong and no tension between any of us. As if nothing bad had happened at all. For those few hours, at least, Dan was alive, back at the house, playing cards with Howie and waiting for us to arrive home for dinner with Professor Cade. It was in the midst of denial that I realized Dan’s death was permanently tattooed across my psyche, an indelible emotion that would forever affect every decision and action I’d ever make from that point on, and it wasn’t so much the guilt (which had become so ubiquitous as to be unnoticeable) but the scar, an injury that I knew would never heal. I could, and would, only get accustomed to it.