“Correct.”
“It can’t be the lobby fireplace. That’s the old caretaker’s cottage, where the fireplace is on the south side of the room. You can see very clearly in this diagram that the fireplace is at the top of the page and the tunnel runs off toward the left-hand corner. In which case, the tunnel would lead across the Quad toward buildings that went up a zillion years after that cottage was built.”
“I know,” said Greg. “I’m the one who told you.”
“McPhee’s fireplace is on the east side of the room, so if this is a drawing of the old kitchen, then the tunnel leads away from the Quad and into the playing fields.”
Greg said it was possible to have an outside escape tunnel. He had seen them at plantations along the James River.
“Yeah,” said Richard, “but remember the legends. They always mention the Homestead and Stringfellow Hall. They always talk about tunnels from building to building.”
Greg said they were making too many assumptions.
“So what do you want to do?” said Richard. “Go back to the dorm and study?”
Greg admitted that he had nothing better to do on a Saturday night with no date.
“The worst we can be is wrong,” said Richard. “We can have some fun, kill some time. Maybe pull the ultimate prank. And if we don’t find a tunnel, we don’t tell anybody how we spent our evening.”
“Let’s make a copy and get on with this,” said Greg.
“Yeah,” said Richard. “The squirrel in this bag will thaw.” They contributed a nickel each to the Xerox machine, made a copy of the drawing, replaced the original once again, and left the library. They went not to the gym but to the northwest entrance to Stringfellow Hall.
Richard wanted to find the entrance in Stringfellow, take the tunnel to sneak into Farnham’s apartment, and deposit the dead animal.
“What if there’s something blocking the door?” Greg asked.
“We leave it behind the door. It’ll still stink up the place. That’ll be even better. He’ll never get rid of it.”
“And how are we going to find the tunnel in Stringfellow?”
That was the tricky part of Richard’s plan. He hoped to use the blueprint to show him the precise angle at which the tunnel left the gymnasium. He would then follow that angle with his eye. Where his eye met Stringfellow Hall, he hoped to find the entrance to the tunnel.
In the cold mist the boys stood at the corner of Stringfellow and looked carefully at the dark gym. The only lighted windows were in the far left side of the building.
“Farnham’s at home,” said Greg. “Let’s just go ask him if we can look around.”
Richard held up the bag with the squirrel in it. “Why not just ask him to stick this squirrel under his refrigerator for us and leave it for a month? The whole idea is secrecy, you moron.”
Greg tried to guess how far it was from Farnham’s apartment to Stringfellow. The first building next to Stringfellow was the infirmary; then came the headmaster’s house; then the chapel; and finally the gym. The south end of the gym was closer to them than the Homestead was, but the place was still a long way from where they were standing. It seemed impossible that the Stringfellow family would dig a tunnel over a hundred yards long just to get to the library.
But Richard was busy checking the blueprint. The parallel lines indicated that the tunnel veered off from the building at a forty-five-degree angle.
“Farnham’s apartment doesn’t stretch the width of the building,” said Greg.
“I know, I know,” said Richard. “It ends before the side stairs to the locker rooms.”
They traced an imaginary line from Farnham’s apartment to Stringfellow.
“Right in the middle of this building,” said Richard. “That makes sense.”
“But it’s one floor below us,” said Greg. “What’s down there?”
“That’s what we’re about to find out,” said Richard.
SCENE 28
Thomas and Hesta walked out of Bradley Hall into the misty silence of the night. He had his arm around her shoulders; she had both her arms around his waist in an awkward hug. It would have been hard to walk that way if they had been in a hurry. But part of the mood was to wait, to see, to let build whatever volcanic explosion Thomas was anticipating. They turned left when they emerged from the building and walked past Reid Hall, the science building.
Thomas wasn’t sure where he was going. If it had been warm and dry weather, they could have stayed outside. Or if it had been warm and wet, they could have managed by finding an unlocked car belonging to a member of the faculty. There were stories all over the school about where you could take girls. You were crazy if you tried to sneak a girl back onto your dormitory. There was always some resident master or a DM prowling around, and for big dances they recruited other members of the faculty and even faculty wives to help supervise. Part of the game was to see where you could find to take a girl, and then to see how far you could get with her once you’d arrived.
“It feels good out here,” said Hesta.
“Yeah. That room gets hot.” It felt good to be touching her. They walked past Fleming Hall, where Thomas had English class, and he thought for a minute about taking Hesta up to Farnham’s classroom. That would make a good story, but the problem was the furniture. The teachers had nothing but desks in their classrooms. But the teachers’ lounge had a couch.
“Let’s go in here,” said Thomas. They cut in through the entrance to Fleming and scampered immediately up a flight of stairs. They dropped their arms from around each other, and Thomas took Hesta by the hand to pull her along. Now it was urgent. The teacher’s lounge was the first door on the left. Thomas pushed it open and nearly ran into Mr. Somerville.
“Boatwright,” said Mr.Somerville. “I thought I heard footsteps in the building.” He was in a sports coat and tie as usual, as if it were Monday morning instead of Saturday night.
Thomas wanted to turn and run.
“This is Hesta,” he said. He was grateful for the habit of manners, which gave him some time to think.
Mr. Somerville took her hand and said he was delighted to meet her.
“I was just showing her around the campus,” said Thomas.
“Indeed,” said Mr. Somerville. “This room seems to be a popular stop on the tour tonight. I encountered my own grandson with a young lady earlier in the evening.”
That was good. At least he wasn’t getting mad.
“We’d better go,” said Thomas.
“Yes,” said Mr. Somerville. “Have a nice visit, Hesta.”
Outside again they were walking.
“We were lucky he was mellow tonight,” said Thomas.
“He seemed like a nice man,” said Hesta. She put her arm around his waist.
She was so warm. He suggested that they cut across the campus.
“Where are we going?”
“The chapel.”
“Isn’t that sacrilegious?” she said.
He did not think so.
She asked him what they would do if it was locked. “Then we’ll go next door,” he said, “and sneak into the gym.”
SCENE 29
They were very scientific about the whole thing. First they paced off the distance on the outside of the building. Starting at the west end of Stringfellow, they carefully counted their footsteps to the point in the middle of the building where the angle to Mr. Farnham’s apartment in the gym matched the angle on the diagram. If the angle was drawn wrong on the blueprint, then they were in trouble. But they were assuming the angle was accurate.
Then they went inside to the ground-floor hallway and measured off the same number of paces. The ground floor of Stringfellow Hall consisted mainly of two hallways that met at a T intersection in the middle of the building. Off the hallways were doors to offices and storage rooms and the bookstore and the game rooms and the laundry room. You had to go up one flight to get to the main floor of Stringfellow, with the carpeted lobby and the
portraits on the walls and the big triple-sashed windows.
Despite his doubts, Greg was becoming excited. The blueprint might, after all, turn out to be legitimate. It was possible that they may have found a tunnel forgotten for decades. Richard counted out loud, and Greg paced, making sure that he kept his stride at exactly the same length as outside. It was bright down here in the tiled hallway, but there were few people around. Up ahead they could hear the click of billiard balls hitting one another, and to their left they noticed the quiet rumble of a washing machine. Nearly everybody on campus was at the mixer.
“Thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six. Stop,” said Richard.
Greg was already stopped. They were in front of a smooth wooden door with a bright steel knob. There was no sign on the door.
“This is it,” said Richard. “Now watch the door be locked.”
The door was not locked.
They opened it and saw a flight of wooden stairs descending into the dark basement. Greg found a light switch on the wall and flicked it. A bare bulb at the bottom of the stairs shone on a splotched concrete floor. They descended the stairs and paused at the bottom to get their bearings.
“We need to go straight ahead,” said Greg.
“I know, I know,” said Richard. “I’ve just never been down here before.”
There was not much to see. The room they were in did not undergird the entire building. It was perhaps twenty-five feet wide and thirty feet long, with walls of white brick and an open ceiling exposing beams of 2" × 10" lumber. Some old furniture, stuff that you might have seen in a common room years ago, was stacked over to the left side of the room. Beside it was a pile of thin mattresses, the kind they used on the dorms. A metal door to their right was labeled FURNACE. And in the wall directly in front of them, they saw a planked wooden door.
Greg suddenly felt as though he had to go to the bathroom. He couldn’t see Richard’s eyes behind the glint of those round little John Lennon glasses, but he could tell that they were focused on the door ahead. The two boys didn’t even speak; they simply ran over to the door in front of them and then paused, instinctively drawing the occasion out for the most dramatic moment.
“This has got to be it,” said Richard. The damp plastic bag in his left hand quivered in his clutch. “You do the honors.”
“What if it’s locked?”
“If it’s locked, we break it down,” said Richard. “We are not stopping now.”
“We should have brought flashlights for the tunnel,” said Greg.
“Just open the damn thing.”
The door was not locked. Greg put his hand on the old-fashioned metal latch and pressed down. The door swung open toward them.
They heard the breathing before they saw who it was inside.
SCENE 30
Heilman is so stupid, Thomas thought, as he and Hesta walked quietly down the aisle of the darkened chapel. He leaves the door to the building open any-old-time so that any-old-body can wander in. And here we are.
He held her hand in his, and he thought she had to be able to hear his heartbeat. He was afraid to talk because he knew his voice would sound strangled. They were walking down the aisle, just like a couple about to be married, only they were skipping the marriage part and going straight to the honeymoon. Tonight’s the night, Thomas thought. Tonight I’m going to find out what it’s really like.
They could hear the creak of wood from somewhere off in the left transept. Another couple, maybe more than one, was undoubtedly here with the same idea, seeking a quiet sanctuary from the noise and the rain and the cold. Thomas could see only dimly in the darkness of the chapel, but he knew its geography well. At the end of the nave they climbed three stairs, and then they were in the choir. A small door, shorter than his waist, swung open to give them access to the cushioned pews.
Hesta was hardly breathing. “It’s so weird to be in a church,” she whispered.
They sat next to each other. Thomas had his right arm around her shoulders. She was right. He had never sat in the choir before, and in the dark and from the new angle, the entire building looked different, like a haunted barn. The creak of wood told him that somebody else was moving toward them. Hell, they should have gotten a reservation. The shape of whoever it was moved off to the right transept.
“Do you want to go?” he asked.
She snuggled up against him. “We just got here,” she said. “It’s nice.”
There was a part of Thomas that was delighted simply to sit here with Hesta and enjoy her company. To have her pressed up against him, to feel her hand gently caressing his fingers, to hear her whispering an occasional question, to which he could whisper a reply—that was good, that was terrific, that was so damn much better than the boyish pranks of people like Richard.
And yet there was another part of him that kept hearing Robert Staines in the locker room. Thomas and Hesta murmured small talk while all the time he listened to the whisper of desire, the urgent suggestive voice that insisted he now succumb to the delicious instinctive possibilities. He knew what he wanted. Only he didn’t want to spoil this moment either. How do you know when the other wants it? And then Hesta turned her face up toward his, and even in the dimness he could see her remove her glasses, could see her eyes shine in the faint light, and almost as though he were watching somebody else, he turned his head and kissed her.
SCENE 31
Greg nearly wet his pants when he realized someone was behind the door.
It opened to reveal a large walk-in closet, like a pantry. The place was lined with shelves, mostly empty, except for the three candles burning on the lowest shelf near the floor. On the floor was a mattress partially covered with an old bedspread. A sofa cushion was at the head like a pillow.
And lying on the mattress were a girl and Ned Wood. Both of them were naked from the waist up. Greg saw the girl’s conical breasts, glimpsed clothes tossed randomly on the mattress, before Wood jumped up and pushed him and Richard back out the door and shut it on the girl behind him.
“What the hell is this?” said Wood. “Junior narc squad?” His blubbery torso was splotched red and white as though he had a rash, and his blondish hair swung across his forehead.
“We didn’t know,” said Richard. His face was bright red. Greg was glad that he himself couldn’t blush.
“What are you doing here?” said Wood. He pushed Richard and glared at Greg.
“We were looking for a tunnel,” said Greg.
“Holy crap,” said Wood. “The Hardy Boys back at the ranch.”
“We won’t tell,” said Richard.
“We won’t tell anybody,” said Greg.
“The hell you won’t. lt’ll be all over the school tomorrow.”
“Not from me,” said Richard.
“I don’t talk,” said Greg.
“What the hell have you got in that bag?” said Wood. “Beer?”
Greg felt like an eight-year-old.
“Nothing,” Richard said.
“What’s in the damn bag?” said Wood.
“A dead squirrel,” said Richard.
Wood started to deliver a complicated set of instructions involving the squirrel, a hot tire iron, and several of Richard Blackburn’s bodily orifices.
Then all of them heard the faint sound of a siren outside.
SCENE 32
She was struggling silently, pushing him off, and he was struggling just as silently. He was stronger than she, but she was no weakling, and she was more desperate.
“Stop,” she said. “Stop it now.”
Thomas could not answer and he could not stop. The delight of their first kiss had broken majestically over his body like a perfect wave on an empty beach. But this force was different, an exquisitely dangerous undertow. He would stop in a minute, in just another moment he would regain his footing, but not now not now not quite yet just another moment, another gasp, another thrill.
“You can stop,” she said, and she raised her knee hard into his gro
in. He shuddered with the pain, and she pushed him off with her arms and her leg and sat up in the choir pew. Then she did something he hadn’t expected. She started to cry.
“You hurt me,” said Hesta. “Why?”
Thomas was angry with pain and shame. “How was I supposed to know?”
“How were you supposed to know what?” said Hesta. “That this was wrong? Because I told you, that’s how. Because I said no. Because I pushed you away.” She sobbed. Her voice was louder.
“I didn’t think you really meant it,” said Thomas.
In the distance they could hear a siren approaching. Neither paid attention to it.
“Say that again, please,” said Hesta.
“I thought you wanted me to. I’m sorry,” said Thomas.
“Wanted you to?” she said.
“I didn’t understand. Now I do.” He buckled his trousers. Nobody in the locker room ever mentioned anything like this.
Hesta’s sobs changed key, from fear to rage.
Flashing lights caught the clear glass windows on the wall of the right transept and splashed colors momentarily over the wall of the chapel. Thomas barely registered the event. He focused entirely on Hesta.
“I understand, too,” said Hesta. “I understand that everything I’ve heard about men is true.” She grabbed her rain slicker and was up and moving before he could react.
“Wait,” he said, as he pushed open the little door to the choir. It hurt him a little to stand. Hesta was already down the three stairs of the apse and into the center aisle of the nave. She did not wait. He caught up with her at the door.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. He was not angry now, but ashamed.
“I’m going back to the mixer,” she said, and she pushed open the door to the chapel. She had her slicker halfway on.
“Just wait a second for me to explain,” said Thomas. He tried to put on his jacket and hold the door and grab her elbow all at the same time. But Hesta was not even looking at him. She was looking next door toward the gymnasium. Two police cars and an ambulance had parked right on the grass of the Quad in front of the gym. Red and blue lights flashed on her face. Thomas saw a large pack of students, boys and girls, moving across the grass in front of Stringfellow.
Passion Play Page 20
