Quoth the Raven

by Jane Haddam

  “Drain cleaners,” he said. “Almost all of those have sodium hydroxide. So do the acids in some batteries—”

  “Sodium hydroxide is lye?” Ken Crockett said.

  “That’s right. In the days before packaged cleaning products, people used to keep it, almost pure, in buckets, for washing out latrines and that kind of thing. But these days almost nobody—”

  “I know somebody who does.” It was the girl in the pumpkin dress, pushing forward in the crowd. “I don’t mean somebody. I mean someplace. I’ve seen it.”

  “Seen what?” Ken Crockett demanded. “Chessey, what are you talking about?”

  “The Climbing Club,” Chessey said desperately. “The cabin up on Hillman’s Rock. There are outhouses up there and there’s a bucket just outside of them and it’s marked ‘lye.’ ”

  Gregor opened another carton, took aim again, poured again—the process was beginning to feel like assemblyline work, and just as futile. He thought: So this is the Chessey that Tibor was talking about; there couldn’t be two girls named Chessey on a small campus like this one. Then he grabbed another carton and started all over again.

  “Even if what we had here was pure sodium hydroxide,” he said firmly, “it still would have at least fizzed when it came in contact with water. The best way to feed somebody lye—”

  “Feed somebody?”

  Gregor had no idea who had said it. Part of him was concentrating on Miss Maryanne Veer. Part of him was delivering this absurd lecture on sodium hydroxide. The rest of him was thinking that the bat the girl Chessey had been hanging on to must have been Jack Carroll. She was supposed to be Jack Carroll’s girlfriend. “—or for someone to take it accidentally,” he went on, “is for the lye to be delivered dry. For best effectiveness, it should be delivered dry and washed down with some kind of nonacidic liquid, done fast, so that the victim wouldn’t notice until it was too late.”

  “Oh,” God,” somebody else said.

  Carton, aim, pour. He was getting a headache, straining to see into that throat. “If the lye had been in her tea, she would have seen it foam. She wouldn’t have drunk it. There had to be something else. A sandwich. A piece of cake. Something.”

  “There isn’t any lye up at the cabin on Hillman’s Rock,” Ken Crockett said. “There never has been while I’ve been with the Climbing Club. The cabin was remodeled for plumbing years ago.”

  “We’re beginning to make some progress,” Gregor told him. “I want to do a wash of the mouth. When I tell you, release the tongue so I can get some milk under it.”

  Ken Crockett braced forward, ready. Gregor reached for yet another carton of milk, thinking as he did that the seriously adrenalated part of this crisis was over. From now on it would be steady, a routine, holding the fort until the medical people arrived and could get a tube down Miss Veer’s throat to ensure that the air passage stayed open. He got the carton open and poured it in with a swirling, circular motion that reminded him—it was horrible, but he couldn’t help it; the metaphor was there and it wouldn’t leave him alone—of the way you were supposed to pour heavy-duty cleaners into toilet bowls. He tossed the empty carton on the floor and reached for another one, wishing that Bennis and Tibor would come back and tell him that help was on the way.

  He was just reaching for carton number three, destination the mouth, when all hell broke loose.

  2

  AT FIRST, IT WAS impossible to know what was going on. Gregor was in the process of pouring even more milk into Miss Maryanne Veer’s mouth. He couldn’t turn around or look up or do anything else to pinpoint the cause of the disturbance. He didn’t dare. Dr. Kenneth Crockett was looking up, and the expression on his face was shock. Gregor tried to tell himself that the noise he was hearing was the arrival of the ambulance men—who else could be coming in force at a time like this?—but there was no way to sustain the illusion, even with his back to the source of the commotion. What he was hearing was not the barked commands of an emergency medical squad, but the wavering distortion of a Gregorian chant.

  “Jesus screaming Christ,” Ken Crockett said, and then rose, involuntarily, to his feet, letting Miss Maryanne Veer’s face drop out of his hands and the back of her head hit the floor with a thud. “Jesus screaming Christ, what do these idiots think they’re doing?”

  “Dr. Crockett,” Gregor said. “Get back here. Get back here now.”

  Dr. Crockett was walking away, unhearing. Gregor was giving serious consideration to screaming out loud when one of the bats dropped into the doctor’s place, grabbed Miss Maryanne Veer’s mouth, and yanked it open.

  “Jack Carroll,” the bat said.

  “I thought so,” Gregor told him.

  Behind Gregor’s back, the chant had grown louder, strident. He’d had enough Latin in school to know it wasn’t Latin he was hearing. It was nonsense, but angry nonsense, and it was getting louder.

  Suddenly, Bennis dropped down beside him, holding a carton of milk in her hand.

  “Get up,” she said. “I’ll do this for a while. Somebody’s got to get those people out of here.”

  “Where’s Tibor?” Gregor demanded. “Where’s the ambulance?”

  “The ambulance and the police are on the way. I talked to the sheriff of the county myself and explained the whole thing. You shouldn’t have sent Tibor, Gregor, he’s in shock.”

  “I had to send Tibor. He was the only one I could trust who knew where the phones were.”

  “Right. Let me do this. Turn around and see what’s going on. And get that Crockett person and calm him down. Oh, for God’s sake. I can’t believe this.”

  She shoved him unceremoniously out of the way, positioned herself right in front of Miss Maryanne Veer’s mouth, and shot the carton of milk down it as he had been doing at the beginning. Obviously, she hadn’t been watching him over the past three or four minutes. She didn’t realize he had switched from the throat to the mouth. It didn’t matter. The throat was the important thing anyway. It was time somebody got back to it.

  Gregor stood up, turned around, and stopped. For endless minutes it seemed as if he could enumerate everything he saw, but make no sense of it. There was a small knot of women standing in a circle at the end of the room near the cash register, blocking all passage in or out except by window. They were all dressed in identical black—black tights, black ballet slippers, black leotards, black gloves. Their faces were painted in mock harlequin design, black on one side and white on the other, with a symbol Gregor vaguely remembered as being an ancient sign of the Devil plastered under each of their right eyes. The one in the center was taller than the rest and had hair so red it seemed to burn. It was long and teased out around her face like radioactive cotton candy. She stepped out a little into the room, threw her arms out, threw her head back, and screeched.

  “Ad hoverum sancterum dessit cray,” she said, and sounded like she was praying. “Quemmor stempanos knevit.”

  Tibor was standing almost in front of her, frozen. Gregor lurched through the crowd toward him, grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him back.

  “Tibor,” he said, “what’s going on here? Who is that woman?”

  Tibor shook his head violently, as if to clear it of hallucinations—and Gregor didn’t blame him.

  “Branch,” Tibor said in a croak. “That is Dr. Branch.”

  “Who? The redheaded woman? That’s Dr. Katherine Branch?”

  “That is what I said, Krekor, yes.”

  “For God’s sake. What does she think she’s—”

  “I told you, Krekor, I told you.” Tibor was suddenly agitated. “She says she is a witch. She thinks she is a witch. She’s doing her witch’s things that she says they did in New England before the Revolution except that they didn’t.” He grabbed Gregor, pulled him close, and began to whisper urgently in his ear. “Krekor, I think she takes belladonna and puts it on her wrists to make her—to make her—like a drug, Krekor, I am losing my English and you don’t understand Armenian. Like a drug, Kre
kor. I have seen her in class. She does this often.”

  “Listen,” Gregor said. “Can you hear that?”

  It was hard to hear anything. The women in black weren’t the problem. Now that Dr. Katherine Branch had finished her prayer, or whatever it had been, they were absolutely silent. They had moved out into the room and begun to dance, slowly and deliberately, in a circle. It occurred to Gregor that they were probably the calmest people in the dining hall. It was the crowd that was getting hysterical and loud. The crowd might be used to Dr. Katherine Branch’s antics, but it wasn’t used to Miss Maryanne Veer keeling over after a little light snack of lye. They were all wound up. They were all starving for a release. Now the release was here and they had begun to send up small ripples of reaction.

  “It’s a siren,” Tibor said suddenly. “I hear it, Krekor. It’s a siren.”

  “It’s a siren,” Gregor agreed. “Do you see Dr. Crockett?”

  “No.”

  “We’ve got to find some way to let the ambulance men in here, and the police, too. Everybody’s surging up to the front and cutting off the access. Isn’t there any other way in and out of this room?”

  “The windows open, Krekor, for fire escapes.”

  “That’s fine for fire escapes. The medical people would have a hell of a time getting their equipment through that way.”

  “Look, Krekor, they are all lying down on the floor.”

  They were indeed all lying down on the floor. Gregor didn’t find it hard to credit Tibor’s comment about belladonna. That, at least, would have been an authentic touch from the world of New England witchcraft. Tibor had told him about it once. So many men and women had confessed to consorting with the Devil and flying on broomsticks because they thought they had consorted with the Devil and flown on broomsticks. Belladonna was a poison. Like so many other poisons—strychnine, foxglove, airplane glue—you got high on it by flirting with a fatal dose. A miscalculation could kill you. A perfect calculation could make you feel like you were floating through air. They had done it, those old witches, in the covens of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Gregor was sure Dr. Katherine Branch and her friends were doing it now.

  Whoever her friends were.

  Did it matter?

  “What we are going to do,” he told Tibor, “is go in, and get them, and pull them out of the way. Just grab their arms and pull.”

  “Krekor, I am not a strong man—”

  “Neither am I, Tibor. It won’t matter. They’re potted on something, if not belladonna then something else. Not a stimulant. It won’t be difficult. Just grab their arms and pull—”

  “The crowd is going to riot, Krekor.”

  “Not if we’re fast enough.”

  They weren’t fast enough. Gregor had barely reached the first of the bodies on the floor when a roar went up behind him. He turned instinctively and saw Dr. Kenneth Crockett standing on a table, looking almost literally like the wrath of God.

  “Katherine,” Dr. Crockett screamed. “Katherine, you world class bitch, you get up off of there!”

  “Damn,” somebody else said.

  Something flew up out of the air from the back of the room in a long graceful arc and smashed into the floor next to Katherine Branch’s head. It took a moment for Gregor to recognize it as one of the jack-o’-lanterns that had been out on the tables for decoration. It was a while after that before he realized that the candle inside it was still lit, and by then another one had come, and another, until it began to feel like it was raining pumpkins.

  Up at the other end of the cafeteria line, at the doors that led to the foyer and the front of the building, the medical people had arrived. Gregor could see what looked like hundreds of them crowding in beside the Swedish meatballs and the roast beef au jus.

  “What the hell,” one of the men back there said. And then a low, twangy voice cut in from deep in the ranks and said, “Let me through. Just let me come on through.”

  If the crowd heard the men at the door, or even noticed they were there, they gave no indication of it. They seemed to have run out of pumpkins. What was raining down now was an eclectic collection of Indian corn, cardboard masks, crepe paper, and ball-point pens. The debris hit the bodies on the floor and bounced off of them without making any impression Gregor could see. Dr. Katherine Branch and her friends—six of them, Gregor counted, obsessively, six of them—lay absolutely still and absolutely silent, as if they were dead.

  Down in the cafeteria line the twangy voice was droning on and on, on and on. “Let me come on through. Let me come on through. Let me come on through.” Gregor strained to see who it belonged to and caught only the movement of men in firemen’s uniforms and medical whites. Then the ranks of official rescuers parted, and a small man stepped into the room. He was old, and fat, and faintly ridiculous, dressed up in a Stetson hat and a khaki shirt. He could have been a Halloween reveler costumed as a good old boy Texas sheriff—except that he had a real Colt .45 in the holster on his hip, and there was something about his eyes that made Gregor think he wouldn’t be afraid to use it.

  The crowd paid no more attention to the man in the Stetson hat than they had to anyone else since the ruckus started. The man in the Stetson hat looked them over, walked to the edge of Katherine Branch’s prostrate circle, and drew his gun. Then he pointed it at the ceiling and fired.

  Well, Gregor thought, in the dead silence that followed, that got their attention.

  The man in the Stetson hat looked pleased.

  “Now what the hell,” he bellowed, “is going on around here?”

  Part Two

  Wednesday, October 30

  Eagerly I wished the morrow;

  vainly I had sought to borrow

  From my books surcease of sorrow—

  sorrow for the lost Lenore—

  —E. A. Poe

  One

  1

  THE CHIEF PARAMEDIC WAS a young man, neither as experienced or as self-controlled as he should have been, and when he got to Miss Maryanne Veer’s body he was held up for seconds by the sight of Bennis Hannaford’s face. Then the spell was broken, and Gregor saw an older man come forward and take the latest of the milk cartons out of Bennis’s hand. The older man was older only in a relative sense. He might have been somewhere between thirty-five and forty. From the way he held himself and the way he moved, in quick economical chops that were like controlled spasms, Gregor was sure he had gotten his medical training in Vietnam. Bennis moved back, and Jack Carroll moved back in the other direction. Even the chief paramedic showed a little deference to this older one, who was the only person anywhere near the body who seemed to know what he was doing.

  On Gregor’s side of the room, near the cash register and the cafeteria line, the man with the gun was getting organized. He had put the gun back in his holster—his shot hadn’t made a hole in the ceiling or left a mark of any kind on it, so Gregor assumed he was using blanks—and then gone to each of the women lying on the floor and tapped them on the shoulders. The women had sat up and then stood. Now they were milling around in a group near the wall, looking ridiculous—which is the only way they could look, given the way they were dressed. It was funny, Gregor thought, but while all the craziness had been going on, he had imagined the room to be dark, even though it couldn’t have been. Bright sunlight streamed through the dining room windows. It was a fine fell day at the end of October, bright and hard and cold, perfect weather for a bonfire. If it stayed this fine until midnight tomorrow, Independence College would have one of the most spectacular effigy burnings in its history.

  The man with the gun was going down the line of women in black, asking their names and writing them down in a stenographer’s notebook. Some of his men were doing the same thing with the rest of the crowd. Gregor noted with approval that the man with the gun was not as much of a rube as he appeared. He had left the foyer door bottled up by a large, complaisant-looking young man in a makeshift deputy’s uniform. Unless someone wanted to take the risk
of jumping out of one of the broad windows into the quad, nobody was going to go home without having his vital statistics put down on paper.

  The man with the gun finished with the women, shook his head slightly—Gregor didn’t blame him for that; those women must have been hell to talk to. Now that they were trying to behave like normal people, it was easy to see they were all high as kites—and then turned, almost knocking into the center of Gregor’s chest. The man with the gun was barely five feet eight and Gregor was tall, the way a certain segment of the male Armenian population gets tall, with a few layers of fat and muscle, but mostly fat, to mitigate the height. The man with the gun tilted his head back, stared straight into Gregor’s eyes, and said, in that hillbilly twang,

  “All right. Who are you?”

  “Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor Demarkian said.

  The man with the gun started to write the name in his notebook and stopped. “Gregor Demarkian? That Gregor Demarkian?”

  “I suppose so,” Gregor said. He hated it when people put it like that. It made him feel like—like God only knew what.

  The man with the gun whacked his notebook against the side of his hip and looked pensive. “Gregor Demarkian,” he repeated. “That’s very interesting, under the circumstances. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m visiting him.” Gregor tapped Tibor on the shoulder.

  “Who’s him?”

  “Father Tibor Kasparian,” Tibor said. He put out his hand, got a look on his face that said he had no idea at all why he’d thought he ought to do that, and put the hand back in his pocket.

  If the man with the gun had noticed Tibor’s embarrassment, or anything about him at all, he gave no sign. He was still whacking his notebook against his hip and staring into the middle distance, as if he were concentrating furiously on the Halloween carnival in the quad, easily seen through any of the windows.