October

by Al Sarrantonio

  Time suspends for an instant. The apple stays in Jerry Martin's mouth, then falls to the floor, cracking open with the sound a beetle makes when you step on its shell.

  Frankie stands still, his grin frozen to his face. "Gee," he says nervously, "just a joke."

  Jerry Martin smiles, a thin, humorless gesture.

  "Come on, a joke," Frankie persists. He titters. "Listen to this one," he begins, but then suddenly, Jerry Martin has pushed him down to his knees, face poised over the washtub.

  Frankie's eyes widen as Jerry Martin forces his head under the water.

  Everyone watches as Frankie struggles comically to pull his head from the water. No one laughs.

  Barry says, "Hey, Jerry, enough, okay?"

  Frankie continues to struggle, hands pushing at the lip of the tub, legs thrashing. It looks as though he really is having trouble. Barry pulls his hands from his bonds and kneels down beside. He tries to pull Jerry off Frankie, but cannot. Putting both hands in the water, he cradles Frankie's face, but still he is unable to remove him from the water.

  "Somebody help me!" Barry shouts. Jerry Martin's face is calm as chiseled ice. Frankie's hands beat wildly at the sides of the tub. His body arches backward futilely. Barry, with Danny Sullivan and Ted Michaels, beat at Jerry Martin's arms, his shoulders, his head, but they are unable to make him let go.

  I observe the drama at the washtub with horrified fascination, until my attention is drawn to a brightening in the orange glow that lights the cellar. The shadows are flickering with greater urgency. The white paper tablecloth, I discover, is on fire. Someone has deliberately opened the four ill-carved pumpkins, overturned them, and allowed their burning candles to drop, spreading fire from the four corners of the room. Tongues of pumpkin-colored flame, licking up across the Halloween crepe paper, are beginning to taste the ceiling rafters.

  I begin to shout "Fire!" but someone beats me to it.

  Jackie Farmer, in his Babe Ruth costume, says in a frightened voice, "Oh, God."

  At the washtub, Frankie Bargeti is suddenly released by Jerry Martin. Frankie's body is limp as Barry pulls it back, mouth dripping breathed-in water, eyes bloated with suffocation.

  Ted Michaels pulls at the cellar door, but it won't open. Fire has filled the room with bright light. I begin to feel small rushes of heat. The exposed beams overhead are crisscrossing with flames.

  Barry pushes past the others to the cellar door. He gives it a mighty pull, but it doesn't move.

  In the back of the cellar, Marsha Denby, in her witch's costume, screeches as a lash of fire whips down from above to ignite her black, peaked hat. Fire snakes hungrily down around her, enclosing her in flame.

  I try to get to her, but a panel of fire drops down in front of me, pushing me back with its heat.

  Barry leaves Ted Michaels and Danny yanking at the door and looks wildly around until he locates Jerry Martin, who is smiling benignly next to the dead body of Frankie Bargeti.

  Barry stalks over to him and grabs him by the sweater. "Tell me how to get out!"

  "No," Jerry says.

  Barry wheels his fist back and hits Jerry in the face. Jerry falls and lies immobile, then sits up, holding a hand to his bloody nose.

  A wall of flame roars through the room, dividing it. I hear Mary Wayne scream. The cellar has begun to fill with smoke. It is getting difficult to breathe.

  Barry shouts, "Here!" somewhere nearby. He is standing on one of the milk crates, kicking off the remains of smoldering, upside-down pumpkin. Above is a small rectangular window. There is a latch on it that won't open. He reaches to pull off his shoe, but it is tangled in white gauze.

  I take off one of my black pumps and hand it up to him He smashes it through one of the black-painted window-panes.

  A wave of cold air washes over me as the glass shatters. Barry breaks the other panel and pulls the rest of the tooth-like glass shards out of the frame.

  The fresh air clears the smoke momentarily, revealing Danny tugging weakly at the cellar door, which is outlined in yellow fire. Ted Michaels and the others around him have collapsed; one boy, in a devil costume, rolls on the floor beating at the red, devilishly grinning, burning mask covering his face.

  "Danny!" I scream, but he doesn't hear me as the smoke closes in again.

  "Come on, Eileen!" Barry shouts. His strong hands pull me up, push me through the window.

  Cool night air assaults me. I lie helpless on the grass outside the cellar window, coughing smoke from my mouth, wiping it from my eyes.

  Finally, gasping lungsful of air, I roll over and look back down into the cellar.

  I hear screams. Cool air pushes smoke aside. I see Barry dragging an unconscious Ted Michaels toward the window. "Take him!" he shouts up at me, and I pull as Barry pushes. Soon Ted is laid out on the grass next to me. Barry disappears back into enfolding smoke, appearing a moment later with the limp form of Danny Sullivan.

  As Barry prepares to lift Danny up to me, Jerry Martin appears. His face is sooted, his hair singed, his nose bloodied. He smiles until he sees the open window, with me outside.

  "No!" he screams, his face becoming an unearthly mask of rage. "This is my night!"

  Jerry rakes at Barry wildly with his fingers. He does not look human; in his keening whine, head thrown back savagely, mouth open round and wide, in his scrabbling grasp, there is something horribly inhuman, almost reptilian.

  "Take him!" Barry shouts, lifting Danny toward me. There are long claws of blood on Barry's face and shoulders. Jerry continues to rake at him, trying to pull him down.

  "Hold him!" Barry gasps, and as I pull Danny out onto the grass next to Ted Michaels, I look back to see Barry stumble.

  I cry out and reach through the window and take hold of his hand. Jerry Martin, mounted on his back, reaches around to claw at his eyes. Barry screams. He lets go of my hand and collapses into the smoke and fire.

  I hear horrible shrieks, followed by silence.

  "Barry!" I call. "Barry!"

  In the cellar there is only silence now, and the odor of burning flesh.

  "Barry—"

  Jerry Martin's face thrusts out of the smoke. He hisses out at me soundlessly. His features have melted away. His hair has burned to blackened scalp and skull, his eyes stare round and white from charred sockets, his mouth is fixed in a skull-smile.

  His burned, bony hand grabs at me, taking hold of my wrist. I feel an icy, numb shock go through my arm. I twitch back, breaking contact, and he reaches out again, blackened bits of flesh falling from his hand, and misses me.

  He breathes heavily, a ragged bellows. He struggles to maintain his position in the window. He slips back, claws with his bone-fingers, and pulls himself back up to the sill.

  Then—

  The Time Machine . . .

  Oh, God, Lydia, is that you? A light goes on behind me; I hear the door open—God, please, Lydia, let it be you.

  3

  October 1st

  For Kevin Michaels, there came a moment, somewhat past the beginning of the second movement of Johannes Brahms's Fourth Symphony, when the music blossomed to aching beauty.

  As Kevin worked in the midst of open cartons of books in his new office, searching with growing frustration for an unfound pencil, turning over a legal pad where he was sure the pencil was hiding, the moment occurred.

  The music had been on in the background, wafting from the small twin speakers of a portable cassette player mounted temporarily on the top shelf of what was, for now, an empty bookcase. For Kevin, the first movement of the Fourth Symphony was stately, slow in procession, marvelous—but easily relegated to the background when other, more pressing needs arose. He had put the cassette into the machine and forgotten it was on. But when the flowering of the second movement occurred, Kevin found himself standing perfectly still, the music commanding his ears, Svengalilike. The errant pencil was forgotten.

  As so often happened at this point in Brahms's Fourth, tears welled in his eyes.


  It occurred to him that, perhaps unconsciously, he had deliberately put this particular piece of music on. I'm back, Father.

  Tears pooled in the corners of his eyes; one spilled over to trace a wet line to his cheek and stop there, drying to salt.

  Brahms knew all about autumn, about bittersweet feelings. Autumn was the bittersweet season, the beautiful, tender passing of the year from life toward death, from knowability to unknowability.

  There was a stained-glass window, a thin rectangle of deep red, blue, and rose, set into the top of the wood-framed window in Kevin's office. As the moment of Brahmsian epiphany commenced, the sun, lowering through the tops of the oaks in the quadrangle outside, slanted its tiring rays through the stained glass and bathed the opposite wall in gothic light. The window was open at the bottom, chilling the room. Reluctant to close the window, enjoying the fall weather, Kevin had donned his gray, button, cardigan sweater, feeling more the assistant professor for it.

  Now, a single leaf drifted down, spinning slowly like a dancer, oblating the colors of the stained-glass window before traversing the rest of the window. Pulled by the air at the open bottom, it spun into the room to balance on the edge of the sill.

  The blossoming moment of Brahms's Fourth moved on to development. Another lone tear found its way from the corner of Kevin's eye to make a temporary tributary on his face.

  I'm back.

  He moved toward the window, edging past a teetering stack of book boxes that threatened to fall and block his way. Stained-glass-filtered sunlight blinded him momentarily as he passed through the angle of its rays. Then it was above him, once again flooding the far wall of the office.

  He stopped at the sill. The leaf, a deep red with tiny patches of still-breathing green, fell from the sill and he caught it, cradling it in his hand. He found its stem with his fingers, turned it, brought it close to his eye. The leaf was moist.

  Back.

  Absently, he lowered the leaf to his side, caressed it while he looked across the quadrangle.

  There was still green grass in the quad, to either side of the center walkway reserved for faculty and seniors. The grass would feel cold if he rolled in it now. He had often rolled in it in October and November, on campus as a young boy with his father. Proudly, he had walked that center boulevard with Theodore Michaels or, daringly, had run it alone when he thought that no one would see. Someone always did, of course, though nothing was ever said. The eyes from all the windows in all the offices and classrooms surrounding this central hub of the University of New Polk were naturally drawn here. The oaks were well tended, the lawns trimmed, the perimeter paths clean, always filled with activity. The energy of the college spilled into here.

  And of course, this was where the pretty girls walked.

  Kevin watched one go by now, lost in thought, head down, repeating something to herself out of a half-open book. He admired the relaxation of her body; tonight, after the exam she may have studied the entire previous night for, she might remove the ribbon that held her long hair back from her face, replace her glasses for contact lenses, her loose sweater with a much tighter one, and return to the self-consciousness of the social being. College students played, of necessity, two roles: one academic, one social—and still, after all this time, after his own undergraduate days here were far behind him, Kevin had to admit that he still much preferred the way this young coed looked now, in desperately quiet thought, to the way she would look later.

  Which brought Lydia to mind

  There was a loud click that startled him. He turned. The Brahms cassette had ended; the tape machine had shut itself off with its characteristically loud sound.

  Back.

  It was chilly in the room now, and even with his sweater on, Kevin felt it. He notched the window down, leaving it open a crack. The sun, he noted, had lowered behind the trees, darkening the quadrangle; as he watched, a scatter of late-afternoon lights set high on the buildings turned themselves on. It was growing dark in his office, also; the stained-glass window glowed with feeble intensity against the far wall.

  Off high to his left, he heard the bong, bong of the clocktower bell, set to ring at six o'clock.

  At the last bong someone knocked, a rapid tapping, the sound of a ring against wood, on his door.

  "Come in," Kevin called. He turned from the window, stumbling into a stack of boxes as the door opened. Someone flipped on the light switch. A bank of harsh blue-white neons flooded the room.

  "Not a very good beginning, Mr. Michaels," the sharp, thin, disapproving voice of Raymond Fillet, the head of the Literature Department, spoke from the doorway.

  Kevin grinned sheepishly, straightened. "Hopefully, tomorrow will be better."

  "Hopefully," Fillet said, unsmiling. In the same sharp tone, he added, "There's a small reception in Dr. Weiss's office in five minutes. Please be there."

  Abruptly, Fillet closed the door.

  Bastard.

  Kevin righted the boxes. A spill of books had slid from the top of one open carton, and he picked them up. Hawthorne, Flannery O'Connor, Scott Fitzgerald—and Eileen Connel. He placed the others back in the carton, kept the Connel book in his hand. Season of Witches. It was her first book, and her masterpiece. For three months, he had fought to get this book on his syllabus. Sidney Weiss had finally sided with him, against Dr. Fillet, and the book had gone onto the list beside Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, and other Masters of Modern American Literature.

  But now, Weiss was leaving for Northwestern University, and Fillet had been named head of the department.

  Which meant, of course, that the battle wasn't over.

  He placed Season of Witches back carefully in its box, left his office, and walked the short hallway distance to Sidney Weiss's office.

  "All hail the young buck!" Henry Beardman said, raising his glass as Kevin entered. Beardman, a brilliant Shakespeare scholar who knew almost nothing else about literature, was already drunk. A pleasant, sad man when sober, he was an aging homosexual trapped in the mores of a time when the closet was an institution. That attitude, coupled with the curse of ugliness, which he held aloft like a banner, made him nearly intolerable when he drank, which was often. Weiss had told Kevin that in the past year, Beardman had begun to show up in class inebriated; and Kevin had chided himself on the evil thought, probably true, that the arc of Beardman's career and life had long ago been charted, and now, especially since the homophobe Fillet was about to wear the crown, Beardman would end in dismissal, and eventually, dissolution.

  Kevin smiled politely at Beardman, moving past him to the back of the cramped office. It was neon bright in here, too, but here and there one of the long bulbs had flickered out, never to be replaced. Long ago the college's maintenance man had refused to come near Dr. Weiss's office, declaring it a hopeless firetrap and refusing to be the one to start the fire. A snake of wires, leading to everything from a copy machine to a coffeemaker, an electric pencil sharpener and small television, was hidden somewhere beneath the oak tables, sagging bookshelves, and behind the two desks, one of which contained nothing but stacks of untouched student papers, some of them dating back to 1960. Weiss had never handed a graded paper back to a student, had always graded verbally, and had never given anything below a B minus. Raymond Fillet had once succeeded, after years of trying, in getting John Groteman, the university president, to demand to see one of those student papers. Fillet had maintained that Weiss never even looked at them and gave out grades indiscriminately—an outrageous charge, which, if true, would have had dire consequences for Weiss's career. Grotemen had finally relented. Weiss, sitting in his squeaky swivel chair in the far corner of the room before his other, workable desk, smoking a pipe, had smiled at Fillet and said, "Pick a card, any card." Fillet had reached deep into one back pile, produced a paper from 1971, and handed it triumphantly to John Groteman, who opened the blue cover to find a meticulously corrected discussion of Beowulf by a student named Mason Johnston. Johnston had been back
on campus the previous October for a reunion; he was now president of a small computer firm in Connecticut. Groteman went through the paper page by page, noted the grade of B plus on the last page, then handed it back to Raymond Fillet.

  "This is an excellent and sensitive correction job," Groteman had said, not hiding the testiness in his voice. "I don't appreciate what you've done, Raymond. Put the paper back where you found it, please."

  While Fillet was blustering, fumbling to find the spot from which he had drawn the term paper, Groteman had turned to Dr. Weiss and said, "Can I ask you a question, Sid?"

  Weiss had smiled. "Anything."

  "What are you keeping all these papers for?"

  Weiss's smile had widened. "That's easy. When I retire, I'm taking them with me to read again. I've found there's more fresh thought in one student paper, borrowed and sloppy and rushed and half-reasoned and even erroneous though it might be, than in all the department staffs in all the universities in America."

  Groteman had left laughing, Fillet trailing behind like an apologetic dog, and that had been the end of the term paper incident.

  And here they were now, these same term papers, stacked even higher, waiting for packing and transport to Northwestern, where, no doubt, they would be stacked and forgotten once more.

  Kevin moved past the desk to the cleared spot on the windowsill where two tall bottles of white wine stood. There were plastic cups nested between the bottles. Kevin poured himself a glass of wine and turned to see the foppish, myopic, disapproving figure of Charles Steadman, Raymond Fillet's graduate student protégé, regarding him with less than interest.

  "May I pour you some wine, Charles?" Kevin offered diplomatically.

  Steadman, who modeled himself on T. S. Eliot, down to a three-piece wool suit and watch chain, spectacles, and wry, practiced, composed countenance, glanced around Kevin at the bottles and made a sour face.

  "Must they always buy wine by the jug?"

  "It's more economical that way," Kevin offered.

  "Yes," Steadman said flatly. His hand went to his waist, as if in pose, and he turned to regard Raymond Fillet.