Shadow of the Lions

by Christopher Swann

  “This has been a terrible calamity,” Ren began. “It’s unbelievably hard to deal with the death of a student here. Frankly, I don’t think we’ve encountered this sort of thing since, well . . .” His voice trailed off, and he flicked a glance in my direction. Then he turned to Chaplain Joyner, who blinked as though someone had just shined a flashlight on his face.

  “Well now, that would be, ah . . . yes, nearly ten years ago,” he said. “Before my time. Although it wasn’t . . . That is, there wasn’t a death. That we know of,” he finished lamely.

  “This is better,” I heard myself say aloud.

  Joyner frowned, as if he thought he had misheard. Sam looked astonished. Porter let out a short, single bark, a bitter ha! without mirth.

  Ren’s reaction was to stare at me just long enough to be unnerving. “I don’t follow, Matthias,” he said calmly. “Better than what?”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to sound . . . I’m sorry.”

  Ren gave a faint smile that must have terrified boys on the receiving end of it. “Better than what?” he repeated.

  I took a breath and forged ahead. “Better than not knowing if—” I stopped. I’d almost said Fritz’s name aloud. “Better than not knowing if a student is dead or alive,” I said.

  Ren considered me. “I don’t think the Jarrars could appreciate that right now,” he said.

  Sam stirred and leaned forward. “Ren, what’s Travis have to say about all this?” he asked.

  Ren reluctantly shifted his attention away from me and eyed Sam. Thank you, Sam, I thought. “He’s flying back tomorrow morning,” Ren said. “He doesn’t think we should do anything else until then regarding the students.”

  Sam raised his eyebrows. “One of their friends just died, Ren,” he said. “They’re going to be upset.”

  “I’m upset.” Ren brought his hand flat down on the desktop, smacking it hard enough to make all of us jump. “How careless are we?” he asked the room. “How utterly, criminally careless? How in God’s name did that boy get hold of a shotgun?” He swiveled in his chair so that he looked directly at me. “Matthias, you were on duty this afternoon. Where were you when this happened?”

  I stared blankly at him for a moment, feeling as if we were all riding together in a car and Ren had just spun the wheel and veered onto the wrong exit ramp. “Uh,” I said, instantly regretting it—Ren was the kind of man who would hate people who said uh and um. “I was on the infirmary porch, talking with Porter. We were talking about—a book,” I finished rather lamely.

  “And while you were talking about a book, Terence Jarrar was shot.”

  “Ren,” Sam said.

  “How did that boy get a shotgun?” Ren asked. The question was asked of the entire room, but he was looking directly at me.

  “No one signed it out —” I managed to say.

  “Signed it out?” Ren looked at me incredulously. “Do you think I give a damn about a piece of paper? Where’s your key?”

  I reached into my pocket and took out the master key—it was a single key on an old plastic Blackburne Lions key chain that would get passed to whoever was on duty. I held the key out to Ren, who took it and shut it in a drawer. “Who else used the key today?” he asked. “Did you give it to another faculty member? A student?”

  Realization and fear shot through me, lighting up my spine like a phosphorescent tube. Ren thought Terence had gotten the shotgun because of me, because of a mistake I had made. Some students brought their own shotguns to school to use when skeet shooting or bird hunting, both under close supervision. The few student-owned shotguns we had were kept in a gun cabinet in a locked closet in Stilwell Hall, at the bottom of the stairs that led from the admin hall down to the bottom floor, where the game rooms and mailboxes and the Brickhouse were. My master key would unlock that closet. I hadn’t given the key to anyone—it had been in my pocket all day—but Ren’s accusations threw me off and made me look guilty, which was a wicked sort of self-perpetuating cycle: I thought I looked guilty, which made me act as if I were, which further increased my fear of how guilty I looked.

  “Matthias,” Sam said, not unkindly, “could anyone have gotten your key? Either they borrowed it or maybe they knew where you kept it?”

  I shook my head. “It was in my pocket all day. Plus there’s a padlock on the gun cabinet, right?”

  Ren leaned forward to rest his elbows on his desk, steepling his fingers like a judge in a courtroom drama. “There is,” he said. “A combination lock. It’s still on the cabinet. I checked it myself. And there’s a shotgun missing from the cabinet.”

  After a pause, Sam asked, “Is it Terence’s?”

  “We’ll have to confirm with the sheriff,” Ren said, folding his steepled fingers together. “He kept the shotgun they found next to Terence for evidence. But for now, yes, it looks like the same gun.”

  I was about to protest my innocence again—and likely dig an even larger hole for myself—when Porter spoke for the first time. “I have a question.” He looked terrible, pale and almost sallow, as if he’d become physically ill from what had happened. “The police are treating his death as an accident, right? That he slipped or something and the gun went off?”

  Ren nodded slowly—his radar was up. “That’s correct,” he said evenly.

  Sam frowned. “What are you thinking, Porter?”

  “I’m wondering if Terence might have killed himself,” Porter said. “Purposefully.”

  Joyner’s eyes fluttered. “Suicide?” he asked, his voice rising a notch.

  Ren spread his hands and placed them flat upon the desk, as if he were about to push himself up. “That’s speculation, Porter. We don’t know what happened out there. We need to let the police conduct their investigation. Until then”—his eyes swept the room—“I don’t want anyone spreading rumors. The Jarrars are coming tomorrow. God knows they don’t need to hear something like that.” He leaned back in his chair and sighed, then turned to the chaplain. “Jim, you might get a few calls tonight and tomorrow. Please minister to the boys as needed.” Joyner jerked his head in a nod. “Porter,” Ren continued, and I saw Porter look up from his lap, “you’ll need to keep an eye on the rest of your advisory.”

  Porter said nothing for a moment, and then nodded. “Of course,” he said. His earlier determination seemed to have been snuffed out, and now he looked like a mournful, washed-up coach. “Poor kid,” he murmured. “I just took him to Charlottesville last week.”

  Gently, Sam asked, “Matthias, could you gather all of his personal things in his room? I think that if we packed all that up for the parents, it would be easier for them. And for his roommate, too.”

  “Of course,” I said. Something sticky and solid had formed in my throat, and I coughed to try to clear it. “I’ll do it first thing tomorrow.”

  As I walked out of Ren Middleton’s office, I realized there must have been a very similar meeting the night Fritz disappeared, perhaps even in that same room. It wasn’t a reassuring thought. As children, we assume adults will take charge when calamity strikes, that they will redress wrongs and make things right in the world. What I had just witnessed seemed more like a dutiful but resigned prayer that all would be well.

  I left Stilwell Hall and crossed the darkened Lawn to Lawson-Parker, wanting nothing more than to collapse into my bed. Then I thought of the boys in their rooms, Terence’s friends, grieving privately, and I recalled Sam Hodges’s kindness to me when Fritz vanished. I felt a sudden tidal pull. I needed to check on them.

  When I reached the dorm, I caught a glimpse of something moving out of the corner of my eye. I turned and saw, in the distance at the far end of the Lawn, a small, dark figure, barely registering in the faint light from the footlights, outside the chapel. It paused and then disappeared—I blinked and the apparition was gone. Gooseflesh broke out across my arms and shoulders. I shook my head, angry at myself; this wasn’t a ghost, but someone sneaking into the chapel after
hours. I stood outside the dorm, my hand on the door handle, and then I turned my back on the dorm and struck out across the Lawn for Saint Matthew’s.

  The front door of the chapel was shut tight, and there was no sign of the figure I had seen there just moments before. The door, however, was unlocked, and I slipped inside, closing the door behind me. Within, the air was stale, smelling of old books. Beyond the foyer, the rows of wooden pews stretched toward the marble altar at the far end of the nave. There was somebody in front of the altar. In the blue moonlight that streamed in through the stained-glass windows, I could barely make out the shape of a boy. He was saying something or making a noise of some kind. Then I heard it more clearly: laughter.

  I clenched my teeth. “Who’s there?” I called out, my voice falling flat in the dead air, and the figure jumped as if shot. It turned, and I saw it was Ben Sipple, his eyes impossibly huge even at that distance.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, approaching him. He kept his eyes locked on mine. As I drew closer, I could see his eyes were swollen and red, and tears shone on his cheeks. He had not been laughing—he had been sobbing.

  “Mr. Glass?” he asked in a small voice.

  “Ben?”

  “Terence died,” he said. His voice nearly broke on died.

  Slowly I nodded.

  “He was my friend,” Ben said. He was shivering. I couldn’t look away from his eyes. There was something grief stricken and mad about them, something dangerous.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Ben let out a sob of laughter. “Everyone’s sorry,” he said. “They’re so sorry about Terence. Well, fuck them.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was still moving slowly toward him, like a negotiator approaching an armed hostage-taker.

  “And fuck you, too, Mr. Glass.”

  I nodded. “Fuck me, too.” For a second, Ben’s angry mask slipped, and he looked confused, even frightened. I bore down on him before he could raise that mask again. “Fuck all of them. I know. I know exactly what you mean, Ben. I do. I understand. I wish I didn’t, but I do.” I realized my eyes were wet with tears and wondered when that had happened.

  Then I was standing directly in front of Ben, still holding his gaze. He didn’t move, just stared in helpless frustration and anger. I thought if I reached out and touched him, the shock would hurl me back as if I’d touched a live cable. Gently, I said, “Why did you come here, Ben? Did you . . . Do you want to pray?”

  Ben’s lip trembled. “I don’t believe in God,” he said in a low voice. Then, as if taking courage from his own words, he said firmly, “I don’t believe in God.” His face hardened. He spun around and, with a sweep of his arm, knocked the candlesticks with their unlit candles off the altar. I fumbled for him, tried to grab him around the chest, but he dodged out of my reach and with both hands grasped the white cloth covering the altar, yanking it off so it belled into the air like a sail. He would have gone for the crucifix next, carved out of mahogany and fixed to the front of the pulpit, if I hadn’t finally gotten him into an awkward bear hug. For a few seconds he thrashed and kicked, screaming horribly and cursing. Then he collapsed into sobs, leaning back against me so that I had to brace myself with my legs to hold his weight. I squatted, my hands on Ben’s arms as I guided him to sit on the floor. We sat there for a long time, saying nothing, Ben crying into his hands as I sat beside him, my hand on his shoulder in the darkened chapel.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Terence Jarrar’s room was depressing even without the knowledge that he was dead. The bottom bunk held a sagging mattress draped with a brown comforter. A tattered composition notebook and chewed pencil lay on the desk. A lava lamp sat unlit and dormant in the corner. Presiding over everything was a poster of a glowering Snoop Dogg wreathed in smoke and gold chains. Terence’s roommate, Brian Schue, was gone for the weekend with his parents in Charlottesville. I wondered if the news had reached him yet. The dorm was still, even for early Sunday morning. Usually someone was taking a shower or playing music or holding loud echoing conversations in the stairwell, but today it was eerily quiet, everyone huddled in their rooms. I hadn’t been able to sleep, so a little after dawn I had gotten out of bed, washed my face, and climbed the stairs up to Terence’s dorm room to gather his things for his parents as Sam had asked me to do.

  It occurred to me, as I stood in his room, that collecting his things would be harder than it sounded. Dirty laundry vomited forth from the open closet and lay in a funky reek on the floor, and while I could guess that Terence’s dresser was the one beneath the Snoop Dogg poster, I couldn’t be sure whose clothes were whose in the heap of laundry. Maybe Terence’s mother had ironed his name into his shirts like so many mothers still did, and like my own mother had. Then I remembered how Terence’s body had been identified—just yesterday—by his name on the sweatshirt label. At that thought, I actually had to sit down on Terence’s bed and wait out the moment. I didn’t sob or tear out my hair—I was too drained for melodrama. It was more like enduring some sort of gut cramp, waiting it out until it decided to stop. The moment passed, and I got back up, wiped the back of my hand across my eyes, and looked in the closet for a duffel bag or suitcase in which to put Terence’s belongings.

  Once I started, I fell into a grim, methodical rhythm. The dresser seemed to empty out itself, one drawer at a time, into the blue duffel I had found under the bed. The pile of laundry in the closet was daunting, but it turned out that Terence’s mother had, in fact, ironed in name labels, so I sorted his clothes and put them into the duffel as well. The composition notebook on the desk was stacked next to his schoolbooks—perhaps I could find a cardboard box to put them in. I took the Snoop Dogg poster down, rolled it up, and placed it on the desk next to the books. All the while the sunlight grew brighter outside the window until it seemed to take almost physical form, its warmth washing over the room.

  With the clothes packed, I felt weirdly inert, my earlier sense of purpose having evaporated. Idly I glanced at Terence’s composition notebook on the desk. It was the same kind of notebook I had written in during my student days, a journal in which students wrote their responses to reading assignments by hand—a throwback in an age of laptops and blog posts. It occurred to me that I had no memory of Terence’s written work. I remembered him getting the Akhmatova poem in class a few weeks earlier, but I couldn’t remember a single thing he had written for my class. This seemed wrong, a crime against his memory. Had I not read Terence’s notebook? I had spent several nights going through my students’ notebooks, poring over them as if I were reading their souls, writing comments and responses in the belief that I would be opening up a valuable communication with them. Instead, I had drowned under the sheer number of their words, their thoughts about the works we had read, the observations they made about school, movies they had seen, their own lives. Eventually I had skimmed the notebooks, just adding a check mark or a brief Good work in the margins. It was entirely possible I had read Terence’s notebook the way I read tweets or Facebook status updates, like glancing at the sky to see what the weather was like. Good writing had mattered to me—still mattered—and it was highly probable that my own teachers’ comments and encouraging words had helped propel aloft my own dreams of being a writer. How hard was it to take two or three more minutes to read what a student had dutifully written? I had been his English teacher, for God’s sake; the least I could do was make sure I had read what he’d written for class. So, writhing with guilt and self-loathing, and not a little self-righteousness, I opened Terence’s notebook and began reading the pages, slowly turning them over one by one.

  It soon became apparent—and this caused yet another spasm of guilt—that Terence was not some adolescent Montaigne. He had written perfunctorily about his reading assignments, employing the same style used by veteran texters who cared less about syntax or spelling than they did about getting to the final period, shedding grammatical rules like a marathoner tossing away a water bottle as he nears the finish line
: I didnt care to much about Oddysseus, he was hard to understand sometimes but the gods and the Cyclops were cool. Most of the notebook’s pages were blank. But then I turned a page and read this:

  The steel wheels

  Turn and turn and turn

  In the night

  Shining with light

  As if they burn

  There was more, all in cryptic fragments of verse as if Terence had tried out an idea and then abandoned it to try another:

  Floating away

  On a hazy day

  Above the plain

  Above the pain

  Guitar solo like a loud laugh

  summer smoke sounds

  The crows fly overhead like black clouds

  burning wheels light up the bricks

  as fate rolls down the path toward me

  Unsettled, I closed his notebook and stuck it on top of the other books stacked on the desk. I wasn’t sure what the poems meant, but I felt like I shouldn’t be reading them.

  I roamed around the room, looking for anything else that may have been Terence’s, and I came across the lava lamp shoved in the corner. The wax in the lamp had formed a single purple mass on the bottom. I picked up the lamp and peered at the base to see if Terence’s name was on it, too. I’d forgotten how heavy lava lamps were. The liquid stirred sluggishly inside. There was no name on the base, but the bottom was covered in gray duct tape. As I looked at it, the duct-taped bottom fell to the floor, surprising me so that I almost dropped the lamp. I clenched it with both hands, imagining Terence’s parents finding me in their son’s dorm room, frantically trying to clean up his broken lava lamp. “That was a gift from me!” his father would say, balling his fists.

  I knelt to pick up the bottom of the lava lamp, and then I noticed the plastic bag shoved into the lamp’s base. When I pulled it out, I saw that the bag contained clumps of what looked like leafy moss. It wasn’t moss. I opened the bag, and a potent, organic smell a little like fresh dung wafted out. Now I understood why the lava lamp didn’t work. Someone had removed the heating bulb inside the base to make a crude storage place for what looked like some very dank pot. I knelt there, staring for a long time at the three marijuana buds in their plastic bag.