Shadow of the Lions

by Christopher Swann

  Sick with such thoughts, I almost missed the sound. It was low but distinct, the sound of a flat piece of wood striking another. It reverberated through the trees and then faded to nothing, all within a second or so. I looked around, puzzled. There was no one on the bridge, nor on the road in either direction. I glanced one more time downriver, seeing nothing on either bank, and then walked across to the other side of the bridge and looked upstream. That was when I saw, among a stand of poplars on the school side of the river, the heavy outline of the outing cabin. The cabin had a screened-in porch that looked out over the river, and I realized that what I had heard was the slam of a wooden screen door, as if someone had opened it and it had swung back on its spring, shutting with a bang. There was a breeze, but not enough to blow open a screen door. I kept my eyes on the cabin. There was a flicker of movement behind the screen door. Or had it been my imagination?

  There was the faintest hint of a path from the bridge to the cabin. No one was nearby as far as I could see, no faculty member walking a dog, no student lurking behind a tree. I walked up the path to the cabin, which was roughly built but looked sound. It was at least sixty years old, with small dusty windows and a steep roof, a few tiles from which lay on the ground under the eaves. I took the steps up to the screen door, one board popping beneath my feet. The door was unlatched, the porch beyond in shadow. I opened the door, which made no sound whatsoever. Part of me was disappointed that it hadn’t made an eerie screech. I smiled at the thought and then froze in the act of stepping through the doorway. On the bare wooden floor of the porch, not two steps ahead of me, lay a thick brass disc. It looked for all the world like a miniature hockey puck. I might have stepped on it had I not happened to glance down. I knelt and picked it up. It was heavier than I would have thought. On the surface was the engraved inscription PLS. Someone’s initials? The disc had a hinge at one end, and I swung the lid open to see the round white face, elegant script letters, and hovering needle of a compass. The needle seemed to work, as far as I could tell. It wasn’t all that surprising to find a compass in a cabin used by the outing club, I reflected. Then again, this compass looked clean, without any dust or leaves covering it to indicate that it had been there for a long time. As if it had been dropped on the porch recently.

  I looked across the porch at the door to the cabin. It was painted a shade of green that might have once been bright. About a foot above the doorknob were a steel hasp, firmly bolted into the door, and a staple on the door frame over which the hasp would fit. A padlock hung from the staple, but the hasp was not fitted over the staple—it swung freely from the door.

  There were windows to either side of the door, both dark and cobwebby. I couldn’t see anything through either of them. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as I reached for the door. I grasped the knob and silently stood there, listening. I heard nothing. Yet I was sure someone was inside. It wasn’t just the unsecured hasp. It was almost a physical perception, like sound or sight, except it wasn’t either of those. I just knew. Knowing didn’t make me feel any more at ease as I opened the door.

  It creaked as it swung inside, and I stepped into a large common room with crate furniture—a sofa and three blocky chairs with ancient foam cushions—and an old brick fireplace. The fireplace held a few ancient cigarette butts, but nothing that had been smoked in recent history. There was nowhere to hide in the main room, no space underneath the crate furniture. Two doors sat in the back wall, seeming to lead into separate rooms. The right-hand door was opened inward about a foot.

  I stood in the center of the room, weighing the compass in my hand. Was there a door between these two rooms? Or was there a rear entrance? No sound came from behind either door.

  “Hey!” I shouted, suddenly, hoping for a reaction. The word rang off the walls. Then, when the sound had dissipated, it was as if the earlier silence had grown denser, withdrawing into itself. Nobody had yelped in panic or stumbled, revealing his hiding place. “I’ve got your compass,” I said. “I just want to talk.” Now I felt like a cop in a bad movie, trying to negotiate with a fugitive. Next I would demand that someone come out with his hands up. A steady silence was my only answer. Swearing, I strode toward the open door on the right, pushed it open, and stepped into the room. Two sets of heavy bunk beds, a window through which milky light hovered, and dust. There was also another door that connected the two back rooms, a fact I became aware of only after someone on the other side of that door shoved it open, hard.

  I turned toward the noise, and the door caught me like a well-timed punch to the face. Lights sparked in my vision. I fell backward, grabbing at the door, which seemed impossibly tall. Then something smashed against the back of my head, and the world shut down around me like an electrical cord yanked out of a socket—a brief flicker and then nothing.

  I OPENED MY EYES and immediately winced. Pain shot through my left cheek. I sat up on a dusty wooden floor. I was in the room with the bunk beds. The back of my head throbbed where it had hit something. Dazed, I looked at the window. The milky light was still there. I looked at my watch and figured I’d been out for only a couple of minutes, max.

  The door. Someone had opened it into my face—on purpose. I got to one knee, ignoring the flares of pain in my head, and then stood, my hand on a bunk bed frame. My cheek stung, and when I touched it, my fingers came away with a drop of blood. Whoever had pole-axed me with the door was gone—I could see through the open doorway that the third room held more bunk beds, no hiding places. It did, however, have a back door. I hurried to it and tried to push it open, but the door stayed firmly closed. My guess was it had its own padlock, this one properly locked on the other side.

  The front door. I turned and hurried back to the front common room. If whoever had been in here had secured the hasp on the front door, I could be locked in. Panic began tickling my throat, but when I reached the front door, it opened under the pressure of both my hands so that I almost stumbled outside onto the porch. A crow, startled, cawed at me from a nearby bush and beat its way into the sky.

  I looked around through the trees and then back toward the drive. Someone was running up the drive, more than a hundred yards away, back toward school. He was wearing a dark jacket, maybe a fleece, and jeans, and a dark skullcap. I took all three of the porch steps in a single leap, nearly stumbling again when I landed, and then started running through the woods toward the drive. My feet thudded on the ground as I ran, my breath rasping in my ears. Pain flickered in my head like a dying lightbulb, threatening one final blaze before burning out. I stepped on a fallen branch, causing it to snap with a loud crack as if I’d broken it over my knee. Ahead, the runner turned his head to look back—a pale face but nothing else I could make out—and then he ran faster.

  It seemed to take me several long minutes to finally reach the drive, and when I finally ran out of the woods and onto the asphalt, the runner was gone. I continued running up the drive, pumping my arms, drawing breath through my nose, and blowing out my mouth. No matter how fast I sprinted, I wouldn’t catch him before the trees ended, but if he was heading back to the Hill, I just needed to be able to see where he went. I settled into a steady, loping run. Why I thought he was heading for the Hill, I’m not sure—probably because I assumed he was a student and would want to get to his dorm and hide in anonymity as soon as possible. But if the letters on the compass I had found were his initials, they would point to his name. At that thought, I realized I was no longer holding the compass. My heart sank. He must have taken it after bashing me in the face with the door. There was an S, I remembered, but the other two letters blurred in my memory. The cold air burned my bruised cheek, and my legs began to protest. I ran harder.

  By the time I reached the edge of the trees, I had a stitch in my side and was beginning to breathe more rapidly through my open mouth, still shy of gasping for air but well on my way. Up ahead, more than halfway up the Hill, someone in a black fleece was running past the infirmary. I ignored the stitch in
my side and kept going.

  At the top of the drive, by Saint Matthew’s, I had to stop and bend over, palms on my knees. Ten years ago I’d been able to run two miles without breaking into a heavy sweat. Now I was wheezing like an asthmatic smoker, sweat dripping off my nose, my legs burning and threatening to cramp. Still bent over, I raised my head to scan the Hill. Empty. No one moved under the trees or on the walkways. The Frisbee throwers from earlier were gone. I tried to slow my breathing, letting the stitch in my side work its way out. He could have run across the Lawn to the gym, or ducked into the library or Huber Hall or maybe even into one of the dorms. I’d lost him. “Dumbass,” I said aloud in between breaths.

  On the far side of Saint Matthew’s, to the left across the Lawn, someone walked into view, heading down the road away from me toward Stilwell Hall. He wasn’t wearing a skullcap, but he had on a black fleece. I stood up. “Hey!” I managed to shout. The person turned and then began running. From that brief glance, I could tell he was young, with dark hair, but he was still too far away for me to get a good look. I lurched after him. He sprinted down the road that circled the Hill, passing the gym and some of the other dormitory buildings—Raleigh Hall, Rhoads Hall. I cut across the Lawn, trying to keep him in sight. If he got to Stilwell, he’d lose me easily in that massive building with all its twisting corridors and stairwells.

  I ran harder, my heart pounding at my ribs. Then I saw the runner turn suddenly and dash inside Vinton Hall, the senior dorm. Ten seconds behind him, I ran up the steps and through the front entrance, nearly colliding with someone just inside the door. “Hey —” the person shouted, and I almost grabbed him by the arm, thinking I’d caught the boy I’d been chasing. Then I realized this boy was wearing gray sweats and was much darker in skin tone. It was Jamal Bullock.

  “Mr. Glass?” he asked, puzzled. “You all right, sir?”

  “Somebody ran in here . . . a second ago,” I said, in between catching my breath.

  Bull nodded. “Yeah. Ran upstairs.”

  “Who was it?”

  He shook his head. “When I came out of my room, he was already halfway up the stairs.” He leaned forward to get a better look at me, and his eyes widened. “What happened to your face?”

  I ran past Bull. “Get the faculty resident,” I called to him, and then took the stairs two at a time.

  The stairs came out in the middle of the upstairs hallway, which ran from the front of the dorm to the back, with rooms on either side. By instinct I turned left, toward the back. There were fire escapes on the rear wall of Vinton. But the window at the end of the hall was closed, the windowsill crusted with old paint and dust, a dead fly on its back by the latch. No one had gone out this way. Which meant that he was still on the second floor somewhere. Two rooms I barged into had no one in them, while in a third, a blond-haired boy, lying on his bed and listening to his iPod, glared at me. Realizing I was a teacher, he began to apologize as I let the door swing shut. In the bathroom, I startled a senior in the shower but saw no one else, either in the shower or the stalls. Back out in the hallway, I heard a strange scraping sound, wood rasping against wood, coming from behind another door. When I opened it, I saw someone across the room in the act of stepping through an open window and onto a gabled roof below, one leg and arm still inside. He got his other leg through the window, but I grabbed his arm before he could withdraw it, too. He put up a mighty struggle, trying to yank his arm out of my grasp, but I dug my fingers in, nearly wrenching the boy’s arm out of his shoulder as I yelled for Bull. “No!” he started yelping as I braced a foot against the wall and began pulling him back through the window. “I didn’t do it! I swear! I didn’t do it! No! I swear I didn’t do it!” By the time Bull came running down the hall with the faculty resident, I had managed to pull the boy back through the window and into the room, where he lay sobbing in a heap on the floor. He covered his head with his arms, but not before I recognized him.

  “What the hell is going on?” demanded the faculty resident, a young, sandy-haired teacher named Matt McGuire.

  “Mr. McGuire,” I said far more calmly than I felt, “would you please call Mr. Middleton and ask him to meet us in his office?”

  McGuire looked at me, opened his mouth, seemed to think better of it, and then nodded before heading off to call Ren Middleton. Bull stayed in the room, his wide shoulders blocking the doorway so that other students, drawn out of their rooms by the commotion, had to peek around him to see Paul Simmons, the headmaster’s son, lying on the floor and crying as if his heart were breaking right before our eyes.

  MCGUIRE CAME BACK A little later, sent the gawking students away, and said Ren Middleton would meet us in fifteen minutes. He said this a bit accusingly, as if I’d dragged him into trouble, but he also looked interested despite himself. I told him that I’d found Paul in the outing cabin, which was strictly off-limits to students. This was enough to satisfy McGuire, although he kept glancing at my face. I knew my eye and cheek had swollen, could feel the skin tightening, but I said nothing about it and McGuire didn’t ask. We walked downstairs, and I asked McGuire to escort Paul, who was now limp and silent, to Ren’s office while I stopped by my apartment. McGuire hesitated, but then walked off with Paul as I cut across the Lawn to Lawson-Parker.

  On my dorm, students were stirring to life. A few were in the showers, while others were folding laundry or blaring music in their rooms, a final defiant act against the ending of the weekend. I shut my apartment door on all of it and went up to my bedroom, opened the top drawer of my dresser, and retrieved the plastic bag of marijuana, which I stuffed into the outside pocket of my coat. Then I thought about why I’d been able to catch up with Paul on the Hill, why he hadn’t run to any of a half-dozen other places. He’d walked out from behind Saint Matthew’s, trying to look casual. He’d also ditched his skullcap. After deliberating for a moment, I shut the dresser drawer and headed for Saint Matthew’s, figuring that Ren Middleton could wait for five more minutes.

  REN WASN’T HAPPY. HE sat behind his desk, in a dark blue suit and white shirt but no tie, as though I had disturbed him in the act of getting dressed for Sunday dinner, and glowered at me as if I were the one being hauled in for questioning. Paul Simmons sat in front of Ren’s desk, looking at no one, slumped in his chair. An uncomfortable-looking Matt McGuire sat next to Paul.

  “Mr. Glass,” Ren said. “Thank you for finally coming. Mr. McGuire tells me you chased Mr. Simmons here through Vinton Hall and dragged him back through a second-story window.” He made it sound as if I’d been vandalizing the dormitory. “Can you tell me why, precisely?”

  I sat without waiting to be asked to do so—in the same chair that Terence Jarrar’s mother had sat in, just over a week ago—and told him about walking down to the river, seeing someone in the outing cabin, going inside to investigate and being clobbered by the door, and then chasing Paul, without yet knowing who he was, up the Hill and into Vinton. I could sense McGuire alternating between rapt attention and disappointment, as if Paul’s injuring me with a door in the face were somehow unsatisfactory. Paul continued to stare at the floor, picking absently at his thumbnail, and said nothing. At the conclusion of my story, Ren nodded once and then turned his attention to Paul. “Mr. Simmons,” he said, “why were you in the outing cabin?”

  Paul continued to stare at the floor.

  “Mr. Simmons,” Ren said, his voice laced with threat, and despite himself, Paul looked up, his blank expression now tinged with fear, “why were you in the outing cabin?”

  Paul opened his mouth, closed it, looked down at his lap, and let out a short, strangled sigh. “I was thinking about Terence,” he said in a low voice. He glanced up. Ren’s face was impassive. “I was . . . sad. About what—what happened to him.” He shivered as if cold. “I wanted to go down to the river, to where he . . . And I couldn’t, I couldn’t do it. I made it to the cabin. We’d gone there once, this fall. With the outing club. We’d had fun. And . . .” He fell silent and looked a
t his lap again.

  Ren grunted. “What about injuring Mr. Glass, here?”

  Paul shot a fearful look at me and then looked back at Ren. “I didn’t mean to do it, sir. I swear. I just—I was scared, I thought I would get caught and in trouble, and so I just shoved the door open to—”

  “Why?” I asked, interrupting. Ren bristled, but Paul turned to me, a worried frown on his face. I spoke gently, without accusation. “Why did you think you’d get in trouble?”

  “Because we’re not supposed to be there,” Paul said. He sounded confused.

  “If you’d just told me what you were doing there—”

  “Mr. Glass makes a good point,” Ren said, leaning forward and regaining control of the interrogation. “If you had simply spoken with him, you might be facing a detention. As it is, you made things much worse. Much worse.”

  It was the wrong way to go. Underneath the apologetic exterior, Paul seemed deeply shaken. I recalled him on the floor in Vinton, crying and saying, “No, I didn’t do it! I swear!” over and over. He needed coaxing, not threats.

  Paul shrank back into his chair under Ren’s words. “I didn’t mean to,” he mumbled.

  Ren sighed, whether from weariness or annoyance, I couldn’t tell. “Mr. Simmons, would you please wait in the room next door. I need to speak with Mr. Glass for a moment.”

  Paul began to get up, but my words stopped him. “Actually, Mr. Middleton, there’s something else. I . . .” I glanced at Matt McGuire. “I’d like to speak with both you and Paul, if I could.”

  Paul sank back reluctantly into his chair. Ren looked at me for an uncomfortable three seconds and then said abruptly, “Mr. McGuire, thank you for your assistance.”