Gods of Aberdeen

by Micah Nathan

  When I get back I have to tell Art I’m no longer interested in his search for the stone.

  They were too far in, I thought. They were too far in and Art couldn’t let Dan go.

  I’m not saying it’s all nonsense—I still think there might be something to it, but getting to that point is too dangerous.

  More murder-mystery idiocy, I thought. Don’t be foolish. Occam’s razor. Law of parsimony. Simplest explanation, nothing more. Art convinced Dan to stay on just a little longer, just like Art said. And Art isn’t scared. He feels guilt. He’s mistaking fear for guilt.

  “Tell me about Dan’s suicide note,” I said.

  Art crossed his arms over his stomach, serene as a monk. “L’eternité…” he said. “It’s by Rimbaud, Dan’s favorite poet. I wrote it the night of the accident and left it on his bed. At first I thought Dr. Cade would find it, or maybe campus security once we called them, but having Howie discover the note worked out perfectly. The wallet under the bed was even better—I didn’t know where it was, and thank God because I would’ve done something foolish, like throw it in the trash for Hector the garbageman to find.”

  Or maybe there’s nothing to it and we’re all just bored.

  “Did Dan know what he was drinking?” I said, slowly.

  Art looked at me. “Of course. Why do you ask?”

  “Then why didn’t he go through the purification rites?”

  Art didn’t answer.

  “Art?”

  He closed his eyes and lay there, still as a stone.

  “Art,” I said, cautiously, “I saw that poem before winter break. I saw it in your room.”

  “What were you doing in my room,” he said. He kept his eyes shut.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “And that’s not the point.”

  I remembered the book on Cornelius’s desk, my first day in the library. Fiat experimentum in corpore vili. Let experiment be made on a worthless body.

  “Dan didn’t know, did he?” I said. “You gave him something to drink and he didn’t know what it was. You’d been planning it, and that’s why—”

  “I’m exhausted,” Art said, turning on his side. He faced the wall, his back to me. “We can talk about this some other time.”

  “I think we should talk about this now.”

  Art kept quiet, then:

  “We have another search party tomorrow,” he said. “You should get some sleep. Really, Eric. It’s been a draining week for both of us.”

  That was it. It seemed so easy for him. Shutting down. Closing off. I could have sat there, asking the same question for hours, and he wouldn’t have said anything.

  I took my pillow and blankets from my room and slept on Art’s floor. I was too scared to sleep alone.

  I joined the search party early the next day, at 7 A.M. I’d planned to go with Art and Howie but by the time I came downstairs they’d already gone, and had left me a note on the dining room table. When I got to campus I found the tables set up as markers for where the search party was going to start, and I stood by myself, drinking hot chocolate out of a paper cup. When the party was finally ready to set out there were about twenty of us, some Aberdeen students, but most townie volunteers. We canvassed the forest east of campus, past the well-worn trails and toward the ravines and boulder-strewn hillocks of the deep woods. Sometimes the snow reached to mid-thigh, and we ended up only covering half the area we had intended because it was too cold. I returned to campus about an hour later, my toes and fingers numb.

  I spotted Art and Howie in the Quad, among a small group of students and campus security officers.

  “I’m surprised to see you out here,” Art said to me, gazing toward the snowy forests. “I was beginning to think you’d miss another day.”

  Howie rolled his eyes and nodded his head in Art’s direction. “How far back did you guys go?” Howie said.

  “We reached the first ravine after the main trails,” I said.

  Art narrowed his eyes. “That’s not far at all,” he said. “Yesterday we covered at least twice that.”

  “Yeah, but that was the north forest—denser growth and not as much snow,” Howie said. “And it was warmer. The windchill today must be close to single digits.”

  “Regardless…” Art looked at me. “I don’t see how these searches are going to help unless a more serious attempt is made.”

  “Well, I’m not in charge,” I said, annoyed.

  Art didn’t respond. A security officer walked over to us, red-faced and bundled in a ski outfit, with a badge pinned to his puffy orange coat. It was Officer Lumble.

  “Afternoon, gentlemen,” he said, smiling. “Hell of a day to be outdoors. Coldest day of the year, I bet.” He took a cup of hot chocolate from the table.

  We all mumbled a response.

  “Have you heard anything new?” Art said, chopping at the ground with the toe of his boot.

  “Nothing you haven’t heard,” said Officer Lumble. “There were a couple of troopers sent from Boston, though. They stopped by our office last night.”

  Art nodded—too emphatically, I thought. “Any reason why?”

  Officer Lumble took off his hat and scratched his head. The sun shone off his peach-colored pate, mottled red with cold. “I guess Mrs. Higgins has some connection with the state police in Boston. Her late husband was friends with the senior detective…something like that. To be honest, we didn’t do much of the talking.”

  Art asked why.

  “They had a bunch of questions, stuff we’d already found out. Like those questions we asked you guys.” He put his hat back on. “But they wanted to go over the whole thing again. You know,” he dropped his voice and leaned in closer to Art, “it was kind of insulting. It’s not like we’re totally incompetent. I told—”

  “But we are dealing with a missing person, here,” Art said. He took out his pipe and inspected the bowl. “With all due respect, this is a bit more important than busting some senior for selling dope in the Garringer bathroom.”

  “Is that so?” Officer Lumble crossed his arms. His normally jovial smile faded quickly into something much darker.

  “It’s disappointing,” Art said, not in a conciliatory way. “Everyone is acting as if Dan is fine. And while I appreciate the delicacy of this situation”—his expression indicated otherwise—“the lack of urgency is, ultimately, counterproductive to solving this problem. We must assume the worst and act accordingly.”

  Officer Lumble nodded. “Fascinating stuff,” he said. “And what assumption would that be?”

  “The one everyone fears but no one has said yet. That Dan is dead.”

  Officer Lumble was going to say something else but stopped himself, and once Art had lit his pipe and taken a few long draws, Officer Lumble walked away, tossing his cup of hot chocolate into a green garbage can.

  I went to all my afternoon classes, ignoring the stares and hushed whispers, uncomfortable in my celebrity status as a friend of the missing. Even Allison Feinstein, who seldom showed any emotion other than bored indifference, paused and stared while I walked past her on the front steps of Thorren, her smoky perfume encircling me. But I trudged on, determined to put everything out of my mind, and instead I tried to focus on school. I wondered if it would make things easier if I disappeared, maybe go back to the Paradise and meet with my old friend Henry Hobbes. Maybe by now he’s fixed the heat, I thought. Maybe the duct-taped hole still held.

  Sometime during the afternoon even more snow had fallen, another two or three inches, plowed into sand-speckled mountains at all edges of the parking lots. The police, from what I heard, had questioned the witness who claimed to have seen Dan yesterday; now, under closer scrutiny, the man (Roy Elmore, a sixty-something alfalfa farmer who’d served a one-year tour in the Mekong Delta) was supposedly backing away from his earlier statements. He wasn’t sure, he said, whether that kid in the white sedan looked like Dan. And maybe his passenger hadn’t been black, maybe he’d been Puerto Rican or possibly
even Cuban (not that a townie from Brant knew the difference, anyway). But rumors still swirled, and there was talk of a kidnapping, since the showing of the mug shot of a black man on Fairwich’s local news had spawned several conspiracy theories. There’d been a fire in Bookertown about twenty miles over, which somehow became connected to Dan’s disappearance, along with a furniture store burglary in Stanton Valley. The Fairwich Sentinel had decided to post the police sketch of the black man on its front page, along with the headline A POSSIBLE LEAD? despite the local authorities’ insistence that Mr. Elmore was a completely unreliable witness. And in a strangely self-damning piece, the following day the Sentinel reported a “possibly racially motivated assault” at a Stanton Valley diner, something about an African-American man and two local highway workers getting into a scuffle in the parking lot.

  I took a cab into town after my classes and got dropped off at St. Michael’s Hospital. It was a small, low-lying brick building with tinted windows and pressed-concrete walkways leading up to a set of automatic sliding doors. There was a television at the reception desk, and on it I saw that the lead story on the five o’clock news was the disappearance of Dan Higgins. They even had a graphic, a black outline of what I presumed was Dan’s head, with a giant red question mark superimposed over it. The search now enters its third day and police still have little information as to the whereabouts of Daniel Higgins, who was last seen….

  I asked to see Cornelius Graves, and the receptionist—a middle-aged, heavy woman with deep blue eye shadow that matched her rayon sweater—had me sign some sheet with a chained pen and then shooed me away, but not before asking me if I was a student at Aberdeen. I told her I was.

  “You know anything about this missing kid?” She talked to me while staring at the news. Cynthia Andrews was standing in front of Garringer Hall and speaking solemnly into a microphone.

  “No,” I said.

  “Something like this happened ten years ago,” the receptionist said, somehow sounding both sympathetic and reproachful. “Some poor girl was hitchhiking up on Route 128, I think it was. They found her a week later in a field. She was obviously, you know—” She made some motion with her hands that indicated the girl was dead and it was best not to mention it. “They picked up the guy who did it, about a month later. He was living in New York, of course, and had killed a couple of other kids over the years. I think he even told them where he’d buried them all. Just goes to show you.” She waggled a finger at me. “City kids like you think nothing bad can happen out here. But bad things do happen, you know. Small town or big city, it doesn’t make a difference.”

  I know, I thought, and walked away.

  Cornelius looked like he’d shrunken into a little old man under a pile of white blankets, with an IV dangling from one withered arm and oxygen tubes extending from his nose like the roots of a tiny, shriveled tree. His room was private and silent, the heavy curtains drawn, and it smelled like antiseptic and baby powder. It reminded me of my mother’s room when she lay dying in the cancer ward. Glowing LEDs from medical equipment, the droning beep of monitors, and everything gray and white, cold and sterile.

  I realized, standing at the foot of his bed, that I had no idea why I’d come or what I was going to do or say. I watched Cornelius’s sunken chest rise and fall with each raspy breath. He’s dying, I thought, and I’m going to watch him die.

  “Eh? Who is that?”

  I stepped back.

  Cornelius moved his head and peered in my direction. I knew he couldn’t see me clearly.

  “Paul? Is that you?”

  “It’s Eric,” I said, finding my voice. I cleared my throat. “Eric Dunne, from the library. I worked—”

  “I know who you are.” He coughed and raised his hand. “What do you want?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I’m happy to see that nothing has changed in my absence,” Cornelius said. “Eric Dunne still doesn’t know what he wants.” He coughed again and struggled to sit up. “Why don’t you step closer.”

  I moved to the side of his bed. I could feel the blue monitors and drab green scanners emanating heat like a car’s engine.

  “I’ve been watching the news,” he said, staring at the small TV that hung suspended from the corner of the room like a giant metallic spider. Its black screen stared back at us like a baleful eye. “Some boy has gone missing at the school…His name sounded familiar.”

  “Daniel Higgins,” I said. “He’s a friend of mine. And Art’s.”

  Cornelius sighed. “I still don’t recognize that name. Say, you don’t know who Dean Richardson has put in charge of the library, do you? Nobody good, I imagine.” He grabbed my wrist suddenly. “Has anyone said anything to you? Is it a grad student? A member of the faculty?”

  I nearly yelled in fright and had to resist yanking my arm back. “I don’t know,” I said, pulling away gently, but Cornelius held firm. “I think they just hired some extra help to keep it organized.”

  He released his grip. “Has anyone access to my office?”

  I shrugged.

  “You must tell the dean I will not allow it.” Cornelius made as if to grab me again but I had backed away. “Do you understand? I cannot have children rooting around among my papers and stealing into my personal things. It is unacceptable. Are you listening to me?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. His breathing quickened. “I’ll tell Dean Richardson first thing tomorrow.”

  This seemed to pacify him. He closed his eyes and sank back into the bed, threatening to disappear altogether. Loose skin hung from his jaw in pale folds and his features had nearly lost all form or order—his cheeks were cracked and creased flat plains, above which lay twin burrows, no glimmer in those eyes anymore.

  We said nothing for a few minutes, kept company by the beep of monitors and the rumble of a snowplow working on the parking lot outside Cornelius’s window.

  “I’ve done something terrible,” I said.

  Cornelius’s eyes fluttered open. He looked at me. “If it’s so terrible,” he said, “then why burden me with a confession?”

  “Art still believes in the Philosopher’s Stone,” I said. “He believes your stories. He follows your methods. He does experiments on cats, like you with your pigeons, but something awful happened, and now, even with Dan missing and Dr. Cade’s deadline—”

  “Deadline?” Cornelius said. “For his book series?”

  “We’re competing for the Pendleton,” I said.

  Cornelius looked unimpressed. “William has always believed the ephemeral will somehow lead to the immortal. The race of scholars died long ago, and yet William still thinks their crypts to be birthing rooms.”

  “You have to tell Art to stop,” I said.

  Cornelius shrugged. “Art will stop when he knows.”

  “When he knows what?”

  “The truth,” Cornelius said.

  “But it’s all lies,” I said. “Look at you. You’re dying. You’re not immortal.”

  Cornelius smiled. “I never said I was. Would you hand me my water?”

  I saw a small cup sitting on the nightstand. I didn’t move. I was too angry.

  “We all seek transformation,” Cornelius said, wearily. He took the cup himself, oxygen tubes dangling and swaying. “We all want to become something we are not. Do you remember the map I showed you? The one in my office?”

  I remembered it. The maze of the alchemist. The dragon guarding the tower of knowledge.

  “When the initiate has lost his way,” Cornelius said, “he may find it again by retracing his steps and coming to that one moment where he chose a path counter to his nature. No one can lead him out of the maze. The initiate must act of his own will—it is his failure to act of his own will that led to his wandering astray.”

  “So Art shouldn’t have listened to you,” I said. I focused all my anger on Cornelius. His fault. His lies.

  “Dan’s gone because of you,” I said. I wiped away my furious tears.
“You’re the dragon. The archetypal tempter. You led Art down a false path.”

  Cornelius shook his head slowly. “My days of temptation are long past,” he said. “But Arthur is not the one who’s lost within the maze.”

  He stared at me.

  “You are the initiate,” he said. “And who do you now suppose is the dragon?”

  Chapter 6

  Much happened over the next twenty-four hours. The local media had been joined by stations from Hartford, New York, and Boston, and their reporters swarmed campus. The extras in my life were suddenly given major roles—I saw Josh Briggs and Kenny Hauseman being interviewed outside Paderborne, and Jacob Blum, in all his chain-smoking, gangly glory, chatting with some Asian woman reporter in a quiet corner at Campus Bean.

  Mrs. Higgins offered a $100,000 reward for any information leading to her son’s whereabouts, making her announcement on the local news on Channel 7. She stared into the camera, while in the background stood an entourage of men in dark suits—attorneys? detectives? I didn’t know. Her hair was pulled into a bun, her diminutive body clothed in shades of black. She was flanked by Senator Feinstein and Dr. Lang, who, I discovered, had lost a son fifteen years ago; the son had gone on a cross-country road trip with his dog and was never heard from again.

  Howie had contacted his family, and Beauford Spacks announced his own reward, an additional $10,000 dollars, courtesy of Spacks Shipping Inc. I heard that Mrs. Higgins’s suite at the Riverside had been transformed into a war room, with a full-time private investigator situated at the dining room table, Mrs. Higgins at his side, and regiments of professional search-and-rescue teams reporting back via two-way radio. There was a massive green and black grid map, Howie told me, crisscrossed with red marker, and the private investigator (a semifamous retired police chief named Teddy Wolford) pored over it, chewing his pen furiously because Mrs. Higgins didn’t allow any smoking in her room.