The Faculty Club

by Danny Tobey

  “More rules. More law. When does it come from inside, Jeremy, absent anything else . . .” Miles shook his head. “I turned to philosophy. I studied Aristotle and virtue ethics. I studied Kant and Mill and Rawls and Nozick. I mastered communitarianism, egalitarianism, utilitarianism, structuralism, deontology, Straussianism, postmodernism, objectivism, contractarianism . . .”

  I started laughing. I didn’t mean to. I couldn’t control myself. It was an unhappy sound—the worst laughter I’d ever heard. I felt like the last hinges in my brain had sprung open. I just laughed. At first Miles thought I was laughing with him, and he smiled uncertainly, but then he heard the edge in it and stopped. He looked at me, his mouth half-open. I just laughed until I thought I’d go insane.

  “You’re talking about goodness,” I said. “You’re talking about goodness, and she’s down there.”

  Miles looked startled.

  “You asked about my career.”

  “We left her down there.” I was shouting. I couldn’t stop. “Miles, you’re talking about goodness and WE LEFT HER DOWN THERE.”

  “It’s just philosophy.”

  “It’s nothing—if you don’t get off this couch. I want you to shut your big fucking mouth because it’s all bullshit.” My head was going to explode, the blood was rushing so hard. “Get up. Get off your fat ass and get off this couch because we are going to save her. We are going to get her out of that dark place and make her okay. Do you hear me, Miles? Do you?”

  He didn’t say anything. He blinked a couple of times. His eyes were red from the pot. He scratched at his beard.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” he said.

  He left the room. I wanted to move. I wanted to go after her. But my legs wouldn’t budge. And suddenly I realized what my legs already seemed to know: if I went down there after her, I might die. If I went alone, without Miles, it was virtually guaranteed. Let him take his shower. Ten minutes under the hot water and he’d come around.

  This was Miles, I kept thinking over and over. My mentor. My protector in high school. I remembered the time we walked down the hall together, and this guy who used to pick on me passed us and said something ugly. In one motion, Miles had him up in the air, and he held him there with one arm for a long time. No words, no threats, no violence even—just the gentle lifting, like a father lifting a child. Miles was valedictorian of his class, and he could lift a bully with one arm. For me. Miles was my hero.

  When the water stopped, he stepped out of the bathroom. He was wrapped in a towel. His massive frame, somewhere between fat and muscle, was pink from the hot water. But the thing that shocked me had nothing to do with his colossal size or his bareness. He’d shaved off his beard. His face looked naked, almost babylike. I barely recognized him at first, and then suddenly he looked just like the Miles from high school, like he’d traveled back in time seven years. As if you could reach inside yourself and produce the person you used to be, just like that.

  But when I saw his face, I knew.

  “I understand what you’re saying,” Miles said. “But I can’t help you.”

  He walked into his bedroom and shut the door.

  I heard it in his voice. There wouldn’t be any discussion. Not this time.

  I walked to the entryway and picked up his satchel. I strung it over my shoulder.

  As I left his apartment, for some reason I thought of Miles proposing to Isabella—one giant kneeling before another.

  I walked the campus one last time. I passed the music school with the statue of Beethoven outside—larger than life and cast in black metal, his eyes and hair blazing. I passed the bridges over the river and saw the line of bell towers, one red, one blue, one green. The campus was quiet. The crew teams still had an hour before first light, when they’d practice on the river, rowing as a unit like an eagle pumping its wings. I passed the library with its massive columns and the statue of our founder with his three lies, and there I flashed back to that first day, passing the tourists on my way to Bernini’s class. I wondered what had gone through Sarah’s mind, down in that hole, if she wondered why I hadn’t tumbled down after her. Then I found myself past the yard, facing Centennial Church.

  The bell tower was shingled with chalky shades of blue, red, and brown, striped like snakeskin. Spotlights went up the sides of the tower and ended in the clouds. I felt an unbearable sense of need rattle me, and I fell to my knees and looked up. When I saw the cross, for the first time in my life it meant something new—no longer did I see a symbol of membership, of fraternity or conversion. Now it was something internal: the intersection of my spine and shoulders. It was a cross inside me, a steel frame, holding me up against the unstoppable urge to crumble. I wanted a religious experience. I wanted a voice and I was instead consumed by an almost infinite silence. The harder I begged that building to speak, the more quiet, the more alone I felt, kneeling in an empty lawn and looking up at a silent building. And yet, in that moment, I had the truest religious experience I believe there is: for I was suddenly filled with the desire to be good, even if no one was watching.

  I did one last thing. I wrote a letter to my dad and put it in the mail. It’s hard to even call it a letter—it was just one line. It said:

  You are not small to me.

  I retraced my steps from Bernini’s office to the steam tunnel door with eyes above it. I passed through the three rooms. The doors were all open now. The mechanisms were silent. It felt like an abandoned movie set. Or, even better, it felt like something I remembered from my childhood, an amazing, unexplainable feeling that was new to my generation, since we were the first generation to grow up with computers. It felt like a computer game, after you’d solved all the puzzles and done everything you were supposed to do for that level. All that was left was to move on. But if you postponed that—if you walked around that world just a little bit longer—it took on an uncanny feeling. The characters were still there, little animated men running through their programmed routines, tending bar, sweeping porches, working the docks of the pirate shipyard. But it no longer felt like a real world, because your tasks were done and the characters had nothing left to say to you, and you saw through the illusion of their activity.

  I found myself past the last room and standing above the hole where the trapdoor still hung open. I let my feet stick out over the edge.

  I took a deep breath, and I jumped.

  37

  I fell, and the walls of the hole arced and I went into a slide that sent me hurtling. Miles’s satchel was across my waist; I had one hand over it and one protecting my head. I was rolling over myself now, smacking different parts on the packed dirt of the walls. And yet there was something thrilling about it. I felt free. I felt hope. I was going to rescue Sarah. This was an adventure, and nothing was going to stop me!

  The walls leveled out as I fell until they became ground below me and a ceiling above, depositing me in a wild roll until I skidded in a mounting pile of dirt. I plowed to a stop. My eyes were closed. I froze for a moment and listened. Nothing. No explosions, no snarls, no voices, not even crickets chirping. Just the light sound of air moving through cracks.

  Did my fingers and toes still move? Check. Vision intact? Check. Wooden spikes through my torso? Negative.

  Things were looking up.

  It smelled pungent down here, thick and muddy. The rocky walls were covered with writing, more mathematical than pictorial. They still looked primitive. Maybe this was once the home of the Einstein of cavemen.

  My body was sore, but I was okay.

  I saw a hallway chiseled through the rock. I moved too quickly and was almost seen by three people at the end of the hall, but they were absorbed in conversation and I pressed myself against the wall faster than I realized I could move.

  At the distant end of the hall were three women. Their lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear them speak. They were young. They reminded me of pretty mothers at a playground. Their skin was almost luminous, lit by a shaft of pale ligh
t from slats above them. They seemed lighthearted. One of them laughed. The women moved away together, so gracefully that it wasn’t at all clear they were walking. They disappeared around a corner.

  I went down the hall after them. I stepped slowly and hoped no one would come around the bend ahead and see me. But it was completely silent. Every step I took, gravel crackled under my shoes. I clutched Miles’s bag and felt the metal inside. It was comforting.

  I got to the spot where the women had turned and was hit with a blast of cool, fresh air. The dirt path I’d followed forked and continued also in the other direction, around another turn. For a moment, I started to follow the women, but something told me not to. I turned and went left instead of right. I can’t tell you why. But I was glad I did. Because the path brought me to a stone stairway within a tight, ascending passage lined with columns on either side. The steps were wide but the stairway was steep, the end high above me. As I neared the top, I saw I was heading toward a slanted opening, like the entrances of Assyrian temples I’d seen in history books. No sound, no movement from that opening as I climbed. But when I reached the top, I looked through the door and saw a room I’d seen before. An altar in the center. A pole that loomed from the floor to the high stone ceiling. And beyond all that, a machine, quietly thrumming and moving in the shadows.

  38

  The machine reminded me of a spider, the way its long spindles bent in unnatural places, producing movements that were alive but definitely not human. Not even mammalian, for that matter. It creeped me out. It was machinelike in an ancient way, like the Gutenberg press. It could have been hundreds of years old. How long had these people been replicating themselves? How many centuries had they lived?

  The machine was also larger than I ever imagined, seeing it through the slots of that vent, looking down. The thin spindle arms spread out from the central mechanism; they filled the room and towered over me. The arms bent and gyrated at joints, like bones. They traced out the points in space of the ritual dance without really capturing what was alive about the dancers—the way stars could be connected into bears and scorpions without blood or brains.

  I wanted to get out of here as quickly as possible. I wanted to rescue Sarah (if she’s still alive, the wicked voice in my head whispered) and leave this place. But I knew what I had to do first. If my theory was right, this machine was the artificial heart that kept the possessed imprisoned. Smashing it to pieces, prying it apart—that would make noise. That would give me away. But if I could do it fast enough, I could free Nigel, Daphne, John, and everyone else. And the people coming to capture me would no longer have bodies to grab me with. That was the theory, anyway.

  You know the old joke about the economist stranded on an island. He decides to build a shelter and says: First, assume a hammer.

  If I was wrong, I wouldn’t have a chance to find Sarah.

  But if I went looking for Sarah, somewhere in this huge place, I might never get back here and have this chance again.

  The tie-breaker was simple: I knew what Sarah would want me to do.

  I reached into Miles’s satchel and pulled out the crowbar. I moved into the room and walked the steps up to the altar and the machine behind it.

  And that’s when I saw something that made my heart stop and took the air out of my lungs.

  There was a person chained to the slab on the altar. His voice was muffled with a gag. His wrists were raw and purple from the shackles. When he saw me, he started struggling violently against the chains and looked at me with wide, pleading eyes.

  It was John Anderson.

  I ran to the altar. What did I feel? Horror, for sure. John was stripped naked. His arms and legs were bound at four points. He was pinned to the sloped rock. When he saw me, he started fighting. The chains were loose enough that he could swing his arms up until the give ran out. They snapped tight and the muscles in his arms and chest flexed. All of this made a terrible noise. I looked over my shoulder to the door. We were still alone, for now. I motioned for him to be quiet. He had a wild, terrified look in his eyes, but I think he understood. He fell still.

  What else did I feel? He certainly looked like the football star I knew he’d been in college. He actually looked like an ancient Greek statue come to life, except for the fact that he had arms. I felt that familiar sting of jealousy at the blond hair, the handsome face, the perfect six-six body. And should I be totally honest? Should I admit that I felt, deep down in a place I usually ignored, a brief flash of glee? Did I remember him gloating at the Idle Rich, leering at me and kissing Daphne on the top of the head? Am I a monster if I admit that some part of me looked at John and said: Who’s on the slab now, asshole?

  I stuffed that down. I worked the crowbar into the loop of the bolt securing one of his chains. I came down on it with all my weight. It didn’t even budge a hair. I tried again. All I did was send a frightening vibration through the bones in my arms. They would snap before the chains did.

  John locked eyes with me. He was terrified. Where was all the cockiness? What had he seen down here that made him look so scared?

  “Listen,” I whispered. “You need to stay quiet. I know what to do. I’ll be right back.”

  At that, he started jerking again wildly, rattling the chains. Jeez, buddy, I thought—a little help, here.

  I studied the machine. The weak points were obvious. The arms that dipped low as they traced out the enchantments; the joints and gears that wheeled those precise orbits in the middle of the apparatus. I could do this.

  I was twenty feet from the machine when I heard the scream. I pressed myself against a column and looked toward the sound. It came from a doorway at the distant end of the cathedral. The room was shadowed, but I saw movement, and suddenly Sarah emerged from a dim shaft of light. She was held on either side by medieval men, large executioners in leather and metal. Men with hungry eyes that cherished, above all else, having orders to follow. One of the executioners had a long, baroque knife, and he held it against her neck.

  They were followed by dozens of figures who slowly filled in the room below me, pressing up to the altar. They carried candles and wore masks: an eggshell face with antlers; a patchwork harlequin; a Casanova; a Scaramouch. I saw a shimmering elephant, made from jewels, carried on ivory poles. Its tusks were burning candles.

  A familiar face arrived on the altar. It was the priest with the gnarled beard and the cruel voice. No unnatural phosphorescence now—his eyes were just black dots surrounded by unnatural white. They were coldly hypnotic. His nose was flat and broad, and his cheeks were coarse, like the surface of the moon. His mouth and eyes were bone dry—when he spoke, the fissures in his lips accordioned.

  He placed his hand on Sarah’s forehead and whispered to himself, eyes closed.

  Then he looked over at another figure, in golden robes. It was Bernini.

  He whispered into Bernini’s ear. Bernini nodded, then cupped Sarah’s face in his hand.

  “Why did you come?” he asked her, shaking his head. “We would have let you live. You realize that, don’t you? Now we have to harm you.” Bernini frowned, disgusted. “We are not barbarians.”

  I raised the crowbar in my hands like a baseball bat. One good swing, I thought. But I’d have to cross the length of the altar first, in plain view. Even if I made it, what then? I was outnumbered. Helpless.

  Sarah moved so quickly she caught the henchmen off guard. She broke free with her right arm and landed a punch across Bernini’s face.

  “I know exactly what you are,” she spat.

  He nearly collapsed. The man was eighty years old, for God’s sake.

  With everyone watching Bernini, I took a careful step, crowbar in hand, toward the machine.

  Bernini brought a finger to his lip and inspected the blood.

  He sighed.

  “It’s okay,” he said to her gently. “I understand.”

  The priest lit the silver box. There was a cascade of red sparks, and then a plume of smoke and sa
lmon light burst through carved inscriptions. It was on a chain, being swept back and forth by the cruel-voiced priest. The light reflected on his cold eyes. The smell hit me—acrid smoke with strange spices. The priest was chanting to himself and swinging the box.

  The light grew, and the half-dressed men surrounding us began pounding their drums. The women dancers advanced from the shadows and began their wild movements. I saw whipping hair and spinning bodies.

  “Is he ready?” Bernini asked, looking at John on the slab, naked and bound.

  John went crazy, thrashing against the chains on his arms and legs. One of the thugs put his weight on a lever, pulling the chains tight and pinning John to the stone.

  A loose rock cracked under my foot.

  Shit.

  I jumped off-course into a shadow.

  The priest dipped two fingers into the box and painted a bright stripe of ash across John’s forehead. He did the same to Bernini. Smoke was filling the room. The ash reflected the light. I could barely see through the haze. I moved behind a column and came face to face with a masked figure with no eyes. I swung the crowbar toward his skull.

  Just before contact, I saw it was a statue. One inch from breaking my wrists and bringing the entire V&D down on me. The drumming grew louder. Gears were turning inside the machine. Leather belts threaded the wheels and pulleys, pulling the jointed arms in competing directions, making them twist and bend in a skeletal dance.

  The men pushed Sarah toward a wooden pole. The sun pole, Isabella had called it, linking the sky to the underworld. They tied Sarah’s arms behind her, binding her to the pole. She was in the center of hell. Bernini spoke to her soothingly. “An animal is sufficient . . . truly . . . a lamb . . . or a goat . . . But . . .” A cold chill ran down my spine. “Only because you’re here . . .” He shook his head. “Only because you’ve left us no choice . . .”

  Oh, God, no.

  He smiled sadly. “I would not have you die for nothing.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Sarah yelled.