The Society of S

by Hubbard, Susan

  I turned on my laptop and did an Internet search for Kathleen. I didn’t find much new, except in the blogs, where someone said that one of the role-players had killed her, and several others responded. Their dialogue struck me as so stupid that I didn’t read it.

  On impulse I searched for “Sara Stephenson.” More than 340,000 hits resulted. Adding the word “Savannah” to her name reduced the results to 25,000 hits. I scrolled through page after page of them, but none connected the name Sara and the name Stephenson — both names were mentioned in other contexts.

  A search for “Raphael Montero” turned up references to a character in Zorro movies. And “Montero” turned out to be the name of a sport utility vehicle. The indignity of it!

  I gave up. I didn’t want to think anymore. On my bureau lay the battered copy of On the Road that Michael had lent me, and I decided to spend the afternoon reading in bed.

  An hour or so later, I set the book aside, dazzled by its style. Kerouac had an odd way with characters — none of his female characters struck me as authentic, and most of the men seemed wildly idealized — but his descriptions were beautifully detailed and sometimes almost lyrical. The book made me want to travel, to see the America that Kerouac saw. A vast world awaited me, I sensed, and no amount of reading or Internet research could teach me what experience would.

  When I went downstairs again, my suspicions of my father had dissipated, and the house seemed familiar again. For the first time in weeks I felt hungry. In the kitchen I went through the cupboards and found a can of cream of asparagus soup. I looked for milk in the refrigerator, but the carton bought weeks ago by Mrs. McG had gone sour. I’d have to dilute the soup with water.

  While it heated, I sat at the table, reading my mother’s recipe book and making a grocery list. This was a first. Mrs. McG had always taken care of the shopping.

  When the soup was ready, I poured it into a bowl and, on impulse, stirred in a dollop of honey from the jar in the pantry.

  My father came in while I was eating. He looked at my meal and then at me, and I knew what he was thinking: my mother had put honey in soup.

  In the living room after dinner that night, my father resumed his story, without being asked.

  The year that he turned twenty-seven, he was invited to conduct postdoctoral research at Cambridge University. His friend Malcolm also was invited, and the two of them arranged for Dennis to accompany them as a research assistant.

  My father had mixed feelings about leaving my mother, but after some initial qualms, she urged him to go. “This will be the making of you,” she told him.

  So he went. After signing some papers, and unpacking his books and clothes in his new flat, he realized how alone he was. Malcolm and Dennis had taken off again, to attend a conference in Japan; he could have accompanied them, but he’d wanted some time alone to think.

  He had a week before the Michaelmas term began, and he decided to take a brief tour of England. After a few days in London, he rented a car and headed for Cornwall.

  His plan was to find a place where Sara and he might stay when she was able to visit him the following spring. First they would drive to Berkshire, so that she could visit a place she’d always talked of — the Celtic horse cut into a hillside near Uffington — then they’d drive on to Cornwall. He found a bed-and-breakfast inn at the top of a twisted road that led to the fishing village of Polperro. He spent three days in a room at the top of the house, reading and listening to gulls cry as they spiraled over the harbor below.

  Every day he went hiking along the cliff paths. Having spent so much of the previous five years in classrooms and laboratories, his body craved exercise. And it lifted his spirits. As much as he missed my mother, he began to think that the separation could be managed.

  En route back to Cambridge, he stopped in Glastonbury, a small town in the Somerset Levels, overlooked by the Tor, a sacred hill. Sara had described it as a center for “alternative thinkers,” a place he must see.

  Three strange things happened.

  As my father was walking down Benedict Street, a black dog ran into the path of an oncoming car; the car swerved and hit a curb with such violence that its windshield shattered, casting shards of glass in all directions. My father stopped for a moment to watch passers-by ensure that the driver was all right — she huddled over the steering wheel, but seemed more shaken than injured — then walked on, glass crunching under his shoes.

  When he saw a sign for the Blue Note Café, he thought at once of Sara. She loved the color blue, and anything with blue in its name she thought lucky. He imagined bringing her to Glastonbury in the spring, leading her down Benedict Street, watching her face light up at the sign. After he went inside and ordered a sandwich, he pictured her sitting across the table from him.

  The woman who came to take his order said he’d “missed all the excitement.” A few moments before, she said, a customer had finished his lunch, then stood up and methodically began to remove his clothing, which he folded and stacked on a chair. She pointed at a chair, at a small pile of folded clothes. Then, she said, the naked man ran out of the café and across the street.

  “Someone’s sure to call the police,” she said.

  Diners at other tables were talking about the incident; the man wasn’t a local, they agreed.

  “He must be mad,” one said.

  After my father had eaten and paid, he headed back to the car park. He was crossing a street when a blind man approached from the other side. He was a large man, rather fat, and completely bald; he tapped a white cane from side to side across the path before him. As he drew closer, my father noticed that the man’s eyes were entirely white, as if the pupils had rolled back into his head. A second before they passed one another, the man turned his head toward my father and smiled.

  My father felt a rush of adrenaline — and something else, that he’d never felt before. He sensed that he was in the presence of evil.

  He quickened his pace. After a minute had passed, he looked over his shoulder. The man wasn’t there.

  Back on the road, he replayed the scenes in his mind but made no sense of them. He later told Dennis and Malcolm about seeing the man who’d feigned blindness, making a joke of it. He said he’d met the devil in Glastonbury. As they scoffed at him, he wished he still shared their skepticism.

  Here my father paused.

  “You believe in the devil?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t a question of belief,” he said. “My instincts were immediate: I’d encountered evil — a word I don’t think I’d even thought before.”

  I wanted him to go back, to tell me the things I most needed to know. Yet I loved the sound of his voice speaking my mother’s name: Sara.

  “You seem to have been different in those days,” I said, to prompt him. “Hiking, and playing on the beach. You didn’t have” — here I hesitated — “lupus when you were younger?”

  He set his glass back on the marble-topped mahogany table next to his chair. “I was healthy then,” he said. “Sunlight didn’t bother me. Food wasn’t a concern. I felt passion for Sara, and for my work. I had no financial worries, thanks to the legacy from my father that supports us. The future” — he smiled wryly — “looked bright.”

  The devil my father met in Glastonbury was nothing compared to the devil awaiting him in Cambridge.

  His research initially was under the direction of Professor A. G. Simpson, a mild, rather shy fellow whose good manners didn’t quite hide his intelligence. Simpson’s research grants totaled in the millions of pounds, and the work focused on stem cell research.

  But within a matter of months, my father and Malcolm were wooed — there’s really no other word for it — by another professor in the Department of Haematology, John Redfern. Redfern’s work was in transfusion medicine, and his laboratories were part of the National Blood Authority operations on the Addenbrooke campus.

  I interrupted my father at this point. “You haven’t told me much about Malcolm
.”

  “He was my closest friend,” my father said. “Malcolm was tall, only an inch or so shorter than me, and he had blond hair that he parted on the left and let fall across his forehead. He had very fair skin that reddened easily when he was embarrassed or angry. He was bright and he wasn’t bad-looking, or so women at the time seemed to think. But he liked to play the part of misanthrope and habitual cynic. He didn’t have many friends.”

  When Malcolm came to pick up my father that day, he wore a tie and a white shirt under his customary buttoned-up cardigan. He’d borrowed a car, and they met Redfern at an unfamiliar restaurant on the other side of town. It turned out to be a stuffy, smoke-filled place, where red-faced businessmen bent over plates of rare roast beef and two veg.

  Redfern rose from a table when they came in. The room fell silent as the businessmen scrutinized the newcomers. Malcolm and my father often were stared at in public places. They didn’t look British.

  Redfern was five foot eight at most, with dark hair and eyes, a large nose, and ruddy skin. He wasn’t handsome, but every time my father saw him on campus he walked in the company of someone beautiful.

  Over red wine and red meat, Redfern explained his plan. He wanted to create a spin-out company to develop a database of serum samples for use in identifying diseases. He spoke at length about how Malcolm and my father might enhance the potential of such a company, about how rich it could make them.

  Malcolm said, “Right, what we’re after is money.”

  The scorn in his voice seemed to surprise Redfern. He said, “I thought Yanks were all about the filthy lucre.”

  (I remembered my Latin — lucrum means avarice. And in Middle English, lucre meant profit, but also illicit gain.)

  In any case, Redfern couldn’t have been more wrong about Malcolm and my father. They both had too much money already. Malcolm’s great-grandfather, John Lynch, had made a fortune in the American steel industry, and Malcolm was a millionaire. My father’s money came from a trust established by his father, a wealthy German made even wealthier from some shady business conducted in Latin America after World War II.

  After Malcolm spoke, my father looked across the bloody plates and splotched napkins on the table and saw anger flash in Redfern’s eyes. In a second, his expression changed to one of sad appeal.

  “Surely you’ll think about my offer,” Redfern said, sounding almost humble.

  They let Redfern pay the bill, and they drove away laughing at him.

  I moved restlessly in my chair.

  “Are you sleepy?” my father asked.

  I didn’t know. I’d lost a sense of time. “No,” I said. “I need to stretch my legs.”

  “Perhaps we should stop for tonight.” He sounded eager. “No,” I said. “I want to hear it all.”

  “I wonder if you do,” he said. “I don’t want to upset you.”

  “I doubt anything will ever upset me again,” I said.

  A few days after the luncheon, my father met Redfern by chance, walking through the town center. Redfern was with a tall Swedish woman who worked in the Cavendish Laboratory. The three exchanged greetings. Then my father found he couldn’t move.

  His legs wouldn’t budge. His eyes were locked on Redfern’s, and when he tried to look away, he couldn’t.

  Redfern smiled.

  My father tried again to look away, toward the woman. His eyes stayed where they were, fixed on Redfern’s.

  A full minute passed before my father found he could move again. Then he looked from Redfern to the woman, who didn’t meet his eyes.

  Redfern said, “I’ll be seeing you soon.”

  My father wanted to run. Instead he walked away, down the street, followed by the sound of their laughter.

  About a week later, Malcolm phoned to invite my father to his rooms for tea. My father said he was too busy.

  Malcolm said, “I saw some amazing hemoglobin today.”

  Malcolm wasn’t the sort to casually use a word like amazing. It was enough to entice my father.

  As he climbed the stairs to Malcolm’s rooms, he was struck by the strong smell of burnt toast. No one answered his knock, but the door wasn’t locked, so he came inside.

  As usual, Malcolm had a fire burning in the sitting room, and standing over it was Redfern, holding a poker, at the end of which smoldered a charred piece of bread.

  “I like my toast burnt,” he said, without turning around. “How about you?”

  Malcolm apparently wasn’t in.

  Redfern invited my father to sit. Although he wanted to leave, he sat. He detected, beneath the smell of burnt bread, another odor, something unpleasant.

  He wanted to leave. Instead, he sat.

  Redfern talked. My father found him simultaneously brilliant and fatuous. Brilliant was a word tossed around Cambridge fairly casually, my father said — adding that he expected that things were similar at most large research universities. He said that academia reminded him of a badly run circus. The faculty members were like underfed animals — weary of their cages, which were never large enough to begin with — and they responded sluggishly to the whip. The trapeze artists fell with monotonous regularity into poorly strung nets. The clowns looked hungry. The tent leaked. The crowd was inattentive, shouting incoherently at inappropriate moments. And when the show was over, no one cheered.

  (Extended metaphors were a device my father used from time to time, I suspect to keep himself amused as much as to elucidate. But I liked the image of the badly run circus, so I include it here.)

  My father watched Redfern pace the room, talking about philosophy — of all things. He said he wanted to know more about my father’s ethics, but before my father could say anything, he talked about his own.

  Redfern considered himself a utilitarian. “Would you agree,” he said, “that man’s sole duty is to produce as much pleasure as possible?”

  “Only if the pleasure produced is equivalent to the diminution of pain.” My father crossed his arms. “And only if one man’s pleasure is as important as any other’s.”

  “Well then.” Redfern’s face seemed redder than ever in the firelight, and he struck my father as exceptionally ugly. “You would agree that the amount of pleasure or pain produced by an action is a chief criterion for determining which actions to perform.”

  My father said he agreed. He felt as if he were attending a lecture in Ethics 101. “Many actions are wrong because they cause pain,” Redfern said, waving his poker, the blackened bread slice skewered at its tip. “You would agree? And if it can be shown that an act will lead to pain, that in itself would be sufficient reason not to pursue it.”

  At this point my father noticed a small movement in the room, somewhere behind him. But when he turned to look, he saw nothing. The sickening smell seemed to intensify.

  “It would follow, then, that there are cases in which it is necessary to inflict pain now to avoid greater pain later on, or to gain future pleasure that is worth the current pain.”

  My father’s eyes were on Redfern’s, trying to fathom his motives, when Malcolm came from behind, pulled back his head, and bit deeply into his neck.

  “What was it like?” I asked my father.

  “You don’t feel a sense of disgust at hearing this?”

  I felt simultaneously alert and numb. “You promised to tell me everything.”

  The pain burned, more fierce than anything my father had ever experienced. He struggled in vain to get away.

  Malcolm held him in an awkward embrace that would have been unthinkable, had my father been able to think. He tried to twist his head to see Malcolm’s face — and then he must have fainted, but not before he glimpsed that, from across the room, Redfern was watching the scene with blatant pleasure.

  When my father regained consciousness, he lay across the sofa, and when he brushed his hand across his face, it came away dark with clotted blood. His friends weren’t in the room.

  He sat up. His head felt large and swollen, and his leg
s and arms felt weak, but he wanted more than anything to run away. The fire had gone out, and the room was cold, but the smells of burnt bread and the other unknown substance persisted. Now they seemed almost appetizing, as did an unfamiliar coppery taste in his mouth.

  His nerves tingled. He felt empty, yet his veins seemed charged with something like adrenaline. He managed to stand and walk to the lavatory. In a dingy mirror over the sink, he saw the wound in his neck and a crust of blood around his mouth. His heartbeat echoed in his head like the sound of metal striking metal.

  Opposite the lavatory was a closed bedroom door, and the unfamiliar odor came from behind it. Something dead must be in that room, my father thought.

  Halfway down the steps, he saw Redfern and Malcolm approaching the staircase. He stood on the landing and watched them come.

  He felt shame, anger, a desire for revenge. Yet, as they walked up the steps to the landing, he did nothing.

  Redfern nodded. Malcolm glanced at him and looked away. Malcolm’s hair fell over his eyes, and his face was pink as if he’d recently scrubbed it. His eyes looked dull, uninterested, and he smelled of nothing at all.

  “Explanations are useless,” Malcolm said, as if my father had asked for one. “But some day you’ll realize that it happened for your own good.”

  Redfern shook his head and went on up the stairs, muttering, “Americans. Utterly incapable of irony.”

  “Did you know what you were?” I asked my father.

  “I had an idea,” he said. “I’d seen some of the movies, read some of the books — but that was fiction, I thought. And much of it has proven false.”

  “Can you change into a bat?”

  He looked at me — that reluctant look of disappointment. “No, Ari. That’s folklore. I wish it were true. I’d love to be able to fly.”