The School of Night

by Louis Bayard

  “You’ve seen him,” I suggested. “Is that it?”

  An irritable twitch. An answering crackle from the tangle of her hair.

  “Look,” I said, “I know I wasn’t very receptive before. About your—whatever you—I mean, they’re visions, right?”

  “Alonzo called them crossings,” she said quietly.

  “Well, see? You told him about it, you might as well tell me.”

  “His mind was a little less closed than yours.”

  “Okay. At this very moment, I am making a heroic—frankly a manful and courageous effort—to crack my mind open, okay? A millimeter.”

  She regarded me with coin-slot eyes.

  “Go on,” I gasped. “I can’t keep holding it.”

  And so, right there, on the sidewalk of the Virginia Dare Trail, three blocks from the Pelican Arms and not two blocks from the local Hooters, Clarissa Dale told me about the man who, on any given night, might come calling.

  It was night where he was, too. Late evening in September, though how she knew it was September she couldn’t say. He more a black woolen cloak and a stiff square black hat, with rounded ridges like a biretta. Head to toe in black, which had the effect of calling out his face, was pale as a fish, grim and masklike.

  “A priest?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “No crosses, no crucifixes. No genuflecting.”

  “Then what’s he doing, exactly? In this dream of yours?”

  “He’s got a handful of stones. Lapis stones, they look like. He’s tossing them into a copper pan. And beneath the pan, there’s a fire. And the whole time he’s speaking. The same four words, again and again.”

  “What words?”

  “Ex nihilo nihil fit.”

  She paused then—struck, maybe, by how the words sounded in her own voice.

  “It was Alonzo who figured out what he was saying.”

  “From nothing comes nothing.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And that’s all the man says?”

  “No. No, when he’s done, he throws back his head and—hollers, really hollers. In English this time. At least I think it’s English.”

  “Hollers what?”

  “Long live the School of Night!”

  To my great relief, she didn’t scream it herself. But there was something unspeakable in the way she mimicked the motion—the way her neck snapped back as though someone had slipped a garrote around it.

  “And you’d never heard that name before?” I asked.

  “Never. And now it’s all I hear.”

  We were walking again, without quite being aware of it. Walking close enough to brush elbows.

  “So when you say you’ve seen the School of Night,” I said, “this is what you mean.”

  She nodded.

  “You haven’t seen anyone else?”

  “I wish I would,” she answered, with an upturn of her mouth.

  “Okay, one more question. Would you recognize his face? If you saw it again?”

  “Henry. A man comes into your bedroom every week for upward of a year? You’re going to remember what he looks like.”

  * * *

  Clarissa’s laptop was newer and faster than mine, so we set it on the tartan quilt of the motel-room bed, I dropped a few words into the Google grinder—and up came a picture.

  “Was this the guy?” I asked, angling the screen toward her.

  The man pictured there was small, simian, wary-looking, with a disproportionately large head. He wore the usual white ruff, and he had a pen in his hand and a Latin inscription ringing him around. Si malum, meum peccatum; si bonum, Dei donum.

  At the sight of him, Clarissa burst out laughing. “Are you for real?”

  “Yep.”

  “He looks like someone’s pet.”

  “Just tell me if it’s your guy.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  She looked at me.

  “So I guess that’s Thomas Harriot,” she said.

  “Nope,” I said, turning the screen back toward me. “Although they thought it was for the longest time. Never mind. How ’bout this fella?”

  A more presentable candidate this time: cerebral brow on angular face; pointed beard, thin lips, large all-seeing eyes; a deep but modest gravity.

  “Huh. Wow.”

  She circled the image with her finger. Lowered her face closer and closer to the screen. Tilted her head from side to side.

  “Well, the beard,” she said, “that’s kind of the same. The forehead, though, it’s kinda slopy. I don’t think it’s…”

  She drew back, squinted the image into focus one last time.

  “No,” she said. “Not him.”

  Her eyes met mine then. She took a long breath, and a welt of pink bled from her cheekbones.

  “Good,” I said at last. “ ’Cause that’s probably not Harriot either. Turns out we don’t really have a definitive portrait of him. No one knows what he looked like.”

  With a soft grunt, she heaved herself off the bed and stood for a long while, looking out the window. Unaware, probably, of the way her hair burned darker against the sun. The bloom of light on her arms.

  “So tell me,” she said. “Did I pass?”

  “The second test, yeah.”

  “What was the first?”

  I flipped the screen down and slid the laptop away.

  “The School of Night test,” I said. “Thomas Harriot would never have used those words. They were Shakespeare’s coinage, not his.”

  “Harriot couldn’t have taken the name for himself?”

  “Why would he? By the time Shakespeare wrote his play, the School—if it ever existed—was almost certainly finished. They wouldn’t have called themselves anything.”

  She turned around. Stared at me.

  “So you’ve been indulging me, Henry.”

  “No. I’ve been contextualizing you.”

  She leaned back against the window frame. “Fuck your context,” she said.

  It was the first time I’d heard her swear. But what struck me most was her tiredness. Her body was shutting down, just as it had yesterday in Stanton Park.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” she said. “I’d like to take a nap.”

  I might have pointed out that she was in my room. Instead, I strolled down to what the motel called, with a certain wistfulness, its ocean veranda. The air was choked with salt, and just to the north of me, in an Adirondack chair, sat a blanketed Maltese dog, gazing out to sea like the doyenne of a sanatorium. We sat there, the two of us, for a good hour, I’d guess, watching the sea oats. And every time my attention flagged, there was Lily Pentzler to snap me back. Lily, with her Alice-blue face.

  When I got back, Clarissa was still awake, looking up at the ceiling fan.

  “Washington Post,” I said, tossing the paper onto the square of bed by her head. “It’s got Lily’s obit.”

  “What does it say?”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t read it.”

  Clarissa snatched up the paper and riffled to the back of the Metro section.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” she said. “You said she didn’t have any family.”

  “She didn’t, as far as I know.”

  “Well, according to this, there’s a cousin. Joanna Frobisher. Of Hyattsville, Maryland.”

  Hyattsville was a twenty-minute drive from Lily’s apartment. But it wasn’t the proximity that was butting up against my brain.

  “Read me that name again,” I said.

  “Joanna Frobisher. You know it?”

  “I know it.”

  13

  MORE THAN ONCE, in the days since Alonzo’s death, I’d asked myself the same question: What if nobody had seen him jump?

  His suicide note could have blown away. The watch and shoes would have been easy prey for thieves. The coat that washed up a few days later on Bear Island? Just another piece of flotsam, not worth mentioning to anybody.

  Yes, Alonzo Wax could have
gone to his end entirely unnoticed if fate hadn’t granted him a witness.

  A forty-six-year-old Hyattsville woman who had gotten lost while taking a late-afternoon hike on the Gold Mine Loop and who, unable to get a cell signal, had decided to tack toward the river in hopes of finding help.

  As she later told the police, all she saw when she approached the Washington Aqueduct Observation Deck was a khaki raincoat, flaring out of the darkness. The human form that stood inside that coat … this came to her only as she got nearer. And then, before she knew it, she was running toward the silent figure on top of the platform. Who was already jumping.

  Stunned, she peered into the torrent of water where he had disappeared. But the night was cloudy, and she had no flashlight. Whoever the man was, whatever his sorrow had been, he was gone.

  * * *

  Testifying weeks later at Alonzo’s inquest, she told the court how the whole experience had taught her to value life and never take anyone or anything for granted. You couldn’t, I remember thinking, have scripted a more empathetic witness.

  “And her name was Joanna Frobisher?” Clarissa asked me.

  I nodded.

  “So what are the chances there could be two Joanna Frobishers in Hyattsville?”

  “Both tied to the same dead man? Not great. Not even particularly good.”

  Clarissa rocked herself to her feet.

  “And nobody asked this woman if she knew Alonzo? Or knew of him?”

  “Why would they?” I said. “It was an inquest, not a trial. Whatever happened was already a matter of record. Alonzo’s family just wanted to put the whole thing to rest.”

  “So if Lily’s cousin was out by the river that night…”

  I pressed my knuckles into my temple. “Lily must have sent her there.”

  “But why?”

  “Because a witness was needed.”

  “Why?”

  I had to sound the answer in my head before I trusted myself to speak it.

  “Because it was the only way people would believe Alonzo killed himself.”

  Because there were too many reasons he wouldn’t have. Wouldn’t have traveled miles from home to do a job he could have accomplished a few blocks from his apartment.

  Whoever chose that bridge had had very specific criteria in mind. The place had to be dark, it had to be remote, and it had to be a place where nobody could ever know for sure what had happened.

  “Whew,” said Clarissa, blowing out two cheekfuls of air. “If you’re right—”

  “If I’m right, Lily Pentzler was part of a conspiracy to commit murder.”

  In the silence that ensued, that final word seemed actually to revolve in the air between us. Slowly, so we could study all its aspects.

  I know. That’s what I’d said to Lily, the last time I saw her alive. I know.

  No. You don’t.

  Clarissa and I looked at each other.

  “Police?” she suggested at last.

  From my wallet I unearthed the card. Punched in the number.

  “This is Detective August Acree. I am not available to take your call at this time.…”

  I left a vague message and then a number and then, after great thought, the following afterword:

  “Um, thanks.”

  And then, for several minutes, we sat there, listening to the hum of the air-conditioning window unit.

  “Still no word?” I asked.

  “From who?”

  “Mr. Swale the book dealer.”

  Absently, Clarissa reached for her Trio, scanned the roster of new messages.

  “Nothing.”

  “Then what do you say we get out of here?”

  “And go where?”

  I briefly thought of saying, Anywhere. But in fact, I had a specific place in mind: the Fort Ralegh Historic Site.

  Located not by the ocean but several miles inland and corresponding roughly to the site where Thomas Harriot and his fellow colonists hunkered down more than four centuries ago. The original settlements, of course, were long gone, and the only thing that still bore Harriot’s name was a nature path, which, for reasons inscrutable, was listed as the Thomas Harlot trail.

  “Ooh,” said Clarissa. “I like the sound of that.”

  A remark just saucy enough to make me fall back a pace. For which I was rewarded by the sight of her gypsum-alabaster legs, striding down the path. It took me a hundred yards to catch up with her again.

  “I’m guessing you’ve been married, Henry.”

  “Once or twice. Or so.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Um, me, I guess. Is this something we need to talk about?”

  “No.”

  The only things we could hear now were the sounds of our feet, muffled by a carpet of loblolly pine needles.

  “So what exactly is wrong with you, Henry? That you can’t keep a woman?”

  “Um…”

  “You can be nice enough.”

  “Well—anyone can. Serial killers…”

  “You’re nice to look at.”

  God help me, I blushed.

  “You mean for my age,” I said.

  “Any age,” she answered, meeting my eyes. “One might even call you a catch, Henry.”

  “Well, every time I was caught, I was released. Shortly after.”

  “So what was the deal?”

  “We’re really going to talk about this.”

  “Only if you want.”

  I picked up a stick, swung it lightly at a red mulberry.

  “The problem wasn’t who I was, it was who I wasn’t.”

  “Who were you not?”

  Something quite impudent about her tone. But when I looked into the bitter-chocolate layers of her eyes, I found … no, better to say I was lost. For a second or two.

  “Oh, you know. I wasn’t the guy with the brilliant—you know, blazing, unassailable future. I used to think I was, but I wasn’t. And unfortunately, I wasn’t an artist, either.”

  “Not even with the love of a good woman?”

  I paused to consider the implications of that question.

  “Truthfully, no. That was the lesson of my second marriage.”

  “Well, never mind. I’m guessing you’re a good teacher.”

  “It would depend on your definition.”

  “Give me one.”

  “Um … I’ve never missed a class?”

  “Good.”

  “I’ve never slept with any of my students?”

  “Not yet you haven’t.”

  And with that, I found myself suddenly paralyzed by the vision of Clarissa Dale, wild-haired, raspberry-lipped, in a pleated tartan skirt, craning her head around my office door.

  Professor Cavendish?

  The effect was so erotic and so unlikely that the only possible response was to laugh. A minute later, I was still laughing.

  “So,” she said. “You do know.”

  “What?”

  “The way to happy.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “In sprints I get there.”

  I thought then of asking Clarissa for her own history, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Or, rather, it wasn’t clear to me that knowing would be better than not knowing.

  We walked on. And as we went, the path began to decant, and the air between the cedars and oaks whitened and deepened, and suddenly there were no trees, and we were standing on a margin of sand, staring out across a gray seethe of water.

  Roanoke Sound.

  I’d first seen it as a child, but I couldn’t remember it being so turbulent. Scalloped and dimpled and threshed by wind. No more than a few feet at its deepest point, but only a local would know that. An outsider … well, hadn’t Thomas Harriot run aground in this very channel?

  “Harriot never married,” I said.

  “Well,” said Clarissa, “just because he didn’t marry doesn’t mean he didn’t love someone.”

  “No historical record of it.”

  “You said there’s no
record of his birthday, either. But he was born.”

  We stood there for some time, a couple of yards separating us. The wind blew in hard from the south, and a pair of seagulls blew in just as hard toward the east, flinging their cries over their shoulders.

  “Look,” said Clarissa, “I never told you this.”

  “Okay.”

  “This guy … whoever he is.”

  “The one in your head.”

  “In my visions, not my head. Okay, I’m trying to find some way of saying this that doesn’t make me sound crazier than you already think I am.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “He’s in some truly—some unimaginable, unholy kind of pain. It’s there in his face, it’s in his body. It’s … it’s entire.”

  “So.” I was taking special care not to look at her. “He’s trying to heal himself, is that it? All that stuff with the stones?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She picked up a pinecone. Tossed it into the sound.

  “How did Thomas Harriot die?” she asked.

  “Cancer. Believe me, you would have noticed. It started in his nose, spread to his mouth. He was pretty disfigured by the time he was done.”

  Retribution, I used to think (back when I believed in retribution). Not so much for using tobacco as for pushing it on his fellow countrymen. Between them, Harriot and Ralegh helped make England a nation of smokers.

  “How old was he?” asked Clarissa.

  “Sixty. Or sixty-one.”

  “And what year would that have been?”

  “Sixteen twenty-one.”

  “What month?”

  “July, I think.”

  “Oh,” she said. “In my visions, it’s September. Or maybe October. Fall, anyway.”

  She was quiet for a while. And then, out of the pure blue, she said:

  “It’s nice out here.”

  “Mm.”

  It was very possibly an accident: the grazing of her bare forearm against mine; the carbonation in our respective skins. I turned toward her, and I was all set to speak when from behind us came the sound of something other, a crackling in the rhododendrons and mulberries.

  Wheeling about, I caught a shiver of white, or off-white. A sleeve, maybe … a pant leg … or maybe nothing. Whatever it was passed like a dream, but me—I could have been one of those first colonists from England, soldiering through the alien growth, every sense sprung wide open.

  And then, from below, came a sound of today. Clarissa’s Trio, chiming from her back pocket.