That night Alex Shipley could not sleep.
She lay in her room in Philbrick Hall, her roommate snoring gently in the bunk above her. She stared into the darkness. She couldn’t stop thinking of Richard Aldiss, of the way he had addressed them on that first night, of that fit he had fallen into. Horrible. It was all strange and horrible, and Alex didn’t know why she had signed up for the class in the first place.
And yet . . .
The night class was also enthralling. It was unlike anything she had ever done at Jasper College. To have a chance to uncover the identity of Paul Fallows, no matter how impossible it sounded—that was the sort of adventure Alex longed for. It was because of the bizarre assignment that she knew she would stay with Aldiss and his class until the end, no matter what happened.
She had read the first seventy-five pages of The Coil. Her vein-spined paperback edition sat on the little built-in desk across the room, an orange USED sticker slapped on the side. She had sunk a bit since the beginning of her senior year. There was a time when Alex would buy only new books, when she would not think of writing in margins. But now she had to save money for Harvard, and so used books were the only option she could afford. Other students’ notes sprawled away from the lines of text, chewed up every bit of white space. To her it felt like a desecration.
Her mother, who lived in the town of Darling just thirty miles away from the college, had warned her about taking Aldiss’s class. Evil, her mother had said. The man, his class—all of it was evil. But Alex knew Professor Richard Aldiss was also brilliant. She’d read his prison writings on great American writers and had felt a lucidity there, a kinship. He spoke of books the way she felt about them—as if they were the truest forms of communication, both primitive and sacred. He once said the book was a lock, and its reader was the key. Damn right, Alex thought.
Tonight, though, something had changed.
Lying there, listening to the whoops and rustles of the late-night students down on the quad, Alex couldn’t put her finger on what it was. Couldn’t articulate it. The notion that Aldiss would change her life had dissolved when she first saw him. It wasn’t that she no longer believed he would enlighten her; perhaps he and his strange ideas about literature could do that much. It was just that he was not as invincible as she had once thought. Not as stark or elegant as his writing would suggest. There was something . . . something almost fragile about the man who appeared on that screen. Something vulnerable.
Listen to yourself, Alex. Getting all mushy about a man who murdered two people in cold blood.
She thought about the riddle. Aldiss’s “homework.”
What is the name of the man in the dark coat?
Alex didn’t have a clue what it meant. The first few chapters of The Coil focused on New York society at the turn of the century. It was a novel in the most traditional sense of the word. Alex knew that there were hidden meanings, not only about the narrative but also supposedly about Fallows himself, but she could not discern them. The first time she had read the classic, as a high school student, she was unmoved by the tale. This thing? she remembered thinking. All that buzz for this book?
But now here was Richard Aldiss, telling them that Fallows’s novels were not novels at all but really games. Games the novelist himself hid behind. And Aldiss had gone further, had given them a clue that night to perhaps take them into the . . . what had he called it? Yes: into the rabbit hole.
What is the name of the man in the dark coat?
Name . . . dark coat . . . games . . .
Alex bounced out of bed. Her roommate, a girl from New Hampshire named Meredith who majored in chemistry, stirred in the top bunk. Alex, her mind roaring and her hands reaching into the dark before her, picked up the copy of The Coil from the desk. Then she went into the small bathroom the two girls shared—a perk for being seniors—closed the door behind her, and turned on the light above the mirror.
She flipped through the novel, skimming the pages until the words blurred together, searching for any connection to a dark coat. It only made sense: the book was their sole material in the class. No syllabus until tomorrow, no handouts. Aldiss had to be leading them to The Coil; he had to be.
When her eyes finally became tired, she looked up from the page and into the mirror above the sink. Time to give up and forget this craziness, she thought. Somebody else has surely solved it by now, and when that person has the answer, all nine of us will—
She froze.
There. In the mirror. An image on the back of the book itself.
Alex, moving slowly now, turned the volume around.
On the back cover was the traditional author’s photograph. It was a man she knew was not really Paul Fallows. Or at least no one could be sure if it was him or not. The image had been slapped on subsequent editions of the novel precisely because of this: no one really knew the identity of the writer, and so the likeness of the encyclopedia salesman remained.
She looked down at the man’s face. At his swept-back hair, the almost calculated smile. At the way his hands were crossed in his lap. And she looked at the dark coat he was wearing.
What is the name of the man . . . ?
Before she knew it Alex was out of the bathroom and moving. She pulled on her jeans and her Jasper College sweatshirt, crammed on Meredith’s wool hat, and went out of the room as silently as she could, the novel still in her grip. Down the elevator and out of Philbrick, onto the frozen quad.
* * *
The Stanley M. Fisk Library was open only at the west entrance. Alex punched in the combination code and moved into the warmth of the building. The night librarian was on, a mousy woman named Daws who dressed like a character out of Austen. “Alexandra Shipley, what are you—”
But Alex was already past her and to the back section of the library. Empty now save for a few zombies who sat reading by lamplight.
Literary Criticism was here, in the back. She knew the place by heart; as a freshman at Jasper she had worked in the stacks, learned the nooks and crannies.
She found the famous study on Paul Fallows on a shelf toward the end of the stacks, in a pool of red emergency light that barely lit up the page for her to read. The book was called Mind Puzzles: The World and Work of Paul Fallows. Copyright 1979, published by Overland Press. Its author was Richard Aldiss, PhD. He had written the book three years before the murders at Dumant.
Alex turned to the index. Found the words she was looking for: AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH (LIKELY APOCRYPHAL). The name of the real encyclopedia salesman, the actual man in the photo, was on the tip of her tongue. She knew Aldiss had said it in his lecture that night. Damn it, Alex, you’ve got to pay attention.
Now she turned to the appropriate page and scanned for the name in the near dark—
But something stopped her. Something froze her there, under that bloody light, the library still and quiet around her. Her pulse, which had been frantic before, strangely slowed. Alex became calm. The sweat working under her arms and on her scalp began to cool. Her entire body went rigid.
There was handwriting in the margins of the book.
Manic pencil writing, numbers and letters mixed together, symbols swirling down the page like a mad and tortured language.
What the hell is this?
Alex scanned the handwritten text. At the bottom of the page she saw a legible stack of lines. They were written differently than the rest. Darker, dug into the skin of the page, almost carved there. A cold hand. The hand of someone determined to have his message be discovered.
I OFFER CONGRATULATIONS FOR FINDING THIS MESSAGE. YOU HAVE COME VERY FAR ALREADY. NOW YOU MUST CHECK THIS BOOK OUT.
Alex’s eyes scanned to the next page, where the crude writing continued. She found another set of lines written in that same pressed hand.
What she read next would change Alex Shipley’s life.
RICHARD ALDISS IS INNOCENT. TO DISCOVER THE MAN WHO ACTUALLY MURDERED THE TWO STUDENTS AT DUMANT YOU MUST FIRST DISCOVER THE TRUE IDEN
TITY OF PAUL FALLOWS. THE TWO MYSTERIES ARE ONE AND THE SAME. DO NOT TELL A SOUL YOU HAVE SEEN THIS.
Alex, her mind on fire, walked as naturally as she could to the front of the library and checked the biography out. The mousy librarian didn’t suspect a thing.
“You English majors,” she said. “You always study so hard.”
Alex
Present Day
7
The old man, her trusted friend, had gone blind. He lived now among his books and the memories of the college he once reigned. There was a photograph, curled with age and hanging above the walnut desk, of him with a former president. Another with a Nobel laureate, now long dead, the two men with their socks falling and drunken grins on their faces. But his prized possession was a childlike jigsaw puzzle, strip-glued and mounted to thin board, adorned with the fragmented and Cubist images of a man’s distorted face. An inscription below: To my friend Dean Fisk, we will find Fallows. Richard Aldiss. The puzzle was dated December 25, 1985. Aldiss had made it while in prison.
Alex ran her eyes over the cluttered desk, grazed through the yellowed documents with wandering fingertips. Her heart sounded in her chest but otherwise she was quiet.
“Awful,” the old man said. He sat in his wheelchair back in the corner shadows, his rheumy eyes quick and wet. “Awful what has happened to our Michael. What has happened to our college. What are you doing over there, Alex?”
Her hands stopped. Heat rushed to her face.
“Nothing, Dean Fisk,” she said. “Just looking at the history in this room.”
The dean breathed. Something was coming in the darkness; the air pressure dropped in the room, the feeling of electricity before a kiss, a secret.
“It doesn’t exist,” he said.
The words dazed her. Her eyes rose from the desk.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said weakly.
“Whatever you’ve heard, Alex, whatever they have told you—you will not find the manuscript in this house.”
“I haven’t heard anything.” This wasn’t like lying to Aldiss; the dean was gone now, his mind turned to mush. He was ninety-four years old and wasted away. She looked at him, saw spittle glisten on his paper-gray cheeks. The full-time nurse—a middle-aged man she had met when she arrived—would be in soon to feed him.
“Those old false pieces of Fallows—it’s over, Alex,” Fisk went on. “You put an end to it during the night class. You.”
“Of course,” she said, thinking, You’re wrong, dean. It will never end.
A silence fell, and her eyes drifted instinctively to the desk. She said, “I went to see Dr. Aldiss this morning. He says whoever did this is re-creating the Dumant murders.”
“Richard,” Fisk laughed. “Richard probably murdered Michael himself.”
She was stunned. “You don’t believe that, do you? You can’t. It just isn’t—”
The door opened behind her and the nurse stepped inside. A pale, deliberate man, so precise in his movements that she barely saw his hands dropping the medicines into the old man’s birdlike mouth. He turned to the silver tray he’d set on the desk. A meal for a child: a piece of toast, applesauce. Fisk looked through his nurse in the way of the blind, nodding purposefully. “Thank you, Matthew,” he said, and the nurse left the room, his eyes falling momentarily on Alex as he went.
When he was gone Alex said, “Dean Fisk, tell me you don’t believe that Professor Aldiss murdered Michael. I know you had a falling-out years ago, but he was your friend. Your confidant. You . . .” Helped save him, she wanted to say.
The old man looked into the void, considering. Then he said without context, “They still play the Procedure.”
She blinked. “Who?”
“The students,” he said. “I can hear them on campus when Matthew pushes me over the sidewalks on our strolls. I can hear them.” He fell silent, and the sound of his raspy breathing filled the room.
“Dean Fisk, about Michael Tanner . . .”
His roaming eyes stopped on her. “If they are coming back for the funeral, they will need a place to stay.”
“Yes.”
He meant the night class students who were on their way to Jasper now. Most of them still lived in Vermont, and of course Sally Tanner was here on this campus already. It had occurred to Alex, as she made those phone calls, how easy it might be, what Aldiss had suggested. How simple to bring them together.
“I want them to stay here.”
Alex’s breath caught. “Here?”
“I want them to be close,” Fisk explained. “This is a grieving time, Alex, and when we are grieving we all need to be together. There is more than enough space in my house. Yes, it is old. There is history here. But it is familiar to them. You can all reconnect, much like you did when Daniel Hayden—”
“Yes,” she interrupted. “I’ll forward your invitation.”
And then the dean nodded, meaning it was time for her to leave. She went out, down a dark hallway that led to the east wing of the mansion, and moved into the heart of the old house.
The air here was musty, unstirred. As she walked the floorboards groaned, and above her the silver spindles of webs clung to the walls. Those walls had cracked, revealing skeins of plaster that seemed to point her deeper into the dark. She knew exactly where she was going; she had spent many days in this house when she was an undergrad at Jasper.
Stanley Fisk, then a spry eighty, had been her ally during the night class. He had shown her how to read the text that was Richard Aldiss, and she would always be indebted to him. If Alex was the most famous Jasper alumna, much was due to him. If he wanted the students to stay in this crumbling place, then who was she to argue?
It would make her job easier.
She took another step, thinking—
“Someone’s here.”
Alex spun around. Behind her was the nurse.
“Who’s here, Matthew?” she asked, managing to conjure up his name as if he were a student who’d raised his hand during lecture.
“A woman. She wants to see you. She looks freaked.”
She looked at him. Older than she had thought at first, his skin so pale it appeared translucent. Why was he here? she wondered. To keep the dean alive, to postpone the inevitable? And what might he know, she thought almost guiltily, of the dean’s possessions?
“Tell her I’m on the second floor.”
“Of course, Dr. Shipley.” So he knew her name too.
The nurse left, the whisper of his tennis shoes disappearing down the hall, and Alex entered a room to her left. It was a relic from another time—two upholstered chairs covered with sheets perched in the middle of the floor, a bookshelf along a back wall, a minor Rothko hanging at a tilt. The room had been fresh once, back when Stanley Fisk ruled the campus and all the college’s decisions went through him. He was known as a man of letters, which was something of a novelty among college royalty. He hosted parties that were attended by Philip Roth and Joan Didion, reinvented the literature program long before Aldiss was brought in for his strange and experimental night class. Fisk was Jasper College, and like this room and its pitiful furniture, the man had been all but forgotten.
I want them to stay here. There were seventeen rooms in this Victorian-style mansion that had been specifically built for Fisk in the sixties, most of them empty now. Undoubtedly spacious enough to host the students who would return. And to allow Alex free rein to follow Aldiss’s instructions.
To observe without them knowing.
She walked deeper into the room, stepping into the funneled light that slanted through a window. She studied the bookshelves. More Fallows here, a spray of Aldiss prison texts. She took out a volume and shook it, maybe hoping for something to fall out. A page, a key? Nothing. The manuscript, the third Fallows—it had to be somewhere. She had been assured by Lewis Prine that it was in this house: The person who sent me this page says Fisk has the rest. He’d sent the page to her four years ago, not long after the death of Daniel Ha
yden. Scanning the book spines, Alex thought, Did you know, Lewis? Did you know it was here when we all came to this house to grieve Daniel, damn you?
“Alex.”
She turned and saw the woman standing in the doorway, leaning as if she was fatigued, as if she had traveled a great distance. Her hair was tangled and stuck to her cheek. She had been crying.
“Sally, I’m so sorry.” The women came together and embraced between the two empty chairs. Alex thinking: How cold she is, how unhealthy, could she have killed—
“I saw him,” the woman moaned, her breath low and hot in Alex’s ear. “I saw Michael lying there on the floor. At first I thought he was sleeping, but then I saw—I saw all those books, Alex, all those awful books . . .”
“Shhh,” Alex said, and they swayed together silently.
Finally Sally Tanner pulled away and took a deep breath. Her knees buckled. Alex reached out, caught the woman by the elbow. Held her upright.
“The cops have been asking me questions since that night,” Sally said. “This detective named Black. He thinks— He doesn’t say this, Alex, but I can see it in his eyes. He thinks I had something to do with Michael’s murder. Can you fucking believe that?”
Alex shook her head. She didn’t know what to say.
“Black asked me something else.” She steadied her gaze. “He asked about Aldiss.”
Alex tensed. “And what did you say?”
“I told the truth, of course. I haven’t spoken to the professor in years. Not since Daniel.”
“What about Michael?”
Something glinted in the widow’s eye, something hard and firm. It said, Too soon. Then it was gone.
“Michael wouldn’t go out there. I know Aldiss lives nearby, but the class—it was over for him. He never spoke about what happened to us back then.”
Then something in her broke, and she fell forward again into Alex’s arms.
When the spell was over, Sally stood up and looked past Alex, over her shoulder at the books. Even those silent objects stirred her, made her tremble and turn away, her hands cupped to her mouth as if clapping quiet a scream. Again Alex thought, Is she the one? Then: Don’t do this, treat them this way just because Aldiss has given you another task. He could be wrong. He could be playing with you.
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