Dominance

by Will Lavender

  “Matthew.”

  “I only want to talk to you,” the nurse said. “Just stay there.”

  Things were moving in her mind. Conclusions, connections. “Aldiss . . .” she managed.

  The light remained. The figure behind it, silhouetted by the beam, stiffened. “I already told you, Alex,” he said. “The professor is somewhere in this building. He’s hiding from us.” There was a mechanical quality to his voice now.

  Could Owen be the one? Alex thought. But how could that be? Aldiss said to look for someone who was part of the night class. And yet here she was, trapped in the hallway, the wild light still flooding her vision. As she backed away from him Alex thought of what she knew about Owen, of all the things she’d seen from him the last two days.

  He was a nurse who’d left his old job after a falling-out of some kind. Now he stayed with Dean Fisk, lived in the mansion, learning its secrets.

  She remembered the card Aldiss had given her: The Procedure has begun. Everything they say, everything you hear could be part of the game. Trust no one.

  Another memory: Dean Fisk in his study saying, But Matthew tells me that he sees them playing it on his walks across the east campus . . .

  “Alex,” Owen said now. “Keller needs help. He’s bleeding badly. Aldiss hurt him.”

  A thought. A seed of something. A reason. Everything became clear in that one second; everything was revealed in that fraction of no-time: the reason Owen was here. The reason he’d come to Jasper College to care for Dean Fisk.

  She looked at the man. Then she said, her eyes steady and her voice level, “Why are you doing this to us, Matthew?”

  Owen’s hand wobbled slightly; the light danced. Silence.

  “You said you were brought here by the college, but that isn’t true, is it? This is a job you coveted for a long time. You’ve been waiting for this moment.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Alex,” Owen said, “but you really need to—”

  “You killed them,” she went on. “You killed Michael Tanner, and then you put Melissa Lee in the lake to frame Aldiss. It was you all along.”

  Owen took another step, the light shifting erratically. Alex listened for movement outside Culver Hall. Nothing now but the howl of the wind. She shut her eyes again.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said. “Just listen to me now. Listen, Alex—”

  A memory descended, fitfully: Iowa. That morning in Iowa inside the Rutherford house. She realized for the first time how much she wanted to be done with it now, to be free of the night class and Paul Fallows and all the rest of it. To finally have it behind her.

  “You killed them,” she said again.

  “No, you killed them, Alex.”

  Alex froze. “What are you talking about?”

  “When you went to Iowa you set in motion all that would happen,” Owen said. “You ruined the game for everyone else.” He made that face again: that sour, childlike face that said to her, This is happening whether you like it or not. “Now I am going to win it once and for all.”

  He grabbed her. Grabbed her by the hair and pulled her out of the screaming light. And it was then that Alex saw the nurse’s face up close; she saw what was strange and familiar about him. That thing she could not place before. It was the eye, Owen’s one blue eye visible while the other remained hidden in shadow. Below the eye was the patchy down of his beard, pale skin reddening in the cold beneath it. She remembered Aldiss during one of his seizures, the camera jostling just enough to reveal a face behind him. Yes—she had seen Owen before.

  It ends, she thought as the light fluttered and began to seep away. It ends like this. Like this. Like this.

  Aldiss had been right all along. The killer was part of the night class.

  Matthew Owen had been one of Richard Aldiss’s prison guards.

  Iowa

  1994

  49

  Alex looked around the small room. The air was thick, musty, dust hanging everywhere. It had begun to choke her, and she used the crook of her arm to cover her mouth. She stepped back into a corner, reached for one of the books, and—

  The whole box slid forward, then toppled to the ground. She froze, waiting for someone to come. The hall remained empty. Quietly, her mouth bone-dry and her heart pounding, she knelt down and picked up another book. When she saw what was there she breathed in sharply, the shock of it hitting her like a blow to the chest.

  Names.

  The encyclopedias contained names, each entry the name of another girl. And they were all girls, Madeleine and Mary and Marybeth and Marissa. Last names too, and . . .

  Yes. Addresses.

  These were real. As real as she was.

  Alex leaned down and flipped through one of the books. Its binding was crude, red string looped through holes, but it was there. Physical. She could pick it up and flip through it in the semidarkness. And this she did, the dust clogging her airways and making her gasp silently, but she kept on turning, flipping through the pages and taking in the names of these girls. There were hundreds here, perhaps thousands, each of them arranged by the name of the town. When she was at the end she flipped back to the title page and saw what the book was called. And this, too, struck a kind of wild fear in her. A blind terror at seeing, at knowing what these books were. What they contained.

  The books were called The Encyclopedia of the Dead.

  Their author was Paul Fallows.

  50

  Alex reached down again and took up another book. There were perhaps fifty of them on the floor, and the boxes in the cramped room were endless. Who are these people?

  As she was flipping through the next book, she heard something. A slight sound, just the tiniest scuff of movement. Her blood froze. She looked up.

  Charlie Rutherford was standing in the doorway.

  At first she could say nothing. Her throat seemed to be destroyed; she was mute, like him. The man looked at her unblinking, his hands perfectly aligned at his sides. In the other room there was a cartoon honk, the jittery beat of children’s music.

  “Charlie,” she whispered. “What are these books? Are these your dad’s?”

  The man said nothing. He simply stood there in the threshold, watching her.

  “Are these people your dad knew, Charlie? Are they women he met when he was—”

  “Mom!”

  The voice was a child’s: loud, rebellious. And as he said it his eyes flashed with mischief: I know what you’re doing. I know why you’re here.

  It didn’t take Lydia Rutherford long. She turned into the room, a hand clapped over her mouth. Alex tried to step back, but there was nowhere to go. She was trapped.

  The woman began to say something but stopped. Then, her voice soft as a whisper, she said, “You aren’t supposed to be in here.”

  “I’m sorry,” Alex managed. “I’ll leave. I’ll just go back to Vermont and—”

  “No.” Lydia took a step into the room. There was something of a smile on her face now, wide and animalistic. She approached Alex and reached out, and Alex flinched. The woman took a strand of Alex’s hair and tucked it behind her ear.

  “Please,” Alex gasped. “Please, I’ll do anything. Anything.”

  The woman’s eyes dropped. She said, “I know you’ve been asking questions about Charlie. He’s a good boy. It’s just that something happened to him. Something happened at his beginning.” She stopped, gazed at her son with pity.

  Alex’s knees wobbled. She looked again at the door, at Charlie standing there so resolute. So still. Blocking her escape.

  “He got his father’s sickness, and what am I supposed to do about that? He’s my son. My blood. I must love him. That’s what they don’t understand about us. That’s why they call us strange. They don’t see, they don’t know how a mother loves her son. They don’t know.”

  Lydia turned then and smiled at him. It was a motherly smile, and when she looked back at Alex it was gone. Replaced by a wrath that bu
rned hotly in her eyes.

  “Charlie,” the woman said. “Go and get Daddy’s axe.”

  Alex

  Present Day

  51

  Matthew Owen strained against her. The light wavered. His face was inches from Alex’s now.

  “I tried to eliminate Aldiss first,” Owen said. “If the brain dies, then the body will fall. When he was at Rock Mountain I was in charge of treating him, of controlling the seizures. But I didn’t go far enough. I missed my chance and he gave Fallows to you on a silver platter.” A shadow passed across his face. “So I worked with what I had. A struggling cop. A few phone calls, the suggestion that Aldiss was searching for him. He put his revolver in his mouth. Easy.”

  Daniel. Goddamn him.

  Owen smiled, and in the coldness of the gesture Alex saw for the first time. She saw how it had happened, the brutal series of events that had led her to this black hallway. Owen had murdered Michael Tanner, had drawn them all back to the campus, and then—

  “Lewis,” she said, her voice tight. Choked. “How? You were there, at the memorial service.”

  “No, Alex. You thought I was there. I had run back to the house for Stanley’s pills and found Lewis all alone.” His voice quickened. “Afterward, Melissa and I slipped away.”

  Alex willed her mind to come back on, her eyes to open. Where? she thought. Wherewherewhere? Owen read her thoughts. “Do you want to see what I did with him?”

  She nodded.

  Then he was yanking her by the hair down the hallway. They were descending stairs, the temperature plummeting. A heavy steel door opened and Owen pushed her into a room.

  She looked up to see that she was in the place where it had all begun. In the basement classroom of Culver.

  There were student desks arranged here in the same pattern they had been in the night class. And at the front was Richard Aldiss. He had been stripped and beaten and lashed to a chair. Owen had carried in his flashlight, and he pointed it at the man. The puzzle tattoo was revealed: Aldiss’s entire body was a jigsaw puzzle, his chest and arms and legs. Owen made a sound, disgusted with the sight of the professor, then he swung the light back into Alex’s face.

  “Alive?” he said. “Not alive? It makes no difference now.”

  Alex hung there in the man’s arms. Her throat was raw, bloody.

  “Everything I did,” Owen said, “was because of the manuscript. Getting close to him in Rock Mountain, going back to school, getting that job at another prison, poring over Austen, Eliot, Dostoyevsky—I was probably the only guard at Oakwood who could talk to Lewis Prine about the Modernists.”

  Alex startled. You set Lewis up, you bastard. You set all of us up. I’ll kill you with my bare hands.

  Owen continued, “It was all because of the third Fallows.” He saw her confusion, and when he continued his tone was more deliberate. He wanted her to see, to understand exactly. “I mastered the first two novels through the Procedure. Found their open doorways, Alex. Walked around inside them. And when I heard that an unpublished Fallows existed, I knew I had to find it. Whatever it took.”

  Alex shivered, more alert now. “A game?” she said. “All of this—setting Aldiss up, murdering my friends—was because of a fucking game?”

  “You don’t understand. You can never understand. The Procedure is no more a game than the printing press is a machine. What I was doing, Alex, was understanding Fallows. Reaching inside his mind. You couldn’t learn him through books, through your innocent little night class. The only way to plumb those novels was through the Procedure. It was how one became enlightened.”

  Keep him talking, Alex. Find out how he did this, then turn him on himself. You can do this. She urged her voice to life. “I don’t understand, Matthew. When did you find the manuscript? How did you beat us to it?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “There were always whispers that a third Fallows existed, and at Rock Mountain I deduced that Aldiss must have found it. But I couldn’t find where he hid it, no matter how often I checked his cell. After his release I continued my search. I was desperate, hungry to continue the game, and there seemed only one place to go. You’re beginning to catch on, I see.”

  Alex nodded. The boxes labeled ALDISS in Fisk’s study. Fifteen years ago, it was all right there.

  “Yes, I knew that Stanley was a frequent correspondent of Aldiss’s. Knew he’d sent boxes and boxes of documents over the years to Rock Mountain. And I suspected that if Aldiss had entrusted the manuscript to anyone it would be Fisk.” He paused. “After I was hired by the college it took me only a few months to find the manuscript in his mansion. I read it and saw, immediately, what Aldiss had done. He’d been playing a game as well—nine victims in the manuscript, nine students in the night class. It was his clever way of continuing the Procedure from his prison cell. But I knew a better way. A purer way.”

  Alex turned her eyes to the wall. She couldn’t look at him, couldn’t bear to follow his story any longer. But Owen reached out, dipped his hand inside the light, and took her face. He turned her gaze toward him and held her there, her cheeks squeezed painfully, so that she could see him as he spoke. Could see how exactly how it ended.

  “You erased Fallows,” he said. “Aldiss led you to him and you destroyed the legend to the map. All we had then were the doorways the Procedure opened. When I found the manuscript I searched for those doorways. And when I found them I began to see. I saw how I could bring the Procedure to life.”

  A line from the manuscript flashed through her mind: Perhaps he had been going backward, taking his plan from the end. There was something about those words, something that might allow her to escape from this hell. Yes, it was right there in front of her now, the connection that Owen had failed to make all along. The end . . .

  “Fallows is dead,” she said defiantly, holding her eyes on him. “You’ve failed.”

  Owen smiled pityingly. “You still don’t understand, Alex. I’ve gone farther than Fallows. I’ve outdone him. Through the Procedure I got inside the beating heart of his manuscript. It was like . . . ecstasy. An epiphany.” He hesitated, his eyes cast back toward the slumped shape of Aldiss. “I don’t need Fallows. I became him.” Owen closed his eyes briefly at the thought, and a smile passed across his face.

  Alex knew what she had to do.

  Iowa

  1994

  52

  “My Charlie was turned differently,” Lydia Rutherford said. “I knew that from the beginning. At first my husband was afraid of Charlie. He wouldn’t hold him. Perhaps he saw himself mirrored in the boy. Perhaps he knew what was bound to happen.”

  Alex stared at the woman and the man beside her. The cartoon soundtrack rippled down the hallway and into the tiny room. “What happened?” she managed.

  “Don’t you see?” the woman said, for the first time managing a smile. “Can’t you figure it out, college girl? My husband was a ghostwriter.”

  Alex stared at the woman, at the axe she wielded. “I don’t—I don’t understand.”

  “He had been writing about women for so long, about how to destroy them,” Lydia continued. “When he fell into the Mood, I left, you see. I took the baby with me and I got out of Hamlet. And when I returned, something had changed. Charles had brightened. I thought it was the encyclopedias, thought his sales numbers had been good. But I was wrong. I found out that he had taken a girl. Murdered her in the woods, dropped books around the body—but not on the face. That came later.”

  The woman stopped. The wind blew and tickled a wind chime hanging from the eaves of the porch. Now, Alex thought. Now comes the end of the story.

  “Charles needed to be found,” she said. “He needed to be found and cured, just as every person with a sickness does. Do you understand? He wanted the investigators to know what he’d done, what he planned to do with other girls. So he tried to tell people, to warn them, to show them who he was with his novels.”

  “How?” Alex asked, her voice quavering.

&nbs
p; “Charles’s mind was strange. His sickness was real. And the scholars thought he was a genius; those students who came to my house thought Paul Fallows was a god, a deity.” The woman stopped, laughing. “Fallows was a name. Nothing more than a name. A ghost, someone my husband made up to hide himself. Those two novels he wrote, especially The Golden Silence—it was a map to him. To find him. To punish him.”

  “But The Golden Silence—there’s a reference to Dr. Morrow in that book. Your husband didn’t know about Morrow. He couldn’t have. Charles was already dead when the doctor . . . sent Charlie home.” Alex was careful not to say “cured.” Not after what Dr. Bern had told them. “What happened to Charles, Lydia?”

  The woman frowned. “Apparently you’re not as smart as I thought you were. We sent Charlie to Shining City, where he met the good doctor. It was our decision.” At this Lydia bristled. “It was Charles’s bad luck to die before any progress was made. It was a clot in his brain that dislodged and then exploded. A mind bomb. And I did what Charles told me to do: I sent The Golden Silence off and had it published. But by that time Charlie was . . .” She looked back at the door, at the man. She shrugged: What could I do? “Like his daddy.”

  “No,” Alex said.

  “The two girls from Dumant discovered the truth,” Lydia went on. “They came here together because that Aldiss told them to, but only one of them came back a second time. The smart one. She found this room, just like you did. And I think Charlie told her things about his daddy. He told her because she was”—her voice soft, ashamed—“a whore. I think she touched him. She would have done anything to get what she wanted. And Charlie talked. He told on his daddy. He told about all the girls, about the bodies and the encyclopedias. But this girl and her friend left Iowa before I could do anything. It was only a few days before we worked up the courage to go to Dumant. It had to be done. Dr. Morrow had not really worked miracles, you see; no one could change the Mood. No one.”