“What the fuck?” Julian said, running his eyes over the mess of powder-blue.
“Where is it, Hadler? Where is it?” Trask said without acknowledging the medication. He emptied Jack’s drawers as well, adding to the mess that his side of the room already displayed. When he went to look beneath Jack’s bed, though, he had barely lowered his head to the floor when he bolted back with a shout of pain.
Flinging himself backwards and slipping over the orange pill bottles, he writhed on his back as Dictionary shot out from beneath the bed and clamped herself onto his face, digging her claws into the skin with a hiss of anger. Trask grabbed her about the abdomen and flung her back violently, and she flipped over the floor in a tangle of fur before landing back on her feet.
“Hey!” Jack rushed forward and scooped her up. As Trask shakily stood up and looked at Jack through his bloodied face, his expression was more infuriated than ever.
“What the fuck is that thing?” he demanded, wiping at his mouth. He turned to Jacobson and gave him a firm nod. “Let’s get him.”
It only took me a moment to register what he had said, but by then it was too late. Trask and the huge lacrosse player moved towards Jack, closely followed by several other boys from the floor who had come in during the excitement. They glowered at him with a deep hunger in their eyes for something that resembled – but was not quite – justice. Jack had barely turned away when the first punch caught the side of his face, and he dropped Dictionary from his arms. As he stumbled sideways, Trask aimed a kick at his stomach that sent him bowling over onto the floor.
“Wait –” I tried to say as the group closed in on him and began to hit and kick every part of him that they could, but my voice sounded strangled in my throat and my shoulder blades were latched to the wall. “Wait – stop – you’ve got it wrong –”
Julian crossed his arms as the boys continued their assault on Jack, occasionally breaking his gaze to look across at me, and Sanders had backed up to the threshold as though uncertain if he should stay or go. They both watched wordlessly as Trask’s foot smashed against Jack’s jaw, and a bright red tooth clattered across the hardwood and rolled to a stop beneath the dresser. He raised his arms to try and shield the blows to his head, but the constant stream of kicks to his ribs lowered them down again as he sought to protect himself, and his face was masked with pain.
“Wait – stop!” I shouted, using all of my effort to pry myself from my spot. “Sanders – make them stop! They’re going to kill him!”
Sanders didn’t appear to hear me. He continued to stare down at where Jack was lying on the floor. After a long moment, he said admissibly, “He killed Miss Mercier.”
“No, he didn’t! Sanders, please, he didn’t – I can explain! It’s not like that!”
But no one paid me any mind. As half the boys continued to beat Jack into the floor, the other half watched on; their expressions held the same type of eagerness that they displayed at the Bickerby sporting events as they cheered on their team. And despite the look of agony on Jack’s face, I couldn’t bring myself to move.
With a flash of dark fur, Dictionary darted back out from beneath the bed and leapt onto Trask’s leg. She clung to it as he aimed another kick at Jack, tearing her claws down his skin and drawing another cry of pain from him, and successfully offered Jack a moment of reprieve as the boys jumped back to watch Trask thrash and shake to get her off again.
“You little shit!” he said angrily, seizing her by the scruff of the neck and tearing her away from him.
She hissed vehemently and latched onto his arm instead. With another shout of pain, Trask shook his arm to release her but had no success. Growling in anger and looking far more animalistic than she did, he dropped to his knees and slammed the arm with her on it to the floor, beating her into the wood with all of his might. She made a terrible sound as she finally let go, but as she turned to dart away from him, he grabbed her by the tail and stomped her to the ground. A shattering crack sounded through the room as her neck broke, and she slumped down with eyes open to the far wall where I stood, finally unmoving.
For a long moment the only sound in the room was of Trask’s heavy breathing as everyone stared at the twisted, distorted body of the dead creature, and then the eyes began to move up to Trask’s face. He showed no concern for what he had done, too preoccupied with his scratched and bitten arm to notice the wary looks of the other boys, at last disconcerted by his stream of violence.
And then Jack’s horrified cry broke through the room, and he rolled onto his knees and elbows as he tried to reach the spot where Dictionary lay, and the blood covering his face could not hide the pain that was clearly printed there that had nothing to do with his physical injuries. He crawled to the dead creature, his bloody hands shaking as they picked up the limp form, and the fur matted in his hands as the moisture tangled it.
“No,” he said into the fur, petting it back to stare into her glassy eyes. “No, Dictionary ...”
“Kyle, what’d you do that for?” Jacobson said. There was an uncertainty in his voice as he eyed Trask that seemed to collect amongst the group.
“It attacked me!” Trask said. “And he would’ve killed it anyhow – it was probably going to be part of one of his satanic rituals like last year!”
Jacobson looked over at Julian in the hope that he would offer him guidance on what to believe, but Julian had turned his face away to stare at the mess of pills upon the ground. Only Jack moved to shake as he held Dictionary in his arms.
“That’s ... that’s enough,” Sanders said at last. “We – we should wait for the administrators. I should – I should tell Brody to make that call ...”
Several of the boys slipped out of the door, but Trask stayed in place.
“We can’t just leave him here – what if he destroys the evidence? What if he escapes?”
Sanders turned his eyes to him nervously.
“I don’t think he’ll be going anywhere, Trask.”
“He might. I know Hadler’s type: he’ll want to get away. We should at least hold him down until the police get here –”
“He doesn’t need to be held down,” Sanders said, looking at where Jack’s crumpled form knelt between them.
“Well, I think I’ll stay,” Trask continued. “I think someone should do something, at least –”
“I think you’ve done enough,” Sanders said. He straightened his stance at last and looked at the remaining students in the room. “All of you – back to your rooms. Come on. Right now.”
Julian twitched as they brushed past him. His breathing was jagged beneath his crumpled collared-shirt.
“But –” Trask said, “we can’t just leave him here –”
“I think we should,” Julian said, though he was unable to meet anyone’s eyes. “Before the cops show up.”
“But we should take care of this before they get here,” Trask said lowly. “We don’t want him to get away with this!”
Julian’s face was still sickened, but it was no longer clear what the cause of it was. He swallowed as he looked from where Jack knelt to where Trask stood.
“Matt’s right, Kyle. We’ve done enough, and – and I don’t want to get into trouble.”
With no one to back him up, Trask finally consented to leave the room. Sanders followed quickly behind them. At the door he paused to look back on where we shook in the destroyed room. The overturned beds, the drawers pulled from the dresser, and the pill bottles scattering the floor somehow looked whole in comparison to the way Jack looked as he clutched the cat that Miss Mercier had brought in from the cold. And as he shut the door on the sight of us, I was aware that every splinter and crack that had scraped into our skin had finally broken to shatter the bones and burn away the flesh, and that the wreck they left behind was something well beyond repair.
Ch. 21
The ridges of my nails slowly stained with red as I gently pried Jack’s grip from Dictionary and blanketed her form in a pillowca
se. Jack and I stared at the neat white square in the center of the room for several minutes, the only orderly thing amongst the chaos, before I finally pulled myself away to take a sweater from an overturned drawer and handed it to him. He pressed his face heavily into it, and it grew thick and dark with blood.
He could barely stand. I clutched his arms to pull him up, hardly managing to hold him until he could find his footing, and then helped him over to his mattress to sit down. The silence in the room seemed unshakable, and the dark from the clouded sky made his shadowed face nearly impossible to see. Realizing how badly my legs were shaking, I sank down beside him.
“Jack, they’re going to call the police.”
He slowly shut his eyes and bowed his head. Then, with careful consideration, he shrugged.
“Jack, we can’t let them do that! They’ll think it’s true – they’ll think it was you!”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it does! They’ll arrest you, you’ll go to jail –”
“Nim, it doesn’t matter.” He turned his head to stare at me, and there was nothing left in the darks of his eyes despite how deeply I stared into them. “There’s no point in pretending otherwise: no one will believe it wasn’t me. It looks like me.”
But even as I opened my mouth to protest, I felt the disheartening reality of the situation sinking into me: Jack’s infatuation with Miss Mercier, the mischance walking her home the night of her murder, the key that had fallen from his pocket, the conversation that Porter had overheard between us, and the file folder lying right out in the open on the desk were all too much to ignore. He was guilty by every account but the truth that no one would believe.
“You can’t go to jail. You can’t – you can’t just let them blame you–”
“Why not? It was my fault anyhow; maybe this is for the best.”
“Don’t start that again!” I said angrily. “It wasn’t your fault – it was whoever did this!”
“Whoever did this was smart enough not to get caught, so it doesn’t matter anyhow.”
“That’s not true, we’ve almost got him! We can just bring all the information to the police and they’ll –”
“And they’ll look into it just as well as they did last time,” Jack said. “They don’t care about Miss Mercier, Nim: they never did. They just wanted it to go away.”
“But those girls – we can tell them what happened to them –”
“And they’ll think we’re insane. Everyone’s happy enough to believe they ran away, and no one wants to mess up their lives by changing things around.”
“But –”
“Nim.” Jack leaned towards me until his face was just an inch from mine, and the bloodied hand that grasped my arm left a purplish stain upon the fabric. “Please stop. Please. There’s nothing we can do to make them believe us. Nothing.”
The silence pressed down on us harder still and Jack’s grip became tighter to clench at my arm, and the skin beneath the shirt and sweater pinched beneath his fingers, but I made no move to pull away from him. I had the urge to latch onto him and never let go, but pushed it away as a separate realization came to my mind.
“You have to go, Jack.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can,” I said, my mind humming feverishly as I laid out the plan within it. “You’ll take one of the boats from the boathouse and row to shore, then – then you’ll take one of the buses up to Canada –”
“Nim, that’s impossible.”
“No, it’s not – just listen. You’ll ... you’ll take Karl’s bank card and get as much money out as you can, then take my passport. No one will be looking out for my name, just yours. And then, once you’re over the border, you can book a flight anywhere, then –”
“Nim, stop. I can’t.”
“But you can!” I said, grabbing his arm as he let go of mine and turned away. “Come on, Jack – it’ll work! If we can’t convince them that it wasn’t you, then you have to get out of here before they get you!”
“But I can’t.” He ran his tongue over his dry lips and stared at me with an unreadable expression. “I don’t want to go without you.”
“I’ll meet you there.”
“Where? I don’t even know where I’m going – you’ll have no idea where I’ll be.”
“Sure I do,” I said, with an expression flitting somewhere between a smile and a frown. “Provence.”
He gave a soft chuckle, but it was wrecked with hopelessness for what would never be.
“I might not get there, Nim. I might not get anywhere.”
“I’ll find you,” I said. “I will – just trust me. But I won’t be able to do anything if they stick you in jail.”
He looked over his shoulder out the window: the campus was heavily shadowed by dark clouds and the half-melted snow was pooling over the pathways and down the windowpane, but the barren sight was nothing compared with the room around us. After what felt like an eternity, he bowed his head in a nod.
“I ... I guess you’re right,” he said. “I’ll ... I’ll go.”
Wiping the blood from his face and hands, he stood and made to change into cleaner clothes. A noise sounded from down the hall and I started, but quieted a moment later. As he reached for a cleaner sweatshirt, I stopped him.
“Wait, wear mine.”
“What?”
“Wear my clothes,” I said, “so you can sneak out of the building. Sanders is probably watching the door, and they’ll be looking out for you. No one will recognize you in my clothes.”
He gave me a look before dropping the sweatshirt to pick up the clothes from the overturned drawers and pull them on. Though the khakis and dress-shirt had been wrinkled from the way they had been thrown, they still looked oddly neat and orderly on his normally disheveled form. He pulled on my winter hat to cover his dark hair and wrapped my scarf about him to cover half of his face. As he donned my jacket as well, I squinted at him to carefully scrutinize if he would be recognizable as he left the building. Without the dark, worn clothing, he looked quite unlike himself.
He shoved the passport and bank card into his inner pocket and zipped the jacket up to his neck. As he turned to look at me, there was a tightness in his expression that masked whatever he was thinking. And I thought of saying everything that I had always wanted to tell him – the unspoken things that were in the back of my mind that I could never push closer – but the knowledge that the administrators and police would be at the residence building in moments made me clench my jaw shut again. And even if I had had the time to say what I wanted to, the knowledge that they might be the last words I spoke to him for a long while made me falter with every word that lingered on the back of my tongue.
“Jack, I ...” I began, but the words wouldn’t come.
He bowed his head accordingly.
“I know,” he said. He took my arm momentarily before pulling away, fingers scraping through mine, and slipped out the door. As it shut quietly behind him and I strained through the silence to make sure that no one stopped him in the hall, my arms fell back to my sides and my hands unclenched to the feeling of the cold air, and I realized just how much I didn’t want to let him go.
I sat down numbly on his bed and stared at the pillowcase covering Dictionary’s broken body. The room was quiet, and outside the walls the building and campus were quiet as well. I was waiting to hear any noise that would indicate that something had gone wrong and that I had made a mistake in sending him out there alone, but the quiet just continued on its way, tormenting me with time that seemed to move too quickly and too slowly all at once. Perhaps if it had been louder then it could have silenced the thoughts in my head; but the words stringing themselves together were ringing in my ears like voices screaming at me from every side.
“Here, he’s right in –”
Sanders fumbled through the door and nearly tripped over pills scattering the threshold. As he straightened to look around the room, his expression paled w
ith the realization of what was missing.
“He’s – he’s –” He looked fully around the room four times before looking to me. “Lund, where is he? Where’s Hadler?”
He had brought several administrators with him, along with Josh Brody, who was standing in the background with a perplexed expression. The sight of them in the doorway was an odd one, and it felt as though they were at the end of a musty tunnel, or at the top of a well that I had fallen down. I stared over at them lifelessly.
“He’s gone.”
“He’s –?” Sanders ran his hands through his hair and glanced anxiously over his shoulder. “But he – he was right here, and I told everyone to make sure that he didn’t leave –”
The administrators came further into the room. They dripped water onto the floor from their soaked jackets and waterlogged boots as they searched-over the already destroyed place for the person who would never be there again. When they saw the file folder on the desk, there was a collective intake of breath followed by another ringing silence.
“Mr. Lund, where did he go? Did he say? Did you see him?”
I shook my head to the questions.
“He must have seen him,” the man said to his colleague. “Someone must have seen him. Go get the boys out of their rooms – I want to talk to all of them before the cops show up. It’s all we need to have another scandal this year.”
When the room had cleared but for the two of us, he lightly shut the door and crouched down to my eye level.
“Mr. Lund, I need to know where Hadler is. You won’t get into any trouble ... if you tell me.” He paused as he waited for my response and leaned in further, but my only desire was to push him away. “You must be in a great deal of shock. Maybe ... maybe you’d like to come up to the Welcoming Building, and we can talk about it there ...?”
“I want to call my uncle.”
The sharpness in my tone made him turn his head as though it had cut clear across the skin.
None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 34