Dominance Page 4

  Now Alex saw him only in shadow. Aldiss was moving behind her, flitting this way and that, playacting the crime. She wanted to see exactly what he was doing, but she was taken in by the lake outside the window. Enraptured by it. There was something about the way the ice drifted, the weak April ice, the way it dissolved and fell to loose, gauzy shreds . . .

  The professor touched her again. Ran his fingers through her hair.

  “This crime,” he whispered. “You said before that it is different from the ones I was accused of. What did you mean?”

  Alex closed her eyes and said, “There were mistakes. The crime scene—it isn’t as clean as the two at Dumant. He was more nervous, perhaps . . . weaker than that man. But there was something else.”

  “What?”

  “The struggle seemed to be staged. Manipulated to mirror the Dumant scenes.”

  “The police told you this?”

  “Yes.”

  Aldiss scoffed. “Do not listen to them. They are men of a false science. They do not know what we know.”

  “And what do we know, Professor?”

  “We know . . .”

  She let him touch her. Let him move his fingers in and out of her hair, play against her neck. She tried not to imagine his face. She closed her eyes.

  “Is it the game?” she breathed. “Has the Procedure begun again?”

  No answer. Aldiss’s shadow twisted on the wall.

  “What kind of person do I tell them to look for?” she pressed.

  Again: nothing. He only kept moving his hands about her hair, his fingers so sure and powerful as they began to massage her scalp.

  “Who killed Michael Tanner?”

  “In the cyndrot,” he said finally, hands clasping her skull, “you look for what mirrors the original object. Its twin opposite, the illusion of sameness it creates. In this case we are looking for someone who knows the Dumant murders so intimately that he or she can replicate those crimes perfectly. To do this one must have secret knowledge of the events. This person must have studied that brutal history so carefully that nothing—no detail, no gesture—could be left unused. The killer has created a cyndrot. For this reason I believe the person we are now searching for is . . .”

  “Who?” she pleaded. “Tell me.”

  “Someone who was part of the night class.”

  Alex inhaled deeply, kept her hands perfectly still on her lap.

  “The killer was there with you in that lecture hall. It is someone you know, Alexandra. There are things about Dumant University that I have shared, both during the class and afterward, with only the nine of you. If I am correct, as I fear I am, then a few of these details will have been used in the murder of Michael Tanner. This oversight might be the killer’s first mistake.”

  “But how do I know who it is?” she asked.

  “There are two ways to find your killer,” Aldiss said. “First, you must get into Michael’s home. See how the killer arranged the books, which ones he chose to highlight. You have to make them let you see what the killer saw that night.”

  “I don’t know if they will—”

  “You must.”

  She looked down at her hands, at the pyramid of books at her feet. “And the second way?”

  “You must bring the students from the class back together,” the professor said softly. His voice, the way he said the words, suggested a kind of pity; it spoke to Alex of a keen apprehension that she had never heard out of Aldiss. “You are the only one who truly understands these people and their motivation, the only one who knows what they desire. And when you have done this, when they are back on the Jasper campus, then you will observe them. That is how you will find the one who committed this murder.”

  “But how do you know?” she asked, desperation in her voice. “How can you be sure one of us did this?”

  Aldiss pulled away. He removed his hands but left something behind, an indentation, a phantom pressure on her scalp.

  “It is someone who was there,” he said again, and then: “I know it in my blood.” Alex thought about what this meant, the path it would take her down. She thought about the others—There are seven of us now, she reminded herself—and imagined them all there, back again on campus for the first time since Daniel Hayden’s funeral. But this time it would be different. This time one of them could possibly be watching her, watching and—

  “Richard?”

  A voice at the door. The trance was broken, and both Alex and the professor turned. Alex thought she saw a blush, a flash of purple deep beneath the mask of the professor’s face.

  “Richard, who is she?”

  The girl was young. A college student. She was model pretty, with full lips and green, intelligent eyes. She wore a Jasper College sweatshirt and torn blue jeans. She had clearly just awakened.

  “Daphne,” the professor said, “this is Alexandra Shipley, one of my former students.”

  The girl said nothing, only stared at Alex. There was the flare of a challenge in her eyes. Alex got up, dusted down the wrinkles in her trench, and forced a smile. The girl is fifteen years younger than you, Alex, and you’re intimidated by her? Christ.

  “I was just going,” she said weakly. “Professor. Daphne.” Alex nodded awkwardly and went to the doorway. The girl hesitated there in the threshold, then she moved to the side and Alex inched past her to navigate the corridor of books.

  She found the front door and pushed into it, hard, reaching for the air.

  But Aldiss was behind her again, pulling her back by the shoulder. Alex stopped on the porch, almost out. Almost free of him.

  “She’s just a child,” she spat into the wind.

  “A toy,” the professor said. “Nothing but a plaything.”

  Alex jerked away.

  “We could continue our session, you know,” he said, his lips close to her ear now. Alex looked out at the small rental car, at the steep drive that would take her back to Route 2 and toward the college. “Fair Daphne wouldn’t have to know.”

  Alex yanked free of him. She heard him laugh behind her as she went for the car, opened the door, and began to get in.

  “Alexandra, wait.”

  She paused, hunched inside the car, one foot still planted on Aldiss’s drive.

  “If I am right,” Aldiss said, “and it is one of them, then you will be putting yourself in grave danger. When the students from the night class have returned and you have begun your observation, be careful, Alexandra, because one of them will also be observing you . . .” He trailed off, ran his eyes beyond her as if he were searching the woods behind his small house. “I would die if anything happened to you. First I would kill the person who did it, and then I would take the axe to myself. I promise you that.”

  Before she pulled away she looked back at the house. She saw him there in a front window. He watched her descent.

  * * *

  Later, when she returned to Jasper, Alex paid a visit to a trusted old friend.

  And then she began to call them, one by one, until all those who remained had agreed to return and honor the life of Michael Tanner.

  The Class

  1994

  5

  “Now, let us begin.”

  The image of Dr. Richard Aldiss on the television screen seemed to wobble a bit and then right itself. Nine faces stared at him, waiting for the professor to begin his lecture. They wondered if he would tell them about what he had done twelve years ago. The two murders (an axe, it was believed, but the murder weapon was never found), the grisly scenes on the Dumant University campus . . . no one knew if it would be a point of discussion. He wasn’t supposed to speak of the crimes, but Aldiss didn’t seem like a man who would play by the rules.

  “What is literature?” the professor asked now.

  No one in the class spoke. The silence hummed.

  Aldiss smiled a bit, leaned forward. His eyes, furtive and black and bearing a hint of dark humor, flitted from side to side, searching them.

  �
��Mr. Tanner,” he said, reading softly from a class roster that must have been off camera. “Please tell us what you believe literature to be.”

  The boy named Michael Tanner spoke up. His voice cracked as he addressed the screen.

  “Literature is an assortment of books,” he said. “The canon.”

  “And what is the canon, in your opinion?”

  “Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf. Mostly the modernists.”

  A shadow passed across Aldiss’s face. “The modernists killed so many good things.”

  The boy shrank back.

  “Mr. Kane,” Aldiss said. “What is literature?”

  “Literature is the feeling you get when you read a book,” said Christian Kane, a slight boy in the second row. He wore a denim jacket with grunge patches dotting the sleeves. He tried to make himself larger than he was, bring himself to the height of those who always towered over him. It worked, but only barely. It worked because Kane was brilliant.

  “Ah, a man of feelings. I like that, Mr. Kane. And tell me—what feelings come over you when you read Isaac Babel? Or Boris Pilnyak, who couldn’t be rehabilitated and was killed by a firing squad and left for the birds to pick apart? Or Dostoyevsky? What do you feel when you read the scenes of Raskolnikov’s axe in Crime and Punishment?”

  Axe. The word rang out in the lecture hall, vibrated around them. Everyone sat still, waiting for the other shoe to fall.

  It did not. Richard Aldiss didn’t flinch, did not appear as if he had even made an error. Perhaps that one word, that casual axe, was meant to be dropped there. Perhaps he had planted it in his lecture beforehand, written the word into his notes. Was he this sort of man? they wondered. Was he the sort who would play mind games with his students?

  “I feel repulsed,” Kane said. “As does everyone else.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Everyone who feels any empathy for the sane.”

  Aldiss laughed. A quick, biting pshaw.

  “Do you know what I felt when I read Dostoyevsky for the first time?” Aldiss said. “I felt a solution. For Raskolnikov doesn’t go unpunished for his crimes against his metaphorical sister and mother. He is indeed not a superman. This thing I felt when I first read that book, this emotion, was one of sadness. I too was destined not to be superman. I too was not meant to go unpunished.”

  The professor appeared to frown, that pale shadow crossing over his face again. The two guards behind him shifted.

  “Ms. Shipley,” he said. “Can you tell us what literature is?”

  A girl in the second row hesitated. The rest of them watched her, this pretty, mysterious Vermont girl. Alex Shipley had long, straight hair that glinted in the classroom light. She was opinionated, razor sharp, and if you did not know her she could disarm you with her honesty—as was her intent. She had told no one yet (she liked to keep secrets until it was impossible not to), but she was bound for grad school at Harvard in the spring.

  “Literature is love,” the girl said.

  “Do you believe in love, Ms. Shipley?”

  “Yes.”

  “And so you must believe in literature.”

  “Very much so.”

  “What about the possibility of literature, like love, to hurt?”

  The girl shrugged, undeterred. The camera that was trained on the students caught this, and Aldiss’s eyes flicked upward to where he must have had his own monitor to view the basement classroom. He smiled: he liked this indistinct, almost rebellious, gesture. “If literature can make us feel anything,” she said, “then why couldn’t it make us feel pain?”

  “The book as knife.”

  “Or arrow.”

  Aldiss leaned back, even more impressed. “Flaming arrow.”

  Another shrug from Alex. “Or axe.”

  Then something happened.

  Aldiss’s face went crimson. He straightened in his chair as if a jolt of electricity were pouring through him and clasped his hands around his throat. Then he began to writhe, still sitting upright, chair legs knocking frantically beneath him. It appeared that he was being strangled, invisibly, from behind.

  The guards moved quickly. They surrounded him, both of them reaching out, only their arms and hands in the shot, trying to still him. But the professor could not be stilled. He flailed and bucked and flung himself around, the chair shrieking against the floor, Aldiss’s figure shifting almost totally off camera. A tiny parentheses of foam crept from his mouth and down his chin. He was misframed now, the faceless guards at the right edge of the screen fighting with him, trying to save him. “His tongue!” one of them said. “My God, he’s swallowing his tongue!”

  The screen went black.

  For a few moments the students in the lecture hall sat silently, waiting. No one seemed to know what to do. They looked at one another, shock and confusion on their faces. The screen popped with static.

  “What do we do now?” a girl named Sally Mitchell asked.

  Then the sound, the electronic tone from before, returned. Everyone looked toward the TV screen.

  Aldiss returned, his hair wild, his eyes racked by pain.

  “I’m sorry,” he slurred. “I have these . . . these episodes sometimes. I’ve always had them, ever since I was a small boy. Not to worry. My minders here are trained medics—they won’t let me expire on you.” He said nothing more.

  The nine stared at the box. Somehow his admission did not calm their nerves. A few of them would dream of him that night. Dreams of only sound and blurred movement: the rake of chair legs, the gargle of pain in the professor’s throat.

  “You have said,” Aldiss went on when he was fully composed, “that literature is defined by its place in the canon. It is defined by emotion, by love. What if”—his cracked gaze swung around the room, falling on them all; and even this, this simple movement, showed the students in the night class why he was such a powerful teacher—“literature is a game?”

  None of them knew how to take this. They stared at the screen, waiting for the man to continue.

  “What if what just happened to me was nothing but a trick?”

  The students were confused. Someone laughed nervously.

  “I do indeed have a neurological condition,” he told his class. “But if I did not, if the spell I just suffered was indeed a hoax, an act—would you have believed I was in pain?”

  No one answered.

  “Come on. Was I convincing, class?”

  “Yes,” a boy named Frank Marsden said from the back row. Thin, handsome in a classical way, Marsden was a drama student with a lit minor. Of all of the students in the classroom, he could tell truth from playacting.

  “Absolutely,” said Alex Shipley.

  “What if literature were like this?” Aldiss continued. “What if a book, a novel, tricked us into believing it was real, but when we actually got into it—when we really read it, when we truly paid attention—we began to see that there was a whole world behind the pages? A universe of deeper truths. And all it took was our ability to find the rabbit hole.”

  He paused, let the cryptic information he had just given them settle in. “How many of you have heard of Paul Fallows?”

  6

  A few had indeed. They told Aldiss what they knew of the writer. They knew that no one was sure who Fallows was—not really. His first novel had been a huge success, but the more critics and scholars called Fallows into the spotlight, the more the writer refused to appear. He began to slip away like a ghost. There had been speculation, some of it published and some of it simply a part of the rumor mill at every lit department in America—Fallows was Pynchon, he was Barth, he was Eco. Or he was Charles Rutherford, the encyclopedia salesman whose photograph graced the back of Fallows’s books. But to this day no one knew; there were no interviews with Fallows, no oral history, in fact nothing that proved beyond a doubt that the man was anything more than a pseudonym.

  But even pseudonyms can be traced. Fallows had never been.

  “Paul Fallows was playing
a game,” Aldiss said. “And in this class I want to take you into that game. The mystery we will unravel, then, will be the author himself. We will read both of Fallows’s existing novels and perhaps, if we are lucky, discover the great writer’s true identity.”

  There was a moment of confused silence.

  “What do you mean discover his identity?” a boy named Jacob Keller finally asked. He was an offensive lineman on the Jasper football team. An enigma: a hulking mass, but kind-eyed and quick with a smile, his fingertips always white with yard-line chalk. He was the only member of the football team who could recite Keats.

  “I mean, Mr. Keller,” Aldiss said, “that your one assignment in this class will be to discover who Paul Fallows really is.”

  “But that makes no sense,” said a voice from the back row. Lewis Prine was a psychology minor, perhaps the one student in the class who did not appear to be infatuated with books to the point of obsession. “People have been searching for Fallows for thirty years. Experts, academics, conspiracy theorists. How can we find him in our little night class at Jasper College?”

  “You must believe in your abilities more, Mr. Prine.”

  The students looked at one another. They felt empowered, energized—and a little bit scared. Time was running out in their first class. They’d been told that the screen would go black at the hour. The feed was set to run no longer.

  “Your reading assignment for the next class is the first fifty pages of Fallows’s masterpiece, The Coil. You will receive the full syllabus tomorrow morning in the campus mail,” Aldiss said. “But I want to leave you tonight with a question. Call it your homework assignment for our next class. It is a riddle right out of the great Paul Fallows.”

  The students waited, pens poised above notepads.

  “What is the name of the man in the dark coat?”

  With that Aldiss fell silent, and in a few seconds his image was gone, vanished from the screen once again.

  * * *