Dominance (22 page)

Alex balled up the eulogy she had written in her room the night before. Then she gathered herself again and said, “The Procedure is a dangerous game.” There was a look of confusion in the crowd, murmurs of uncertainty. “If anyone is playing it, then you must stop immediately. Michael knew this as well as anyone. If not for the Procedure, he might still be—”

At that moment someone cried out in the distance. The sound had come from the steep hill that led up to the Fisk mansion. The mourners turned and searched the fringe of campus, looking for the voice.

It was Detective Black. He was running toward them.

All Alex could do was simply watch the man approach. He ran across the east quad and entered the crowd, pushed his way to the stage.

“What is the meaning of this, Detective?” Dean Fisk said. He had rolled his chair forward. His blind eyes scanned the crowd madly.

“There's been another murder,” Black said breathlessly. “The body was found in your home just a few moments ago. Everyone needs to return there immediately.”

*   *   *

There was a group of policemen standing on either side of the armchair, looking down at the body of Lewis Prine. He sat stiffly, his hands clasped over his trenchcoat. The fire had gone out and the room smelled of ash. On the tables, glasses and bottles from the night before made a lonely cluster, some of them smeared with lipstick, others toppled on their sides. And in the middle of the room was the dead man, looking as if he were nothing but a bystander to it all.

So he decided to come after all,
Alex thought.
He just got to campus too late.

Prine's head was cocked back as if he had fallen asleep sitting up, and draped across his face was a book, a paperback that was stained now with dark blood. It was Christian Kane's
Barker at Night.

“I swear to God,” Christian was saying somewhere in the midst of people in the room. “I swear I had nothing to do with this. I'm being framed. I'm being framed, goddamn it!” His voice was tinged with hysteria, and the others regarded him coldly. Sally Tanner had fallen limply into Frank Marsden's arms, and in her face was a breathless shock.
No,
she mouthed soundlessly.
No, no, no.
Beyond her Lucy Wiggins stood by the fire, her arms cradled around herself, trembling in fear. And Keller stood beside Alex, his eyes jumping from the dead man to the wall and back again. Like Alex, he couldn't look at Lewis without remembering Iowa.

“A bullet wound,” Black was saying, “just behind the right ear.”

“I have no guns in my house,” Fisk said defensively. “If you find the weapon, then it was brought here by the killer.”

“My men are searching,” Black said, and Alex thought of the book she had hidden in her room. The object within and the place where she'd left it that morning. Black caught her eyes and she looked quickly away. “What we need to do now is get everyone who was in the mansion this morning back here. Prine was murdered then, either just before or just after everyone left.”

“But someone would have seen him,” the dean pleaded. “We would have surely run into—”

“Which way did you leave the house, Dr. Fisk?” Black asked.

The dean gestured to Matthew Owen. “Through the kitchen,” the nurse said.

“So it is possible,” deduced Black, “that when you left you simply did not encounter Lewis Prine. The man was running late, and when he arrived, someone here, someone who was staying in this house, murdered him.”

Fisk scoffed. “Impossible.”

“After the murder of Michael Tanner,” Black said, “we have to examine every possibility.” The detective looked at Alex and said, “You visited Aldiss last night.”

“He hasn't been here,” she said. It was too quick, too defensive. “He wouldn't come to a memorial service. It isn't his style.”

“Every possibility,” Black repeated.

Then the man backed into the hallway and said something to Dean Rice, who looked pale and shaken. The dean nodded and left the house.

“Is everyone back from the service?” one of Black's lieutenants asked.

Alex looked around. The great room was a swarm of activity now, cops and technicians working within the wide space cordoned off to preserve the crime scene; it had taken the former students nearly an hour to work their way free of the people at the service, past the crush of reporters pushing forward against the stage. Through the grimy window she could see a clutch of reporters. Rice was giving them some sort of statement.

Aldiss was right,
she thought.
He was exactly right about all of this.

“Is that everyone?” Black asked again.

“Everyone,” said Keller, still fixed firmly at her side, “except for one.”

Alex scanned the room and noticed that someone had indeed not returned from the service. When she saw who it was, a mix of anger and confusion swept through her.

“Melissa Lee,” she said aloud.

Black nodded and motioned to the lieutenant. “Find Lee and bring her back here,” he said. “Everyone who stayed in this house last night is a possible target—and a suspect.”

When the students arrived the next night in Culver Hall, they found the classroom empty. The television cart had been pushed to a back corner and on the chalkboard someone had written NO CLASS—PROF. ALDISS HAD BLACKOUT.

The nine students went back out into the night. They walked together, the wind burning their cheeks. The campus rested, the high windows in the Tower throwing grids of yellow light onto the quads. The wind screamed through the corridor of dormitories on the west campus. For the longest time no one in the small group spoke.

It was Melissa Lee who broke their silence.

“The game,” the girl simply said.

“What about it?” Keller asked.

“We should play. Here, tonight.”

The others stopped walking. Lewis Prine said, “I don't know if that's such a good idea, Melissa.”

“I have a friend at Dumant,” Lee continued. “Russian lit major. She says they still play the Procedure on weekends. It's nothing—just something to do for fun. We've read enough of
The Coil
to at least fake it.” Her eyes jumped from face to face. She wanted this.

“I don't understand it,” said Sally Mitchell quietly. “It all sounds . . . cliquish.”

“Come on, Sal. Do you think there's anybody else at Jasper who could play this game? No, only us. We're the best. I think this is what Aldiss was telling us the other night. He was urging us to start our own game. To begin the Procedure on this campus.” Lee fell silent. They were in front of the Fisk Library now, a lone streetlamp illuminating their group.

Finally Daniel Hayden spoke, the boy's voice clear and sharp in the night: “I don't want any part of this,” he said. And he turned and left. The others watched him go, his footsteps crunching away over the ice, and when his figure was merely a speck on the dark quad, Lee said, “Anybody else scared?”

No one moved. It was an agreement.

*   *   *

Twenty-four hours later, Alex pulled on her gloves and slipped outside. She stopped on her dorm's front porch and looked across the campus into an unsettling blackness, unusual for a winter's night. Where was the moon?

She walked, her breath steaming in her eyes. She kept her head down and went instinctively; every turn on the campus she knew by heart. It took her three minutes and seventeen seconds to reach her destination.

The party was already throbbing. The Alpha Sigma Tau house was crammed full, students clumped into the living room and standing before a blazing fire. Someone bumped against her, offered her a cup. It sloshed over into her bare hand, scorching cold. Alex took it and drank. The music raged.

She looked for Keller. She had begun to do this out on campus, at these random parties: search the room for his smile. Sometimes she saw him and sometimes not, but always she looked and felt empty when she couldn't find him.

At the back of the house now. A set of tall windows looking out over the vast east campus, the darkness here more unstable. A few students were sitting on floor cushions, playing truth or dare. Keller wasn't among them. The song—Throwing Muses'“Cry Baby Cry”—ebbed away and another replaced it.

Someone brushed past her again. “Hey,” Alex said, the drink still burning her throat. She looked up, but the person had bled into the crowd.

No. Not quite. They had left something.

A note. Another piece of confetti dropped into her cup, swimming upward, four words bleeding away just as she read them.

Culver Hall. It begins.

Alex felt her throat constrict. Again she looked around, laughing despite her fear. She'd forgotten about the Procedure in the day's studying, blotted it out with Fallows. The real Fallows, not the legion of subtext:
The Coil,
the end of that strange book coming on now, the meaning she knew was there taunting her, just out of reach.

Maybe you need to get deeper,
she told herself now.
Maybe you need to go where Aldiss went.

Alex left the house, went back out into the cutting wind. She made her way to Culver.

The building was as black as the night. Nothing moved; nothing rustled.

At first Alex didn't see anyone. The drink, the smoky frat house, the fear she felt knocked through her, tremored her limbs. Made her legs weak. The cold became sharper, the moonless night more bottomless. She wondered if she'd been tricked, if this was Lee's way of pulling a prank.
That bitch,
she thought—and it was then that she saw a shape flit against the building's dark facade. Someone was coming.

Frank Marsden appeared before her, a loopy smile on his face. “Miss Claire?” he said.

Alex wanted to laugh. To be doing this here, tonight . . . it was ridiculous. And yet another part of her wanted to keep it going, to see if she could play the game Aldiss had spoken about in his lecture. To see if she was worthy. She remembered his words that night:
The strange thing about the Procedure was that you didn't know you were inside it until you realized something had changed.

“Yes, sir?” she said.

“Welcome home, my dear lady,” Marsden went on, falling into the part like the actor he was. “Welcome to . . . Fuck.” He shook his head and brought up a paperback book he'd brought with him. It was
The Coil.
Marsden had brought a penlight, and he shone it on the page. Finally he said, “Welcome to Hamlet, Iowa. Is there anything I can get you?”

Alex opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. Nothing but a girlish little squeak that made Marsden shift and Alex flush with shame. She remembered the scene but couldn't find the words. The details. Now everything left her, got sucked away as if some kind of vacuum lock had been cracked, and a feeling of panic swept over her. She didn't want to go to the book, to show Marsden that she'd already forgotten.
Then you are shunned. And as a Fallows scholar, to not be inside, to not be one of them—that is a fate worse than death.

“The book,” Marsden whispered, offering his copy. She smelled whiskey on his breath; it was all a game, she told herself, nothing but a deviation from midterm exams on a Thursday night. Just a little fun. She tried to relax. “Your line.”

Alex took the book from him, opened it. Found the scene and read, “You can show me where—”

“No reading,” Marsden said. “That's one of the rules. Sorry, Alex.”

She lowered the book, closed her eyes. “You can show me where Ann Marie is staying. It has been so long since I've seen her.”

Marsden said, “Right this way.”

She followed him. And as she did she noticed something: other people, some of them strangers and some familiar. Ten or twelve Jasper students, each passing her on both sides of Rose Street. She saw Lewis Prine. “Evening, ma'am,” he slurred, tipping an invisible hat.

It was the scene. The scene exactly, down to the crowded street and the people swarming by.

Fallows. They're replicating it, re-creating the book here, on this campus.

For some reason, the realization filled her with dread.

Alex followed Marsden around Culver Hall, past trees glazed with snow. Branches smacked at her face but she walked, and soon they were on a different quad. In front of them was Turner Hall. This was Melissa Lee's dorm. The students called it the Overlook, after the hotel in
The Shining.

Inside then, into the warmth. More students here, extras and outcasts. Some of them drank from plastic cups, some were already drunk
and going off script. The scene in
The Coil,
the tiny four-page movement Lee had chosen for this game, contained only some of it.

Someone called out, “What the fuck is a Procedure?” Another two students kissed, tongues flashing. Someone was playing the Doors on a portable stereo, “The End” filtering through it all. Frank Marsden, still in character and stumbling a bit, led Alex to the staircase. She followed him up.

The door to Lee's room had been cracked, just as Fallows described it, and inside there was the heavy smell of marijuana. Soft, acoustic music played, and as Alex entered she saw Lee sitting before a cardboard box wrapped in tinfoil: the “mirror scene,” one of the more important in
The Coil.
Aldiss had highlighted it, had finely gone over it with them, had talked about its themes and details at length. Now she was here, in this simple dorm room, inside those pages. Alex's pulse quickened.

The others were here: Sally Mitchell, Michael Tanner, and Keller. Her heart skipped when she saw him, but she brought herself back. They were waiting for her, sitting off to the side and not moving through the room—a little different from Fallows's original version, but it would have to do. They were too far in now.