Dominance (8 page)

Aldiss nodded firmly. Then he said, “Well. I didn't want to speak to you about this, but if
research
is being done without my knowledge, then it appears that we must. Let me only say this: I am guilty of sending two girls to their graves. I spend every night in this institution thinking about the troubled man I was as a young professor at Dumant University. And all I can say to you is that the mind is a locked room, conscience is the key, and some of us threw away the key a long time ago.”

“Are you sorry?”

Hayden again. And in that instant the students saw, for the first time, what their professor was capable of. His annoyance at the boy turned to something else, something like rage, hot and vile just at the corners of his eyes. In the very next second it was gone.

“ ‘Sorry' is just one word among many, Mr. Hayden.”

“But you murdered two people! You killed two innocent women and you arranged those books around their—”

“No one knows the entire story of what happened at Dumant,” Aldiss said. “No one will ever know. For me to say that I am
sorry
”—the word spat into the microphone before him—“would be to go back and relive my crimes, and I am not about to do that. Not here, not now.”

For a moment, it appeared Hayden had said all that he was going to say. But then he raised his gaze to the television one more time and said, “There were just the two, weren't there?”

Aldiss blinked, calmly, as if he had anticipated this very question.

“The victims they know about,” Hayden continued. “The two grad students—you've never killed anyone else, have you?”

The professor swiped a hand over his mouth and said, in a voice that was as sharp as glass, “I will not be interrogated by a student.”

With this the boy relented. He nodded, more to himself than anyone else, and placed his copy of
The Coil
on top of his notebook. Then he stood up and began to make his way to the television screen. There he paused and said something to Aldiss, something no one else in the class caught because his back was to them, and he walked out the door.

For a moment no one spoke.

When Hayden was gone the professor said, his voice even and calm, “And then there were eight.”

There were uneasy laughs. Someone coughed nervously. A few of them chattered just to hear the noise of their own talk. After a few seconds Aldiss hushed his students by putting one long, pale finger to his lips: “Shhh, class.” Silence descended.

He shuffled the notes that were in front of him on the rickety prison-issue table and said, “Now, who discovered the name of the man in the dark coat? Who solved the riddle?”

For a moment no one spoke. Then, from the middle of the lecture hall, a girl slowly raised her hand.

*   *   *

Alex had debated whether to say anything. Hadn't Aldiss just told them that he was guilty? Hadn't he confessed to the two murders right there before his class, with nine live witnesses and whoever else was watching the damn TV to hear his words? She thought about the book, so carefully hidden in her desk drawer back at Philbrick Hall. Of the strange
and tantalizing message there.
Richard Aldiss is innocent. Do not tell a soul you have seen this.
Perhaps she should remain silent, act as if she had never even found the thing at all.

No.

To say nothing would be to possibly let an innocent man die in prison. Perhaps this admission of his guilt was part of the trick. Part of Aldiss's master plan. She knew if the book and its hidden message were real, then Aldiss was counting on her. Relying on her to follow the clues . . .

Down the rabbit hole.

She raised her hand.

“Ah, Ms. Shipley,” Aldiss said, no hesitation at all in his eyes or his voice. “Tell the rest of the class what you found.”

Does he know?
she wondered.
Can he possibly know that I checked out the book? If so, then how is he so calm?

“The man in the dark coat,” Alex said now, trying to find her voice. Her tongue felt thick, misshapen. “His name was . . .”

“Please go on.”

“The man's name was Charles Rutherford.”

The professor smiled. Despite herself, Alex felt a rush of pride.

“The encyclopedia salesman?” someone behind her asked. Melissa Lee had a reputation at Jasper, both for being blazingly intelligent and for inciting a sex scandal that had been weaving its way through the lit faculty for the past two semesters. She wore all black, heavy layers of it, and her hair was streaked with alternating patterns of light and dark that made her look vaguely animalistic. Her face was death-white, a style the students at Jasper had begun calling Goth. Her eyes were painted black and her ears flashed with silver studs, and a sardonic smile always played upon her dark purple lips. Her T-shirt tonight read
KILL A POET
. “But Rutherford's a nobody. A pawn. He was dead a year before
The Golden Silence
even appeared, but they still slap his photo on the books because no one can be sure about the role he played. How did she . . .” Lee glared at Alex, and Alex merely smiled.

“That's the whole point, Ms. Lee,” Aldiss said. “Rutherford became a flashpoint for the Fallows scholars exactly because he was so improbable a suspect. First, he died of a brain embolism in 1974. One year later,
the second Fallows novel was published. There was also the problem of his clean-cut, square, midwestern image. At first, when the search for Fallows began, many believed that the Rutherford photograph was nothing but another trick. More misdirection. But as the scholars began to search for Rutherford, they found something very interesting.”

“He was a writer.”

Aldiss looked out at the class and found the one who had spoken. “That's right,” he said. “Very good.”

The boy was the football player, Jacob Keller. He was sitting just to Alex's right, and she glanced over and found his eyes. He nodded at her.
Cute,
Alex thought,
in a smart-jock sort of way
. She had seen him around campus with a few of his teammates, had spotted him down at a bar called Rebecca's a few times, sitting at a back table and tracing blocking patterns with his fingertips on index cards. Now Keller leaned over and whispered, “Me and you, Shipley, we're his pets now. The only question is where they'll find our bodies.” Alex stifled a laugh, and when she looked up she saw that Aldiss had heard. He was looking right at them, and her heart caught in her throat—but the professor only smiled.

“Charles Rutherford was indeed writing a book,” Aldiss finally continued. “They found pieces of the manuscript in his briefcase after his death. But it was a strange book, nothing like the stuff Paul Fallows would become famous for.”

The professor looked down at his table, shuffled through more of his notes, and then came up with one sheet of paper.

“Or was it?”

A quick movement, and then the professor's form was eclipsed on the screen, replaced by a yellowed document he had held up for the camera. One rumpled page, years old from the look of it, arteries of age running through the sheet like the whorls on a palm. Alex read what was written there, saw that the font was that of a typewriter. The page was heavy with bubbled mark-outs and grayed correction tape. It appeared to be—
How strange,
she thought. It was an encyclopedia entry.

“Rutherford was writing his own encyclopedia?” said a boy in back. This was Christian Kane, the slight boy with the denim jacket. Kane was the class auteur; he wrote Stephen King–esque short stories and
published them in the Jasper College literary magazine,
The Guild.
Kane fashioned himself after the famous French artisans, with upswept silvering hair and oxford shirts and colored scarves. His stories were so bizarre and violent that many wondered if he didn't live a secret life, if he hadn't somehow gleaned firsthand knowledge of his macabre subject matter back in his Delaware prep school.

“That's right, Mr. Kane,” Aldiss said. “He had just begun the volume when he met his demise. Just a few entries. As you see, he was still in the A's. But this encyclopedia—it was so much different from the Funk & Wagnalls he was selling door to door. This book was unusual. It seemed to be about Charles Rutherford himself, about his own experiences, the things he did and the people he spoke to every day as he sold his wares. At first, the line between this amateurish, navel-gazing writing and the labyrinthine, puzzles-within-puzzles writing of Fallows is clear. But as the scholars began to dig deeper, they saw that Rutherford's encyclopedia was itself a kind of puzzle.”

“How do you mean?” Michael Tanner asked.

“I mean Rutherford seemed to be playing a game. A game with himself, maybe—but then again maybe not. Look at this.”

Aldiss held another sheet up, this one much like the first. The paper looked so old and used that Alex felt as if she might be able to smell the must wafting off of it.

“This is one of the last entries.
A, Albridge.
A tiny description of a town follows that heading. Albridge, Iowa—population two thousand. A nowhere town not far from where Rutherford lived and worked. But what's unusual is when you look at a map of Iowa—”

“It doesn't exist.”

Keller again. Alex saw how quick he was, how he beat everyone in class to the answer. Whereas her mind, so tediously slow, moved much more carefully. Deliberately. She found herself looking at Keller again, glancing over and willing him to catch her eye.

“Albridge, Iowa, is indeed fictitious,” said Aldiss. “It was not on any maps at the time and still isn't. In his ‘encyclopedia entry,' Rutherford claims he was there. That he sold encyclopedias to a few residents. That he ate in a small diner near the town square. But none of that was real. And so, armed with this information, we must ask a greater question.”

For a moment the class remained silent, hyperaware. They hung on Aldiss's voice. He was moving them toward something now, drawing closer to a connection between Charles Rutherford, the dead man whose image had appeared on the books, and Fallows himself. The only sound in the lecture hall was the electronic hum and crackle of the television.

“Why?” Alex asked.

Aldiss looked at her with knowing eyes. Eyes that seemed to pick up everything in their path, to notice everything. Eyes that had once belonged to a young, clearly handsome man. But now they looked as if they
contained
too much, like when she refilled her mother's sugar bowl at home and some of the granules poured out on the table. That was it, Alex thought: there was some of the professor pouring out, overflowing through the screen itself.

“That's right, Ms. Shipley,” he said now. “The question is ‘Why?' Why would Charles Rutherford make up the small town of Albridge, Iowa? Why would he claim he'd spent his days there? The only solution is that Rutherford was playing a trick on someone. That his encyclopedia wasn't an encyclopedia at all but rather a—”

“A novel,” said Sally Mitchell in her too soft, too sweet voice.

Aldiss didn't respond; he only grinned, pleased that these nine (
No,
Alex reminded herself,
we are eight now
) special students were moving so fast.

“But there are always problems with the Rutherford–is–Paul Fallows theory,” Aldiss said. “The obvious one being that the man was dead when the second book appeared, which blew the whole thing out of the water. The photograph on the book jackets—it meant nothing, the scholars claimed. It had been a joke. Another play by Fallows in the game.”

“Did anyone at least go to Iowa and check it out?” Lewis Prine asked.

Aldiss nodded. “The scholars got to the Rutherford widow, of course. When the second and final novel,
The Golden Silence,
appeared, we—they had to know. And so yes, they flocked to Iowa. Sometimes they would just sit outside the house where Rutherford had once lived.”

“Jesus,” Melissa Lee muttered.

“Some of them gathered the courage to speak to his widow. At first she was polite, but then she saw how obsessed they were. To know. To put the mystery to rest. And she became angry. She and Charles Rutherford had a son, a young boy who was so ill that he had to be institutionalized for a time, and she had to think of his safety. This Fallows character, this crazy writer—he was not her husband. He could not be. She scolded them, drove them off any way she knew how, called the local police on them. Soon they drifted away and left the poor woman and her boy alone.”

The class thought about this. Frank Marsden, his lashes still thick with mascara from rehearsals for
Richard III,
asked, “So Rutherford, your ‘man in the dark coat'—there is no chance that he is really Paul Fallows?”

Aldiss said nothing at first. The students sat silently, waiting, the red-eyed camera mounted in the corner of the room recording everything. “I am not ready to answer that question,” Aldiss said at last. “There are indeed connections between the two men. Connections that it has taken me twelve years to uncover. It is so very difficult to work with the resources this prison can offer, but I believe I am finally close to the answer. Very close. I have discovered things about Fallows that I never knew when I was outside these walls.”

With that Aldiss paused, and everyone in the class sat forward.

“With the help of a few of my trusted colleagues,” the professor went on, “including my old friend Dr. Stanley Fisk, professor emeritus at Jasper, I have uncovered new information. Information that no Fallows scholar has seen.”

“What kind of information?” Alex asked breathlessly.

“Documents, mostly. But also clues hidden inside the two novels. Clues that you, students, will be following as this class goes forward. But these clues will not be given to you. You must earn them. This is a classroom of higher learning, after all, and in any good class the strong rise to the top. I will give you what I have discovered, but only if you earn your keep.”