Chapter Four

The heavy, wooden door made a small, startled noise as the key turned in the lock. Tess thought he heard something inside, the sound of something scuffling, followed by a whoosh of air. He opened the door cautiously, only to find the room pitch black.

“Oh, come on, don’t just stand there.” Clear pushed Tess into the room, and flicked on the lights behind her. The room was lit by four offensively powerful florescent lights in downward-turned fixtures, which took a moment to flicker to life. The lecture hall was one of the older ones – irregular sides, a high ceiling with a legacy of crisscrossing rafters overhead. Wrought-iron windows lined the far wall of the room, with tied-back dark red curtains on either side. The seats were all wooden, and looked as though they would creak when sat on. The room smelled like old wood and cloth, with a weird hint of something Tess couldn’t identify.

Tess was relieved to see that there was no one inside.

“I thought you said we were investigating new faculty,” Clear said.

“Um, I thought I did, too.”

Their words echoed back at them from high above.

“Well, this is neither new nor faculty.”

“Maybe we’re supposed to investigate the woman this was named after.”

“She’s not new, either! She stopped teaching here nearly sixty years ago!”

“I am so confused,” Tess admitted, flopping down in one of the wooden seats. The reverberating creak startled him back onto his feet.

“No one ever accused Professor Kincaid of being too sane,” Clear offered as she wandered through the hall. “Maybe he’s gone senile,” she added, examining the chalkboard.

“I suppose we may as well look around, just in case,” Tess sighed. He would rather just go home, but he didn’t want all this chasing around to be for nothing.

“Hey, did you just hear something?” Clear asked, looking up from the drawer she was rifling through.

“Um, I was a bit preoccupied.”

“Preoccupied, my ass. You were just staring off into space. Or maybe you were just checking me out.”

Tess made a face at her.

“No, seriously, I think I heard something moving up there.”

Tess looked up at the ceiling. The shades on the light fixtures kept the bulbs from bringing much light into the upper regions of the room. Tess thought a marching band might be able to hide in the rafters if they kept real still.

“It’s probably just bats,” Clear said confidently. “This would be a great place for bats.”

“Yeah.”

There was a moment of silence as the two looked up into the darkness. Clear closed the desk drawer carefully.

“You know,” she ventured, “I don’t think there’s anything to find here. Let’s head back.”

Tess agreed.

****

The next day, Tess was eating lunch with Clear and Al in the Risibel Memorial Cafeteria. Tess was spooning some jambalaya into his mouth, as Clear recounted last night’s break-in to Al.

“—so while I’m searching for info on this woman or hall or whatever we’re looking for, I hear this noise. Tess was too busy checking me out to notice—”

“I wasn’t checking you out,” Tess tried to interject, with a mouth full of jambalaya. It came out as more of a mumbly-splashy noise.

“Great defense. Anyway, Sterne Hall is full of bats. Hundreds of them. Can you believe this university lets bats just live wherever? Before you know it, the whole place is going to be full of guano.”

“We didn’t see any—”

“Guano means bat shit,” Clear added in a stage whisper.

“We didn’t see any bats, Clear. And I wasn’t checking you out, anyway – I wasn’t checking her out,” he added to Al, who nodded sagaciously. “I was just trying to figure out who we’re trying to find out about.”

“There were so bats, probably.”

“We didn’t see any bat poop.”

“You mean guano,” Al suggested.

“You mean bat shit,” Clear suggested.

“Look, all I’m saying is maybe it wasn’t bats, because we didn’t see any bat sh—any guano.”

“Or maybe they’re very clean bats. I mean, this is a university,” Clear teased.

“Or perhaps the professors collect it for biology experiments,” Al added.

“Ok, I give up.” Tess took another bite of his jambalaya and made a face, half at his friends, and half at the food.

“Hey, look who’s spotted us,” Clear said, prodding Tess. “It’s that girl you said loves cheese stakes yesterday, and that guy she hangs out with.”

Tess mumbled something, embarrassed.

“You know, she’s not bad-looking. You might have had a chance with her, if you hadn’t made such a fool of yourself. Oh my, oh my.”

“Look, I’m not interested in her, okay?” An image of McKenzie, the beautiful, confident girl from his geology class pranced through a summer field in his mind. His first thought was how much he wanted to impress her, and his second was how much he wanted to keep Clear from finding out.

“You cad! What’s she ever done to you?”

“Hey, what’s the deal with that guy she hangs out with?” Tess asked quickly to change the subject.

“No one seems to know,” Al answered, “but I’ve heard they go everywhere together.”

“Are they – ‘together’?” Tess asked.

“Oh no,” Clear said with a giggle. “Oh no no no. Milo is what we women like to call ‘gay’. That means, attracted to other men.”

“I—” Tess started to say.

“Not women. Just men,” Clear interrupted.

Tess glared at her. “Ha ha, the greek kid doesn’t know what gay means. You’re a stitch, you are.”

“You’re from Greece?” Maya said, having just arrived at the table. “That is so cool. There’s a really good Greek restaurant near here. I went there with my parents the first night we were here.” Maya suddenly stopped talking and looked down at her tray, her cheeks reddening.

“What my associate means to say is that the Greek culture is quite fascinating, and we’d like to join you for lunch, if you don’t mind,” Milo said, coming to Maya’s rescue. “I’m taking a class on ancient Greece right now, and I feel they were very forward thinking.” Milo gave a little laugh.

Clear laughed too, but Tess wasn’t sure why.

“Seriously, though, what’s really interesting is this class on paganism I’m taking with Professor Wheeler. Did you know that this is one of the few pagan-founded universities in the country?”

“I did not know that,” Clear said a little too seriously, while Al just nodded.

“It’s true. Philip Crowley, one of the founders, was into spiritualism, geomancy, and all sorts of interesting things.”

“That’s your hobby, right?” Tess said. “You’re into séances and pictures of faeries and stuff.”

“Well, not so much the faeries. But as far as historical information about séances is concerned, this class is great. Professor Wheeler studied under Professor Sterne – the old one, not the new one.”

Tess, Al, and Clear exchanged glances.

“What did I say?” Milo said, looking around at the three.

“How much do you know about Professor Sterne?” Tess asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. A little of this, a little of that. She was considered the foremost professor of occult religion in her time. Well, the foremost at a liberal arts institution, anyway. That’s why Wheeler is so good for information on spiritualism and the like. Why?”

“Well, it’s like this . . .” Tess began to explain.