Date Night (Part 2)

Jacob felt panic sharpen his mind, raising his awareness to a level he rarely bothered to obtain, and then going still further until his awareness felt thin and brittle, like a still pond’s surface after a night’s hard frost.  The apples he was holding tumbled from his hands, landing in his backpack to join the bread by merest luck alone.  What could he say to escape?  What excuse could appropriately explain his presence in the kitchens?  While his mind raced, his hands and feet solved the problem for him.  Well before he knew what he was doing, a fifth apple was pulled from the barrel and thrown at the Dean’s head; simultaneously, he whirled and ran for the door.

Moving away from the light so quickly made the small white rooms grow darker disproportionally.  A mere two turns later he felt sure that the dishwashing machine was directly ahead, but he could see nothing at all.  The room felt limitless, as if he could run forever ahead without finding either the door or any other impediment to his headlong sprint.  His heavy boots slapped the tile, but the sound seemed to drift away without the echo that had been so obvious just moments ago.

Jacob shook his head and came to a sudden stop.  There was no question he was still in the kitchens, and there was no reason to think otherwise.  The door simply must be nearby, and running into the dishwashing machine could break his legs with little difficulty.  The logical action was to proceed carefully, no matter what the danger behind him was.  No sooner had this thought crossed his mind than the Dean, somewhere behind him, came close enough that the light from his lantern began to spill into Jacob’s room.  Impossibly, it was not the dishwashing room, and he found himself only an inch from a white-tiled wall.  Another instant of running would have knocked him out cold.

He threw his gaze around the unfamiliar room, looking for exits.  Directly behind him, in the direction he thought he’d just come in, were three doors on ground-level, and a ramp leading up to a fourth.  He no longer had any idea where the Dean was.  The room grew steadily brighter, as if lanterns were slowly approaching from every entrance simultaneously, herding him towards the ramp.  Jacob’s mother had a saying: “When you’re out of other options, take the one you’ve got.”  And so he did.

The ramp, which had looked wooden, made a metallic sound as he stepped on it.  As he threw himself at the door, the room lightened and he felt sure his pursuer was right behind him.  Desperately, he grabbed at the handle and was surprised that it opened without resistance.  A few frantic moments later, and he had exited the kitchens through the cafeteria and was back in the icy freedom of the outdoors.  Burying himself in the anonymity of darkness, he took off in a random direction across campus, remembering to stay on the sidewalks to avoid leaving a clear path of destruction in the crusty snow.

Just as his heartbeat began slowing, the clocktower struck one o’clock.  Jacob shifted the weight of his backpack and sighed.  Besides not getting the food he needed, he apparently was unable to stay focused even long enough to tell the time.  He could have sworn that he left his dorm at ten, but surely no more than forty-five minutes had passed.  He kicked himself mentally: it was a wonder he was even able to function.  Cursing under his breath as the adrenaline began to fade, he straightened his course and began heading back to his dorm.

The next day, after missing breakfast and sitting dejectedly through lunch, Jacob Bale began performing triage on his plans for the evening.  He had no money to take Miss Swenson anywhere, he had cooked nothing the night before, and the only supplies he had been able to steal were a single loaf of bread and some apples.  The apples were meant to be the pièce de la resistance, but were a poor excuse for an entire meal, much like wearing a gold monocle instead of a gentleman’s suit.  His disguised dorm room no longer seemed like a virtue made from shortcoming, and instead just felt pathetic.  And he still had no horses.

Still, something had to be salvageable.  The hurdles he knew, but it was time to look at his resources: bread and apples.  Unbidden, a memory came back to him from a time before his father had disappeared in the European War.  He and his parents were in a grassy valley of some kind.  The sound of water came from somewhere nearby.  And they had bread and apples.

A picnic.  If the setting were good enough, it might compensate for the poor table-spread.  Thank goodness for the recent rise in temperatures; there was still no melt during the day, but the dead of night was still only a modest drop to just under 25 degrees.  With a little bundling, a starlight picnic could be just the thing.  It would be memorably different, anyways.

But to really pull off a nighttime picnic, especially one that was trying to hide its desperate roots, Jacob knew he needed at least one extra component.

                Jacob swallowed.  Hard.  Then again.  He wouldn’t have considered this a short time ago, but the previous night made him feel that his priorities – no, his very world was unraveling.  What better time to press your luck?  He knocked on Henry’s door, and stepped quickly back as if the door might take offense.

                Henry Flint was a student of indeterminate age whom everyone recognized and everyone left alone – unless you had business with him.  He had come to Bemidji from Chicago, and had no interest in higher education.  His entire college career was based on having access to students seeking alcohol and willing to pay handsomely for it.  Of course, every third student’s relatives ran a secret still somewhere in the woods, but there was always a chance that those beverages would make you go blind or explode in the bottle.  Henry had a seemingly limitless access to the real stuff: the best of the best.  And if that’s not what you wanted, you stayed out of his way.

                  Jacob licked his lips, and knocked again.  He felt the invisible eyes on him in the hallway, watching and judging him, and waiting seemed to make it worse.  He longed to move, to hide in some scrap of darkness, to be looked over.  When he heard a voice from within, he took the initiative and let himself in, closing the door quickly behind himself.

                Only once he was inside, his eyes struggling to adjust to the darkened room, did he truly think about what a strange thing that had been for him to do.  What was wrong with him these days?

               Heavy, expensive-looking drapes were firmly drawn against the two windows, and the room was covered in deep shadows.  A figure stirred somewhere in the depths, and for one horrible moment it looked like the Dean; then the silhouette solidified and it was merely another student – but it still wasn’t Henry.

                “I, I wanted to speak with… Isn’t this Henry Flint’s room?”  This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

                “Henry?”

                Jacob’s eyebrows raised of their own accord.  It was a woman speaking to him from the shadows.

                “I’m sorry, ma’am, I must have the wrong room.”

                “Ma’am?”  She gave a gasping laugh.  “Henry’s gone.  He does that sometimes.  Haven’t seen him all week.  You see him, you tell him Daisy’s looking for him, you hear?”

                Already thrown off-balance, Jacob was having a hard time thinking straight.  The air in the room was thick and hot, oppressive and smothering.  The room smelled like burning sage, and it irritated his nose.  He wanted to leave.

                “Yes, I will do that, of course.”  He turned to leave, then paused.  He had to see this through.  “You don’t know anything… this is awkward, you understand, but someone had told me that they’d heard from someone that Henry might have, uh, for sale, um, things.”

                A pause, and another gasping laugh from the darkness.  “Sweetie,” the voice began.

                “Of course not, I’m sorry, never mind.  I can show myself out.”

                “Henry’s been gone for nearly a week, and there’s no telling when he’ll be back.  Sometime it suits him to lay low, you know?  Check back Monday.  All I know is I ain’t seen him and I ain’t gonna give you anything that’s not,” her voice lowered, became almost conspiratorial, “mine to give.”

                Something about her words seemed odd to Jacob’s ears, but he was anxious to go.  He was sure the air was choking him – and, impossibly, it kept getting thicker.  A few minutes more, and he feared the weight would choke him and he would simply drown standing up.  He turned to the door and froze for just an instant.  The voice came to him once more, low and dripping with amusement: “Aww, I didn’t mean to startle you, Rabbit.”

                But it wasn’t her words or the room which made him pause, it was the nail driven into the door.  A thin spike of metal, flashing slightly as it reflected some light which had no source and illuminated nothing else in the stinking, crushing darkness of Henry Flint’s room; but the brief glint gave him the answer to his problems.

                “You said he might not be back for days?”  He asked.  Metal would be his salvation.

                “When Henry goes for cover, only the devil himself knows when he’ll come up for air.”

                “I’ll talk to him then,” Jacob said, and opened the door just enough to escape into the yellow light of the hallway.  He had to check behind the dorm, and there was a window at the end of the hall.  Pressing his nose against the cold glass, he looked down and felt a reckless surge of adrenaline.  He never found a horse or carriage with which to pick up Miss Swenson, but there were five cars on campus; and the owner of one of them had vanished on cue.

                He raced up two flights of stairs to his own room, and grabbed the supplies he’d spent the morning preparing.  It wasn’t far to the Swenson farm, and the car would be back that evening after dark.  No one would ever be the wiser, and if anyone noticed it gone they would assume Henry hadn’t gone quite as far as normal – or perhaps that “Daisy” or someone had borrowed it.  He raced back down the stairs and outside, ignoring the one last thick strand of air that tried to close his throat as he passed by.

                The car was beautiful.  Twice Jacob walked by it with exaggerated casualness, even though it appeared no one else was nearby.  Each time he sought the crank in vain with his eyes, hoping to look practiced and confident if anyone should oversee him from a distance.  It wouldn’t do to look puzzled at the operation of his own car – no, no, nothing suspicious about this man of the world out for a drive.  It wasn’t until he walked right up and stared at the front that a thought occurred to him: Flint had spared no expense, and had purchased a top-of-the-line motor with electric start.  Sure enough, there was the black button on the dashboard.

                Jacob’s nerve was almost shaken: what was he doing messing around with a car like that?  But inside he knew that somewhere along the line, perhaps without realizing it, he’d already cast his dice.  There were no decisions to be made anymore; all that was left was to wait and see how things played out.  He slid into the driver’s seat and held down the button until the engine roared into life.  For just a moment, time seemed to slow as he wheeled the car onto the road and turned north.

                Had he looked behind him, his last view of the campus might have shown him the silhouettes of the watchers, scattered throughout the buildings and staring silently, pressed against the windows while he remained vulnerable in the light of day.  But that was merely paranoia, he knew; he refused to look behind.  Besides, his date was waiting.