something? Then it hit him. This morning was the last period on the exam schedule. The departure of the students, the teachers, even the film crew, all vanishing at once like characters in a fairy tale, probably happened just this way every Christmas.
The church bell-the top of the chapel tower visible over the gold-domed roof of Goodrich Hall, weathervane pointing north-tolled the hour. At the same time, a cold wind began to blow; from the west, Nat noticed, despite the weathervane. No snow had fallen yet, but everyone said the Inverness Valley was one of the snowiest places in the east. Nat looked up, saw a line of clouds closing over the sky.
He wasn’t going anywhere for Christmas. There’d been money for only one trip home that semester, and he’d chosen Thanksgiving, although it was shorter, because Patti’s birthday had been the day after. He crossed the quad and went into Baxter to check his mail. Standing before the rows of brass letter boxes, he realized he was still holding the basketball.
Nat put it down, turned the dial to J3, took out a letter.
Dear Nat I’m so sorry about that little insident at Julie’s party. I don’t know what came over me. I’ll never drink like that again. For sure. You were so great about it. At least that’s what Julie said the next day. Joke. Everythings ok but I miss you so much and not looking forward to Xmas at all. One other thing I think I missed my period-but don’t worry, I maybe just got mixed up. I love you soooo much. Patti ps-my present should be there by now.
Nat reached back into the box, found a small package. He took it back to the dorm. Wags’s lab notes still lay all over the floor of the outer room. Nat heard voices in Wags’s bedroom, glanced in the open door. No Wags. Clothes trailing over everything, and the TV on. One of those movie channels Wags liked to watch. An actor from the thirties or forties whose name Wags would know at once but Nat didn’t stared thoughtfully into his glass while an offscreen actress asked what they were doing that night. Nat smelled coffee, noticed a steaming cup on the windowsill, half full. He left the TV on, went to his own bedroom, put Patti’s gift on the bed.
Tacked on the wall was a list of what he wanted to accomplish during the holiday: clean room laundry write home work out get to know town and surroundings
›on next semester
That last one being the most important: Nat had registered for an American novel course that required reading a book a week, and he’d never keep up, would fall behind in everything, without a head start. Book one, Young Goodman Brown and Other Stories, already borrowed from the library, was waiting on the orange crate that served as his bedside table.
Nat sat on the bed, picked up the book, but first reread Patti’s letter. He tried to see what she’d crossed out, partially distinguishing only one word- kissed, pissed, or missed- but nothing else. He swung his feet up on the bed, overcame the urge to take off his sneakers. No time for sleep: two hundred pages of Young Goodman Brown and Other Stories before dinner was the goal. He read the letter one more time. There, in the center of all those unusual silences-his room, the dorm, the whole campus-he could almost hear Patti’s voice. What had happened at Julie’s party didn’t bother him at all; what bothered him was the spelling. That, and the way she dotted the i in her name with a heart. Had she always? If so, it hadn’t mattered before. Why should it matter now?
Nat opened Young Goodman Brown. The title page showed a woodcut of a young man striding down a country road. Someone had drawn a bottle of beer in his hand and a fat joint in his mouth. Nat turned the page.
Young Goodman Brown came forth at sunset into the street at Salem village…
Nat opened his eyes. It was dark. His gaze went to the window, but there was no window, at least not where he was looking. He’d forgotten he wasn’t in his bedroom at home. Rolling over, he checked the clock, read the numbers-11:37-but before he could make sense of them he heard footsteps in the outer room.
“Wags?” he called, but his throat was thick with sleep; he cleared it and tried again. “Wags?” At that moment he remembered that he’d been leaning out of a helicopter in his dream.
Silence from the other room. Then the door to the hall closed. 11:37 P.M. Wouldn’t Wags be home in Pittsburgh by now? Not Pittsburgh exactly, but someplace nearby called Sewickley, as Wags’s parents had mentioned a couple of times on the Parents’ Day visit in October, the significance lost on Nat at the time. Since then he’d learned that the country hid a network of Sewickleys with names like Greenwich, Chagrin Falls, Dover, Lake Forest, Grosse Pointe; that many students at Inverness came from those places; that Wags knew people they knew, and they knew people he knew.
He sat up. Had the door to the hall simply closed, or had it been something else, more of a slam? Nat rose, switched on the lights, peered into the outer room, saw everything as it had been earlier, Wags’s lab notes still strewn on the floor, the screen savers of both computers in motion. He opened the door.
A man was walking away toward the stairs at the far end of the hall, a big man carrying something heavy. Nat took in a ponytail swinging behind his head and an electrical cord trailing between his legs, two dangling things that his half-sleeping mind, still following the logic of dreams, tried to relate. By the time he realized there was no relationship other than the visual one he’d seen at first glance, the man had disappeared down the stairs. Nat went back into Wags’s bedroom. Wags’s TV was gone.
Nat ran into the hall, yelled, “Hey!” He kept running, fully awake now, down the stairs to the first floor. No one there, but he picked up the sound of descending footsteps. Nat followed, heard the clicking of hard shoes on the old brick floor of the basement corridor. He yelled “Hey” again, took the last flight in one leap, swung around the banister post into the basement corridor. No one there.
Nat went down the corridor, slowing because it ended at a padlocked steel door with the word Maintenance stenciled on the front. He walked back the way he had come, passing three other padlocked doors, all of which he knew led to storage lockers for the students, and came to another door, lockless. Nat stood in front of that door. He sensed someone on the other side, tried to think of a way he could summon security and stand guard at the same time. Then came a jolt of adrenaline, and he jerked the door open.
A janitor’s closet, full of brooms, mops, buckets, cleansers. Even empty, it wasn’t big enough for a man with a television, especially one the size of Wags’s. Nat closed the door, went back along the corridor, trying all the padlocks. Fastened, every one.
Nat stayed in the basement corridor for a minute or two, listening for a sound, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did.
He went upstairs, along the first floor to the main entrance of the dorm. Had he imagined those footsteps on the brick floor, or misinterpreted some sound he had heard? It was one or the other. Nat opened the door to the quad. Surprise.
White. White everywhere: snow had fallen while he slept, fallen heavily, although it wasn’t snowing now, and the stars shone bright. A foot of snow, maybe more, deep, crisp, even. It bent the branches of the old oaks, gave the statue of Emerson a hulking, steroidal profile, rounded the dorm entry pediments and other architectural features whose names Nat was starting to learn: pure, unmarred whiteness, glowing under the old Victorian lampposts as though lit from below.
Nat called campus security from his room and was told to file a report in the morning. He locked the door to the hall, went into Wags’s bedroom, took in the disarray, no worse than before, and the coffee cup on the windowsill, still half full but now cold, satisfied himself that nothing else was missing. Back in the outer room, he picked up Wags’s lab notes and piled them neatly on his desk, even trying to arrange them in some sort of order.
Nat sat on the couch that Bloomingdale’s had delivered after the visit of Wags’s parents and reopened Young Goodman Brown. This time he followed Goodman Brown out of Salem to his meeting in the forest with what Nat supposed was the devil. He paused at the sentence “But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.” Nat read it several times and was reaching for his yellow highlighter when he thought: unmarred.
Snow unmarred. And therefore? Nat went downstairs, out to the quad. The night was cold and still, the only movement his own rising breath. He circled the dorm, snow up to his knees, sometimes higher. The only footprints were his, a shadow-filled trench he tramped around the building like a moat in miniature. His feet, still in the sneakers he’d slept in, got cold and then cold and wet. Other than that, no result. Back in his room, he called security again.
