Page 28 of The Bad Weather Friend

“But I don’t want to be mean,” Benny said.

“Being mean is not the way to happiness,” Mengistu said. “You must do what Jurgen and I intend to do.”

“We intend,” said Jurgen, “to endure until we’re of age, and then bail out of the ruling class, live among people who don’t want power over others, who don’t think they’re entitled either by birth or education to control everyone else.”

“The bigger problem might seem to be surviving Briarbush without being changed,” Mengistu said. “But it is not.”

“The bigger problem,” Jurgen concurred, “is what our families will do to us, a few years from now, when we try to bail out.”

Mengistu’s light, musical voice became heavy. “We want to avoid ending in a monastery built by pyrolater monks or the equivalent.”

“I don’t think I have to worry,” Benny decided. “My family already abandoned me. My mom and Jubal, my stepfather, didn’t send me here to be changed. They just wanted to get me out of the way.”

Jurgen said, “How very fortunate you are if that’s true.”

“However,” Mengistu said, “for whatever reason, you are here. Once you are here, Headmaster Baneberry-Smith, his insect-obsessed wife, and his staff of brainwashers will steep your intellect in nonsense, poach your heart in lies, Cuisinart your soul, pour you into the Briarbush mold, bake you, and send you off to university where you will be spatulated with a bitter icing of entitlement, after which you will not have any memory of the kind of person you once were and wanted to be.”

“Mengistu wants to be a chef and eventually own a restaurant,” Jurgen said, explaining the culinary references.

“But my parents,” Mengistu said, “wish to arrange a position for me in a major media company, have me develop a suitable on-air image, and eventually move me into politics to oppress the working class if they rebel against the planned revolution from the top.”

“Wow,” Benny said. “That doesn’t sound like any fun at all.”

“No, it does not,” Mengistu agreed. “It sounds like even less fun than whatever has happened to poor Prescott Galsbury in the laboratory of the headmaster’s wife.”

Thus the conversation returned to the ant-eating Galsbury, whom Mengistu had seen at a window of said laboratory two weeks earlier, three weeks after the boy had supposedly been expelled and sent home.

In the tradition of rebellious boys immured against their will in Gothic institutions where mysterious goings-on were going on, the three friends schemed to investigate the laboratory that very night. When the lights-out bell sounded at ten o’clock, they would all be tucked in bed, fully clothed, with the covers drawn to their chins. Felthammer House’s proctor, Carter Manship, a senior and a shameless toady of the school administration, would proceed room to room with his usual fascistic enthusiasm, certifying that the occupants were abed and turning out the lights on them. The proctor himself was required to be in bed for the night by ten thirty, and he was the kind of suck-up who would rather be castrated than break a Briarbush rule. At precisely 10:45, the three conspirators would leave their rooms through windows and meet in the grove of silver firs behind Catherine Baneberry-Smith’slaboratory, at the farthest end of the open meadow from the school and its dormitories.

This plan seemed too simple to succeed, but three conditions ensured its success, the first of which was the school’s isolate location. Briarbush was so remote that even the most adventurous hikers never made it alive through the abysmal ravines and primeval forests to invade the—as the brochure put it—“scenic and idyllic redoubt of academic pursuits, where your loved one’s mind will be enriched and his character properly formed.” At the bottom of the only approach road stood a formidable gate that would withstand mortar fire, if it ever came to that, and a gatehouse at all times occupied by two heavily armed former Marine Corps snipers. Because the school buildings also featured impenetrable, cleverly concealed panic rooms, no further security was required to patrol the grounds at night. If Mengistu, Jurgen, and Benny were stealthy and quick, they were at no risk of encountering either security personnel or kidnappers.

The success of the boys’ plot was further facilitated by the location of their dorm rooms, which were all on the ground floor of Felthammer House, providing them with easy egress, and also because Mengistu Gidada had a room all to himself. His parents paid a double tuition for this courtesy, ostensibly because they wanted him to be able to attend to his studies without distraction, although in fact because they feared the wrong roommate might seduce their son into a life of sexual ecstasy that denied them grandchildren. Repeatedly, his father had warned, “Sexual ecstasy before the age of twenty-one, especially with other than a female, will flood your brain with dire chemicals that, over time, will lower your IQ to that of a monkey, a very sad monkey. Sexual ecstasy must be delayed until the brain is fully formed. For one asyoung as you, sexual ecstasy is far more damaging than injecting heroin and eating dung, though you should never do those things, either.”

Finally, the three seekers of truth were unlikely to encounter any member of the school staff or other students. Rarely did anyone venture outdoors after dark, other than into the gated quadrangle, because of the chance of being mauled and eviscerated by either a cougar or a bear. What Mengistu’s father had perhaps forgotten was that, in boys of a certain age, undertaking forbidden adventures can generate brain chemicals that induce a state of ecstasy and override even the fear of being eaten alive.

And so the friends met in the grove of silver firs, which was known as the Headmaster’s Hanging Ground. Rumor had it that decades earlier a headmaster, driven mad by his students, had hanged himself from a tree here. This was denied by the administration, and it was likely a baseless rumor, but because the boys wanted it to be true, it was a legend that could not be quashed. In the interest of school spirit, every institution of this kind needs to respect such lore.

Adjacent to the Headmaster’s Hanging Ground stood a single-story building of considerable size, in which groundskeepers housed their machines and equipment. Because thieves and vandals were not a problem in the remoteness of Briarbush, the doors to this structure were never locked. Mengistu, Jurgen, and Benny were able to obtain two powerful Tac Lights that maintenance personnel employed when searching distant pockets of the school’s vast attics for bats and for the occasional gagged-and-bound freshman or sophomore who, during hazing week (the fourth week of every month), had been secured there by upperclassmen determined to instill psychological endurance and paniccontrol in him. They also borrowed an extendable ladder and carried it to the back of the laboratory, which stood perhaps forty yards east of the Headmaster’s Hanging Ground.

This occurred under a Cheshire moon hanging over them like the bright teeth in a cocked sneer, as if the moon knew what horror waited to be revealed and believed they deserved to be terrorized for the rule-breaking hugger-muggery in which they were engaged. The air was cool and still. An eerie hush prevailed in the surrounding forest, as if the bears and mountain lions were approaching through the underbrush on tiptoe to avoid revealing themselves while the delectable prey might still be able to flee.

The two front casements of the lab featured clear glass. At one of these, Mengistu had seen a tormented Prescott Galsbury. The next day, both openings were boarded over from the inside. Throughout the rest of the building, other panes were frosted glass; they always had been. However, a large skylight on the roof, which could be seen from the third floor of Felthammer house, seemed to be clear glass. This window was the observation point into the secrets of Catherine Baneberry-Smith’s laboratory that Mengistu and Jurgen and Benny—who believed themselves to be sane—were determined to reach.

The metal ladder clattered when they raised the extension, and it banged once against the rain gutter as they positioned it. The bang was louder than the clatter. The three boys froze, prepared to sprint away into the night if a voice challenged them. The lunar sneer seemed to grow sharper and more contemptuous, but Benny was pretty sure he imagined the moon’s increasing derision.

Because the single-story building was wide, the pitch of the roof wasn’t extreme, and the cast cobbles with which it was paveddidn’t splinter underfoot as slate might have done. The skylight lay on the south slope, just below the ridgeline: a double row of four panes, each two feet square, framed by what appeared to be stainless steel, separated from one another by muntins of the same metal.

The reflection of the moon sneered up at them.

As quiet as commandos scouting an enemy installation, thrilled by their bravery, so self-controlled that they didn’t even whisper to one another, the boys gathered at the high window on their knees, peering into the depths of Mrs. Baneberry-Smith’s laboratory. The darkness below was not absolute. Here and there, scores of tiny indicator lights on equipment of unknown function glowed red or green or amber, but these did not relieve the gloom.

Mengistu pressed the lens of his Tac Light to a pane before switching it on. This prevented glare from reflecting off the skylight glass and avoided producing so much light that a teacher who happened to look out a window of his apartment in Sikes House, the faculty residence, might suspect curfew was being broken.

Without angling the beam, Mengistu could illuminate only one small area of the lab directly below. He needed to ease along the skylight, sliding the lens across the glass, to explore the premises piecemeal, while Jurgen and Benny inched along with him, squinting into the Frankensteinian depths. In addition to arcane machinery, the room held rows of large glass boxes, like aquariums with curated environments, although they were not full of water or fish. From a height and in the inadequate light, Benny couldn’t clearly see what specimens occupied these glass-enclosed worlds. He glimpsed shadowy shapes skittering and scuttling and twitching. His impression was thatnone of these creatures was small enough to be squashed by a stomping foot. And none was as lethargic as the toxin-crippled cockroaches his mother used to bury in a beetle cemetery in the backyard. To a one, these insects seemed highly agitated, perhaps disturbed by the sudden beam of light. Or maybe being subjected to observation and experimentation by the headmaster’s wife had driven them bug-shit crazy.

Frustrated by the limitations of this method of inspection, Mengistu tilted the Tac Light and found that, at the proper angle, he was able to direct the beam farther across the room below while minimizing the glare enough that they could see through it fairly well. Which was when they discovered the human form, naked and as pale as snow, facing away from them, hanging halfway up the far wall of the lab. The individual’s arms were splayed, his hands flattened against the wall above his head, legs dangling, as if he must be chained or nailed through the wrists or fixed there in some even grislier fashion, like the humongous exotic insects pinned to display board in Lucite boxes in the headmaster’s drawing room.

In a voice that Benny found surprisingly steady under the circumstances, Jurgen whispered, “Is that Galsbury?”

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