Page 62 of The Bad Weather Friend

Spike said, “Remember what I told you, Benny.”

“What did you tell me?”

Harper said, “About why ten percent of the people assigned to him have been murdered horrifically.”

“Seven percent,” Spike corrected. “And do you remember why, Benjamin?”

“Because they wouldn’t listen to you.”

“Niceness plus free will minus what equals what?”

“Minus wisdom equals death.”

“Equals horrific death. Okay then, let’s pay a visit to F. Upton Theron.”

AS HE ENTERS PALAZZO DEL CONIGLIO, BENNY REMEMBERS THE BRIARBUSH REGIME CHANGE

Years before he had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck, Headmaster Lionel Baneberry-Smith had overseen the conversion of the school chapel into a theater in which movies were shown on weekends. Therefore, his memorial service was conducted in the gymnasium. His casket rested on trestles and straddled the division line between Felthammer Court and Kentwhistle Court. Students were required to attend, but because the headmaster had been a rather remote figure, those who planned the affair saw no need to place boxes of Kleenex at strategic points in the bleachers.

The service began with a recording of John Lennon singing his touching anthem “Imagine.” This was followed by a stirring tribute to the deceased from the chief groundskeeper, Finn Finbar, who too insistently claimed that the departed was one of the greatest men of his generation and who expressed his undying gratitude that the late headmaster had drastically reduced the number of times per year that seasonal flowers were changed out, thus lifting a serious burden from the landscape crew. At this point, the sound system delivered Elton John singing “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” which led to an appearance by the widow, Catherine Baneberry-Smith. She walked to the casket, a dramatic figure in a floor-length long-sleeved white dress. She took the microphone from its stand, as if she might sing, but she did not sing. She said that she wore white as a statement of defiance in the face of death, that it was her belief that science would one day defeat death, and that it was Lionel’s rotten luck to fall down the stairs and break his neck before an immortality serum could be developed. She completed her remarks by informingstudents and faculty that the board of Briarbush Academy had appointed her to her late husband’s position, as the first headmistressin the long history of the institution. As she returned the mic to its stand and walked off the court, the house lights dimmed. Darkness gathered in the gymnasium, and a spotlight focused on the casket. Mourners were asked to rise and stand throughout the playing of a third song, “Don’t Come Around Here No More” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

In the morning, Lionel Baneberry-Smith would be trucked away to a town in Kansas, there to be buried near Lester and Bertha Smith, who were said to be his parents, though for some reason they lacked the first half of his surname.

Meanwhile, subsequent to the service, dinner in the dining hall featured five courses and seven dishes that were Lionel Baneberry-Smith’s most favorites, which he would never be able to enjoy again. Faculty, although not students, were served a series of fine wines that, in their grief, they imbibed to excess.

Later, Mengistu Gidada joined Jurgen and Benny in their dorm room to discuss the events of the evening. They had eaten little in the dining hall, because the ceremonies left them with the fear that life at Briarbush was about to become even stranger than it had been heretofore and with the suspicion that the memorial dinner, more than any other, was likely to be heavily spiked with saltpeter or something worse. They feasted on what they had purchased in the commissary: potato chips, corn chips, Ritz cracker sandwiches with peanut butter, Planters peanuts, and Cheese Doodles.

They also did a bad thing.

Recent events suggested they were living in their own personal End Times, that Mrs. Baneberry-Smith would resort to hertrove of unearthly knowledge to create horror after horror. They were not permitted to have phones, and even if they possessed phones, their parents were unlikely to accept their calls. Even if their parents might take their calls, none of the truths they had to tell about Briarbush or its headmistress would be believed. They had been sent here by parents who thought of their offspring not as sons but as raw material to be forged into useful tools in the great game of wealth and power. Such people, craving power more than all else, believed only what they wanted to believe, and truth didn’t matter to them. They would never be a light in any darkness.

That was the realization Mengistu and Jurgen had come to some time ago, which they had not wanted to talk about on the night that Bugboy was killed, the realization they had told Benny would be a scar on his heart when he arrived at it on his own.

So they had done a bad thing, which they had never done before and would not do again. After the memorial service, they purchased a pint of vodka from Vigor Maitre, the landscaper who dealt in smutty magazines. Now, intending to drown their fear and find their way to greater hope, they washed down all the junk food with spiked Coca-Cola.

They didn’t get profoundly drunk, only tipsy, and they didn’t puke, but they also didn’t drown their fear. That night and in the days ahead, their fear was always simmering and sometimes boiling. Neither did the vodka lift them to a higher rung of hope. However, they remained as hopeful as ever because any boy who is bonded in the best way with at least one other boy has an ally against the world.

(Spike wishes it to be known that, had he been present, this behavior wouldn’t have been tolerated. Even the horrors conjuredby Mrs. Baneberry-Smith do not justify the reckless consumption of intoxicants by young men whose brains, not yet fully developed, could be forever stunted by inebriation. To dissuade the boys, he would have opened his abdomen, extracted his stomach—an organ with its own teeth—and set it loose to chase them around the room until they collapsed, exhausted by terror.)

As the weeks passed and mountain summer drew toward an end, Dr. Catherine Baneberry-Smith was out and about more than she had been as the headmaster’s wife. She purged from her wardrobe the white she’d worn at the memorial service, dressing in black at all times. These weren’t the garments of a widow respecting her lost spouse, but the decidedly erotic costumes of the kind she wore on the night of the bug hunt—snug jeans, tight sweaters with V-necks. Firm breasts without need of support provided deep cleavage and lessons in fluid dynamics that, in a boy’s boarding school, should have been inappropriate in the extreme, that should have been the number one topic among the horny inmates, and yet neither the faculty nor the students dared to comment on the headmistress’s unorthodox attire, as if they sensed that doing so would bring upon them the wrath of gods unnamed and unknowable.

It was Mengistu who perhaps put his finger on it when he said, “It is not gods they fear, but the woman herself. On a deep level, they all know that something about her is profoundly wrong, in some way not fully human. Intuition tells them she is a mortal danger to us all. Her provocative dress does not excite them because, in spite of all her physical attributes, she seems somehow not to be one of our species. They are cowed by her because every one of them is here alone, with no true friend in this place, with no bonds like those we have forged among us. That capacity has been somehow educated or brainwashed out ofthem, and each alone dares not speak about what others are not speaking, for fear of condemnation or something unknown but worse than condemnation.”

Soon the headmistress strode the campus in black leather boots that came almost to her knees. More and more often, she sheathed herself in leather pants as tightly fitted as anything a flamenco dancer might wear, a black silk blouse with the top two or three buttons undone, and a leather jacket with lines of silvery studs decorating the collar and lapels. She painted her fingernails black and began to wear black lipstick. If it seemed she wassolicitingcriticism or censure in order to establish herself as yet another victim of discrimination based on gender or sexual identity and thus have grounds to sue for compensation, the three friends agreed that was not the case. Something less tedious and far stranger than profit seeking compelled her on this course.

That speculation was confirmed when the first of the zombies appeared around her. They weren’t the flesh-eating kind of zombies, not the rotting and unclean walking dead. They were four seniors from Kentwhistle House, well scrubbed and properly dressed in their gray slacks and blue blazers and white shirts, but not in class where they ought to be. MacAskill, Ferragamo, Ellison, Calacalis. They didn’t shamble, but matched Catherine Baneberry-Smith’s brisk pace, shoulders back and apparently committed to a serious, urgent mission. They murmured to one another and to their headmistress, but as far as could be seen, she never spoke to them, as if she might be able to direct them to her purpose without the need to speak.

On the ninth of September, standing at a second-floor window of the school library, the three friends watched as a squad of zombies accompanied the striding headmistress from the facultyresidence to her laboratory. These four were from Felthammer House. Ramirez, Blankenship, Cho, Heggenhougen.

“Not zombies,” Mengistu whispered. “They serve her somehow, not in any way that Vigor Maitre might find exciting, but as if they are programmed, following some genetic imperative, without either fear or sexual attraction, as if she is the queen of the hive and they are sexless worker bees.”

On the evening of that day, Mengistu and Jurgen and Benny made a shocking and dismaying discovery during dinner in the dining hall. Santiago Ramirez and Andrew Heggenhougen were among the five other boys assigned to their table every night. Santiago’s eyes had always been a warm brown. Now they were lead gray. Previously as blue as Nordic skies, Andrew’s eyes were the soft gray of tarnished silver. Otherwise, these worker bees seemed unchanged, their personalities intact, Santiago boisterous to an annoying extent, Andrew quick with a sarcastic and cutting quip, Santiago eager to talk about soccer as well as the legs and butts and breasts of women in the entertainment world, Andrew more inclined to talk about politics and himself, both of them insufferable.

The other three boys at the table—Knacker, Hisscus, and Nork—appeared oblivious of the ocular transformations that Santiago and Andrew had undergone. Jurgen fished for a reaction by complaining that his eyes were itching because of autumn pollens and asking if anyone else was having the same problem. Benny repeatedly inserted comments about the beautiful eyes of the entertainers whose legs, butts, and breasts so obsessed Ramirez, until Nork asked him if he intended to become an ophthalmologist.

Although Mengistu was the most verbally gifted of the friends, he seemed to realize that subtlety—even blunt statements—wouldn’tevoke thoughtful consideration and intelligent responses from the other five dinner companions. Leaning over the table, head craned forward, with the intent expression of a cop interrogating a murder suspect, he chose silence as he repeatedly engaged the gray-eyed duo in staring matches that they broke off after five or ten seconds. Benny never saw them regard Mengistu with the contempt of the half-alien children in that old movieThe Village of the Damned; rather, they appeared puzzled by his behavior and seemed to chalk it up to an increase in his geekiness. This convinced Benny that even with the evidence that mirrors provided,they didn’t recognize what had happened to their own eyes. They didn’t know that they were being transformed into ... Into what?

When the dinner hour ended with a dismissal tone broadcast over the sound system, Jurgen wove quickly through the crowd to look at Felix Blankenship, one of the other worker bees who had scurried around with the headmistress earlier in the day. The boy’s once blue eyes were now the gray of mouse fur.

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