Page 63 of The Bad Weather Friend

Benny managed to check out the fourth, Marshall Cho, whose ink-black eyes had faded to ash gray.

Minutes later, in Mengistu’s dorm room, the three were slumped in armchairs, each boy half in soft lamplight and half in shadow, precisely as in Jurgen and Benny’s room, an ambiance that appealed to an adolescent sense that the world was a twilit realm drifting one day toward pale hope but the very next day toward darkness and annihilation. Benny had no candy, either for comfort or to use as a weapon; neither did Jurgen have close at hand his stolen steak knife nor Mengistu his can of powerful insecticide. They had arrived at the disturbing conclusion that any weapons available to them were inadequate to the threat.

“Whatever’s happening,” Jurgen said, “whatever she’s scheming toward, it’s all accelerating.”

“Indeed,” said Mengistu.

Benny said, “Everyone at Briarbush, the faculty and staff and students, everyone but us, seems to be under a spell, hypnotized to accept whatever she does, whatever happens, as just a new normal, nothing to be concerned about, nothing to see here.”

“Manifestly,” said Mengistu.

“I can only assume,” said Jurgen, “that if she knows with total confidence that she holds them in some kind of spell of ignorance and illusion, with whatever alien technology, then she also knows the three of us are not as blinded as the others.”

“Indubitably,” said Mengistu.

Benny said, “At some point, when she feels the time is right, she’ll come for us, and we’ll either become like the rest of them, or we’ll wind up like her husband, not necessarily buried next to Lester and Bertha Smith out there in Kansas, but buried somewhere.”

“Unquestionably,” said Mengistu.

“Are we screwed?” Jurgen asked.

“We’re screwed,” Benny confirmed.

Mengistu said, “We have one potential weapon—knowledge.”

“What knowledge?” Jurgen and Benny asked simultaneously.

Mengistu said, “We must seek clues as to how she exercises the power she possesses and how she might be foiled. We must search for that knowledge, and expeditiously. I do not believe it would be wise to seek understanding in her laboratory, where we might encounter another Bugboy or his ilk. But when she is working in the lab, we might find it fruitful to break into her house and search the shit out of it.”

PALAZZO DEL CONIGLIO

When he stepped through the open door and into Palazzo del Coniglio, Benny felt as if he not only shrank physically but also diminished in value as a human being. The architecture and interior design seemed to be calculated to render him submissive. He wasn’t humbled by a sense of majesty and wonder and mystery as he would have been in any great cathedral, where humility tended to expand the spirit. Although the scale of the house was grand, Benny felt burdened by the mass of it, even vaguely claustrophobic, and wanted to be gone from there.

The foyer measured maybe forty feet in diameter. The gold-leafed domed ceiling arced more than thirty feet above the floor. Polished mahogany walls. Limestone floor with a checkered border of malachite and black granite. In the center stood a six-foot-diameter walnut table, French, perhaps two hundred years old and inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl and silver wire.

“The architect and interior designer were geniuses,” Spike declared. “They spent spectacular sums to create an impression of grandeur, while employing countless cunning techniques to mock H. Ellsworth Theron by overdoing everything to the point that sublime proportions and details were exaggerated precisely enough to become tawdry. They imbued the faux grandeur with an oppressive quality equal to anything the most ominous Gothic building could impose. They must have despised Ellsworth Theron a great deal.”

“So white, white, white has some appeal after all,” Benny said.

“None whatsoever. It’s just a different kind of awfulness from this.”

At the far end of the foyer, two curved staircases with several tons of gilded bronze railings offered different routes to the same second-floor gallery. Harper dashed past Benny, hurrying upstairs to find the bedroom where the umpteenth Arabella was confined for her safety.

To the right of the foyer, doors stood open to a vast library with a mezzanine, Persian carpets in jewel tones, and several pairs of massive French armchairs upholstered in fabric with such patterns as fleur-de-lis. Although it was as old as the rest of the house, the room appeared to be recently assembled and as yet unused.

To the left of the foyer, beyond another pair of open doors, lay what might have been a gentlemen’s lounge with a massive black granite fireplace. Ruby-red leather sofas and matching armchairs. A billiards table. A bar with eight stools. Behind the bar, a colorful mural depicted uniformed men on horseback charging valiantly across a landscape littered with dead soldiers and ribboned with cannon smoke, perhaps inspired by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Men might gather in this chamber, without their ladies, for after-dinner brandy, cigars, and conversation so stuffy as to put them at risk of suffocation if a window wasn’t open.

Benny and Spike crossed the foyer to another pair of doors, beyond which lay a drawing room larger than a professional tennis court, with several seating areas. Illumination descended from two immense crystal chandeliers and radiated from a bedazzlement of gorgeous Tiffany lamps. As planned, Benny paused in the doorway while Spike proceeded across the threshold.

Even from his perspective, he could see the man sitting off to the right in an armchair beside an occasional table. At ninety, F. Upton Theron didn’t look his age. He looked much older. Perhapshis head wasn’t a large potato that had shriveled until its moisture content was immeasurably small; however, the swags of puckered and brittle skin festooning his face required closer inspection before the potato hypothesis could be disproved. Whatever color his hair had once been, it most likely had turned white for a time before it had finally acquired the unhealthy yellow tint of the stringy silk from a diseased corn plant. Because Benny wanted to be generous, he assumed that Theron’s nose had once been as straight and sculpted as that of anyone who had been born from the headwaters of New England society and that its current appalling condition was either evidence of a degenerative rhinological malady or the consequence of decades of extreme alcohol abuse. Swollen, shapeless, strangely folded at the tip, darker than the pale face that surrounded it, webbed with prominent red capillaries, it could have been no more disconcerting if it had been a nose that was bitten off by an iguana, swallowed, retrieved from the reptile’s stomach, and sewn back on by a surgeon who never completed medical school. Theron’s unfortunate appearance opened a tap of compassion in Benny. Dripping with sympathy for one of the people who intended to ruin his life, he felt stupid, but the sympathy dripped anyway, like a leaky faucet.

“Gentlemen, I’ve been sitting here enjoying a root beer and anticipating your arrival with pleasure.” Theron’s robust voice was as appealing as his face was off-putting. “Please sit with me, and let’s resolve this misunderstanding. Come in, Mr. Catspaw, come in. Perhaps you gentlemen would like a root beer.”

Benny remained in the doorway, looking around the drawing room, pretending to be awed by the splendor of the place. “What a room. What a house. What a night to remember.” If he entered the chamber before Harper arrived with the giant white rabbit, hewould probably be dead sooner than later; dying would be unfair to his personal craggle, whose failure rate would then be closer to 10 percent than to 7.

Spike stood to one side of Theron’s chair, staring down at him as though at an abomination that crawled out of a sewer grating.

Peering up at the giant, Theron produced a smile like a slit in a deflating beach ball. “And what is your name, sir?”

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