Page 82 of The Bad Weather Friend

She said, “You’ll draw a crowd when you go to Comic-Con, but the reaction will be much greater if you take the time to design a better costume than the clothes you’re wearing now.”

Then she proved to have a vicious surprise of her own. On her side of the island, from a shelf concealed under the countertop, she withdrew a pistol that had a round already chambered, and she shot Harper Harper.

WHEN HARPER IS SHOT, BENNY IS TOO SHOCKED TO DWELL ON MEMORIES OF HIS RETURN TO BRIARBUSH, BUT HERE IS PART OF WHAT HAPPENED BACK THEN

During the fourth of his five peaceful years with the good Dr. Fernsehen Liebhaber, Benny had emerged from hermitry long enough to take driving lessons and get a license to operate a motor vehicle.

Now, on Saturday, after two days on his own, one day after his eighteenth birthday, he purchased a used Honda and started the long drive north to Briarbush Academy. He didn’t entirely understand why he felt compelled to return to the campus. He didn’t yet know that Mengistu and Jurgen had vanished into the forest on the day Naomi had come in the limousine to take him away, and he did not know that a team of sixty-two search-and-rescue specialists had been unable to find the slightest trace of them.

(It is vital to keep in mind that the disheartening information about Mengistu’s and Jurgen’s fate was previously imparted during a sequence set in the present day, long after Benny made the journey that is about to be recounted here. In that scene, he was recalling the one now unspooling. This is sometimes how stories must unfold, and there’s nothing to be done about it but to issue a clarification and friendly reminder as provided here.)

Even if the boys hadn’t died in an attempted escape, they would no longer be at Briarbush, for Jurgen would be nineteen and Mengistu would be twenty. No student remained at the academy past the age of eighteen. In part, Benny made the journey in the hope that he could persuade the alumni affairs office toprovide him with the current addresses for the only two friends he’d ever made.

He was also curious, of course, as to whether Mrs. Baneberry-Smith was still the headmistress and whether she had turned the entire student body into gray-eyed worker bees, as well as to what extent and purpose she had been able to apply the extraterrestrial science that had been injected into her with a vicious bite.

(It is no less vital to keep in mind that in the present-day chapter titled “Do No Harm,” it was revealed that the headmistress blew herself up along with several Briarbush students, a tragedy for the boys who were killed but perhaps a happy development for a world spared from the evils of alien technology. This current chapter is set earlier in Benny’s life than “Do No Harm,” when he hadn’t yet learned about the explosion.)

Considering the horrors Benny witnessed during his short time as a student at the remote boarding school, one would be excused for finding it curious that he would return there knowing that he might be risking his freedom and even his life. However, friends are what make life worth living; when a person has had only two friends—and then for less than three months—the desire to reconnect with them after half a decade can be irresistible regardless of the danger.

Furthermore, he felt drawn by something he could not name. The figure of the astonishingly well-proportioned headmistress, clad all in black and carrying a whip, loomed vividly in his mind’s eye. He didn’t want to believe that he was in the grip of a debased erotic compulsion, but he knew himself well enough to know that he didn’t fully know himself. At times during the long drive, he could hear the voice that had spoken to him and his friends in the language of another world and had issued from the headof Lionel Baneberry-Smith as it floated inside the levitating glass sphere; most likely, what he heard now was a memory of that voice, though he could not rule out the possibility that it was more sinister than a mere memory.

For whatever reason in addition to those, he drove north from the suburban sprawl around Los Angeles, stayed overnight in Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco, and continued early the next morning toward the unknown.

Sunday afternoon, Nature acknowledged Benny’s brave but perhaps foolish return to Briarbush by creating an atmosphere identical to that on the day when his mother had whisked him away in a limousine. The overcast was the disturbing gray of morbid tissue and riven by black lesions. A funereal pre-storm calm lay over all, and the dark evergreens were like gigantic monastic mourners whose robes hung motionless in the still air.

At the bottom of the approach road to the school, the windows of the guardhouse were boarded over, and the security gate stood open, seeming to indicate that nothing was as it had once been at Briarbush. On the high plateau, the extensive lawns had not been mown in a long time, the grass having grown as tall everywhere as always it had been in the wilder meadow. The school, dormitories, and other buildings forming the quadrangle were as impressive as ever, monuments to the mastery of the masons who constructed them and to the institution’s storied past. However, though not fallen into ruins, the structures were without signs of life and appeared to have been abandoned.

Benny parked his Honda on the driveway, where weeds bristled between the cobblestones, and went first to the main entrance of Felthammer House. The great wooden door proved to be locked and in need of maintenance; the carved image ofa knight astride a horse was weather damaged, in need of fresh coats of stain and sealant. The windows revealed no lights inside, no sign of occupants. He would have liked to visit the room he had shared with Jurgen five years earlier. But perhaps it was just as well he didn’t take this sentimental journey only to discover, as he surely would, that it led to melancholy rather than a warm nostalgic wistfulness.

He waded through the tall grass to the nearest quadrangle gate and opened it and stepped into that vast limestone-paved courtyard. The center fountain stood waterless. The eight marble statues of famous philosophers, once placed at intervals, no longer stood on their plinths. Surely they had been sold to an art dealer. But Benny smiled as he thought the eight might have come to life and, keenly aware that they didn’t belong in this place of little learning and much indoctrination, had hiked away to another institution where they were appreciated.

Although Benny was sure now that his visit here would not gain him any knowledge regarding the whereabouts of Jurgen and Mengistu, that he would have to seek a lead on them elsewhere, he nevertheless crossed the quadrangle to Seidlitz Hall, which had housed classrooms and administration offices. If the academy’s files hadn’t been destroyed but instead packed up in hope that the school might one day reopen, maybe they were still here, where he could access them.

As he was trying the locked door, a voice behind him said, “May I help you, young fella?”

Startled, Benny turned and saw a man wearing a long-sleeved ankle-length white tunic belted with a cincture and over that a full-length white cope fastened across the upper chest by a clasp. The cope featured a hood that was at the moment not raised.White socks and sneakers completed the outfit. He carried a wooden staff as might have a shepherd on a Greek isle in the distant past.

“My name is Knute Pebbity, but I prefer to be called Brother Sunshine since I ordained myself in the church.”

“What church is that?” Benny asked.

“The Church of Earth.”

Brother Sunshine’s hair and beard were white, his face tanned and weathered. His left eye was blue, and the right was green, and they were open very wide. He might have been fiftysomething.

“I’m Benny. I used to go to school here. For a short while.”

“I myself never attended Briarbush. I’m a former Army Ranger and currently an employee of the Internal Security Agency, which some people refer to as the American gestapo, though I don’t see myself as a fascist, especially not since I ordained myself. I’ve been assigned to live here, stand watch, monitor developments, and report weekly to my superiors regarding unusual occurrences, if any—of which there are plenty. I don’t believe you’re unusual enough to report, but we’ll see.”

Benny didn’t want to be judgmental, though he could not help but be wary of Brother Sunshine. “I’m surprised that the Internal Security Agency hires clergymen as agents.”

“Oh, I wasn’t self-ordained when I started here. That happened after a few months because of what I saw. Washington assigned me to Briarbush not because they needed a clergyman in the position but because I was functionally insane.”

“Ah. What does that mean—‘functionally insane’?”

For whatever reason, Brother Sunshine looked at the storm sky, raised his staff, shook it, and shouted,“Fulgur Prohibeo!”Then he turned his attention to Benny. “I’m insane but capable of doingmy job. Thus functional. I’m not one of yourdangerousmadmen types.”

“That’s good to know.”

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