Page 70 of The Bad Weather Friend

Eventually, a slow-rising tide of dirty light along the eastern horizon revealed that storm clouds had gathered during the night, trailing gray beards of mist, for the moment withholding their rain.

Exiting dorm rooms by the windows, the three friends met again under the giant spreading pine, fifty yards from FelthammerHouse. During the weeks they had planned for this moment, they’d stolen a roll of painters’ tape and a claw hammer and a screwdriver from the maintenance crew’s supplies. Jurgen also had the chef’s knife with which he’d armed himself for a previous adventure, and Mengistu carried the aerosol can of insecticide that might deter a large bug or a human assailant. Benny had refrained from purchasing a fresh supply of candy bars. Thus prepared, they set out through the fast-waning night for the house of the headmistress.

They approached the rear of the residence and crouched behind shrubbery to reconnoiter the backyard. Under the sooty sky, with no sun to stretch or shrink shadows, the black of night melted into a dreary grayness, as if an acceleration of time had eliminated the morning and afternoon, marrying dawn to dusk. Although Benny had once thought this place appeared stately, it now loomed like the desolate, oppressive House of Usher imagined by Edgar Allan Poe.

“There is enough natural light to allow us to navigate the rooms,” Mengistu said, “and with the storm impending, we cannot expect brighter conditions. Why are we delaying?”

“We know why we’re delaying,” Jurgen said.

“We know,” Benny agreed.

“Of course we do,” Mengistu said. “My question was rhetorical, intended to shame us into exhibiting greater courage. If we do not exhibit greater courage and get on with this before the headmistress returns, sooner than later we will fall under her spell as others have done. We will be alike to the millions who, in this culture, have trammeled themselves with infinite absurd bureaucracies, regulations, and rules to give their existence meaning after their ancestors declared no need for meaning two and ahalf centuries earlier. Shall we become termites in a colony, living for no purpose but to devour what little remains of our once glorious civilization, or shall we grow into men of responsibility?”

“Why don’t you go first?” Jurgen suggested.

Pressing two fingers to his forehead, Mengistu said, “I am more of an inspirational philosopher than a man of action, a truth that I am humbled to discover just now.”

Benny rose from behind the sheltering shrubbery and sprinted across the yard to the back porch. He made that charge not in the spirit of the Marines who raised the flag on Iwo Jima, but because he was overwhelmed by a sudden fear that seven bears, whispering in an alien language, would loom behind them, fall upon them, and tear them limb from limb, a fate that seemed more terrible than any that might await them in the house.

The back door was locked, but it featured four panes in the top half. Benny began tearing strips from the roll of painters’ tape and applying them to the square of glass nearest the lock.

When Benny’s friends joined him, Jurgen said, “We were kind of locked back there. You unlocked us.”

“Not me,” Benny said. “Bears.”

“What bears? There aren’t any bears.”

“The possibility of bears,” Benny explained.

“There is at all times a possibility of bears,” said Mengistu. “We act, or we are acted upon.”

“Exactly,” said Benny.

When the glass was covered with blue tape, Benny used a single strip to form a hinge linking the pane to the wood frame.

Benny stepped aside, and Jurgen swung the hammer. The pane shattered with a quiet crackling sound. The glass adhered tothe tape. When Jurgen pressed on the pane, it drooped inward, well secured by the hinge, and did not fall noisily to the floor.

Mengistu said, “Allow me to rehabilitate my damaged reputation by being the first to risk death inside these walls.”

Benny and Jurgen were all right with that.

Mengistu reached through the empty pane, felt for the thumb turn, and disengaged the deadbolt. The door announced the violation with an extended creaking as it swung open. They would have been amazed if it had been silent.

They began in the basement with some reluctance. In stories of this kind, bad things happened to people in basements. If a basement harbored a secret, it was a secret best left undiscovered, and if you uncovered it anyway, it would tear your face off or do something worse to you. Because there were no windows in that subterranean space, they could turn on the lights, the better to see one another being eviscerated. The steps led into a room with a gas furnace and water heater, and although there was no statue of Satan or bloodstained altar, there were three closed doors. Three doors for three nosy boys. Benny could not shrug off the feeling that the house had been built not for any headmaster, but for him and his companions, with the foreknowledge that they would one day open these doors and get what was coming to them. With a spirit of shared risk, each chose a door, a fate. In stories of this kind, one intruder always dies, and two escape to encounter death elsewhere. This was not a story, however, but real life, so there was no reason that mortal threats might not lurk in each room, with three lives taken in the next minute. Three doors were opened, three light switches flipped, and no one died. Such an anticlimax was a great relief and, in the strangest way, slightly disappointing.

On the main floor once more, they began in the kitchen, where neither of the refrigerators contained a collection of eyeballs floating in mason jars full of embalming fluid. They did not find either a collection of poisons in the pantry or cookbooks with recipes for cannibals. Go figure.

Room by room, closet by closet, cabinet by cabinet, drawer by drawer, carefully examining every object to be sure it was only what it appeared to be, the friends conducted an exhaustive search for evidence that might convict Mrs. Baneberry-Smith. For a document or device that would explain the powers she gained by exploiting the knowledge from another world that was injected into her during that long-ago jungle expedition. For some clue as to how to defeat her.

After spending two hours on the main floor without arriving at even the smallest revelation, they began to lose confidence that the house contained what they hoped to find. If they found nothing on the second floor, they would have no option remaining but to search the laboratory. Theyknew, as surely as anyone can know anything, that if they went into the lab, they would either be carried out dead or come out transformed and no longer themselves, whether Mrs. Baneberry-Smith was on campus or not.

Before proceeding upstairs, they used the half bath to “pee” (Benny) and “take a leak” (Jurgen) and “relieve the pressure of a distended bladder” (Mengistu). They took cans of Pepsi from a fridge and stood at the kitchen island to drink. They considered eating a store-bought cake that was still in its original container, but after a lengthy debate, they agreed the headmistress might have opened it, contaminated it, and wrapped it up again. After twenty minutes spent in this fashion, they acknowledged thatthey were avoiding the second floor not because they feared finding nothing, but because they feared finding something.

An hour later, they found the locked room at the back of the house. Jurgen used the hammer and screwdriver to assault the lock assembly. The chamber contained a shiny black column about two feet square and five feet high. No immediate threat appeared, though the boys were profoundly unnerved by the severed head.

Any severed head would have curdled their blood, but this one was especially disturbing for three reasons, of which only two were at once apparent. First, this was the head of Dr. Lionel Baneberry-Smith, who had supposedly broken his neck when he’d fallen down the stairs while sleepwalking. Second, the head terminated in a two-inch wide metal collar and floated in a glass sphere that itself floated a few inches above the column with no visible support. As unsettling as a floating, bodiless head might be, it was also the kind of thing that most boys of a certain age would find irresistible, and the young men of Felthammer House were no exception.

“She sends the body off to Kansas,” Jurgen said, “but she keeps the head. Why does she keep the head?”

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