The
Boy in the Tunnel
by
20.
“Please am I sitting
here?” said a rough Slavic voice somewhere north of
“Excuse me?”
“Sorry, I say not so good. Please to be sitting here may I?”
“I’m sorry, but a friend
of mine’s meeting me here.”
“Your friend is being
late, Dragan thinks! Not so good friend, huh? Here, I
keep company. Such pretty girl should not eat alone.” Dragan
set his tray on the table, jostling a glop of grey beef stroganoff off the
plate. He sat down and stuck his fork into the slimy noodles.
“I am seeing you before,
I think?” Dragan stuffed a forkful of stroganoff into
his mouth, leaving a strand of the sauce on his mustache.
“I don’t—“
“Yes! Yes! I am RA in Wintertree. I am seeing you on quad, I am sure.”
“Okay.”
“You know Dragan, for sure, right?”
“Oh, you do! You were
seeing Dragan in welcome-to-school play! Dragan was small-town freshman, just in college for first
time. Dragan drinks too much at party, vomits in
stairs! You are remembering?”
“There is important
lesson: do not vomit in stairs! Then Dragan has to
clean up. Very messy. Dragan
cleaned enough vomit in
“But please be knowing: in real life Dragan
has not crabs. Only in play! Only acting!”
“Oh
wow, the time. Listen, Dragan, thanks for sitting with me,
but I’ve got to get—“
“Now I am remembering!
Yes! You are Kenya Cassidy, yes?”
“Dragan
is number-one volleyball fan! I am seeing you play all the time! You are like
gazelle. Beautiful ball-spiking gazelle.”
“Thanks. We really
appreciate your support. But really, I do have to get going...”
“Please. Is no problem. Have to practice for volleyball, yes? No time
for sitting.”
“Yeah, practice.”
“Okay. Is
nice to be meeting you. Dragan will see you at
next game!”
“Yes. Please to be saying
hello to Joanie for me.”
The thing inside
“She is being on the team
too. She is number-one—no, you are number-one player, but Joanie
is being number-two best player.”
“Right. Okay. I will.”
“I am having one more
question,” Dragan said.
She tried to say
something but nothing came out. She couldn’t believe that everyone around her
kept eating, like nothing had just happened. They should have stopped, gasped, dropped glasses and broken plates.
“You are thinking how is Dragan seeing your bedroom? Is good
question. I am warning you. Ron Marston sends Dragan to be spying on you. He is thinking you saw
something and he is wanting to know what it is. He is
telling Dragan put camera in your room, take pictures
of your things. He is getting angry at Dragan for
taking pictures of things Dragan is liking, not so
much things Ron Marston is liking.
Well, Ron Marston is not knowing
Dragan is here now. Dragan
is warning you, Kenya Cassidy, because Dragan feels
things for you. I know you have boyfriend, so no pressuring. But someone, not Dragan, will be coming for you, and will not be nice like Dragan. So you should be running away and hiding. Dragan is knowing a good place to
hide, if you like.”
*****************
The busy signal woke Dick
back up. It was like right in his ear, this harsh aggressive beeping, and as it
continued Dick swore it started to say something. Like the
beeps were learning actual words.
Drew wasn’t here anymore.
Dick was alone with the busy signal. His chin was sticky with dried blood, and
his tongue couldn’t stay out of the little painful hole where a tooth used to
be.
Dick stood up and hung up
the phone. Aside from the missing tooth and a real fucker of a headache, he
seemed to be okay. He was still wearing the tie, though it too was now glazed
with dried blood. He jerked it from his neck and threw it to the floor.
The voice on the phone
had said something that didn’t make any sense. “The Quartermaster has a
girlfriend.” Well congratu-fucking-lations to the
Quartermaster. How happy he must be, what with a girlfriend and a PR guy to call
people in weird underground libraries to brag about it. What an awesome life
the Quartermaster must have.
Dick’s foot bumped into
something on the ground. He looked down at it: the copy of his own Handbook,
the thing that had started this whole mess. He picked it up and opened it to
the index.
Quartermaster, The,
phone call concerning...178
rumors
about....184
Dick turned to page 184:
The Nine Dead Men, according to the more popular rumors,
maintain a strict hierarchical organization, so as to promote both responsible
leadership and loyal service (and, not coincidentally, intra-society
competition). Milo Kirby, or at least a Santa Claus-like perpetuated fiction
thereof, always occupies the highest, unnamed rank. The six Dead Men from the
sophomore, junior and senior classes take the following titles, in descending
order of superiority:
Secretary of the Exterior
Sergeant-at-Arms
Corpus Major
Corpus Minor
The Viscount of The Eastern
Spiral
Quartermaster
Though usually seniors take the top two positions, juniors
the two Corpi, and sophomores Viscount and
Quartermaster*, nothing in the (allegedly) official rules of the Nine Dead Men
prevents a sophomore, for example, from attaining the rank of SecEx. The two freshmen who are admitted near the end of Fall
Semester each year, however, share the rank of Undead from the time of their
Abduction Ceremony until the Burial and Resurrection Ball at the end of Spring
Semester, at which the two graduating seniors are discharged from the Nine Dead
Men, and titles are bequeathed for the coming school year.
*A NOTE ABOUT THE QUARTERMASTER: Traditionally, the rank
of Quartermaster has had strong ties to Wintertree
Hall Room 79 (now Rooms 79A and B). For twenty-seven of the last thirty years,
the Nine Dead Men have chosen a freshman resident of 79 Wintertree
to join their ranks. The room, so the legends say, was assigned to but never
occupied by Milo Kirby, and so his adherents have chosen their Quartermasters
from 79 Wintertree to honor him, except when the
room’s residents have proven too disagreeable even for the likes of the Dead
Men. Of course, like all information regarding the Nine Dead Men, this is pure
fiction**.
**Amateur 9DM scholars may be interested, however, in the
case of one Franklin Arnett, who lived in 79 Wintertree
from the fall of 1984 to the spring of 1985, the same year that 79A was
discovered. Arnett’s residency in the room is verifiable by official DUH
records, but there is no record of a roommate until November of 1984, when
Russell Boardman joined him in the room and two transfer students from Dalton
College became the first residents of 79A. It is unlikely that Arnett had no
roommate for the better part of Fall Semester; rather, numerous sources
indicate that Arnett did in fact share the room, and that this roommate was
responsible for discovering 79A, and that this discovery somehow led to his
eviction from Wintertree Hall and the eradication of
his records. That is all well and good, you say, but what has it to do with the
Nine Dead Men? Calm yourself and you shall hear.
Two years later, Arnett caused a relatively major scandal
on campus when he tried to stage a revolt against the Nine Dead Men, who he
claimed were secretly controlling the University. The big news was not that
this shadowy society might have some influence over the University
administration—those who believed in the existence of the Nine Dead Men assumed
this already—but that someone was publicly claiming to be one of the Nine Dead
Men. Arnett said that he had been Abducted by the Dead Men in the fall of 1984,
and then was named Quartermaster in the spring, a post which he held for the
entirety of his sophomore year. At first, Arnett said, he believed the Nine to
be relatively harmless, a group of young men who enjoyed the idea of a secret
society as a sort of conceptual art piece. But as his stint as one of the
Undead continued, Arnett began to see things that concerned him. What these
things were Arnett never said, his tongue stayed by fear or prudence or perhaps
lack of imagination. He tried to put his misgivings aside and serve as
Quartermaster, but near the end of his sophomore year his superiors asked him
to do something he was unwilling to do; in his Student Union diatribes against
the Nine Dead Men, he would only say that the request made of him was
“unreasonable.”
The usual unnamed sources, however, say that this
unreasonable request concerned Russell Boardman, who by that time had become a
Resident Assistant in Wintertree, and a valued
confidant of RLC Ron Marston. The specifics of the
request remain a mystery, but one can only assume that Arnett and Boardman
forged a bond during their time as roommates, and that Arnett was unwilling to
jeopardize that bond simply to please his alleged superiors in a fictitious
secret society.
Arnett’s crusade against the Nine Dead Men attracted a few
supporters, mainly from the black-clad and unwashed segments of the student
population, but his revolution fizzled as it became clear that the enemy (if it
even existed at all) was unwilling to reveal itself, and though Arnett claimed
to know their secret headquarters and meeting places, he had no evidence to
back up his claims.
Dick closed the book.
That was enough bullshit history for now. The main point was that this
Quartermaster probably lived in 79 Wintertree last
year; and as the only person Dick knew who fit that criterion was Chet, Dick
searched the stacks for his roommate’s Handbook.
© 2005 Gardner Linn