Dominance (6 page)

The guards moved quickly. They surrounded him, both of them reaching out, only their arms and hands in the shot, trying to still him. But the professor could not be stilled. He flailed and bucked and flung himself around, the chair shrieking against the floor, Aldiss's figure shifting almost totally off camera. A tiny parentheses of foam crept from his mouth and down his chin. He was misframed now, the faceless guards at the right edge of the screen fighting with him, trying to save him. “His tongue!” one of them said. “My God, he's swallowing his tongue!”

The screen went black.

For a few moments the students in the lecture hall sat silently, waiting. No one seemed to know what to do. They looked at one another, shock and confusion on their faces. The screen popped with static.

“What do we do now?” a girl named Sally Mitchell asked.

Then the sound, the electronic tone from before, returned. Everyone looked toward the TV screen.

Aldiss returned, his hair wild, his eyes racked by pain.

“I'm sorry,” he slurred. “I have these . . . these episodes sometimes. I've always had them, ever since I was a small boy. Not to worry. My minders here are trained medics—they won't let me expire on you.” He said nothing more.

The nine stared at the box. Somehow his admission did not calm their nerves. A few of them would dream of him that night. Dreams of only sound and blurred movement: the rake of chair legs, the gargle of pain in the professor's throat.

“You have said,” Aldiss went on when he was fully composed, “that literature is defined by its place in the canon. It is defined by emotion, by love. What if”—his cracked gaze swung around the room, falling on them all; and even this, this simple movement, showed the students in the night class why he was such a powerful teacher—“literature is a game?”

None of them knew how to take this. They stared at the screen, waiting for the man to continue.

“What if what just happened to me was nothing but a trick?”

The students were confused. Someone laughed nervously.

“I do indeed have a neurological condition,” he told his class. “But if I did not, if the spell I just suffered was indeed a hoax, an act—would you have believed I was in pain?”

No one answered.

“Come on. Was I convincing, class?”

“Yes,” a boy named Frank Marsden said from the back row. Thin, handsome in a classical way, Marsden was a drama student with a lit minor. Of all of the students in the classroom, he could tell truth from playacting.

“Absolutely,” said Alex Shipley.

“What if literature were like this?” Aldiss continued. “What if a book, a novel, tricked us into believing it was real, but when we actually got into it—when we
really
read it, when we
truly
paid attention—we began to see that there was a whole world behind the pages? A universe of deeper truths. And all it took was our ability to find the rabbit hole.”

He paused, let the cryptic information he had just given them settle in. “How many of you have heard of Paul Fallows?”

A few had indeed. They told Aldiss what they knew of the writer. They knew that no one was sure who Fallows was—not really. His first novel had been a huge success, but the more critics and scholars called Fallows into the spotlight, the more the writer refused to appear. He began to slip away like a ghost. There had been speculation, some of it published and some of it simply a part of the rumor mill at every lit department in America—Fallows was Pynchon, he was Barth, he was Eco. Or he was Charles Rutherford, the encyclopedia salesman whose photograph graced the back of Fallows's books. But to this day no one
knew;
there were no interviews with Fallows, no oral history, in fact nothing that proved beyond a doubt that the man was anything more than a pseudonym.

But even pseudonyms can be traced. Fallows had never been.

“Paul Fallows was playing a game,” Aldiss said. “And in this class I want to take you into that game. The mystery we will unravel, then, will be the author himself. We will read both of Fallows's existing novels and perhaps, if we are lucky,
discover the great writer's true identity
.”

There was a moment of confused silence.

“What do you mean discover his identity?” a boy named Jacob Keller finally asked. He was an offensive lineman on the Jasper football team.
An enigma: a hulking mass, but kind-eyed and quick with a smile, his fingertips always white with yard-line chalk. He was the only member of the football team who could recite Keats.

“I mean, Mr. Keller,” Aldiss said, “that your one assignment in this class will be to discover who Paul Fallows really is.”

“But that makes no sense,” said a voice from the back row. Lewis Prine was a psychology minor, perhaps the one student in the class who did not appear to be infatuated with books to the point of obsession. “People have been searching for Fallows for thirty years. Experts, academics, conspiracy theorists. How can we find him in our little night class at Jasper College?”

“You must believe in your abilities more, Mr. Prine.”

The students looked at one another. They felt empowered, energized—and a little bit scared. Time was running out in their first class. They'd been told that the screen would go black at the hour. The feed was set to run no longer.

“Your reading assignment for the next class is the first fifty pages of Fallows's masterpiece,
The Coil.
You will receive the full syllabus tomorrow morning in the campus mail,” Aldiss said. “But I want to leave you tonight with a question. Call it your homework assignment for our next class. It is a riddle right out of the great Paul Fallows.”

The students waited, pens poised above notepads.

“What is the name of the man in the dark coat?”

With that Aldiss fell silent, and in a few seconds his image was gone, vanished from the screen once again.

*   *   *

That night Alex Shipley could not sleep.

She lay in her room in Philbrick Hall, her roommate snoring gently in the bunk above her. She stared into the darkness. She couldn't stop thinking of Richard Aldiss, of the way he had addressed them on that first night, of that fit he had fallen into. Horrible. It was all strange and horrible, and Alex didn't know why she had signed up for the class in the first place.

And yet . . .

The night class was also enthralling. It was unlike anything she had
ever done at Jasper College. To have a chance to uncover the identity of Paul Fallows, no matter how impossible it sounded—that was the sort of adventure Alex longed for. It was because of the bizarre assignment that she knew she would stay with Aldiss and his class until the end, no matter what happened.

She had read the first seventy-five pages of
The Coil.
Her vein-spined paperback edition sat on the little built-in desk across the room, an orange USED sticker slapped on the side. She had sunk a bit since the beginning of her senior year. There was a time when Alex would buy only new books, when she would not think of writing in margins. But now she had to save money for Harvard, and so used books were the only option she could afford. Other students' notes sprawled away from the lines of text, chewed up every bit of white space. To her it felt like a desecration.

Her mother, who lived in the town of Darling just thirty miles away from the college, had warned her about taking Aldiss's class.
Evil,
her mother had said. The man, his class—all of it was evil. But Alex knew Professor Richard Aldiss was also brilliant. She'd read his prison writings on great American writers and had felt a lucidity there, a kinship. He spoke of books the way she felt about them—as if they were the truest forms of communication, both primitive and sacred. He once said the book was a lock, and its reader was the key.
Damn right,
Alex thought.

Tonight, though, something had changed.

Lying there, listening to the whoops and rustles of the late-night students down on the quad, Alex couldn't put her finger on what it was. Couldn't articulate it. The notion that Aldiss would change her life had dissolved when she first saw him. It wasn't that she no longer believed he would enlighten her; perhaps he and his strange ideas about literature could do that much. It was just that he was not as invincible as she had once thought. Not as stark or elegant as his writing would suggest. There was something . . . something almost fragile about the man who appeared on that screen. Something vulnerable.

Listen to yourself, Alex. Getting all mushy about a man who murdered two people in cold blood.

She thought about the riddle. Aldiss's “homework.”

What is the name of the man in the dark coat?

Alex didn't have a clue what it meant. The first few chapters of
The Coil
focused on New York society at the turn of the century. It was a novel in the most traditional sense of the word. Alex knew that there were hidden meanings, not only about the narrative but also supposedly about Fallows himself, but she could not discern them. The first time she had read the classic, as a high school student, she was unmoved by the tale.
This thing?
she remembered thinking.
All that buzz for this book?

But now here was Richard Aldiss, telling them that Fallows's novels were not novels at all but really
games
. Games the novelist himself hid behind. And Aldiss had gone further, had given them a clue that night to perhaps take them into the . . . what had he called it? Yes: into the rabbit hole.

What is the name of the man in the dark coat?

Name . . . dark coat . . . games . . .

Alex bounced out of bed. Her roommate, a girl from New Hampshire named Meredith who majored in chemistry, stirred in the top bunk. Alex, her mind roaring and her hands reaching into the dark before her, picked up the copy of
The Coil
from the desk. Then she went into the small bathroom the two girls shared—a perk for being seniors—closed the door behind her, and turned on the light above the mirror.

She flipped through the novel, skimming the pages until the words blurred together, searching for any connection to a dark coat. It only made sense: the book was their sole material in the class. No syllabus until tomorrow, no handouts. Aldiss had to be leading them to
The Coil;
he had to be.

When her eyes finally became tired, she looked up from the page and into the mirror above the sink.
Time to give up and forget this craziness,
she thought.
Somebody else has surely solved it by now, and when that person has the answer, all nine of us will—

She froze.

There. In the mirror. An image on the back of the book itself.

Alex, moving slowly now, turned the volume around.

On the back cover was the traditional author's photograph. It was a
man she knew was not really Paul Fallows. Or at least no one could be sure if it was him or not. The image had been slapped on subsequent editions of the novel precisely because of this: no one really knew the identity of the writer, and so the likeness of the encyclopedia salesman remained.

She looked down at the man's face. At his swept-back hair, the almost calculated smile. At the way his hands were crossed in his lap. And she looked at the dark coat he was wearing.

What is the name of the man . . . ?

Before she knew it Alex was out of the bathroom and moving. She pulled on her jeans and her Jasper College sweatshirt, crammed on Meredith's wool hat, and went out of the room as silently as she could, the novel still in her grip. Down the elevator and out of Philbrick, onto the frozen quad.

*   *   *

The Stanley M. Fisk Library was open only at the west entrance. Alex punched in the combination code and moved into the warmth of the building. The night librarian was on, a mousy woman named Daws who dressed like a character out of Austen. “Alexandra Shipley, what are you—”

But Alex was already past her and to the back section of the library. Empty now save for a few zombies who sat reading by lamplight.

Literary Criticism was here, in the back. She knew the place by heart; as a freshman at Jasper she had worked in the stacks, learned the nooks and crannies.

She found the famous study on Paul Fallows on a shelf toward the end of the stacks, in a pool of red emergency light that barely lit up the page for her to read. The book was called
Mind Puzzles: The World and Work of Paul Fallows.
Copyright 1979, published by Overland Press. Its author was Richard Aldiss, PhD. He had written the book three years before the murders at Dumant.

Alex turned to the index. Found the words she was looking for: AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH (LIKELY APOCRYPHAL). The name of the real encyclopedia salesman, the actual man in the photo, was on the tip of her tongue. She knew Aldiss had said it in his lecture that night.
Damn it, Alex, you've got to pay attention.

Now she turned to the appropriate page and scanned for the name in the near dark—

But something stopped her. Something froze her there, under that bloody light, the library still and quiet around her. Her pulse, which had been frantic before, strangely slowed. Alex became calm. The sweat working under her arms and on her scalp began to cool. Her entire body went rigid.

There was handwriting in the margins of the book.

Manic pencil writing, numbers and letters mixed together, symbols swirling down the page like a mad and tortured language.

What the hell is this?

Alex scanned the handwritten text. At the bottom of the page she saw a legible stack of lines. They were written differently than the rest. Darker, dug into the skin of the page, almost carved there. A cold hand. The hand of someone determined to have his message be discovered.

I OFFER CONGRATULATIONS FOR FINDING THIS MESSAGE. YOU HAVE COME VERY FAR ALREADY. NOW YOU MUST CHECK THIS BOOK OUT.