Fool on the Hill (36 page)

THE KILLING HOUR

I.

Wind the clock for a killing hour, then. Let it begin just before the turn of years, at 11:15 on the night of December thirty-first, with the snapping of a branch. Let it conclude fifty-eight minutes later, at thirteen past midnight, with a sound like fingernails on a coffin. And set it up just so:

On the morning after Christmas, Preacher looked into the bathroom mirror to find his head wound almost healed. Noon of the same day, Jinsei received a phone call from the supervisor at Uris Library, where she had been working since October. Over the winter break the Library was doing an extensive reorganization of its card-tile system, and those few student workers who remained in Ithaca were urgently needed. The roads had been cleared sufficiently of snow by now that travel up The Hill
was no longer a great odyssey, and after a short conversation, Jinsei agreed to come in that afternoon. In fact, Jinsei worked at the Library almost every afternoon that week, up to and including the thirty-first, often staying until late in the night.

Late in the night on the twenty-seventh, Rasferret moved his camp from The Boneyard to the crown of The Hill
.
Riding on the back of the Messenger, he soared unseen to the belfry·of McGraw Hall, the central of the three grey boxes that had been the first buildings erected on the campus. A century ago the belfry had housed Jenny McGraw’s famous chimes, but now only dust resided there—dust, and Rasferret the Grub. His Rats traveled on foot over snow-encrusted ground to join him, and together they set up a discreet base of operations, within sight of the Clock Tower where Hobart dreamed fearsome dreams.

The twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth were days of watching and waiting, with precious little incident, but a number of important things happened on the thirtieth. Preacher got in touch with Fujiko, who was having a wonderfully carnal vacation over at Tolkien House; they agreed to have a small get-together to celebrate New Year's Eve, with Preacher bringing Jinsei up to the House after she got off work. The sprites, too, had a New Year’s celebration
in the works, an HO-scale gala with skating on the frozen surface of Beebe Lake. One of Rasferret’s Rats managed to overhear a group of sprites talking about this, and while the creature did not understand much of what was said, it got the gist: that tomorrow night, the majority of the Little People would be off away from the center of campus, out of ear and eyeshot of whatever might go on there. Rasferret had at last been provided with a striking date; he spent most of that night laying his final plans. Barely twenty miles away, in a chalet along cold Cayuga’s shore, Ragnarok spoke a prophecy. From a deep slumber he uttered a single sentence: “My God, her eyes are glowing.” Myoko and Lion-Heart, locked together in their own room, did not hear this, nor would they have understood it if they had.

December thirty-first dawned bleak and cold, with a promise of fresh snow. Jinsei and Preacher made love one last time before she went up The Hill to work. Love left them joyful and unaware.

Night came all too quickly.

II.

Preacher tramped up the front steps of Uris Library shortly after eleven o’clock on New Year’s Eve, bearing a gift for his Lady. Snow came down in light swirls, enough to dust the ground and obscure the glowing faces of the Clock Tower in a fine reflected haze. He stepped right up to the glass doors, which were locked, and rapped loudly with a white-gloved fist. Jinsci appeared a moment later, a long-stemmed rose wrapped and tucked delicately into the crook of one arm. She fumbled with an enormous ring of keys and managed to unlock the doors.

“Hey,” Preacher said, leaning in out of the cold to kiss her. “Where’s your coat?”

“Um . . .” Jinsei replied, kissing him back. “Mrs. Woolf wants me to stay on another hour.”

“Does she?” he said, sounding unimpressed. “It’s New Year’s, Jin. Fujiko, her dude, and midnight are all waiting on us. Can’t you work an extra hour some other time?”

“I could, but . . . well . . .” She held up her hand, the thumb and forefinger a bare centimeter apart. “We’re
that
close to finishing with the letter R.”

“Oh,” said Preacher, and they both got laughing. He laid a ginger hand on the wrapped flower under her arm. “What’s this?”

She shrugged, handing it to him. “Something I picked up for you on the way to work. It’s probably wilted by now.”

“Mmm.” He bent and kissed her again, lingering a bit longer at her mouth. “I brought you something, too.”

“Oh?” She traced the line of his jaw with a finger. “What?”

He drew back, grinning Wind rushed in the open doorspace and shuffled the dark strands of her hair.

“Tell you what,” Preacher said. “I’ll give it to you when we get to Tolkien House.”

“Mean.” Jinsei tried for a pout but couldn’t quite handle it. “I gave you your flower already, didn’t I? But honestly, Preacher, Mrs. Woolf really wants me to stay that extra hour. I think it’ll make her New Year for her.”

“If you finish the letter R?”

“If we finish the letter R.”

“That’s going to make her life better?”

“Old librarians are easy to please.”

“Hmm,” He kissed her a third time, lingering, lingering. “What about young librarians?”

“Oh, they come along eventually,” she told him. “Why don’t you go ahead, tell Fujiko and Noldorin that I’ll be a little late. I’ll probably miss midnight, but I’ll be there as soon after as I can.”

Preacher opened his mouth to speak and she caught him in yet another kiss, putting the brakes on any further argument. When they broke for air he was nodding, a smile practically etched onto his face.

“All right,” he conceded. “Can’t disagree with that kind of reasoning. You just be careful walking up to the House, hear me?”

“I’ll be careful,” she promised.

“All right. And here.” Clutching the rose affectionately, Preacher fished in his coat pocket with his free hand and brought out a small white box.

“What is it?”

“I forget,” Preacher shrugged. “You’ll have to open it and see.”

She did. The bracelet in the box was dark-stained wood, girdled with a band of bright silver that shimmered prettily in the arc-light above the library door.

“It’s beautiful!” Jinsei gasped, then remembered a bone-pale bird and a sealed iron box. “Oh no. This isn’t—”

Preacher nodded. “I had it in my pocket when we ran. Cot it in my head yesterday to go see a friend on Buffalo Street who makes jewelry. Waste not, want not, I figure.” That was not all of it—there was more to his odd compulsion to do something with the silver band than simple economy—but it was all he could find words to say.

“Oh, Preacher,” said Jinsei haltingly, “Preacher, it’s beautiful, but . . . I never want to go into that graveyard again, and I’m not sure I can keep something that will remind me what happened there.”

“What
did
happen there. Jin? A little scare, a little scratch. My head’s all better now.” He looked at her, caught her with something in his gaze. “It’s a pretty thing,” he said. “And I don’t know, maybe it’ll bring you luck sometime. They say silver’s good for that.”

It was her turn to argue no further. A strange feeling seemed to charge the air around them, a feeling of . . . well, momentousness. Something big, something serious about to happen. Jinsei took the silvered bracelet and set it upon her wrist; in that moment her love for Preacher was as strong as it ever had been, ever would be.

“You be careful too,” she said, catching his hands in her own. “Walking.”

Preacher grinned. “I’m always careful, Lady.”

They drew together for one last kiss before he set off, but the kiss multiplied into a long series of kisses, and for a precious grain of time they stood necking in the doorway, card-files and Rhetta Woolf waiting within for Jinsei, snow and darkness waiting without for Preacher, the dance of lips and tongue obliterating all but each other.

III.

Rasferret the Grub was alone in his hideaway, his Rats since dispatched on various dark errands, the Messenger set to circling above the Arts Quad, a warden against unforeseen intrusions in the hunt. Not that Rasferret was entirely blind, shut up in the belfry. He had a Sense, a magically enhanced feel for the surrounding territory; he knew where his troops were, and his targets.

He crouched in a tight wooden crawlspace littered with the scraps of careless meals, concentrating on his first animation in over a hundred years. A long time it had been, but he was fresh with power, and he had not forgotten the trick. It lay in a drawing together of the mind, a focusing, a willful push. A portion of Rasferret’s being—soul, spirit,
ka,
call it what you will—twisted free, coalescing in front of him, little more than a sparkling shimmer in the air, really, a gossamer of gossamers. He concentrated still further, marveling at the ease of it despite his lack of practice, and sent the essence outward into the night, searching for a host to animate, not knowing that one had already been selected and prepared for him by the Storyteller.

Rasferret’s
ka
shot northward with dizzying speed and purpose, drawn magnetically toward Fraternity Row, toward Tolkien House, where a pale mannequin stood waiting like an expectant bride. In that hidden part of Lothlórien where the trees grew thickest, Rasferret’s spirit entered into the Rubbermaid, giving life to plastic limbs, igniting glass eyes with blue fire. Looking out through those eyes, Rasferret sampled his new shape, flexing the hands, swinging the arms, breaking a branch underfoot as he took his first step forward.

It was 11:15, and the killing hour had begun.

IV.

Tolkien House co-president Amos Noldorin and his Lady Fujiko—naked as Adam and Lilith in Eden—lay together on a white silk sheet in the clearing by Lothlórien’s entrance. Just above them was the door in the hillside that led to the Khazad-dûm sub-cellars and the elevator.

The stars winked prettily in the skydome, with the brief flicker of an occasional meteor adding variety. The air in the Garden was pleasantly warm, not too humid, a faint breeze bringing a scent of exotic flowers—African violets, perhaps, or
mallorn
blossoms. With this environment-controlled Paradise serving as a backdrop, the lovers argued good-naturedly about what they ought to do in the next fifteen minutes or so. Noldorin insisted that they should get dressed and go upstairs to await Preacher and Jinsei, who were due to arrive at any time now. Fujiko, her Bohemian libido in full ascendancy, made her own desires known by running her tongue briskly up and down behind his left ear.

“Now wait,” Noldorin protested—not too strongly—as she pushed his back down flat against the sheet and endeavored to climb on top of him. “Just wait, they’re going to be here any minute.”

“Is the front door locked?” asked Fujiko, her small form above his large one now, kissing his chest.

“No,” Noldorin admitted, weakening.

“What of it, then?”

“I’ll tell you what of it . . . I’ll . . . look,
look,
what if they walk in and find us like this?”

“Let them get their own sheet,” Fujiko suggested, her hands at work. “Or they can use the grass.”

“Don’t you think—” Noldorin paused briefly to gasp. “—don’t you think that would be just a little breach of good manners?”

“Never preach etiquette to a Risleyite,” replied Fujiko, and that was when someone pulled the switch, changed sensual daydream to ice-veined nightmare. Her hands on Noldorin’s body grew rigid. His budding erection wilted like a cut flower, and gooseflesh arose on both their skins.

“
Jesus
,”
Fujiko exclaimed fearfully, and Noldorin, still flat on his back, did not have to ask what was the matter.

The skydome had gone black. Utterly. But that was not the worst thing. The breeze had dropped to nothing, yet somehow all the warmth seemed to have been sucked out of the air with its passing. Steam wisped from the bodies of the two lovers; the temperature plummet was that sudden, that instantaneous. But that was not the worst thing, either, nor was the fog that began to materialize around them threatening to nullify what little illumination remained from the hidden groundlights. The worst thing was the sound, the not-so-stealthy approach-sound of something that echoed toward them from a nearby bank of trees.

“Jesus, oh Jesus, we’re not alone,” Fujiko cried, shivering. In another place and time—an eternally distant time—she had gone into battle against an angry motorcycle gang without a qualm, but now a supernatural dread entered her, filled her head with terrible storybook images: the Big Bad Wolf out for Little Red Riding Hood’s blood, Hansel and Gretel’s Witch, hungry for gingerbread.

Noldorin rose to a crouch, drawing the sheet about him and Fujiko to keep away the cold, hiding their nakedness. He too felt the dread, but not only dread. He felt strangely dizzy: dizzy from the sudden change in temperature, dizzy from lying on his back, dizzy from the wine he had drunk earlier. Head swimming, he studied the ring on his right hand, a silver band set with a white opal. It was intended as a replica of one of Tolkien’s three Great Elvish Rings. Magic. Oddly or not so oddly, with his head in a spin and terror crawling beneath his flesh, Noldorin found the concept of magic more interesting than ever before in his life. More crucial.

“The elevator,” Fujiko was saying, tugging at him. “Come on, we’ve got to run to the elevator, get upstairs—”

“No,” Noldorin said with sudden certainty. “We won’t make it that way. Not the elevator—the Circle.”

“What?”

“The Enchanted Circle.” He was on his feet, pulling her with him. “Hurry, it might be our only chance!”

Too panic-stricken to argue, she followed him, racing barefoot along the path to the ring of magic stones, the same ring within which Eldest sprite Hobart had, at the Hallowe’en revel, shared the tale of Rasferret the Grub with his fellow Little People.

Noldorin sought no stories, only sanctuary. He hauled Fujiko along as fast as she could go; the thing among the trees drew nearer, hearing them run, pursuing them. Almost at the Circle they lost the white silk sheet. It snagged on a branch, and rather than stop to retrieve it they sprinted the last ten yards naked, diving into the Circle, clutching each other protectively.