Danny Tobey - The Faculty Club

It was a stroke of luck.

I looked at the article for a second, ran my fingers down the smooth leather.

“This reminds me,” I said-easy now-“of the day we met each other.”

I smiled at him, and he smiled back with that joyless, thin smile. I shook my head and even laughed, tentatively. “You were going to give Daphne that beautiful book and ask her out.”

“She said no, of course,” Nigel said, grinning.

“Well, at least she got a nice book out of it.”

“Yeah, lucky her,” Nigel laughed.

My stomach dropped three stories.

The center square… the center square…

Why don’t you tell him the joke? Maybe he’ll thank you.

Nigel wouldn’t be thanking anyone, because Nigel-the Nigel I once knew-didn’t even exist anymore.

I took off so fast I’m not sure he knew what happened until I was out the door. I heard him yell after me, then pick up the phone and shout into it.

I skipped down the steps of his brownstone three at a time and almost fell head over heels down them.

Everything fit.

Our center square had been wrong. The professor planning his own “death,” the one I met face to face-we had assumed his obituary was a cover, a hoax to hide the fact that he was already immortal. I guess I’d pictured a bunch of three-hundred-year-old men living in a cave somewhere, pulling the strings and ruling the world. But that wasn’t the center square at all. His “death” was a hoax all right, but not in the way we thought.

Because there were two ways to be immortal, really. You could make your body live forever. Or, you could jump ship when your body was about to give out…

Three new spots every year.

Three new students, the best and brightest, initiated into the V &D.

What was the central ceremony of voodoo? What had Isabella told us?

Not immortality but possession. The loa mounts the horse.

What if someone found a way to use voodoo-someone from outside the culture-in a way it was never intended? I thought of Mr. Bones, in his office with artifacts from around the world. A pushpin in every inch of the map! How many continents had they searched for their path to eternal life?

My God-what had Bernini said to me in his office? It had seemed so strange at the time. How tall are you? Good bone structure. Can you guess the last time we elected a shorter than average president? It was inspired. If you lived forever in your own body, you had to hide. But this… stealing a new body every generation… How many centuries to amass wealth? How many turns to be president? You could build dynasties. Empires.

The loa mounts the horse: his mind, your body.

A line of the most brilliant people in the world, waiting to cheat death, over and over… And every year, a line of fresh students, clawing past each other to be initiated. What fools! Victims of the world’s most exclusive faculty club. And I’d been queuing up right along with them, placing my head on the chopping block with a big hopeful smile… But I didn’t make the cut, did I? And that’s when Humpty had said, Tell him the joke. Maybe he’ll thank you. Yes-thank you for not taking my body, my life. (But maybe, just for a second, did I feel a crazy pang: what was so wrong with my body anyway?)

I had to get back to Miles and Sarah.

But then I saw him. Across the street, walking toward me with his head forward. The road was perfectly empty, silent except for that figure cutting a quick path in my direction. I tried to scream, but my throat locked up. I was blowing air. I felt it streaming from my lungs, but no sound came out-just a weak hiss.

I took off running, away from the man.

At the far end of the street, I saw another figure step out of the shadows and come toward me, at the same fast clip. I cut down a side street that ran between two rows of brownstones, beautiful old homes. I hit a patch of black ice and slid wildly, knocking into some trash cans that broke my fall but slammed my arm and shoulder, stinging like hell. Pure adrenaline was driving me now. Somehow I jumped up and kept running. I risked a look behind me and saw the two men converge and move toward me, side by side. Not running so much as loping toward me with long strides. I was thirty feet from the end of the block. Once I got there it was a major intersection with at least three ways to run. If I could just make it far enough ahead of them, I could lose them. I willed myself to run faster. Twenty feet. Fifteen. And then my heart stopped as another two figures appeared at the end of the street. They blocked the exit. Silently, they started moving toward me.

I did the only thing I could. Without thinking, running on pure instinct, I broke left into an alley and tore down it faster than I’ve ever gone in my life.

It was claustrophobic; lightless except for a thin strip of starry night above me.

Then I saw what was waiting for me at the end of the alley, and I realized they hadn’t been chasing me. They’d been herding me.

Three figures stood at the far end of the alley, blocking the path, not moving, waiting.

Between us was an open manhole. A small wisp of water vapor curled from the black circle. They were closing in behind me. I tried to stop but I was running at a speed that sent me slipping and sputtering on patches of ice. And then some sort of primitive math took over-four behind me plus three ahead equals fuck it, take the hole. So I stopped trying to brake and let my hands shield my head and I jumped through the hole, feeling it slam my shoulder on the way down, feeling the empty air, a pale blue disc pulling away until all my senses were pulled to the wet slamming under my feet. I hit the ground and felt the shock run through me.

I picked myself up. There was a burning in my leg, but I could walk. At first, all I heard was the trickling of water. I shook from adrenaline and cold. I was standing in a small gentle stream. I watched water an inch deep move in a current over my shoes. Every twenty feet or so, grating slits above me let in faint street light.

In that dim glow, I saw the figure, ten yards away, cloaked and hooded, staring at me.

He was tall. There was a slow heaving in his shoulders, a calm low breathing.

He took a step toward me, then paused.

I couldn’t see his face. He said nothing, made no noise.

He took another step forward.

I willed my legs to move. They wouldn’t.

I want to see his face, a crazy voice inside me offered.

Another step. Deliberate. Methodical.

Move, I hissed to myself.

Nothing. Glue legs. Useless, wet, and dead.

The steps came faster then, the stride long and precise. Each step smacking into the thin stream under our feet.

Move. Move!

Now he was charging me.

Without stopping he reached a hand into his cloak, and it came out a moment later with a metallic ping. When his hand returned to his side, there was a long blade pointing down from it.

I moved.

My legs popped out of their paralysis. I took a few steps backward and then turned and ran like hell.

Every step splashed. The water, the stone, the slits of light, it felt like a tomb, and I wondered if I was a ghost who hadn’t gotten the memo yet. My side was screaming-one of those “stitches” you get in high school gym from switching between walking and running. A voice, low and seductive, whispered in my head: You could just stop. It won’t hurt. Now or later. Come on, it’s easy.

I didn’t stop. I pushed through the stitch and it went away. But the hooded man was closer. I don’t know if my legs were giving out or if he was warming up, but I heard his splashing steps faster and nearer. His blade must’ve scratched the wall-I heard a ching! Was he raising it? Was that the sound of the blade up over his head? As I ran, what kept coming into my head was an image of Sarah, standing in that shaft of light at the top of her stairs, her eyes brilliant and hazel brown, almost gold, just after she’d been crying. I wanted to see her again. That’s all I knew. I had to get out of this tunnel. In a straight chase, he would catch me.