Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

— GRADY TRIPP, Wonder Boys

IN THE FALL OF 1948, when I arrived in Plunkettsburg to begin the fieldwork I hoped would lead to a doctorate in archaeology, there were still a good number of townspeople living there whose memories stretched back to the time, in the final decade of the previous century, when the soot-blackened hills that encircle the town fairly swarmed with savants and mad diggers. In 1892 the discovery, on a hilltop overlooking the Miskahannock River, of the burial complex of a hitherto-unknown tribe of Mound Builders had set off a frenzy of excavation and scholarly poking around that made several careers, among them that of the aged hero of my profession who was chairman of my dissertation committee. It was under his redoubtable influence that I had taken up the study of the awful, illustrious Miskahannocks, with their tombs and bone pits, a course that led me at last, one gray November afternoon, to turn my overladen fourthhand Nash off the highway from Pittsburgh to Morgantown, and to navigate, tightly gripping the wheel, the pitted ghost of a roadbed that winds up through the Yuggogheny Hills, then down into the broad and gloomy valley of the Miskahannock.

As I negotiated that endless series of hairpin and blind curves, I was afforded an equally endless series of dispiriting partial views of the place where I would spend the next ten months of my life. Like many of its neighbors in that iron-veined country, Plunkettsburg was at first glance unprepossessing — a low, rusting little city, with tarnished onion domes and huddled houses, drab as an armful of dead leaves strewn along the ground. But as I left the last hill behind me and got my first unobstructed look, I immediately noted the one structure that, while it did nothing to elevate my opinion of my new home, altered the humdrum aspect of Plunkettsburg sufficiently to make it remarkable, and also sinister. It stood off to the east of town, in a zone of weeds and rust-colored earth, a vast, black box, bristling with spiky chimneys, extending over some five acres or more, dwarfing everything around it. This was, I knew at once, the famous Plunkettsburg Mill. Evening was coming on, and in the half-light its windows winked and flickered with inner fire, and its towering stacks vomited smoke into the autumn twilight. I shuddered, and then cried out. So intent had I been on the ghastly black apparition of the mill that I had nearly run my car off the road.

“ ‘Here in this mighty fortress of industry,’ ” I quoted aloud in the tone of a newsreel narrator, reassuring myself with the ironic reverberation of my voice, “ ‘turn the great cogs and thrust the relentless pistons that forge the pins and trusses of the American dream.’ ” I was recalling the words of a chamber of commerce brochure I had received last week from my hosts, the antiquities department of Plunkettsburg College, along with particulars of my lodging and library privileges. They were anxious to have me; it had been many years since the publication of my chairman’s Miskahannock Surveys had effectively settled all answerable questions — save, I hoped, one — about the vanished tribe and consigned Plunkettsburg once again to the mists of academic oblivion and the thick black effluvia of its satanic mill.

“So what is there left to say about that pointy-toothed crowd?” said Carlotta Brown-Jenkin, draining her glass of brandy. The chancellor of Plunkettsburg College and chairwoman of the antiquities department had offered to stand me to dinner on my first night in town. We were sitting in the Hawaiian-style dining room of a Chinese restaurant downtown. Brown-Jenkin was herself appropriately antique, a gaunt old girl in her late seventies, her nearly hairless scalp worn and yellowed, the glint of her eyes, deep within their cavernous sockets, like that of ancient coins discovered by torchlight. “I quite thought that your distinguished mentor had revealed all their bloody mysteries.”

“Only the women filed their teeth,” I reminded her, taking another swallow of Indian Ring beer, the local brew, which I found to possess a dark, not entirely pleasant savor of autumn leaves or damp earth. I gazed around the low room with its ersatz palm thatching and garlands of wax orchids. The only other people in the place were a man on wooden crutches with a pinned-up trouser leg and a man with a wooden hand, both of them drinking Indian Ring, and the bartender, an extremely fat woman in a thematically correct but hideous red muumuu. My hostess had assured me, without a great deal of enthusiasm, that we were about to eat the best-cooked meal in town.

“Yes, yes,” she recalled, smiling tolerantly. Her particular field of study was great Carthage, and no doubt, I thought, she looked down on my unlettered band of savages. “They considered pointed teeth to be the essence of female beauty.”

“That is, of course, the theory of my distinguished mentor,” I said, studying the label on my beer bottle, on which there was printed Thelder’s 1894 engraving of the Plunkettsburg Ring, which was also reproduced on the cover of Miskahannock Surveys.

“You do not concur?” said Brown-Jenkin.

“I think that there may in fact be other possibilities.”

“Such as?”

At this moment the waiter arrived, bearing a tray laden with plates of unidentifiable meats and vegetables that glistened in garish sauces the colors of women’s lipstick. The steaming dishes emitted an overpowering blast of vinegar, as if to cover some underlying stench. Feeling ill, I averted my eyes from the food and saw that the waiter, a thickset, powerful man with bland Slavic features, was missing two of the fingers on his left hand. My stomach revolted. I excused myself from the table and ran directly to the bathroom.

“Nerves,” I explained to Brown-Jenkin when I returned, blushing, to the table. “I’m excited about starting my research.”

“Of course,” she said, examining me critically. With her napkin she wiped a thin red dribble of sauce from her chin. “I quite understand.”

“There seem to be an awful lot of missing limbs in this room,” I said, trying to lighten my mood. “Hope none of them ended up in the food.”

The chancellor stared at me, aghast.

“A very bad joke,” I said. “My apologies. My sense of humor was not, I’m afraid, widely admired back in Boston, either.”

“No,” she agreed, with a small, unamused smile. “Well.” She patted the long, thin strands of yellow hair atop her head. “It’s the mill, of course.”

“Of course,” I said, feeling a bit dense for not having puzzled this out myself. “Dangerous work they do there, I take it.”

“The mill has taken a piece of half the men in Plunkettsburg,” Brown-Jenkin said, sounding almost proud. “Yes, it’s terribly dangerous work.” There had crept into her voice a boosterish tone of admiration that could not fail to remind me of the chamber of commerce brochure. “ Important work.”

“Vitally important,” I agreed, and to placate her I heaped my plate with colorful, luminous, indeterminate meat, a gesture for which I paid dearly through all the long night that followed.

I took up residence in Murrough House, just off the campus of Plunkettsburg College. It was a large, rambling structure, filled with hidden passages, queerly shaped rooms, and staircases leading nowhere, built by the notorious lady magnate, “the Robber Baroness,” Philippa Howard Murrough, founder of the college, noted spiritualist and author and dark genius of the Plunkettsburg Mill. She had spent the last four decades of her life, and a considerable part of her manufacturing fortune, adding to, demolishing, and rebuilding her home. On her death the resultant warren, a chimera of brooding Second Empire gables, peaked Victorian turrets, and baroque porticoes with a coat of glossy black ivy, passed into the hands of the private girls’ college she had endowed, which converted it to a faculty club and lodgings for visiting scholars. I had a round turret room on the fourth and uppermost floor. There were no other visiting scholars in the house and, according to the porter, this had been the case for several years.