Donna Tartt - The Secret History

Perhaps because they were the last to leave, I hated to see the twins go most of all. After Francis's horn honks had faded into the snowy, echoless distance, we walked back to their house, not saying much, taking the path through the woods. When Charles turned on the light, I saw that the place was heartbreakingly neat – sink empty, floors waxed, and a row of suitcases by the door.

The dining halls had closed at noon that day; it was snowing hard and getting dark and we didn't have a car; the refrigerator, freshly cleaned and smelling of Lysol, was empty. Sitting around the kitchen table we had a sad, makeshift dinner of canned mushroom soup, soda crackers, and tea without sugar or milk.

The main topic of conversation was Charles and Camilla's itinerary – how they would manage the baggage, what time they should call the taxi in order to make a six-thirty train. I joined in this travel-talk but a deep melancholy that would not lift for many weeks had already begun to settle around me; the sound of Francis's car, receding and then disappearing in the snowy, muffled distance, was still in my ears, and for the first time I realized how lonely the next two months would really be, with the school closed, the snow deep, everyone gone.

They'd told me not to bother seeing them off the next morning, they were leaving so early, but all the same I was there again at five to tell them goodbye. It was a clear, black morning, encrusted with stars; the thermometer on the porch of Commons had sunk to zero. The taxi, idling in a cloud of fume, was already waiting in front. The driver had just slammed the lid on a trunkful of luggage and Charles and Camilla were locking the door behind them. They were too worried and preoccupied to take much pleasure at my presence. Both of them were nervous travelers: their parents had been killed in a car accident, on a weekend drive up to Washington, and they were edgy for days before they had to go anywhere themselves.

They were running late, as well. Charles put down his suitcase to shake my hand. 'Merry Christmas, Richard. You will write, won't you?' he said, then ran down the walk to the cab. Camilla – struggling with two enormous carpetbags – dropped them both in the snow and said: 'Dammit, we'll never get all this luggage on the train.'

She was breathing hard, and deep circles of red burned high on her bright cheeks; in all my life I had never seen anyone so maddeningly beautiful as she was at that moment. I stood blinking stupidly at her, the blood pounding in my veins, and my carefully I rehearsed plans for a goodbye kiss forgotten, when unexpectedly she flew up and threw her arms around me. Her hoarse breath ™ was loud in my ear and her cheek was like ice when she put it against mine a moment later; when I took her gloved hand, I felt the quick pulse of her slender wrist beneath my thumbs.

The taxi honked and Charles put his head out the window.

'Come on,' he shouted.

I carried her bags down to the sidewalk and stood under the street lamp as they pulled away. They were turned around in the back seat and waving to me through the rear window and I stood watching them, and the ghost of my own distorted reflection receding in the curve of the dark glass, until the cab turned a corner and disappeared.

I stood in the deserted street until 1 could no longer hear the sound of the motor, only the hiss of the powdery snow that the wind kicked up in little eddies on the ground. Then I started back to campus, hands deep in pockets and the crunch of my feet unbearably loud. The dorms were black and silent, and the big parking lot behind the tennis court was empty except for a few faculty cars and a lone green truck from Maintenance. In my dorm the hallways were littered with shoe boxes and coat hangers, doors ajar, everything dark and quiet as the grave. I was as depressed as I have ever been in my life. I pulled down the shades and lay down on my unmade bed and went back to sleep.

I had so few belongings it was possible to take them in one trip.

When I woke again, around noon, I packed my two suitcases and, dropping my key off at the security booth, hauled them down the deserted, snowy road into town and to the address the hippie had given me over the telephone.

It was a longer walk than I'd expected, and it soon took me off the main road and through some particularly desolate country near Mount Cataract. My way ran parallel to a rapid, shallow river – the Battenkill – spanned by covered bridges here and there It would have been a pleasant, if demanding walk even in the summertime but in December, in two feet of snow and with two heavy suitcases to carry, I found myself wondering if I would make it at all. My toes and fingers were cramped with cold, and more than once I had to stop to rest, but gradually the countryside began to look less and less deserted and finally the road came out where I had been told it would: Prospect Street in East Hampden.

It was a part of town I had never seen, and worlds away from the part 1 knew – maple trees and clapboard storefronts, village green and courthouse clock. This Hampden was a bombed-out expanse of water towers, rusted railroad tracks, sagging warehouses and factories with the doors boarded up and the windows broken out. All of it looked as though it had stood abandoned since the Depression, except for a seedy little bar at the end of the street, which, judging from the scrum of trucks out front, was doing a good brisk business, even this early in the afternoon.

Strings of Christmas lights and plastic holly hung above the neon beer lights; glancing inside, I saw a line of men in flannel shirts at the bar, all with shot glasses or beers before them, and – towards the back – a younger set running more to baseball caps and fat clustered around a pool table. I stood outside the red, padded-vinyl door and looked in through the porthole at the top for an instant longer. Should I go in and ask directions, have a drink, get warm? I decided I should, and my hand was on the greasy brass door handle when I saw the name of the place in the window: Boulder Tap. I had heard of the Boulder Tap from the local news. It was the epicenter of what little crime there was in Hampden – knifings, rapes, never a single witness. It was not a 1long its course. There were few houses, and even those grim, terrifying house trailers one frequently sees in the harkwoods of Vermont, with tremendous piles of wood to the side and black smoke pouring out the stovepipes, were few and far between.

There were no cars at all, except for the occasional derelict vehicle propped on cinderblocks in someone's front yard. the type of place where you'd want to stop in alone for a drink if you were a lost college bov from up on the hill. j O J L But it wasn't so hard to find where the hippie lived, after all.

One of the warehouses, right on the river, was painted bright purple.

The hippie looked angry, as though I'd woken him up, when he finally came to the door. 'Just let yourself in next time, man,' he said sullenly. He was a short fat man with a sweat-stained T-shirt and a red beard, who looked as if he'd spent many fine evenings with his friends around the pool table at the Boulder Tap. He pointed out the room where I was to live, at the top of a flight of iron stairs (no railing, naturally), and disappeared without a word.

I found myself in a cavernous, dusty room with a plank floor and high, exposed rafters. Besides a broken dresser, and a high chair standing in the corner, it was completely unfurnished except for a lawn mower, a rusted oil drum, and a trestle table which was scattered with sandpaper and carpentry tools and a few curved pieces of wood which were perhaps the exoskeletons of mandolins. Sawdust, nails, food wrappers and cigarette butts, Playboy magazines from the 19705 littered the floor; the many paned windows were furry with frost and grime.