The first jostling and shoving took less than three minutes to start up, and even as she nearly lost her balance, Lisa Butteli grinned, a swell of pride bursting up in the back of her mind. Here it comes, she thought. Let's see you deal with all of us you fucking prick!
The moment the event had been advertised on posterboards across the Iowa State University's Amelia City campus, Lisa had seen it, and made swift mental plans to organize the resistance to it. Turning Point USA had booked the Clarence Hill Auditorium for an evening presentation, to take place in just two weeks' time. Lisa imagined they gave such a short window of notice in the hopes of avoiding any organized opposition. Think again, you con loser trolls, she mused, snatching up one of the fliers thumbtacked in the entryway of her dorm building.
Within an hour of getting up to her room after her shift at the nearby Starbucks, she had emailed every fellow member of the student organization she belonged to on campus, SAFE (Students Against Fascism Everywhere). Most had also seen the fliers around the school earlier, and were considering putting together a protest at the event.
TPUSA had selected Ian Parks, a loud-mouthed conservative commentator and podcaster who focused on the American Midwest, to come to the Amelia campus for one of their recruitment/speaking tours. Lisa knew him well, had sparred with him back and forth several times on pre-Elon Twitter. She volunteered to spearhead organizing their protest, or at least some element of it; ultimately, she had been put in charge of putting together slogans, chants, and questions to aim at Parks and his cohorts. William Sevvit, the chapter lead of their particular SAFE group on the Amelia City campus, would handle overall plans.
She could see the first of the TPUSA people coming along down the sidewalk that would lead them to the auditorium building, Parks striding upright at the lead, flanked on either side with two other young men who looked not too unlike him. All three wore simple, crisp brown suits with narrow red ties, their strides confident and brisk. Were Lisa able to separate her personal, ideological view of them from their surface-level physicality, she might admit that they were classically handsome in a sort of gruff, old-fashioned masculine manner.
From her current worldview, however, heavily influenced by her time online and living on campus, she saw them for what she truly believed them to be- stuck in the past Dude-Bros trying to pass themselves off as respectable by wearing the kind of monkey suits that corporate fascists used to mask their deep nastiness. Lisa felt a couple of her people jostle past her on either side, joining a kind of corridor gauntlet of SAFE members and other students who had agreed to coordinate the protest activities.
When Parks and his cohorts could no longer proceed three abreast, Parks took the lead. Only a couple of paces in, Lisa drew out the metal coach's whistle she had tucked in her shirt and blew out a single short, sharp blast on it. The human corridor members began snarling and belting out every insult and bit of invective they felt toward people like Parks and his outfit. Lisa turned around and quickly darted inside the Clarence Hill Aud building, finding the unrest inside, between her people and the small handful of TPUSA's on-campus fans, had escalated faster and much more potently than she had thought it would.
She had expected some shoving and shouting, maybe the deployment of pepper spray if things turned physical. What she had not at all anticipated was what she walked into, with scores of students forming a tight circle around a set of four masked people ruthlessly kicking and stomping a fifth individual on the floor. There were cries around her of "Knock it off" and "Enough!", to be sure; but she also heard snarls of "Fucking kill him", and "Bash the fash, man, get 'im!"
This had gone well farther than anticipated. Lisa started to scan up and down the corridor, hoping to at least spot one or two campus police by the twin oak doors leading into the main auditorium, when she remembered that part of the group's plans had been a carefully constructed set of distractions around campus to pull away possible resources for the TPUSA people to call on.
Okay, a bit of an overstep there, she mused, trying to press her bulk toward the ongoing assault. By the time she got near the front, people were breaking apart, leaving a young man groaning, his face swollen and bloody, a previously crisp white TPUSA shirt covered in scarlet spatter and the scuffs of boots where he had been repeatedly kicked and stomped.
Nobody was helping him. Lisa cautiously approached the guy and crouched down near his head. He tried to cock his head up, muzzily said through mashed lips, "Get, help."
"Looks like maybe you could've helped yourself by not associating with Nazis," she replied evenly, standing up and walking away toward the main auditorium.
**
Triumph rolled over her and her fellow SAFE members as Parks muttered, "Screw this" into the microphone, barely audible over the buzzing of scores of kazoos and shouted questions and insults, everything from accusations that Parks and company were Nazis to calls of "Shut up, conserva-cucks!" Sweating and flustered, the conservative commentator set the mic back in its stand as a chant, Lisa’s proudest contribution to the day’s plans, started to issue forth from the crowd- “T-P-USA, you have got to go away! T-P-USA, you have got to go away!” Short and simple, it had a definitive cadence for repetition, a militant audible quality that swiftly overwhelmed all other sounds in the auditorium.
Dozens, scores of cell phones were held aloft, filming the entire ongoing incident, which Lisa found herself both thankful for and a little worried about. Broadly speaking, she believed in transparency as an essential part of fostering a positive, collaborative community living scenario, particularly when people in online spaces had a bad habit of trying to maliciously misrepresent exactly how events transpired. More and more often the last couple of years, though, she had found that transparency ended up circling back and biting folks on her side of things in the ass, revealing that they were, more often than not, the instigators of hostility and violence.
Adding her own cell phone camera to the flock of those presently filming, Lisa tried to carefully scan the people who were going up toward the stage and surrounding Parks, in order to get a good view of them for her recording. She didn’t know all of them, but she thought she recognized a couple of them as faculty or staff members from the school itself. This made a certain sense to her; most organizations like TPUSA didn’t just randomly show up to college campuses, but were invited by certain members of campus staff or student organizations of a notably conservative bent.
Not that there were many of those on the Amelia City campus for Iowa State University. There had been four when Lisa started her freshman year, and thanks to the efforts of herself and like-minded cohorts, three of those had been disbanded and scattered to the wind, their members coalescing into a single outfit that was pretty constantly on the verge of being censored or banned entirely from the student body life.
As Parks and his look-alikes from TPUSA started making their way toward one of the auditorium’s side doors, Lisa saw a water bottle arc through the air at them, followed by a grunt and Parks yelling, “What the fuck, people?” Several more bottles flew, most of them still full, raining down on the TPUSA trio and the supporters circling around them, trying to get out of the chamber. Lisa stopped recording and turned around, weaving her way back toward the main entrance of the hall and calling one of the other SAFE coordinators, Charlie.
“What’s up, Lisa,” he asked as he picked on his end.
“Parks and his people are leaving, heading out the west side of the building, the side entrance,” she replied, carefully working through more students out in the main corridor, trying to get back outside with the phone pressed to her ear.
“Oh, shit, already? All right, I’ll let them know,” Charlie said, proceeding to hang up. Lisa got outside about twenty seconds later, and she heard from over on the building’s west side an uproarious wave of shouting and laughter, unspecified mockery, and she smiled, finding a spot to just stand and wait to see Parks and his people come around; their vehicles were still parked along the main road through campus just a couple of dozen yards away. As they stalked away from the auditorium hall, she spotted them, covered in a slimy layer of eggs that they had been pelted with. One of the three young men halted a few paces behind Parks and the other fellow, reaching into an inner blazer pocket and retrieving what Lisa recognized was an EpiPen, jabbing himself in the arm after dropping the egg-soaked blazer coat.
Within minutes, Parks and his TPUSA cohorts were peeling away, fleeing the Amelia City campus.
**
A great deal of work was going to have to be done, she realized, reviewing the various video files that had been emailed to her from the other members of the SAFE group. Someone had gotten pretty close to the stage, and caught a student trying to reach up and yank Parks physically down off the edge of the raised platform, which could have resulted in a pretty bad fall if they had succeeded. They were only stopped when Parks aimed a kick at the student’s head which barely missed by inches.
Lisa had spent a great deal of her freshman year’s down time honing her skills with video editing tools, however, and it was almost child’s play to crop the video to make it look like Parks had simply gone over to the edge of the stage to take a swing at a random member of the student body. On to the next step, she thought. As mentioned before, she supported transparency, yes, but not when it made people like Parks and his people look like they were on the right side of history. She thought of Popper’s Paradox, and grinned, moving onto the next video segment.
The work was tedious, and didn’t seriously tax her abilities, but she nonetheless would not put it aside until she was properly ready to send it off to the appropriate local media outlets, YouTubers and TikTokers who would lend their abilities of amplification to her group’s cause. There was a brief portion of this time, as well, that took her away from trimming, clipping, and editing, in order to use a facial recognition software program to compare some of the faculty and staff faces in the videos against a public database of profile pictures for the campus’s instructional and institutional body.
Four of the six staff that the program turned up didn’t really surprise her all that much, and even a cursory look through their online activities showed that they had likely attended the event merely to act as observers, looking out for the overall health and welfare of their student body. Yet, two of them struck her as unusual. One of the two was an off-duty campus police officer, Reginald Scott, who was also, it turned out, himself a senior year student trying to work and earn his way through school. The last one the program found, however, hit a nerve with Lisa, as he was one of her professors- Professor Jacob Marks, a professor of medieval history.
Professor Marks had often struck Lisa as a curious fellow. A man in his late middle age, he was predominantly bald atop his head, with a ring of scraggly black hair around the sides and back, tinged through with a few streaks of gray. He had eyebrows so bushy, they looked like little caterpillars crawling across his forehead if one looked long enough. On two fingers of each hand, he wore heavy silver rings of some kind, and he owned a curious dark blue cloak that he wore in the colder weather, a cloak with strange, cabalistic symbols embroidered along the bottom hem in bright yellow thread. During the warmer seasons he had a similar cloak that appeared to be a great deal lighter, absent the symbol markings, but this was a man who was hard to miss in a crowd.
Outside of his lengthy lectures about the various cultures and customs of various peoples around the world in the era often referred to as ‘medieval’, she didn’t know much about Professor Marks on a personal level. She frequently struggled to pay attention in his lectures from one end to the next, and this was made even more challenging by the odd schedule that he kept; where most long-term professors on campus taught at least one class per day, the cloak-bound Mark only gave lectures on Mondays and Thursdays, from 10a.m. to noon. If someone couldn’t make it to one class, he also let it be known early on, they would not be provided synopsis notes from the prior lecture, at least not from him.
“You are university students, not babes barely out of your clouts,” he had groused on the first or second of classes she had attended. He had come across as stern, brooding, severe, an impression that was only reinforced each time Lisa had witnessed him interact with a student beyond the occasional question regarding some historical reference he made during his lectures. “You shall take a measure of personal responsibility.”
Scouring all of the usual places online, she started with Twitter, and did not discover any account for him there. She checked Facebook: similarly void of a profile for the history professor. A hop, skip and jump over to LinkedIn, where she suspected she would at least find a hint of an online presence, but once more, she came up with nothing. Using one of her online alternate search toolkits, she checked for Professor Marks on Gettr, Gab, Minds, and Truth Social- all came up with no account belonging to him. All she needed was a hint.
One did exist, though, a video clip on Truth Social posted by an account belonging to a member of the campus’s student body, attached to a brief bit of praise for the professor. It had apparently been from the previous school year, and the student in question was saying how amazing it was to, quote, “See a professor actually give one of these insufferable wokesters a dose of their own nonsense!”
Apparently, when referring to a student’s response to one of his few pointed questions during a lecture, Professor Marks had pointed out that his reply was typical of those who didn’t actually pay attention to recent history. The student in question stood up and started correcting the professor, informing him that the student’s pronouns were ‘she/her’, because she was “a trans woman, and trans women are real women!” The professor’s response had been delivered in a dead-pan that, according to this Truth Social post, absolutely rendered everyone else in the lecture hall silent.
“If that were entirely true, linguistically, than why would you need to so vehemently insist on using the qualifier of ‘trans’ in the first place, my child?” The poster hadn’t been wrong; the video played on for several seconds, and nobody in the lecture hall uttered even so much as a half-hearted retort. Much to her chagrin, even watching the video now on her laptop, Lisa couldn’t think of a proper response to that question herself. Still, she had video now from other SAFE members showing Marks up on the stage with the TPUSA people, and a few well-placed inquiries on a couple of message boards later, she confirmed that Professor Marks had been one of the people on campus who had invited Parks and his people to come speak to the student body, along with the lone conservative student group on campus, The Young Elephants of Amelia.
Using a form letter template, she quickly put together a lengthy e-mail to the Dean of Students, sending it via .pdf to other students so that she could gather digital signatures from as many people around campus as she could get it to in a short time frame. Once it was returned to her the following day after her classes, she attached several photos from the event, each one featuring Professor Marks, and sent off the final message to the Dean. Now, it was just a matter of waiting.
**
Sitting in her Psyche 301 class, Lisa found herself genuinely taken aback as several campus police officers quietly filed into the room, approaching several of her classmates and whispering back and forth with them for several seconds before they were ushered from the room, their laptops and bags carried with them. As the first of these students drew near the door into and out of the room, Professor Thompson raised a finger for the campus cops’ attention, collectively. “Where exactly are you folks taking my students?”
“Administration building, ma’am. They might not all be back right away,” one of the taller, burlier officers said, clearing his throat. At first, Lisa was confused, but as she carefully looked at each of the students being led out, she realized that each and every one of them was a member of The Young Elephants of Amelia.
Side benefit, maybe, she mused. The letter she had sent with its dozens of signatures had not named any Young Elephants by name, only opting to single out Professor Marks for ‘creating a dangerous, unwelcoming environment by inviting such a publicly known hate group as TPUSA on the Amelia City campus of Iowa State University’. The letter had gone on to highlight the multitude of well-known bigots and fascists associated with the organization, and Lisa had even added a small personal appeal to deal with Marks, who, to quote her ad-libbed portion of the letter, ‘hardly made the student body feel inclusive in his lectures, once singling out a trans-woman student in his lecture hall for scorn and derision’. Sure, her choice of framing might not have been intended by Marks, but perception, as they say, is everything in politics.
She tried to turn her attention back to Professor Thompson, but found her mind wandering through joyful imaginings of the sort of trouble that Marks and the Young Elephants were now in.
**
“Hey, it’s not perfect, but it gets you out of a class on Tuesdays, doesn’t it,” asked Clay, as he, William, Bobby and Lisa waited on their order to arrive in the corner booth of the Denny’s located just off-campus a few days later. SAFE’s top leadership met every other Saturday morning most of the time, but they had all agreed that an impromptu meeting was in order. William held a small, smug grin on his feline-reminiscent features, spinning his smartphone absently on the tabletop, buoyed off the hard surface by one of those little Pop-It attachments that made holding the phone easier.
“Sure, for now,” said Lisa, taking a sip of the diner coffee. Awful stuff, but it’s caffeine at least, she mused. “Wasn’t Tara coming too?”
“Haven’t heard from her for a couple of days,” William said, nodding to their waitress as she approached the table. “Not since the morning after the event, actually. Anyway, I wanted you guys to see this,” he said, offering his phone to Lisa, who took it quickly and read over the email that William had pulled up. It was from one of their organization’s allies in the faculty, relaying to William that the Dean of Students had begun an inquiry into The Young Elephants group, and was going to try to determine their level of culpability for inviting TPUSA onto the campus in the first place, ‘thus establishing an environment of conflict and distrust among the student body’. Lisa handed the phone over to Bobby beside her then, nodding.
“You think they’ll shut them down, then,” she asked.
“Probably not, no,” William said, his grin fading a little. “They’re the last conservative-leaning group on campus, so they probably can’t just get rid of them, it’d be seen as a bridge too far to remove all opposition to people who’ve decided to not be a bunch of pricks and bigots. Even assholes are supposed to have representation on a college campus.” As they proceeded tucking into their breakfast, going over some brief small talk and brainstorming their next group action, an ambulance pelted past the diner, the sirens shrieking as it blazed by. Ambulances were a common enough sight throughout Amelia City, sure, but normally one didn’t expect to see them in broad daylight.
Furthermore, one didn’t usually see them heading directly for the school campus.
It was an hour later that Lisa overheard someone talking about the cause of the ambulance; Tara Brighton had been discovered in her dorm room, dead. There weren’t a lot of details being shared out among the student body just yet beyond the fact that one of her dorm neighbors had called campus police to report a suspicious odor coming from Tara’s room, one of the few singles units in her dorm building. Lisa contacted her manager at Starbucks to inform her that she would be running about an hour late, and after she got the message saying that would be fine, Lisa started sprinting through every campus-associated social media account, student or alumni-operated, looking for any inkling of a detail about what had happened to poor Tara.
There were, as one might expect so soon after the discovery, plenty of folks engaging in outright conjecture and speculation, but Lisa noted a notable lack of one common explanation being offered- nobody was suggesting that it had been suicide. On an American college campus, one would have a hard time being able to throw a stone without being able to peg at least one person who had considered killing themselves over the course of their time at university. Yet here, she was finding no scintilla of evidence that anyone would even voice this possibility.
Knowing Tara even moderately well, which she did, Lisa acknowledged that this was highly understandable. Tara had been a bouncy, energetic young woman, friendly and outgoing, and never once displaying the sort of out-of-character moments of maudlin external contemplation that, in at least her own experience, usually stood as a marker of someone who was in truth deeply, personally troubled. There had been no hints of suicidal ideation, or even self-harm or criticism. Tara Brighton was not a good candidate for suicide in her mind.
Yet, to not even find a single person online suggesting it as a likely scenario? That just doesn’t sit right, she thought. Someone knows something, saw something. I just have to keep looking.
**
It was while she was at work that Lisa finally observed something that might have hinted at what happened to Tara. It was around five o’clock in the afternoon, as the final hour of her shift got to its starting point, that she overheard a pair of students half-whispering about what Reggie Scott had told them he saw when he responded to the call about a suspicious smell coming from Tara’s dorm room. Reggie was not only a campus cop, but also a senior at the school, and a relatively popular young man at that. A quick once-over at the girls at the table told Lisa that yes, they appeared like the sorts with whom Reggie would associate, trying to lay on the ‘alpha male’ charm.
I’m no alpha anything, but I have my ways, Lisa thought, bringing a couple of biscotti over to the girls. “Hey, these aren’t going to sell before the day’s out, so I was wondering if you ladies would like a complimentary biscotti,” Lisa said amiably. The girls smiled and thanked her, and Lisa took up the plate once more. “Um, I’m not trying to be nosy, but did you guys just say that Reggie Scott’s the one who found Tara Brighton this morning?”
“Yeah, it was pretty bad,” said the one girl, her nose wrinkling up in disgust. “He said he took pics with his phone, you know, for the police report? But when we asked to see them, he got all serious and stuff, said he could get in trouble for that.” Lisa took the plate back behind the serving counter, put her own tip money in the drawer to make up for the biscotti she’d handed over, and determined what her next course of action would have to be, though she didn’t care for the idea one bit.
She was going to have to go talk to Reggie Scott.
**
“I just need a couple of minutes of his time,” Lisa said, pocket notebook and pen in hand as the duty desk officer gave her a bored, half-lidded glower. The officer got up and walked away, heading back into the bullpen area, returning a minute later with Reggie in tow, the senior looking sharp in his neatly pressed white uniform shirt and badge, momentarily hiking up his equipment belt and giving Lisa a quick up-and-down, brows furrowed. “Reggie?”
“Yeah,” he said, hooking his thumbs through his belt. “I think I know you; Lisa, right? Butelli?”
“Um, yeah,” she said, grinning despite her distaste for guys like Reggie. “How do you know me?”
“My ex-girlfriend follows you on Twitter,” he replied with a downward curl to the corner of his mouth.
“Okay. Um, can I talk to you a little more privately,” she asked, trying to lead the way back out of the campus police station to at least its front steps, where there wouldn’t be prying eyes. She didn’t really need to spend long talking to him, thanks to the fact that she had his cell phone number already from his Facebook profile. The cloning program she’d gotten from one of her friends in SAFE only needed her to be in close proximity to his phone on a shared wi-fi connection for a couple of minutes in order to capture and copy every photo image on his device, and then she could head back to her own dorm room to cycle through them for the pics he’d taken at the crime scene. Still, it required she manage to keep him within a few yards and in range of the station’s publicly available wi-fi signal.
“Sure,” he replied after a few moments’ hesitation, grabbing a nearby windbreaker off a coat rack and following her outside. The moment they were out on the steps fronting the building, he said, “You know, it’s maybe not my place to say this as a campus cop, but I think it’s pretty fucked up what you and your friends did to those folks from TPUSA the other day. They were invited here for a speaking engagement.”
“Like Nazis need an invitation to show up anywhere,” she muttered in response, rolling her eyes at him as she clicked her pen open.
“God, do you know how tiresome that shit is? Anybody you don’t like, or don’t agree with, they must be a Nazi, right? And why is that always your go-to, huh? Have you never heard of any other groups of evil motherfuckers around the world, throughout history? You’re like a broken record; for God’s sake, I remember seeing you Tweet once that Dan Bongino must be one, because he’s a white guy with a shaved head who’s a conservative.” Reggie folded his arms over his chest, looked away, and let out a snort. After a few moments, though, he shook his head and sighed. “That’s, probably not why you’re here to talk to me, though, is it? Is it Brighton?” Lisa nodded. “Yeah, I’m the one who took that call, found her. You doing some kind of student paper story or something about it? Because I can’t say anything on the record,” he continued, slipping out of his antagonistic tone and into one that was much more formal, officious. Lisa didn’t like him, but she could respect his ability to cleanly separate between his personal grudge with her and his acceptance of his job duties.
She felt her pocket vibrate, and recognized that his was the signal informing her that the cloning had been completed. “You can’t tell me anything at all? Just something that maybe I could attribute to an ‘anonymous source’ or something like that?”
“Sorry. But hey, look,” he said, casting about them for onlookers or eavesdroppers, taking half a step closer to her as a look of genuine apprehension closed over his face. “Between you and me? It was bad. Like, horror movie bad, okay?” She took a quick note, just to maintain her seeming cover for having come to the station to begin with. “Did you grow up around here? Amelia City in general, I mean?”
“No, I’m from Nebraska,” Lisa clarified.
“Okay, so maybe you won’t get it right away when I say this,” he continued, clearing his throat. “But growing up here, I always heard, well, stories, about the area. Things that just seemed a bit too weird, you know?”
“Everyplace has its ghost stories,” she said with a shrug.
“Not like Amelia,” he replied, his voice now barely a whisper. “If something like one of those stories is what happened to Brighton, then do yourself a favor; until it runs its course, don’t go anywhere alone.” He took a step back from her, turning to head back into the station. “Not even a self-righteous, blue-haired land whale like yourself deserves what happens to people in those stories.”
**
Back in her dorm room, Lisa spent several minutes trying to recover from her much-needed sprint to the shared bathroom just down the hall, her stomach still gurgling, but the immediate and overpowering urge to vomit again subsiding. The pictures of Tara Brighton in her room had been revolting in a way she didn’t think was possible. She had watched plenty of horror films growing up, and she’d seen some pretty disturbing material online since middle school and beyond. None of those things had prepared her for seeing a real dead body, much less someone she had known personally.
She realized now that she actually felt a touch of sympathy for Reggie Scott; he may be an asshole, yes, but the fact of the matter was, he had responded to a call, found what he had found, documented it, and continued not only doing his job, but attending classes without taking time away to process what he had been witness to.
The images Reggie had captured with his phone had been high resolution, thanks to having the latest and greatest phone available on the market, and they had been taken at several angles, eight photos in total. Tara appeared to have been lashed by her wrists and ankles to the four corners of her bed, with the tips of her fingers all clipped or cut off, and her lower face turned into a gore-caked, bloody ruin. Her whole lower jaw had been removed, her tongue absent from the gaping wound left by her jaw’s absence, and both jaw and tongue deposited unceremoniously at the end of the bed between her lashed feet.
Two of the pictures, taken from each side of her head, revealed that her own fingertips had been crammed into her ears by the maniac who had slain her.
The Amelia City campus of Iowa State University had a certified maniac on its hands.
**
When Clay Burton didn’t show up for Women’s Lit, Lisa waited until after class to try calling him. The call went straight to his voicemail, which was something that had never happened in all the time she had known him, since their freshman year together. It indicated that his phone was off, and as everyone who knew him well understood, Clay never turned his phone off. There had been a two-day period during sophomore year when he’d freaked out a little, because his mom and dad had forgotten to pay his phone bill, and Sprint had temporarily turned off service, but that had been an extenuating circumstance, forgotten almost as soon as it was over.
Lisa texted him quickly as she made her way from the Women’s Lit class toward Starbucks to work her short four-hour shift for the day, asking him to call her as soon as he had the chance. She hit ‘send’, and stopped in her tracks when a little gray bubble popped up with a ‘bloop’ noise, filled with four words that sent an arctic chill through her- ‘Could Not Deliver Message’. She called campus police immediately, trying to convey her concern without sounding hysterical, and though she suspected they might normally have brushed her off, nobody on campus had yet set aside in their minds what had happened to Tara Brighton; campus police informed her that they would be sending someone to his dorm residence immediately to check on him.
Worried and distracted, Lisa managed to screw up at least five drink orders before her manager pulled her into the office to ask if everything was all right. When Lisa explained that her friend Clay was now missing, and that she had been friends with the young woman who was murdered just a few days earlier, her manager nodded sympathetically, and offered her the opportunity to go ahead and take off early. Lisa took her up on the offer, and even though the sun wouldn’t be setting for at least a couple of hours, she practically jogged all the way back to her dorm room.
There was a noticeable hustle in everyone else’s step on campus as well, she observed en route.
**
The discovery of Clay Burton was all anybody could talk about the following afternoon around campus. He’d been located a couple of miles away from the school, and despite official policy surrounding the release of details in a murder, some anonymous employee of the Amelia City Police Department had informed local reporters that Burton had been found in an abandoned and condemned apartment building bound up with chains and hung upside down from a rafter, his head lowered into a battered old pot full of dozens and dozens of egg whites and yolks; he had apparently drowned in egg, though not before his fingertips had been cut off and his tongue ripped out of his mouth.
There began to float around the school over the course of the next few days a rumor that some of the faculty and staff were contemplating shutting down the campus temporarily, at least until such time as the campus and city authorities could come up with some kind of plan for how to contend with whatever was going on. More such mutterings cropped up when, a week after Clay Burton’s discovery, William Sevvit was found by a coworker in the parking lot outside of the bar he worked part time at, his throat slashed open, his tongue yanked out through the gaping wound in a macabre display, his fingertips cut off and crammed into the center console. Like the other two, he also appeared to have been bound into his driver’s seat with lengths of chain.
The Dean of Students issued a school-wide e-mail blast to every student attending the campus, informing them that if they wanted to take a temporary sabbatical in light of recent events, they needed only get approval from their professors in writing, and drop off said approvals to the administration building. They would be granted a two-week mental wellness leave, and arrangements would be made for them to take any previously scheduled tests or perform academic in-class work upon their return.
For Lisa, the concern over this string of grisly slayings was far more tangible, more personal than for most other students. All three of the victims thus far, after all, had been members of SAFE, an acronym which, at the moment, seemed as far from apropos as one could get. The day following the e-mail from the Dean, she started around to the various lecture halls and classrooms she attended, receiving written approval to take advantage of the 2-week mental wellness retreat from the campus; her mother had been more than happy to say she’d be on her way to pick Lisa up the moment she got the okay to take the break.
With the approvals in hand, Lisa headed to the administration building, taking the papers to a tired, somewhat frazzled-looking secretary, who pulled her aside into a cubicle near the building’s entrance, offering her the guest seat as she sat at her own and started clacking away at her computer. A document scanner situated on the right side of her desk hummed as she slid the papers through, and the secretary wordlessly tapped away on her computer for several minutes, finally sitting back in her seat with a pensive look.
“Is something wrong,” Lisa asked.
“I don’t think so, but let me go speak with the Dean real quick,” the secretary said, popping up off of her seat and shuffling away. She returned about ten minutes later, and when she sat back down, she had a look on her face that told Lisa that yes, something was wrong. “Okay, so, we’ve only had a few other students already apply for the 2-week leave, and this didn’t come up with either of them, but I’m kind of glad this did come up, because it’s going to again.”
“What’s the problem? I got the go-ahead from all of my professors right there,” Lisa said, pointing to the gathered papers now sitting behind the scanner. The secretary let out a sigh, shaking her head.
“No, you didn’t, actually, Miss Butteli. There’s a professor missing here; Professor Marks.” Lisa blinked mutely at the secretary, her confusion beginning to twist toward frustration.
“How am I supposed to get his approval? He’s on leave,” Lisa pointed out.
“Yes, on paid administrative leave for the time being. But according to our system, he’s still taking office hours throughout the week to speak to students one-on-one. If you want to take the leave, you’re going to have to bring us a written approval from him too to complete the process. I’m sorry,” the woman said with a shrug. Lisa thanked her quietly, promising she’d be back with Professor Marks’s approval in hand.
**
“Enter,” said the low, rumbling voice from beyond the solid oak door, left open the barest crack so that sound could pass in and out of the office. Lisa gently prodded the door open, revealing a modest sized and relatively Spartan academic office, its only seeming décor a narrow black desk and two heavy book cases on the wall opposite the door, filled with dense tomes of some sort. Professor Marks sat behind the desk, several bookmarked volumes arrayed before him, a hardcover journal of some sort before him, a rather fine-looking pen in hand. He looked up at her in the doorway, scratching at his chin with the pen through his thick, scraggly beard, his eyes droopy, almost bored or half-asleep, his mouth bent in an almost perpetual contemplative frown. “You’re one of mine then, aren’t you? Boreli?”
“Butteli, sir,” she said with a faint nod.
“Ah, yes, my apologies. Do come in. Shut the door,” he added, waving a hand toward the dark green armchair situated across the desk from himself. She pressed the door shut behind herself and moved to the chair, pondering it for a moment before easing down into it; it looked older than the man whose office she had entered. “What can I do for you, Miss Butteli?”
“Well, I’m sure you’ve heard about what’s been going on around campus the last couple of weeks,” she began. “And that the Dean has offered us a chance to take a 2-week break to try and process things, maybe get away to feel a little safer, maybe, hopefully, give the freak who’s been killing kids around here a chance to either get caught or move on.”
“I’m aware of the circumstances, yes,” said Professor Marks, gently shutting his journal notebook and sliding it aside, setting his pen next to it. He leaned back in his leather desk chair, fingers steepled in front of his bearded chin and mouth, eyes narrowed upon her. “Miss Butteli, are you familiar at all with the original usage of the term ‘blue hair’,” he inquired.
“I beg pardon, sir?” This felt like an odd aside, but Lisa figured it would be a quick historical observation, and then Marks would move along. He’s been on paid leave for almost a month, maybe he just needs to flex his teaching muscles, she reasoned.
“It stems from a practice, largely among older women, who started having their hair stylists use a blue colored hair rinse to soften the turning of their hair from colored to white. The result was usually a kind of gentle silver coloration, instead of the dead gray or white that so many ladies fear they shall take on at a certain age.” The professor shrugged, a small movement at the corner of his mouth suggesting a smirk. “Such vanity. Foolish, really.” Professor Marks rolled his chair back from his desk a little and rose, his blue cloak rustling a little as he folded his arms behind his back; Lisa found it a touch odd when she had seen him wearing it inside when she first entered, but she had ignored it, chiefly concerned with getting her approval write-up and leaving the campus for a little bit. “There is a reason I knew your name, Miss Butteli, even though, admittedly, and in a rare showing of error, I mispronounced it.” His manner, already naturally taciturn and severe, seemed to draw shadows to his countenance from the corners of the room.
“I have you for one of my classes, sir,” Lisa said, abruptly feeling a cold sweat threatening the nape of her neck and her forehead.
“Yes, there is that. There is also the fact that you were the author and a co-signatory on a letter to the Dean of Students and the campus President to have me disciplined for the role I played in inviting the gentlemen from TPUSA to come speak to this student body,” Marks replied in a half-snarl, his nose and upper lip crinkling in a snarl. “You would silence those with whom you disagree, rather than confront them in honest intellectual debate, a cowardly and dishonorable approach to opposition if I say so myself. And an unfortunate decision on your part as well, child.”
Lisa flinched as a sudden metallic rattling sounded to her right, and she whipped her head that way, watching as lengths of blade-edged chains lashed themselves in a large ‘X’ over the door, sealing it shut. Half a dozen more such lengths clattered down around her from the ceiling of the office, and she looked back at Professor Marks, whose cloak ruffled about him as more links coiled around his midsection from an unseen place. His eyes shone with a sickly yellow light, and the cabalistic symbols on his dark blue cloak shimmered. The faint, coppery scent of blood filled the room, and Lisa felt her heart hammering like an overheating engine in her chest.
“No mere human, particularly one such as yourself and your little friends, can silence my people,” the thing across from her now intoned, his voice suddenly both raspy and booming, like thunder threaded through with its crackling herald. “Comes to you the stranger named Marek, He of the Chains,” the once-professor pronounced, flicking his left hand toward her. Two of the chains hanging down snapped out, lashing her arms to the arms of the chair on which she sat, while two more flashed out from under his desk to coil around her ankles, binding her further. The stranger came stalking around his desk, a short selection of chain links in his hand, their edges glinting lethally in the overhead lights of the office. He tilted his head to one side, leaning down so close to her that Lisa, even in her terror and thrashing against her otherworldly bonds, could feel the tickle of his scraggly beard against her own chin. “When we silence the voice and still the pen stroke of others out of spite, we deserve nothing less for ourselves. Turn about, as they say, is fair play.”
And with a flick and press of those sharpened links in his hand, the stranger named Marek cut off three of Lisa’s fingers, starting the process that it had put the others through before her.
-Fin-