Chapter X: Big Willie's Biggest Regret

Big Willie Odom had done a lot of bad things in his life. Despite what he told the judge, the jury, the parole board and his probation officer, he never truly regretted anything he did. The only things that he had the slightest regret for were the situations that landed him in prison, and even then, he only regretted that he hadn’t been smart enough to elude the police. When it came to the things that he was never caught for, Willie washed his hands of everything.

Willie grew up on the mean streets of Hempstead, New York, a rough Long Island neighborhood surrounded on all sides by affluence, decadence and expressways. While the Islanders were busy winning Stanley Cups in neighboring Uniondale, Willie was breaking into cars in the Nassau Coliseum parking lot, stealing the ones he could sell and looting the ones that he couldn’t.

He was in juvie before he was in high school, which he never finished because he got sent up to the majors, doing three in Ossining for stealing cars. Willie was a tough customer. At 6’5” and 300 lbs, he was not easily intimidated, and his toughness got him through those three years in prison. There were inmates twice his age that thought Willie would simply succumb to his elders, but the oversized youngster punched, kicked and downright dominated his way to respect. By the time he was released for good behavior—a citation given to him because nobody dared to come forward and accuse him of perpetrating a few savageries—he was the cellblock’s unquestioned leader at the ripe age of 20 years old.

But on the outside, Willie found things a lot tougher. There were few jobs to be found, and the only real talent that Willie could put on his resume was his aptitude for breaking into, hotwiring and stealing cars. He could steal Air Force One if he really tried. But being a 6’5” black man driving in any vehicle, let alone a tiny sports car, made him an easy target for racial profiling. After only being out of the pen for six months, he was incarcerated again in Attica, and did 10 more years. Unlike his All-Star performance in Ossining, he found that in Attica, he may have been one of the biggest inmates, but he was certainly not the toughest.

His muscles were no match for the cunning shank attacks perpetrated by shiftless gang minions. His size only made him a bigger target. Willie was stabbed four times while he was at Attica, the last of which left him in the infirmary for six months. He spent the final three years of his time in Attica looking over his shoulder everywhere he went. He trusted no one, had no friends and lived in a state of constant fear.

Transitioning from Attica to Morgenthau was remarkably smooth for Willie. For all he knew, some of the addicts who lived in the woods were the same gangbangers who had stabbed him while he was in prison. He had elected to live a life of seclusion at Morgenthau and chose not to get to know any of his fellow residents. Instead of joining the majority of the population in the Main Residence Hall, he had broken into the Fieldhouse and was living on a wrestling mat underneath the foldout bleachers. He had come to Morgenthau during the somewhat blissful period where Nolan wasn’t stingy about his residents paying the rent, before The Watcher started his campaign of pain and extortion.

One night, Willie got lost in the dark and realized that he was surrounded by the shadowy figures that lived in the woods. He had no idea what they wanted from him, but he immediately felt like he was back in the washroom at Attica, about to be ambushed by the gangs that he refused to join. The 37-year old giant ex-convict closed his eyes in fear as he felt the addicts descend upon him, but suddenly their demonic whispers were drowned out by a loud voice.

“Get away from him you fucking mongrels!” shouted The Professor, taking one of his late night smoking strolls. With that, Willie opened his eyes and saw the last streaking shadows of the addicts rush back into the woods as The Professor lit a match and appeared in front of him. Willie had seen this old man before, but always took him for another snooty white man who saw him as nothing more than another negro criminal.

The Professor walked up to Willie and took a long drag from his pipe and blew out a long, white plume. “Take my advice, son,” said The Professor, “Stay off these streets at night. Those creatures are god damn lunatics.” With that, the old man stumbled off into the darkness, unafraid of the addicts or any other monster, ghost or demon that inhabited the woods.

Willie spent that night and the next few days thinking about what had happened to him. In the past, Willie was a rock. His physical power was unquestionable and his mental fortitude was as guarded and solid as Fort Knox. Now, he was nothing more than a big baby who froze and shivered in the face of the unknown; more terrified than the 70 year old, feeble, crusty Professor who had every reason to be scared, yet feared nothing.

Slowly, Willie began to assert himself like he had before his time in Attica. He revered The Professor for the way the old man had handled the addicts. Like many of us, he kept trying to find ways to impress and please the old man. Willie began taking on various tasks at the campus, minor things like carrying the maniac druggies out of the foyer of the Main Residence Hall when they had escaped their frightening homes in the bowels. He helped Alistair with his many crazy projects, and he started making some extra cash by stealing cars and parking them in tow-away zones, getting a small cut from a man named Eddy who he had met on the inside in Ossining. When he could, he would run errands for The Professor, picking up various items and delivering messages to his lone contact in the outside world.

But more than any other service that Willie performed for the college, his most appreciated undertaking was his undertaking. Although the thought of burying the dead bodies of the expired druggies and maniacs made a lot of residents queasy, Willie never objected to accepting the role of gravedigger, and was always the first to volunteer for the job. The job never really got personal until Kendra was murdered in the spring after the great fieldhouse fire, and half a year before The Professor took his own life after that long and rainy autumn.

It had always made Willie jealous that a smart and pretty black woman like Kendra—who came to Morgenthau six months after Willie—had fallen the way she had for the aging, white Professor, even if she was about 10 years older than Willie. Willie had never finished high school and spent his college years in prison. Other than their skin tone, Willie and Kendra had little in common. Yet, he was still fascinated by her, and always went out of his way to smile and say hello whenever she passed him on the thoroughfares. To make matters worse, Willie had nothing but the fondest admiration for The Professor, especially in the aftermath of his run-in with the shadowy figures in the woods. Since then, Willie had been able to keep his emotions in check, always keeping his head in the game, and never allowing outside influences to distract him from his focus. He was a new man now, who did not allow things like jealousy to cloud his mind and weaken his resolve. But he was only a man.

Kendra’s presence had thrown the entire community into a loop. Things were never quite the same as they were before she came to Morgenthau six months after Willie; nor were they quite the same after she left this world. Kendra brought out something in everybody’s life. Most of the men just found her attractive, and went out of their way to please her, much like we did for The Professor. However, the subtle ass kissing with The Professor was more or less the reflection of our father/teacher respect for him. With Kendra, the men were always trying to get her to smile or laugh in the hope that if she left The Professor she might shack up with them next.

There was no better example of this than Willie. Over the course of two years that Kendra spent with us, Willie’s loyalties slowly began to shift from The Professor to his live-in companion. He started coming up with excuses when The Professor asked him to go into the Tri-Towns to fetch an item for him. Of course, if Kendra asked him the same question, he would drop everything and fetch whatever item she requested like a hyperactive dog chasing a Frisbee or a tennis ball.

Things changed around the time that The Watcher’s reign of terror began to grip the campus in fear. Anyone who claimed to not be intimidated by the brute was a liar, even someone as big and tough as Willie. The Watcher reminded Willie of the hired muscles at Attica; mindless sentinels sent out by weaker men to do their dirty work. The Watcher was as fearless as he was merciless. He was under strict orders, and he followed them to a T.

Kendra was not afraid of The Watcher, for she knew that he was only a minion of Nolan, the real monster at Morgenthau. For a long time, The Professor had been secretly paying the rent for he and Kendra, knowing that she was bound to say or do something that would land both of them in a great deal of trouble. Kendra could be slapped around a few times, but one savage blow to The Professor could kill the old man, and at that time, he was certainly not ready to die.

It was only a matter of time before Kendra found out about it and when she did, she was furious at The Professor. By then, Willie was no longer living in the Fieldhouse (Alistair had burned it down earlier that spring) and he had taken a residence in the slimy dorms, a floor below The Professor. As he listened to Kendra’s voice scolding The Professor through the paper-thin walls, a wide, shit-eating grin stretched across his scruffy, bearded face. Maybe this was the final straw, he fantasized to himself, maybe this time she’ll leave him for good.

A cold front blew into Morgenthau that evening, dumping a solid two inches of rain on the campus. The stormy weather reflected the suddenly stormy relationship between The Professor and his companion, who had bolted out of the building to chase Nolan and voice her fury about the illegal rents he was charging. The Professor—who still had a lingering hip injury from when I hit him with my mom’s car back in the Tri-Towns—came lumbering down the stairs asking if anyone had seen Kendra. Willie emerged from his room and told The Professor that she was looking for Nolan. The Professor shook his head with disgust, thought about things for a second, then looked up at Willie and asked him to come with him to find Kendra.

By this point, Willie’s lovesick head had been completely conquered by his lust for Kendra. He had fallen under the impression that he was so close to finally having her all to himself. He was certain that he was one of her favorite residents, and he could satisfy her needs better than the crusty, old, Professor. Going out there into the rain would not only be a pain in the ass, but it would only keep the old man and Kendra together. He couldn’t let that happen. Not after this long.

Willie complained about the weather and said that he didn’t want to go outside on such a dreary night. The Professor—who had gotten so used to Willie serving both he and Kendra so faithfully—turned a disgusted eye towards the tall black man standing in the doorway of his room. The Professor had seen a remarkable transformation in Willie, who was once so terrified of the addicts in the woods and was now as unshakeable as he was in Ossining. All of a sudden, he was too scared to get wet? He suspected this might have something to do with Willie’s feelings for Kendra, but time was wasting, and she was getting further and further away.

“If you’re not going to help me, you’re not going to help me,” said The Professor gruffly as he walked for the stairs, adding, “Not like I’ve ever helped you out, you ungrateful bastard...”

By morning, our world had changed forever. By morning, Kendra was dead, The Professor was half-dead, and Willie was safe and sound in his room, but feeling utterly helpless, as if he’d been shanked once again. Somebody had murdered Kendra, and Willie knew that if had he only gone out to help her, she would still be alive. He would have sacrificed himself for her; he could have held her attacker at bay long enough for her and The Professor to escape. He could probably have killed the attackers with all his pent-up sexual frustration and his love for Kendra. He could have done something, but he had selfishly done nothing.

When we brought The Professor back up to his room, the old man was barely conscious, but he had enough strength to open his eyes as the residents carried him past Willie’s room; enough strength to stare at Willie with a damning, hateful glare. He never forgave Willie. Willie never forgave himself. Although he was 6’5” and 300 lbs., that night, he cried himself to sleep.

Chapter IX: Papa Grasso Gets Rich

On the day before The Professor took his own life, Giovanni “Papa” Grasso sat in a modest meeting room in the Tri-Towns where a zoning committee was meeting to discuss the future of the property formerly known as Morgenthau University. I wasn’t there, but Grover was. He had heard Simeon mumbling about it on his cell phone and decided to take a walk over to town hall before he went over to moonlight at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow.

Papa Grasso was the size of both his sons put together, and his clout was just as big. It had been close to seven years since Papa and his late brother had bought the Morgenthau property and they had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on the deal. With one vote, and with one handshake, they could recoup all their losses and turn a slick profit.

Of course, the profit that Papa Grasso would make would only be a profit in monetary figures. In reality, owning the property had been the largest disaster of his life; personally, spiritually and physically, not just financially. The seven year battle to transform the campus into a sprawling splatter of townhouses had left him with high blood pressure, a stomach ulcer, a son whose head was so fucked up that he didn’t go outside for fear of phantom drug addicts, as well as the loss of his co-investor and brother to the same stress-related ailments that would kill him if things didn’t change.

Papa Grasso had pulled many strings and lined many pockets. He had twice petitioned the zoning committee to re-classify the campus as a residential area and had been denied both times. The board was very clear; they would not allow Morgenthau to be demolished for yuppie townhouses. In order to get a new zoning board appointed, he donated tens of thousands to the opposing political party, sabotaged their candidates, financed a smear and intimidation campaign, and had some of his cronies rig polling places on election day.

The end result of Grasso’s scheme was a brand new government that swept the local elections the year before The Professor’s death. They had little experience, no real agenda, taskforces or five-step programs. The new government had been assembled for the sole purpose of re-zoning Morgenthau. The new government excused the zoning board, which furiously complained to the newspapers, but were ignored by a public more concerned with celebrity gossip. Crime in the Tri-Towns began to rise. The new government, already in over their heads and looking for a scapegoat, began to look to the old campus and its homeless hoards as the source of the big problem in town. The solution was simple, and it started with Giovanni “Papa” Grasso.

At 8:15 in the morning, the gabble fell and a motion came to the floor. It happened so quickly and so quietly that Grover thought he had entered the wrong conference room. Within a matter of seconds, the board proposed “The Reclassification of Community Board 7” approved it, and quickly went on to the next matter of business. A joyous Papa Grasso lurched up from his chair, shook a few hands next to him and left the room to go downtown and sign the papers with the developers that had remained unsigned for over five years.

Grover was hardly astonished or devastated to learn that the campus’ fate had been decided by corrupt, government officials. He had been at Morgenthau longer than anyone but The Professor, and he secretly believed that this date would have come sooner. Had The Grassos really cared about the property, they would have strung barbed wire along the gates. They could have hired personal security to maintain the property and they could have hired landscapers to maintain the overgrown jungles and the lavish gardens. Had they truly loved their alma mater, they would have allowed it to keep functioning as a university that churned out CEOs, State Senators, Pulitzer–winning photographers and professors of art and history. Instead, they had stabbed it in the stomach and watched it slowly bleed to death.

It would only be a matter of time before the college would be razed for the condos. They would have to tear down the Main Residence Hall, because there was no way to repair the damage that the squatters had done to the building. The library was gorgeous, but it was haunted, and it probably always would be. Weeds and neglect had suffocated the Gardens’ exotic plant life, not to mention the fact that there were several corpses buried without hermetically sealed coffins. Admin and Services were literally sewers, since Alistair had run his makeshift sewage lines into their basements. Had they truly cared about this place, they would have razed it to the ground when they bought it so that people like us couldn’t come and sully something so beautiful.

Grover couldn’t help thinking that if The Professor hadn’t sunken to such desperation following Kendra’s murder that perhaps he would have led the charge to save Morgenthau from the developers. He wouldn’t do it for us, because he was very vocal about his disgust for his fellow residents.

He would stand up because he had been standing up for seven years. He stood up when the school eliminated his program, when they closed down his school and when society shunned him for living a life of squalor and destitution. He stood up through freezing winters and brutally hot summers. He had stood face to face with Nolan and The Watcher. He remained standing even when they killed the only woman that he ever loved, although it devastated him to do so.

Depressed, bedridden, anemic and heartbroken, The Professor kept standing, even if he wasn’t quite sure what he was fighting for anymore. In the beginning, he was fighting to save his job, but he never really liked his job. The only thing in his life that had remained a constant was the University where he grew up, studied, lived and worked. He was not going to let a thief like Giovanni Grasso to get the best of him and take away the only place that he had ever called home.

Over his dead body.

A few days after The Professor’s death, Willie drove a stolen car back over to the University to find a parade of goldenrod colored construction vehicles lined up along the eastern wall of the campus. The sun was finally setting on Morgenthau University and there was nothing that any of us could possibly do about it.

Chapter VIII: Winston and His Ghosts Paint a Masterpiece

Winston Ipswitch lived alone in Morgenthau University’s abandoned library on a bed of clothes laid out on a frame of old encyclopedias. Next to The Professor and Grover, Winston had the longest tenure of any of the residents on campus. His accommodations at the library were always a subject of controversy and jealousy, mainly because he was the building’s only tenant and paid the same amount of rent as everyone else. He certainly did not see himself as the rightful owner of the building, and whenever he was accused of hogging the library all to himself, he invited any resentful individuals to come spend a night with him in the library. Anyone who took him up on the offer never went back again.

The bodies of our departed brothers and sisters may have been buried on the west side of campus in the forgotten splendor of The Gardens, but their spirits unquestionably lived in the library. According to Winston, who had majored in Art History at Morgenthau back in its heyday, there had always been some kind of spirit in building, even before the campus was abandoned and people started dying.

The library more adequately resembled a medieval castle than it did anything else. It had once been a lavish mansion on the outskirts of the city in the late nineteenth century. An artist’s colony developed around it, and some of those buildings were eventually incorporated into the Morgenthau Academy and later by the University of the same name.

So, when asked about the ghosts that haunted the library, Winston said that most of them had been around for a good hundred years.

“It’s just like any old house,” he told me one afternoon when I was helping him and Alistair board up a window that had cracked during a summer hailstorm. “The people who lived there before me still feel like they own the place. They’ve been dead a hundred years and they still feel like they own the place!” Winston’s favorite remark was always saved for when new people asked him about living with the ghosts.

“Doesn’t it bother you living with ghosts?” asked Eva the first time she met him.

“They annoy me less than you people do,” he said, always with a smirk.

Winston ended up living at Morgenthau after a modest career painting murals in New York City began to unravel due to a debilitating nerve disease that affected his ability to hold his brushes steadily. He refused to call it Parkinson’s, and usually said some other name when asked what his disease was called. When the condition was still in its earliest stages, Winston tried to ignore the disease and compensated for the jittering and shaking by painting with smaller brushes or even with his opposite hand. As a result, his work slowed to a crawl and he missed deadlines, fell behind in his work, and spent his advance before he finished the job and received the rest of his commission.

As a result, he was kicked out of the artists collective where he was living in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and decided to try to get a teaching fellowship at Morgenthau, only to travel back to his alma mater to find that it had been boarded up and closed down. While roaming the deserted thoroughfares on that November morning, he saw The Professor as he was walking back from the Admin building, the only descent place to take a shit in the entire complex before record snowfall collapsed its roof that winter.

The Professor told him to get lost if he knew what was good for him, but Winston lingered around the campus until night fell and the temperatures began to dip below freezing. Unlike years later when the campus was overrun with addicts and other squatters, the campus only had a handful of residents at the time. The quadrangle had yet to become a jungle of weeds and overrun by snakes, the Fieldhouse was still standing, but locked. The Main Residence Hall was open, but the stench drove Winston away immediately.

The only building that Winston found unlocked was the Library, which The Professor had been looting whenever he began to lose his mind with boredom. A solid, stone building, the library was a quick stroll from the dorms, connected to the quadrangle by a two story arch that led to thick oak doors, adorned with a series of wood carvings. Inside the doors, a reception desk sat at the foot of a double staircase that led up to the nonfiction sections. By sidestepping the reference desk and the stairs, a Morgenthau student would then walk into a well-lit, high ceiling chamber that housed fiction, microfilm, computer stations, typewriter stations and dozens of comfy couches and chairs for reading and studying. The upstairs nonfiction section served as a mezzanine that looked down on the grand room of the library.

By the time Winston came back to the library, he found very little of the building he remembered from his days studying about the Impressionist movement. The lobby was cluttered with debris, dirt and random trash. The grand room of the library swirled with a perpetual fog of dust and smoke. Several bookcases had toppled over like dominoes, their contents were scattered across the ground like leaves beneath a tall tree in autumn. The couches, ones so comfy that Winston remembered falling asleep while cramming for a bio final, had been ripped to shreds or had their cushions stolen by the campus’ first few residents looking for decent bedding.

It broke Winston’s heart to see his college in the shape that it was in. He had no idea what happened to this place that he had called home. This time of year, a place like the Library would be filled to capacity with students prepping for midterms and thesis projects. Instead, the life had been sucked out of this once lively place. It felt like he was living in a cemetery long before he ever encountered the ghosts.

He rarely spoke about his spectral landlords, but when he did, he would criticize them for being so repetitive. Things like tapping his shoulder when he was walking through a dark room were terrifying at first, but after a while he had come to expect it from them, the same way he stopped getting fooled by his uncle who always told him his shoes were untied before flicking his nose. Every now and then he would talk about the ghostly figures that spent eternity re-arranging the scattered books back into their proper Dewey-Decimal order. If pressed, he would talk about the sounds of footsteps in the dark, or the squeaky wheels of the book cart as it rolled along the mezzanine, or the old typewriter that would start up in the middle of the night and type exactly 2,000 words. They bothered Winston, but as he always said, they didn’t bother him half as much as we did.

Winston got through the first few weeks in the library without sleeping at all. He took a few naps during the day when the spirits were on break. The library’s old, solid structure allowed for the heat to be held throughout the winter and for a cool, cellar-like feeling to maintain throughout the summer. Even as the other residents braved the elements in the dorms, no one who had spent five minutes in the library would dare of trading their hypothermia for a warm night with the ghosts.

As a result, Winston tried his best to work through the night painting. His hand had gotten progressively worse when he was not painting, but there was something about working in the dark in the middle of a ghostly study group that had found a way to calm his nerves. His canvases, old tarps from the basement stretched around the frames of the empty bookcases, were painted with a variety of old paint buckets he had found in the utility closets of the academic buildings. Most of his paint was white, but there were a few buckets of Morgenthau’s school colors, red and black, and the occasional light blue or cream.

He painted by candlelight, in a setting that looked more like a séance than an artist’s studio. When he held his palette in his good hand, his bad hand trembled as it dipped his brush into the paint. But Winston had learned to absorb the energies of the spirits around him. As he moved the brush towards the canvas, his wild jerks swirled into a high-speed, controlled vibration. He went from being as erratic as a weed whacker to being as precise as a tattoo needle in a matter of seconds. Occasionally, he could let loose the reigns and his uncontrolled strokes turned into stylized etchings, using his cursed hand’s spasms as a unique approach to his work.

In a past life, Winston had painted portraits, landscapes and murals. In the darkness with the ghosts of the library, he had harnessed his true talents, and the result was dark, primal, furious artistry that still maintained delicate form and intricate arrangements.

The prime example of Winston’s distinctive artistic style was the 10-foot by 6-foot portrait of Kendra that he painted in the days following her death. The piece a cathartic expression as much as it was a lesson in self-torture. In a fit of anger, Winston tore a nearly completed painting off his makeshift easel and covered the tarp with black paint, using up every drop, scraping out the final streaks with his own bare hands and filling in every white space on the cloth. He began screaming at the ghosts in the library to leave him alone so that he could concentrate. He threw books in their directions and spit whiskey through his candles, forming fireballs so bright and crisp that he swore he could see demonic faces in them. He challenged the specters to give him all that they had.

He told me a few months later that the experience was the scariest night of his life. Before then, he had kept an impersonal relationship with the ghosts, but after that night he had crossed the line into their world, and they were about as tired of him as he was tired of them.

The completed painting hung up in the mezzanine, in front of the library’s cathedral-like stained glass windows from the time he finished it until the day we wrapped The Professor’s body in the canvas and buried him. I was amazed that Winston was willing to part with the canvas. He had painted a dead-on perfect portrait of Kendra’s face and shoulders in clean strokes of white and off-white paint. The rest of the painting was a series of erratic strokes that pictured—among other things—the scene of her murder; the dark, menacing forest where she was found; the evil, guiltless fiends who had committed this act; and, according to Winston, the ghosts that tortured his psyche while his bad hand unconsciously composed his finest masterwork. It could have been in any art museum in the world, but instead it’s buried with the corpse of our departed friend and teacher.

I visited Winston one afternoon not too long after The Professor’s death and talked to him as he sketched out a new painting on a brand new canvas. The day suddenly turned into night and I began to realize that we were not alone in the room.

“I think I should leave,” I told Winston. “I don’t want to get really freaked out by your roommates,” I told him.

Winston continued painting and spoke in his typical monotone, “If it makes you feel any better, they’ve been here for about an hour already,” said the painter. I gulped. “Just keep looking at the painting,” he said calmly.

It was hard not to look around the room where I imagined that a dozen apparitions were standing in audience, watching Winston sketch out his next masterpiece.

“What do they want?” I asked, sheepishly.

“Well,” he said with a long, exhaling sigh, “They’re probably not very happy that you’re here, but then again, there is little that makes them happy.”

“What should I do?” I asked.

“Just keep focusing on the painting,” he repeated. “If you want to leave, you don’t have to make a big scene about it, you can just get up and leave. They’re not going to try to scare you if you act like you’re not afraid and that you don’t want to be bothered.”

“But you’re not afraid of them, and they still bother you,” I countered.

“Well, the big secret about me, kid, is that I’ve kind of become dependent on them. And they’ve kind of become dependent on me. It’s funny how life works like that sometimes. My parents were the same way. Fucking hated each other. But once they were separated for more than a few days they’d start crying uncontrollably. My mom only outlived my dad by two weeks. Fact of the matter is, they steady my hand, and I keep people afraid of them.”

“What happens if we’re no longer afraid of them?” I asked.

Winston turned around from his painting, with his eyes subtly glancing over my shoulder. “Well,” said the painter, “if you’re truly not afraid of them, turn around and see for yourself.” And with that, he picked up his palette and began laying down some smooth black lines and giving off the distinct impression that our conversation was over.

I slowly got my feet, clenched my fists, gathered a head of courage and turned around to find the dark room empty. No sounds of footsteps, no apparitions, nothing. I began thinking that perhaps it was all a point that Winston was making. Did the ghosts really exist or had Winston simply perpetuated the myth so long that people believed it? Were those footsteps really ghosts or just the sounds of an old, rickety building, or perhaps the unwelcome intrusion of one of the addicts from the woods? Had Winston invented this myth so that he could maintain the library’s cozy comforts all for himself? He was crazy enough to do it.

On my way out the door I thought Winston tapped me on the shoulder to tell me I’d forgotten something. I turned back and saw nobody standing there. I screamed like a girl and ran like hell.

Chapter VII: The Steve's Near Death Experience

The Steve acquired his name when he moved into Morgenthau following the disastrous end of his career as a computer programmer. The Steve had written every kind of programming code known to digital man. The short, stout Chinese immigrant could never speak English well, but he spoke poetically in binary code and had a preternatural, extrasensory ability to communicate with computers.

Everything in The Steve’s life was a series of ones and zeroes. There was little grey area in his life, beginning from his strict upbringing where failure was not an option. He excelled in school, graduating high school at 16 to attend MIT at the dawn of the second age of computers. In a system of ones and zeroes, The Steve was all ones. He was so good at what he did that he developed many rivals who simply could not keep up with the insane caliber of his work. He had trouble making friends in college, especially when his perfect test scores constantly skewed the curve, causing a surefire A- to plummet to a C+. Although the human parts of his brain secretly longed for interaction with other people, the lonely boy from Flushing, Queens had long ago developed deep emotional relationships with his computers. He spoke their language and they never judged him for who he was.

After MIT, The Steve wound up at one of the top software companies in the United States writing code for all kinds of programs, revolutionizing a series of user-interface platforms. For all I know he wrote this very word-processing program I’m typing on now. His rapid success was matched only by an equally rapid rise in animosity against him. Just as in college, he had developed a series of jealous enemies who wanted nothing more than for him to vanish back into the Dungeons and Dragons lair he came from. Unlike college, however, there was a lot more at stake in the professional world. The Steve’s innovations often undercut the work of his peers, some of whom had been working on protocols for two years, only to have their puzzles solved seemingly overnight by the socially awkward human calculator. A lot of new jobs were created by his innovations, but more jobs were made obsolete because of his creations as well.

The circumstances surrounding the shocking end of The Steve’s career remain a subject of debate and scrutiny within the software development industry. Equal armies of opinion have taken the position that he was framed; set up from the get-go by a Caesar-like conspiracy. Others claim that The Steve got what was coming to him.
One night while sleeping alone in his condo apartment in Silicon Valley, The Steve’s house was raided by a platoon of FBI agents and local police officers. They grabbed The Steve, blindfolded him and brought him in for questioning regarding some e-mail that had been intercepted by the Bureau.

The agents accused The Steve of conspiring with his counterparts in China to sell a series of software secrets to Chinese software companies that were trying to cut into Silicon’s stronghold. Normally, the Federal Government would not get involved with a corporate fraud scandal, but The Steve’s company had many clients, including the U.S. Department of Defense, and some of his codes were used by the military for missile guidance systems.

The Steve, one of the highest paid developers in the world, had access to an incredible legal team who fought to expose that the allegations levied against him were false. He was able to escape the scrutiny of the government, but by the time he was exonerated, no company wanted to hire a foreign-born developer who had been accused of international espionage. It didn’t get easier for The Steve, for by the time he had dodged the spy charges, the entire internet bubble had burst and there was nobody who could hire him even if they wanted to.

He ended up working a series of jobs selling and fixing computers, but years of speaking almost exclusively with computers had rendered his English skills completely useless. He was fired from several jobs for being incapable of assisting customers who wanted to buy simple electronic equipment.

With a decent stack of cash left to his name, The Steve ended up at Morgenthau after Willie had stolen his car from a parking lot in one of the Tri-Towns. He walked around desperately for an entire afternoon before he ended up walking along the long stone walls of the campus. He was looking for a pay phone when he came across his Toyota being towed from the front of a funeral parlor. His front wheels already jacked up, he ran over to the tow truck and pleaded with the truck driver, but the driver blew him off, mostly because he couldn’t understand what the hell he was saying.

While The Steve argued with the driver, Willie emerged from the gates of the campus to collect his fee from the driver who would turn a profit from impounding The Steve’s car one way or another. The truck drove away with the Toyota, and The Steve chased it for a good 20 yards before giving up. Willie, who never really felt any remorse for his thefts, went over to comfort the strange Chinese man.

“It’s okay, baby,” said Willie patting him on the back, “They don’t charge too much for that shit. You’ll have your ride back in no time.”

The Steve responded to Willie by trying to explain that he had been living out of the car for the last three days since his eviction and that he did not have enough money on him to bail his car out of the lot. The only words that Willie could decipher were that The Steve had no place to go. Although Willie felt that there were too many people living on campus as it was, he invited this babbling immigrant back to Morgenthau, if not just to get him to shut the hell up. He also didn’t want him to arouse suspicion among the police as to who was stealing all of these cars around town and leaving them conveniently in “No Parking” areas.

The electricity had not worked in Morgenthau since the Grassos closed the school and all of the computers in the academic buildings had been pawned off long ago. For The Steve, a man whose entire world only existed in the digital realm, moving into the main residence hall at Morgenthau was like moving to Mars.

He had been known Steven Chin in the real world, but he acquired his nickname after another Morgenthau resident with the same first name objected to there being two Steves in the same complex. Originally, it was The Chinese Steve, but eventually it was shortened to The Steve. Even after the “original” Steve took his own life by hanging himself in the Fieldhouse, The Steve’s new moniker had already stuck and the residents got used to it.

He never appreciated the name and he was upset that other people were continuing to change his name for him. He had been forced to adopt an Americanized name when his parents moved to America when he was two, and now these junkies and deadbeats were doing the same thing to him.

The Steve was never happy at Morgenthau. Nolan’s rent was steep, but it was doable. Like The Professor, Grover and a few other residents, The Steve had enough cash left over from his previous life to pay the rent. His fortune was something of a myth, like some old pirate’s treasure chest. He kept his cash somewhere around campus, hidden in a tree or behind a wall. There were some people who would follow The Steve around for the few days before the rent was due, trying to see if he would give up the location of the money.

Knowledge of The Steve’s hidden treasure made him a marked man to some of the real desperate junkies around Morgenthau. The Steve was subject to infrequent, and often brutal beatings at the hands of the fiercely desperate hoodlums that called the campus home. Sometime before I moved in, The Steve was beaten within an inch of his life by the “original” Steve as he tried to obtain the location of the money. Several times during the beating The Steve gave up the location of his money, but the blood in his mouth—compounded by his poor linguistics—made his confessions inaudible to his aggressor. He was bedridden for almost two months after this, and would have died for sure had it not been for the kindness and compassion of Kendra.

Kendra’s death affected everybody who knew her. It devastated The Professor—who was never as happy as he was when he was with her, and was never as miserable as he was once she was gone. It was crushing for Alistair—who had temporarily given up the junk on the advice of Kendra, only to overdose twice immediately following her death. Winston’s powerful grief was matched only by the incredible artistic output he had after her death, composing his finest paintings in her honor.

The Steve owed his life to Kendra. He had never really been able to thank her for nursing him back to health, and this crushing regret drove him into a state of white-hot anger, the kind that he had always been taught to repress. He blamed a lot of people for what happened to Kendra. Of course, he blamed Nolan and The Watcher for conspiring to silence her, but he also blamed The Professor for not convincing her to keep her mouth shut. But more than anyone, The Steve blamed the addicts in the woods for failing to do protect Kendra from the awful fate that doomed her.

A lifetime of repressed rage, torment and sadness had boiled into a thick, scorching steam that had begun to spill out of The Steve’s ears in a high-pitched whistle. Without warning and without fear, he ventured deep into the forest one night to confront the addicts in an attempt to get some kind of explanation as to why justice had not been done. The addicts had a reputation for dispensing their own brand of justice on the campus, but they never punished the innocent. Kendra had done nothing wrong and there was no reason that the addicts should have allowed her to die—especially in the brutal fashion that she did.

Alistair was on his way back scoring junk when he saw The Steve speed walking towards the edge of the woods, an area that was universally considered off-limits at night. He turned back to try and stop the crazy Chinese man from doing something stupid, but he swiped his arm away when he tried to pull him back.

“I want answers!” yelled The Steve as he shook off Alistair and ventured fearlessly into the woods. Alistair ran after him and pleaded for him to come back, but he could not be reasoned with, and Alistair was way too afraid of the addicts to go any further into the woods than he already had. That night, from anywhere on campus you could hear wild, brutal screams coming from the direction of the addicts’ woods. Depending on who you asked, the screams sounded like The Steve was either being tortured or issuing a battle cry. Either way, most people believed that they had seen The Steve for the last time.

When we heard about what happened to Nolan after the addicts kidnapped him and left him shivering, shirtless and scared shitless, I started to think about The Steve and his hot-headed march into the woods to confront the addicts for their failure to protect Kendra. I started to think that maybe the addicts didn’t kill him; perhaps he had gone out there to join them, to lead the charge against Nolan and to help administer the punishment that he deserved.

To just about everyone’s surprise, The Steve was found about three weeks after his disappearance by Willie as he was on his way out to pick up another payment from the tow-truck company. He found The Steve much in the same way that Nolan’s father found his son, in a state of shock, compounded by acute hypothermia, paranoia and crippled by fear. Willie brought The Steve back to his room in the main residence hall that had been cleared out a day before he was finally found. He had never been a big talker before his brief stint with the addicts, but after that he didn’t say a word to anyone for months. He was not interested in talking to anybody until Eva arrived that summer. Then he never shut up.

Chapter VI: In the Gardens with Eva

Eva showed up in July of The Professor’s last year of life. She was 17 years old, pregnant, bruised and addicted. Eva came from a good family, won beauty pageants and excelled at private schools. She got mixed up very young and then went through interventions, rehabs and clinics. She snuck out, ran away, got into trouble and slept around. She had found that the only things in life that made her happy were lying, cheating, stealing, manipulation and bribery.

After a few years of rapid self-destruction, her parents lost complete control and stopped pushing back. Like a rubber ball that kept getting hit against a brick wall, Eva came back harder and harder each time. This time they didn’t swing and she lost her momentum, lost her mind and lost her way.

She was sucked in by the gravity of the Tri-Towns. She was seduced by the posh boutiques and the upscale malls. She was drawn in by the dark back alleys and the chemical hideouts. She was hypnotized by the bottom-feeders and proprietors of pollution. She died in as many ways as a person can die while still living, breathing and walking.

And that was all before she got to Morgenthau.

She ended up at Morgenthau because Simeon thought that it would be the best place to get rid of the girl. She longed for his affection and it was driving him crazy. Plus, Simeon feared that if his parents found out that he had impregnated a 17-year-old, drugged out prostitute, it would jeopardize his stake in the family fortune— one that kept shrinking the longer they owned the Morgenthau property.

Simeon believed that the campus was the perfect place to hide Eva. She would quickly be eaten up by the campus’ bad element before she even knew what hit her. In his mind, she wouldn’t last more than two weeks. Simeon believed this because he had no idea about the community that had slowly grown over the squat’s existence.

Simeon wore thick glasses on wire-thin frames, and even with such a powerful prescription he could only see his residents for what we were, not who we were. He saw the addicts, whores, drug dealers, thieves, gamblers, losers and hopeless souls. Anybody could see that that’s what we were. But deep in the darkened, disgusting hallways of the main residence hall were emotions that were so basic and so universally human that Simeon could never have understood. He was never there on the nights when Grover would make soup for as many people as could fit in the tiny common room. To Simeon, Grover was just another queer with AIDS. He was never there to see Alistair’s innovations and how they made our lives easier. To Simeon, Alistair was just another junkie. He never saw any of the beautiful canvases that Winston painted in his cavernous residence in the Library. To Simeon, Winston was just a raving lunatic who believed in ghosts.

And Eva was just another piece of ass to Simeon. In his eyes, she didn’t have emotions, she didn’t have a soul, she didn’t have any dignity—to him the only thing she had was between her legs. He didn’t just assume that she would be eaten alive in a place like Morgenthau; he was actually looking forward to it. He wanted his problem to go away, and there was no better place to disappear completely than on the other side of that stone wall and those iron gates.

One morning while returning to collect one of his tools, Willie discovered Eva in The Gardens on the west side of campus. She had fallen asleep on one of the benches that lined the pathways of the Gardens. She jumped at the sight of Willie, a tall, muscular and unkempt black man. Willie tried to calm her down and assure her that he meant no harm, but according to Willie, the girl had shriveled up into a tiny ball that could not be pried open.

Immediately, Willie began to miss Kendra, who had been buried over in these same Gardens for a little more than three months. Kendra knew how to deal with young people. The youngest residents at Morgenthau were generally in their mid- to late-twenties. A lot of them were like me, college dropouts that fell into a life of addiction and despair. Nobody could ever recall a girl as young as Eva—who looked even younger than she was—ever coming to live at the University. Had Kendra been there, she might have convinced the girl to leave this wretched place, go to a home for pregnant teens and get her life back together. But she was dead, and so was the hope for a lot of people.

Willie couldn’t just leave her in the Gardens. She may have survived the first night, but a pretty young girl like that could not expect to be safe in an environment wrought with characters like the addicts, the maniacs and The Watcher. He came back over to the Main Residence Hall and asked if anyone could help him with this terrified girl. The Professor—who had not recovered from the great confrontation in the rain with Kendra—refused to leave the building and go anywhere, particularly to The Gardens. By that point, Doobie and Hook Hands were dead, The Steve was still recovering from his near death experience and Grover was in the Tri-Towns moonlighting as a volunteer to score us free soup. The only person who wasn’t cynical or stubborn enough to go help the poor girl was me.

Eva had loosened up from her tightly constricted ball as we approached. I asked Willie to stay back as I moved forward to talk to her. The closer I got, the more the young girl dazzled me. How had this pretty young face with long blond hair ended up covered in dirt and bruises? I knew girls like this in high school and college. They were Wall Street traders, professional models and actresses. They might do the occasional speedball or purge themselves to make weight for the spring catalogue, but they didn’t end up in places like this.

I tried to communicate with the girl, but she had become extremely distrustful of all men in the wake of her fiasco with Simeon. Even if a soothing female presence like Kendra had been alive to handle this situation I doubt that she could connect with the girl immediately. I looked over longingly over to the corner of The Gardens where Kendra lay buried. My eyes then glanced back towards the cherry trees where we had buried Herschel Hook Hands and Doobie. Eventually they would bury all of us out here, including this angel who had been cursed and sent to this purgatory.

After a few seconds of drifting in a daydream I came back to reality and spotted the girl staring at me through the corner of my eyes. By the time I cocked my head over to where she was sitting she had already returned to her comatose pose. She tried to hide for a few seconds, but she knew that I had caught her staring at me. After half a minute, she slowly lifted her head and made eye contact with me.

Eva had big, bright, blue eyes, perfectly symmetrical on both sides, with the exception of minor swelling under her left eye that had yet to bruise into an ugly indigo. I looked behind my shoulder to find Willie standing at a distance, still flabbergasted by this alien princess that had landed on our disgusting planet.

“What’s your name?” I asked the girl.

She took a deep breath and a big gulp that I could tell was irritating her sore throat. I expected to hear the coarse rasp like that of the many junkies and maniacs that I’d encountered on campus. What came out of her mouth was a voice that was as smooth as silk and sweet as honey.

“Eva,” spoke the frazzled teenager. I took a look back at Willie, who couldn’t believe that I had found a way to break through the rust and connect with her. He picked up his tools and turned as he began his walk back to the main residence hall. I rose up from the bench and extended my hand to Eva. She stared at my hand for a few seconds, questioned my gesture and finally reached out her hand to mine. It was skinny, rough and ice cold, like holding hands with a skeleton.

“Come with us,” I said. “We’re going to make sure nobody hurts you. You’ll be safe with us.” Although I delivered that line with assurance and sincerity, I only took a few steps before I began to have serious doubts about keeping that promise.

Chapter V: Alistair and the Great Fieldhouse Fire

A hundred dollars is not a hell of a lot of money. But when you’re homeless, unemployed, an ex-con, drug addict or psychotic, Nolan’s rent made Morgenthau seem like Park Avenue real estate. Making money was hard, but to Alistair Reagan, it came easy. A plumber, electrician and all around handyman in a past life, Alistair knew how to disassemble anything and rebuild it. He knew how things worked and could see that there were often simple solutions to the campus’ numerous annoyances. In many ways, he made our uncivilized commune somewhat bearable.

During my second year at the college, after the worst winter in Morgenthau’s history finally came to an end, a short-lived, unseasonably warm spell blew through the region and began to breathe a sense of life back into the abandoned campus. With the temperatures still warm enough to walk around at night, a sudden feeling of potential energy surged through the entire campus. A sense of such possibility hadn’t been felt around here since the student body had stormed the administration building during the infamous protests in 1979.

Even though the streets were not safe at night, a group of residents began to congregate in the foyer of the main residence hall. Grover, The Steve and I stood in the alcove along with Doobie and Herschel Hook Hands, both of whom wouldn’t survive the unseasonably cold spell that would immediately follow that warm night.

The snakes in the quadrangle were unusually busy for this time of year. Normally the snakes stuck to the overgrown jungle of the quad, but that night, several could be seen slithering towards the center of campus. Even the addicts from the woods were becoming increasingly noisy, as their whispery conversations became audible over the still, balmy air.

For a brief minute, everything fell silent. The maniacs in the basement paused their incessant wailing. The water dripping from the leaky pipes in the bowels ceased. The sounds of the highway, the ambulances in the Tri-Towns and the roar of the commuter trains vanished. We knew that something was coming. I could immediately feel the oxygen being sucked into the center of the campus. It was seconds before we heard sharp crackling sounds emanating from the plaza where the clock tower—which had only been correct twice a day for more than five years—suddenly became illuminated with a bright, flickering orange glow. None of these things enticed more excitement in this hapless batch of homeless rejects than the sound of Alistair’s rebel yell as it soared over the big ruckus.

Damn the snakes and the addicts, I thought as I ran down the quad path through the big arch at the library. As the other residents turned the corner and joined me, our faces were frozen and numbed by the unfathomable sight before us. Our eyes were shocked out of their dim focus by the brightest blaze of light we had ever witnessed.

On that night, Alistair Reagan turned the Fulton Fieldhouse, a NCAA-quality basketball court and event center, into a raging inferno, shooting flames high up into the night sky, bringing an added hour of daylight to a campus that had not had working electricity since it was permanently closed.

As the fire raged on, Alistair danced around the edge of the flames like an African tribesman, shaking and moving his body with such expression that I had not seen in a long time. Morgenthau had the ability to suck the vibrancy of life out of someone. It sucked the color from paintings, the harmony from music, the scents from the air and the warmth from the sun. On that night, the colors were so hot, so vibrant, that even Winston, the artist who painted his murals on giant canvases in the library, could never have dreamed of such imagery.

As Alistair danced around his finest creation, The Professor and Kendra sat in rusted, folding chairs, clapping their hands and laughing their asses off. I had never heard The Professor laugh before, and I never heard him offer more than a sarcastic chuckle for the rest of his life. He puffed big white plumes of smoke from his pipe as he chanted “Bravo! Bravo!” In the tunnels and the basements, the maniacs began to holler in full chorus. Alistair echoed their insane banter with wild yelps and coyote-like howls. This was his moment. For more than twenty years, Alistair had been replicating his euphoria with a ceaseless variety of artificial substances that only made him feel more alone and more helpless. This was the first time he had truly felt alive in that long a time, and god damnit, he fucking loved it.

Of course, Alistair was no pyromaniac without a cause. All he wanted to do was to collapse the tall structure to the ground so that he could pillage the building for copper pipe. He had deliberately set a series of fires near all the critical supports of the field house. You could not have had a more professional demolition if you hired the same people that imploded Veteran’s Stadium.

The day after the fire, all of us slept in, as the euphoria of the previous night had provided for a deep, pleasant rest. As the temperatures reverted back to normal, Alistair was digging through the still-smoldering rubble and began to harvest his treasure. He would easily be able to salvage enough copper to pay his rent for the next year, but instead he traded in his bounty for three months rent and a celebratory bonanza of booze, heroin and a cheap lay.

Despite his frivolous addictions, Alistair was one of the least selfish members of the Morgenthau community. Since his arrival at the campus, he had been using his skills to help us, making a series of small, yet sizeable improvements. He had found a way to tap into the water supply from the university’s fire hydrants, which by law, had to remain active in the event of a fire. The fieldhouse had lit up like a box full of tissues, and it burned out just as quickly. By the time anybody could have possibly reported the fire in one of the Tri-Towns, the blaze was effectively contained by the cunning preparations of Alistair himself. He had been very careful; the last thing he wanted was for the woods to catch fire, which would undoubtedly draw immediate retribution from the addicts.

The running water allowed us to drink, cook and occasionally–but not frequently–bathe. Most importantly, he had rigged up a primitive sewer system, whereby a leaking pipe emptied into a bucket that washed away the waste into a makeshift cesspool at the bottom of the uninhabitable administration building. The man was a goddamn genius. He genuinely loved everyone who he knew at the campus. The only problem was that he loved the drugs just as much as he did us. As a result, he died of a broken heart.

Chapter IV: Bumper Cars in the Tri-Towns

I’ve never been good at first impressions. I suppose the reason that The Professor and I got off on the wrong foot was because he saw me as a faithless follower who did not think for himself. Or I suppose it was because I almost killed him when I hit him with a stolen car.

I didn’t mean to steal the car, and I certainly didn’t mean to hit The Professor, but both things had happened as a result of a heavy night of drinking and the ingestion of unmarked prescription pills. At the time, I was unemployed and living with a guy named Aquaman and his girlfriend who called herself Skittles. I was 24 years old, and had officially given up on college after four attempts. I had come home to live with my parents who gave me two weeks to clean myself up and get my life back on track. I agreed to go see a therapist in my hometown, but I got a bit sidetracked.

It wasn’t entirely my fault. I was walking over to the therapist’s office when a fight broke out between two gaggles of hoodie-wearing bastards in front of a 7-11. I tried to make peace between the two leaders who were barking at each other before the leader of the emo-looking kids stuck me. With that, a scuffle broke out and I immediately joined the opposing side. The next thing I knew I was involved in a three-county highway chase and spent the night in an opium den speak-easy in another state. When I returned home four days later the locks had been changed and the doorbell had been disconnected.

Now, I didn’t mean to steal my mom’s car. I mean, technically I had every right to drive it because the insurance policy had yet to officially be cancelled, even though I hadn’t paid it in two months. Of course, even if my driving wasn’t illegal, I was wasted and had no business being on the road. In my defense, I was in the Tri-Towns, and after 1:00 am, the rules of traffic cease to apply, and the rules of bumper cars take effect.

The Tri-Towns had everything. They had the big malls, the best bars, the hot clubs, the after-hours joints, and of course, the seediest and unscrupulous drug dealers this side of the Casablanca. The Tri-Towns always teetered between respectability and repulsion, combining cookie-cutter communities with cocaine alleys. One day, the entire region will be townhouses and condos, but for now, it remains one of hell’s finest suburbs.

Now, The Professor had spent his entire life within a 20-mile radius of Morgenthau and the Tri-Towns, and the old son of a bitch should have known better than to walk the streets while the rules of bumper cars were in effect. Regardless, I should have done more to avoid him. I had been driving the speed limit to avoid the ire of the local police, but my reaction time had slowed tremendously due to the old man pills that Aquaman had offered me.

I saw The Professor from down the road with my high beams on. I attempted to drive around him, but my vision had been placed on a five second delay. When I assumed I was 100 yards away, I was actually 10 yards away. By the time my brain caught on to the trick, I had clipped The Professor’s right hip and spun him into a heap of trash placed outside a clam bar. Rather than do the sensible thing and speed away in the stolen car, I stupidly pulled over to the side of the road to see if the man was okay.

I walked over to the trash and found the old man in his corduroy jacket yelling into a bag of garbage.

“Agggg… you thoughtless bastard!” he yelled at me. Me? Thoughtless? I thought, Fuck you man; I’m here to see if you’re alright.

“Sir,” I mumbled, “Are you al—“

“Just shut up!” he yelled as he lumbered to his feet, swatting away my arm as I offered to help him. He was walking back to the car, which remained parked in the middle of the street, prime target for anyone out engaging in bumper cars. I got into the driver’s seat and motioned to open the passenger’s door for him, but the old man had other plans.

“Slide over, you god damn moron,” demanded The Professor. I tried to refuse, but he started swatting at my head and in a state of panic—possibly promoted by the prescriptions I had overloaded on—I obliged.

“Sir, don’t worry, I’ll drive you to the hospital,” I said, trying to calm him.

“We’re not going to the god damn hospital,” he said. “They’ll arrest both on sight.” The Professor groaned as he pushed me out of the cockpit into the passenger’s seat. He grimaced as he shifted the car from park to drive, but as soon as he was ready to step on the gas we both saw the red and blue lights reflect off every surface surrounding the car. “Sweet merciful shit,” he muttered, realizing that the police had spotted the car positioned awkwardly in the street.

“Just keep your god damn mouth shut and we’ll get out of this,” said The Professor without a great deal of trepidation, as if he had been through situations like this before. The Professor re-shifted the car back into park and placed his hands peacefully at ten and two. Two officers in dark uniforms slowly marched up towards the car, thinking that their menacing stroll would induce fear into The Professor. Instead, he just looked annoyed and tired.

The officer banged his flashlight on the driver’s side door, not hard enough to break the glass, but pretty hard nonetheless. The Professor gracefully lowered the driver’s window and swirled his head around to the policeman on the left.

“Good evening officer,” said The Professor, doing his best to hide the fact that he was in a tremendous amount of pain. “Is there a problem?” The officer looked past The Professor and over to me, the drunk asshole who was scared shitless in the passenger seat. Over my shoulder I felt the icy glance of the second officer who was just waiting for me to flinch so that he could draw his weapon.

“Sir, these streets are dangerous at this time of night. Why are you out so late and parked in the middle of the street?”

As if he had already concocted a perfect story, The Professor sighed and dropped right into a carefully prepared diatribe.

“I apologize officer, but you see my imbecile grandson here went out and got himself shitfaced drunk and was too wasted to drive home. So at three in the morning I had to get out of bed and pick his lazy ass up from the Kobra Klub. I apologize for the inconvenience, officer.”

The Professor did not need to embellish my intoxication, for I certainly looked the part. The officers were hoping to nab a couple of bumper car kids and exchanged a nod before one of them walked back to the patrol car.

“Alright, well, drive home safe, sir. Take the back roads if you can.”

“Will do,” replied The Professor. “You go have yourself a safe night yourself.” With that, The Professor rolled up the driver’s window and proceeded to drive off.

He picked up a fair amount of speed immediately, making it clear he had no intention of staying one more minute in the treacherous Tri-Towns. Within a few minutes the two of us had rocketed out of downtown and began flirting with the city limits and the outskirts of Morgenthau. The Professor drove past the rusty iron gates of the college and drove a few blocks down to a funeral parlor that sat across the street from the college. He finally parked the car, let out another painful groan and leaned over to my face.

“You owe me, kid,” said The Professor. “I need you to help me back to my room.” He exited the car and started walking back towards the long stone wall that guarded the Morgenthau property.

“Wait a minute,” I yelled, stumbling out of the passenger’s seat to catch up with The Professor. “Where the hell do you live? And we can’t just leave the car there, it’s going to get towed.”

“Precisely,” said The Professor, who had crossed the street and was standing next to a pay phone. He picked up the receiver and awkwardly pulled a few coins out of his jacket pocket, still visibly shaken from his near death experience. He inserted the coins, dialed the number and waited for someone to answer.

“Eddy,” said The Professor, “It’s Willie… Hey, fuck you! This is Willie god damnit! Yes, I have another one for you, outside the parlor… Just make sure we get our cut.” With that, The Professor slammed the receiver down and grimaced in pain. He began lumbering towards the rusty iron gates of the college. I ran up along side him to see if he was alright.

“Excuse me, Willie, are you—“

“My name isn’t Willie, you asshole!” yelled The Professor. “Willie is the name of a friend of mine who steals cars and leaves them in places where they’ll be towed. The towing company gives him a cut of the impounding fee.”

“Oh…” I said sheepishly as we approached the entrance. “Where are we going?”

The Professor looked at the entrance and let out an exhausted sigh of disgust and relief. “We’re going home,” said The Professor who hung his head momentarily before instructing me to assist him over the wall and back to the place that I would call home for the next two years.

Chapter III: The Addicts in the Woods

The addicts believed in everything. They believed that the snakes were spawn of Satan sent to curse the college. They believed that The Professor was a messenger from God, a wizard capable of unimaginable powers. They believed in ghosts and claimed to communicate with the dead who lay buried in The Gardens. They believed that Nolan, Simeon, their father and The Watcher were the four horsemen of the apocalypse. They believed that Kendra was our savior; an angel sent to deliver us from evil, who became a martyr for our sins. They believed in life after death. They were not afraid to die and at times, they were too scared to live.

Their idea of law and order was based on karma and logic. Before The Watcher became Morgenthau’s version of Johnny Law, the addicts dispensed their own justice on the empty streets of the abandoned campus. The addicts moved together in packs. No one ever really knew how many of them lived in the woods at a given point, except that they seemed to survive the cold of winter and the blistering heat and humidity of the summer. Some of them died off, but they were quickly replaced by younger, faster and more insane versions of themselves. They were faceless rebels who were all for one and one for all.

Before Nolan started trying to scare the rents out of the residents, the addicts kept the campus in a state of tense equilibrium. At Morgenthau, there were no locks on the doors, and thefts were known to occur from time to time. When they did, the thieves were rarely able to get off campus to pawn the merchandise. On the rare instance that there was a rape or murder, the addicts were known to intervene. Their justice system was neither deliberate, nor predictable. Their sentences would be carried out randomly and swiftly.

They were not our protectors; they were there to destroy us before we destroyed ourselves. They moved like shadows through the forests on the east side of campus, descending into underground sewers connected every building, dorm and pathway. They had free license to wander through the main residence hall, the snake-ridden quadrangle, and anywhere else they pleased.

My first encounter with the addicts came during my first week at Morgenthau. At the time, I had been breaking into vending machines in one of the Tri-Towns. I had been successful at first, but I quickly realized that the machines did not replenish their supply of quarters, nickels and dimes fast enough for me to turn a profit big enough to pay Nolan’s rent.

I hopped the rusted, mechanized gates at the ivy-covered entrance to the campus and started making my way up the avenue to my freshman-wing room in the Main Residence Hall. The dilapidated squalor of Morgenthau had not fazed me in the beginning. I got used to the mold, the stench of piss, the crack pipes and the syringes. I didn’t mind the lukewarm soup that was prepared every few days by Grover and I found that I could sleep at night because I owned nothing that could be stolen.

But that walk up the avenue in the middle of the night was making me quickly reconsider my decision to stay at this awful, awful place. I was tired, and I knew damn well how my mind could play tricks on my sleep-deprived mind. At first it was the arrhythmic sound of my own footsteps, as if a second set of steps were falling out of sync with mine. Then it was my own shadow, which stalked my movements, silhouetted by moonlight. Underneath the trees, different shadows moved along with me. Just mind tricks, just fatigue and paranoia.

Finally it was the whispers that drew my attention. Soft, slow whispers; just loud enough that I could hear, just soft enough that I couldn’t understand. Even if I could hear what they were saying, the addicts had long ago developed their own form of communication, a dry, staccato sequence of chips, chops and whistles. I sped up my pace and could hear accompanying footsteps slowly adjust to my new rhythm.

I knew they were out there somewhere and that they were toying with me. I stopped dead in my tracks and heard the other footsteps quickly stop with me. I looked around down the leaf-covered avenue to find no man, no woman, no child, no beast or monster—just my shadow in the moonlight. But as I stood still, I heard the footsteps resume their pace, quickening, multiplying and radiating all around me.

I turned around swiftly to make a mad dash to the dorms, but was struck hard and fast from my blind side. I let out a yelp and fell to the ground where I felt forces moving over me like ocean waves crashing. I was stuck in their undertow. They didn’t try to hurt me, they only tried to confuse and disorient me. I felt quick movements all along my body, sliding along my legs, torso and face.

It had lasted all of 10 seconds before I opened my eyes to an empty street, black as the night sky. They had disappeared back into the woods as quickly as they had descended upon me. They had robbed my jacket pocket of the coins that I had collected that evening, probably less and five dollars. They had been attracted by the jingling change. They didn’t spare me a single cent and they had spilt none on the ground as they escaped. It was ill-gotten money, and they knew it. In such a dishonest place like Morgenthau, the addicts sought to teach me a lesson. I had to earn an honest living. I never forgot it.

I don’t know for sure why everyone referred to them as addicts. The drug dealers at the campus certainly never sold anything to them, and if their stash was stolen, the culprit was usually one of the maniacs from the basement; and those scoundrels were the real addicts, not the fiends in the woods. The Professor once suggested that it was because they moved like speed freaks, they jonsed like junkies and they were shady like cokeheads. In reality, we called them addicts because there was no other way a sober creature of God could move and operate like they did.

I got off easy compared to what the addicts put Nolan through. A week after Kendra’s death, Nolan met with The Watcher to discuss the recent passing of their problematic nuisance and to reward him for his deeds. On the way back to his Land Rover, night suddenly fell across Morgenthau, an hour ahead of schedule. Big, black storm clouds blew into the region without mercy, and Nolan’s footsteps were not fast enough to carry him down the avenue to the shelter of his jeep. A wicked wind blew in from the east and tore limbs off trees like drumsticks off a Thanksgiving turkey, sending a cloud of dirt and sand into Nolan’s eyes. He never saw it coming, and before he knew it, he was lost in the terrible world of the addicts.

Nolan was missing for almost a week before he finally turned up at the doorstep of his father’s townhouse in the Tri-Towns. He was filthy from dirt and human waste, shirtless, shivering and utterly terrified. He never spoke of the things he saw or endured at the hands of the addicts, but he made it very clear that he would never go back to the campus, and his job was quickly re-assigned to his younger brother Simeon.

To exact revenge, the Grasso family sent The Watcher into the woods, but after a week of searching through the tunnels, Watcher found no signs of human life out there. Simeon was furious with The Watcher and accused the brute of being lazy, but when he accompanied him on his own expedition, Nolan’s little brother was stunned to find nothing at all.

But they were there. We knew that they were there. And secretly, we all wished that they had just killed Nolan rather than put the fear of God into him. The addicts did not care about the rents or the brutish punishment handed down by The Watcher if it was not paid on time. There were prices to be paid for everything in the eyes of the addicts. We had to pay for our accommodations and Nolan had to pay for his transgressions against Kendra as well as the sanctity of the campus. If the addicts were not sober creatures of God, the possibility certainly had to be floated that they were in fact, the manifestations of God himself.