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.