Page 12 of The Villains of Winter

“You don’t even believe that.” Hazel slammed a therapy pamphlet against his chest. “Don’t you notice a pattern with your exes—Halle, Harmony, Hazel? Get help, Elliott.” Her voice cracked on the last syllable.

Elliott tried to explain, but he collided into someone else in the caliginous dimness.

Professor Hexley grasped Elliott by the shoulders to steady him, and he steered him like a ship. He raised his bronze torch above their heads, lest they both caught on fire. Smoke swirled onto Elliott’s shoulder from the older man.

Hexley had forgotten to extinguish his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, the same way he’d forgotten to shave, his fine jawbone swathed with stubble.

Elliott blustered an apology, mortified to accidentally ram into a professor, and he squeezed past him into the lecture chamber, inhaling a lungful of decades-old dust and myrrh imported from the isles of the Mediterranean. The dust settled warmly beneath the amber lighting of the chamber. Elliott found the furthest tier in the back to nurse his hands. The older students congregated near the pit of the bronze dais and the twenty-year-olds smoked relentlessly into the chilly air to settle their nerves. A few juniors brought in tiny bottles of brandy to take the edge off their migraines. Everyone had heard about the punishment.

Elliott rested onto a stone ledge in the fourth tier. A couple of diligent girls read through the conspectus before the lecture beside him, while a set of rambunctious boys at the front replayed Monday’s hockey game against the Minnesota Wild to entertain themselves.

The lecture chamber next to theirs was a life drawing course where a nude man and woman sat with an expression of interest as they were painted or sculpted, meanwhile Elliott’s hands were searing his nerves apart. He prayed beneath his breath that it wasn’t a practicum day.

As Elliott gazed forward, he focused on Professor Hexley, a distractingly handsome man, young enough to pass for a graduate student, if you never peered too closely at the wrinkles in his lineament. There were a few silvered hairs in his stubble. He was the kind of teacher that didn’t care if you sauntered in fifteen minutes late, or if you missed an entire morning of class to cure a legendary hangover. To everyone’s astonishment, he was one of the few professors that deeply despised the hiemal tradition. The guilt existed in the bruise-toned hues beneath his brown eyes.

He was profoundly inebriated that morning. He’d reeked of cognac when Elliott first collided with him and now, even four tiers away, Elliott could still smell the spirits on him.

Professor Hexley must’ve heard of the seven students that attempted escape and the gore of their punishment. Hexley’s dark brown skin was creased with remorse.

Any other week, he was well-ordered, disciplined, and put together with acute attention to detail. However, he’d left behind his tie, or perhaps he’d spilled coffee on it and therefore needed to discard it, because he’d certainly drenched his crinkled shirt in espresso, his sleeves rolled to his elbow. As if he’d missed his mouth completely, he was soaked through, much to the disdain of the secondary professor.

Professor Perrineau opened his pert mouth, but Professor Hexley raised a hand to silence him. “Let’s get the winter over with.”

Disgruntled, Professor Perrineau fastened his ascot, sitting perched at the edge of the burnished dais like an ostrich, before Perrineau couldn’t bear it anymore and like a nagging spouse, he dried the unshaved stubble of Professor Hexley face with a satin handkerchief. An intimate moment that belied their animosity.

“You know how they already regard men with our complexion, Hexley. Keep it together.”

“I’ll wear an ascot next time to appease the respectability politics of a death ceremony.” Hexley glanced down at the silk around Perrineau’s neck.

“It’s not respectability politics, it’s dignity.” Professor Perrineau’s eyes sharpened. “They’re waiting for any excuse to call us incompetent. You were a prodigy once, that’s why you were hired, remember that.”

After it was apparent that Hexley wouldn’t bother to change his shirt, Perrineau quietly thrust a set of papers into his hands. “Fine. Here is the conspectus. Debate how many penises are in the Bayeux tapestry of the Norman conquest of England for all I care. I can’t stand to be seen with you when you’re in a disordered manner.”

“Perhaps you should’ve sent my replacement with a philosophy professor like I formally requested.”

“I tried. None of them wanted to deal with your compassionate sentiments, except Helmut. We warn you every year not to infantilize these students. They’re not your children, they’re adults. They’ve made their decision.” Professor Perrineau gazed down his thin nose at Hexley’s wilted collar, then Perrineau glanced over the art students. “These infants of yours wouldn’t last a moment with the philosophy professors as it stands, anyway.”

Everyone sunk in their seats at the idea of being taught by the philosophy professors. Professor Helmut Wulfram was a mountainous, bearish man with a prolific beard, and pale-white skin, built like a lumberman. Wulfram adhered himself to Stoicism and its emotional mastery. He didn’t believe in the modern mindset. He wore his chitōn with a himátion, the heavy cloak mantled over his garment as though he were Socrates in the Republic, and whenever he hunted in the stark winter, he draped woolen chlamýs or burrus over his chitōn as though it was the age of Antiquity.

Wulfram relished terrifying the students with deliberate references to past hibernal deaths or grisly implications of imminent deaths, yet the philosophy students loved him ferociously.

One could hardly get the students to leave the mountains willingly.

The philosophy students studied in his cave as he chopped wood, stoking large fires like a modern Prometheus, where Elliott heard he lulled your mind into a false pretense of comfort with the amiably cozy fireplace, but his axe was a terror as he railed through Socratic seminars and rigorous Marcus Aurelius lectures that drained the mind until he’d thoroughly sifted through it. He strived to instill hard work ethic and learn the strategic thoughts of his students in readings of Thucydides and Xenophon of Athens as though they were young conscripts drafted in a war. He pillaged the concepts of existentialism in the winter. He purged the mind of everything except fatalism discourses throughout the hibernal week.

Thankfully, Professor Hexley embraced the heart of his students. He was beloved for that reason. There were students that slept on the stone ledges with blankets that weren’t even part of Hexley’s caves, and several huddles of students spilled in from the hallway, because his classroom was a safety blanket itself.

His steady timbre was a safe haven, even at his most intoxicated.

He would never surrender his students to Professor Wulfram.

As Perrineau stormed out in protest, Professor Hexley set aside the conspectus without a single look at it. He knew intrinsically what would keep his students distracted from the hibernal. “Let’s debate Titian’s Allegory of Prudence.”

Elliott had studied the oil-on-canvas crafted by the Italian Renaissance painter Tiziano Vecellio for weeks by then. There were three heads depicted: an elderly man with a grizzled expression positioned to the left, a matured man with his dark eyes bearing slightly forward, and a youthful boy expressionlessly aimed to the right.

Each faced a different direction believed to be signaling three separate stages of life in a man’s past, present, and future over his lifetime. However, there were three animal heads symbolized beneath each man: a dark wolf beneath the elder man; a golden lion beneath the matured man; and a bright dog beneath the youthful boy.

Lyra was the first to raise her hand with her usual pile of books on the corner of her ledge. She always sounded like a textbook to Elliott. “The themes of the Renaissance Era in Italy, specifically circa 1550-1565, were considered the Dark Ages. The main symbolisms were religious themes of sin and regret.” She paused ruminatively for a moment. “Perhaps it’s exactly what everyone believes…that the man committed sin as a youth when he was more of a dog, then he graduated to more ferocious sins as a lion, and in the end, he became a weary wolf of regret as a wrinkled old man. The pain in the lion’s eyes alone is unmistakable.”