Page 14 of The Villains of Winter

Silence swelled around the lecture chamber as the irriguous air dried out of the cave.

For a moment, the air was the only sound to be heard, before Hexley lowered his head with his voice nearly gone. He hadn’t anticipated the question, but he cleared his throat.

“My twin brother slipped sleeping pills in my coffee that midnight and he took my place in the winter ceremony. Everyone believed he was me. He’d been granted permission from the provost. By the time I woke up, he was already lynched.” Professor Hexley lifted his head over the collective gasps. “My brother had wanted to be a professor at Æscwulf. Therefore, I’ve lived his dream for him and I’ve tried to provide comfort to the students he would’ve taught. That day was fifteen years ago. In those times, no one bothered to take down the ‘Negro boy’s’ body. Therefore, I took his body down with my bare hands and brought him home. Year after year, I’ve returned here. For my own atonement. For repayment.”

​​ CHAPTER NINE

“ARE YOU HERE TO COME to bed with me, Elliott?” James smiled upon sight of him. The Hallowe’en costumes rested on the unorderly mattress behind him. “I’m starting to think you might love me.”

In the dormitory, James unbuttoned his shirt and trousers, a cigarette edged in the corner of his smirking mouth. James bit onto a rugged calf-skin vest with the other end of his mouth as he stepped into a pair of hard terrain trousers for his costume, and buttoned the smooth cotton of his western rancher shirt. As he set the cattle-white cowboy hat on his hair, he looked every bit of the Marlboro Man. “Ready, partner?”

He tossed Elliott a dark pistol.

“Ready.” Elliott caught the pistol with one hand as he dressed with the other, tying a roughened, dark bandana around his neck. They were cowboys that year and Elliott lowered his voice into his best graveled Clint Eastwood grunt. “‘‘Bout time this town had a new sheriff.’”

He felt rather foolish saying it, and the cigar smoke made him choke, but Elliott kept the hand-rolled cigar in his mouth all the same. Elliott didn’t even bother to re-light it as they navigated the crowded corridors to the Common Room.

By their third year, very few students regarded Samhain any longer, fully embracing Hallowe’en with relief they wouldn’t needed to translate ancient Celtic verses and recite old rites the entire night. The first year students and second year students held prayers to the old gods for the survival of the winter. The third year students and fourth year students were freed of the College mandated paganry.

There were divinations of rotted nuts and peeled apples for the tradition.

There were scratchy, coarse animal-hide masks; centuries-dated costumes of malignant spirits and bittered devils; and blackened faces painted with bonfire ash for protection.

There were harvests of squashes, potatoes, parsnips, walnuts, grains, gourds, pork, and poultry. There were potted drinks of mulled wines and cider. The students gathered at the refectory to exchange good will and harvested fruit. May the winter have mercy upon them.

However, in recent years, the endowment donors urged the College to put forth effort towards modernity to appeal to the youth and to regard themselves with the prestigious Ivy League crest. Heathenry was the nature of Æscwulf College, however, and therefore compromise was reached.

That fateful autumn in Æscwulf College, it was the year of the vampire. The grand theater, Thysdrus, transported students to the castle of the nobleman Count Dracula in the Carpathian Mountains, adorned in broken battlements. The students traversed the jagged alps of Transylvania where the welcome staff spoke nearly entirely in German or Romanian, bearing hulking, thickened accents that exhibited their months of preparation for a single nightfall at the very end of October.

“‘Denn die Todten reiten Schnell[3],’” whispered the faculty with eerie smiles when students passed by them in the twilight-soaked evening. Draped in ankle-length robes, the head professors greeted them openly. “‘Enter freely and of your own free will![4]’”

Every student knew it was a trap. Only the freshmen foolishly stepped over the threshold of the amphitheater, vanishing from sight.

The mountain prairie was paved with rugged land, coarse rocks and asperous ridges freighted from Wallachia, preserved from the century of Bram Stoker. Its serpentine path sinuously curved through lush Balkan peonies, alpine bellflowers and deadly bursts of wolfsbanes. The plains of purple viper grasses had taken the groundskeepers several weeks to perfect.

Even insects native to Transylvania were flown in–orache moths, Old World swallowtails, stag beetles–but Elliott followed James towards the Common Room. He knew better than to make eye contact with the dark-clothed professors.

On Saturday night, the Winterthur Hall Common Room had hundreds of costumed students gathered around the sectional couches to watch the hockey match as the Connecticut Carnivores played against the Pittsburgh Penguins. The Common Rooms were always packed on the weekends. A few people sipped drams of plum brandy–slivovitz–but no one included the tinctures of bat blood.

From Apollo, the prophetic madness. The gift of prophecy, oracles, divination. The professors believed there was no greater means of inducing prophetic madness than fear itself. Primal fear. Primitive pain.

The freshmen drank bat blood that night.

Blood of animals.

It was the modern tradition. None of the upperclassmen wanted to be bitten as professors unleashed hellacious Wallachian bats into Thysdrus. No one desired to be nipped and scraped in the python pits, where instead of bobbing for apples, students plunged their hands into pools of snakelets for rare editions of encased Shakespeare. No one reveled in being hunted by Translyvanian wolves that snarled and frothed with powerful jaws towards any fresh meat. The wolves were restrained, of course, muzzled, but their ear-splitting, bestial howls were petrifying. A professor always trilled towards the terrified faces, “‘Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!’”

Instead, in the Winterthur Hall Common Room, if you paid ten bucks, Heather Tần would fill your cup with Absolut. If you paid her fifteen bucks, you received a full rum and coke, a Cape Cod of vodka and cranberry juice, or screwdrivers. Anything fancier than that, Glenfiddich or J&B, was twenty bucks.

Alcohol was how Heather Tần paid her way through college, but she wouldn’t let anyone under twenty-one inside. Heather barred the doors with her arms as Elliott approached, her hands on either length of the doorframe. She squinted up at him from her short height. “Are you twenty-one years old?”

“He’s with me,” James explained beside Elliott, and Heather’s eyes glazed over the junior. She might’ve been the only one immune to James Wilde. Around them, the radio blared AC/DC on top of the hockey game announcers as everyone on the worn couch prayed for a win. Rows of elven archers sat at the edge of their seats. Lines of orcs chanted under their breath for the player to choke on a penalty shot.

James handed her a fifty dollar bill, but Heather narrowed her eyes on him.

The students were allowed cassette players with pre-approved classical music tapes, but they weren’t allowed the radio. It was contraband. Rap music promoted violence, promiscuity, and hoodlum behavior. Metal music was a Satanic prelation of Lucifer. The gateway to Hell.

Although Æscwulf was pagan-founded, the endowment benefactors were Christian since 1951. The modern paganists believed in capital more than the old rites.