Quoth the Raven (12 page)

“Here,” he said, “here is something much more pleasant to talk about.” He formed his lips into a fish-circle and brought up a noise from the back of his throat, loud and raucous, that made Gregor jump.

“Here,” Tibor said again. “Here she is, Krekor, as I have told you. Lenore.”

What came through the open window was the largest raven Gregor had ever seen, so black and glossy its beak looked almost canary yellow. It hopped onto Tibor’s arm and then began to climb up his shoulder, moving carefully, as if it knew its talons could hurt and it was taking care not to hurt Tibor. It came to rest on Tibor’s shoulder.

“You look like Edgar Allan Poe,” Bennis said.

Tibor had been hunting around in his pockets. He came up with something small and round, put it in the center of his palm, and offered it to Lenore. The bird looked at it for a moment and then ate it.

“Hamburger,” Tibor said. “I feed her pastry, sometimes, but it is not right. Ravens are carnivores.”

“You carry hamburger around in your pockets for a bird?” Bennis said.

“I change it every day.”

Gregor thought the more proper question to ask in this case would have been: Why would anyone want to cultivate the friendship of something that looked so much like a harbinger of death? He wouldn’t have asked it, because he knew it was just one more manifestation of his skewed feelings about Halloween. As it turned out, he wouldn’t have had a chance to ask it even if he’d wanted to.

“Say ‘hello’ to Gregor and Bennis,” Tibor commanded the bird.

Lenore hopped off Tibor’s shoulder, flew into the room, and came to rest on the back of the empty wing chair. She stared first at Gregor, then at Bennis, then at Tibor. Then she opened her mouth and let out the most bloodcurdling scream Gregor had ever heard.

“I don’t understand,” Tibor said, “what’s that?”

Lenore jumped onto Tibor’s hand and said very clearly: “Bastard. Bastard, bastard, bastard.”

“T
HE REAL PROBLEM WITH
Mattengill’s analysis of the sociocultural parameters of evidentiary psychosis,” the man ahead of them in line was saying, “is that it doesn’t take into account the essential functions of spatiotemporality.”

The college dining hall was a cafeteria—inevitable, Gregor would have realized, if he’d thought about it—and Tibor was leading their way down the line past the plates of Swedish meatballs and roast beef au jus. Beyond the line was a large, unusually graceful room, high ceilinged and marble floored, furnished with sturdy Shaker tables and high-backed chairs. Gregor had been under the impression that every college in the country had given up that sort of thing in favor of painted steel and laminated wood. The line itself, though, was the epitome of the twentieth-century American college dining hall aesthetic. It had stacks of rectangular plastic trays with rounded corners. It had heavy stainless steel tableware devoid of any ornament. It had a long tray-rest made of stainless steel tubes. Most of all, it had food: starchy, gelatinous, and colorless. It was food that promised fervently to be bland.

Tibor had loaded up his tray without really thinking about what he was going to eat. Tibor never thought about what he ate. Bennis had taken a wilted-looking chef’s salad that seemed to be blanketed by indeterminate cheese. Gregor, remembering all those picnic baskets in the back of the van, had settled for a doughnut and a cup of coffee. He knew he wasn’t going to starve. There were two dozen honey cakes on the way. Now they were approaching the cash register, Tibor with his green card out. The man who had been talking about spatiotemporality was just paying up.

“I don’t know what was wrong with Lenore,” Tibor was saying. “She never did anything like that before. She says ‘Hello.’ She says ‘Good-bye.’ She says ‘Good luck.’ To Dr. Branch she says ‘You have a nice ass.’ I think Dr. Crockett taught her to do that. She does not scream like a banshee in its death throes.”

“If she says all those things, she’s a he,” Gregor said. “Female ravens can’t be taught to imitate talk.”

“That’s a sexist thing to say,” Bennis said.

Gregor gave her a withering look. “Sexist or not, that’s nature. Here, I’ll do another sexist thing. I’ll buy your lunch.”

Tibor had already passed beyond the cash register, waving his green card and smiling vaguely at the student who was manning it. He was walking briskly through the large room toward a table next to one of the tall windows. Watching him, Gregor realized he had been wrong to think, as he had at first, that the dining hall had not been decorated like the rest of the campus for Halloween. The decorations were there, but the room was so large and well proportioned it swallowed them. Every table had a tiny jack-o’-lantern in the middle of it, candlelit from within. Every column had a bouquet of Indian corn tied to the center of it. It all looked superfluous.

“Six ninety-five,” the student at the cash register said.

Gregor gave her a ten, took his change, and motioned Bennis to follow him to Tibor’s table. She had been listening to the conversation behind her—something about the intergenerational reenactments of mythic gravities that Gregor hadn’t really heard—and Gregor wasn’t sure she’d seen where Tibor had gone.

“Over there by the windows,” Gregor told her, as they passed between two students who were, blessedly as far as Gregor was concerned, talking about the latest
Star Wars
movie. “He’s been joined by a man who looks like a cover model for one of your L.L. Bean catalogs.”

The man not only looked like the model for the cover of one of Bennis’s L.L. Bean catalogs, he behaved the way Gregor had always suspected those men would behave. As soon as Gregor and Bennis reached the table, he leapt to his feet. Then he reached out, took Bennis’s tray, and put it down for her. Gregor’s tray was already on the table, so he didn’t bother with that. He simply put out his hand, smiled heartily, and said,

“How do you do, Mr. Demarkian. I’m Dr. Kenneth Crockett.”

Father Tibor Kasparian never leapt to his feet for anyone, although he’d done it once or twice from sheer excitement. He stared at Dr. Kenneth Crockett for a moment in utter astonishment, then waved Dr. Crockett, Gregor, and anyone else who might be in the vicinity into their seats.

“This is Miss Bennis Hannaford,” Tibor said. “Miss Hannaford is a member of my parish.”

Gregor nearly choked on his coffee. Had Bennis told everyone on earth, except him, that she was buying that apartment?

“We have been talking,” Tibor was going on, “about Lenore. Have you seen Lenore today, Dr. Crockett?”

“Call me Ken,” Dr. Crockett said. It sounded automatic, as if he’d gotten used to telling Tibor this same thing over and over again. “I’ve seen Lenore a couple of times. I’ve been wondering if she’s ill.”

“She sounded like she was strangling when we met her,” Bennis said.

“I haven’t heard her talk. I was up at the cabin today—we have a rock-climbing club here; the club keeps a log cabin up near Hillman’s Rock—anyway, she was out there, circling around this morning. I’ve never known her to circle as much as she has the last few days.”

“The last two,” Tibor corrected “She was all right the day before yesterday. I had her in my office, eating out of my hand, and she was talking away just as usual.”

“Maybe the circling has something to do with sex,” Bennis said. “Maybe she’s getting ready to mate or looking for a mate or something like that.”

Gregor found it absolutely astounding, how Bennis could manage to bring sex into any conversation. It was a trait he had come to decide was universal in her generation of women, and he didn’t like it. He took a bite out of his doughnut, which was stale. He took a sip of his coffee, which was nearly as bad as the stuff Tibor made at home. Then he pushed the whole mess away from him and said, “In the first place, as I was telling you before, if it talks, it’s a him, not a her. In the second place, ravens don’t mate in the fall and they don’t mate by circling, either. They circle when they’re coming in for a kill.”

“Is that so?” Dr. Kenneth Crockett looked bemused. “In that case, I suppose we’ll have to find Lenore a bird psychologist. What she seems to be circling in to kill these days is Constitution House.”

“I thought you said you saw her circling a cabin in the woods somewhere,” Gregor pointed out.

“She wasn’t actually circling the cabin,” Dr. Crockett corrected. “She was just up over Hillman’s Rock circling. But the last couple of days, what she’s been doing most often is circling over Constitution House. Even Father Tibor’s noticed it.”

“That is true, Krekor. I have noticed it. She goes up into the air and around and around our house.”

“She never comes down?” Gregor asked, realizing at the last minute that he had done it himself, called the raven “her.” “He never swoops or lights on anything anywhere?”

“He never swoops,” Dr. Crockett said.

“Of course she lights on things, Krekor,” Tibor said. “She came into my apartment not half an hour ago. You saw her yourself.”

“He wasn’t lighting to kill. He was just coming in to see what he could find.”

“Well, there it is, then, Krekor. The behavior does not make sense. It doesn’t matter if Lenore is a him or a her. It only matters that she is not well.”

The ebb and flow of contradictory pronouns was beginning to make Gregor dizzy. Accuracy mattered to him. He could never understand why it didn’t matter to everyone else. He looked at Dr. Kenneth Crockett with some curiosity. Here was a man, a Ph.D. and a scholar, a man whom Tibor had pronounced himself in favor of—and yet there was something about him that Gregor didn’t like. It all seemed jerry-rigged somehow—his personality, his conversation, even his clothes. It was as if Crockett had woken up one morning and decided on the man he was going to be, and then gone out and become that man, but only from the outside. The core of him was someplace else, some
thing
else. It didn’t fit with the rest of him, and it chafed.

Gregor shifted a little in his chair—why was he forever the victim of uncomfortable chairs?—and said, “You know, there is one possible explanation for the kind of circling you’ve been talking about. He may have been spotting.”

“Spotting?” Dr. Crockett asked.

“Carrion,” Gregor said. “Ravens aren’t vultures, of course. They kill their own meat. But any carnivorous bird will spot carrion, if there’s enough of it.”

Father Tibor blanched, “What do you mean, Krekor, if there’s enough of it?”

“I mean if the kill is big enough, of course. It would have to be a very substantial kill, I’d think, in the case of a bird like Lenore. He’s well fed without having to work too hard for it.”

“I don’t understand why she bothers to work for it at all,” Bennis said. “All she has to do to get fed is show up at Father Tibor’s window. Why should she knock herself out chasing small animals?”

“Instinct,” Gregor said. “Community responsibility. In case you didn’t know it, birds are fairly communal animals, even if they don’t live in herds. If Lenore is spotting carrion, then he’s not just spotting carrion for himself. He’s spotting it for any of his fellow ravens who happen to be able to see him.”

“Krekor, Lenore has no fellow ravens. Lenore is the only raven anyone has ever seen in this part of Pennsylvania.”

“Excuse me,” Dr. Kenneth Crockett said. “That’s Alice. We were supposed to meet and we kept missing each other.”

He was already on his feet, looking away from them, his legs bent slightly at the knees, getting ready to move him quickly. From his initial politeness, Gregor would have expected handshakes, rituals, trivialities—but that initial politeness had been stripped away. Dr. Kenneth Crockett didn’t seem to care about anything but getting across the room to Alice—or maybe, Gregor thought, away from them.

“Excuse me,” Dr. Crockett said again. Then he spun around and hurried off, into the crowd.

Bennis got out her cigarettes and lit up. “Good grief,” she said. “Who’s Alice?”

“Dr. Elkinson,” Father Tibor said. “We met her when we were going into Constitution House. She’s over there, by the cash register.”

Someone else was there, by the cash register, in deep conversation with Dr. Elkinson—an older woman with an iron permanent and a face of steel and ice who reminded Gregor far too much of the most terrifying Sunday school teacher he had ever had. The older woman seemed to have nothing on her tray but a cup of tea, as if she were made of metal inside and didn’t need human food. Dr. Elkinson’s tray was much more reassuring: a hamburger, a little cardboard boat full of french fries, and a garishly colored old-fashioned tin can that said Belleville Lemon and Lime All Natural Soda.

“Who’s she talking to?” Gregor asked. “Is that the infamous Dr. Branch?”

“No, Krekor, that is not Dr. Branch. That is Miss Maryanne Veer. She is the secretary for our office.”

“I think I’ll stay out of your office,” Bennis said.

Gregor dragged his attention away from Dr. Elkinson, Dr. Crockett, and Miss Maryanne Veer, and found himself face-to-face with a very worried Father Tibor. He felt almost instantly guilty. He had meant to rattle Dr. Crockett and see what came of it. He hadn’t meant to put Father Tibor Kasparian off his food.

“Tibor,” he said, “don’t get so upset. I was just presenting a possibility. I don’t have any real—”

“What’s that?” Bennis said.

Bennis was an immobile sitter. She got comfortable where she wanted to be and stayed there. Now she was rising off her seat, leaning forward, her palms flat against the table and her arms straining to stretch just a little longer, just a little farther. The tone of her voice had been so shocked, Gregor found himself rising too, turning toward the cash register again, confused and alarmed.

He had every reason to be alarmed. What he saw, when he finally got himself into position, was a tragedy out of a cheap horror movie. Miss Maryanne Veer had moved away from the cash register, toward the center of the room. She was there now, alone, her head thrown back, the sound coming out of her throat a cross between a gurgle and a scream. Her chin had been stripped of skin and left raw and bloody. Something seemed to be eating into the front of her dress and the skin on her neck. At her feet, where her teacup had fallen and shattered, a puddle of brown and green was having no effect on the floor at all.