Glover University was not considered a great institution by any of the country’s rankings, not even within the state of Wisconsin. If someone was looking for discussion groups, advanced scientific projects, or at least an average football league, they would not find them there. Despite the possible altruism that inspired his actions, when Horatius Glover imagined in 1887 the founding of an academic institution of higher learning, the project was in fact perceived as just another philanthropic whim of a wealthy man. His pragmatism and impatience for results only reinforced that idea in the minds of the ordinary citizens of Leadtown. After all—so some thought, especially among the local high society—Glover had been in his youth nothing more than a country boy who had dropped out of school in the third grade.

From then until adulthood, he had held many hard jobs: he had been, in succession, a farmer, a lead miner (during the boom of lead and iron mining in Wisconsin), a Union soldier, and finally, after the end of the war in 1865, a logger in the vast pine forests of Minnesota. It was there that, after saving for almost two decades, he managed to buy a very modest sawmill with only three workers. That sawmill would become the first brick in what would later be his reputation as a tenacious and progressive paper tycoon, recognized throughout the state. And yet, despite his constant pride in his humble origins and his rise through sheer hard work, many in Leadtown saw in Glover a deeply rooted inferiority complex, one that drove him to perform acts meant to endure in the collective memory long after his death.

And after all, is there any greater testimony to a man’s greatness than an institution capable of transforming society with the radiant light of knowledge?

Whatever his intentions may have been when he founded the university, Glover was poorly advised in his task, and the academic team he assembled was far from adequate for the institution he had imagined. In its early days, Glover University began with three faculties: Law, Medicine, and Arts. But as a practical man who had come from poverty, Glover considered the latter unnecessary.

“The people of Leadtown,” he used to say, “need lawyers and doctors. Poems, novels, and paintings do not put food on the table nor do they contribute to the development of society.”

Ironically, after his death—ten years later—it was the Faculty of Arts that ended up becoming the most valuable among the twenty that would eventually make up the campus. It is worth noting at this point that World War I, the Great Depression, and the negligent administration—first by his widow and later by his two sons (the former more interested in the Glover Foundation, the latter in the company)—were the factors that contributed most to Glover’s decline. There was even a time when studying Arts at Glover was comparable to studying Law at Harvard. And although the Faculty of Arts was eventually overtaken by the decay that spread across the entire university, its ruin was never as severe.

Glover University also became sadly famous for the low quality of its graduates, its crumbling campus, its reputation as a refuge for rejected students from across the state, the indecorous behavior of several members of its fraternities, and above all for the strange events surrounding a very particular urban legend: The Horror Story Club.

The Horror Story Club was regarded in Leadtown in the early 1970s as a foolish invention of a few lazy Glover students. They met on the first Sunday night of each month in a neglected basement of the Faculty of Arts to take turns telling the most sordid rumors in the county’s history. It was not until four of its members disappeared under rather strange circumstances that the group began to be viewed with suspicion. Under strong public pressure, the Leadtown County Police closed the case six months later, with no significant progress. The identity of whoever was responsible for the disappearances was never discovered. The missing students were declared dead after a week of fruitless searches, but their bodies were never found.

Ironically, the club and its members became yet another horror story in the town’s collective memory. Rumors ranged from a psychopath infiltrated into the group to the intervention of paranormal forces. Whatever the cause, the basement was supposedly sealed by the faculty authorities in order to put an end to the wave of scandals further staining the campus’s already damaged image.

********

Fred Tyler was sitting very casually in front of his laptop. He was terribly bored, and he was the only one there who did not make even the slightest effort to hide it. During the two and a half hours of sterile discussion, he yawned five times quite conspicuously and was about to pull a piece of candy from his pocket—a bad habit he had carried since childhood. Needless to say, his spontaneous and perhaps overly transparent nature did not earn him much sympathy among his colleagues.

Even so, most of them thought the same thing he did: that the meetings of the Faculty of Arts Council had become a complete waste of time. The difference was that while Fred expressed his dissatisfaction openly, the others hid it beneath a veneer of feigned interest.

They must be worried about their jobs, Fred thought. Though with Glover’s poor credentials, any professor who valued his career at all should not be working there—and would hardly get hired on another campus either.

Despite the heterogeneity of the faculty—ranging from scarcely qualified members like Ginger Frattini of the Narrative Department to others of great value such as Robert McGoff, Patrick Anderson (with a master’s degree in Indochinese mythology), Franklyn Martin (remembered by everyone since the 1970s as a shy and strange student of that very same faculty), and Fred Tyler himself, an authority on British Romantic poetry—most of them, except for Tyler and McGoff, were between fifty and fifty-five: too old to be hired elsewhere and too young to retire. The other exception was Franklyn Martin, who was already sixty-seven.

At forty-five, with an impeccable résumé, Fred Tyler had received numerous offers to teach at universities not only in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota, but also in places as far away as New York and Illinois. He had even received one from Harvard. But more than a valued academic, he considered himself simply a native of Leadtown, and except for the time he had spent earning his master’s degree in the United Kingdom, he had never left. He was as much a Leadtown local as he was a Glover alumnus.

Despite his deep sense of humility, Tyler had always been regarded in his hometown as a diamond among pebbles. He could have accepted any of those offers and left… but he saw something in his students. Something deeply hidden, yet present. And that, in his view, was the only reason worth staying.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Franklyn Martin began in his excessively formal style, “I am the senior professor here, not only in age but also in years of service to this institution. I have known better times in this faculty. Thirty years ago, one could say ‘I am from Glover’s Faculty of Arts’ with genuine pride.

“Those were days when studying in this faculty set trends within a radius of five hundred kilometers, and the atmosphere was filled with academic debates, both among students and among professors. In my student years, there were so many outstanding pupils, and we won regional competitions five or six times against some of the most prestigious universities in Wisconsin and Michigan. I still keep several of those awards…

“No, in those days there were no aimless kids wandering around, nor did the mediocrity that now prevails exist. We need to implement the necessary strategies to return to those days. We need responsible administration… and a good selection of students.”

It was no exaggeration. He truly was the oldest professor in the Faculty of Arts and the only one who had graduated from there. He had been there since he was eighteen, when he was a shy and introverted boy, though without any of the classic “nerd” stereotypes. Instead of unkempt hair, he always wore a military cut; he never wore glasses and was not weak—in fact, he possessed remarkable physical strength. Nor was he pale; on the contrary, he was deeply tanned. And yet he was still perceived as a nerd, above all because of his personality: too intellectual and withdrawn. There was something strange about him: a boy with an academic mind but the appearance of a street tough. Naturally, this often made him the target of mockery from scrawnier boys. Curiously, he did not seem to be aware of his own strength, and they took advantage of his insecurity to ridicule him. Sometimes they even confronted him in groups, and since he preferred simply to ignore them and walk away, they grew increasingly bold.

That meeting, like so many others, was nothing more than a formality. Everyone talked about projects and the needs of the faculty, but no one dared to present a formal request to the dean or the board. There were no good pigments in the Fine Arts school, and the Narrative Arts auditorium was small and nearly in ruins; yet in contrast, Horatius Glover’s mausoleum, with its gleaming marble columns, had five employees assigned to its maintenance.

“And these are our demands,” announced Michael Bolt, coordinator of Dramatic Arts, pointing to the blackboard. “Anyone else want to add something?”

Still holding the marker, Michael was surprised to see a single arm raised in the air.

“Yes, Tyler…”

“When are you planning to present them to the board?”

For several minutes, a thick silence reigned that no one dared to break.

********

Muttering a curse at the alarm clock on the nightstand, Debbie Cunningham half-sat up in her blankets and began her unusual morning ritual: two blinks, a yawn, a slap on each cheek, and two or three yoga stretches. Her roommate Jane often told her—barely holding back laughter—that it was the closest thing she had ever seen to a comic routine.

Debbie took a few unsteady steps, almost tripping over a chaotic pile of blankets, clothes, magazines, and worse still: a long and repugnant trail of vomit that began less than a meter from her bed and seemed to end in the bathroom. Following that disgusting trail, she was able to make out a partially burned marijuana joint and something that looked like a shrimp tail. The sight—and above all the smell—almost made her vomit too.

On her way to the bathroom, she picked up two socks and a bra stained with what was probably Jane’s undigested dinner. She knocked softly on the door and waited a second.

“Are you okay, Jane?”

Whatever Jane might have answered was drowned out by a violent cascade of vomiting. Debbie knew then that she had to go in. And what she saw was particularly sad: Jane was completely naked, her head literally inside the toilet, vomit splattered across her chest and forearms. She did not seem to care that her thick, light-brown curly hair was floating in the water.

It was not the vomit or the toilet that shocked Debbie—she had been to enough high-school and fraternity parties to be impressed by that—but seeing Jane, almost a child, in that state. She had turned eighteen just three weeks earlier. Until now, Jane had been a very proper girl, almost puritanical… or so Debbie had thought. This had all the hallmarks of a stupid hazing.

In the few months she had known her—this was Jane’s first year at Glover—Debbie had begun to worry about her more than she cared to admit. An only child from a middle-class family in Appleton, Debbie had begun to see in Jane the little sister she had never had. And in that relationship, she felt as responsible for her as if she truly were her older sister. No one was going to humiliate Jane like this without answering to her for it.

“Who did this to you, Jane?” Debbie asked, trying to sound firm. “What happened last night?”

Jane, still with her head in the toilet, took so long to answer that Debbie carefully held her and turned her face toward her, not worrying about the tears.

“Who was it?” she repeated.

Jane slowly seemed to regain awareness of her surroundings and of the situation. Her gaze met Debbie’s cold brown eyes, crouched in front of her.

“At the end of Professor Davidson’s class,” Jane began, sobbing, “Mike invited me to a party at his fraternity…”

“Wait a second!” Debbie interrupted. “Are you talking about that asshole Mike Grant from ΣΔΠ?”

“You know him?” Jane asked, more surprised than hurt.

“He was after me two semesters ago,” Debbie explained, handing her a towel. “He’s a sewer rat… but this time I’m going to catch him by the tail.”

A shy smile appeared through Jane’s tears.

“But you still haven’t told me what he did to you,” Debbie said, thinking the worst. “Did that bastard force you?”

“Oh, no,” Jane said more calmly. “But inside they gave me some strange drinks—kind of bitter—and I think I did some crazy things too. I guess some of those guys touched me, and there were girls dancing half-naked… I think I remember one of them giving me a French kiss. I have no idea how I got back. I guess one of them brought me… and this morning I woke up with a terrible headache. I started feeling worse every second and—”

“You left me this yellow brick road like in The Wizard of Oz,” Debbie finished for her. “I suspect they gave you more than just drinks, Jane…”

A loud knock abruptly interrupted the conversation. Debbie made an impatient gesture to Jane; on her way to the door, almost tripping again over the pile of clothes, she managed to hide some of the mess under the bed with her foot.

On the other side, Peggy Lodge was pushing the door, straining against the chain. When Debbie opened it, she could not prevent Peggy and Matt from seeing the disaster long enough. Peggy Lodge wrinkled her nose quite noticeably almost the instant she stepped in. She was a very good friend, but tact and subtlety were not among her virtues.

Coming from Highland Park—one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in downtown Detroit—she had grown up with no sense of subtlety at all. When your alcoholic father leaves home on your fifth birthday, and you have to drop out of high school for four years to help your mother support herself and your three younger siblings, tact and discretion tend to fall by the wayside.

Very different was the boy now standing a few steps behind her. Matt Barnes was the typical spoiled upper-class kid. He was there because of his deplorable habits. He had gained some notoriety in his adolescence in the volatile world of software piracy and website hacking. And while Peggy had been forced to drop out of Highland Park Public High School for economic and family reasons, Matt had been attending, every other week, the prestigious Ralph Waldo Emerson High School in Appleton. When the authorities expelled him, his father—a prominent reconstructive plastic surgeon—hired him a private tutor. A year later he was barely admitted to the University of Wisconsin, from which he was also expelled after two disciplinary boards (one of them for hacking into the grading system).

“What a disgusting smell! It reeks like a fishing boat!” Peggy exclaimed loudly enough for Jane to hear from the bathroom. “And this mess… and… ooooh!”

“Yes, Peggy,” Debbie said dryly. “I wouldn’t have noticed if you hadn’t pointed it out…”

“Was it that girl?” Peggy blurted out, completely ignoring Debbie’s sarcasm. “I just happened to be around when I saw her leave with that idiot… what’s his name?”

Matt looked from one girl to the other, more intrigued than he was willing to admit. It seemed like a casual argument, but in the four and a half years the two girls had known each other, their relationship had been both a close friendship and an undeclared war.

“Girls, girls!” Matt intervened, standing up. “This is entertaining, but we’re late for Professor Lawsson, and I’m very interested in how Zeus was able to, you knoooow… with Leda, as a swan…”

Both girls laughed at Matt’s childish joke.

He really doesn’t seem like a threat, the way some people in his past claimed, Peggy thought. As a survivor of Detroit’s slums, she had seen many dangerous boys: thieves and muggers still with baby teeth, expert killers of fourteen who by eighteen were already gang leaders. A boy from her street—murdered two years earlier—had once told her that for his sixteenth birthday he didn’t get a car from his parents, but a gun from his older brother.

By contrast, a bored—and soporific—upper-middle-class boy who played around with computers and occasionally skipped his very expensive private school did not seem to her like a juvenile delinquent at all, not even a mere “bad boy.” For Debbie, who had grown up with a broader moral sense, boys like Matt were the most vulnerable to bad influences and the most likely to fall into the murky waters of white-collar crime.

“Okay, I’m not ready yet,” Debbie said, gently pushing them toward the door. “You go ahead and save me a seat.”

“Don’t be late,” Peggy advised her. “And I’m really sorry about Jane, truly.”

********

“In Prometheus, Byron shows himself as he really is. Paradoxically, in this particular poem, Byron speaks more about himself than in his autobiographical works…”

From the last row of chairs in the large semicircular hall, Debbie could see a more mature Fred Tyler. Despite the distance, it was only from there that she could watch him comfortably without drawing his attention—he was too absorbed in his lecture. He looked so self-assured at that moment that Debbie found it hard to believe he was the same man who, in front of her, ran his fingers through the lock of hair on his forehead and rummaged in his pockets for candy.

That fleeting impression eased her bad mood a little after the annoying conversation she had had with Mike Grant two hours earlier. She admitted she had said a few inappropriate things, but when she heard words like “innocent slut” and “actress” coming from Mike’s mouth, referring to Jane, her fury had exploded in the form of a loud slap.

“This is one of the most distinctive traits of Romanticism,” Fred continued, “not only in Great Britain but everywhere it reached: the exaltation of the ego. Most Romantic poems are autobiographical, and another common element is pathos. Romantic poetry does not deal in gentle emotions; it prefers to speak of great personal suffering or exultant happiness. British Romantics are more restrained than the Spanish ones, for example, but Byron and Espronceda, Keats and Bécquer, share the same general lines… Remember to bring your essay on Lord John.”

All the students except Debbie had already left, and Tyler saw her as if for the first time: standing upright, projecting that incredible image of self-control and solidity. But they both knew how much passion and sensitivity that façade could conceal. There was a tacit agreement between them to protect one another: she would not take any of his classes.

“Are you still in love with Byron?” she asked teasingly.

“Yes,” he admitted, “as much as you are with Emily Brontë.”

They both laughed. Luckily, no one else was nearby at that moment. If there had been, they would simply have looked like a student seeking guidance and a professor always willing to help.

“I’m in love with Byron and at the same time I’m having a torrid affair with you!” Tyler continued theatrically. “For Christ’s sake! I’m bisexual and a cradle-robber at the same time! I have no redemption!”

“And you forgot one more sin: bigamy!” Debbie replied with a smile.

Tyler had no idea where this situation between them was heading, and with a certain sadness he recognized that he was more worried about her than about himself when it came to this strange relationship. But for the moment, his desire to be close to her outweighed his will to stay away.

********

While Debbie and Tyler delighted in the classroom, Paul Henderson took a deep breath before beginning his nightly patrol routine through the dormitory halls. One more night of this, he thought. As the resident counselor of the Faculty of Arts, he had to collect forgotten items, straighten out kids wandering the corridors, shut down impromptu room parties, and other “trivialities” of that sort. And on top of all that, he had to write reports on every student, despite the fact that there were cameras in the halls.

This will be your last year as an RC!, he promised himself.

He was lost in these thoughts when he saw, ten or twelve meters ahead, a half-open door and a very bright light inside, contrasting with the dimness of the hallway. He walked toward it: it was Mary and Therese’s room.

They must have left the door open, he thought. Perhaps they had just returned from a fraternity party; after all, they were famous for everything except prudence. He knocked softly and waited a moment.

“Therese? Mary?” he called. “Are you there?”

No one answered. Then he decided to go in.

The door creaked slightly as he entered the room; they must be deeply asleep or even drugged, because although the university claimed to have a “strict” policy against weapons and drugs, there was no real commitment to enforcing it, and the dean and other authorities looked the other way.

He went toward the trash can and stopped abruptly midway, letting out a moan of horror: Mary Pattison’s body was lying against the wall next to their bunk bed, with a fire axe sticking out of the upper part of her forehead. It was driven in so deeply that Paul thought he could glimpse a hint of her brain beneath a disordered mass of pale blond hair, splattered with clotted blood and bone fragments.

He stood there as if nailed to the floor. For a moment the shock left him unable to move a single muscle, and when he finally could, it was only to flee, barely holding back nausea as he ran to his own room. The hallway now seemed longer and more sinister, and if anyone had seen him then, they would have thought he had seen a ghost: he was sweating profusely, pale, breathless, and on the verge of vomiting with every step.

When he finally reached his room, he instinctively shut the door and went to his bathroom, where, without noticing the absurdity of his actions, he locked himself in again and went straight to the toilet. He bent over the bowl and remained there for several minutes after the spasms had stopped. More relaxed now, he sat on his bed for a few more minutes, thinking about what had happened and what he should do.

What struck him most was her expression. He had never seen a corpse before, much less that of someone violently murdered; but common sense suggested that such faces should be terrible—if someone kills you, it is a death that catches you by surprise and you should be trying to escape or fight back. Instead, Mary’s expression was inexplicably relaxed, her eyes half-closed and her mouth slightly open, as if she knew her killer and were waiting for him to proceed.

It was said in the hallways that she had slept with every boy in ΣΔΠ and even with some from other fraternities. Henderson had caught her three or four times with weed and even with a vial of heroin once; she had tried to seduce him, and there had been a time when she dared to approach him with a sexual proposition. It’s possible she wasn’t really interested in me but in taking advantage of my position, he had thought then; it’s always good to have an RC on your team.

Paul did not know how far she was willing to go, but he did know one thing: she did not deserve this. She was studying dramatic arts, hoping someday to become a sought-after Hollywood actress, and although she was a very poor student, at least she was trying—and now…

After a brief hesitation, he decided to go straight to the police. This was an extreme situation, one he had never seen there. If he went to the dean or the board, they might think of the faculty’s already damaged image before cooperating with the authorities. He was aware that his decision could cost him not only his position but even his enrollment; nevertheless, he had no other choice.

He took his cell phone from his pocket and dialed a number. He waited what felt like an eternity.

“Hello? Is this the police department?” he heard himself say when someone finally answered. “My name is Paul Henderson from Glover. I’m calling to report a murder on campus.”

Next Chapter: Chapter Two