He stopped. What the hell was this? Nam Sibyllam quidem… Whatever it was, it wasn't English. And there, buried in the middle of it, some weird-ass squiggles that weren't even part of the normal alphabet. He glanced at the explanatory notes at the bottom of the page and found the first bit was Latin, the second Greek. Next came the dedication: For Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro. The notes said that last bit was Italian.
Latin, Greek, Italian. And the frigging poem hadn't even started yet. What next, hieroglyphics?
It was a nightmare.
He scanned the first page, then the second. Gibberish, plain and simple. "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." What was that supposed to mean? His eye fell on the next line. Frisch weht der Wind…
Abruptly, Dewayne closed the book, feeling sick. That did it. Only thirty lines into the poem and already five damn languages. First thing tomorrow morning, he'd go down to the registrar and drop this turkey.
He sat back, head pounding. Now that the decision was made, he wondered how he was going to make it through the next forty minutes without climbing the walls. If only there'd been a seat up in the back, where he could slip out unseen…
Up at the podium, the professor was droning on. "All that being said, then, let's move on to an examination of-"
Suddenly, Hamilton stopped once again.
"Excuse me." His face went slack again. He looked-what? Confused? Flustered? No: he looked scared.
Dewayne sat up, suddenly interested.
The professor's hand fluttered up to his handkerchief, fumbled it out, then dropped it as he tried to bring it to his forehead. He looked around vaguely, hand still fluttering about, as if to ward off a fly. The hand sought out his face, began touching it lightly, like a blind person. The trembling fingers palpated his lips, eyes, nose, hair, then swatted the air again.
The lecture hall had gone still. The teaching assistant in the seat behind the professor put down his pen, a concerned look on his face. What's going on? Dewayne wondered. Heart attack?
The professor took a small, lurching step forward, bumping into the podium. And now his other hand flew to his face, feeling it all over, only harder now, pushing, stretching the skin, pulling down the lower lip, giving himself a few light slaps.
The professor suddenly stopped and scanned the room. "Is there something wrong with my face?"
Dead silence.
Slowly, very slowly, Dr. Hamilton relaxed. He took a shaky breath, then another, and gradually his features relaxed. He cleared his throat.
"As I was saying-"
Dewayne saw the fingers of one hand come back to life again, twitching, trembling. The hand returned to his face, the fingers plucking, plucking the skin.
This was too weird.
"I-" the professor began, but the hand interfered with his speech. His mouth opened and closed, emitting nothing more than a wheeze. Another shuffled step, like a robot, bumping into the podium.
"What are these things?" he asked, his voice cracking.
God, now he was pulling at his skin, eyelids stretched grotesquely, both hands scrabbling-then a long, uneven scratch from a fingernail, and a line of blood appeared on one cheek.
A ripple coursed through the classroom, like an uneasy sigh.
"Is there something wrong, Professor?" the T.A. said.
"I… asked… a question." The professor growled it out, almost against his will, his voice muffled and distorted by the hands pulling at his face.
Another lurching step, and then he let out a sudden scream: "My face! Why will no one tell me what's wrong with my face!"
More deathly silence.
The fingers were digging in, the fist now pounding at the nose, which cracked faintly.
"Get them off me! They're eating into my face!"
Oh, shit: blood was now gushing from the nostrils, splashing down on the white shirt and charcoal suit. The fingers were like claws on the face, ripping, tearing; and now one finger hooked up and-Dewayne saw with utter horror-worked itself into one eye socket.
"Out! Get them out!"
There was a sharp, rotating motion that reminded Dewayne of the scooping of ice cream, and suddenly the globe of the eye bulged out, grotesquely large, jittering, staring directly at Dewayne from an impossible angle.
Screams echoed across the lecture hall. Students in the front row recoiled. The T.A. jumped from his seat and ran up to Hamilton, who violently shrugged him off.
Dewayne found himself rooted to his seat, his mind a blank, his limbs paralyzed.
Professor Hamilton now took a mechanical step, and another, ripping at his face, tearing out clumps of hair, staggering as if he might fall directly on top of Dewayne.
"A doctor!" the T.A. screamed. "Get a doctor!"
The spell was broken. There was a sudden commotion, everyone rising at once, the sound of falling books, a loud hubbub of panicked voices.
"My face!" the professor shrieked over the din. "Where is it?"
Chaos took over, students running for the door, some crying. Others rushed forward, toward the stricken professor, jumping onto the podium, trying to stop his murderous self-assault. The professor lashed out at them blindly, making a high-pitched, keening sound, his face a mask of red. Someone forcing his way down the row trod hard on Dewayne's foot. Drops of flying blood had spattered Dewayne's face: he could feel their warmth on his skin. Yet still he did not move. He found himself unable to take his eyes off the professor, unable to escape this nightmare.
The students had wrestled the professor to the surface of the podium and were now sliding about in his blood, trying to hold down his thrashing arms and bucking body. As Dewayne watched, the professor threw them off with demonic strength, grabbed the cup of water, smashed it against the podium, and-screaming- began to work the shards into his own neck, twisting and scooping, as if trying to dig something out.
And then, quite suddenly, Dewayne found he could move. He scrambled to his feet, skidded, ran along the row of seats to the aisle, and began sprinting up the stairs toward the back exit of the lecture hall. All he could think about was getting away from the unexplainable horror of what he'd just witnessed. As he shot out the door and dashed full speed down the corridor beyond, one phrase kept echoing in his mind, over and over and over:
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
TWO
"Dinnie? Vin? Sure you don't want any help in there?"
"No!" Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta tried to keep his voice cool and even. "No. It's all right. Just a couple more minutes."
He glanced up at the clock: almost nine. A couple more minutes. Yeah, right. He'd be lucky if he had dinner on the table by ten.
Laura Hayward's kitchen-he still thought of it as hers; he'd only moved in six weeks before-was usually an oasis of order, as calm and immaculate as Hayward herself. Now the place looked like a war zone. The sink was overflowing with soiled pots. Half a dozen empty cans lay in and around the wastebasket, dribbling out remnants of tomato sauce and olive oil. Almost as many cookbooks lay open on the counter, their pages obscured by bread crusts and blizzards of flour. The lone window looking down on the snowy intersection of 77th and First was speckled with grease from frying sausages. Although the vent fan was going full blast, the odor of burned meat lingered stubbornly in the air.
For weeks now, whenever their schedules allowed time with each other, Laura had thrown together-almost effortlessly, it seemed- meal after delicious meal. D'Agosta had been astonished. For his soon-to-be-ex-wife, now up in Canada, cooking had always been anordeal accompanied by histrionic sighs, clanging of pans, and- more often than not-disagreeable results. It was like night and day with Laura.