An Academy for Liars, page 11
There was a swell of noise, everyone speaking at once—contradicting Dante, whispering among themselves, a handful of professors who argued for everyone else to be quiet and thus contributed greatly to the noise themselves. The commotion reminded Lennon of a startled flock of chickens.
“What’s a gatekeeper?” Lennon asked, but they either didn’t hear or chose to ignore her.
Only Dante registered that she’d spoken, his gaze softening some as it met hers. When he spoke across the table, the rest of the room went quiet. “Gatekeepers can open gates, at will, to different places. The last one who lived was Irvine, who first built the confines of this school and shielded it from everyone else.”
“Drayton’s prodigy. From convocation. I remember.”
“Then you may also remember that Irvine gave his life to defend this school,” said Eileen, not looking at Lennon, or anyone really, her eyes trained on some random point near the center of the table. “He weighed his own life against the interests and well-being of this school and chose the latter.”
“But he was also a student,” said Dante. “He learned to hone his gift, and when it came time for him to lay down his life, that was a decision he made himself. A willing sacrifice. Not something that was forced upon him.”
Eileen waved him off. “She isn’t worth the trouble. Irvine was a prodigy. He’d been taught in the ways of persuasion for years. Whereas Lennon—”
“Hasn’t had the opportunity to prove herself,” said Dante, cutting her off. “All I’m asking is that you give it to her. Under my instruction—”
“Your instruction?” Eileen looked incredulous—baffled, even.
“All right, if not mine, then Ben’s. Let him show her the ropes. She has promise, Eileen. The least you could do is give her the chance to prove it.”
But Eileen shook her head. “I’ve heard enough. Let’s put this to a vote and be done with it. Shall we?”
“Lennon hasn’t done anything dangerous. All she did was open a gate to another part of campus. That’s hardly a capital offense—”
Eileen ignored him, turned to address the rest of the room. “All in favor of expulsion?”
All the professors around the table, save Benedict and Dante, raised their hands.
Lennon’s heart seized. Just that quickly, with a few raised hands, she had lost everything. “W-wait please—”
Eileen stood up, collecting her papers. “Well, that decides it. Dante, as her advisor, I’ll leave you to handle this situation in whatever way you see fit. Just make it clean, will you? You know how messy these things can become when a memory is left half-intact.”
But Dante didn’t move or speak. His gaze homed in on the rotary phone, just a split second before it started to ring, a shrill tinny sound that silenced the room—the murmurings of conversation and the shuffling of papers, the heartbeats and ragged breaths, the buzzing of the bulbs in the old chandelier that dangled above the table—it was a sound that seemed to suck up every other.
Eileen, along with the rest of them, stared motionless at the phone for a few rounds of ringing before—as if emerging from a trance—she picked it up, snatching the receiver from its cradle, holding it to her ear. “Yes. Yes, sir. No. Of course.”
Dante locked eyes with Lennon and smiled.
Eileen pulled the receiver from her ear and placed three fingers over the mouthpiece. “Lennon, the chancellor would like to speak with you.” She passed the phone down the table, the coiled cord stretching almost taut.
Lennon took it, raised the receiver to her ear. “Hello?”
“You will continue your studies here at Drayton.” The voice crackling over the line was the same one that Lennon had heard, weeks prior, when she’d first received word of Drayton. A voice like all of the voices of everyone she had ever known together in horrid synchrony. Her mother, her sister, Wyatt and Sawyer, Sophia and Dante, Blaine and Benedict, the childhood friend with whom she hadn’t spoken in more than eleven years, the clerk at her favorite grocery store. And then—perhaps the loudest voice of all—her own. “You will train under Benedict to hone your skill as a gatekeeper, in the service of this school. Do you understand, Lennon?”
A muscle in Lennon’s clenched jaw jumped and twitched. “Yes.”
There was a rattling sound—like loose change in a cup, or perhaps the clearing of a throat through a storm of static. “I wish you the best of luck with your future studies.”
Lennon and Dante emerged from the hearing to find that the mild showers from earlier had given way to a punishing deluge. They waited for the worst of the storm to pass in a dark and empty breezeway off of Irvine Hall. Dante fished a tin of what appeared to be hand-rolled cigarettes from the pocket of his trousers. The wrappers were black, and they smelled strongly of clove. He offered one to Lennon, and the two of them smoked and watched the rain come down. It was a particularly good cigarette—wrapped tight and thin with a milky clove smoke that, when exhaled, made pale whorls on the air.
“Did you speak to the chancellor on my behalf?” Lennon asked. “Is that why he called when he did?”
“I might’ve put a good word in for you,” said Dante.
“I owe you one.”
He waved her off. “You owe me nothing. I’m your advisor. It’s my responsibility to look out for you.”
That responsibility seemed starkly at odds with what Eileen had asked him to do during the hearing. “I don’t think Eileen shares your concern.”
“She’s just afraid.”
“Of what?”
“You, of course.” He paused to examine the tip of his cigarette. Flicked away the ashes. “Here at Drayton, we like to think of persuasion as a science. Our founder, John Drayton, believed in developing skill through practice and firmly asserted that mastery could only be ascertained through complete and total control of your own mind and, with practice, the minds of others. But there are some among us whose abilities are more…compulsive. Emotional, you could say. John found them threatening because a power like that can’t be entirely controlled. It’s instinctual and, by proxy, volatile.”
“And you think that was what happened when I opened that elevator? My emotion was the trigger?”
“Yes. But you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself. There are quite a few of us, actually. And we can do great things if we devote ourselves to understanding the particulars of our own process. Your elevator gate may have appeared compulsively—may still appear that way—but you have a responsibility to learn your triggers and master this power as best you can. Because if you fail to do that…there will be repercussions.”
“Like you taking my memories?”
He didn’t respond.
“Would you have really done that? If Eileen had asked you to?”
“That’s the school policy, so yes.”
“And if you did that, I wouldn’t remember Drayton or the people I’ve met…or you?”
Dante—still staring at the rain—traced the filter of his cigarette back and forth along the line of his lower lip. “If I’d done my job right, yes. I would’ve taken it all.”
“How?”
“That’s a lesson for later in the semester,” said Dante. “It involves an application of persuasion that’s near surgical in its precision and as a result it’s incredibly dangerous. If done wrong, you can make a person’s mind forget how to execute basic functions like breathing and swallowing. That’s why it’s considered combative persuasion, the first stage of it anyway. It’s one of the ways we kill with the power we wield.”
Lennon wanted to ask if that was something Dante had done before—if he or anyone else at the university had killed with persuasion—but she bit the question back. “That sounds…a little sick.”
“It can be,” he said. “But I’ve seen it used in more merciful ways. There was a professor who taught here a few years ago, Dr. Gordon Meyers. He was dying of spinal cancer, one of the most painful ways a person can go. I and the other professors here took it upon ourselves to induce a state of memory loss, moment by moment—”
“Like laughing gas? Making him forget the pain?”
“Just like that,” said Dante. “But more efficient. It allowed him some lucidity in his final days, while also shielding his mind from the worst of the pain he endured. He died with a smile on his face. Imagine that: a man at the end stages of one of the most painful cancers known to man dies grinning. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“You’re still trying to talk me out of my moral qualms?”
“It’ll make the rest easier,” said Dante. “You’ll deal with so much during your studies—neurosis, exhaustion, frustration, burnout, despair—why add guilt to the mix?”
“I can’t help it,” said Lennon with a shrug. “Symptom of a functioning conscience.”
Dante gave her a wry smile.
“There is something I wanted to talk to you about…but I didn’t know how to bring it up.”
“Go on,” said Dante, watching the rain.
“I saw you a few weeks ago and…you weren’t yourself.”
She had half expected this statement to trigger some reflexive response from Dante—a stiffening or a look of shock—but he remained placid. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean you were different.”
“How so?”
“You looked at me differently.”
Here Dante met her eyes, and it was everything Lennon could do not to cower under his gaze. “And how did I look at you?”
“In a way you shouldn’t have,” said Lennon, a little frustrated now, and embarrassed to even say this out loud though she knew she wasn’t the one who should’ve felt ashamed. “Or at least…in a way you wouldn’t have if you’d known what you were doing. And then you just smiled at me, so strangely, and the next day, during class, it was as if nothing happened. I realized then that you didn’t remember. That whoever it was I’d encountered wasn’t the same you who’s here with me now.”
Dante hung his head, looking for a moment conflicted. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologize. I knew it wasn’t you. But I do want to know who he was.”
“I don’t know if I can answer that question in a way that will satisfy your curiosity.”
“Try,” said Lennon.
Dante seemed, for a moment, to search the rain for an answer. “There’s a cost for what we do here. That night, you saw that in the form of whatever—or whoever—it was you encountered. I try to keep him leashed, but it’s hard at night, when I’m tired. I wasn’t able to make it back to Irvine before he broke free of his tether and surfaced.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s as much me as the man you’re talking to now. I just like him less.”
“How long has he been with you?”
“Quite some time. But he doesn’t mean you any harm.” Dante said this in a way that indicated he meant someone harm, but that someone was not Lennon. “Can I ask you to keep this between us?”
Lennon was reluctant to agree to that. “Will he appear again? I mean, surely you can’t keep him chained up forever. Can you?”
“I can certainly try,” said Dante. “Like I said, I’d had a hard night. I lost composure, but I won’t allow that to happen again, which is why I’d appreciate your discretion.”
“You have it.”
“Good,” he said, and looked relieved. “On that same note, I wouldn’t speak to anyone about what you saw through the elevator gate. Not even Benedict, if you can avoid it. You’ll have to be careful with him, and with everyone from here on out. Your future at Drayton depends on it.” The rain abated some. Dante dropped his cigarette and crushed it underfoot.
“Why?”
Dante made as though he hadn’t heard her. “You should head back to Ethos. Before the next band of the storm sweeps through. Remember what I said about Benedict and the rest, especially if you want to keep your memories of this place.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Yes,” said Dante. “But not one from me.”
In Irvine Hall, there was a single elevator, constructed by William Irvine himself. It had ornate iron doors, its cabin was relatively small, and its control panel sported about a dozen buttons, each corresponding to a different location—New York City, Amsterdam, Kyoto, Moscow, Boston, Beijing. With the press of a button, the cabin accessed these different cities as easily as the levels of a building. Unlike the elevator that Lennon had summoned, William’s elevator didn’t spawn at random. It was a fixed feature of Irvine Hall: reliable, efficient, and perfect in its functionality, despite its old age.
This was the elevator through which Lennon, and many of her peers, had first entered Drayton. It was also the elevator that she was instructed to take back to Benedict’s home in Utah for the first of her weekly lessons in gatekeeping. Eileen had wasted no time adjusting her schedule. The night of the hearing, the vice-chancellor had arranged for her first class with Benedict to take place the following afternoon.
The journey to Utah took the better part of three minutes, and Lennon took this opportunity to examine William’s elevator. Apart from the fact that it was a bit old and rickety, the elevator seemed completely normal. Riding in it, Lennon would’ve never guessed that it accessed different cities instead of floors.
She wondered why the faculty had been so panicked by the elevator she’d opened. What was so dangerous about this means of transportation anyway? As far as she could tell, it was nothing more than a faster alternative to driving or flying. But none of the faculty had treated it as such. There was something she didn’t yet understand that Dante and the rest had been either unable or unwilling to disclose the night of the hearing. And Lennon was determined to discover what exactly that was.
There was a man waiting for her in the foyer of Benedict’s house when the elevator slowed to a stop. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with brown eyes and a lick of golden-blond hair that swept tastefully across his brow. He had an aquiline nose and high cheekbones.
“I’m Claude,” he said without really looking at her, which was a bit awkward because, with the two of them alone in the hallway, there was nothing much else for him to be looking at. He extended a pale hand threaded with delicate blue veins.
She shook it. It was damp and very cold. “Lennon.”
“A pleasure.”
There was an awkward silence, during which Lennon expected Claude to offer some explanation of who he was and why he was greeting Lennon instead of Benedict. When he didn’t, Lennon, a little affronted by his rudeness, said: “And you are…?”
“Ben’s apprentice. He asked me to show you in. I’m sorry he’s not here to do it himself, but he’s out in the garden attempting to behead—or if not that, then poison—the mole that’s been digging up his rosebushes. But he’ll be in shortly.” Claude spoke with a gravelly antebellum drawl that made him sound like a southern aristocrat who’d died and been buried, exhumed, and reanimated.
They sat together in the living room, where—on a large oak coffee table—a selection of hors d’oeuvres had been arranged—finger sandwiches, cut vegetables, and the like. Lennon didn’t partake of anything but a small cup of tea that tasted so strongly of roses it was almost unpleasant.
Claude watched her from an armchair across the room, his brow furrowed. His pale eyes possessed a disconcerting intensity that made Lennon feel like she was crawling out of her skin.
“You’ll have to forgive my staring. It’s just that I expected…more.” This would’ve been rude if it’d come from the mouth of anyone else, but Claude delivered this naked truth with an air of nonchalance. As if he was simply too casual to be cruel.
But even though Lennon knew he meant no harm, she still bristled a bit. “More of what?”
“Well, now that I’ve said it out loud…I don’t really know. I guess I just expected someone different. Older. But you can’t be more than, what? Twenty-one?”
“Four,” Lennon corrected him. She drained her teacup, set it down in the saucer with a clatter, and winced.
Claude only smiled, pulling a small flask from the pocket of his blazer. He offered it to her, and when she shook her head he merely shrugged, and poured a generous splash into his own teacup. “It helps with the nerves,” he said.
Benedict entered then, or perhaps he’d been stalling in the doorway for some time, waiting for the right moment to make his presence known. He was light-footed, as if he had memorized each of the creaking floorboards of the old house and took special care to avoid them. He wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and a dirty canvas apron.
“Off you go,” he said, shooing Claude out of the chair he sat in.
He obliged, winking at Lennon on his way out of the parlor.
“I see you’ve met my apprentice,” said Benedict.
“How is an apprentice any different from an advisee?” Lennon asked.
“Simple,” said Benedict, lowering himself into his chair. “An apprentice is someone who’s actually going to be something someday. Something more than the average student at Drayton. A professor like myself typically has only one, maybe two, apprentices in a lifetime. That’s because, as my apprentice, Claude will take up my tenure. This house and everything in it will become his. He’ll be tasked with protecting this gate and by proxy one of the few entrances to Drayton itself. He will, in essence, become me. In choosing him as my apprentice, I’ve chosen my successor.”
Lennon wondered who Dante’s apprentice was, if he had one. If not, was there a chance—however slim—that she could be considered for the role?
“Your Dante was apprenticed to Eileen,” said Benedict, as if sensing that her thoughts had turned to her own advisor. “He’ll one day—sooner rather than later, I suspect—choose an apprentice of his own. I’d thought Emerson O’Neill was a shoo-in for the role, the two of them being so close and her having so much promise. But now that you’ve come along with your elevators…I suspect you may be an upset in her path to succession.”
