Dead Of Winter (The Rift Book II)

ROBERT J. DUPERRE

THE RIFT BOOK II

DEAD OF WINTER

ILLUSTRATED BY JESSE DAVID YOUNG

Chapter 2

The Professor

William, there is something I need to tell you,” my teacher, Arthur
Sweetney
, told me one afternoon during the winter of my twentieth year. We sat in opposite corners of his home office, our noses pressed into the reading materials we had chosen for that day. Mine was
Ada
or Ardor
by Vladimir
Nabokov
; his, a weathered and beaten copy of
The Divine Comedy
– a book he proudly declared to have read more than forty times. That he chose our traditional moment of quiet reflection to commence a discussion I found to be odd.

“What is it, sir?” asked I.

Arthur removed the glasses from his wrinkled black nose and stroked his long white beard. He closed his eyes when he spoke.

“I fear for you, William,” he said. “There will be those in this world who will wish to break you. These are the takers, those who live their lives siphoning the talents of the strong and ambitious. You possess a gift they have always desired, encased in a body they fear. They will attempt to tear you down, son, to make you think of yourself as the obligated instead of the privileged. You must never let them force this upon you. Defend yourself and your place in the world. You know what is right and good much better than they do, for they are inadequate, and can never take advantage of you if you do not let them.”

When he finished his speech, Arthur placed his glasses back on the bridge of his nose and lifted his book. I never responded to his words, because I did not feel I had to. Inside I was smiling. My future held many great things, of this I was certain. I would write the greatest novel known to man. I would change the face of the world and open it up again to the virtues of intellect and philosophy that it seemed to have lost.

All of this passion I owed to my teacher, to Arthur
Sweetney
, the only
man
in my life who ever loved me. When my moment to shine came, when my name passed the threshold between obscurity and prodigy, I would thank him for all that he gave me.

Unfortunately, I never received that chance, for my teacher, my lovely Arthur, passed away two months later. It was I who found him, slumped in his recliner with
A Farewell to Arms
spread open in his lap. I touched his cheek. His flesh was cold and wrinkled beneath my fingers. It was then that I realized, to the full extent, the meaning of death and loss. I would never see this man again. He would never again enlighten me with his knowledge. We, together, would never scale the heights I imagined we would.

“I love you,” I said, and kissed his cheek. Sadness swelled in my chest, and the tears followed. I ran to his kitchen, balled myself in the corner, and cried. The sensation did not last long, however, for through this sadness came another, more enlightened thought. There was no reason for despondency. This was the way of the world, the natural order, and this understanding left me no grounds for mourning.
Arthur would always live on through the words I placed down on paper – his gateway to immortality, as well as my own.

My sorrow diminished, I called the paramedics and meandered back into his office. I crossed his arms over his heart. “I will not disappoint you,” I said, and then picked up his book, closed it, and placed it back on the mantle.

All these years later, after all the pain and torment I have experienced, that afternoon in his apartment was the last time I ever cried.

*
  
*
  
*

William “Billy” Mathis wiped his tired eyes and stretched his legs. His muscles cramped from the posture he kept, cross-legged and slumped, for hours on end. The candle before him flickered as a cold breeze drafted trough his concrete cell. Light danced off the gray walls. It was a lonely vision.

Another evening waited just around the corner, and yet again there was no help in sight. He sighed, peeled open the Velcro fastener of the rubber folder to his right, placed his pencil in its proper slot, and slid the papers he’d been writing upon beneath the cover. He did this with
caution,
not wanting any harm to come to the delicate words he had traced on the paper’s faded blue lines. These were
his
words,
his
life,
his
story.
It will be important one day
, he thought.
The world must know what happened. I must help them understand.

The cold bore down on him, making his body ache. To remedy this he stood, cracked his back, and walked through the barred door into the corridor beyond. At the end of this indifferent concrete passageway was a set of stairs leading up. He paused.

Only a month ago, the gate to his cell mysteriously opened. This occurred after the week of dead silence that followed the deafening roar of a conflict both unseen and unknown to him, a roar that echoed through the walls of his tiny, solitary chamber. He had been granted freedom for the first time in more than ten years, and yet, as with all things he experienced in life, this freedom did not come without its price.

A nervous chill rose up his spine as he stared at those gun-metal-gray steps. He bounced from one foot to the other, all the while wondering if he should simply turn around and retreat back to the secluded confines that had become his home. His desire to observe the last of the day’s light defeated any fear he felt, however, and he trudged upward with his hands stuffed in his pockets, slid through the
iron gate
, and entered the main holding area of SCI Greensburg.

As he passed row after row of unguarded prison cells, he blurred his vision and kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. He did not want to glimpse, even for a moment, either the tangled mess of bloody corpses contained within or the splatter of human remains that painted the walls. He breathed through his nose, deep in concentration, and thanked his luck that the iciness of winter had arrived early this year. The temperature hadn’t risen above freezing since the day he first stepped out of his cell, and there was no heat or electricity in the building. With all this death around him, there was no telling how putrid the place would have stunk had that not been the case.

The abandoned front lobby provided respite from the carnage. He took his chair from behind the desk, set it up in front of the huge, open windowpane, and took a seat. A sip of stale water from his canteen slid down his sore throat as he stared out into another dying day.

Strong winds blew in through the smashed window. This didn’t bother him, for he was bundled enough to survive at least a few hours in sub-arctic temperatures. Snowfall clouded all he could survey, piled up at least two feet off the ground, transforming the countryside into a white void. A smile came across his lips. He hadn’t seen anything this magnificent, this
pure
, in ages. The itch of exhaustion burned behind his eyelids; the smolder of the unknown rapped at his brain. He shrugged them both off. There would be time later for both sleep and the quest for answers in this strange, Twilight Zone world. For now, he would savor every moment of life, every moment of beauty,
every
moment of freedom.

Current predicament
be
damned.

*
 
 
*
 
 
*

That night, the dream came at Billy hard and fast. Familiar faces dashed through his memory: his father Carl, who died in a botched convenience store robbery before Billy was born, leaving him nothing but dog-eared pictures to remember him by; Matilda, his mother, a large, uneducated woman who gave every working day of her life to her children despite her emotional struggles; his four older brothers, Andrew,
DeJuan
, Maurice, and David, siblings who never found an ounce of trouble not worth their while; Arthur
Sweetney
and his kind eyes that blazed with intellect; the students,
his
students, who sat in the courtroom during his trial, their features weaving and blending, becoming a sea of unrecognizable humanity. But mostly it was
Her
he dreamed of – Marisa Rodriguez, the one he could never love given his moral superiority. The one he had failed. These phantoms swam past him while he stooped in shackles on an abandoned street corner, chained to a pole like an animal. They gazed down on him, disappointment in their eyes.

The cityscape dropped away like a stage curtain. In its place rose an exquisitely decorated ballroom. The dim light ratcheted up a notch, revealing a dance floor and its slick surface of polished parquet. No longer in chains, he straightened up and stepped forward. Inside his brain, a soft hum trickled through his eardrums.

He turned. A girl stood in the center of the dining area. She had a head of short-cropped brown hair. Her gaze leveled at him. This girl, this
woman
, imparted a Byzantine coldness through a pair of deep-set, russet eyes. Her posture, with shoulders slumped and knees cocked in a lazed manner, suggested she held no malevolence for him. She put a hand to her heart and lifted those penetrating eyes to the ceiling. The tune in Billy’s head grew stronger. It was her singing, this he knew, and it sounded so beautiful, but her movements didn’t match the lyrics. Her lips mouthed
help.
The voice sang
God Bless the Child.

That’s got
his own
, that’s got…his own.

*
 
 
*
 
 
*

Billy rolled over, on the cusp of waking. His throat constricted, humming the tune from his dream. The ratty blanket he’d been using for warmth bunched up beneath him. A twisted knob of fabric jabbed into his kidneys. He clutched his abdomen and groaned.

Rising up on sleep-numbed legs, he stumbled down the hall. He positioned his feet on either side of the hole in the floor that served as this cell’s latrine – one of the more unfortunate shortcomings of solitary confinement in
Greensburg
– and relieved
himself
. A stream of urine splashed into the well of stinking fecal matter below. The sound it created reverberated through the emptiness like an angry phantasm.

The duty done, he yanked up his pants and leaned against the wall. His shoulder pressed into a thick layer of grime, but he paid it no mind. His thoughts were elsewhere.

He remembered his days playing center field for the Penn Dutchmen (had it been twenty-five years already?) and the way he would perform the same ritual before every game: relaxing his tired body in seclusion with his eyes pressed shut while his brain kicked into overdrive. Everything that needed sorting out would run through his mind in those moments, from term papers that needed sprucing up to ideas for novels he wanted to flesh out to the myriad ways one could interpret the finer points of
The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock
.
Never once would he think of the coming exercise in athletic competition. That part of life, the physicality, was easy. To William, only what rested above his shoulders mattered.

We’ve been given the gift of intelligence
, Arthur
Sweetney
had been wont to say,
and the only evil there is in the world are the men who don’t use that gift.

Billy’s lips dropped into a frown.
I am spending time in a prison,
he mused,
surrounded by nothing but rotting corpses, snow, and trees. What in the world is keeping me here? Is it uncertainty? Is it the comfort of the established? Is it fear?
Yes, that was it.
Fear.

He kicked his body off the wall, went to his cell, his home for more than a decade, picked up his burlap sack and the binder that contained his life’s work, and took off as fast as his forty-six-year-old legs could carry him. Up the stairs he flew, feet skillfully weaving through the scattered carnage, and entered the mess hall. As usual, he ignored the butchery in the wide-open space, which was ten times worse than anywhere else in the building, and, when he reached the cafeteria serving line, leapt over the counter. He dropped to his knees behind the stainless-steel barricade of hotplates and storage cabinets and rummaged through his stash of non-perishables. He dropped cans of baked beans, split peas, and cream corn into his sack. Then he twirled on his heels and turned the dial on the lockbox behind him. Three twists later, the safe sprung open, and he removed the nine-millimeter pistol stored within. He checked to make sure the safety was still locked. Satisfied in its security, he wrapped the gun in a kitchen towel and dropped that in the bag, as well. The next order of business was the flashlight from under the rear sink and two signal flares from over the dry supply breakfront. He smiled.
These items were packed away for a reason
, he thought.