The Lords of Discipline (60 page)

Suddenly, in full flight, I rounded a curve in the road and the plantation house came into view. It was fully lighted but there was not a car or human being in sight. Pausing, I drifted along the edge of the woods and began planning my approach to the house. I began speaking to myself in a low, unnerved whisper. The sound of my own voice reassured me, called me, as though my voice was the only absolute proof I had of the reality of the moment. “Easy, Will. Careful, Will. Find out who they are, then get the fuck out of this place.”

Keeping to the forest, I circumnavigated the house, which gleamed like a white ship in the center of a perfectly trimmed lawn. In some outbuildings behind the house, I found three automobiles. All of them had Institute parking stickers, and I wrote the numbers of the stickers and the makes of the cars on a piece of paper in my wallet. I also recognized one of the cars, and I wrote down the name of the first of The Ten in my class: John Alexander.

But I still did not know for certain if Pearce was in the house. Unless I saw him with my own eyes there would be no value to my witness or testimony. Searching for the safest approach to the house, I crossed a road behind it that led to the ocean a quarter of a mile away. I had once had a footrace with Johnny DuBruhl down that road at a cookout the General gave for the basketball team in my junior year. I could just hear the breakers rippling along the beach.

A colonnade of oak trees led from the rear of the plantation house to the formal gardens enclosed by a lichen-covered brick wall. Crawling along the wall, I made it to the first tree, surveyed the house, then ran to the next tree. By keeping in the protection of those trees, I arrived unchallenged at the thick hedge of azaleas that encircled the entire house. The azaleas were perfect cover for my reconnaissance; they were trimmed precisely to my height and I could crouch unseen, moving from window to window, at my own slow pace.

The living room in the front of the house was empty and still, but there were uniforms scattered on coffee tables and chairs and slung insouciantly across a baby grand piano. There was no light on in the dining room, but there was a door open and I could see a light on in the hallway. I moved through the azaleas cautiously, silently; and for a moment a delicious, almost palpable curiosity had replaced the fear.

Then I heard the strangest voices I had ever heard in my life: human voices I was sure, but they sounded more like the witless chorales of insects in the forest than anything readily attributable to the family of man. I had to cross into the light of the front portico and dash past the entry steps to get to the western wing of the house where I heard the voices. My ears registered each sound in the night. I looked around me and studied the terrain again before I continued my secret approach. I felt as if I could hear the flight of owls or the death of leaves in the garden. So alive was I, so burning with the intoxicants of this exact moment, that I felt as if I could count each cell of my body with my index finger. My body seemed enlarged, tingling, electric, and somehow invulnerable as I crept unseen beneath the covering azaleas. From the human shadows moving grotesquely on the lawn in front of me, I knew that whatever the activity taking place in the house it was occurring in the multiwindowed room on the far western wing. I was ten feet from the room when I heard the first scream.

Yes, Tom Pearce and I had indeed come to the same place on the same chilly April night.

Cautiously, I peered into the bottom pane of the first window in that room. The scene was exactly as Bobby Bentley had described it except for one significant and disturbing difference. When the members of The Ten screamed at Pearce they did so in high-pitched, effeminate voices, which collectively had the sound of a choir of possessed and maniacal castrati.

Pearce was tied up in a wooden chair in the middle of a room with no other piece of furniture in it. They had stripped him naked and sweat poured in dark streams from his brown, well-muscled body. A look of supreme agony and inexhaustible suffering shone in his eyes. His mouth had dropped open and saliva hung from his lips in obscene strings. Anger began to take the place of fear as I watched.

They worked on him in squads of three, screaming at him in those other-worldly, disembodied voices. On the brick floor I could see the sweaty imprint of Pearce’s body and imagined their beginning the evening by breaking Pearce physically with three or four hundred pushups.

“You gonna leave my school, nigger?” one of the masks asked.

“No, sir,” Pearce answered, though his voice was barely audible.

“We’re gonna kill us a nigger tonight, Pearce. I always wanted to kill me a nigger,” a voice said from a part of the room I could not see. There was so much movement in the room I could not count them accurately without being seen. But I was sure I knew how many of them were in the room.

“It’s gonna be like this every night for the rest of the year, nigger. When you gonna sleep, nigger?”

“How does it feel to be a nigger, boy?” another mask screamed. “To wake up knowing you’re a black cocksucker every day of your life. You’re an ugly nigger boy. But you’re going to be a dead nigger soon. We might even kill you tonight if you’re lucky.”

“I’m gonna make you suck my cock, nigger. That’s the only thing niggers are good for. To suck a white man’s cock. To suck their master’s dick. You want to suck my sweet white cock, nigger?”

“No, sir. Please, sir,” Pearce cried out.

“Give him the juice again,” one voice shouted as Pearce began screaming and struggling against the ropes that were cutting into his flesh. There was blood on his wrists.

The black masks surrounded him, all screaming, some of them laughing, but the insane, demented, and joyless laughter one would expect to hear in inaccessible wards of insane asylums. The masks and voices were hideous in the lovely light of a chandelier, incongruously placed in this bizarre room obviously not built for chandeliers. The room must have been an old kitchen, I thought, but the wing looked new and I wondered to myself if the room had been constructed especially for these grim rites. Four of them held Pearce as a fifth applied a small clamp to the head of Pearce’s penis. Then he flicked a switch and an electric current flowed brutally into Pearce’s body, and he convulsed as he screamed. The screams carried over the entire island.

We had learned about counterinsurgency techniques in military science classes in our four years at the Institute. Experts in the field informed us that electricity, properly applied, could break a man’s resistance quicker than any other method of interrogation.

The guy controlling the switch was John Alexander. I don’t know how I knew for certain, but his stiff carriage and the odd way he balanced his shoulders when he moved revealed his identity as certainly as a fingerprint. An asshole moves like an asshole even when he wears a mask.

Alexander adjusted the switch controlling the amount of current sent into Pearce’s body. You could judge the force and duration of the current by the intensity of Pearce’s screams. I was nauseated and thought I might vomit in the bushes. I did not know how long I could be a spectator to such outrage. Then Pearce lost consciousness and the masks cheered. One of them threw a bucket of water into Pearce’s face to revive him. Another took off his shirt and began mopping his chest of perspiration. I noticed the long, ugly, centipede-shaped scar incised into his left shoulder and knew I had discerned the identity of a second member of The Ten: my friend and fellow athlete Cain Gilbreath.

But even without the scar I should have recognized Cain’s massive shoulders and his thick, brutal neck. The masks had hypnotized me; the masks and the rings that proved that all the members of The Ten were my classmates. If I could have ripped the masks from their heads, I was sure I could identify each member of the organization.

As Pearce fought his way back to consciousness, the phone rang in a distant room in the house, a sound as incongruous and misplaced as the chandelier casting a delicate light on the masked figures surrounding the naked black boy strapped to the wooden chair. The masks turned to each other in featureless puzzlement. Then one of them left the room quickly. The phone rang five times before it was answered.

When he returned he whispered something to the group. Two of them came directly toward the window where I was positioned. I sank down into the green depths of the azaleas, and breathing hard, I watched through the foliage as they peered into the black night. One of them glanced downward to the exact spot where I was hidden. As they returned to the group, I lowcrawled on my hands and knees to the thickest, most impenetrable part of the hedge. I saw a light go on in the custodian’s house two hundred yards away, then go out again. I wondered if he had seen me at the window, and I was angry that I had forgotten about the existence of the fucking custodian. As I burrowed into the brush cover, the front door of the plantation house swung open, and two of them, armed with M-1’s with fixed bayonets, moved swiftly into the yard and began stabbing the bushes with their bayonets. They did not speak but moved with extreme deliberation around the house, stabbing viciously and at random into the dark yielding thicknesses of the azalea hedge. I flattened myself and did not draw a breath for a full minute as they passed above me. The blade of one bayonet passed two feet above my head and was delivered with such force and thrust it would have skewered my throat had its aim been truer. How would the General explain a bayoneted athlete in the azaleas, I wondered, as they continued to work their way patiently around the house. My heart beat against the earth and my lips bit into the rooted, sandy soil. I did not move for twenty minutes, and I thought I would not move again that night until I was sure I could make a clean, unobserved escape. But I wanted to get away from that house, and most of all, I wanted to return to the secure anchorage of my room, to the safety of roommates. I wanted to escape from all responsibility for Pearce. I didn’t move or lift my head until I heard Pearce screaming again. Undone, I put my hands over my ears, but the screams cut through my fingers and my eardrums felt as if they were being lacerated with glass.

I rose to the window once again and saw one of them dousing Pearce with gasoline. He poured the gasoline over Pearce s head, into his face, and splashed it against his chest and groin. The high-pitched voices were in full cry again as the lunatic chorus sang out their imbecilic, vicious chant of loathing. They gathered in the far corner of the room and lit candles in a ritualistic and strangely beautiful ceremony. Bowing to each other and grinning beneath the cloth masks, they began a slow cadenced march toward Pearce, the candles held like swords in front of them as they made their long approach.

“Set the nigger on fire.”

“You gonna leave, nigger?”

“Fire, nigger, fire.”

Pearce, delirious and insensate with terror, began screaming out of exhaustion and terror.

“I’ll leave, sir. Please, sir. I’ll leave. I’ll leave. Never come back, sir. Please, sir.”

And still they came, the fire before them.

I almost vomited again; I went down on my knees and tried to keep from retching. Pearce’s screams, nausea, the smell of gasoline through the open windows, the sweetness of the azaleas. My hand found a brick.

I came out of those azaleas with that brick, with that weapon.

I threw it high, lobbing it like a grenade through the window, the glass shattering with a surreal cleanliness, and continuing its arc, almost in slow motion and somehow dreamlike, the brick exploded into the chandelier and the room, suddenly silent, burst into a dazzling shower of ruined glass.

I smashed another pane with my fist, felt the bite of glass in the heel of my palm, and shouted into the room, “Pearce, it’s Will McLean and I’ve seen it all.” And pointing to the shoulder with the scar, I yelled, “And I know you, Cain Gilbreath, you motherfucker. And you, John Alexander. I know you.”

Then I was running. I saw them moving toward the doors and exits, and my brain, overpowered with the images and visions of this demonic night, turned toward escape. I sprinted around the side of the house, moving low and fast, using the cover of the hedge until I had to break into the open and be exposed to the light. Already, I had made my first mistake and had run in the opposite direction from my car.

“There he is. Get him,” I heard someone yell from the back door.

But by that time I had reached the road to the beach and I headed toward the sound of the breakers like a sprinter fast out of the blocks. I was running blindly down the road in complete darkness. If there had been a tree planted in the middle of the road I would never have seen it and would have left my brain decomposing in its bark. I remembered the road being straight, and I had to trust the accuracy of that memory because I began to hear the footsteps in pursuit of me, footsteps matching me stride for stride. My hand was aching in the cold and I could feel the blood warm between my fingers and dripping off my damaged hand. I was afraid the loss of blood would weaken me, slow me down, and allow them to catch me. Already there was a lightness in my head.

But I broke suddenly out onto the open beach and sprinted to the left, through soft, difficult sand, until I hit the hard wet sand at the ocean’s edge.

Then I took off. The sprinter in me, the dashman, the flashy guard trained under the lights, ignited on that fast sand and let loose for two hundred deliriously heady yards, until I thought my lungs would burst. A light fog dusted the beach and the air was completely still, as though the earth and the water were thickening around me, trapping me cunningly in the thickness.

Casting a quick glance over my shoulder, I saw three black masks following me in the fog. Cain Gilbreath, with his thick, formidable body, was pursuing me with a grim intensity that frightened me more than anything had all night. I thought that my friendship with Cain would have meant enough to make me immune from his pursuit, at least. The three of them were running easily, pacing themselves, intent on letting me run myself out, exhausting myself in the first mile. I pressed my palm against my heart and tried to stem the flow of blood.