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By Root 2459 0

hours passed, then four. The twins came back, and the three of us had just ordered up some lunch from room service when Francis burst in, half-hysterical. The money for that year was all gone, you see. His mother had checked out every cent of the principal at the first of the year and hadn’t told him about it. It was a nasty surprise, but even nastier given the circumstances. He’d tried everything he could think of—to borrow money on the trust itself, even to assign his interests, which is, if you know anything about trusts, about the most desperate thing one can do. The twins were all for going ahead and taking our chances. But … It was a difficult situation. Once we left we couldn’t come back and anyway, what were we supposed to do when we got there? Live in a treehouse like Wendy and the Lost Boys?” He sighed. “So there we were, with our suitcases packed and passports ready, but no money. I mean, literally none. Between the four of us we had hardly five thousand dollars. There was quite a bit of discussion, but in the end we decided our only choice was to come back to Hampden. For the time being, at least.”

He said this all quite calmly but I, listening to him, felt a lump growing in the pit of my stomach. The picture was still wholly obscure, but what I saw of it I didn’t like at all. I said nothing for a long time, only looked at the shadows the lamp cast on the ceiling.

“Henry, my God,” I said at last. My voice was flat and strange even to my own ears.

He raised an eyebrow and said nothing, empty glass in hand, face half in shadow.

I looked at him. “My God,” I said. “What have you done?”

He smiled wryly, and leaned forward out of the light to pour himself some more Scotch. “I think you already have a pretty good idea,” he said. “Now let me ask you something. Why have you been covering up for us?”

“What?”

“You knew we were leaving the country. You knew it all the time and you didn’t tell a soul. Why is that?”

The walls had fallen away and the room was black. Henry’s face, lit starkly by the lamp, was pale against the darkness and stray points of light winked from the rim of his spectacles, glowed in the amber depths of his whiskey glass, shone blue in his eyes.

“I don’t know,” I said.

He smiled. “No?” he said.

I stared at him and didn’t say anything.

“After all, we hadn’t confided in you,” he said. His gaze on mine was steady, intense. “You could have stopped us any time you wanted and yet you didn’t. Why?”

“Henry, what in God’s name have you done?”

He smiled. “You tell me,” he said.

And the horrible thing was, somehow, that I did know. “You killed somebody,” I said, “didn’t you?”

He looked at me for a moment, and then, to my utter, utter surprise, he leaned back in his chair and laughed.

“Good for you,” he said. “You’re just as smart as I thought you were. I knew you’d figure it out, sooner or later, that’s what I’ve told the others all along.”

The darkness hung about our tiny circle of lamplight as heavy and palpable as a curtain. With a rush of what was almost motion sickness, I experienced for a moment both the claustrophobic feeling that the walls had rushed in toward us and the vertiginous one that they receded infinitely, leaving both of us suspended in some boundless expanse of dark. I swallowed, and looked back at Henry. “Who was it?” I said.

He shrugged. “A minor thing, really. An accident.”

“Not on purpose?”

“Heavens, no,” he said, surprised.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know where to begin.” He paused, and took a drink. “Do you remember last fall, in Julian’s class, when we studied what Plato calls telestic madness? Bakcheia? Dionysiac frenzy?”

“Yes,” I said, rather impatiently. It was just like Henry to bring up something like this right now.

“Well, we decided to try to have one.”

For a moment I thought I hadn’t understood him. “What?” I said.

“I said we decided to try to have a bacchanal.”

“Come on.”

“We did.”

I looked at him. “You must be joking.”

“No.”

“That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard.”

He shrugged.

“Why would you want to do something like that?”

“I was obsessed