The Night Parade(25)

“Any word on the girl?”

“None yet,” Kathy said. “The last bit of news was that she was still in critical condition. They took her to Hopkins.” She glanced up at him, her breath warm and already smelling of wine. “It’s the same thing that happened to those students of yours, isn’t it?”

“They weren’t my students,” he said. “They just attended the college. I didn’t even know them.”

“But it’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

“I’m not a doctor, Kath.”

“It’s what happened to Deke, too.” It wasn’t a question this time. She was running through all the incidents in her head now, he could tell, replaying them as if their sum would now total the blueprint to some terrible plan unleashed.

David had thought about Deke every day since that night he’d found him wandering down Columbus Court in his underwear. It was impossible not to, since Deke’s house—or what remained of Deke’s house, following the fire—could be seen from their front windows. Two days after the fire, David had spoken with a police detective about the incident—he told the detective about finding Deke in his underwear in the middle of the street, and about ushering him back into his home. He spoke of the disruptive condition of the house, the strange, detached way Deke had been speaking, and about the massive amounts of blood he’d discovered in Deke’s bathroom. The detective, a pock-faced fellow in his late thirties, jotted down notes without the slightest inkling of emotion. When David had finished his story, the detective set down his notepad and asked if anyone else on Columbus Court had exhibited any strange behavior lately. David said no, and asked what that had to do with anything. The detective shrugged and commented that he had been getting a lot of reports concerning strange behavior lately. More than the usual stuff, he’d said. When David asked him to elaborate, the detective was reluctant. When David pushed the issue, the detective told him it was nothing and that he shouldn’t have brought it up. It hadn’t been until later that evening, after speaking with the detective, as he’d lain in bed staring at the darkened ceiling while Kathy snored gently beside him, that David’s mind had returned to the ice cream man. It occurred to him that no one on Columbus Court had ever learned exactly what had happened to Gary, the ice cream man. The police had taken him away, the Freez-E-Friend truck had been towed, and that had been the end of it. As if it had never happened.

David considered mentioning this to Kathy now, adding one more piece to the peculiar and morbid puzzle that she was now so obviously assembling in her head, but he ultimately decided against it. A young girl had fallen ill at Ellie’s school today, coughing up blood while staggering around the playground during recess as if lost, before collapsing on the ground in a series of convulsions. Ellie’s teacher had told Kathy that a handful of students, including their daughter, had witnessed the whole thing. He didn’t need to frighten Kathy any further, augmenting her fear with reminders of all the strange events that had been happening over the past nine months. As it was, he could feel her trembling against him now.

“Ellie’s teacher said Ellie wasn’t even that scared,” Kathy said. She was staring off into the distance. “In fact, she said Ellie even helped calm some of the other kids down.”

“Well, that’s a good sign,” he said, trying to sound upbeat.

In the kitchen, the telephone rang.

“Jesus,” he said, startled.

“I’m not in the mood,” Kathy sighed, not moving.

“I’ll get it.”

“No, I’ll get it,” she said, patting his thigh and getting up from the sofa. She disappeared into the kitchen and answered the phone with an exhausted, “Hello?”

David turned his attention to the TV. It was an episode of The Big Bang Theory, one he and Kathy had seen half a dozen times. The show’s canned laughter irritated him, so he found the remote wedged between two sofa cushions and muted the volume. A scroll at the bottom of the screen read, Officials at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are still puzzled over bird deaths and disappearances following unusual migratory patterns.

He thought now of the students from the college, two of whom had exhibited symptoms similar to the girl in Ellie’s class. He hadn’t witnessed either episode, but had learned about them both from Burt Langstrom later in the English department’s office. Burt hadn’t witnessed the incidents either, but he had always been a veritable font of subversive knowledge on campus, and David had no reason to doubt the stories’ authenticity.

Some girl, a freshman, had doubled over in the quad between the humanities building and the cafeteria and had begun convulsing on the ground. When blood started gushing from her mouth, witnesses assumed that she had bitten her tongue while having a seizure. But then the blood had spilled out of her nose, and people started to shout for campus security.

A similar incident had occurred to a frat boy as he sat in class—he simply stiffened and tipped over, crashing to the floor. His legs began to jerk spasmodically, and when he coughed, blood sprayed along the linoleum floor tiles. Both students died at the hospital within days of their collapse. As far as David was aware, no cause of death had ever been stated.

“It’s an illness,” Burt Langstrom had suggested over lunch. Just talking about it had stemmed David’s appetite, but Burt tore into his roast beef sandwich as if they’d been talking about nothing more gruesome than the upcoming Orioles game. “Probably some strain of meningitis or something like that.”