Neverworld Wake(28)
Rumors about the quarry—how to find it, what happened to students who went there (most of whom were long gone from Darrow, so events could never be verified)—were part of the weekly goings-on at Darrow and served as a foundation to its lore. The quarry was as tightly woven into the fabric of the school as its official song, “Oh, Lord, Unbind My Heart”; its motto, “Truth, Compassion, Enterprise”; and even Marksman Library, the Gothic fortress of weather-beaten gray stones that stared out like a menacing stepfather from every brochure.
After World War I, Vulcan Sandberg Corporation created the quarry for mining granite. By the 1950s, they were bankrupt, the quarry forsaken. In the ensuing years, the crater filled with water, creating a lake two hundred feet deep. The grounds overgrew, with grass that reached your neck. The Foreman’s Lookout—a wooden box like a pioneer-era saloon hoisted fifty feet into the sky, accessible only by scaling a narrow ladder—began to lean northward. Then there was the quarry itself, a hole in the earth the size of a small town. It sat there, gaping and ominous, impossible to look away from. It seemed to reveal some terrifying truth about the world the grown-ups wanted to keep hidden from us.
Darrow’s football team used the quarry for Streak Night, the annual tradition of new recruits racing naked to the quarry and back. The crew team went swimming in the lake before state championships for good luck. Couples went there to lose their virginity, daredevils to brood. It was whispered that Vulcan Sandberg was actually a government cover-up, that the quarry had actually been the landing spot for an alien spaceship.
For Darrow’s administration, Vulcan Quarry was a lawsuit waiting to happen, the enchanted wood they wanted to clear-cut to put an end to the dark fairy tales wafting off it like some toxic mist. There was always some board member protesting, collecting signatures to declare it a safety hazard, lobbying state representatives for it to be turned into a cultural center, a YMCA, a housing complex. In the meantime, it required new fencing and a twenty-four-hour police patrol. The town of Warwick—partly out of resentment over being told what to do by uppity out-of-towners, partly out of ineptitude—dragged their feet doing anything about it, though, and as long as I attended Darrow, the fencing around the quarry—rusted, riddled with holes, its faded signs halfheartedly declaring KEEP OUT—remained little more than a suggestion at best.
After Jim was found dead, however, he became the poster boy for the board’s cause. Last I’d heard, the quarry was going to be turned into a reservoir and there was brand-new, state-of-the-art fencing around it.
Not that that would keep Darrow’s students out.
If the administration knew the lengths to which the student body went to sneak out at night, to the quarry and everywhere else—dorm rooms, basement gymnasiums, boiler rooms—they wouldn’t have believed it. There was a secret forum—AlbanzHax.biz—where students past and present anonymously revealed how to get in and out of every dorm without being caught.
All dark clothing. Porch ledge. Sneak past the window where Mr. Robertson is zonked out with an issue of Poets & Writers over his chest. Get past him ur golden.
The six of us snuck out to Vulcan Quarry all the time. We were already in the habit of stealing away to each other’s rooms after curfew, clambering across ledges and landings to hash over boys, teachers, sharing a cigarette in the dark before hightailing it home, stealing back into bed. Sophomore year, Cannon found the crude map and pointers for the quarry etched into the tiles of the forsaken gym in the old athletic center. At midnight we escaped our dorms, meeting at the entry to the Philosopher’s Walk. Barely able to suppress our laughter, we took off running down the tangle of dirt paths to get there.
Those were the best nights of my life.
I couldn’t say why, exactly, this was so—only that I knew that as an old woman, when I thought back to my youth, I’d remember these nights, sitting with these five people along the harrowing window ledge of the Foreman’s Lookout, gazing into that clear blue lake hundreds of feet below.
Our friendship was born there. There we were bound together. Something about seeing each other against that spare, alien backdrop of rock, water, and sky—not to mention the prohibited, dangerous thing we were doing—it X-rayed us, revealed the unspoken questions we each were asking. You could feel life burning us, our scars as real as the wind whipping our faces. We knew that nothing would ever be the same, that youth was here and nearly gone already, that love was fragile and death was real.
* * *
—
“What about the White Rabbit?” asked Martha now. “It never sat right with me. It was just too easy. The White Rabbit suddenly revealed to be Jim the exact moment he turns up dead?” She shook her head. “It went against everything I knew about him.”
“You think it was a cover-up?” asked Whitley. “Some grand conspiracy concocted by the administration and Jim was the fall guy?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re right,” I said to Martha. “There’s no way he was the White Rabbit.”
“How do you know?” Cannon asked me.
I just know.
* * *
—
The White Rabbit.
It was what everyone called the drug dealer at Darrow, someone who circulated the student body, invisible and invasive as a virus.