Homecoming — Chapter 3: A Little White Lie

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CHAPTER THREE: A LITTLE WHITE LIE

Greg refused to say anything else until they could return to the college.  Trixie begged off from Duke, who told her she could go but, “That doesn’t erase your debt to me, girly!”  Coffee and tea was poured to go, and they headed back up Main Street and to the imposing neo-gothic administration building.

There, Greg furtively glanced around for any observers, but most of the staff had left for the weekend.  He motioned for them to follow him down a flight of stone steps into the cool, damp basement level.  “Nobody needs to know you were down here,” he said cryptically.

“Is this where you store the bodies of the kids who die of stress?”  Trixie peeked behind a door, and was disappointed to see the un-sinister belongings of a janitor’s closet.

Walking to the end of the corridor, Greg pulled out a ring of keys and unlocked a plain brown door with frosted glass that had the title “OVERFLOW STORAGE” on it.  The lights flickered on to reveal a room almost as dull as the hallway outside it: a quartet of beige filing cabinets, two empty shelves, and a pile of stacked chairs.

“Take a seat, one and all, the circus is about to begin,” he said, and opened one of the drawers while the rest set up the chairs in a semi-circle.

“Gee, Greg, you take us girls to the finest of places,” Naomi grinned.

“Pipe down,” he said, rummaging through the files.  “Ah, here we go.”  He pulled out a closed folder, unwound the string, and looked into its contents.

“Before I begin, has everyone gone to the bathroom?”

“Yes,” they droned.

“Wash your hands?”

Jackson looked at his hands in mock horror.  “I’M UNCLEAN!  … yes.  Get on with it, man.  Why’s the college shutting down?”

Greg held up a finger.  “One more question.  Did anyone hear of the Y2K incident?  Not the fake computer thing, the one here at Manning.”

“I did,” Trixie said.  “Not a lot about it, but something came across my desk about a couple of disappearances.  Stephen Black and…”  She snapped her fingers, remembering.  “Daryll Storey.”

Greg nodded, resuming a lecture pose.  “They didn’t just disappear — they were abducted, or so the police concluded.  But it goes back a bit before even that.  The beginning of the end of Manning College started with one little white lie on the eve of the millennium.”

* * *

Back then, I was just an assistant to the Dean of Students, a guy named Rich Brady.  Nice guy, a little too old and out of touch to really be an effective leader with the students, but the college tolerated him mostly out of loyalty and the assumption that he’d retire soon and take a nice pension.  He did just that, a year later, but it was already too late for us when he did.

Everyone here on staff is required to attend a Monday morning meeting, mostly to bounce ideas between departments, listen to the various heads complain about funding and how their peers got more perks than they, and to review the main goals for the upcoming week.  Standard stuff.  Pretty boring, and assistants never, ever talked in these things, so I’d spend the hours refining my talents as a doodle artist.

This particular meeting was of note because it was the last before the professors and staff departed for the winter break, as the students had left the Friday before.  The President of the school, Trent Stafford, wanted to make sure that everything was tied up before the new year, so he made it mandatory that we stick around for his talk.  Stafford was, to put it kindly, a chronic sufferer of Head in the Ass Syndrome — pardon my French, Autumn (“It’s cool,” she replied).  Always thought he knew best, never really listened to any ideas that were outside of his realm of interest, and generally led the college through one of its more lackluster eras.

So that day, he was all worked up over the flipping of the calendar to the year 2000, and was a bit peeved that we didn’t have the foresight to plan anything for it.  Notice the “we”, as in “everyone else but Stafford”, who felt it convenient to blame us for constant small failures.  Anyway, seeing as how everyone was gone, except for us anxious employees, Stafford told us that we had to plan something grand and marvelous for the return of the students in mid-January.  Something to celebrate the grand new era that we were about to see.

He plopped that challenge on the table like a dead raccoon, and asked us to deal with it.  So there was a bit of half-hearted brainstorming — I mentioned how everyone really wanted to leave, right? — and then Ilsa McDonald of the Physics department mentioned, probably as a joke, Mardi Gras.  Stafford looked intrigued, so everyone just nodded and said that’d be a great idea.  A Midwestern Mardi Gras, right here at Manning, to celebrate Y2K.

We got up to leave, which is when Rich Brady got Stafford’s attention.  Brady was an accomplished brown-noser, really, I learned some of the best sucking up tactics under his tutelage.  And he wanted to stay relevant to the college and to Stafford, so they wouldn’t give him the boot and force a premature retirement.  So he tells the president that he knows a terrific stage magician from New Orleans that would be perfect for the party, a guy named James Jacobey.  Stafford writes his name down, and we all leave.

Turns out that Brady only knew of Jacobey, and that through a late-night cable show on which the magician, who went by the stage name of “The Voodoo King”, did a few tricks with a Cajun accent for spring break at some other school.  I think it was the only thing he could remotely connect to “Mardi Gras”, which is why he blurted Jacobey’s name to Stafford that day.

Flash-forward two months, and it really looks like we’re going to pull McMardi Gras off.  The students are excited, the party committee went all out (with a higher-than-usual approved budget, approved by Stafford himself) to turn the campus into the French Quarter, and we were even promised a bit of press, especially with the Voodoo King headlining it.

The party raged all weekend, and for an event loosely based around the debauchery and drunken revelry of Mardi Gras, it didn’t really get out of hand.  Sure, there were a few rowdy frat boys who used their elevated blood alcohol levels to mix it up, and a handful of babies were conceived over those days, but that’s to be expected, more or less.  Security was all around, and everyone was just in good spirits.

On Saturday night came the big event, and everyone gathered into the auditorium to see the Voodoo King do what he do so well.  The King had made quite a few demanding and particular requests to the college concerning the setup and equipment, but when Stafford is on a roll, the wallet is always out and open.  We gave him everything he wanted, plus a generous advance.

If anyone had bothered to run a police check on the guy, they would have discovered that James Jacobey had a rather extensive criminal record, ranging from petty larceny to armed robbery and kidnapping.  Jacobey had been out on the street for a couple years when he came to the school, but really, as my daddy always said, repeat offenders are never to be trusted with the safety and well-being of your student population.

The show began with a bit of fog and low-level pyrotechnics, and Jacobey came out dressed as one of those Mexican Day of the Dead skeletons.  I was there, in the back row, and I have to admit — even for a criminal, perhaps especially for a criminal, the guy had style.  He knew how to work a crowd, levitating the pretty girls and magically making their boyfriends’ clothes disappear.  He does card tricks, ring tricks, sawing the calculus professor in half — which got his first “encore” of the evening — swallowed fire, and generally worked everyone up into a heavy metal frenzy.

You could tell it wasn’t exactly president Stafford’s cup of tea, but he tolerated it because he felt as though the students were applauding for him for putting this all on — you could read it in his face.  And when the Voodoo King asked him to come up on stage for his next trick, well, he hopped right on up like a prince about to be crowned.

Jacoby started into this monologue about how he had tapped into the dark voodoo powers of the Caribbean, and how some of his magic was just illusions but some was terrifyingly real.  That he had the power to cloud and control people’s minds, to call up evil spirits to do his bidding, and then cast them down again.  He sits Stafford on a stool and then brings out a duck, a real duck, to sit beside him in a cage.  The poor thing was pretty terrified at the lights and noise, and kept quacking and wildly flapping its wings, even after Jacobey threw a blanket over the cage.  He tells the crowd that he will now turn Stafford into a zombie, entirely under his control, and even Stafford had the good sense to look a bit nervous about this.

Then Jacobey reached into the covered cage, muttering a chant, and then either killed, or pretended to kill the duck.  We couldn’t tell, and trust me, nobody was checking to see after all was said and done.  (“Ew!” Autumn said.  “Poor bird,” Chloe added.)  What happened next was strange enough to take our minds off that, in any case.  Jacobey waved his hand over Stafford and the guy stiffened in his chair and widened his eyes, like he was pretending to be a spook at a kiddy haunted house.  Booga booga.  Unless you believe he killed the duck and it gave him dark powers of zombification, this was a very talented display of hypnosis.  He makes the president get up, act like a chicken, strip off his shirt and do a burlesque dance, that sort of thing.  He had the crowd rolling, although I kept wondering what happened to that duck.

With zombie Stafford used up, he walks the guy over to the side of the stage and leaves him there, still stiff as a board and twice as interesting as he ever used to be.  With that done, he asks the audience for two more volunteers, and literally people are falling over their feet to get up there.  The first two kids who reach the stage were Mr. Black and Mr. Storey.  He tells everyone that he’s going to make them vanish, but not in the usual way.  He was going to use “voodoo magic” and send them far, far away.

Stephen and Daryll are playing along with it, looking scared but really mugging for the crowd.  Jacobey signals his assistants to bring on the stage two black cauldrons — both big, and both heavy, as far as we could tell.  He sets them up on frames, and asks the pair to get in them, one apiece.  They do so, waving to their girlfriends, and the Voodoo King slid a lid over the pots.

That was the last time anyone ever saw them.

Jacobey goes ahead and lights a fire under each cauldron, some sort of smokey torch that was obviously meant to cover up something.  He utters a few cryptic words, bangs on the pot lids with a large bone, and opened them with a flourish.  Empty, of course, and everyone applauded.  He finishes the show by laughing maniacally for a few minutes, no purpose to it, just a weird, shrieking laughter, and he informs everyone that his last trick was yet to be seen.  He was going to make the entire college disappear with a single curse, and we were powerless to stop it.

For kids facing down midterms?  That brought the house down.

But what about the students?  Jacobey later walked the police through the illusion, showed them where the secret trap doors were on the cauldrons, where Stephen and Daryll should have crawled to, but they were gone, of course.  By the time people started to get concerned, right around the point where Stafford snapped out of his hypnotic coma, we’d already searched through the entire arts center and sent security to check out their dorm rooms.  Manning went into lockdown for a few days, and then students were sent home while trained search teams combed through the entire campus, inch by inch.

All we know is that Stephen Black and Daryll Storey never reappeared to anyone on campus, never returned to their rooms, and left behind two anxious and grieving families, girlfriends who entered counseling for months afterward, and complete confusion on our part.  The police couldn’t find any clues, and even with Jacobey as a chief suspect and later tried for their abduction, they couldn’t make it stick.  Other than his prior record, the guy was either clean, a master criminal, or actually skilled in voodoo.  If he did do it, he wasn’t very bright to kidnap two kids in front of a couple thousand witnesses.

So after the trial and the media frenzy abated, the board of directors demanded a sacrifice, which signaled President Stafford’s resignation, but by then, the college accrued a nasty reputation.  “Negligent” was some of the nicest things people could say about us, and that fall we saw a sharp drop in both new enrollments and alumni giving.  We were pariah; nobody wanted to touch us.

The worst part was that Stephen Black was the son of Leland Black, who was not only a member of the board, but one of the college’s largest financial contributors.  He pulled out in disgust, took his wallet with him, and wanted nothing more to do with us.  We were right in the middle of constructing the new multi-million dollar rec center, largely with money from his fund, and the college had to scramble to try to cover the sudden deficit.  We got very close to broke that year.

Everyone here just assumed this would all blow over.  It was tragic, to be sure, but how many colleges and universities have tragedy hit them and go on truckin’ nonetheless?  Yet time didn’t erase memories or heal wounds, it just sort of made things worse.  Manning’s developed a reputation as a “cursed” school, and I’m not just talking about Jacobey’s silly hex or how awful our football team is.  We can’t get some of the state funding we used to, every mistake we make is magnified because of our reputation, and every February, bored media outlets continue to trot out the unsolved McMardi Gras case.

We’ve closed three dorms already because of decreased enrollment, and had to cut deep into all areas of the budget.  It’s hard to attract new people and new funding to the school when you are just a lesser shadow of what you once were.  Public perception is that we peaked back in 2000, and in reality, we’ve been on life support over the past couple years.  Last month, the board called all the faculty and staff in to privately announce the closing, which they’re going to make public tomorrow, after the big game.  Guess they didn’t want to demoralize the Mavericks worse than they are already.

* * *

“Which is why I decided to call you all and ask you to head out this year,” Greg concluded, collecting the reports and newspaper articles he had passed around during the tale.  “If it wasn’t this year, it wasn’t going to ever happen.  And I thought you might want to say goodbye to Manning before it was gone for good.”

He sat down and waited.  Somewhere over their heads, a toilet flushed, causing the pipes to rattle and whoosh.

“So do you give this speech to all the tours?” Jackson asked, breaking the silence and sounding bitter.  “Because if so, I think I’ve got your enrollment problem figured out.”

“I can’t believe it, Greg,” Naomi said, looking stricken.  “I mean, I know we haven’t been around or anything, but that’s like…”  She waved a hand in the air, fishing for the words.

“Like rediscovering your favorite childhood doll, only to have someone grab it and toss it in a fire,” Trixie said helpfully.

“Exactly,” Naomi said.  “You kind of just assume some things will go on forever, even without you.  It’s more comforting that way.”

“Come on guys, it’s not like it’s taking away our memories,” Chloe said.  “I mean, Greg, that’s terrible about your job, and I’m sure we all feel bad about it, but these things happen.”

“No,” Jackson interjected, slapping his hand down on his lap.

“Come on, it’s not…”

“No!” he said more forcefully.  “This place was the last great time I’ve had in my life, and it’s totally not okay that they’re taking it away.”  He got up and stalked out of the room, visibly upset.

“I wasn’t trying to upset anyone,” Greg said, concerned.  “I just wanted to be up front, so you didn’t hear about it tomorrow.  I thought we could get it out of the way, and have a good time.”  He looked pleadingly at the others.

Naomi looked at the open door.  “It might not be that easy, Greg,” she said softly, as Jackson’s footsteps clomped up the stairs.

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