At least Fritz Skander understood the difficulty.

“They need to trust you,” Skander had said in his soft voice. “I can help you with that. I know them. It won’t take long. They’re basically good people.”

Hawthorne had felt so grateful that he had shaken Skander’s hand. In response, Skander had given him a smile of such warmth and willingness that Hawthorne’s doubts receded.

“It’ll be hard for a while,” said Skander, “but they’ll come around.”

“I’m depending on you,” Hawthorne had told him.

Skander patted Hawthorne’s arm. “That’s what I’m here for.”

Hawthorne’s meeting with the students had been less daunting even though they were less welcoming. But they were adolescents and Hawthorne felt he knew the breed. Their suspicion, indifference, and cynicism lacked the inflexibility that age gave a person. Although they were wary, it would be easier to win them to his side. They were quieter than kids in a treatment center, better able to keep themselves under control. And they were more sophisticated, more capable of channeling their energies in a single direction, even more analytical. So they had watched him.

He would always be available to them, he’d explained; if they had complaints they felt were being ignored, they could come to him at any time.

“What about the food?” one boy asked. “It sucks.”

“We’ve hired a new assistant cook and yesterday he made fresh bread for lunch. Personally, I thought it was wonderful. The problem at the moment is the kitchen’s budget but I’m sure it can be increased a little. The new cook has placed a suggestion box outside the kitchen. If there’s a kind of food or particular dishes that you want made, just leave a note and maybe he can do it. I know he’d like to.”

“Can we get wine with meals?” asked a boy.

“Or beer?”

There had been more joking suggestions. Hawthorne had waited for them to quiet down. But he liked their energy. Some seemed sullen or hostile but most were good-humored. He spoke about the difficulties the school was experiencing but also how the board was committed to making the school better. Money was being raised but they had to be patient.

Meeting with the staff, he had again spoken about the idea of a milieu and the need to prepare students for the adult world, not just by teaching the three Rs but by teaching them age-appropriate behavior and raising their sense of self-esteem. He knew the staff often had contact with students and he was sure they could make helpful suggestions. He would begin meeting with them weekly to discuss the school and the work it was doing. There would be refreshments; the atmosphere would be relaxed.

The fifteen or so men and women were skeptical but polite. Since most were hourly employees, they didn’t share the faculty’s complaints about spending extra time on campus.

Afterward at a reception, Hawthorne was introduced to each of the staff, including the new cook. The man told him a joke. What had it been? “Did you hear the story about two cannibals eating a clown? One says to the other, ‘This taste funny to you?’”

Hawthorne had been surprised but he had laughed and chatted with the cook, whose name was Frank, a man about thirty with a narrow face and his dark hair slicked back with gel. Frank had seemed especially energetic and Hawthorne heard him telling jokes to others as well. Hawthorne was glad of his vitality. He seemed the only one not made nervous by the new headmaster and he looked at the scar on Hawthorne’s wrist without embarrassment. Still, Hawthorne had found himself trying to draw a line between upbeat and hyper. But he also liked the man’s cousin, Larry Gaudette, the head cook, who seemed serious, responsible, and even slightly critical of his cousin’s joke telling.

Sliding off the railing, Hawthorne stood and stretched. It was nearly one in the morning and he had a few files left to read. He would spend the weekend going over student files, then start scanning them onto floppy disks. And he wanted to read the files of students who had transferred or dropped out. Some he would telephone. Even if he only got an earful of complaint, it might be useful to hear why they had left. If he worked all weekend, maybe he could keep his mind fully occupied. Skander had invited him to dinner on Saturday night and he looked forward to that. Hawthorne glanced up at the dark windows of Adams Hall. A sudden breeze sent the dried leaves of the ivy rattling and whispering. Strangely, he had a sense of being watched. He looked more closely at the windows.

Suddenly, Hawthorne had a shock. Somebody was standing at a third-floor window looking down at him. It was a man. There was something very odd about his clothes. With a feeling approaching horror, Hawthorne realized the man was dressed in a fashion that had gone out of style a hundred years earlier. The stern white face and thin beard, the somber clothing—the man stared down at Hawthorne with such anger that it was all Hawthorne could do not to turn away or cover his eyes. The figure was standing about a foot back from the glass, dimly illuminated by the security lights along the walkway. Hawthorne waited for him to make some sign but he stood at the window, forbidding and lifeless.

Forcing himself into action, Hawthorne ran across the terrace toward the French windows. Once inside he paused long enough to grab a flashlight from the hall table, then he hurried through the door separating his quarters from the rest of the building. He stopped to listen. The only noise was the wind moaning through a crack. Hawthorne ran for the stairs, taking them two at a time as he dashed toward the third floor. His shoes had rubber soles and made hardly any noise. He kept the flashlight off; there was enough light in the stairwell from the windows. When he reached the third-floor landing, he opened the fire door and listened again.

From farther up the hallway, he heard laughter, manic and inhuman. Hawthorne moved quietly through the door and down the hall. The laughter grew louder with breathless hysteria. Here the only light came dimly from the open doors of the classrooms. Touching the wall with one hand, Hawthorne moved forward, gripping the flashlight but not turning it on. The laughter seemed to be coming from a classroom halfway down the hall, which looked out over the playing fields. Hawthorne calculated that it was in this same area that the man had been standing. He paused at the doorway. His hands were sweating and he wiped them on his pants. The high tenor of the laughter, its tenacity without pause for breath, its noisy echo in the empty classroom—Hawthorne imagined it spewing forth from the dead mouth he had seen.

He flicked on the flashlight and stepped into the classroom, sweeping the beam across the desks and blackboard. There was no sign of the man he had seen at the window. Then, on the teacher’s bare desk at the front of the room, he saw a set of jittering white teeth jumping and turning in the circle of the flashlight’s beam. The awful laughter was coming from the teeth. Hawthorne gripped the doorjamb and watched the teeth hop about on the desk, approach the edge, then scuttle back to the center. He felt for the light switch and turned on the overhead fluorescent light. The white teeth and bright pink gums were a toy, a plastic toy. Laughing and twitching, they again skittered to the side of the desk, balanced briefly on the edge, then fell to the floor with a crash and were silent. Hawthorne kept by the door. It was the scientist in him, the clinical psychologist, who stared at his two hands and watched them shake, as if he had the D.T.’s or the palsy of the very old. The very peculiarity of it helped to calm him. In the silence there was only the hum of the fluorescent lights and the occasional low moan of the wind.

After making sure there was no one hiding in any of the rooms, Hawthorne hurried back down the stairs. At the bottom he paused, but there was no sound. He hurried through his quarters, out to the terrace, and down to the lawn, hoping to see someone running away, but there was nothing. He walked quickly across the grass. He had turned off the light but still held it in his hand. His heart was beating rapidly and he felt that if he relaxed even a little his panic would overwhelm him. About a hundred yards from Adams Hall he entered a grove of trees and stopped. He became aware of a peculiar but somewhat familiar odor. Almost without knowing it, he found himself thinking of France, where he had gone with his wife shortly after their marriage.