Chapter Text
Richard Papen’s way of life could be likened to living in a dark cellar, where one perpetually stumbles against unseen obstacles, with little success, to close a battered trunk whose lid never quite shuts – the lock is rusted and the handle flaps around like a broken wing. His decisions, polished and repolished as though they were buttons intended for admiration, were less choices than careful evasions of calamity. He seemed to approach life as if it were a storm shelter, boarding up the windows of his mind with the same care you’d take with an ark before the waters rose. To him, time itself was a slum alleyway where every step had to be planned in advance. In that endless watchfulness, he shrank, folding himself smaller and smaller until he seemed to vanish, secreted like contraband into the lining of his own worn case.
He possessed rules, plain and unadorned, which might be likened to scripture scrawled in chalk – half solemn declaration, half untidy graffiti. They bore none of the authority of divine commandment, yet served, in their humble fashion, to arrange the small necessities of his life with such string and pins as he could contrive.
The first rule was clear: leave Plano. Leave its breathless thoroughfares, blistering and oozing tar beneath the Texas sun like molten brass; its streets sagging with half-stripped pickups, their innards strewn across driveways like a cannibal's midden; their gears and axles oxidizing to the color of ochre, desert bones. Leave behind those August eternities that stretched yawning and sun-dazed, perfumed with unleaded gasoline and the damp, scissored musk of lawns. Leave behind local boys who blushed raw and radiant from drinking cheap beer, and girls who hunched sullenly on hot, anvil-like bleachers, exhaling pale script into the shimmering air. Plano was a sermon in asphalt, a gospel of desolation. To stay was to submit to that dull eternity; leaving was the only way to escape its slow suffocation.
The second rule is to earn enough money so that he would never have to return. He didn't require riches; at least, not the ostentation so often displayed in journals. Instead, he wanted financial security: the ability to buy a coat in winter without anxiety and fill the tank without considering which meal to skip. He dreamed of radiators hissing faithfully through winter nights and a front yard smelled of lilacs rather than oil. He wanted a name that meant more than “that boy from the mechanic’s shop.”
Everything else – be it love, friendship, beauty or even that elusive happiness which so many pursue – was optional.
His father’s garage was a chapel of scorched rubber, the air thick with the fried stench of wiring and oil. Above the workbench, a television was bolted on like a cheap pulpit, spitting out the news in a nasal monotone. His father stood shirtless in his overalls, laboring with grim persistence; sweat and grease varnished his body until he glowed in the dim light. His mother wandered the house like a ghost, smoking at the kitchen sink, hair damp from the cool air, eyes always averted. They weren’t cruel people, but they weren’t particularly tender either.
So, Richard learned not to expect tenderness. Instead, he looked for the alcoves where its ghost might still be conjured.
The town library served as his refuge, a place where the extremes of the seasons were tempered: cooled in summer by machinery and warmed in winter by radiators. The smell of paper, sweet like bread, lingered in the air. The silence within wasn’t just the absence of sound, but a tangible presence that pressed upon the listener as though it were alive. Over time, Richard realized that this silence was a more faithful companion than speech, and certainly less dangerous.
He started working there at sixteen. It wasn't because he wanted to help – he didn't like people, and they didn't like him – but because the pay was better than working in a grocery store, and it let him lose himself among the stacks. He spent most of his shift re-shelving books, straightening spines and wiping dust of encyclopedias that no one opened anymore. And in the long silences in between, he read and the words became his true companions.
One evening, amidst the library's syrupy stillness, Richard discovered Greece. Not the nation nailed to postcards in tourist brochures, but the older apparition: Homer’s voyages; Aeschylus’s dramas walled with blood; marble wrecks buckled by centuries; wars fought for gods. He began with myths, soft honey-lore, but inevitably drifted into the raw meat of tragedy and then into the alphabet itself. The letters were rivers, serpents and forked lightning; they were more alive than his own dull English and more fundamental, like atoms. At first, he copied them clumsily in pencil, but repetition produced elegance, order and form. He told no one. It was his secret: a pure language, hidden away from the grime and pollution of Plano, that set him apart.
When the application season came around, Richard knew exactly what to do. He would apply to a place far away as far from Texas as possible, choose a discipline that commanded respect and had a high status. And he would shape himself anew: no longer the mechanic’s son, but a young man who moved with care and confidence, proving that he could survive in a harsher world.
On the Hampden forms, in the barren column marked 'Skills', he scrawled two words, carelessly, as though they were a throwaway chalk scribble on the wall.
Knows Greek.
It looked ridiculous among the ledgers of the math club and the baseball team, but it glittered like a key that had been slipped into a lock he had not yet seen.
The air in Vermont was different to that in Texas: cleaner yet keener, with the faint scent of pine and frost. He arrived at Hampden in early September, carrying just one battered suitcase, his clothes folded with the soldier’s precision. He moved cautiously, as if crossing a threshold into a foreign kingdom, expecting to be turned back at the gate.
The gravel walkway leading to the admissions office was elegantly bordered by elms, their leaves already displaying the first hints of autumn. Richard took deliberate steps on the stones, wishing his pace to appear neither too rapid, which might suggest eagerness, nor too slow, which might betray uncertainty. Hampden revealed itself all around him in an elegance that was both careless and assured, to which his own caution was a striking contrast.
The students sprawled across the lawns as though they had been born knowing how to arrange themselves elegantly, every gesture unconsciously poised. Scarves were thrown over their shoulders and linen trousers were pressed to a sharp point, even in the wet air. Their laughter rippled on, punctuated occasionally by the bright smoke of cigarettes. They seemed like a different species altogether – like exotic birds glimpsed through the trees; their beauty was as startling as a shining shell found in the sand.
Richard knew that he didn’t belong with them. That, of course, was the whole point. He had not come to Hampden to carry on as he was, but to efface himself and be remade – to become someone who could blend seamlessly into collegiate life. He wanted to be a man with a degree, a profession and a future unsullied by the bitter taste of gasoline. All he needed to do was keep still, attend his lectures and pass through unnoticed, like a shadow slipping across a wall.
In four years, the door to another life would open. He believed this with the blind certainty of faith. However, plans are fragile things and even the slightest crack could allow the flood in.
Two days passed before he saw them. They appeared suddenly in the late morning, like silhouettes cast from the sun itself. Five figures strolled across Hampden's green. Their eyes did not flicker and their heads did not turn. They had no need for recognition, for they were the gravitational center. The world subtly bent around them, aligning itself in quiet choreography so that everything framed their procession.
Henry led the way. Despite the unseasonable warmth, he wore a dark suit and his expression was fixed in a solemn stillness. His movements were precise and deliberate, as though weighed on invisible scales. He had the air not of a student, but of an older, sterner figure – a remnant of another century, preserved in flesh. He seemed more monumental than alive, like a statue whose silence commanded reverence.
Francis walked beside him, all scarf and languid elegance, his long limbs thrown carelessly yet with studied charm. His expression always hovered on the brink of amusement, as if the world existed chiefly to entertain him. When he leaned towards the others to speak, his mouth curled into an ironic half-smile, as though everything were a private joke.
The twins, Camilla and Charles, followed. Their resemblance was disquieting in its exactness. Camilla was slight, her face turned inwards as if listening to an inaudible melody. Charles kept close to her, his features striking chiefly because they mirrored hers so precisely. Together, they seemed less like siblings than an accidental symmetry, a reflection that the world had permitted by mistake.
Bunny, the illusion’s fracture, trailed at the procession’s ragged tail. His voice was a bright flare and his grin stretched beyond elegance into parody. He slouched, abandoning all posture, and laughter tumbled from his mouth, scattered like a handful of coins flung to the wind: gaudy and indiscriminate; ringing as they fell where they may.
Richard stopped in his tracks. They passed by without so much as a glance, yet the sight of them was etched into his memory. Their beauty was not the common kind, but something stranger and more troubling; they were self-contained and inviolate, as if they belonged to a higher order of being. In that instant, Hampden seemed nothing more than their stage and the rest of us no more than shadows in their play.
Rumors about them had reached him long before he saw them. Julian Morrow’s Greek class was not a course that one could enroll on; it was a door that could only be opened by invitation. It was spoken of in half-truths and fragments; more legend than syllabus. There, language was not grammar, but a gateway; a rite of initiation.
He vowed to himself that survival was his only compass; not secrets or cultish lures. Yet when he lowered his gaze to the paper, he saw that it was already inscribed, the ink slanting like a sly conspirator’s smile. Introduction to Attic Greek. There was no professor’s name, no annotation, nothing to anchor it to the world of fact. It lay there like a charm scrawled by another hand, a whisper written into his life's timetable.
The first invitation was found folded between the pages of his timetable. The paper was thick and old-fashioned, as if torn from a ledger. The ink was delicate and the letters were almost ornamental. It gave the impression not of an announcement, but of a summons.
Julian Morrow requests your presence at a trial lesson in Ancient Greek. Thursday, 9 a.m .
He dismissed the first, feigning blindness.
The second arrived in person, in the form of a neat-looking secretary who spoke his name before he had even introduced himself. Her conspiratorial smile was like a sealed envelope, and he found it stifling, like a velvet noose around his throat.
The third invitation came from Julian himself. As Richard crossed the green, a tall man in a dark suit stepped into his path. He was composed and polished. He addressed Richard by name as though it were his own, as though he had some quiet right to it. Richard offered the barest hint of a courtesy before withdrawing as soon as possible, unsettled by the ease with which the man had claimed him.
By the fourth summons, it was clear that escape was no longer possible. He would have to go. If he could not refuse, then he would spoil it, overturning it from within. It was a childish vow, but the idea that he might destroy as well as enter steadied him.
The room was absurd in its pretense of being a place of study; a cathedral masquerading as a classroom. The ceilings stretched into vaults, where gold-leaf moldings caught and fractured the morning light into a sacramental gleam. The tall-paned windows were ajar just enough to let in the chill exhalation of autumn. Sunbeams drifted through the room, carrying dust motes that looked like flakes of manuscript, scripture disintegrating mid-sermon. The air smelt of parchment and something more ancient: a ghost of stone and plaster. It was as if the walls themselves had grown fat on centuries of overheard confidences.
Richard pushed open the door. Its creak cut through the silence like a blade. They were already there, five of them arranged like figures in an obscure museum painting. Their presence was too deliberate and composed; it was as though they had been waiting all along.
At the front stood Julian Morrow, composed and elegant, his handsome face arranged into the careful stillness of authority. When he spoke, his voice was warm, but precise, each word balanced as if weighed beforehand.
“Mr. Papen,” he said. His tone was genial, but the words landed like a reprimand. “Late on the first day. And without even the courtesy of an introduction.”
Richard did not answer. He did not sit down.
Instead, he stepped forward into the center of the room, where he was met with the weight of their closed eyes. Henry’s gaze was as sharp as a blade, while Camilla’s was as soft as gauze. Charles lingered just behind her, his presence like a shadow. Francis leaned back, watching with idle amusement. Bunny was already smirking. At the front, Julian waited patiently.
Richard opened his mouth.
And he sang.
Not in Greek. Not in Latin either. But in English.
The melody rose pure and clear, his voice steady and cutting like a discordant note across the ordered hush. Ten years of war, they killed us slowly. The words held no grandeur or invocation of gods or heroes; only grief: a hymn to blood and loss where philosophy should have reigned supreme. I’d rather bleed for you...
He did not look at them. His gaze was fixed somewhere beyond their faces, as though the song belonged to an unseen presence.
When the last note faded, silence filled the high room. Dust hung suspended in shafts of light. No one moved.
Richard bowed – a precise, economical gesture that seemed almost mocking – and then turned away.
The door closed behind him with a quiet, irrevocable click.
Outside, the air was cooler and the leaves stirred faintly in the trees. Richard stood still with his hands in his pockets, his heart beating loudly in his chest.
He told himself that he had ruined their ceremony and turned their summons into a farce. He would walk away before they dismissed him. That was the plan.
Yet, as he crossed the green, the hush of the Lyceum still echoing in his ears, he suddenly knew: he had not escaped them. He had only made himself unforgettable.