“I need to go now,” he said into the phone, looking at me. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Quite.” He smiled. “I will.”

He hung the phone up.

“Who was that?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“No one,” he said, smiling back at me.

The clock had started. Fine. Fuck the clock. Fuck whatever was waiting for me on the other end of that call. Right now, it was just me and Nigel. I couldn’t rush this. It was a dance. A magic trick, even. And I wasn’t going to get caught with a rabbit halfway out of my sleeve. Not tonight.

I was going to take my time, because that was the only way.

Nigel stared at me, waiting for me to say something. I stared back. His desk was covered with books, and he appeared to be writing a paper or even a book in longhand. There were stacks of handwritten pages, with cross-outs, marginal notes, insertions, all in the same urgent script. Not a computer in the room.

Stress is an amazing thing-an hour ago it was bringing out the worst in me, and now it was bringing out the best. When I spoke, my voice didn’t crack. It sounded deeper and stronger than it had in weeks.

“Is it everything you hoped it would be?” I asked him.

Nigel didn’t flinch.

“Is what everything I hoped it would be?” he asked with a straight face. “Law school, you mean?”

I reclined in my chair without taking my eyes off his. I aimed for just south of angry and repeated, very clearly: “Is it everything you hoped it would be?”

He gave me a dead-eyed stare, raising his eyebrows.

“Yes,” he said. “Everything and more.”

“I’m happy for you.”

“What do you want, Jeremy?”

“Nothing, Nigel. I don’t want a thing.”

Take it slow.

“So why are you here?”

“I think you know.”

Easy, I thought. Less anger, a little more hurt.

“We used to be friends…”

Nigel sighed. His guard went down just a hair. But not the coldness that was just behind his eyes. The people on the other end of that call were still coming, and he knew exactly what they’d do to me when they got here. And he didn’t care.

“I know,” he said. “We were.”

“I helped you. That’s the part that kills me. I helped you.”

He rubbed the dome of his head.

“What do you want me to say?”

Okay, swipe one:

“That night in the library, you were a mess. Didn’t even know how to read a case. I helped you. What a fool I was!”

Let it sit.

Reel him in.

“Did you come here to insult me?” Nigel said, pushing away from his desk. “Tell me I’m stupid? That I don’t deserve whatever it is you think I have?”

Good. Keep his eye off the ball.

Then the wagon jumped the tracks.

“I got you something,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I ordered it a while ago. It just came. I was going to give it to you at school. But since you’re here…”

He gave a little sarcastic shrug.

I needed to get him back on track. Time was running out. They were coming. And he was stalling me. But I couldn’t show fear. I couldn’t let him see what I was up to.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything. Just take it.”

He paused. He waited me out.

“Where is it?” I asked finally.

“Over there,” he said. “Under the bed. In a box. Go get it.”

A chill went up my spine. We weren’t in the dorms after all, we weren’t even on campus-but my mind was spinning like an out-of-control clock, and I couldn’t help but wonder: Was there a hatch under his bed? Another link to that maze that seemed to connect everything in this town? I imagined myself walking to the bed. Getting down on my hands and knees in the plush carpet. Peeking under the edge of the bed, seeing only black. Reaching my hand under, feeling around in the soft darkness. The strange fist with the knife gliding out, chopping my hand like a master chef working down a carrot. Another hand grabbing into my hair, yanking me under the bed, swallowing me down into the hole.

I was starting to sweat. I doubted Nigel could see it yet, but maybe he could smell it. Maybe he could smell the fear.

Now or later, I thought.

I stood up.

I went to his bed. He was watching from behind me. I could feel it. He didn’t say a word. I had a sudden image in my head. Not my life flashing before my eyes. Just a single memory. My mom, holding that envelope in hand, that letter of acceptance. Baby, she said. She dropped the mail all over the floor.

I knelt down. It was dark under the bed. The only light in the room was the fireplace, crackling over by Nigel. I lifted the comforter and tried to see under the bed. Where was the box? I couldn’t tell-it was pitch black in there. I reached in and felt for it. My fingers touched woolly carpet.

No hand with a knife slashed out at me.

My fingers felt the edges of a cardboard box. I sighed. The ground below me suddenly hardened and felt more solid, more comforting. I pulled the box out and carried it back to Nigel’s desk.

“Open it,” Nigel said.

I hated this. He was running out my clock. But the whole gambit depended on flow. He couldn’t see what was coming. I had to follow the rhythm.

Inside the box was my article. Nigel had paid some company to bind it in a nice leather cover. It was thin, but it looked grandiose, important. I felt a flash of pride. On the cover, my name and the title were embossed in gold letters.

It was a stroke of luck.

I looked at the article for a second, ran my fingers down the smooth leather.

“This reminds me,” I said-easy now-“of the day we met each other.”

I smiled at him, and he smiled back with that joyless, thin smile. I shook my head and even laughed, tentatively. “You were going to give Daphne that beautiful book and ask her out.”

“She said no, of course,” Nigel said, grinning.

“Well, at least she got a nice book out of it.”

“Yeah, lucky her,” Nigel laughed.

My stomach dropped three stories.

The center square… the center square…

Why don’t you tell him the joke? Maybe he’ll thank you.

Nigel wouldn’t be thanking anyone, because Nigel-the Nigel I once knew-didn’t even exist anymore.

I took off so fast I’m not sure he knew what happened until I was out the door. I heard him yell after me, then pick up the phone and shout into it.

I skipped down the steps of his brownstone three at a time and almost fell head over heels down them.

Everything fit.

Our center square had been wrong. The professor planning his own “death,” the one I met face to face-we had assumed his obituary was a cover, a hoax to hide the fact that he was already immortal. I guess I’d pictured a bunch of three-hundred-year-old men living in a cave somewhere, pulling the strings and ruling the world. But that wasn’t the center square at all. His “death” was a hoax all right, but not in the way we thought.

Because there were two ways to be immortal, really. You could make your body live forever. Or, you could jump ship when your body was about to give out…

Three new spots every year.

Three new students, the best and brightest, initiated into the V &D.

What was the central ceremony of voodoo? What had Isabella told us?

Not immortality but possession. The loa mounts the horse.

What if someone found a way to use voodoo-someone from outside the culture-in a way it was never intended? I thought of Mr. Bones, in his office with artifacts from around the world. A pushpin in every inch of the map! How many continents had they searched for their path to eternal life?

My God-what had Bernini said to me in his office? It had seemed so strange at the time. How tall are you? Good bone structure. Can you guess the last time we elected a shorter than average president? It was inspired. If you lived forever in your own body, you had to hide. But this… stealing a new body every generation… How many centuries to amass wealth? How many turns to be president? You could build dynasties. Empires.