Free Dominance by Will Lavender

was . . .”
    â€œPlease go on.”
    â€œThe man’s name was Charles Rutherford.”
    The professor smiled. Despite herself, Alex felt a rush of pride.
    â€œThe encyclopedia salesman?” someone behind her asked. Melissa Lee had a reputation at Jasper, both for being blazingly intelligent and for inciting a sex scandal that had been weaving its way through the lit faculty for the past two semesters. She wore all black, heavy layers of it, and her hair was streaked with alternating patterns of light and dark that made her look vaguely animalistic. Her face was death-white, a style the students at Jasper had begun calling Goth. Her eyes were painted black and her ears flashed with silver studs, and a sardonic smile always played upon her dark purple lips. Her T-shirt tonight read KILL A POET . “But Rutherford’s a nobody. A pawn. He was dead a year before The Golden Silence even appeared, but they still slap his photo on the books because no one can be sure about the role he played. How did she . . .” Lee glared at Alex, and Alex merely smiled.
    â€œThat’s the whole point, Ms. Lee,” Aldiss said. “Rutherford became a flashpoint for the Fallows scholars exactly because he was so improbable a suspect. First, he died of a brain embolism in 1974. One year later,the second Fallows novel was published. There was also the problem of his clean-cut, square, midwestern image. At first, when the search for Fallows began, many believed that the Rutherford photograph was nothing but another trick. More misdirection. But as the scholars began to search for Rutherford, they found something very interesting.”
    â€œHe was a writer.”
    Aldiss looked out at the class and found the one who had spoken. “That’s right,” he said. “Very good.”
    The boy was the football player, Jacob Keller. He was sitting just to Alex’s right, and she glanced over and found his eyes. He nodded at her. Cute, Alex thought, in a smart-jock sort of way . She had seen him around campus with a few of his teammates, had spotted him down at a bar called Rebecca’s a few times, sitting at a back table and tracing blocking patterns with his fingertips on index cards. Now Keller leaned over and whispered, “Me and you, Shipley, we’re his pets now. The only question is where they’ll find our bodies.” Alex stifled a laugh, and when she looked up she saw that Aldiss had heard. He was looking right at them, and her heart caught in her throat—but the professor only smiled.
    â€œCharles Rutherford was indeed writing a book,” Aldiss finally continued. “They found pieces of the manuscript in his briefcase after his death. But it was a strange book, nothing like the stuff Paul Fallows would become famous for.”
    The professor looked down at his table, shuffled through more of his notes, and then came up with one sheet of paper.
    â€œOr was it?”
    A quick movement, and then the professor’s form was eclipsed on the screen, replaced by a yellowed document he had held up for the camera. One rumpled page, years old from the look of it, arteries of age running through the sheet like the whorls on a palm. Alex read what was written there, saw that the font was that of a typewriter. The page was heavy with bubbled mark-outs and grayed correction tape. It appeared to be— How strange, she thought. It was an encyclopedia entry.
    â€œRutherford was writing his own encyclopedia?” said a boy in back. This was Christian Kane, the slight boy with the denim jacket. Kane was the class auteur; he wrote Stephen King–esque short stories andpublished them in the Jasper College literary magazine, The Guild. Kane fashioned himself after the famous French artisans, with upswept silvering hair and oxford shirts and colored scarves. His stories were so bizarre and violent that many wondered if he didn’t live a secret life, if he