Under the influence of a greater force none of them can explain, the six residents of the Meadows are prone to mass hysteria from time to time.
Still, they solemnly deny having anything to do with the two missing Yale students.
Nate is the captain...
"The excess of a virtue is a vice." —GREEK PROVERB
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I knew hell would be inevitable at this point. However, I was still hopeful I could avoid prison. The sentence if I were to get caught for the crimes my father wanted me to commit would be far less severe than what I deserved. Perhaps only a couple of years of probation if I got lucky. But I hadn't made it this far in my wrongdoings to go down over something so silly.
I was sitting in my father's office then, trying to distance myself from my surroundings as much as humanly possible. With a resigned sigh and a lot of tension in my shoulders, I sat up and tried to clear my head and focus on the latter of the two prospects that were possibly waiting for me. Prison.
I knew that the legality of things had never concerned my father, and it had certainly never stopped him from doing whatever it was that he wished to do. He was the man, the myth, the fraud who had made twelve million dollars in less than an hour. On your average day, he would shoot enough drugs into his system to sedate the entire city of New York. There was never a string too thin or a shelf too high. His ability to comprehend the real world had gotten lost possibly some thirty years earlier, likely while high and drunk and in the middle of an orgy.
But however idiotic his words might have sounded to me, they left me with this awful feeling that my life was about to change for the worst. That I had become a pawn in a game we were bound to lose. I wanted to believe I wasn't exactly that. I wanted to believe that I had a choice in these things but in the grand scheme of things I don't think I ever did.
I took a sip of the whiskey they had forced into my hand, no doubt thinking that if they got me nice and drunk I would be a little more willing to comply. I felt their burning gazes as they studied me intensely. They rearranged their sitting position now and again, cleared their throats, and sighed deeply.
Instead of daring to make eye contact with any of them, I studied the office we were in with a vague sense of nostalgia that felt misplaced inside of me. I knew very well that outside of those four walls, there would be nothing but rows of darkness that the moonlight could hardly reach and a stillness that was perhaps eerie if observed too closely.
But that one dreary night did not do justice to just how spectacular this place could be when in action. Spectacular in a twisted and morbid sort of way because nowhere else were men encouraged to become this disturbingly animalistic version of themselves quite like they were at Statten Financial Corp. It was bewildering at best and grotesque at worst.
