The House of Hidden Things

IX: Everenden

Howards Building Auditorium

It's late enough that the only sound in the auditorium is the constant hum of the projector and the hollow echo of my own shoes on the platform.

Two long blackboards run the length of the room, lit from above so the chalk drawn outlines appear to float. But the display light on the podium, off to the side of the platform, distorts the effect enough to flatten their edges.

The last lesson was still drawn on the blackboard edges: lungs, tissue diagrams and a black spaced sketch of a throat. Lines reach from the outline drawn straight across to names that belong to each part.

In the hall beyond, I could hear the shuffle of chairs, the low murmur of students. The J-term students were always here: those who lived and breathed their work would live here if they could. But these were detailed. Something an artist would do, and very different from the regular professors hand. Shaded and cross-hatched.

The bulb in the projector warms enough to click on, covering the anatomical sketch with one of my own. Split on the projector screen with a page from the hidden room. I cross the platform, heels loud in the big space and draw a small marker from my pocket. Felt-tip and red. Erasable.

Two near rows of glass slides are open on the table to the left of the projector. All eight laid out on the wood there. I'd marked two of the slide samples after finding the string of numbers - written on the side of the glass – in an index, stapled to the books first page. Both mundane and completely accounted for in the real world.

Nothing inhuman about them.

I couldn't say the same about the anatomical sketches in that same book. I'd pulled the one with the feather inside it, curious about it's origin as well. The books had been stacked back where they were on the shelf. Stacked high and in an order enough to take up all the remaining space on that shelf so I wouldn't have to see it.

A family secret I was hiding this time, instead of everyone hiding something from me. The file on Eleanor DelGrave rests in my leather bag just below the podium on an auditorium seat. Covered with my coat and scarf.

The platform shifts under my feet. The anatomical figure drawn into the book and copied onto the translucent paper had folded bones side by each against it's shoulder blade and a wide arching growth along the spine. The samples may have been mundane but the sketches were anything but. I pressed the red ink of the dry erase marker over the thick strokes of the outline. Three bars of red bleed onto the page.

The identity number of the next slide was written in this pages margin. I set the slide into the projection table laying both it and the anatomical figure side-by each. Twirling the red marker between my fingers.

"Angelus Mutationem. The Angel Mutation." Came a voice from high above in the auditorium.

I stand, straighten, and turn. The man behind her looked familiar, someone I'd seen in passing, in the time spent in the Howards building maybe, or between hour shifts when most of the students went to find coffee and warmth. I lean against the podium, shifting my weight onto one hip. The pen still clutched between fingers.

"Angel Mutation?" I ask him, squinting into the dark

"The addition of a bone along the spine, between the shoulder blades. The place where angels were said to have grown their wings," he said in a low voice. I follow his steps down the auditorium staircase. Reaching the edge of the platform. I twirled the Felt-tip pen, again. "If they were real."

"If. Can I ask how is it you know about all this, Mr...?"

"Gabriel Everenden," he said in a low voice. Though he wasn't taller than I am standing on the platform, his presence took up infinitely more space. He raises his chin to looking up at me, sliding a hand out of his pocket, reaching it out to me. He looked at me steadily, eyes watching me twirl the pen one more time before I put my hand in his. "This specific mutation is one of many Professor Hampden likes his students to know. I'm his research assistant, it's my job to find obscure abnormalities so he can fail the students who aren't omniscient."