The Return Of The Muse

Brian paused as he finished telling his story.  The rosy tint returned to his whitened cheeks and his breathing became normal again as if he’d just let go of a heavy weight. He was able to smile now and acted like his old self.

            For the rest of the night I was mystified by the legend. Of course I knew he’d made it up, but I only wished I could prove it. If Brian had told me the story fifteen minutes earlier I could have ran back to the school and watched the statues just in time to make sure they weren’t alive. I’m assuming that’s why he waited until midnight to tell it. It made for a better story.

            Finally at two AM I staggered back across campus with Andy, the two of us pretending to be drunk on root beer.  There was no way for us to avoid the two statues standing motionless in the moonlight on the main lawn. They both stared out of cold, dark visors with drawn swords. It really didn’t look like they were fighting, though.

            The next day I didn’t get up until noon, and the day after that I spent all my time indoors playing computer games. When Monday finally rolled around, I was both tired and unprepared for classes. I walked past the statues on the dew soaked grass.  They looked different this time. Both of them had sheathed their swords and were kneeling with folded hands.

           It was September 10th, 2001.

About a hundred years ago when the college was first being built, a group of excavators digging the foundations of the main hall were stopped unexpectedly by a large rock. What they first thought was bed-rock turned out instead to be a large meteorite. By the time they finished unearthing it they discovered it to be seventy-five feet in diameter. They were puzzled how it got there because there were no impact marks.

            The next day while trying to hoist it out with a crane, the meteor fell fifty feet to the ground  and split open. Inside they found fossilized human bodies along with the remains of a medieval sailing ship. Most of the wood had calcified, but some of it had not yet turned to stone. The experts were astonished. They had no way to explain how European knights from the 13^th century aboard an Italian ship had landed in Northern Wisconsin inside a ball of rock. Most of the artifacts were sold to museums, but there was one object on the ship that the head of the college would not relinquish control of. It was a rolled up parchment scroll written in Byzantine Greek.

            For years this scroll lay in a secret vault, unopened because of its poor condition. Finally one day a classics professor managed to get it out of the case and began unrolling it one inch at a time. It took him five days to open it an entire foot. And everyday he kept opening it, something horrible happened.

            The first day a workman fell off the roof and broke his back. The second day two statues in the middle of campus depicting good and evil fell on each other and crumbled into dust. On the third day a faculty member died of a stroke, and on the fourth day a brand new building burned down. Finally, on the fifth day, the classics professor reluctantly closed the scroll back up and put it back in its case before sunset. He finished just in time to avert another disaster. That was the last of the tragedies.

            Once the scroll was rolled back up and restored to the vault things began to go well for the college. The student body tripled in size over the next three years, and the college president was elected to congress. The two statues in the center of the college were replaced with two brand-new ones, hewn out of the stone of the meteorite. They still depicted good and evil, but they were fashioned to look like the 13^th century knights found in the stone.

            So every night at the stroke of midnight, the two statues begin to move and fight each other. Some people say it’s because the stones possess the souls of the two dead men. Other’s say it’s an optical illusion caused by the rare metals from outer space. What ever the case, everyone agrees that there’s something strange going on. They say that one day one of the statues is going to win their epic battle, and depending on which side triumphs, something wonderful or horrible will happen to the entire school, if not the entire world.

My second week at Tree Point College went pretty well because we didn’t have any exams. I got along alright with my room-mate Collin who was studying philosophy, but my best friend was a kid down the hall named Andy Davis. He introduced himself to me the day after I blew the ceiling panels out of the chemistry lab. He informed me on the spot that he had an older sister who also went to school there and that I was welcome to start dating her anytime I wanted.

            By the Time Friday evening had come I was so anxious to get out of the dorm for the weekend that I had a backpack packed and ready to go. I asked my preppy room-mate Collin what he was planning to do.  He told me he was invited over to some professor’s home to discuss intellectual stuff. That sounded almost worse than studying, so I ran off to find Andy instead. He and his sister and some upper classmen friends were going to hide out in the woods and light an illegal bonfire while drinking root-beer out of the bottle and singing camp songs. This sounded like a much better plan, so I lit out with them and didn’t get back ‘til two AM.

            That night was the first time since I’d come to school that I really enjoyed myself. There were about a dozen other kids there, all juniors and seniors, and they had a lot of great stories to tell. Andy’s sister Rachel was a junior. She was cute but I could tell right away that she wasn’t interested in me. The two of them had an older brother named Brian who was of medium build and about two inches shorter than I was. He was a fun guy to hang out with and was a great story teller. Around midnight he became very serious for a little while and stopped talking. By this time the crickets down by the creek were chirping loudly as the sparks flew upwards toward the stars. I watched Brian very carefully.  Suddenly, with out warning, he stood up by the fire and started telling us another story….

When I was eighteen years old my parents paid for me to attend a competitive private college in northern Wisconsin called Tree Point. I’ll be the first to admit that this place was kind of preppy. Not only were the dorms gender-segregated, but the school had its own song written by some 19^th-century dead guy that we all had to sing at convocation. In addition, the dorms had curfews, and if you wanted to visit a girls’ dorm you had to show your student ID to an on-duty RA in the lobby and sign out when you left. If you didn’t you could be subject to a $50 fine and/or possibly academic probation.

            My first experience there was a run-in I had with a student named Jerome. He asked me if my parents were “alumnae” and if I expected to graduate “cum laude.” I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. I thought it might be some sort of “momma” joke, so I punched him in the face.

            Yet I managed to enjoy myself quite a bit, despite occasionally embarrassing myself in front of students who were much more sophisticated than I was. The reason for this was, even though I was kind of laid back, that I really enjoyed learning.  I would question everything. When my calculus teacher explained to me that differential equations could tell you exactly how fast an object is going, I challenged him at it. When my English professor said that Shakespeare was the greatest master of the English language, I challenged him at that as well. Finally I overstepped my bounds when I challenged my chemistry teacher’s claim that Hydrogen was a flammable gas. One exploded balloon and two blown-out ceiling panels later, I was forced to admit he was right.

            But the truth of the matter was I didn’t mind being made a fool of. I quickly made friends with all the people I really wanted to hang out with, and all the rest avoided me out of pure shame.  That didn’t bother me at all. I didn’t like most of them either.

(Holy Land, Earth. December 12th, 1099 A.D.)

            A small piece of elevated desert land stretched out a mile or two between dusty mountain cliffs. A smattering of vegetation and ugly animals were scattered throughout the tiny valley, but otherwise it was vacant of visible life.

            “I think they’re coming,” Travers whispered to Alfred who was up on the ledge above them giving final instructions to the archers. “Don’t shoot at them until we know that they’re the bad guys. Only kill them if they look ugly enough to be related to you.”

            He had to stop talking now because a squadron of foot soldiers was already coming around the bend. They were jogging in perfect beat at a steady running pace. They had on thick green turbans and white flowing desert robes that flapped around their ankles. They each held a spear in one hand and a large shield in the other that bore the sign of what looked like a “P” and an “X.”

            “Die desert scum!” yelled Alfred as he flung himself fifteen feet off the ledge. Travers had to duck in order to avoid being hit by his Scottish comrade in the head. The eager crusader had attacked the newcomers in a matter of moments, laying at least four or five of them square on the ground before most of them could draw their swords. The leader was faster, however, and had already unsheathed a long silver knife.

            “Your prowess does you credit!” grinned the captain as he faced his would-be opponent. “Unfortunately for you, Alfred, I’m one of the good guys.”

            “Sorry,” muttered the Scotsman. “I took you for a Turk. What are you doing out here, so far from home.”

            “I’ve come to retrieve you,” said Darien, “and I have orders to bring you back whether you want to come or not.”

Chapter Eight will be posted tomorrow