It was dead week – the week before finals – and the residents of Hancock house sat together at the long living room table, studying. It was a cold, clear December night… one of those nights in which the stars take on an austere quality and the moon looks down at an unfamiliar angle. Our home, however, felt safe.
I was doing homework in one of the chairs when our estranged RA shuffled through the door after another long night of god-knows-what.
“You guys in for Taco Bell?” he asked us.
We emphatically responded that we were. The constituents of Hancock crowded into two cars and sped off through the night towards our midnight regular.
When we returned, brown bags capsized on the wood table, spilling beefy five-layer chalupa crunches, super gordita cinnamon supremes, and Mexican soft taco burrito-lupas. But highest and most empyrean of them all was the fire sauce. The fluorescent living room chandelier brought out the scarlet effulgence of the plastic as mounds-upon-mounds of the Mexican ambrosia flowed like the Rio Grande… there would be no wall built here.
We ate with a mirth matched only by the pagan kings of lore, but we were kings of a new breed – kings of essays and practicums, of reading and accounting, of Taco Bell and coffee. In short, we were the stressed but jubilant kings of grease, and we ate and laughed under the strange night.
But it was not to last. A stray fire sauce packet chanced from the hands of one of these monarchs and hit another, splattering the nectar into his eye. A shout of fury, riding the wave of the Baja Blast, sounded from the lips of our housemate. Blind from rage and fire sauce, he kicked a soccer ball at the accidental sniper.
The ball sailed past the perpetrator and struck the front of a short door with a clamorous BOOM. The door, situated at an odd angle behind the living room fireplace, shuddered and was knocked slightly ajar. Forgetting the conflict in their curiosity, the housemates of Hancock rushed to the mysterious door.
Illuminated only by the Christmas lights on the window, the depths of the small room (for that was what it was) remained obscured. The door had always remained locked – nobody had the key, and we were never told what was behind it.
Hancock was an old house, purchased by Herbert Hoover himself for the best young horse of his grandparent’s litter and a mason jar of handpicked oats. Houses as old as Hancock have secrets, and we were about to bear witness to a secret that none of us would ever forget. Someone turned on a phone flashlight and we peered into the eerie little space…
Seated against the back wall of the room was a figure clutching a book to its chest. The head of the figure was oriented downward and appeared to be motionless. We crept into the crypt, all of us walking as if the figure would notice us at any moment and jump to his feet.
I watched our RA move slowly forward into the dimness. He reached down and touched the figure on the shoulder, started, then turned around and told us to leave. Burning with curiosity, we all shone flashlights at the figure and there saw a sight that would never leave us.
Slouched against the wall was the body of Robin Baker, the president of George Fox University. His face was expressionless, as if he had but fallen asleep with his eyes open. The dusty book he clung to in his cold hands was “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis.
We jumped back at the atrocity, each of us filled with dread at the gruesome display and terrified about what it might mean.
To be continued.
