Maybe it was because Rossi was on my mind as I passed under his windows that I became acutely aware of his lamp still shining there. In any case, I was actually stepping into the puddles of light thrown from them onto the street, heading toward my own neighborhood, when they-the pools of light-went out quite literally under my feet. It happened in a fraction of a second, but a thrill of horror washed over me, head to foot. One moment I was lost in thought, stepping into the pool of brightness his light threw on the pavement, and the next moment I was frozen to the spot. I had realized two strange things almost simultaneously. One was that I had never seen this light on the pavement there, between the Gothic classroom buildings, although I’d walked up the street perhaps a thousand times. I had never seen it before because it had never been visible there before. It was visible now because all the streetlights had suddenly gone off. I was alone on the street, my last footstep the only sound lingering there. And except for those broken patches of light from the study where we’d sat talking ten minutes earlier, the street was dark.
My second realization, if it actually came second, swooped over me like a paralysis as I halted. I sayswooped because that was how it came over my sight, not into my reason or instinct. At that moment, as I froze in its path, the warm light from my mentor’s window went out. Maybe you think this sounds ordinary: office hours finish, and the last professor to leave the building turns off his lamps, darkening a street on which the streetlights have momentarily failed. But the effect was nothing like this. I had no sense of an ordinary desk lamp’s being switched out in a window. Instead it was as if something raced over the window behind me, blotting out the source of light. Then the street was utterly dark.
For a moment I stopped breathing. Terrified and clumsy, I turned, saw the darkened windows, all but invisible above the dark street, and on impulse ran toward them. The door through which I’d made my exit was firmly bolted. No other lights showed in the building’s facade. At this hour, the door was probably set to lock behind anyone who walked out-surely that was normal. I was standing there, hesitating, on the verge of running around to the other doors, when the streetlights came on again, and I felt suddenly abashed. There was no sign of the two students who’d walked out behind me; they must, I thought, have gone off in a different direction.
But now another group of students was strolling past, laughing; the street was no longer deserted. What if Rossi came out in a minute, as he certainly would after having switched off his light and locked his office door behind him, and found me waiting here? He had said he didn’t want to discuss further what we’d been discussing. How could I explain my irrational fears to him, there on the doorstep, when he’d drawn a curtain over the subject-over all morbid subjects, perhaps? Embarrassed, I turned away before he could catch up with me and hurried home. There, I left the envelope in my briefcase, unopened, and slept-although restlessly-through the night.
The next two days were busy, and I didn’t let myself look at Rossi’s papers; in fact, I put all esoterica resolutely out of my mind. It took me by surprise, therefore, when a colleague from my department stopped me in the library late on the afternoon of the second day. “Have you heard about Rossi?” he demanded, grabbing my arm and wheeling me around as I hurried past. “Paolo, wait!” Yes, you’re guessing correctly-it was Massimo. He was big and loud even as a graduate student, louder than he is now, maybe. I gripped his arm.
“Rossi? What? What about him?”
“He’s gone. He’s disappeared. The police are searching his office.”
I ran all the way to the building, which now looked ordinary, hazy inside with late-afternoon sun and crowded with students leaving their classrooms. On the second floor, in front of Rossi’s office, a city policeman was talking with the department chairman and several men I’d never seen before. As I arrived, two men in dark jackets were leaving the professor’s study, closing the door firmly behind them and heading toward the stairs and classrooms. I pushed my way through and spoke to the policeman. “Where’s Professor Rossi? What’s happened to him?”
“Do you know him?” asked the policeman, looking up from his notepad.
“I’m his advisee. I was here two nights ago. Who says he’s disappeared?”
The department chairman came forward and shook my hand. “Do you know anything about this? His housekeeper phoned at noon to say he hadn’t come home last night or the night before-he didn’t ring for dinner or breakfast. She says he’s never done that before. He missed a meeting at the department this afternoon without phoning first, which he’s never done before, either. A student stopped by to say his office was locked when they’d agreed on an appointment during office hours and that Rossi had never shown up. He missed his lecture today, and finally I had the door opened.”
“Was he in there?” I tried not to gasp for breath.
“No.”
I pushed blindly away from them toward Rossi’s door, but the policeman held me back by one arm. “Not so fast,” he said. “You say you were here two nights ago?”
“Yes.”
“When did you last see him?”
“About eight-thirty.”
“Did you see anyone else around here then?”
I thought. “Yes, just two students in the department-Bertrand and Elias, I think, going out at the same time. They left when I did.”
“Good. Check that,” the policeman said to one of the men. “Did you notice anything out of the ordinary in Professor Rossi’s behavior?”
What could I say? Yes, actually-he told me that vampires are real, that Count Dracula walks among us, that I might have inherited a curse through his own research, and then I saw his light blotted out as if by a giant-
“No,” I said. “We had a meeting about my dissertation and sat talking until about eight-thirty.”
“Did you leave together?”
“No. I left first. He walked me to the door and then went back into his office.”
“Did you see anything or anyone suspicious around the building as you left? Hear anything?”
I hesitated again. “No, nothing. Well, there was a brief blackout on the street. The streetlights went off.”
“Yes, that’s been reported. But you didn’t hear anything or see anything out of the usual?”
“No.”
“So far you’re the last person to see Professor Rossi,” the policeman insisted. “Think hard. When you were with him, did he do or say anything strange? Any talk of depression, suicide, anything like that? Or any talk of going away, going on a trip, say?”
“No, nothing like that,” I said honestly. The policeman gave me a hard look.
“I need your name and address.” He wrote down everything and turned to the chairman. “You can vouch for this young man?”
“He’s certainly who he says he is.”
“All right,” the policeman told me. “I want you to come in here with me and tell me if you see anything unusual. Especially anything different from two nights ago. Don’t touch anything. Frankly, most of these cases turn out to be something predictable, family emergency or a little breakdown-he’ll probably be back in a day or two. I’ve seen it a million times. But with blood on the desk we’re not taking any chances.”