“Good night, Professor Vaughan.”
“Good night, Daria. See you tomorrow.” Mary Vaughan glanced at the clock; it was now 8:55 P.M. “Be careful.”
The young grad student smiled. “I will.” And she headed out of the lab.
Mary watched her go, remembering wistfully when her own figure had been as slim as Daria’s. Mary was thirty-eight, childless, and long separated from her husband.
She went back to poring over the autoradiograph film, reading off nucleotide after nucleotide. The DNA she was studying had been recovered from a passenger pigeon mounted at the Field Museum of Natural History; it had been sent here, to York University, to see whether it could be completely sequenced. Previous attempts had been made, but the DNA had always been too degraded. But Mary’s lab had had unprecedented success reconstructing DNA that other facilities couldn’t read.
Sadly, though, the sequence broke down; there was no way to determine from this sample what string of nucleotides had originally been present. Mary rubbed the bridge of her nose. She would have to
extract some more DNA from the pigeon specimen, but she was too tired to do that [60] tonight. She looked at the wall clock; it was now 9:25.
That wasn’t too late; many of the university’s summer evening classes got out at 9:00, so there should still be lots of people milling about. If she worked past 10:00 P.M., she usually called for someone from the campus walking service to escort her to her car. But, well, it didn’t really seem necessary this early in the evening. Mary removed her pale green lab coat and hung it on the rack by the door. It was August; the lab was air conditioned, but it was surely still quite warm out. Another sticky, uncomfortable night lay ahead.
Mary shut off the lights in the lab; one of the fluorescents strobed a bit as it died. She then locked the door and made her way down the second-floor corridor, past the Pepsi machine (Pepsi had paid York University two million dollars to become the exclusive soft-drink vendor on campus).
The corridor was lined with the usual bulletin boards, announcing faculty openings, classroom assignments, club meetings, come-ons for cheap credit cards and magazine subscriptions, and all sorts of items for sale by students and faculty, including one poor clown hoping to get someone to pay him money for an old electric typewriter.
Mary continued down the corridor, her heels clicking against the tiles. No one else was in the hallway. She did hear the sound of the urinals flushing as she passed the men’s room, but that happened automatically, governed by a timer.
The door to the stairwell had safety-glass windows, with wire mesh embedded in them. Mary pushed open the door and headed down the four flights of concrete steps, each [61] flight taking her a half story lower. On the ground floor she left the stairwell and continued a short distance down another corridor, this one also empty except for a janitor working at the far end. She walked into the entryway, passing distribution boxes for the campus paper, The Excalibur, and, at last, headed out through the double doors into the warm night air.
The moon wasn’t up yet. Mary headed along the sidewalk, passing a few students as she did so, although none she recognized. She swatted at the occasional insect, and A hand clamped down over her mouth, and she felt something cold and sharp against her throat. “Don’t make a sound,” said a deep, raspy voice, pulling her backward.
“Please-” said Mary.
“Be quiet,” the man said. He was continuing to pull her back, the knife pressing sharply into her throat. Mary’s heart pounded violently. The hand over her mouth came off, and she felt it again a moment later on her left breast, squeezing roughly, painfully.
He’d pulled her into a small alcove, two concrete walls meeting at a right angle, a large pine blocking most of the view. He then spun her around, pinning her arms against the wall, his left hand still holding the knife even as it also gripped her wrist. She could see him now. He was wearing a black balaclava, but he was clearly a white man-rings of his skin were visible around his blue eyes. Mary tried to bring her knee up into his groin, but he arched backward, and all she managed was a glancing contact.
“Don’t fight me,” said the voice. She smelled tobacco on his breath, and could feel that his palms were sweaty against her wrists. The man pulled his arm away from the wall, yanking Mary’s with it, then he slammed both their arms back against the concrete so that the knife was closer to Mary’s face. His other hand found the front of his own pants, and Mary could hear the sound of a zipper. She felt acid at the back of her throat.
“I’ve-I’ve got AIDS,” said Mary, scrunching her eyes closed, trying to shut everything out.
The man laughed, a sandpapery, humorless sound. “That makes two of us,” he said. Mary’s heart skipped, but he was probably lying, too. How many women had he done this to? How many had tried the same desperate gambit?
There was a hand now on the waist of her pants, pulling down. Mary felt her zipper parting, and her pants coming down around her hips, and his pelvis and his rock-hard erection grinding against her panties. She let out a yelp and the man’s hand was suddenly on her throat, squeezing, nails biting into her flesh. “Quiet, bitch.”
Why didn’t someone come by? Why was there no one around? God, why did She felt a hand yank down her panties, then felt his penis against her labia. He rammed it into her vagina. The pain was excruciating; it felt as though things were ripping down there.
It’s not about sex, thought Mary, even as tears welled from the corners of her eyes. It’s a crime of violence. The small of her back slammed against the concrete wall, as the man smashed his body against hers, ramming himself deep into her, again and again and again, his animal grunts growing louder with each thrust.
And then, at last, it was over. He pulled out. Mary knew she should look down, look for any identifying details, look even to see whether he was circumcised, anything that might help convict the bastard, but she couldn’t bear to look at it, at him. She tilted her head up at the dark sky, everything blurred through stinging tears.
“Now, you just stay here,” said the man, tapping her cheek with a flat side of the knife. “You don’t say a word, and you stay here for fifteen minutes.” And then she heard the sound of a zipper going up, and the man’s footfalls as he ran away across the grass-covered ground.
Mary leaned back against the wall and slid down to the concrete sidewalk, her knees coming up to her chin. She hated herself for the wracking sobs that escaped from her.
After a while, she put a hand down between her legs, then pulled it away and looked at it to see if she was bleeding; she wasn’t, thank God.
She waited for her breathing to calm down, and for her stomach to settle enough that she thought she could rise to her feet without vomiting. And then she did get up, painfully, slowly. She could hear voices-women’s voices-off in the distance, two students chatting and laughing as they went along. Part of her wanted to call out to them, but she couldn’t force the sound out of her throat.
She knew it was maybe twenty-five Celsius out, but she felt cold, colder than she’d ever been in her life. She rubbed her arms, warming herself.
It took-who knew? Five minutes? Five hours? — for her to recover her wits. She should find a phone, dial 911, call the Toronto police… or the campus police, or-she knew about it, had read about it in campus handbooks-the York University rape-crisis center, but…
But she didn’t want to talk to anyone, to see anyone-to… to have anyone see her like this.
Mary closed her pants, took a deep breath, and started walking. It was a few moments before she was conscious of the fact that she wasn’t heading on toward her car, but rather was going back toward the Farquharson Life Sciences Building.
Once she got there, she held the banister all the way up the four half flights of stairs, afraid of letting go, afraid of losing her balance. Fortunately, the corridor was just as deserted as it had been before. She made it back into her lab without being seen by anyone, the fluorescents spluttering to life.
She didn’t have to worry about being pregnant. She’d been on the Pill-not a sin in her view, but certainly one in her mother’s-ever since she’d married Colm, and, well, after the separation, she’d kept it up, although there had turned out to be little reason. But she would find a clinic and get an AIDS test, just to be on the safe side.
Mary wasn’t going to report it; she had already made up her mind about that. How many times had she cursed those she’d read about who had failed to report a rape? They were betraying other women, letting a monster get away, giving him a chance to do it again to someone else, to-to her, now, but But it was easy to curse when it wasn’t you, when you hadn’t been there.
She knew what happened to women who accused men of rape; she’d seen it on TV countless times. They’d try to establish that it was her fault, that she wasn’t a credible witness, that somehow she had consented, that her morals were loose. “So, you say you’re a good Catholic, Mrs. O’Casey — oh, I’m sorry, you don’t go by that name anymore, do you? Not since you left your husband Colm. No, it’s Ms. Vaughan now, isn’t it? But you and Professor O’Casey are still legally married, aren’t you? Tell the court, please, have you slept with other men since you abandoned your husband?”
Justice, she knew, was rarely found in a courtroom. She would be torn apart and reassembled into someone she herself wouldn’t recognize.
And, in the end, nothing would likely change. The monster would get away.
Mary took a deep breath. Maybe she’d change her mind at some point. But the only thing that was really important right now was the physical evidence, and she, Professor Mary Vaughan, was at least as competent as any policewoman with a rape kit at collecting that.
The door to her lab had a window in it; she moved so that she couldn’t possibly be seen by anyone passing by in the corridor. And then she undid her pants, the sound of her own zipper causing her heart to jump. She then got a glass specimen container and some cotton swabs, and, blinking back tears, she collected the filth that was within her.
When she was done, she sealed the specimen jar, wrote the date on it in red ink, and labeled it “Vaughan 666,” her name and the appropriate number for such a monster. She then sealed her panties in an opaque specimen container, labeled it with the same date and designation, and put both containers in the fridge in which biological specimens were stored, placing them alongside DNA taken from a passenger pigeon and an Egyptian mummy and a woolly mammoth.