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It was 1 a.m. Saturday night, the first weekend after summer break, and if the world was a fair and just place Melvin Armitage would have been pleasantly drunk, cheered by the laughter of friends he hadn’t seen in months, and (in a particularly fair and just world) thinking about who he might be taking back to help warm his small and poorly heated room.
But the world was not fair, or just. It was a world where Armitage was assistant to Professor Einas Blyth, and that meant that he was drenched in sweat, caked in grave dirt, and his lower back throbbed furiously from digging up the recently deceased.
He drove up the long driveway towards the old mansion assigned to the Professor by the Institute (a decision, Armitage suspected, based on its remoteness from the Institute’s main
