Deadly Spirits

by Michelle Scott

  Leave it to Smalley to put the ‘fool’ back in ‘foolproof’, Ernie thought. “Maybe it would better if he got on the intercom and just said, “Put your head between your legs and kiss your ass good-bye.”

  Mary didn’t laugh. Instead, she fiddled with the gold cross that hung around her neck. “It doesn’t matter anyway, does it? A code wouldn’t have done a thing to stop what happened.” They’d reached her classroom, and she stood with her hand on the doorknob as if she couldn’t make up her mind to go in or not. “Gene didn’t want me to come to school today, but I told him that I had to be here for the kids.”

  “Are you going to be all right?” Ernie asked.

  “Yes. No. Possibly.” She shrugged and looked away. “How about you? Have you talked to anyone?”

  “You. Just now.” When she rolled her eyes at him, he grinned. “I’m fine. Really.”

  “That’s just it. You’re too fine.”

  He gave her a sly look and ran his fingers through his hair. “That’s what all the ladies tell me.”

  Her frown deepened. “Seriously, Ernie, don’t joke. After what happened to you…”

  “Not to me. To one of my students, but not to me. I was the lucky one.” Though since that day, he didn’t feel lucky. Not one bit.

  “After what happened to you,” she continued as if he hadn’t interrupted, “I don’t think it’s good to simply go on as if nothing has changed.”

  “Nothing has changed. By the end of the week, it will be business as usual. And by the end of the year, all we’ll be able to talk about is how many kids aren’t showing up for class and should we fail them or not.”

  Her expression didn’t lighten. In a surprisingly intimate gesture, she put her hand on his arm and squeezed it. “Talk to someone. Please.” She dropped her hand. “Call me if you like.”

  “And have Gene the Machine beat the living daylights out of me for harassing his wife? No, thanks.”

  “Don’t call him that; he hates it.” But this time she did smile. Then she swatted him gently with her umbrella before going into her room.

  Ernie’s room was three doors down. He lingered outside it for a moment, getting up his courage, before entering and flipping on the lights. It was the first time he’d stepped through the door since the shootings.

  There was, of course, no evidence of the violence that had taken place here. No blood or bone chips or flaps of skin littering the floor. No gray matter smeared across the window panes or Rorschach of blood on the bulletin boards. The cleaning company had done its job well.

  But as Ernie surveyed the room, he felt that the cleaning company had done an excessively good job. This wasn’t his room; it looked too clean. Too shiny. The floor and been stripped and re-waxed. New bulletin boards replaced the old ones, and the walls were freshly painted. Even the desks had been scrubbed down. It was as if the entire room was screaming, ‘Look at me, I’m clean!’. But what Ernie wanted was for his room to be grubby and disgusting, the way it had been before the shooting. He wanted everything to be the way it had been before the shooting, back when his only worries revolved around the fact that his students didn’t know the central idea of “Bartleby the Scrivener” no matter how many times he’d covered it in class.

  That’s what he’d been doing on the day of the shootings: trying to get the kids to understand the central idea in “Bartleby”. It had been unseasonably hot that October morning; the breathless, muggy kind of hot from which there was no relief. Ernie’s shirt had been soaked with sweat from the moment he’d walked into his classroom. The electric fan at the front of the room blew a tepid breeze across the first row of desks, but did nothing for the back of the room. Most of the students were yawning, and a few dozed. Even the flies buzzing around the windows were sluggish.

  Ernie’s mind hadn’t been on the lesson, either. Instead, he was fretting about the delivery of record albums that he’d recently won on e-Bay. The UPS man was bound to set the package on his front porch where the afternoon sun would warp them. So unless he could get a hold of his father and convince him to rescue the box, his purchase would be ruined.

  As he contemplated his dilemma, a shout out in the hall interrupted him.

  “Help!! Help!!”

  At the cry – a shriek of pure terror – his heart had jump started, suddenly pumping at full speed. He ran out into the hall, nearly colliding with the student who had screamed. She clutched his arms so tightly that he cried out in pain, but even as he tried to pry the girl away from him, he heard the gunshots.

  There were two of them, sharp reports that brought to mind the .30 – 30 rifle he used for hunting. He shoved the girl inside the classroom and looked down the hall. Seeing nothing, he ran back inside, closing the door behind him. “Take cover,” he told his wide-eyed students. He was about to try the defective telephone on his desk when the classroom door swung open with a bang that made several kids yelp in alarm.

  And then Jonathan appeared in the doorway.

  The hero fantasies Ernie had indulged in over the years – himself as Bruce Willis, maybe, taking on a group of terrorists in an office building or Russell Crowe facing down an entire South American guerrilla army – immediately faded into black. When faced with the reality of that blood-spattered boy toting the rifle, all of his superhuman notions vanished in a heartbeat.

  Instead, Ernie made a weak remonstration, as if Jonathan were trying to enter class late without a tardy slip. “Hey, you can’t…” was all he managed to utter before Jonathan pegged his target, put the rifle to his shoulder, and pulled the trigger. Then, as calmly as a hall monitor delivering a message from the office, the killer turned and left the classroom.

  Somehow Ernie had made it out of the building. Somehow he found himself out on the football field with hundreds of screaming, crying, shell-shocked students and faculty. There was vomit on the front of his shirt as well as a great deal of his student’s blood. Afterwards, several people claimed that he had tried to help the victim, and that he had refused to leave the classroom until all of his students were safe. He, for one, couldn’t remember doing any of it.

  When he had finally gotten home and had found that the box of records was sitting on his front porch just as he had predicted, he stared at it in amazement. While he’d been at school facing his worst nightmare, life had gone on as normal. A man in a brown uniform had delivered his package to his home. The records had warped in the hot afternoon sun, just as he’d predicted. His seventy dollar investment was gone. That these things had even mattered to him at one time was the grimmest kind of comedy.

  Now, as Ernie stood in his hyper-sanitized classroom, the memory of the shooting left him feeling weak and slightly sick. With sudden shame, he realized how thin his veneer of bravado was. He’d come to school this morning prepared to be the life of the party, ready to put on a courageous front for the other teachers. What a sham. In reality, he’d hadn’t slept at all the night before knowing he’d have to walk these hallways today. Just pulling into the parking lot that morning had brought a wave of anxiety so intense that he’d nearly turned around and gone home. He was as frail and weak as anyone and, what was worse, he was too frail and weak to admit it.

  Not able to bear another moment in this empty, far-too-clean room, he decided to get a cup of coffee. He still had a few minutes before the first bell rang. He greeted the students who were now filling the halls and went into the teachers’ lounge. Luckily, a pot of coffee had just finished brewing. Ernie filled his cup – a travel mug the size of a small thermos – to the very top, nearly emptying the carafe.

  The only other person in the teachers’ lounge was Dave Miller who was buried in his sports section. Ernie took a seat across the table from him. “Not up for conversation this morning?”

  Dave grunted and looked up for a moment giving Ernie a chance to glimpse the dark circles under his eyes. Usually, the coach was a bulldog on the verge of a snarl, but today he exhibited a weariness that Ernie had never seen before. His wa
s the face of a man going through the motions.

  Concerned, Ernie gentled his tone. “How’s the team taking this?”

  Dave shrugged. “It’s tough.” He stared thoughtfully down at the sports section. “The sad thing is that Vandyke was shaping up to be a good player. He’d put on some muscle over the summer and was packing attitude when he showed up for the first practice. He was really getting into it; playing like he was ready to single-handedly take on the Lions at Thanksgiving.” The coach’s eyes grew distant. “He was showing promise.”

  Ernie had been nodding sympathetically and sipping his coffee, but he suddenly stopped. He didn’t like the sound of this at all. Extra muscle was one thing, but the aggression was a red flag. He’d had Jonathan as a student the previous year and knew that the kid was as easy going and affable as they come. Had someone asked Ernie to make a list of students who might potentially shoot up the school, Jonathan would have been dead last. “That doesn’t sound like him at all,” Ernie told the coach. “I mean, weren’t you surprised when he showed up at practice and acted like he wanted to take on the Lions?”

  Dave evaded his eyes. “Not really. I’ve seen it happen before.”

  Ernie’s stomach tightened. When Dave had been hired two years before, Ernie had heard rumors that the coach had turned a blind eye to steroid use among players at his previous school. Though the accusations hadn’t been proven, Ernie had always wondered why a class AA coach would leave his job to come out to a class C school in the country. “Seen it before? Like with steroids, right?”

  Dave’s face hardened into the take-no-prisoners expression he used during the games. “Look, he had buffed up a lot since last year. Maybe more than a kid usually would. But I heard that he was working over at the Calhoun farm last summer, and I thought that all that hay bailing and woodcutting or whatever had put some muscle on him.”

  Ernie felt a sick twist in his gut. “He was working for Evander Calhoun? Are you sure?” Suddenly his concerns over steroid abuse disappeared.

  “The guys ragged on him quite a bit about it. They were all looking for details, you know? Wondering what the old guy was like.” Dave picked up the sports section and opened to a new page. “I guess there’s all kinds of rumors about him.”

  While the coach went back to reading his paper, Ernie retreated into stunned silence. Ten minutes ago, he wouldn’t have thought that anything could have made him feel worse than facing his classroom.

  He knew from firsthand experience that Evander Calhoun’s reputation was not built on rumor alone. Though Ernie never liked to think of it, the summer he’d turned thirteen he’d also spent some time working for Evander. The old coot had been cunning in singling him out for the job. Like everyone in town, he’d known that Ernie’s mother had just died, that his father was deep in the bottle, and that Ernie himself was isolated and lonely, desperate for a guiding hand to help him through the tragedy. In short, Evander knew a victim when he saw one.

  Looking back on it, Ernie wasn’t sure what haunted him more: the memory of what he’d experienced or the fact that no one had believed him. And he wondered if Jonathan – good-natured, grinning Jonathan who wrote the most sincere, yet unbelievably bland essays about his family’s trips to Disneyworld and how much he loved his girlfriend – had been forced to go through what he had. The answer came immediately. Of course he had. Nothing else could explain why the boy had done what he’d done.

  The intercom interrupted his reverie. “Attention, Mrs. Redguard!” The secretary’s normally strident voice was high-pitched with strain, just a decibel away from a scream. “Mrs. Redguard! Mrs.… Oh, everyone just leave the building! Now!”

  This is the end of the sample to The Soulless. The Soulless is available at the Kindle store, and can be read for free with Kindle Unlimited.

  More supernatural suspense by Michelle Scott – Straight to Hell

  The devil never forgets a deal.

  I, Lilith Straight, was the woman you always wanted to be. I was married to someone better looking than your husband, we lived in that house you always wanted. Within a year, however, all of that changed. My marriage dissolved, my house burned down, and my job hardly paid the bills. So when I was hit by a car and died, I thought my life couldn’t get any worse. Boy, was I wrong.

  Hell was not the place I imagined. It was worse. During my brief stay, I learned some disturbing truths about my family. Most worryingly my ancestor’s deal with the devil promising him every female descendent as a succubus.

  So these were my options: Life on earth as a soul-sucking seductress. Or death and pass the succubus baton to my sweet little daughter. There was no choice. Welcome to hell on earth, Lilith. Mother, teacher, wanton she-demon.

  Straight to Hell is published by Carina UK (the digital imprint of Harlequin), and is available wherever e-books are sold.

  About the Author

  Maybe it's because of my Halloween birthday, but I've always been attracted to scary stories. On the other hand, I love romances as well. Once I discovered that these two genres existed side-by-side in urban fantasy novels, I was in heaven! Urban fantasy is like chocolate and peanut butter: a perfect, to-die-for combination that I can never get enough of.

  I've been writing since childhood, but earned my bachelor's degree in psychology and my master's in English literature. When I'm not writing, I'm a straight-laced English teacher at a two-year college in Detroit. I've been married to Mr. Right for over thirty years. I also have three children: a boy and two girls, all of whom have threatened to never speak to me again if I turn them into characters and put them into my books.

  To stay on top of new releases, and get access to freebies, visit Michelle Scott’s fiction and sign up for my newsletter.