As usual in these situations, the chant of “Fight! Fight! Fight!” started up and children, boys and girls, came running from all over to witness the beating. In what seemed like absolute harmony, Mark and David opened their mouths and spill the horrible sound.
‘Nyeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!’
Francis now had a scarlet fist as Gary’s nose was cut and bloody, but the bigger boy kept on pummeling away the sound was taken up by more of the children crowded around. Louder and louder it got, until it seemed everyone standing was taking part, and as Gary lay bloody and crying in the dirt and Francis, finally letting him go, scooped up as many loosed marbles as he could find, a large figure pushed through the circle of droning children and began shouting.
“That is ENOUGH!” roared Evans, the bearded, stout deputy headmaster. “Francis White, my office NOW! Gary, get yourself to the nurse, boy. The rest of you, BE QUIET! Stop that infernal racket and get back inside, bell goes in two minutes. Stop it, NOW!”
The noise stopped, just like that.
The children slowly walked back towards the red-bricked school buildings.
Mr. Evans helped Gary up, gave him a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and shook his head, wondering what new ridiculous trend this group droning thing was.
***
Over the next few days the lamentation, as the noise was named by Mr. Helby—the English literature teacher—during a discussion in the staff room, occurred more and more.
It became a regular part of practically every break and lunchtime. Each successive day it increased in volume as more and more of the children joined the terrible chorus.
Mrs. Colback, the elderly school secretary, quit her job because of it, saying it reminded her of when the Germans were sending doodlebugs into the skies and raining death down upon the city.
Teachers at one end of the school complex would hear the ‘nyeeeeeeeerrr!’ sound rise way off at the other end and rush across to help their fellow staff calm the situation. It was always the same form of trigger; someone had dropped something, fallen over, started a fight, broken an item, and the hideous, broken Klaxon-like dirge would emanate from the pupils in the vicinity.
On Friday, during lunch, all of the teachers were eating together in the dining hall at the staff table. Even Mr. Talbot, the headmaster, had made a rare appearance to dine with his colleagues. He usually just stayed in his office during lunch and ate a Cornish pasty, a bag of cheese and onion crisps and a Scotch egg, all washed down with a carton of Ribena. The hall was full with blue-blazered pupils and the low, incoherent buzz of multiple conversations filled the space. The air was filled with the aromas of the various food items being offered by the dinner ladies that day—beef sausages, chicken curry, grilled turbot—all battling to dominate the sense of smell, creating a whirling, pungent atmosphere of oils, tang and spice.
“Well,” said Mr. Talbot, slicing into a sausage and piling mash onto his fork, “let’s see if this monstrous din rises up today. If it does then this is a good place to address all of the children at once before the weekend, and I have ordered Miss Honeydew to photocopy a letter I composed to send home to the parents.”
“I’m sure it’s just a silly trend,” Miss Winter suggested, “just like when they were wearing those beer bottle caps on their shoes or when all the boys were tucking their ties into their shirts, it’ll become boring to them soon enough and they’ll wait for the next ridiculous gimmick to come along.”
Mr. Evans rubbed his beard and shook his head. “No, not a trend, this one, Beverley. It’s something else entirely. It almost seems to be—for want of a less dramatic—contagious. It started with that Holland boy and now half the bloody school are doing it.”
“I think it’s all about the empathy of the child’s soul,” Mr. Helby said, pushing a piece of fish around his plate absentmindedly, “this sound, this lamentation, they’re somehow passing the feelings of sadness and sympathy between themselves and expressing those feelings with the basest of noises. It’s quite remarkable, actually.”
“No offense, Mr. Helby, but that’s poppycock! I was there when Mark Holland started this whole nonsense and, I assure you, there was no sympathy involved, it was a horrible and mocking thing. The lamentation? More like the cruel.” Mrs. Dodd sat back after her little outburst, not even realizing she had leaned quite so far forward whilst talking, and felt the quick heat of a flush in her cheeks. “Anyway, if you will excuse me, I do need to pop across to the chemist before lunch is over, and pick up a prescription.” She stood, gathered her plate and cutlery and dropped them into a plastic bin on her way out of the hall, handbag swinging from the crook of an elbow.
“See what you did, Andrew?” said Mr. Evans, pointing a fork with a piece of chicken pierced on the tines at his colleague. “Poor woman couldn’t get out of here fast enough. Prescription my arse. She was absolutely traumatized that day with the Holland lad, and you calling it a good thing is not going to help. I agree with her, too, it’s a bloody disease is what it is.”
“Language, Timothy!” Mr. Talbot lowered his head and surveyed the table over the top of his spectacles. “There are children around us, in case you had forgotten.”
A loud clatter sounded across the hall as one of the dinner ladies dropped a big, empty metal serving dish to the tiled floor. All the teachers inhaled sharply and held their breath for a moment; the sound they dreaded immediately started to rise as child after child stood and began to wail.
Table by table the students stood and joined the cacophony, staring and pointing in the direction of the unfortunate dinner lady who stood silent and still, horrified.
Mr. Talbot took in the scene for a short while, utterly bemused, before pushing himself up from the table and shouting at the children to stop it and sit down. He couldn’t make his voice heard over the awful noise even when shouting. “You lot! Don’t just sit there, help me with them!”
Mr. Talbot slammed both fists into the tabletop as he berated his teaching staff at the top of his lungs.
Everyone quickly rose and dispersed around the room, clapping their hands and yelling for silence.
***
Eileen Dodd sat in the small café down the road from the school, drinking a large mug of tea and chain-smoking a pack of Benson & Hedges, trying to calm down. Andrew Helby was an infuriating buffoon on the best of days but his attempts to explain away that bloody horrible noise as an act of good had really rattled her cage.
She blew smoke from her nose with a big huff, shaking her head, knowing she shouldn’t let herself get so wound up by the man.
There was a rumble as one of the town’s signature cream and maroon double-decker buses passed by in the street and Eileen placed a hand against the window, felt the vibrations in the glass.
Right, Eileen, finish this tea and get back to it, no more being mardy over Helby, he’s always going to be an annoying idiot just like a dog is always going to bark when the postman comes, not worth the stress.
She put her cigarette out in a ceramic ashtray with a series of stabbing motions and gulped the last of the tea. As she stood up to leave, a great crashing noise came from down the road, a terrible screech, glass breaking, people screaming, causing everyone both in the café and on the street to turn their heads towards the commotion. It had felt like the whole building shook.
“That sounded like it came from the school!” said a waitress, peering through the window, and Eileen was out of the door in a flash, joining a number of people who were already hurrying up the road towards the source of the commotion.
As she neared the corner, a new sound joined the screams and moans, overpowering them; that infernal drone, the cruel. A heavy sense of dread soured Eileen’s belly as she rounded the corner and the deep red brick of the school buildings leant a hard backdrop to the scene ahead. The black and grey undercarriage of the bus she had seen just a minute earlier was exposed and facing in her direction, the bus having tipped over onto its side. The two left side
wheels that were now up in the air span around, going nowhere. There was glass all over the street, shards glinting in the sunlight, whilst the heads and shoulders of several passengers emerged from the broken windows of the bus, some of them bloodied, some waving their hands for help as they struggled to pull themselves up and out of the toppled vehicle.
Groans, screams and cries came from inside the bus where, Eileen imagined, most of the people on board would be piled up against the side of the vehicle that now lay against the street itself.
The poor people upstairs would have hit a lot harder than those down below, she thought.
Worse than all of this, though, was what greeted Eileen as she moved around the back of the bus, towards the terrible noise; it was so loud she actually placed her hands over her ears.
A river of blue filled the road, every single pupil from the school it seemed standing in columns, mouths wide open as they howled. At the very front, nearest to the crash, stood the teachers. Talbot, Winter, Helby, even tough Mr. Evans, every last one of them. Right arms outstretched, index fingers pointing forwards, eyes wide, thecruel issued forth from the adults far louder and harsher than anything the children were capable of.
She noticed with a quick horror that made her sweat and feel cold all at the same time that the anxious and curious bystanders who had rushed to the scene with her were, one by one, moving towards the back of the bus and lining up with the children and teachers, raising their arms and joining in with the terrible hell howl.
Old ladies with blue rinses out shopping for soup, shopkeepers in aprons and baker’s jackets, young families out for lunch in the local eateries, even a solitary policeman who had been riding by on his bicycle, all took their place in the chorus of hate.
Eileen knew she had to get as far away as she could, and turned to run as fast as she could; her feet disobeyed her intentions and stayed stuck to the ground as she tried to turn, resulting in a horrible, twisting face plant.
Before she could even acknowledge the loose teeth in her jaws and the blood pouring from her smashed nose she was crawling towards the abominable choir, hand over hand and elbow over elbow.
She felt her wrecked mouth open wide to its fullest extent and all hope was lost.
BIOGRAPHY: Harper has been writing unsettling stories across many genres for the last few years. He has had stories appear in collections with such great tale tellers such as George RR Martin, John Shirley, Joe R. Lansdale, Nancy Collins, Brian Keene and Tim Curran. He currently has his first solo collection of short stories ready for publication and two novels in progress.
RED SCREAM WITH LITTLE SMILE
Paul Edmonds
Garland has always been a cultural mousetrap. Things creep in, usually when they’re used-up and on clearance, but nothing ever leaves. Walk downtown and you’ll see the past on full display, the beatup cars and the fanny packs and the greasy Elvis haircuts, all of it just swirling around, blocking out the contemporary like some weird nuclear winter. It happens when a place is left holding the short straw of geography—so much gets lost in transit that it locks in whatever it can. Recycles the old days like air in a sealed room. And that’s just what happened in the spring of 1996, when the students of Garland High decided to send up a call to Melinda Barrett.
It was a PBS special that pulled her memory from the clouds of time. The Decline of the Brown River Valley. The documentary, which played over two nights in early May, targeted the cluster of small towns that comprised a thirty mile stretch of hopelessness, which began in the north-central part of the state and petered off at the Berkshire Mountains to the west. It ruffled a lot of feathers in Garland, but there was no disputing the salient points: An alarming number of high school dropouts; the scourge of domestic violence; a teenage pregnancy rate that could rival the most prolific puppy mill.
Most damning was the bleak report of the Valley’s manufacturing industry, a once-bustling juggernaut that had devolved into a disgrace of low wages and dangerous working conditions. Singled out was the Barrett Tool Company, one of the few factories that had trudged on after the Great War.
Interspersed between current shots of the building’s crumbling edifice were stills of the factory during its golden age—an idyllic blue-collar paradise of smiling workers and gleaming machines. At the center of the glowing, old-timey images, was Melinda Barrett, beautiful and stern-faced among her fawning employees. Melinda Barrett, who’d inherited her husband’s half of the business in the twenties, rescued Garland from the slavering jaws of the Great Depression. Melinda Barrett, who drowned at age thirty-five, was found downriver, spread out on a rock, birds fighting over her eyes.
The doc pried opened her casket, but it was Alan Trembley, sociology teacher at Garland High School, who kicked it over, that sent Melinda’s corpse skidding across his classroom floor. Trembley had been hit hard by the documentary. He captured all four hours on videotape, and over the course of a week, made his students watch every depressing minute. He would stop the tape frequently to contradict the filmmakers and wring his hands like a damsel in some silent movie. But despite the animated commentary, interest quickly waned, and by Friday most of his class had checked out, nodding off and drooling onto their desks.
Until one girl, Freda Castine, was plucked from her semi-coma by something she glimpsed on the small Magnavox TV.
“What’s that?” she said, wiping spittle off her chin.
Trembley paused the video, tapped the screen with the remote. “This?”
It was a black and white picture, a wide-angle snap of the Millers River, sparkling in the day’s last light. In the background, photobombing the pleasant scene, was the Barrett Tool Company, black against the setting sun. In the foreground were a dozen teenagers crowded along the scrubby bank, several more clinging to the riveted support beams of the Exchange Street Bridge. They had funny haircuts, were decked out in high-waisted trousers and pleated skirts and baggy cardigan sweaters. Their mouths were open wide, their chests puffed up, as if they were trying to blow the massive brick eyesore into the next county.
“Yeah,” Freda said. ‘What are they doing?”
Her sudden interest roused the rest of the class. They sat up, rubbing the sleep from their eyes.
Trembley grinned. “Scream Night.”
“Scream Night?” Freda said. “Never heard of it.”
“Tradition’s been dead for a while,” Trembley said, and sat on the edge of his desk. “Was popular in the thirties and early forties when this school was just eight rooms and an outhouse.”
Freda squinted, gave the picture a closer study. “What were they screaming at?”
Trembley rewound the tape, froze on a portrait of Melinda Barrett. Her thin lips were set in a tight frown, her haired pulled back into a tidy businesswoman’s bun. She had a rose pinned to her blouse, so big it could have been a strange third breast. She looked like the kind of woman who could handle your finances, or revamp your assembly line, or maybe shoot off your balls.
“This little lady.”
“The tool chick?” Jim Fournier, nicely stoned, hair sticking up in chunks and spikes. “What’d she do, steal their mascot or something?”
“You’re an idiot,” Freda said, but she was smiling. She’d been best friends with Jim since first grade, along with Billy LaFond, who was home that day recovering from knee surgery.
“Nothing so reasonable,” Trembley said, and folded his arms. “They were trying to raise her from the grave.”
The class leaned forward, all at once, as if it’d been choreographed.
“Zombie style,” Freda said excitedly.
“Well, no,” Trembley said. “It was her spirit they were attempting to summon. They believed that if they made enough noise, Melinda Barrett would show herself.” He sniffed. “And if she did, then a good summer would follow.”
“Like when a groundhog sees his shadow,” Jim said, licking his lips. “Early spring and all that.”
“Similar theory, I guess.”
Freda fidgeted in her seat. “Why would seeing some dead lady mean a good summer?”
“She was like a patron saint to this town,” Trembley said. “Her husband, Sydney, started the business in 1913, and from day one Melinda campaigned for the employees. Sydney rarely listened, though. He was a stubborn man. Same with Aldo Brighenti, his partner. The bottom line was all they cared about.”
“Damn,” Freda said. “The Brighentis owned the factory way back then?”
“Half of it, they did. But then Sydney passed—stroke—and Melinda took over his share of the factory. She made some big changes. Saw to it that her people were treated fairly. Paid them well. It caused a lot of friction with Brighenti.” Trembley scratched his bushy beard. “After Melinda died unexpectedly, things went downhill. Brighenti put things back the way they’d been before. Slashed wages, tossed safety out the window. I’m sure a lot of those kids felt the effects at home. Maybe they figured it couldn’t hurt to send out a little prayer to the woman—or at least their version of a prayer.”
“Did anyone ever see her?” Jim asked.
“I’m sure a few of those screamers saw something they thought was a ghost. Reflection off the water, a wink of light from some girl’s sparkly bracelet.”
“But you don’t believe any of it was real?” Freda said, sounding a little dejected.
“Sorry,” Trembley said. “I don’t.”
“Maybe they did see something, though,” Jim said. “A mass hallucination. Like Haley’s Comet.”
Freda glared at him. “That really happened, dummy.”
Trembley shrugged his shoulders. “Want to know what I think? They were just having fun. Being kids. And if they passed around a few stories, so what? Whole thing was harmless enough. Helped them forget their problems for a while.”
“Why’d they stop doing it, then?” Freda said.
“Part of it was the war. Making a joke of death wasn’t very funny once Garland boys started coming home in caskets. But mostly, I think it was just the town itself. The factories started closing, optimism became a scarce commodity. Wishing for a good summer—a good anything—must have seemed pointless.”
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