by Matthew Tait
Jeff looked directly into the camera. ‘In the fall of 2000. One way for me to gauge time was never things happening at the school, believe it or not. It was the music the kids were listening to. Rock bands were out, and boy bands were back in. That I remember.’
‘And you said she was … initially kind?’
Nodding, Jeff said, ‘Kind as a sister’s kiss, despite her outward appearance. Quiet, too. Took her a few days to settle into the routine and make sure the sinks in the science building were done properly, but after that she was fine. Never took a sick day, either. Unlike some of the others did on payday so they could go somewhere and drink it up.’
‘I remember the papers,’ Jason said. He stood by the door, as if ready to make a sudden exit if the situation demanded it. ‘They said she started … grooming some of the adolescents during her shift?’
‘Even now it’s hard for me to believe it – to believe it was the same girl. Tuesdays and Thursdays she did the music room, the toilets downstairs, and emptied the trashcans on the second floor a bit later. She took a lot of time to do it, too. Forty-five minutes to be exact. Too much time in her four-hour shift. And just like in the gym, there’s still a lot of students hanging around in that building after the final bell rings – students finishing up on their piano lessons, prepping the theater room, or just hanging around bored for their parents to pick them up.’
Dillion said, ‘So she just … started making conversation with the students?’
‘We didn’t encourage it. Talking to the faculty and students is somewhat forbidden, outlined as a no-no in the initial employment contract we sign, but everyone did it. You have to keep the lines of communication open so you knew when to clean the desks and when not to – when to stay out of the way if the teachers were conducting interviews with the parents and so forth. Marcy, I guess, liked to play the guitar at home, and during her clean she would pick up an instrument and get talking to the young ones. After all, it was only a short time ago she’d been one of them.’
Carolina looked confused. ‘She was a student here, too?’
‘No, I didn’t say that.’ Though he tried, it was difficult to keep the impatience out of his voice. ‘I just meant she was fresh out of high school, herself. Had all the same concerns they did. During those nights she struck up a friendship with a girl, one Regina White. Regina’s parents worked late in the city and didn’t come to pick her up until well after 6 o’clock. Marcy, she … she would invite her down into this room while they waited.’
Jeff stopped. He could see the others weighing the import of his words, reconciling what they had seen on their TV screens with what he was divulging now. And it had all happened right here, of course, in this room. Young Marcy had seduced a female student – cajoled her into doing deeds among the dirty rags and bottles of bleach. Deeds deemed not only unethical in the school’s eyes, but against the law as well. Because Regina had been a minor, only fifteen years old. And there had been others as well …
Now Dillion moved closer, edging toward Jeff in a way that was almost creepy. And though Jeff knew what was coming, had agreed to omit no details, it still made him feel as if he were disclosing something he shouldn’t. ‘Tell us what you know,’ Dillion said.
‘I caught them here, that first time. Came down to get a can of the bubble-gum remover – my trolley had run out – and I almost walked in on them. They were … going at it, I guess you could say. And Regina seemed entirely reciprocal from where I was standing. They didn’t notice me watching, didn’t hear my key slide through the lock. Marcy had cleared away what was in the middle and laid down some kind of a sheet for them. She’d also drawn something like a pentagram around it. Had her little stereo playing, too. The most horrible sounds you ever heard. Not like her death metal, either, but something even worse, something like chanting. Anyway, I quickly closed the door and slipped out. It was hard finishing up my part of the building, but I did it. Later, I came down and confronted Marcy.’
If there was even the slightest titillation amongst his audience, they chose not to reveal it. Jason appeared sick. Alyssa and Carolina the same. Dillion had not shifted from his rigor-mortis director’s stance.
‘She appeared shamed, of course. Utterly beside herself with it. Seemed perplexed, too, as if she had no recollection of having sex in this cleaning closet while she was supposed to be working. And do you know what? I don’t believe she did remember. Not properly, anyway. You see, I’d been working here long enough to know how the unseen world could work on a person, and if it wanted to it could drive you a little crazy … or make you have strange desires you would never contemplate on an ordinary day.’
Dillion asked, ‘The unseen world?’
Jason said, ‘Strange desires?’
For this part Jeff suddenly found it difficult to look directly at his spectators. Instead, he stared down at the concrete. ‘It’s hard to explain. Like I told you before, there are a lot of nights a cleaner is completely alone. And it’s at those times when you can feel the place working on you, burrowing into you. Myself, I thought I had developed a knack for tuning it out. But sometimes I let my guard slip. One night I almost went postal, wanted to trash the seventh grade science rooms and let out some of the nocturnal animals they kept bundled up in cages. And I almost did it, too –’
‘The unseen world,’ Dillion pressed.
‘I haven’t really mentioned that before now, have I? No, I guess not. Was kind of a personal nickname I gave to the other place overlapping this one. A place far-removed from the world of playing children and teachers but so close on some days you could almost smell it.’
‘You didn’t fire her then and there?’ Alyssa asked.
‘No, I didn’t,’ Jeff replied simply. ‘Because I knew it wasn’t really her. I did give her a warning, though. We had the same rules here as anywhere else. Three strikes and you’re out. I told her romantic shenanigans were fine and good and none of my business … but that she needed to keep that stuff private and keep it at home.’
Jason’s look of pale sickness had gravitated to outright revolt. ‘But surely you knew it was more than just two girls … exploring each other. What about the pentagram? The weird music you said she was playing?’
‘We all carry guilt, Mr. Wedle. Some more than others. Why didn’t you alert the school principal when Father Parrington began showing his illness physically? Weren’t weeping sores enough for you to run to your mother and confess?’
For a moment Jason appeared dumbstruck, kneading his purple tie with one sweaty hand and staring at Jeff reproachfully. Then his shoulders slumped in resignation and he nodded.
‘I can’t tell you why I didn’t take more forceful action. I wanted the girl to keep her job, but it was probably more than that. Maybe I just wanted to see something like that again, or maybe, just maybe, Providence Place made me believe there would somehow be consequences if I breathed a word of it to anyone.’
Alyssa, using the trainset for an ashtray, butted out her smoke on the tracks and ignited another from her seemingly endless stash. ‘But she kept doing it, didn’t she?’ she said. ‘Kept bringing girls down here?’
‘From what I later found out, yes. And boys, too. When students were interviewed in the … shall we say aftermath, some of them confessed to a threesome taking place. Truth be told, I don’t know absolutely everything that Marcy did.’ Pausing, he added: ‘Only what she did at the very end.’
At this, Dillion did move, scooting forward toward Jeff with the eerie agility of a stalker. Though Jeff recoiled, slightly taken aback, he took a deep breath and gathered the rest of his courage. This was, after all, what Dillion had paid him for.
‘I got a call from one of my other cleaners, Robb, who’d finished his three-hour shift at 7:00 PM. He couldn’t get into this room to return his key and sign out. Someone had jammed the door from the inside. Coming down the steps, I think I instinctively knew that whatever was happening to Marcy had reached a whole new level. A Matthew
Thrane kind of level. Thankfully almost every child had disappeared by then, the only ones left were a few stragglers playing basketball in the northern quadrangle. I told Robb that when I opened the door, he wasn’t to scream or make a scene. And he didn’t, either – full credit to the man. Though he did quit the following day. No surprises there.’
‘How did you get the door open?’ Dillion asked.
‘With a crowbar. Just like the one you’ve got in your bag. Took a while – Marcy had propped up one of the classroom chairs in need of fixing under the door handle. But we got it open … eventually.
‘There were three of them – four including Marcy. Although that was something else I didn’t know until later. Because there were so many jostling limbs within the circle she’d drawn. Nylon clad legs and arms, some of them with their shoes still attached. Two girls and a boy. I couldn’t see their heads at first, since they were underneath you see. But I could see their torsos, their intestines, and even shiny bone fragments like something you’d see in a butcher’s window.’
‘Jesus,’ Carolina remarked, and Jeff noted the wince from Jason. A grown man whose cassock-wearing days were a thing of the past, he still carried the ability to recognize sin and disprove of it.
‘I didn’t notice Marcy for some time, because I was too numb with shock. That, and trying to figure out how she’d done it. I mean, there was a saw off to one side on my desk, still dripping blood, and various other cutting tools. But how had she managed to kill so quickly and efficiently? This was … not just dismemberment; it was evisceration. The kind of skilled workmanship you’d expect a meat-packer or a fucking serial killer to perform.’
Jeff was out of breath, and he hated himself for it. Not all that long ago, (when Dillion had first made his offer), he had proclaimed to their director Providence Place didn’t scare him like it did others. But what a cuntish joke that was turning out to be. Because here he sat on the cusp of hyperventilating. Those bodies had been children for Christ’s sake; intact pieces of upright humanity with both personality and soul. And one of his cleaners had reduced them to something one might glimpse strolling through an abattoir: off-cuts of offal dumped unceremoniously into a boiling vat.
On the verge of hyperventilating or not, he certainly had their attention now. All that was really left to divulge was the state of Marcy herself.
Pointing a finger into the corner, he said, ‘She jumped from over there.’
The others followed the path of his finger, eyebrows arched.
‘I’d set up a small pyramid of crates – we used them sometimes to dust higher ground, places the adjustable mops couldn’t reach. For most of the school year they just sat there, doing nothing. But Marcy put them to use.’
‘She jumped?’ Jason asked. ‘You mean she hung herself?’
‘Not precisely, no. She just jumped. But first, she placed a broom in her center, inside of her, so that when she came down, she landed on it. When I found her, she was sort of lying in a fetal position on her side. The broom had gone all the way through her body and come out her throat.’
Silence greeted the revelation. A silence, Jeff mused, that had substance. They were eyeing the crates, trying to imagine this grisly scenario playing out – trying to envisage the pain and end result of such a scenario. There were many ways a person could choose to end their life, countless means depicted on the news and shown in movies, but Marcy Ribald’s selected method had a taboo, almost urban-legend mystique. Something you might have heard or read about but never dared to believe had actually played out.
‘Most of it was covered up, of course. We did a lot of that here. Not the murders – you all know Marcy went crazy and killed herself and others. But let’s just say there were no open casket memorials for the victims. And let us also say the school board paid out handsomely to their families in return for discretion.’
Again, there was more silence. But it didn’t last long.
Outside, somewhere very close, another scream tore through the night.
Six
It wasn’t a woman screaming, Carolina thought. Not this time. This was vaguely feline … or perhaps even the blaring of an infant.
Sometimes it was hard to differentiate between the two.
She recalled, sometimes with brutal clarity, the sound little Maddox had made in the often traumatizing days following his birth: a yowl like a Siamese cat in the initial stages of battle; a needy caterwaul signifying another feeding was imminent.
After Jeff’s tale the group had reconvened back to the basketball court, Carolina more than happy with the unexpected interruption and a chance to vacate the suddenly oppressive cleaners’ room. She was aware people had died in there, of course – had died brutally. But somehow Jeff’s closing epilogue had given the past a new dimension. Where there was a trainset, Carolina could now see bodies. Where there were boxes, blood.
‘It’s moving away from us,’ Dillion said, sounding mildly relieved despite his obvious intention to capture something else on film. ‘Heading toward the art buildings.’
‘Then that’s the way we go,’ Carolina said.
She could feel their collective gazes, probing.
‘What? It’s where we were heading anyway. After that, we press onto the gym and then the swimming pools.’
Was that so hard to believe? That she wanted to get to the pools swiftly, and have her part in all of this done? She supposed it was. Jeff and Jason had borne witness to both murder and suicide at Providence Place – had, in effect, gotten up close and personal with it. But her own story was a little more convoluted in the particulars, a tale comprising both bullying and rape. Rape at the hands of an otherworldly predator, no less. Of course, the official story had only scratched the surface of things – and there could be little doubt the group suspected this.
Only Alyssa looked on the verge of speaking up. She opened her mouth, closed it … then averted her eyes away from Carolina’s.
The skinny mole has no idea what to say to me, whether she should be sad or sorry. How often in life do bullies get to meet their victims again as grown adults? Not many, I’ll wager. Alyssa Asterious is still a stubborn bitch, and I’ll also wager a thing like remorse probably doesn’t fit into her vocabulary at all.
Carolina pushed the thought away. There would be time for recriminations later, if they surfaced at all.
By an unspoken command they started walking again. Underneath the sound of shoes slapping pavement, Dillion’s audible commentary was a barely discernible monotone. Words of phantom screams had turned into annotations about the weather and legible graffiti. For the first time this night, Carolina found herself wondering just what kind of film would bear fruit for Dillion’s obscure project. Was this pilgrimage a documentary to be sold to the highest bidding distributor? Or was it a series of weblogs for a ghost hunting website? From the outset, Dillion Cook had provided scarce details of his plight, his offer of payment in advance more than enough incentive to convince Carolina to sign on the dotted line. Only months after she’d given up Maddox for adoption, her mother had forsaken Cranston altogether, essentially abandoning her. Shortly thereafter, both her father and brother had followed suit. Though the desertion had begun well before Maddox’s arrival; had begun, in fact, the night of her attack. Although Sarah Gates had attempted enrolling her daughter in other places of learning, no local institute wanted to touch the pudgy swimmer whose listless countenance had graced a slew of National Enquirer-type publications. At first, Carolina had been grateful for the money and attention, could envision an end to a lifetime of bullying and harassment at the hands of students and teachers alike. But she should have known better, of course; should have known that once her perfectly normal baby entered the world, all offers to tell her story would dry up along with the promised money doing so procured. Soon enough Carolina’s tale of a poltergeist became yesterday’s headline, and the local media found some fresh horror at Providence Place to latch on to.
The basketball court
ended, and another playground took its place. Happily entitled Kurrajong (taken after an Australian tree which grew on the periphery), the space was an open education center where some of the younger children had amassed each day. Here, outdoor playing equipment in the form of swing-sets and mountable forts had shared space with sandpits and slides, a swath of land that had to be crossed by the older students to reach the arts center. Though some of the rides remained intact, others had succumbed to defacement, a miniature pyre erected and burned like a macabre offering. On the rear wall flanking the yard, a weathered sign proclaimed:
Childhood Should be a Journey, Not a Race.
Alyssa snorted. ‘Well isn’t that rich? Now they tell me. If only this had been erected when I was here, perhaps my life would have turned out differently.’
Carolina eyed her curiously. ‘Do you still do any acting, Alyssa?’
In lieu of a reply, another cigarette was kindled. Then Alyssa caught wind of the others also watching her. ‘Sometimes,’ she answered, her tone almost defensive. ‘Commercials, mostly. Last year I did a film-clip for a local band.’
‘I remember it,’ Jason said. ‘For Lucid Dream, right?’
Alyssa blew out smoke, arched her eyebrows.
‘Oh, I know what you’re thinking,’ Jason said. ‘Not my kind of thing, right? You’re forgetting I grew up singing in a choir. Lots of boys who grow up singing in a choir end up in the music scene.’
‘Really? That a fact?’
‘From my experience, yes.’
‘You played in a band?’
‘Not exactly. But some of my friends did. I went to a few shows during my university days. Lucid Dream was great. Still is.’
Carolina tried to imagine Jason sidled up to a bar and found she couldn’t quite do it.
With flashlight beams straddling the murk, Jason’s face had turned pink yet again. In an embarrassed tone, he asked, ‘Say, can I pinch one of those?’