The School of the Undead
Michael Woods
Copyright © 2017 Michael Woods
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-1979563499
To my family.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Pg 1
Chapter 2
Pg 17
Chapter 3
Pg 41
Chapter 4
Pg 83
Chapter 5
Pg 125
Chapter 6
Pg 171
Chapter 7
Pg 201
Chapter 8
Pg 216
chapter 1
When he woke up, the first thing Brenden felt was the terrible weight that was pressing down on his body. He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound escaped as the still unsettled earth immediately rushed in to fill the newly open space to silence him. In the total darkness that seemed to have enveloped everything, Brenden tried to free himself but found he was unable to move his limbs more than a couple of inches.
The discomfort of the soil in his mouth and nose - as well as the constant pressure on his body - made it impossible for Brenden to think clearly about anything. However, after growing tired of his pointless struggle, he started to wonder, as best he could, how it was possible that he was alive and in the situation he was in. He felt that his chest was still trying to expand to inhale, but how could he be taking in air under all this dirt. His first thoughts of explanation revolved around the idea that he was suffering a terrible nightmare and that all he had to do was wait, but hours passed - seeming like days to Brenden – and nothing changed. Every now and again, a darker idea occurred to him; his senses had just deserted him and all he was experiencing was just some sort of illusion. Though he could not completely dismiss this idea, he could also not wholly accept it as it was all too achingly real.
After finally giving into the notion that what he was experiencing was not just a phantasy, Brenden fought with himself to try to recall the last moments he could remember prior to waking up buried under the mountain of earth that imprisoned him. Hazy though his memories were, he could remember leaving school and walking home through some of the empty streets of his town.
Onto the black canvas of the darkness of his grave, Brenden’s mind eventually conjured up the image of the artificial orange light which illuminated the streets near his school. The high brick wall of one of the town’s Victorian graveyards, which Brenden passed almost every day, appeared at his side and he could almost hear the crunching sound beneath his feet of the drying leaves that had started to fall about a month or more before. He recalled that as he reached the corner of a familiar wall, which marked the end of the town and the beginning of the unlit lane that led on to his home, he had noticed an unusual shape some distance away in the field beside the road. The light of the late autumn, early evening sky had been sufficient for the boy to determine that someone was there, but little else. He had removed the torch his mum insisted he use to light his way home - something he hardly ever did as he prided himself on being able to find his way in the dark - and cast its beam in the direction of whatever was there. In doing so, he revealed the odd sight of a man standing, quite still.
Despite the stories he had heard and the advice on strangers he had been fed for as long as he could remember by TV, his school and his mum, he had made no effort to get away. The oddity of the man, who had continued to just stand there, had infected him with curiosity. But it was not just that, he had also been concerned about the man’s well-being. He remembered that the idea had struck him that perhaps the man had driven his car into the field and was in need of help. There had been a story about such a thing happening in the local paper.
Brenden had then noticed the stranger’s staring eyes and desperately pale features; but this did not scare the boy off as the man looked to be in shock, further convincing him that he had stumbled across the poor victim of some accident. He called out to ask if the stranger needed help, whether there was any problem, but he received no reply. Instead, the man responded with a barely perceptible shudder of his fleshy white face and by starting to mutter a string of inaudible sentences under his breath. Once this image had been brought back to Brenden’s mind, he discovered that he could no longer remove the sight of the steady gaze of the man’s small grey eyes from his thoughts. For a time, this image, which became ever sharper in the boy’s imagination, was all that Brenden could perceive.
As Brenden continued to meditate on those eyes he just could not forget, he experienced an instant of abject terror brought on by a glimpse of a memory. But whatever it was, the boy’s mind cast it away almost as soon as it had appeared, and Brenden was returned to the darkness and the force of the earth upon his body. He was aware that it was not just his mind, but something else that had broken the spell of the cold fear he had experienced a few moments before, a fear whose cause he had already forgotten. Then, for the first time since he had woken up, he thought he heard something. He focused his attention to try and home in on the noise, but initially, Brenden was just not able to tell whether he was just imagining the sound or whether it was real.
He waited, what else could he do? And, eventually, it became clear to Brenden that there was indeed a noise, one that was repeating over and over again, and one that was gradually getting louder. For what seemed like hours, every few seconds Brenden would hear a dull thud and a scraping noise. At first, Brenden was glad of the distraction, but as time passed the sound quickly progressed from being annoying to terrifying. In painfully slow increments, the noise grew louder until it became a booming explosion in the boy’s ears. But there was nothing he could do to get away or stop it. He fruitlessly struggled again, but the torture of the situation was only exacerbated through the action; it made him even more aware of how confined and helpless he was. Several times he decided that he could take no more and he pleaded through the earth in his throat for everything to end, but it just carried on and on.
That was until he heard someone shout.
“Stop!”
Though he could not be sure, Brenden thought it sounded like a woman’s voice. It suddenly occurred to him that perhaps someone was undertaking a rescue attempt and hope raised within him. He tried to call out once more, but it was to no avail as his mouth was full of moist dirt. He gave up his efforts to shout to contact whoever was there and instead focused on trying to listen in as hard as he could to what was going on above him. He could make out that there was a conversation involving the voices of two people - one that was almost shrill, and the other deep and rumbling - but Brenden could not make out a single word of what they were saying; just that the high pitch remarks lasted much longer than those of the other voice, which only ever consisted of a couple of words at most. The conversation ended and despite what he had felt earlier on, Brenden silently pleaded that he would soon again hear the terrible sound of what he now realised was digging. But the digging did not continue.
Instead, after a short period of nothing, the earth above Brenden’s chest started to move and a hand burst through the ground before fumbling around and attempting to pull at his shirt. The hand retreated, unable to gain purchase, but whatever was happening was not over as waves of pressure then passed over the boy’s face and chest until he could feel the soil starting to give, enabling him to push his head up an extra inch, then another. A hand brushed against his brow and then wiped away the soil from his face. Slowly, Brenden opened his eyes and took in the sight of a large, sickly pale, milky-eyed man covered in black earth. Brenden looked beyond the man and saw that he was at the bottom of a large hole in the ground, at the top of which stood the striking figure of a dark-eyed, short woman framed by t
he orange purple glow of an overcast night’s sky.
“Poor thing,” she said in her slightly piercing, high-pitch voice. “The lid must have already caved in. No matter, no matter. Get him out of there Freddie.”
The boy attempted to aid Freddie as the man worked to extract the rest of Brenden’s body from the ground, but he found he had almost no strength to do so. Gently, Freddie pushed as much of the soil away from Brenden as he could and then grasped the boy from under his shoulders to pull him out. At first, the man attempted to stand the exhumed boy in the hole, but even this was beyond Brenden’s power. After a shrill remark from the still as yet unidentified woman, Freddie caught Brenden before lifting him up and out of the hole to lay him down on a bed of grass.
Free from the compression of his grave, Brenden felt as if he were weightless enough to float just a little above the ground, but in reality, he was still too weak to get up. He was, however, able to turn his head and finally take in the sight of the young woman, who was illuminated by two torches laying upon the floor, and who he considered to look so odd that it seemed to him that he must have just been saved by a couple returning from a fancy dress party. She had a large body of hair that had been curled back upon itself and upon which sat a wide-brimmed hat. She was also wearing an ankle-length, purple skirt and a white ruffle shirt.
“Now, Brenden. I know this must be a very strange and uncomfortable situation for you” said the woman, “but at least you are out of that hole. Please, let me introduce myself. My name is Ms Margaret Halford, but you can call me Ms Halford. I am here on behalf of the Tithonus School to ask whether you would be willing to gain instruction on how to, well, live now that you have found yourself in your present condition.”
Ms Halford waited several beats for Brenden to respond, but as he gave her nothing but widened eyes, she continued.
“Of course, you do not need to inform us of your decision straight away. We will first take you to the school and then you can see… What is wrong with you, boy!”
As Ms Halford had continued to speak, Brenden had started to try and lift his limp arms to his face and work his mouth so as to remove the soil that still prevented him from speaking, making him look as if he were a significant amount of distress. Ms Halford leant down and realised the problem straight away.
“Oh, how terrible! Freddie, get some water, will you. The boy’s stuffed up!”
***
“I think you will need a drink of this,” said Ms Halford after Freddie had cleaned out most of the soil from Brenden’s throat. Freddie came over to him with a metal flask and slowly started to pour a viscous iron flavoured liquid into his mouth. He expected to gag due to the texture of the drink, but instead, he found that as it went down, the liquid was satisfying a terrible thirst of which he had not even been aware.
“What is this?” asked Brenden, wondering how he had gone his whole life without having this drink that was most certainly the most satisfying he had ever had. He even started to feel rejuvenated, with strength finally returning to his limbs.
“Blood,” replied Ms Halford. “Look, my dear, you really ought to know. You’re a vampire.”
Brenden said nothing. Instead, with the strength that had been granted to him by the drink, he pushed himself up into a sitting position and started to look around at where he was. He looked down towards where the street ran alongside the field he was in, and as ridiculous as what Ms Halford had said, it became apparent to Brenden that he was in a graveyard. Slowly, Brenden raised himself off the ground and picked up one of the two torches that still lay in the grass before moving over to the end of the newly dug hole. He expected to then see a headstone with his name carved into the surface but found only a temporary wooden plaque to confirm where he was.
“What about my Mum?” whispered Brenden.
Ms Halford moved over to Brenden’s side and he noticed for the first time he could just about see through her to the street beyond.
“I can’t go back, can I?”
Ms Halford raised her transparent and incorporeal hand to his face for just a moment. She smiled, but the rest of her features spoke only of sadness.
***
Brenden rested his head against the window of the rather battered mini-bus that Freddie had ushered him into after brushing off the worst of the earth from his burial clothes. He shifted uneasily on the plastic tarpaulin that Ms Halford had insisted he sit on so as not to dirty the vehicle’s seats too much and looked out on the almost empty motorway that was passing by. At first, he had tried to sleep, but despite being an hour on the road and his usual form of falling straight to sleep in any car, he could get no rest. Questions were constantly raising themselves at the back of Brenden’s mind about who he was, where he was going, what was going to happen to him, but he did not want to face up to them. So, he quietened them down again and again with the thought that he had lost his life - whatever it was worth - and by letting himself fall into the sense of loss and emptiness that this conjured up within him.
Freddie kept the mini-bus at a steady 60 miles per hour, meaning that even though the road was nearly deserted, Brenden was able to see a number of passers-by as they either overtook the vehicle or slowly drifted into the space behind the boy. With his head still leaning against the window, he watched the other vehicles appear and then disappear, wondering who was in them and if they had any idea of what was sitting in the mini-bus they were driving by. An estate car, going only a little faster than the Freddie, came up alongside the mini-bus in the middle lane and Brenden noticed that there was a little girl asleep in the back seat; her head resting on the window, in a similar way to himself. After the car passed over a bump in the road, the girl stirred and looked in his direction. Brenden waved to get her attention, but she either did not care to notice, or she was still too drowsy to take in what was going on around her. Instead, she looked away from the road and started speaking while rubbing her eyes. Brenden turned his attention to the front seat to see who the girl was talking to and found the driver, who he assumed must have been the girl’s mother. The mother looked a little frustrated and tired from the road - not surprising seeing that it must have been after five in the morning - and he thought how often he had seen his own mother tired and frustrated after a long day.
Brenden suddenly felt the urge to get in contact with his mother and his old life. He looked away from the estate car to let it slowly move away from the mini-bus without his further attention. Earlier on, Ms Halford had told Brenden that he could go back to his mother if he truly wished to do so as neither she nor Freddie had any hold over him. However, she also made it very plain that it would be very unwise for him do so.
“First of all, Brenden,” she had said, “there is a good chance that your mother will just not be able to accept that you have come back. She will think that you are either an imposter or that she has gone quite mad. You see, she has seen you buried and has said her goodbyes. I do not tell you this to warn you off from going, I speak from knowledge of what has happened before. Is this not so, Freddie?”
“Mmmhh”
“I have heard so many accounts from people who have returned only to be chased away, especially from those unfortunate to be, well, a zom…”
“Mmmhhhh!”
“Well, to be in such a position as poor Freddie here, especially since all of those awful films came out. But this is not the worst possible outcome, my poor boy. You see, if you decide to return home, things can get a bit tricky. We have a code, you see, to protect ourselves and others like us. If you turn our offer of help down now, there is a good chance we will not be able to help you in the future. Not that we would not want to help, but we have a primary rule. Once one steps over the line and, well, irrevocably harms one of those outside of our community, one is outcast forever. And the thing is, without our help, it will not be long before one such as yourself will start to feel the hunger. Poor Freddie here is just the same. Even loved ones are in danger. Indeed, they are often the ones i
n the greatest danger of all, as it is to them where those who wake up alone often go first. Indeed, even those who go to the school feel the pull to go home, and all too often, if they give in to these desires they are soon lost to us.”
Brenden had had questions about how it could be that Ms Halford could have given him the blood she had revived him with if it was the case that they did not kill. However, he was not in the mood to ask as he was far too distracted by the notion that if he were to go home he could harm or even kill his mother. Ms Halford could have been lying of course, but how was Brenden to know. Soon enough, he had come to the decision that he would go to the school.
Freddie turned the mini-bus off the motorway and after a brief drive along a minor road, they trundled up to a large, ornate and crumbling gateway that led on to a densely forested lane. Freddie slowed the vehicle down to a crawl as the way ahead was lit only by the headlights of the car.
“We’ll be there very soon,” said Ms Halford. “I’ll just have to pop into the school for a moment first and then I’ll come and get you as soon as I can.”
Brenden gave the faintest of nods and then returned his focus to the darkness outside. Light became visible through the trees and as the mini-bus continued on more seemed to appear until there seemed to be a minor constellation of bright misshapen stars hanging low in the sky. When the forest ended, the scale of the enormous building became apparent to Brenden as he could see perhaps a hundred lights stretched across the blackness. Near the centre of them all was a well-lit porch and it was here where Freddie brought the mini-bus to a stop.
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