The Job of the Wasp

by Colin Winnette

  There was a nervous, feverish air to the proceedings. Something seemed to have been tacitly decided by a select group, and I had to admit I was only vaguely aware of what that decision was. But it was clear that what had once been about unity was quickly looping back to a simple matter of survival.

  “May I be untied?” I said, marveling to myself at how close the two words were to one another, how easily one became the next. “I’m not sure the ropes are necessary anymore.”

  “Quiet,” said Anders, “or we’ll gag you too.”

  They’d hauled the Headmaster’s corpse onto one of the long tables near the center of the room. Boys brought candles from the dormitory and climbed on to the tables to set them in the ceramic light fixtures that hung from the ceiling. Those fixtures, punctured with an awl or needle prior to baking, cast perfect dots along the tall windows at either side of the dining hall, like stars against the howling black night. When the lightning came, it only erased them for a moment.

  The boys each registered the sight of the Headmaster in different ways. Weeping, grinning, vocal disbelief, simple and silent surprise; I felt I could see all of humanity in that progression of faces. I wept too, and for all to see, as I was unable to clear my face due to my hempen strictures.

  “You’re right to beg,” said a voice. One of the twins had found his way behind me and was tightening the ropes, which had continued to slip from the moment they’d been tied. “But it will do you no good.”

  “Anders,” asked a small boy, of whom I had no memory whatsoever, “what’s happened?”

  I ignored the twin, watching instead as Anders moved past the small boy and leaned against the head of the table on which they’d set the Headmaster, looking down over the dead man’s face. Something had changed in Anders’s expression. He had always worn a nasty kind of scowl, but it was as if it had all been hastily wiped away, leaving only the faintest traces of the boy he once was. There was a new neutrality to his look that chilled me to the core.

  “Wait until everyone has arrived,” he said, looking up. “We’re only going to explain it all once.”

  Those words, calming as they might have been on their own, were delivered in a voice that only nightmares could do justice. It was as if Anders had been wrapped in shadow or drowned in the darkness of the lake down the hill. Watching him, I felt a fear that had lived in the back of my mind for as long as I could remember move suddenly to its front. Though I had never trusted him, I’d never felt compelled to watch him closely until now. Something of significance was about to be revealed, and I understood that Anders, perhaps unknowingly, would be the one to reveal it.

  He rose and moved to the door, and it occurred to me that whoever had pushed me that early night, after the fire department left us, had to have been roughly my size or larger, as he’d pushed me so effectively and confidently to the ground. And Anders was the only boy in the room who fit the bill. I was large, the largest of us all, it was true, but Anders was tall and strong. He had mean-looking arms, like two gargoyles set to protect his dull torso. It was hard to believe he actually belonged in a facility for boys. I could easily picture him drowning a grown man behind the local pub over an apple or a bit of bread.

  “Is that the last of you?” he said, shutting the braided wooden door behind two small boys who walked side by side as they entered, taking each other’s hands upon seeing the Headmaster splayed out on the table.

  “Y-yes,” said one of them. “I think so. What’s happened?”

  “Something terrible,” said Anders, setting his fingers to their shoulders, “but also something very important.”

  “Klot,” I said, scanning the room for any boy who might volunteer a relationship to that name. “Where is Klot?” I said, to no one in particular.

  Though many of the boys stirred, their expressions revealed only fear, confusion, annoyance, or sadness. I was satisfied to see nothing that I could use, until I realized it was what I wasn’t seeing that would prove useful.

  Anders had not so much as looked my way when I spoke, even to determine where the noise was coming from, thereby signaling, in this critical evasion, that he and Klot, who was surely soon to appear, were co-conspirators. Anders had avoided me almost entirely since we’d entered the dining hall, and his indifference in response to my mention of Klot had been too seamless to ignore. Even when Anders spoke to me, he spoke around me, as if to look me in the eye would reignite his humanity and cause him to question all that he’d prepared. Ms. Klein, Hannan, and now the Headmaster: It had all started with Anders. Why hadn’t he wanted to look at the drawings of Ms. Klein, if it weren’t for his being in love with her? He wasn’t religious. No orphan could ever truly believe in God. He wasn’t a moral boy, as he’d made clear with all he’d done to me that evening, and in transporting and displaying the corpse of our only father figure, like a head on a pike.

  I hadn’t been able to see Anders clearly from the beginning, so clouded was my judgment with images of the Headmaster, who, it was now obvious to me, had only ever acted to protect me, had only ever had my interests in mind, my well-being, however inconvenient, as the foundation of his thoughts and actions. He had come to me in confidence, he had reached out to me in private, he had all but held my hand and said the words “It is going to be okay.” And I had repaid him with suspicion and duplicity. I was ashamed of myself. I was disappointed in my abilities as a thinker and as a developing young man.

  I watched Anders step away from the table on which they’d set the Headmaster and open his arms to the crowd. I shuddered as he began to speak.

  “Boys,” he said. “Thank you all for coming. I know it is late, and I know many of you had only just made it to sleep because of the storm. You’ll thank me, however, when this meeting has come to its end. I should tell you all first what the new boy failed to tell us all earlier: We are locked down. By order of the Headmaster, who has always served us well, the school and its approaching roads are sealed off until the storm abates.”

  The room groaned and murmured, while the storm howled, rattling the loose glass in its panes. I struggled quietly against the ropes. The twin’s new knots were painfully lodged against the rounded bones in my wrists, and I could feel them beginning to bruise. The whole evening had taken a dark turn, and I feared for the worst.

  “We’re stuck here for now,” said Anders, “but we’re stuck here together.”

  “Will we only ever make speeches and never act, except against me?” I said. “People are dead. We have to come together.”

  Anders nodded, as if agreeing with me in everything I’d thought and said up until that moment, but then the same twin from before gripped me by the hair and tipped back my head. When I attempted to shout in complaint, he filled my mouth with wadded fabric. It was horrid and sweet to taste, and I realized as he stepped past me, now nude from the waist up, that I was gagged with the top half of his uniform.

  “No doubt some of you have heard the stories this one has been telling,” Anders said, gesturing at me. “And it’s possible some of you believed them. That the Headmaster had murdered Ms. Klein. That the Headmaster was staging an elaborate framing to foist the crime off on our newest addition with the limp and the baggy pants. No doubt some of you hoped this was true. You’d sensed some scandal in our midst or needed an explanation for why the Headmaster had been particularly harsh in disciplining you one afternoon. How convenient it would be for you if true. As counterargument, I present the corpse of our fine Headmaster. The body of the man who was supposedly behind the chaos that ended Ms. Klein’s life and that of our beloved Hannan.”

  The boys murmured and writhed. They were like a cave full of snakes in a coil.

  “Yes, the body count is at an alarming high,” said Anders. “Hannan, Ms. Klein, Thomas—it’s true, there’s no doubt in that—and now our beloved Headmaster. It seems, yet again, that we have made a mistake.”

  The
boys in the room were rapt. I couldn’t believe that someone so obviously malicious and cruel in spirit as Anders was able to draw in these boys and hold them. I felt miserable watching them become absorbed in his deceit, and I realized that this was the very essence of innocence: a willingness to believe. And why every story about innocence ends with its being lost.

  “We are one shy of our annual five, boys,” said Anders, “and I understand the fear you all must be feeling. But I ask you not to act out of fear. Not to make any rash decisions. I ask only that you hear our case and make your decision based on the evidence, as well as any instinctively uncanny feelings you might experience in the presence of this individual, bound and gagged for your benefit.”

  At that moment, the doors opened to reveal a figure cast in shadow.

  “Ah,” said Anders. “Here we are.”

  “It’s Fry,” said one of the boys, and they all soon joined him in acknowledging the boy now entering the room.

  “Fry,” they said.

  “Fry,” they whispered.

  “It’s him,” they said.

  And it was young Fry, the boy who had served me my first sample of the full-spread nastiness that would eventually come my way at the facility, strolling through the braided wooden doors that connected the dining hall to the rest of the world, as if the recess bell had just been rung and he was reluctantly but diligently filing toward his evening chores.

  He positioned himself at the front of the room, taking his time to allow us to adjust to his presence. This wasn’t his first public address.

  “Thank you, Anders. I can take it from here,” he said. “Hello, dear friends. Have you missed me?”

  I felt unexpected relief at seeing Fry alive and well. That he had color in his cheeks. That he looked well fed. He hadn’t been hiding in a ditch somewhere, and he certainly wasn’t buried in the garden. Still, it was obvious from the way he and Anders were presenting themselves, and from the fact that no one had removed the shirt from my mouth, that their intentions toward me weren’t at all good. I tongued the shirt, trying slowly to unlock it from the hinge of my jaw. I had no plan for what I would say once the gag was removed, but it was a clear first step toward freedom, so I would take it.

  “Nearly every year,” said Fry, “we’ve believed ourselves to have found the answer. And every year so far, we’ve failed in some way. But can we really be blamed for that? We aren’t detectives. We aren’t ghost hunters. We aren’t even very good at math.”

  The boys laughed then, settling cross-legged on the floor, as if we were going to be there for some time. Anders shook his head with affection and admiration.

  It was no wonder I hadn’t fit in. No wonder the boys had hardly even introduced themselves. I’d been blaming myself for my inability to get through to them, but it was also true that no one had reached out or made himself available. I had assumed this was the way of life in the facility, that it required an edgeless attitude of indifferent getting-on. And I’d been happy to go along with it. But now I understood it was only hostility not yet expressed. Those at the top, like Fry, like Anders, had been coordinating their attack, while the rest were biding their time. This wasn’t a facility for orphan boys at all but an illicit hideaway for some secret society of miniature manipulators. These weren’t clueless boys in the least—they were mature human beings with agendas and ideas, with the power to take a bad thought and force it to its brutal conclusion. I struggled against the ropes and licked at the gag with the root of my tongue.

  “It is with great sadness that I watched our brothers fall this year,” said Fry. “Great sadness and a heavy heart. But also shame. I am ashamed at us for going so far astray last year. Ashamed at our inability to see the truth amid the lies and misperceptions. The unrealities that we as a group forged into realities in the co-stoked fires of ignorance and rage. And grief. I think every night of poor Klausen’s fate, and I wonder sometimes if we had any of our facts straight at all. I don’t blame Thomas or Hannan for what they say they saw last year. I only blame myself for being unable to see anything else.”

  He paused, but purely for effect.

  “This year, as some of you already know, I took it upon myself to be the watcher. Faced with the suspicion that our previous actions had not fully resolved our problem, I put it to myself to collect the evidence needed to confirm a new theory. A simple theory that, perhaps, we’d been wrong in our belief that Klausen was our ghost. Pale, strange Klausen, with his taste for murdering small animals. He wasn’t our friend, but did he deserve what we did to him? Who can say, at this point? Certainly he accepted his fate. He didn’t fight us. Which made it easier to believe. And I do wonder if we didn’t, in fact, though incidentally, grant peace to an unrelatedly guilty conscience. What troubles might have haunted Klausen we will now never know. And though it wasn’t the end of our particular mission, that doesn’t mean our mistake was without positive results.”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose like an old scholar, and I trembled at his theatrics. The care in his delivery, the light in his eyes: I understood finally that Fry was the missing piece, not Anders. Fry had put it all in motion, and he was now carefully, confidently presenting his case against me. Anders had stayed visible, at the forefront of the action, so that he and Fry, who was working behind the scenes, could corral me toward this final showdown in the dining hall, where the rest of the group would be collectively turned against me. It was all so remarkably clever. I admired them both in that moment for what they had been able to accomplish together. Had they truly murdered everyone? Or, I wondered, perhaps more generously, had they caught wind of the murders, incorrectly blamed me, as I had incorrectly blamed the Headmaster, and as a result gone to work to guarantee I would receive justice for all they assumed I’d done? I knew I deserved to be punished for what became of poor Thomas, but I feared they misunderstood the extent of my crimes. And while I wasn’t without blame, the same now seemed true of everyone in the room.

  But there was hope. I refused to believe that the Klausen whose hands I’d felt in the hallway only a short while ago had been anything less or more than a living, breathing, malicious young boy, which meant that those seeking to punish him had failed in whatever terrible justice they’d tried to inflict. It followed that they might fail in their attempt to bring me to that same terrible justice, or even that Klausen was still out there somewhere, hiding and waiting for his revenge, and, upon hearing me or seeing me being dragged into the dining hall to face his same fate, could have had a change of heart and been moved to intervene, inspired by the echo of our parallel situations. Which would mean my salvation was nearly at hand. It was possible. But how likely? Could I count on one of three hellions who had locked me in a closet to come to my aid? Or would I be on my own in my final moments, forced to fend for myself?

  I was sad for the other boys then, imagining myself breaking free of them and the harm I might have to inflict in doing so. They weren’t wrong in seeking to put an end to the brutal suffering that ran rampant in our facility. They weren’t wrong in banding together to work against a problem that affected them all. There was something admirable in their efforts. It was, in fact, what I had been after all evening, only I had been foolish enough to think that I was the first to have dreamed of it, or the only one who could achieve it. I had imagined myself leading the charge of unity, even preached that charge to a group that had, in fact, as they were demonstrating now, unified long before it had occurred to me to unify them. And they had done so, it seemed, in opposition to me. At least this semester.

  “On their own, perhaps only a few of the following instances warrant consideration,” said Fry, “but together they are too striking to remain unexamined. On our first day of class, I pricked our newest member with the razor-sharp end of my pencil sharpener. I’d stayed up late the night before honing its dull blade to a whisper, and yet, though I stabbed him fully and directly, not a drop of blood exit
ed the wound. He did react in pain, but none of that life-giving formula presented itself. It wasn’t enough to damn him, but it was enough to make me suspicious.

  “I complained that night of an unsourceable pain and nervous evacuations, earning me an irregularly monitored bed in the medical suite, which would then become my base of operations. The following day, I began to shadow our fat, gagged friend here, and it became clear to me that, as many of you will likely have noticed, he has more than a few social problems. He has some trouble with names and faces. He lacks social grace, has trouble being polite, insists on his own way or no way at all. He is stubborn. Cruel. Self-centered. The makings of a poor party guest, indeed, but also qualities not so uncommonly associated with ghosts who fixedly haunt.” He stamped his foot for emphasis.

  I noticed that Nick was watching me as Fry spoke. His gaze was fearful and focused, locked into mine. I could tell he was already convinced by Fry’s words, believing now that I had been the ghost all along, and I was sad to see Nick so easily swayed. So desperate to believe. I imagined his parents looking down on him from a white cloud up on high, weeping with disappointment. Nick was not going to have an

  easy life.

  “As my suspicions came more sharply into focus,” said Fry, “I was forced, over and over again, to escalate my illness for the sake of further observation, so much so that the Headmaster had doctors visiting the medical ward, professional doctors with stethoscopes and large black bags, which the Headmaster reminded me time and again the facility could not afford. And yet, he still held my hand as they administered their shots. He followed up daily to confirm I was not in danger. You know who would never have done that? Our plump prisoner here, who is only delighted right now, I’m sure, to have this much attention directed at him. When I could, I continued to shadow the baggy-trousered specter as he haunted the edges of your play and social hours, as he drew violent images of each of you being torn apart by one another, exploding at the tips of pencil sharpeners like gray balloon animals. Until, finally, he was called into the Headmaster’s office to account for the images I’ve heard you later discovered on your own, alongside that same man’s murdered corpse. These images of Ms. Klein, our first clue toward understanding the bloody proceedings that had already started to unfold, were presented to our newest nugget and he accepted responsibility for them without pause. He proudly declared himself the artist, though the quality of his other drawings might suggest this claim was a fabrication. But why? Why position himself as the artist? There’s yet more to know and, in knowing, you will understand that accepting the blame for these drawings was only one of many steps in a malevolent plan, the results of which were already and would continue to be far more appalling than a few simple hand-drawn images, which the Headmaster was only looking for an excuse to forget about. For you see, gentlemen, the true nightmare was already under way, and these drawings were a mere distraction. And after what I am prepared to share with you, with my undeniable observations as evidence, we might together take the necessary steps toward what I hope will be our final solution.”