The Teacher's Tales of Terror

by Chris Priestley

  ‘Oh, thank you, Mama,’ said Martha, from behind a large handkerchief.

  The handkerchief was lowered as soon as Martha’s mother went to the counter to pay. Martha smiled. Vernon scowled. Martha frowned threateningly and Vernon backed away.

  ‘What about my cufflinks?’ asked Vernon as his mother put her money away.

  ‘I think I’ve spent quite enough money for one day,’ she said, looking at the shopkeeper. ‘Good afternoon.’

  ‘Good afternoon, madam,’ he replied. He bowed to Martha as she left. ‘Good afternoon, miss.’

  Once they were outside, Martha held the brooch up and inspected it properly. It looked so different in the daylight. The highlights glistened in the sunshine but, if anything, the blackness of the jet seemed even deeper, even blacker.

  She had not appreciated how detailed the carving was on the snake as it curved its way round the brooch: each scale was painstakingly inscribed and the face – particularly the needle-sharp fangs and the cruel eyes – was astonishingly lifelike.

  Martha pinned her new brooch to the collar of her coat and the family continued on their way up the narrow lane to the long flight of stone steps that led to the church and abbey on the cliff top.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ said Vernon once they were ahead and out of earshot of their mother.

  ‘Life isn’t fair,’ said Martha, looking at her brooch.

  ‘Anyway, it’s horrible,’ said Vernon.

  ‘What would you know?’ said Martha.

  ‘I know something’s horrible when I see it,’ he said.

  ‘So do I,’ she replied, glowering at him.

  Brother and sister glared at each other until their mother puffed up the last of the steps to stand beside them.

  ‘Come along,’ she panted. ‘Come along.’

  The Thriplow family explored the abbey ruins and visited the church of St Mary with its odd, ship-like interior. Then they walked among the rows of eroded, salt-scarred headstones of the graveyard.

  Martha was fascinated by the way some of the graves seemed to be plunging right over the cliff, as the wind and tides gnawed at its foundations. Would the church tip into the sea one day, she wondered. Or the abbey? Nothing stayed the same. Everything changed. She looked at her black-clad mother peering at a headstone.

  ‘Why does everything have to change?’ she said. She looked down at her brooch and had an urge to take it off and hurl it into the sea. She missed her father terribly all of a sudden. She blinked and a tear trickled down her cheek.

  The family returned to their hotel on the opposite side of the bay and ate their supper in near silence. They retired early, and even Martha’s outrage at having to share a bedroom with her brother did not get its usual outing. She was simply too tired. She was asleep in an instant.

  When Martha reached for her coat to look at the jet brooch the following morning, she found instead only the silver backplate and pin it had been attached to. Her surprise was replaced by anger almost immediately.

  Martha strode over to her brother’s bed and shook him roughly awake.

  ‘What?’ said her brother sleepily. ‘What’s the matter? What –’

  ‘You know exactly what’s the matter, you horrid little sneak!’ said Martha. ‘What have you done to my brooch?’

  ‘Your brooch?’ said Vernon. ‘I haven’t touched your silly brooch. It’s ugly and vile and I wouldn’t touch it for all the world.’

  Martha slapped him across the face.

  ‘Liar!’ she hissed.

  ‘I shall tell Mother!’ said Vernon, holding his face.

  ‘Of course you will, you little weasel,’ said Martha. ‘You always do!’

  Martha’s mother had been passing their door and walked in to find Martha looming threateningly over her brother.

  ‘Martha!’ she hissed, having the foresight to close the door behind her in case another guest might happen by. ‘What is the meaning of this?’

  ‘He has taken my brooch,’ she said. ‘He’s broken it and stolen it!’

  ‘Martha, control yourself!’ said Mrs Thriplow. ‘Is this true, Vernon? Have you taken the brooch?’

  ‘No,’ wailed Vernon. ‘And she slapped me!’

  Mrs Thriplow closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  ‘Do be quiet, Vernon,’ she said. ‘What will the other guests think? Martha you will not strike your brother. Do you understand?’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Enough!’ their mother commanded, clapping her hands together. ‘I expect the brooch has simply fallen off somewhere in the room. Have you even looked?’

  Martha was forced to admit that she had not.

  A thorough search was undertaken but no brooch was found. To make matters worse, when asked by her mother, Martha was unable to say, without any doubt, that the brooch had been intact when they arrived back at the hotel after their walk.

  Martha had been so tired she had taken her coat off without registering whether the brooch was still in one piece.

  Mrs Thriplow explained the situation to the hotel manager and the hotel staff were quizzed without much success until another guest overheard and said that she had seen Martha arrive back and had noticed that the brooch seemed to be broken. She had been about to say something at the time, but her husband had called her away.

  Martha was forced to croak a begrudging apology to her brother for wrongly accusing him. Mrs Thriplow puffed herself up into a state of outrage about shoddy craftsmanship.

  ‘We shall go back to that shop this very morning!’ she declared. ‘We shall demand that he replace that brooch forthwith.’

  Mrs Thriplow had seen an opportunity to make her daughter come away with a more suitable piece of jewellery. Martha sighed and pushed her chair back from the table noisily.

  ‘I don’t want another brooch, Mother,’ said Martha. ‘That was the only thing in that horrid shop that was not vile.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Mrs Thriplow.

  ‘Could I look at the cufflinks, Mother?’ asked Vernon.

  ‘I don’t want to go back there,’ said Martha grumpily.

  ‘They have no right to sell shoddy goods, Martha,’ she replied. ‘It is precisely because so few people return and complain that these people continue to behave so abominably. I blame you, Martha.

  ‘I was on the point of leaving but you would insist on my buying you that frightful brooch. I knew there was something suspect about that awful man. Well, he will rue the day he decided to try to swindle Cornelia Thriplow!’

  And so the Thriplow family left their hotel and walked down the steep hill to the harbour and over the bridge. Fishing boats were returning as they made their way through the market and up through the narrow lanes.

  Near to where the long flight of stone steps leading to the church began, Martha and her family stopped and stood staring in confusion at the window of a haberdasher’s.

  They retraced their steps and came back to the same spot. They walked on a little and then returned, all with the same bemused expression.

  ‘But that’s impossible,’ said Vernon, giving voice to a sentiment shared by his mother and sister.

  For though they were all sure that they should be looking at the window of the jet shop where they had bought Martha’s brooch, there was no sign of that shop at all. That is – there was a shop there, but it was the aforementioned haberdasher’s, not a jet shop.

  Martha’s mother went to the door of the shop and opened it. All three of them peered in. Even if it was possible that the jet shop had packed up its business and been replaced by this one in such a short space of time, the haberdasher’s shop was a completely different size and layout. The door opened the opposite way for one thing. The Thriplow family retreated to the other side of the street.

  Mrs Thriplow was a practical, unromantic sort of a person and was ill-prepared to deal with such strangeness so soon after breakfast. She felt a migraine rolling in like a storm.

  ‘How is that possible?’ said Martha.
‘The shop was here. And now it’s not.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ said her mother. ‘We must be mistaken.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘We must be mistaken, Martha,’ Mrs Thriplow repeated fiercely and was already walking back down the hill, eager to be away from the dizzying illogicality of that place.

  Martha and Vernon followed her after a moment’s hesitation, each of them looking back over their shoulders at the place where the shop should have been but was not.

  The subject of the shop that was not there was avoided at supper. Mrs Thriplow had refused to speak of it again, and Martha and Vernon had not had any opportunity to speak of it while alone. By the time they went to their room they had both privately veered towards their mother’s way of thinking. They must have been mistaken about the location. It was the only answer.

  Martha got changed hurriedly, as she always did, whilst Vernon was in the bathroom. When she put on her nightdress, she noticed a bloodstain on it, just below her neck.

  She wanted to get a better look. The only mirror she had in the bedroom was a small hand mirror and that was really not much use. Something about the shape of the stain made her realise that it corresponded to where she would have worn her brooch. She had pricked her finger on the pin. Had she done the same when she had put it on her coat?

  She unbuttoned the front of her nightdress, nervously checking that Vernon was still in the bathroom. Pulling the nightdress aside, she was horrified to see that there was a small hole in her flesh, as if an arrow had pierced it. Surely it was much too large to have been made with a brooch pin?

  Then Martha felt something move under her nightdress and jumped back, shrieking and slapping herself, trying to catch whatever it was and bat it away. Vernon came in and was very much amused by his sister’s curious antics.

  Until she turned to face him.

  Vernon’s face was transformed in an instant from mirth to horror as he shouted out, pointing and staggering backwards. Vernon ran for the bedroom door and flung it open, throwing himself through, screaming for his mother.

  Martha felt something moving across her face and put her hand up to flick it away, but it was not on her face she now realised – it was underneath. It was under her skin.

  Martha knew instantly and instinctively that it was the snake from the brooch – what did the man call it? – the uroboros. It was somehow inside her flesh, slithering round her eye socket and across her forehead. She looked in the mirror and screamed.

  Martha Thriplow awoke with a gasp, sitting upright in her bed, the bedcovers strewn on the floor. She was bathed in sweat and her heart was hammering.

  ‘Martha?’ called Vernon.

  Martha made no reply. She patted herself all over for a sign of the thing under her flesh but could feel nothing.

  Whilst Vernon gazed on in bafflement, she grabbed the mirror and pulled her nightdress aside. Martha saw with relief that the hole in her chest was gone. It had been a nightmare, she thought. Just a nightmare.

  Martha Thriplow ate her breakfast with all the relish of a reprieved felon who had escaped the axeman’s block. She even shrugged off Vernon’s teasing of her behaviour on waking.

  Martha’s nightmare had been so shocking that she had no inclination to revisit it in her thoughts, and with startling speed a fog seemed to roll over and obscure it entirely in her mind, much to her relief.

  By the time Mrs Thriplow had gathered her children together for yet another shopping expedition into town, Martha was back to her normal self.

  They made their way down the hill from the hotel, crossed the bridge and then walked along the stone jetty to the little lighthouse at the end. Mrs Thriplow encouraged them to take large breaths of the sea air as she always did, convinced as she was of its efficacious properties.

  As they strolled back along the harbour wall, Martha remembered that she had woken from a nightmare, but she could no longer recall what it had been about. She found this unaccountably irritating and her mood was not improved when her mother announced that they were going to shop for some pieces of jet jewellery as suitably sombre mementos of their stay.

  A small bell pinged shrilly as Martha opened the door. It was a dull and sunless day, but even so the tiny shop seemed gloomy and cave-like in comparison.

  Martha Thriplow was still occupied with trying to recall the nightmare that had disturbed her sleep. She had barely noticed anything on her walk up from the harbour. It was something terrible, she remembered. But that was all she could remember.

  Mr Munro snapped the book shut as he finished the story, making most of the class jump in the air. A girl near the back let out a small whimper. Mr Munro smiled.

  ‘There,’ he said quietly. ‘I trust that was not too dull for you?’

  Looking down at his desk, he noticed the name ‘Montague’ carved into the wood in a neat copperplate script and mused for a moment on the falling standards in graffiti.

  ‘Are you going to tell us another story, sir?’ said a boy at the front.

  Mr Munro looked up and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Would you like another story?’ said Mr Munro.

  ‘Yes please!’

  Mr Munro opened the book and began to look through it.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘I think you will enjoy this one.’

  ‘Is this one about Dracula, sir?’ said one of the boys eagerly.

  ‘None of the stories are about Dracula,’ replied Mr Munro.

  A prim-looking girl near the front put her hand in the air.

  ‘Or vampires,’ said Mr Munro.

  The hand went down.

  ‘What is it called, sir?’ asked another girl.

  ‘It is called “Simon Magus”,’ said Mr Munro, opening the book and taking out the leather bookmark, ‘and concerns a boy called Simon and a holiday he took with his guardian to the glorious city of Siena in Tuscany.’

  3

  Simon Magus

  Simon had enjoyed much of his visit to Italy. He had particularly appreciated the chaotic energy of Rome and had been utterly entranced by tales of Christians being thrown to lions in the Colosseum.

  He had thrilled to the stories of gladiators hacking away at each other in front of a bloodthirsty crowd.

  He had enjoyed eating out in the crowded piazzas with their huge fountains. Rome was loud and raucous and just a little bit dangerous.

  And in Florence they had witnessed a fatal stabbing in the Piazza della Signoria. Blood had spurted out of the dead man’s mouth. A woman had fainted. It had been the most exciting thing Simon had ever seen.

  But Simon was not enjoying Siena. The only interesting thing about Siena seemed to be that there was a dangerous horse race round the town square every year. Sadly the next race would not be run for months.

  Simon’s parents had both been killed in a ballooning accident in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa two years previously whilst he was away at school. He was in Italy with Uncle Henry, his guardian.

  Uncle Henry had enjoyed a misspent youth and, like many who have been led astray in their younger days, he was determined that Simon would not replicate what he now saw as appalling errors of judgement.

  Uncle Henry was very keen that Simon should embrace the arts and culture of Italy, but more importantly, fully engage with his Roman Catholic faith – a faith that had given Henry such solace in the years since the death of his beloved wife.

  Their marriage had been childless, but possibly because of it, they had been everything to each other. It did mean, however, that Uncle Henry’s knowledge of children was hazy in most respects.

  His avuncular advice often took the form of warnings against the lures of Satan. Simon was rather intrigued by what these lures might be, but Uncle Henry was always frustratingly vague in that regard.

  ‘Satan is everywhere,’ his uncle had said.

  ‘What does he look like?’ asked Simon.

  ‘Just like an ordinary man,’ said Uncle Henry.

  ‘Then
how will I know if it’s Satan?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll know,’ said his uncle solemnly. ‘Be on your guard. He is among us at all times, my boy. Waiting: waiting for his chance to ensnare a good boy like you.’

  Simon was not a good boy, however. He had never been a good boy. But Uncle Henry meant well and Simon was very fond of him. When his guardian smiled down at him, he did his best to stifle a yawn and smile back.

  They were in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. It held the treasures of the duomo — the cathedral – of Siena. He and Uncle Henry had just been in the cathedral and had lit candles – Simon for his parents and Henry for his late wife.

  Simon had rather liked the cathedral. It had a sort of gloomy grandeur about it. But the museum was less to his taste.

  It was not that it did not contain some interesting things. It was just that there were only so many statues and paintings Simon was prepared to look at in one day.

  It might not have been quite so bad had Uncle Henry and Simon simply walked around on their own. Uncle Henry had quite a skill for bringing out the gory and unsavoury details that many guidebooks missed. He was particularly strong on the torture and grisly martyrdom of the saints. His description of the slow grilling of St Lawrence over an open fire was something that would stay with Simon for ever.

  But, possibly aware of this dubious trait in his personality, Uncle Henry had decided that it might be better if they joined an organised tour group for their visit to the museum.

  Their guide to the treasures therein was an Italian woman in her late forties who had the reddest lips Simon had ever seen.

  ‘This is another exquisite tempera panel by Duccio and it shows a fascinating incident in the life of St Peter,’ said the guide. ‘Can anyone guess what it depicts?’

  Simon had not the faintest idea and even less interest, but just as he was drifting off to thoughts of battling gladiators, he heard his name mentioned and instinctively looked up.

  ‘That is correct,’ said the guide, pointing to a small painting. ‘This figure here is Simon Magus. It is said that he had a dispute with St Peter in Rome. Perhaps some of you have already been to Rome?’