The last tread at the bottom of the stairs creaked as she put her weight on it. Wendy stopped, stifling her rising panic. But the sound she had made was probably not audible to whoever was in the living room; they were now muttering loudly to themselves.
A moment later and Wendy was at the front door. In two very quick, confident movements it was unlocked and opened, but the rush of cold air that prickled all over her skin came from within the cottage, not without. She turned, and in the dark of the hallway she could see the figure looming over her with the massive paschal candlestick raised up, ready to be brought down upon her head. . . .
***
Wendy did not feel able to explain to the Johnsons exactly what she thought she had seen. She fled the house, and her neighbours seemed to take forever to respond to the hammering on their door. They called the police, who turned up half an hour later. Once they had investigated, they reported that the front door of Holme Cottage was wide open and that there was a big old candlestick in the middle of the hall floor, but otherwise nothing seemed to be amiss.
Wendy returned to her house the next day with Mrs Johnson, once it was fully daylight. They drank several cups of tea until Wendy said that she would be fine left on her own. She knew that she had a few hours to decide what to do, before it became dark. Initially she was certain that she had to take the candlestick outside and chop it up for firewood, but that would have been what Trevor wanted.
Wendy set the candlestick back in its place by the armchair and lit it. There was little noticeable illumination of the living room at first, but as night fell it was steadily filled with a warm, honey-coloured light. Wendy walked around the room, came in and went out, never looking directly at the armchair, always hoping for some sideways glimpse of her sister. She didn’t see anything, but eventually she realised that the light of the candle was reassurance enough; it seemed to offer the comfort, even the protection, she hoped for. But it would have to be kept constantly lit, despite the fire risk, and she would have to guard against it ever going out once it was dark inside the house. For it had been in the night, with the candle extinguished, that she had seen the stick raised up, in the hands of the pale, pinched, hate-filled figure that had been so hideously suggestive of Elizabeth’s ex-husband, Trevor.
NINTH ROTATION
Stephen Holman
Earl Grey crossed the threshold of the Medici Arts Academy at 8am on a Tuesday morning, with a familiar tightness in his chest and mild nausea in his stomach. He knew, from three months, experience, that the sensations would be only partially relieved by the mug of hot coffee that was, at that moment, first and foremost in his mind.
Earl traversed the main teaching area, heading towards the stairs leading up to the instructors’ mezzanine. The journey meant weaving his way through a slow-moving herd of glassy-eyed teenagers who were also arriving to start their day. Despite its imposing name, the Medici Arts Academy was no seat of higher learning, but an inner city, public charter high school, catering to kids from sixth grade through twelfth. Though public, and therefore under the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles School Board, the fact that Medici had its own charter meant that it could offer alternatives to LA’s standard education program. Earl’s presence at the school was part of that alternative. He wasn’t an instructor; he was an artist, hired by the school to enhance the kids’ awareness of art, both in historical terms and (supposedly) to inspire through his own example.
Earl ascended the stairs to the mezzanine and walked towards the small kitchenette where instructors habitually clustered to escape during the five minute morning break and half hour lunch. The escape was only partial; there were no classroom walls in the Medici Arts Academy. The building had once been a clothing factory and the conversion from sweatshop to public school had been achieved with minimum expenditure. Despite—or perhaps because of—the daily presence of three hundred kids in the building, the spirits of whirring sewing machines were still able to make their subtle presence felt.
The mezzanine was empty. None of the other teachers had yet arrived. Earl made a beeline for the industrial sized coffee machine, and switched on the heater, intending to brew a fresh pot. Raising the large coffee urn, he realised that it was still half full of cold coffee brewed the day before. Abandoning his initial plan, he filled a mug with the rank fluid, stuck it in the micro-wave, hit the one minute button, and headed towards his teaching area to unpack his bag.
Leaving the kitchenette meant momentarily venturing back into the teenage jungle for a space of twenty paces, and the moment he did so, Earl regretted it. A tubby young boy with frizzy, carrot red hair suddenly entered his peripheral vision and stopped in front of him, blocking his path.
‘Can you see this picture I drew?’
His mind fixed solely on his microwaving coffee, Earl waited impatiently as the boy reached into his bag and pulled out a creased sheet of paper. He held it flat for Earl to see. It was a primitive, graceless, pencil sketch of two battling figures, both of whom were wielding swords. No, scratch that. Light sabres. The rough, geometric outline of the larger figure’s head had triggered the revelation that this was an intended portrayal of Darth Vader. Ergo, the scrappy character next to him must be Luke Skywalker. Conclusion: light sabres, not swords. The drawing contained no foreground elements. No background details. No sense of perspective. And extraordinarily little talent or imagination.
‘Nice,’ said Earl. ‘Keep up the good work.’
Earl pushed past the boy, walked into the semicircle of chairs that defined his designated teaching area, and put down his bag with a sigh. It was now 8.05 am and already he felt tired. Teaching art history to high school children was not a profes-sion for which Earl felt himself suited. Some were born to teach; others were born to create, and Earl had, from an early age, felt a deep conviction that he was born for the latter. Admittedly, having parents who were both successful artists might well have influenced this conviction, and yet Earl himself had experienced some degree of success in the fine art world. This success had peaked in his late thirties, however. The year 2000 had ushered in an era of minor disappointments that had accumulatively eaten away at his confidence. So, now here he was, somehow approaching fifty, and confusingly trapped in a career cul-de-sac that exhausted him so utterly that all recent attempts to initate artistic endeavours after work, or even at weekends, had sputtered into inertia. So much for inspiring through his own example.
Why he’d ever applied for this job to begin with was actually something of a mystery to Earl. Was it a misguided urge to ‘give something back’ to society? Or simply financial panic? He still wasn’t sure. Why the school had accepted him was an even greater mystery; Earl had no previous teaching experience and certainly no teacher credits—usually essential in landing a job in the LAUSD school system. He got the impression, however, that the school principal, Alastair Gillespie, a rebel by nature, and a trail-blazer in the field of progressive education, had rather enjoyed the challenge of finding a way around the LA school board ruling. He’d done it by renaming Earl’s job position. Earl Grey wasn’t actually an ‘art history teacher’ or even an ‘artist-in-residence’ at the Medici Arts Academy; the official description of the work he did here was ‘humanities enhancement’. Earl hated the title; he felt it belittled him. It gave fuel to a nagging suspicion that taking this job had been the biggest mistake of his life.
The distant ping of the microwave alerted Earl to the fact that his coffee was now hot and ready to drink. He headed quickly back to the kitchenette, which was now slowly filling with miscellaneous instructors, nodding silently to one another as they doffed hats and jackets, and prepared themselves for the coming onslaught.
8.30 am. First Rotation. It was another of Alastair Gillespie’s naming quirks that nothing at the Medici Arts Academy should be known by its common appellation. Thus, teachers were ‘instructors’, pupils were ‘scholars’ and classes were ‘rotations’. All a little pretentious, Earl thought, but hey, not half as bad a
s Starbucks naming its smallest coffee size, ‘tall’.
First Rotation lasted forty-five minutes. This was followed by Second Rotation. Then the five minute morning break. Then two more forty-five minute rotations. Then lunch. Then four more rotations, with only a five minute ‘meditation period’ between the first two and second two. Earl taught the same exact lesson in each rotation—but to a different set of thirty kids—all of varying grades and ages. Noise level had to be kept as low as possible due to the lack of classroom walls, and much of Earl’s teaching time was spent shushing and promising poten-tial punishments to kids who dared talk during class.
Kids, Earl had been told by the other instructors, had an obsessive compulsion to communicate with each other and would go to any length to do so. They weren’t adults, not even college students; they were kids, and kids find it difficult to control themselves. Earl tried not to take interruptions to his art history monologues personally, but still found the constant outbreaks of whispering and giggling, stressful and offensive. By the time he left the building after an eight hour day, having taught the same art lecture eight times, back-to-back, to eight different combinations of thirty unruly kids, he was always dizzy with exhaustion.
‘In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took his inspiration from the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and modelled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterised the central themes of his later life, and led him not to the Classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travels in North Africa, in search for the exotic. As well as being friend and spiritual heir to Theodore Gericault, Delacroix was inspired by Lord Byron, with whom he shared a strong identification with the “forces of the sublime”—of nature in violent action.’
Brrronggg! Brrronggg! Brrronggg! Earl’s class was brought to an abrupt end by the sound of the school bell. End of First Rotation. The teenagers seated in front of him immediately leapt to their feet.
‘Sit!’ commanded Earl. The teens reluctantly sat.
‘You may go,’ Earl growled. The kids stood again and began to shuffle off to their next class. Earl turned and began to scan back through the jpeg images of Delacroix’s paintings on his computer, readying himself for the imminent start of Second Rotation. His concentration was interrupted by a youthful voice close behind him.
‘Can you see this picture I drew?’
Earl glanced over his shoulder. Standing next to him was the curly-haired kid who’d accosted him earlier. The boy was hold-ing out the same drawing he’d shown Earl less than an hour ago.
‘Didn’t we already have this conversation?’ Earl said, rummaging through the jumbled list in his head, trying to put a name to the boy’s face. Remembering the names of three hundred teenagers in the three months he’d been at the school had not been an easy task. Some of the less prominent personalities had still not imprinted themselves successfully, and this young lad was apparently one of them.
‘Go to your next rotation,’ Earl told him. ‘You’ll be late.’
As he turned back to his computer, Earl caught a quick glimpse of the drawing. It did seem to have changed a little. Luke Skywalker had grown shorter and a little plumper, and the geometric shape of Darth Vader’s helmet was now less distinct. His cloak had also been erased. The boy must have been working on it during math class.
Second Rotation.
‘ “Give me a Prussian Blue and I could make mud from the sewers of Paris look like a virgin’s pale flesh.” ’
Earl looked around at the semi-circle of youthful faces. Somebody giggled.
Virgin. Hee hee. Earl kept at it.
‘What do you think Delacroix meant when he said that?’
Silence.
‘What do you think he was talking about? Hmm?’
Silence.
‘Does anyone know what Prussian Blue is?’
Silence.
‘Has anyone ever heard of Paris?’
Two hands sluggishly raised.
‘Hallelujah. Well let’s begin there and start filling in some gaps, shall we?’
Five minute break. Then Third Rotation. Same again. Delacroix. Prussian Blue. Forces of the Sublime. Mud from the Sewers of Paris.
Fourth Rotation. Delacroix. Blue. Mud. Sublime.
Brrronggg! Brrronggg! Brrronggg! Lunch break. Thank God. Earl dismissed his ‘scholars’, quickly turned off his computer, fumbled in his bag for the plastic tub containing his sandwich and headed towards the instructor area. Suddenly the boy was in front of him, blocking his way. Thrusting forward his sheet of paper.
‘Can you see this picture I drew?’
Earl looked down at the small, plump figure, trying to size him up. Was he being serious or was this another ploy to annoy the uptight art history instructor? The boy didn’t look as if he had the gumption to attempt such a dare on his own. Had other boys put him up to it? Earl glanced around. No one else was paying any attention. He looked down again. The boy’s face was blank, inscrutable. Marco? Marshall? Earl still couldn’t remember his name.
‘Okay. What are you up to? What’s going on here?’
The boy continued to hold out the paper. Earl found his slightly vacant stare unsettling. He glanced down at the sketch. Again it seemed to have changed. Darth Vader had shrunk a little and his clothes looked more contemporary. Luke now had curly hair and had lost his light sabre.
‘I do not critique scholars’ personal artwork, and you shouldn’t be doodling during school hours. If I see this drawing again, I will have to confiscate it. Now put it away and go to lunch.’
Earl pushed past the boy. He felt tense. Needing to unwind, he ignored the other instructors in the lunch area and sat down at a table on his own. He opened his lunch box and gazed out through the mezzanine railings at the sea of human hubbub on the floor below. The sight disturbed him. Averting his eyes, he tried to relax by focussing his thoughts solely on his ham sandwich.
Fifth Rotation. Delacroix. Delacroix. Forces of the Sublime. Mud from the Sewers of Paris. Did the life of this dead painter mean anything to these twenty-first-century teenagers? Did painting itself matter any more at all in this era of jpegs, instagrams, soundbites and ringtones? Picasso, in the first twenty-five years of his life, had witnessed the invention of steam turbine engines, cars, planes, movies, light bulbs, x-rays, machine guns and the theory of relativity. He had painted ‘The Demoiselles D’Avignon’ in response. The result had been to propel the respectable art of academic figure-painting into the industrial age. To have cynical smart-asses drag it, kicking and screaming, through fifty dynamic years of radical deconstruction and finally leave it burned out and washed up in the dead zone of postmodernism. Art was finished. Now these kids had nothing but consumerism to inspire them. That and the reheated remnants of artistic triumphs from ages past, dished out to them by guys like Earl, themselves disillusioned and washed up. They were all dead, or might as well be.
Announcement over the speaker system:
‘Sixth and Seventh Rotations will be combined this afternoon. Scholars go to Sixth Rotation and remain in your seats when the Seventh Rotation bell sounds.’
What? What did that mean? Earl looked over at the science class that was being taught on the other side of the Mezzanine. The science teacher caught his eye, grinned and shrugged. Don’t ask me, the shrug seemed to say. Nobody knows why anything happens around here.
Earl groaned. Combining Sixth and Seventh Rotations meant, presumably, that he would have extra kids in his next class, and also mean that he would somehow have to extend his Delacroix lecture from forty-five minutes to an hour and a half. This sort of schedule-juggling happened a lot at Medici. Most instructors seemed unfazed by it, but Earl, still somewhat new to teaching and reliant on the structure of his carefully-planned classes, found it extremely stressful.
Combining Sixth and Seventh Rotations also meant that he would be dealing with Hugo and E
mporio Burton for an hour and half; two brothers from a family of twelve kids, all of whom were named after perfumes or colognes. Emporio, the eldest, had told Earl on his second day at the school, that he and his brothers’ plan for when they had left school was to start a gang and take over LA. Earl had laughed at the joke, but since then, had become less and less sure that it was one. Hugo and Emporio, both clearly opposed to art appreciation of any kind, had apparently seen Earl’s art history class as a testing ground for their takeover plans. Using a mixture of pupil intimidation and instructor demoralisation, they had disrupted every art history rotation they’d attended since September. Their various ploys included kicking other kids when Earl wasn’t looking, asking totally unrelated questions and addressing Earl as Mister Teabag. The next ninety minutes would be gruelling.
And what was worse . . . the boy was back. When the kids had arranged themselves on the seats, Earl looked around and saw him. Seated cross-legged on the floor, silently staring, still holding his drawing. Ignoring him, Earl started his lecture.
Twenty minutes into the rotation, Earl looked up. Emporio’s hair was on fire. Flames crackling. Earl stared at the boy, entranced. An ex-girlfriend had once accidentally set her hair on fire at a dinner party by bending too low over a candle flame. For a second the shocking memory overwhelmed him. The girl shrieking. The expressions of panic. Earl blinked. The flames were gone.
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