The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror
Page 61
He thought of more than a few angry parents calling Ms. Johnson and asking why some substitute was telling high school stories to sixth graders. He dropped the storytelling voice.
“Do you guys want me to stop?”
“No!” The chorus was nearly unanimous. Nearly. There were two girls in the back who had not responded, in addition to a boy in the end chair, second row, left. Was it apathy? He couldn’t tell. And again, it was too late now to really make a difference.
“I brought my stuff in a week before classes started,” he continued. “I’ve never been much of a decorator, so I had my parts of speech posters, a couple of pictures of Langston Hughes, an exploded version of a Maya Angelou poem, my file case, you know. And just when I am tacking up the verb-adverb board, I thought there was something in the wall. Something moving. I mean, have you ever heard something so faint that thirty seconds after it happens you wonder whether you really heard anything at all?”
Heads nodded solemnly. He walked to the wall.
“I could have sworn it sounded like this.”
He made his fingers into a claw shape and scratched his nails down the plastered surface. A few kids squirmed in their seats.
“So I ran out into the hall like an idiot, because I thought someone was playing a joke on me. But it was just an empty hallway. Later, when I went down to get my lunch I asked one of the other teachers if they played practical jokes on people here. It was then that he told me about the alcove, about the cover-up, about Bria Patterson. I didn’t believe him. But when I went back upstairs to finish setting up, there was something sitting on my desk. It was something that hadn’t been there before. It was a girl’s blue cross-tie, laying there unbuttoned.”
Lots of uncomfortable shifting. A boy was clawing his nails into his cheeks, eyes wide as saucers. A girl with multi-colored beads in her hair had her knees knocked together and her hands in a finger web around the front of them. She was rocking and mouthing something unintelligible.
“I didn’t want to touch it. Even though my common sense knew someone must have just stuck it there for a joke, my heart knew there was something unholy about it. Like it had come from the grave.”
Someone was making a high-pitched moan up in her throat, but Ben hardly heard it. He had to finish and he had to nail this one. Damn the consequences, damn the torpedoes, damn everything.
“Now, I know for a fact that each and every one of us has a low grade level of ESP. I’m not talking about dumb stuff like bending spoons and reading minds and making flower pots fly across the room, but think about this. Have you ever been at The Old Country Buffet, or even in our crummy lunchroom, and you could swear someone was staring at you from behind? And then you turn, and they are staring, for real, for real?”
Heads nodded.
“That’s the way I felt. I turned quickly, and I could swear that I saw the edge of a blue uniform skirt whip past the doorway. Then there was a swishing noise out in the hall. Like a jump rope dragging across concrete. I walked over, turned the corner, and she was there. I could see through her. She had blond pigtails, and no eyes, just dark spaces. There was a line of blood coming down the corner of her mouth, and she was running that jump rope back and forth across the floor. She was moaning in the voice of the dead, “Mommy . . . ”
Ben was dragging the imaginary rope, playing the part, eyes far off, mouth slightly ajar. Here was where the story always ended. He had never figured out a proper conclusion, and he normally broke character, smiled and said something like,
“Come on guys. I was just kidding. You didn’t believe that crap, did you?”
He did not get the chance. The fire alarm went off. Loud. It was a buzzer that was so overwhelming down here it actually made his skin vibrate.
Girls screamed. Boys jumped up from their desks as if there were snakes crawling on the floor. Three girls in the back row stood up, hands pressed to their mouths. They were hyperventilating. A tall girl with white stockings had rushed to the corner of the room, pulled out her blue sweater at the neck, and buried her face in the void as if she was going to puke into it.
Ben was terrified. Surely, he would hear about this from Johnson.
“Guys!” he shouted over the numbing buzz. “Out through the Cherry Street door! Go ahead, it’s just an alarm! And I was only kidding about the ghost . . . ”
No one really heard. They scrambled for the door. A boy was crying and rubbing the base of his palm against his cheek in angry shame. A girl with thick glasses and blackheads clustered around her nose was furiously punching numbers into a cell phone. Oh, Ben was in a shitstorm now. He wondered if he would be fired. He hadn’t looked at his resume for years. This was bad. The last thing he wanted was to be thrown into the system and assigned to a regular Philadelphia public school. They doled out positions by seniority. Charter schools did not rack up points, and he would probably wind up at some ghetto middle school where the kids took apart your emergency phone on the first day, ran in and out of the classrooms like mental patients, and found out where your car was parked before it was time for recess. Ms. Johnson ran a tight ship here with this charter, and he was lucky to have the position he did. He had never really been in trouble with Johnson, but he heard she was merciless if she had a cause. He supposed he could beg. At least he had that.
He walked out into the sunshine and crossed Cherry Street. It was tennis weather. Construction was going on down Broad Street and you could hear a dull pounding complimented by a slightly sharper ratcheting noise associated with cranes and oiled chains being rolled onto big pulley wheels. The kids were gathered in front of a row house with empty planters in front of the dark windows. There were faded white age stains shadowed up the brick. A couple of his tenth graders had migrated over and were sitting on the concrete steps one residence down. Ben waved to them absently and started working his way between children, pleading his case. It was lame and awkward and necessary. He had to do some kind of damage control no matter how slip-shod it appeared.
“I was only kidding, guys. You know that, right?”
“I made the whole thing up. I tell it to my tenth graders all the time. It’s a silly story, really.”
“Didn’t you see that I had no ending for it? Yes. It was just a joke. No girl like that ever went here at all.”
Mr. Rollins got on a megaphone.
“Drill’s over. Move on to your last period class.”
Ben had not worked the group in its entirety. He had gotten to the hyper-ventilators, joked it up, and earned a round of cautious, weak smiles. It turned out that the girl with the blackheads was simply supposed to call her mother at the end of seventh period every day and she had almost forgotten. Big relief there. Still, he hadn’t made it to the crying boy or the tall girl who’d almost vomited into her sweater. There were a lot of loose ends here.
Ben Marcus went back inside with his head hung down.
This time he might have actually blown it.
Johnson had not called Ben in to the office today, thank God. He knew there was an unspoken code in the high school not to snitch about the wild stuff he pulled up there, but he had not expected the sixth graders to be so discreet. It had taken all of his will power not to tell Kim about it like a confession when he got home yesterday, and he had woken in a cold sweat three times during the night. But he was pretty sure by now that everything was going to be all right. Ms. Johnson did not bide her time when she had to get something off her plate, so no news at this point in the day was certainly good.
His homeroom was up next. The brown tables were folded up and pushed to the back left corner of the lunchroom. There were rows of chairs set up in front of the steam table and the student council had put up crepe paper streamers. There were some new plants suspended from the drop ceiling, and old Jake had hooked up a sound system. Ms. Newman’s homeroom had just completed an oldies thing featuring the Electric Slide that the students laughed at and Ms. Johnson obviously preferred. A guy pretty high up on the food chain
at Temple University sat with her at the judge’s table, along with a man wearing thin rectangular dark glasses, close cropped sideburns, and a long black overcoat.
Laquanna walked to the center of the space, and the other girls followed. There was a hush. The boys filtered in and took positions between. Malik walked to the front, and there was a rousing cheer speckled by only a few boos from the small crew of guys from the “C” section that he had beaten in a parking lot rap battle last week. He looked over at Jake, and the music blasted on. The kids exploded in movement, and Ben grooved a bit where he stood. He was going to miss this homeroom next year. They had been a lot of fun.
Someone was pulling his sleeve. He looked down. It was a girl from the elementary school, short, probably fourth or fifth grade, long hair curled in sausage shapes and pulled back by a pink satin ribbon tied in a floppy bow. Her eyes were wide with terror.
“What?” he said. “What’s wrong?” He had to nearly shout to be heard over the music.
The girl said something and he could not make it out. He leaned down, and her breath came hot in his ear.
“It’s the dead girl. She’s in the bathroom.”
Ben pulled back a bit and raised his eyebrows.
“What?”
She made her lips frame the words in the deliberate manner one used when speaking to the slow or the deaf.
“Our teacher went out to make copies on another floor. Help us. It’s the dead girl. She’s in one of the stalls moaning, Mommy.”
Ben pushed past her and marched out of the lunchroom. The music was cut to a haunt the minute he turned the corner, and he felt his face going hot. This was just what he needed. Some jackass sixth grader squatting up on the toilet seat so you couldn’t see her feet, then groaning “Mommy” like a wounded doorbell when a younger kid tried to take a piss. Wasn’t this always the way of things? He was so sure he had dodged a bullet, and now in this strange backlash, he was still going to get nailed. He could picture the meeting right now, the teachers all at their tables looking innocently at each other, Johnson up at the podium.
“It has come to my attention that some middle school children have been frightening the elementary school students in the bathroom. Evidently, a story about an abducted third grader has been going around the school, and I would like to know where this started. From the bits and pieces I have heard, the story seems rather sophisticated for a student. I want to know what teacher was involved with this. I want that teacher to come forward and take responsibility for . . . ”
You know the drill.
Ben reached the end of the hall and made the quick left. He paused, but only for a bare second. He had never been in the girl’s bathroom. He walked through the archway, (there were no doors for bathrooms at People First), and before passing the brown steel divider that blocked the sightline, he called out,
“Teacher coming in! Excuse me! I apologize!”
The bathroom was empty. Besides the lack of urinals to the left, it was the same as most institutional boy’s rooms. Brown tiled floor, drain grate in the center surrounded by a shallow puddle of water in a shape that vaguely resembled Texas. There was a row of sinks and each basin had a mirror above it, the reflective material more like tin foil than glass to avoid cracking under the variety of incidents that were so often far from delicate. The soap dispensers each had spots of blood orange residue pooled below on the sink tops where quick hands had missed, and only two had been converted to the newer white units that rationed out foam by palm activation. There was a Fort James paper towel dispenser by the entrance just above an industrial plastic yellow trash can surrounded by the damp, crumpled sheets that had been poorly tossed. There were four stalls, the first three standard issue, and the last sectioned off in its own private area that spanned the width of the space. All three of the doors on the regular stalls were open, but barely. It seemed the floor was pitched in a way that kept them resting an inch or two in off the lock plates. The handicapped door was half ajar.
Ben pushed open the door of the first stall with the middle knuckle of his index finger. Vacant. The bowl was unflushed from what looked like nine or ten sittings, all number one thank God for small favors, and on the wall someone had written, “Shaneeka sucks monkey nuts.” Stall number two was in the same relative condition, and number three, of course, was filled with a deposit Ben could not believe someone had the guts to leave out on the surface of this earth. He backed out, breathed in deep, held it, shouldered into the thin stall, and reached for the flusher with the sole of his shoe. When it whooshed down, he pulled back quickly. These institutional mechanisms were sometimes loaded with such strong jets that they kicked up a bit of back splash off the suction.
After the rush of the initial violent whirlpool, there was that hollow, pipe-like refilling sound, and just underneath it, Ben heard a voice. From the handicapped stall. It sounded like it was in tow just beneath the running water, an echo, a faint ringing. It sounded like a girl’s voice. Before he could really make out words, it blended with the receding sounds and thinned out to silence.
Ben walked into the handicapped stall. There was a runner bar along the wall, another behind the toilet, a private sink, and a separate towel dispenser. To the right there was also one of those tin foil mirrors, and he saw something move in it. His breath caught in his throat. It was blue, and it had seemed to shoot through the mirror like liquid through a distorted syringe. He moved closer to investigate, and sighed. It was his shirt, picked up in the light and worked through the microscopic steel grooves in an hourglass effect. How did the girls adjust their makeup with these funhouse things? The boys had them too, but he thought the female breed would have demanded better. Personally, he always used the faculty lounge up front by Johnson’s office. It was worth the walk.
The hair on the back of his neck was up.
He turned.
There was a hand coming out of the toilet. The seat was up and there was a hand gripping the rim.
Ben grit his teeth and smiled, despite the knocking his heart was still making up in his ears. It was one of those dollar store, plastic dead hands you could affix to door rims and bed edges. So here was the dead girl. Ha ha.
He levered down a fistful of towels and approached. The artwork wasn’t even good on this thing. The sores had red spots half covering the indentations and spilling over about a quarter of an inch. Probably a misaligned factory stamp. The nail polish on the scabby fingers had already flaked partly off, and at the edge of the wrist, the press that had molded the rubber most probably had a small void since there were two renegade nodules sticking off that needed to be pruned. Ben reached down to pluck it off the rim and stopped.
There was writing behind the toilet. It was written faintly on the wall tile in the spidery, uneven, block letter style of a young child,
Turn a promise to a lie, and you will be the next to die.
“Fuck,” he muttered. The written message had suddenly reminded him of a missed obligation. He grabbed the joke toy, held it off to the side a bit, and walked it out of the stall. His feet made hollow echoes across the floor. He had forgotten to put in a good word for the boy who had been looking at the dead frogs. It would have taken two seconds. He tossed the rubber toy into the yellow bin and sighed. His word was his bond.
Something splashed in the handicapped toilet.
Ben put his fists to his sides and stalked back to the stall. Enough already. He stopped when he turned the corner of the doorway.
There were two hands gripping the rim of the bowl as if reaching up from deep within it, palms down, fingers over the edges. They were girl hands, rotten and burst at the knuckles with yellow-graying bone sticking through. The skin was mottled, water-shriveled, and blue. The fingers released, and the forearms slipped back into the water, the hands following, down to the fingertips. Gone. There was a faint gasp, like the exit of breath.
Ben approached the toilet. “I did not just see that,” he said to himself. His legs were numb, his mouth
ajar. There was a brown ring at the surface edge of the water, and there was still the hint of faint ripples dancing above the submerged, funneled pipe orifice.
Something from the drain-hole exploded.
Ben saw a flash of dirty blue and white checkerboard just before it whipped across the bridge of his nose. The cold toilet water that sprayed him in the face was eclipsed by the sharp snap of pain. His glasses flew off to skid along the tile into the next stall. Ben’s left eye had been struck bald and it was squeezed shut. The other was half open in a squint, and through the blur he saw the elongated jump rope whirling mad figure eights, its alleged wooden handles still buried in the depths of the drain. Dirty water snapped to the sides spattering the dull yellow concrete block wall and the steel divider to the left. Ben put up his hands in a defensive posture, but the rope was quicker. It snaked out and hooked him at the back of the neck.
It spun mad spaghetti twirls and peppered drain water up his nose. He clawed his hands at the front of his neck and couldn’t get his fingers under. The taste in his mouth was hot copper. There was a yank, and he was brought a foot closer and a yard lower. He kept his feet, but he was losing this tug of war.
Black spots danced in front of his eyes, and his lungs started screaming for air. He tried rearing back, but the pull was too great. He opened his eyes for the last time, and saw the toilet bowl rush at his face. And the last thought Ben Marcus had on the face of this earth was that the promise he had broken was far more fundamental than a forgotten bribe to a kid who was messing around with a dead frog in a jar.
Lia fears for her kind. They are fragmented and she knows that even under threat they will not unify. Some humans will submit to the knife rather than give in to the beast; the true wolf will kill until it dies of exhaustion . . .