The Gated Trilogy

by Matt Drabble

  “Who’s Dr Lempke?”

  “He was the doc here before Samuel.” At the mention of Dr Creed’s name, Sarah-Jane’s cheeks flushed a little in a way that Emily found endearing. “I think that Dr Lempke retired somewhere out near Maine. I think that he had a daughter out there.”

  “What about in the diary when Jessica says that you warned her about Thirlby? What did you mean?”

  SJ leant in closer and lowered her voice, “Nothing sinister. Only that Mrs. Thirlby could be a bit of a cow sometimes, and Jess was starting to come into work later and later. I was worried that she might get fired.”

  Emily leant back into the sofa and processed the information; the impression that she got from the diary was of an increasingly disturbed woman. She was also concerned at her own somewhat paranoid feelings only this morning when travelling into work. On top of that, she was also starting to feel that everyone was watching her in the same way that Jessica described.

  What did that mean? Was it a common side effect of pregnancy? Was there something in the water in Eden? Or had Jessica had genuine cause for concern?

  She suddenly realised that it had been an age since she had spoken and Sarah-Jane was staring at her with growing worry etched on her face.

  “Emily,” SJ asked softly, “are you okay?”

  “Do you mean am I seeing my students replaced by camera-eyed robots?” She had meant to speak lightly and with humour but she didn’t feel that anything was funny here. “Don’t worry, SJ, I’m fine; just a little tired.”

  “Maybe you should take it a little easier. I’m guessing being pregnant can’t be easy.”

  “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Emily!” Sarah-Jane said, shocked but smiling shyly.

  “Oh come on, Sarah-Jane. You and the good doctor will be married before you know it,” Emily teased. “And you’ll be squeezing out a classroom full of your own students before long.”

  Sarah-Jane turned embarrassedly and walked back towards her classroom, slowly gathering the children returning after lunch. “You’re terrible,” she said to Emily as she walked, her face alight with the thought.

  Emily stuffed the diary deep into her shoulder bag and hefted it onto her shoulder as she walked slowly back to her own classroom.

  She stepped into the hallway outside the lounge and moved along the gloomy corridor.

  Suddenly, she felt eyes upon her at the far end. Silhouetted in the shadows was the unmistakable form of Mrs. Thirlby.

  Emily shuddered under the distant gaze of the headmistress. Her obscured features made her all the more intimidating. Emily had to walk several feet towards Thirlby and she positively ran the last few paces towards her classroom and the noise within.

  She wrenched the door open and jumped gratefully into the sunny room.

  ----------

  The clock crawled by slowly; the hands almost seemed to move backwards at times, dragging the day interminably. Thom stared wistfully out of the window. The sun was bright and warm and the day was passing him by.

  Eden High School was home to the town's teens aged between 14 and 18 and it was the sister school to the elementary school that was across town.

  The classroom held fifteen students; it was the limit in Eden, and it also meant that there were never any hiding places.

  Back in LA, Thom had been able to drift to the back of the class and fly under the radar.

  The teachers at his old school had only seemed pleased to get out of the building unscathed at the end of the day; education had come a distant second to self-preservation.

  Here in Eden, however, it appeared to be deemed necessary for the educators to actually educate.

  Thom was an intelligent young man; he knew that he picked up subjects quickly and easily, and he had always performed on standardized tests with distinction.

  His attention problems seemed to derive from boredom. He could pick up the basics of any subject in a flash, but once his brain grasped the subject then it would switch off and search for the next injection.

  “Mr. Bray?”

  Thom looked up in surprise, caught in his wanderings. Mr. Stark, his biology teacher, was staring at him, awaiting a response. Thom had to actually stop and think in order to place the teacher and the subject.

  “Sorry, sir?” was the only response that he could muster.

  “Have you been listening at all, Mr. Bray?” The tone was more than a little condescending.

  “Of course, Mr. Stark,” Thom smiled.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?” Thom asked politely.

  Mr. Stark crossed his arms across his narrow chest; he was around fifty years old, balding, with a retreating hairline that had long since abandoned the front lines.

  He wore a peppered white goatee and small round glasses. Stark favoured a wardrobe that had long since witnessed better days, consisting of several brown and tan checked jackets, and grey slacks.

  He was the sort of teacher that Thom’s previous school would have eaten alive. But this was not LA - this was Eden.

  Thom glanced around the class at his colleagues; none were his friends. Since the move, he had been unable to really connect with any of the other students in school. His tastes and interests just didn’t seem to mesh with anyone else’s. Where he had a voracious appetite for horror and metal, his fellow classmates seemed pasty-faced replicated teenagers.

  The school didn’t actively dissuade him from his tastes; no one had ever dragged him aside to chastise him for his proclivities, and he was just simply left on the outside of all circles. In his experience of life and movies, most schools had their various cliques and gangs, nerds, brains, jocks, Goths etc. But here, everyone seemed content and happy. There were no divisions of race or colour, no segregation of the popular and the not so popular. There seemed no in-house competition, as though Eden was all one team and they were all team players.

  In theory, it would seem an ideal environment and Thom certainly did not miss the constant violent threat that his old school had possessed. But in reality it was just simply dull.

  “The question was, what is cell theory?”

  “Oh right.” Thom processed quickly and effortlessly. “Cell theory asserts that the cell is the constituent unit of living beings. Before the discovery of the cell, it was not recognised that living beings were made of building blocks like cells. The cell theory is one of the basic theories of biology,” he recited, as he watched the clock tick closer to 3pm.

  “Very good, Mr. Bray.” Mr. Stark sounded as though he was struggling to gain the upper hand again. “You see what happens when you listen to me in class?” he announced. “Even Mr. Bray here can learn a thing or two.”

  Thom’s smart mouth had often been his downfall but the school bell rang loudly saving him from himself for once. The class trooped out in its usual slow and considerate fashion .

  Not for the first time, Thom thought of tripping up a classmate, or slapping the teacher just to get a real emotion even if it was anger.

  On the occasions that he had bumped into students in the halls - regardless of the fact that he was the accidental aggressor - he was always apologized to.

  He had been scared taking the keys from his mother’s office, and then fearful sneaking around the suicide woman’s house. He had been terrified when he’d pushed open the bathroom door, only to then be painfully accosted by the giant sheriff.

  As frightened as he’d been, at least it was a real emotion; his heart had pounded violently against his chest, but it was real.

  Since the move here, there had been a dearth of reality in his world; his mother floated through the day with a smile tattooed onto her face as did most of the town it would seem.

  The sky was always blue and the sun always shone brightly. The only other person he had met that seemed real to him was the writer.

  He had spent the previous afternoon at Michael’s house and they had talked about books and movies all within the horror genre.

&
nbsp; Michael’s knowledge had been vastly superior to his own and he had gone away with a mountain of research to pursue. For an old guy, Michael was alright; his taste in music and horror reminded Thom enormously of his absent father. He did, of course, recognise this fact and was aware of his own need for a figure to fill that void.

  Thom moved along the hallway slowly. He didn’t have anywhere in particular to go this afternoon.

  Michael had told him to call by anytime but he felt that he didn’t want to outstay his welcome already. The hallway was by now deserted; the long rows of metallic lockers were all clean and graffiti free. The floor squeaked and sparkled as his lonely footsteps echoed off the abandoned walls.

  He always carried a small notebook in his backpack; he used the book to jot down his own story ideas.

  His imagination often ran at dizzying speeds and without a notebook, most would be lost to the ether.

  The dark hallway began the churning of tales within his mind as the gloom closed in around him and he felt the telltale increase of his heart rate as he delved into the recesses.

  He started to see long slithering tentacles sliding their way around the lockers, the metal boxes buckling under the power of the deep. Great suckers opened and closed hungrily with rows of flesh-shredding razor teeth. The monstrous arms snaked their way ever closer to his juicy bones. The school was empty and no one would hear him scream in the dark. But the tentacles were only arms; somewhere hidden in the blackness was the body, a cavernous devouring monster that would send mortals into madness with only a glance at its hideous form.

  Thom scribbled furiously, catching the prose before it fluttered away from his mind on distant wings. He could hear the wet slithers and he could feel the cold reptilian skin as it brushed his own. He could feel all of this as he wrote until sweating hands grabbed him for real and he screamed.

  “Watch where you’re going, boy!”

  Thom was jerked back into the here and now; the darkened corners of his imagination retreated reluctantly. He was standing face to face with a rather disappointing monster - his biology teacher.

  “Sorry, Mr. Stark,” he muttered.

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it, Mr. Bray; look at the mess you’ve made.”

  Thom followed Stark’s pointing to the spreading brown stain on the front of his pants. The teacher had been carrying a large mug of coffee that was now half emptied in the most inconvenient of locations.

  “Come with me, Bray.”

  Thom noted the drop in Stark’s angry tone; the biology teacher now had hold of his shoulder and was dragging him in his wake towards the teachers’ lounge.

  Stark barged open the door and pulled him inside; Thom was immediately struck by the lack of offending odours.

  Back in his old school, the teachers’ lounge had been a place of refuge, stale coffee and sweat, and the aroma of fear hung on the air whenever the door was cracked open and the sour waft ventured into the hallways. This lounge, however, looked like a plush apartment.

  There were several long and deep sofas, reclining armchairs, and large bookcases with both reference and fiction books. There were also excellent catering facilities.

  Two large vending machines stood tall and proud against the far wall; even from this distance, Thom could see that the monetary facility was disabled. Fresh fruit and pastry crumbs sat happily on serving platters on long wooden tables as did two industrial coffee machines. Thom didn’t eat this well at home.

  “Sit, Bray.” Stark pointed to the furthest sofa from by the sink, grabbing some napkins and wetting them at the sink.

  Thom obeyed the instruction and sat, enjoying the comfort, but less so when Stark sat down a little too close to him.

  “Look at the mess you made, Thom.”

  Thom tried to avoid staring directly at the slightly uplifted groin area that his biology teacher was indicating towards. Stark began dabbing at his trousers.“You’re a strange one, Thom,” Stark said pleasantly. “You’ve got brains, you’ve got intelligence, but no one seems to be able to, um, stimulate you.”

  Thom suddenly felt a little uncomfortable; the school around them was deserted of teachers and students. His dawdling had left only him behind.

  “I mean that you could go far, you could go as far as you wanted. You just have to give a little more effort,” Stark said in a strange hushed voice as he continued cleaning his trousers.

  Thom was not completely oblivious to the ways of the world; he’d had a couple of girlfriends back in LA, and he’d even brushed a tender breast over a thick jumper once before. It was not until Stark gently brushed a trembling hand across his cheek did alarm bells ring.

  Stark’s other hand was still dabbing the coffee stain at his groin and his breathing deepened and hitched.

  For a moment, Thom thought that the teacher was having a stroke of some kind - his breath was positively panting now.

  Thom’s own mind suddenly exploded as he felt an unwanted hand brush his own thigh. He looked into the teacher’s eyes and saw a strange blend of terror and excitement in Stark’s expression.

  The world stood still and Thom’s body felt frozen like a deer in the headlights.

  He desperately wanted to scream and yell for help and tell the teacher to get the fuck off of him, but all he could do was sit and shiver.

  Abruptly, the poisoned silence was shattered by a ringing cell phone. Stark suddenly looked as though he was aware of his actions for the first time.

  The teacher’s face reddened a crimson shade and he stood quickly and awkwardly. Stark took the phone from his inside pocket and flipped the ringing phone open.

  His expression turned from red to black as he saw the identity of the caller. Thom sat fixed to the sofa and he knew that this was his window, but something about the shaking biology teacher was fascinating to watch.

  “H-H-H-Hello,” Stark stammered. “I wasn’t…” he spluttered nervously. “But I, I, I wouldn’t, I resent the…”

  Thom watched as Stark’s face grew increasingly terrified; his expression was now a mask of terror. Whoever was on the other end of the phone was shaking the teacher to his very core.

  “But…, but…” Stark was barely able to speak against the incoming tirade, “I will… of course… yes right away.” He pressed the end call button with a shaking finger. “Thom, you’d better go home now, son,” he said in a strained robotic voice.

  Thom managed to hoist himself up off of the sofa; Stark kept his back to him and wouldn’t turn around and face him. As scared as he’d been, the slumped shoulders of the teacher now wobbling with the soft sound of crying brought forward an unwanted dreg of sympathy. He squashed it hard and left quickly and without a word.

  ----------

  Henry Stark was calculating the time that it would take for him to get home, get the ready-packed case and get out. His heart was pounding and not in the good way.

  He cursed his weakness; for so long it had been kept under control, locked and chained in the basement like the filthy animal that it was.

  He couldn’t believe that one slip had already ruined everything. It was a roller coaster that had been set in motion; the car had climbed the steep incline slowly and steadily without him even noticing.

  He’d sat on the sofa, staring into the eyes of the young, fresh virgin spoils, without even realizing that his mind was set in motion.

  Suddenly, the roller coaster had tipped over the top of the slow, steep incline and then pitched forward. The car had rolled with startling speed, careering forward and violently out of control.

  His primal instincts had taken over whilst his self-preservation had lain dormant and silent. All it had taken was one hand on one thigh and his world had collapsed around him.

  His hands trembled with fear as he desperately tried to get his keys in the car ignition. He steadied himself with considerable care. If he didn’t grasp onto the life preserver now, then he would never be found again. The phone call had shattered his fantasies into a million pieces
and had dragged him back into the real world; a world that had now turned black and deadly.

  Eventually he calmed himself enough to start the car. With forced control, he pulled out of the parking lot slowly and nonchalantly drove the short distance to his house.

  He thumped the wheel in frustration; everything here had been perfect, so perfect.

  The money was fantastic; the classes were small and the students eager and manageable. The school board had even provided him with a house in town. It was a spectacular property, far in excess of anything he had ever seen before.

  Throughout his whole career he had been able to suppress his unnatural desires during work hours.

  There had been a number of select and discreet organisations that he had maintained a cautious membership to. This select band of merry men had provided him with enough data to enable him to function out in the real world; he had guarded his memberships with the utmost care and scrutiny.

  He had always been able to keep his desires under control through sheer force of will and cowardice over his discovery, and he had never laid a hand on any student.

  It was the most perverse of ironies that he had been suspended from his last job over an untrue allegation of abuse by a failing student with a grudge to bear.

  Alan Hatcher had been an academically underachieving thirteen year old. “Hatch” had been an all star performer on the field, the court, and the pool, but never in the classroom.

  He was popular with both sexes in the school. He had an easy, casual manner that drew people to him; boys wanted to be him, and girls wanted to be with him.

  His effortless charm had won him fans amongst the faculty, none more so than the principal, who had come to Henry one day pleading with him to tutor the boy through his classes.

  Hatch’s prowess in the sporting arena drew much wanted and needed attention to the school in an age of competition for funding.

  Henry had been the most effective teacher at the school, owing in no small part to his desire to be close to his children.

  At first, Hatch had been willing and attentive but his interest had soon waned. His attention was difficult to hold; he would lose focus quickly and his temper became short and easy to blow.