by Matt Drabble
A gaggle of children were making their way along the corridor and he had to slow down so as not to alert them by showing his fear.
The new boy, Joshua Bradley, was leading the line and looked up at him with a strange small smile as he passed.
He remembered that Mrs. Merryweather had been hounding him for details on the new transfer; he regretted his memory of being sharp with her.
The odd thing was that while he could remember meeting the new boy’s parents, he couldn’t actually picture them or the meeting. It was like a story with words but no images. He shook the thoughts from his head and got back on the matter at hand.
He headed out through the kitchen that was, thankfully, devoid of staff.
He reached the back door and used the key hanging above it on a hook to open it.
He was twenty yards or so from the school before he realised that he wasn’t dressed for the occasion. His trousers were already soaked through up to his knees and his shoe covered feet were crying out for waterproof boots.
He made his way as quickly as he could towards the woodland, following a direct line of sight from his office window.
He wanted to seek out Maurice to come with him, but he didn’t want to appear weak in front of the caretaker. Maurice was the only other man who knew the dark history of Ravenhill and he would require his assistance if another victim had been claimed.
He reached the outskirts of the woods and plunged deeper inside. The shadows were long and impenetrable to the feeble rays of daylight. He tried to get his bearings from the school but inside the gloom it was difficult to focus.
He wandered around in the dark, suddenly wishing that he had taken the detour to Maurice’s cottage, or at least brought a torch.
The tree branches brushed against him with sharp bare branches seemingly determined to keep him away from their bounty.
He was starting to spin around in circles as his childish fears of the dark grew and manifested.
Suddenly the woods seemed a thousand miles thick and wide and the thought that he would never find his way out again started to gnaw around the edges of his mind.
He fought hard against the irrational intrusion, determined to remain calm, but it was a battle that he was losing.
He started to flail backwards as the notion that the branches were trying to grab and restrain him took over.
He flapped and kicked out as he stumbled blindly until his back hit something large and heavy.
He stood rooted to the spot as he slowly reached back and felt for whatever was behind him.
His fingers brushed against manmade material and he knew that someone was standing at the back of him.
Cringing and shivering he turned slowly and deliberately.
The face that greeted him was frozen in a monstrously frozen and swollen death gasp and he shoved it away.
Edna Bailey swung back and forth, the tree branch creaking under her weight, as she hung from the noose and Barnaby forgot himself and screamed.
CHAPTER 14
Father Brendon Monroe watched as PC Paterson tapped away at the computer with seemingly little interest.
The young lad wasn’t much in the way of company and he was hoping that Sergeant Ross would return soon, hopefully with some kind of illuminating news.
He was still struggling to come to terms with the fact that two of his elderly parishioners had apparently gone nuts and started trying to kill people and, in at least one case, succeeding.
Colin Merryweather had never been much of a man and Brendon had on more than one occasion tried to breech the subject of domestic abuse with Mavis, but even he hadn’t deserved an axe in the face.
He wandered over to the maintenance closet and pressed his ear up against the door trying to listen for signs of movement. “Do you think she’s ok in there?” he asked Paterson.
“I dunno,” the young policeman replied with a disinterested shrug, not taking his eyes off of the monitor.
“Do you think we should check on her? It’s awfully quiet in there,” Brendon said nervously.
“Dunno,” Paterson answered with even less interest.
“Yours really is a steel trap mind designed for detective work isn’t it, William?”
“Huh?”
“Exactly,” Brendon shook his head in exasperation. “Have you found anything yet?”
“Not really, I’m not sure how we’re spelling that word.”
“Tlacatecolotl?”
“Yeah, that one.”
Brendon walked to the desk and wrote it down.
“Oh, I was way off,” Paterson laughed unhelpfully.
Brendon took a deep breath and found some of his often needed patience. “Why don’t you try again?” he said through gritted teeth.
About 20 minutes went by and Brendon wondered if the young PC’s attention had drifted off again when he suddenly perked up.
“Aztec?” Paterson suddenly said out of nowhere.
“Excuse me?”
“Aztec, does that mean anything?”
“I literally have no idea,” Brendon answered honestly. “Are you saying that Tlacatecolotl is an Aztec word?”
“According to Wikipedia,” Paterson said, pointing at the screen.
“What’s Wikipedia?”
“It’s a site that tells you shit about shit.”
“You mean it’s bad?” Brendon asked confused.
“Huh?”
“You said that it’s shit,” Brendon said as patiently as he could muster.
“Yeah, I meant stuff, it’s a site that tells you stuff about stuff,” Paterson explained.
“I could spend the rest of my life having this conversation,” Brendon mumbled under his breath. “What does the computer say about Tlacatecolotl?”
“It means devil,” Paterson said in an offhand manner.
Brendon mulled the thought over. Just why on earth would two elderly women refer to him as a devil, him a priest of all people?
“Who’s a devil?” Sergeant Ross asked as he struggled through the back door to the station and Brendon thanked the heavens for an intelligent life form returning
“Apparently I am,” Brendon answered. “And apparently our two old dears now speak an ancient Aztec language,” The slight trace of humour in his voice died when he looked at the sergeant’s face. “What did you find at Edna’s house?” he asked, not knowing if he wanted to find out.
“Nothing good,” Donald answered in a low tone.
Brendon watched as the older man walked unsteadily towards the small kitchen at the back of the station.
He opened a cupboard and withdrew a small bottle of whisky kept for special occasions.
Brendon looked on as the sergeant took a long hard slug from the bottle and his face flushed red with the warming alcohol.
Brendon waited for Donald to speak in his own time. Fortunately, the ever dim PC Paterson seemed to have found an ounce of discretion and sat in silence.
“She killed him,” Donald finally said. “She killed him and then sat down to eat breakfast next to his severed head.”
“Who?” Brendon probed gently. “Who did she kill?”
“Rocco.”
“The landlord from The Royal Swan?” Paterson asked.
“No, that’s Robert,” Brendon said, half-listening to the young PC. “She killed her dog?” he said to Donald.
The sergeant only nodded in reply.
“But she loved that dog,” Brendon said in shock.
He couldn’t remember a time when Edna wasn’t banging on about her chocolate Labrador as though it was her child.
He had spent many a morning being bored rigid by tales of Rocco’s intelligence and prowess. He found the thought of her killing him even more difficult to digest than her attempt to poison him.
“Sergeant Ross?” he asked loudly and a little shakily.
Donald looked up at him with a glassy stare.
“What the fuck is going on?” Brendon asked succinctly.
&nbs
p; ----------
Stuart followed Maurice down into the bowels of Ravenhill. The steps were stone and steep and the lighting was questionable to say the least. In a moment of chivalry he had insisted that it was unnecessary for Sarah to accompany them; it was a moment that he was somewhat regretting.
The cobwebs hung low and undisturbed by Maurice’s smaller stature, but Stuart’s head was disturbing many a carefully constructed web and the spiders were not best pleased.
The boiler lived beneath their feet in the lowest point of the basement level.
Maurice had assured them that it was more than likely just the pilot light that had blown out, but he had been adamant about not checking alone. But even with the two of them, Stuart couldn’t help but feel nervous.
There were single bulbs strung along the ceiling in single file formation, but their illumination was gloomy at best.
Stuart didn’t consider himself a man susceptible to flights of wild imagination, but heading downwards into the darkness he felt distinctly uneasy.
He couldn’t deny that the photograph in Maurice’s cottage of his grandfather looked exactly like the man he had remembered seeing in the hallway one night: a man who had seemingly disappeared into thin air before his eyes; a man that Sarah claimed to have seen leaping off the roof in his pyjamas and a man who had left no corpse.
“How much farther?” he asked the caretaker whilst trying to keep his voice light.
“It’s just around the corner,” Maurice answered in a voice that was about as far from light as you could get.
He had heard Maurice’s story about being hounded by a group of kids and found it easier to believe the bare bones than the caretaker’s interpretation. A group of bored kids throwing snowballs at the man’s cottage was one thing, but the whole Stepford School was quite another.
Ravenhill was an old building to be sure, and he wasn’t sure if he believed in ghosts or not, but if they were real then it stood to reason that Ravenhill would have its fair share. But Maurice was a strong and steady man; whatever had spooked him must have been something real.
The basement level smelled damp and fusty and the air was thick with dust.
The walls were raw stone and covered in some kind of indistinguishable moss.
There were pieces of old furniture scattered round indiscriminately, a chair here a table there. Maurice carried a powerful flashlight and he swung the beam around occasionally to the accompanying sound of fleeing vermin claws scuttling on the ground.
“This place is pretty grim,” Stuart said, keeping close to Maurice.
“It’s not so bad,” Maurice replied. “Every face has to have a few hidden flaws, no matter how beautiful it is on the surface.”
“Jeez, what are you, a secret poet?” Stuart asked surprised.
“Piss off,” Maurice grumbled in reply.
They made their way through the dark and around a bend. The space opened up and a huge metallic cylinder sat on the floor.
There were long winding tentacle pipes that stretched off in every direction along the walls and up into the ceiling.
The thing sat there dark and silent and Stuart felt oddly afraid, like the monster was only pretending to be dormant and was just waiting for unsuspecting human flesh to wander just a little too close.
“Ok, the pilot light is here,” Maurice pointed. “If I show you how to do it then that’ll make two of us who know and if I’m not here for some reason then you won’t need to come find me.”
Stuart found the statement more than a little strange, but didn’t want to spend time discussing it down here.
The caretaker quickly ran him through the simple process until he was sure that he’d got it. The boiler roared into life and a constipated loud whoosh of hot air shot through the pipes.
“Maurice, why did you bring me down here?” Stuart asked nervously.
The caretaker turned towards him in the near darkness. His face was hidden in the shadows cast by the overhead low bulbs. “Because I won’t be here much longer,” he answered ominously.
----------
Sarah stayed topside while the boys went below. She had offered to go with them but she wasn’t too upset that Stuart had insisted that it wasn’t necessary.
She was pondering the implications of the silver frame in Maurice’s cottage. The photograph was undoubtedly of the same man that she had witnessed leaping off the roof, but quite what it meant she could not say.
She also knew that the man matched the description of the man that Stuart had seen disappear in front of him. She could feel the teacher’s reluctance to believe his own eyes, but she knew the dangers of ignoring what lay before your own eyes.
She was still thinking, when Barnaby suddenly came crashing in through the front doors. His face was white and he looked like he’d seen a ghost, appropriately enough.
“Mr. Barnaby, what is it?” she asked sharply.
He turned towards the sound of her voice, but his eyes didn’t seem to focus on her. “Out there,” he whispered in a small scared voice. “She’s dead, in the trees, just hanging.”
Sarah grabbed hold of his arms and guided him to an empty classroom off to the side of the main hallway.
There were still 13 students on site - any one of which could come wandering around the corner at any minute - and the last thing they should see was their Headmaster losing control.
She closed the door behind them and slapped his face hard. It was probably more the enforced human contact rather than the hardness of her blow that seemed to bring a little reason back into his eyes.
“Tell me what you saw,” she stressed.
“A woman, an old woman; I think her name is Edna Bailey, but it was hard to recognise her properly. She has hung herself from a tree on school grounds. Her face was all…,” he trailed off as the sight of the dead woman ran back across his mind.
“Are you sure?” she asked. His hard look told her that he was. “Have you called the police?”
“I was just about to,” he bristled.
“Where exactly is she?”
“Out in the woods, about a hundred yards from the fence.”
“Maybe we should check?” she offered quietly.
“Check? Check? What on earth is there to check?”
“I just think that this place has a way of making you see…, things,” she finished.
“Ms Mears, I have been here a long time.”
“Then you should know what I’m talking about,” she replied, holding his stare.
“I have been here a long time and this place is full of myths and rumours and nothing else. Some poor woman has obviously had some kind of mental breakdown and committed suicide on school grounds. I shall inform the authorities and nothing else.”
She could only watch as the Headmaster strode purposefully out of the classroom. She wanted to stop him but she didn’t have a reason.
The door swung both ways like a saloon bar’s to accommodate charging children with little peripheral vision. As the door swung open she could see the long corridor. Standing at the end of it was Joshua Bradley; he lifted his hand and waved with a small smile. But as the door whispered back across the floor and passed into the classroom, she saw that he had vanished.
----------
Donald Ross slammed the phone down hard into the cradle. The line had finally died like he had expected it would due to the weather, but the timing could not have been worse.
He was in way over his head and he desperately needed help. With no mobile phone signal this far out in the sticks, the landline and internet connections were all they had.
He looked around the station at his troops. He was blessed with an overweight priest and a spotty kid who looked like he was playing dress up in a police uniform, not to mention his own raggedly old ass.
The lights overhead flickered and dimmed, before dying completely.
“Shit,” he mumbled in exasperation. “Paterson, go and start the generator,” he ordered.
&n
bsp; The young PC dragged himself up from his chair and stomped sulkily across the room.
He grabbed a waterproof jacket from the hook by the door and headed out. Donald waited for the telltale sound of the generator kicking throatily into life, but silence filled the air.
“That useless bloody kid,” he said, shaking his head.
“I’m sure he means well,” Monroe shrugged.
“It’s just a shame then that he’s so bloody useless,” Donald grumbled.
The door suddenly flew open and Paterson came rushing back in, slamming the door behind him. Donald could see from the kid’s wet hair that the snow was coming down again in a thick flurry. He raised his eyebrows and lifted his arms waiting for an answer.
“It’s buggered,” Paterson said.
“What?” Donald demanded.
“I said it’s buggered,” Paterson replied louder.
“I don’t think that it’s your volume that’s the problem, more the details of your message,” Monroe said.
“Huh?” Paterson said with a confused expression.
“What’s wrong with the generator?” Donald said taking a deep breath.
“It’s bug...”
“I swear to God if you say it’s buggered again I’m going to make you stand outside for the rest of the day,” Donald snapped.
“Maybe we should take a look,” Monroe offered helpfully.
The two of them grabbed their coats and followed the young PC out of the door and around to the rear of the station.
The winds were picking up again and the snow was coming down hard. The three of them had to lean into the blustery weather to be able to walk forward.
They rounded the corner and saw the mess that had once been the generator. The large metal box had been smashed to pieces with something big and sharp. There were deep gashes in the casing where someone had struck it repeatedly.
Donald tugged the other two on their arms and motioned for them to head back inside. When there, he threw his jacket off in anger and frustration.
“What the hell was that?” he demanded to two blank looks. “Who the hell would do that?”
“I’ve a more worrying question,” Monroe said. “Why?”