Dark Screams, Volume 7

by Dark Screams- Volume 7 (retail) (epub)

  David trudged through the morning snowfall, greeting the drifting clumps around him as if they each had a name. He felt strong, released as he walked through the wide-open schoolyard, breathing deep the gathering gloom. He liked the dimness of the sky when it snowed; bright light hurt his eyes. He was used to living on a narrow little street in a narrow little house with narrow little neighbors who all looked and sounded alike. The massiveness of Ravensbrooke was a revelation to him, and he breathed it in as if it would leave him if he dared let it out of his lungs.

  He didn’t notice the cold; he was composing a piano duet in his head, and the parts were caught up in a fight. He didn’t hear the gasps around him at first, nor even see the other students shove past him to the base of the school’s clock tower, as the left hand in his brain was battling the right for supremacy, forte pounding the pianissimo into submission.

  Then one of the larger students, a beefy girl called Penelope, bounced off him and knocked him to the ground, his fall leavened by the heavy pelt of snow beneath him. As she bounded off, not having even realized what she’d done, David stood and brushed snow from his crimson-tipped porcelain face. All the other children were looking up, and David did the same; his eyes, the deep, clear blue of a frozen lake, turned gray as they reflected the snowy sky.

  “Miss Featherstone…” he breathed aloud, her name appearing in a cloud.

  His theater arts teacher, a tiny bundle of nervous energy who seemed always to think she was on the verge of being chastened, stood like a cuckoo bird at six o’clock in front of the giant clock face on the tower that loomed over the campus. Her shiver seemed more from nervous anxiety than from the cold, though she was dressed only in a navy blue skirt and matching unbuttoned sweater over a crisp white blouse. Her eyes, deep brown and wide, almost always showed the whites around her irises, but they were wider now, and unblinking. She plucked at the snowflakes as they dropped to her shoulders, as if it mattered, and her entire body was quaking. Tears were freezing on her cheeks, and her long, straight black hair was being gnarled by the breeze way up above the crowd forming below. She seemed to be trapped in some kind of hysteria, her cries seeming more like laughs much of the time. She seemed to be talking to herself in mutters that were carried away by the wind, and then shouted:

  “Laugh at me now!”

  David didn’t want to laugh at her. He didn’t want to cry, either, but he certainly didn’t want to laugh. She seemed so sad, so pitiful, so kind of, well, crazy.

  Some of the kids were laughing at her, though, which made David uneasy. He didn’t understand how other people seemed to think, if they thought at all. He didn’t want to understand them.

  —

  Nicholas charged out of the teacher’s apartment and into the snow, pulling on his overcoat and wrapping a scarf around his neck. Oh, Jesus, he thought. Has it come to this?

  Gemma Featherstone stood quaking atop the clock tower, the toes of her simple black shoes curving over the edge of the masonry. Nicholas charged his way through the young crowd of students as they stared up to see their drama instructor precariously balanced on the clock’s lip. It was not the cold that froze him into place at the base of the spire.

  Gemma locked eyes with Nicholas, then pointed to him, fury mixed with pain.

  “Laugh at me now!” she cried out again. “Laugh at me now, Nicholas!”

  He didn’t want to laugh at her, and he wondered why she so commanded him. He didn’t remember ever laughing at her. She wasn’t really very funny.

  Her timing, though, was impeccable. As the accusation left her lips, Rose entered from stage left, wrapping a coat with a faux-fur hood around her, rushing up behind her husband.

  “Get back inside!” Nicholas shouted at Gemma.

  That just made the tiny woman above them shake her head like a petulant child.

  “Go ahead, laugh at me now!”

  “No one is laughing at you!” Well, nobody other than the mean kids clustered on the east end of the quad.

  “What is she doing?” Rose asked as she rushed up behind her husband, laying her hand on his back.

  “Laugh at me now, Nicholas!” Gemma cried again.

  Rose lifted her hand from Nicholas’s back and looked at him, a shadow crossing her face. Nicholas didn’t dare look at her…or away from Miss Featherstone.

  “Don’t do this!” he shouted, but that only made her willful.

  With her eyes clenched shut, she leapt, her petite figure adrift in the wind and snow as the clock struck the quarter-hour.

  —

  David watched in mesmerized fascination as Miss Featherstone took to the air, a navy blue angel, as time slowed to a crawl. She was held aloft as the clock stopped ticking and nobody blinked or breathed. As much as it was possible for a nine-year-old, David fell in love with Gemma Featherstone at that very moment. As the wind teased her hair and rustled her skirt, she seemed to look right into his eyes, and David could tell that she loved him as much as he loved her. Which meant: forever.

  And then, because only he could see in slow motion, he observed something lift from the pocket of her sweater. It was small and white, a slender envelope that lifted into the sky, tumbling through the air like a wounded bird, drifting, falling.

  He saw her lips move and would swear forever more that she spoke to him: three simple words, words that no boy wants to hear until he’s a man, and even then only when he’s lost his mind to passion. But these were special words to a special boy like David, and they stole his heart. She said, “I love you.”

  The clock’s second hand clicked over and time returned to its breakneck pace in the blink of an eye. Miss Featherstone’s body raced to the brick walk and shattered, breaking her neck and taking her life as the crowd gasped as one and rushed back to keep from getting hit.

  David, though, didn’t move. The slender white envelope tumbled, falling on its end into the snow before him, slicing into it and disappearing beneath its soft cloud. Looking around to make sure that no one else had seen, he reached in and pulled out his personal little mail delivery and slowly backed away from the ensuing bustle of activity.

  —

  Gemma Featherstone stared up from the broken pile of her body through wide, freezing eyes. As her life quickly retreated from the body that had held it for the last thirty-two years, she saw the face of the only man she’d ever loved loom over her to look deeply into her. But once glimpsed, he—and everything around him—faded from view forever.

  —

  Nicholas stood at a distance as Gemma Featherstone’s delicate, battered body was scooped up by the ambulance team, covered with a sheet, and trundled into the vehicle before disappearing behind the solid slam of metal doors. The cooling corpse, its head lolling horribly, was so tiny that she seemed like a doll, an exquisite, fragile imported doll meant to be protected under glass, but now hopelessly and irretrievably broken. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men. Mr. Wedge, the corpulent and testy schoolmaster, was at a loss, trying to herd an unruly gaggle of privileged and talented youngsters into the buildings. Ms. Tarragon, in charge of counseling the girls, tried to assist, but kept choking on her own tears. Other teachers stood horrified and unbelieving at the proceedings and were unable to speak, though that would change quickly. The teachers’ lounge would not be quiet this morning.

  Rose had already retreated to the apartment, standing at the window and holding the curtain, which half covered her face, in her hand. Her morning’s joy had long been extinguished.

  Nicholas glanced over his shoulder, but before he could lock eyes with his wife, she pulled away, back into the darkness. He would have to deal with that later. For now, he watched, still stunned, as the ambulance pulled away, its swirling red light disappearing into a deepening drapery of blinding snow.

  Nicholas had known that Gemma was unstable—what artist wasn’t?—but he never thought she was capable of this. He had no idea how much she was hurting, but he knew he was a big part of all that pain. Fro
m the moment he saw her he found her intriguing, if not particularly attractive. She couldn’t have been five feet tall—no bigger’n a minute, his nana would have called her—with wide, seemingly frightened eyes that rarely blinked. When she smiled, it seemed like a performance that she drew from some kind of Stanislavskian memory course to dredge up joy and happiness and charity, rather than her own experience and emotion. When she spoke, and when you could hear her, which was rare, as she had so little confidence that she spoke in whispers and mutters, she was surprisingly witty, if not exactly funny, but anything but seductive. She certainly was not his type, if he had one. Gemma’s frame was slender to the point of skinny, a head that was almost too large for the body that supported it, with a build that bordered on boyish. Rose, whom he’d married only three years before, was more voluptuous than anything, and a good half-foot or more taller. Gemma’s hair was glossy and soft, long and wavy; Rose’s was thick and black and cut to a stump at her jawline. In the beginning, though, it was Rose’s smile that enchanted, engaged, drew him in. It was luminous, lit up her entire face…and his, though that was a while ago. All that seemed to remain of that smile were the creases that it left in its wake. He missed that most of all, though once in a while, as it had that very morning before Gemma killed herself, Rose’s face would light up again and the world would be reborn. Gemma’s smile, when it dared emerge—the real smile, not the one she tried on for the public—was shy, sad, and, in hindsight, endearing.

  Gemma was the last of the instructors that Nicholas had met when he came to the academy. As Rose attended to her administrative duties behind a massive, centuries-old desk, Nicholas and his art history class had volunteered to paint the sets for the junior division’s performance of Romeo and Juliet, a story certain to resonate with ten-year-old star-crossed lovers everywhere. He found Gemma to be quite wonderfully encouraging with the kids under her tutelage, but when he’d tried to strike up a conversation as they painted Juliet’s balcony, she became even more diminutive and couldn’t even look him in the eye.

  He developed a fascination with her after that. She seemed a bit like a little mouse, frightened of her own shadow when around adults, but sweet and commanding when alone with her students, all of whom seemed to adore her.

  Nicholas tried to draw her out and would always greet her with a big American hello and grin, which seemed to embarrass the hell out of her. But more than once he caught her giving him a quick interested look. He certainly never sensed the approach of danger or flirtation or even infatuation, but it happened.

  He had needed a volunteer for his life drawing class, which, of course, when conducted for prepubescents, did not involve nude models. Rose was going to sit for his class, but at the last minute, the Wedgehog decided he could not do without her actuarial expertise in the office and held her captive there for the rest of the afternoon. He’d seen Gemma running lightly on tiptoe down the hall outside the open classroom door and went out to stop her.

  “Do you need to be somewhere?” he asked her.

  She looked down at her feet, never at his face.

  “I never need to be anywhere,” she muttered below her breath. That made him smile. His smile made her flush.

  “Could you sit for my life drawing class? It would just be for an hour or so.”

  Her face went bright red, even though a little smile sneaked out. “Oh, no,” she said,.“I couldn’t do that.”

  “Sure you could,” he encouraged her. “You’d be a lovely model.”

  That made her look up at him but without lifting her head. “No. Really.” He could tell she wanted to be convinced, and he felt like convincing her.

  “Oh, come on. It will be simple; just sit on a stool for an hour and let the kids sketch you. The kids will love to draw such a pretty woman.”

  That lifted her head.

  “I’ve modeled before…” she whispered, but when he asked her to repeat it, she just shook her head. Her shyness was captivating, brought out a beauty that Nicholas had missed in her before. This hint of a past, something beyond the walls of the school, was somehow a bit provocative to him on top of the frightened little woodland creature that she seemed to be, and he felt the first little tug at his heart.

  “Then you’ll help me out?”

  She pondered it for a moment, then nodded. “Yes,” she said, “I’ll help you out.”

  “That’s great, thanks. I owe you one.”

  “And I plan to collect,” she mumbled, hoping Nicholas didn’t hear her. Of course, she just meant it as a little joke. Of course.

  —

  Needless to say, classes were canceled for the day, which was a Friday, anyway, and led to a welcome holiday for students and staff alike. The students—junior and senior levels both—gathered in the dining hall for an orderly luncheon and took to their rooms to get out of the cold and into their forbidden electronics that so many of them had sneaked into the academy. Instructors and staff tended to look the other way when the youngsters battled one another on their iPods and PSPs, as long as they didn’t make too big a deal of it, and kept them out of the classrooms.

  But David, the Odd Boy, was not so electronically inclined. Besides, he had a secret and wanted to be alone. So while the other students decided to take this opportunity to slaughter a few more brain cells in honor of their dear, departed drama teacher, David made the long walk to the Music and Drama Building, which was dark and empty, and whisper-scuffed to one of the little piano studio chambers at the end of the hall. Normally the hallway was filled with a civil war of battling instruments and melodies from behind the not-quite-soundproofed doors of the studios. But on this day, it was eerily silent, empty, abandoned. Which, of course, was exactly why David was there. He opened the unlocked, padded door of room 32; flicked on the lights, which stuttered into dull illumination; closed the door behind him; and took a seat on the padded piano bench.

  Once he was seated and alone, he realized how hot it was in here. He was sweating, his palms slick. He wiped them on his pants before he dug into the pocket of his sweater and held out the letter from the world’s most beautiful teacher. His hands shook as they held the little ivory envelope; it was blank, save for a tiny heart drawn in red ink on the upper-right corner where a stamp would be, addressed to no one. But it had been delivered to David. He touched the little heart with the tip of his finger, tracing it as she had drawn it, and felt the heat of her as he did so. He could smell her, and he held the envelope close to his face and breathed the scent of her perfume deeply: rose, subtle and distant, but rose. He could even smell its redness. He touched the little heart to the tip of his lips and kissed it. He was sure it kissed him back.

  He slid his finger under the flap, slowly and carefully easing it open without tearing the parchment. It was still damp with her saliva, he realized, as he slowly teased it open. Once the flap was free, he ran the tip of his tongue across the gum of the flap, tasting the mint of the sticky envelope on top of another, more organic flavor. He tasted her kiss.

  He pulled the envelope away, knowing what he was doing was wrong, weird, perhaps even naughty. He held it carefully in both his hands, as far from his body as he could, staring at it, feeling guilty. But he could not keep from her message to him for much longer; he needed to know what she had needed to tell him. His heart pounding, he opened the envelope and drew out the single scented piece of thick paper within. He carefully laid the envelope onto the piano’s keyboard, unfolding the letter, which was creased in half.

  “I love you,” the letter told him. “I don’t want anyone else.”

  Then a faint lip print of subtle pink, and what appeared to be a small spatter of dry blood.

  She loves me, David thought. I knew it!

  For he loved her, too, always had, only didn’t know it until now. Now that she was dead. He ran his fingers over the lip print, his hands kissing her lips before he dared to touch it to his face. But he could not resist her kiss for long; he touched the paper gently to his mouth an
d felt the lipstick stick lightly to him. He drew it away from his face and stared at it; the lips spoke to him, told him again, “I love you, David.”

  He placed the letter on the music holder on the piano and stared at it, his hands suddenly inspired, and he began to improvise a gentle composition that invented itself as it went along.

  —

  The sun began its early-evening winter descent, though it was barely four o’clock; the police had come and gone and the staff had clustered together to cluck and coo and conjecture about what had driven Gemma Featherstone to take her life. Theories abounded—these were teachers, after all, and teachers of the arts given to flights of imagination—but theories are all they were. Miss Featherstone (and she was always Miss, never Ms.) was quiet, shy beyond the point of painful around adults, and very private. She worked in the theater, then trundled off to her apartment, her evenings always spent alone, never really joining in. They had never trusted this queer duck, this tiny, quiet creature who would always look like an aging girl, never truly a woman. She may have been in her early thirties, but if you didn’t look closely, she could have been twelve. Not really part of the Ravensbrooke family, but she did a good job, and the theatrical presentations that she produced were always impressive and often won awards.

  When the last of the loitering onlookers had given in to the chill that followed the setting of the sun, Nicholas knew he could no longer avoid his home and his wife. The blackout curtains were drawn inside his apartment, and he dreaded what lay in wait for him behind them. He felt hollow, detached, emotionless, though he knew this was only temporary. Still, he could not feel a goddamn thing.

  So he turned and took a final look at the clock tower that threw its dimming shadow over him before he walked back to the teachers’ quarters and into his home.

  Nicholas walked into the apartment to the scent of a simmering stew. He peeked into the kitchen to catch a glimpse of Rose’s back, standing in front of the stove, stirring the pot. She did not turn to acknowledge his entrance. He peeled the scarf from around his neck, hung his coat on the hook by the door, and stood in the middle of the living room, not sure what was coming next. He had no appetite for beef stew tonight.