Four against two, it crossed his mind. A look at Antoine, who watched him and expressed his impatience with begging, urgent gestures. Toni hesitated for a second, then pressed down the handle and opened the door with a quick, sweeping movement.
Light poured into the corridor and three boys and a girl jumped up from the toolboxes, cleaning buckets and upturned wooden boxes on which they had settled in convivial company in shock. One, the biggest and seemingly strongest of them, a red-haired freckled boy, still held the joint in his hand. It took him a moment to realize that he hadn’t been surprised by teachers or the janitors, but by his classmates. When this thinking process was completed, the shock evaporated from his face and gave way to an aggressive malice.
“What are you doing? Are you guys complete morons? Scaring us like that?”
His blue eyes now looked more closely at the newcomers.
“Oh, I see. New. You don’t know your way around here yet, do you?”, he said, stressing each syllable.
“You don’t even know the hierarchy, right? I think in that case, we can show some mercy today and slap you idiots around just a little, instead of ... well, what do you guys think?”
His two friends, he had addressed with his last words also seemed to wake up now. They weren’t as strong as him, but both were still much stronger than Toni and Antoine. They had tightened up when the red haired boy approached them directly, while the girl with the pale face and short dog brown hair had retreated to a corner. When Toni noticed this, he also discovered another door on the opposite side of the room, which had been partially suspended with an old carpet.
Could it be?
He grinned inside.
Could it really be that the boys and girls wings were connected via the cellar? This opened up completely new opportunities for him to spend his free time. This anticipation he almost forgot that he had just been threatened with a beating.
While Toni was still thinking about whether he should try to negotiate, Antoine had already jumped forward and gave the guy to the left of the redhead a heavy blow directly into the solar plexus. When the boy tipped over, Antoine grabbed him by the dark hair and rammed his knee into his face. The hit opponent went down immediately. That’s right, give them some blitzkrieg, Toni thought. Attack is the best defense. However, neither of them had reckoned with the animalistic temper of the redhead. When he saw what had happened to his friend, he jumped forward towards Antoine. Toni´s new roommate braced himself and put his hands in defensive position, but at the last moment the redhead swung around, away from Antoine and shot two quick blows towards Toni. One punch hit him on his right cheekbone and the other one in the stomach, which made Toni see the stars. He was sick at first, then, two seconds later, it turned dazzling black in front of his eyes.
***
As he slowly came to his senses, Antoine knelt beside him and talked to him quietly.
“Come on. Get up, we have to get out of here.”
Toni needed a moment to get his bearings again. They were still in the stoner’s den. The redhead, his friends and the girl were gone. Toni laboriously sat up. In Antoine’s face he could see a beginning, slowly darkening black eye, just like one he certainly had.
“Good thing, your lightning attack! Did you get beaten a lot?”, Toni wanted to know.
“Certainly more than you. You’re lucky you went down right away.”
Yeah, could have been worse, Toni thought.
“Where where you hit? Apart from the eye, I mean,” he asked.
“Mostly the ribs, and I got a nasty kick in the thigh.”
This seemed quite mild to Toni when he thought of the angry face of the red-haired freckling.
“So you lost, huh? For that you are still looking quiet fresh.”
“Of course I lost. It was two against one. But after the first exchange of blows, I started to keep the others at a distance and kick their friend, whom I knocked out at the beginning, over and over again. At a certain point they began to fear for him and asked for a truce.”
“Clever,” Toni just said.
In reality, however, he thought it was more than clever. It was ruthless in a malicious way to behave in such a way as to exploit the mutual loyalty of the three. He and Antoine would get along just fine.
Toni reached out his hand to Antoine.
“Come. Help me up.”
Toni was still a bit shaky on his legs, so Antoine supported him as they crept back into their room. There they spent the rest of the day alternately fetching towels soaked in cold water from the common bathroom at the end of the corridor and cooling their bruises. They didn’t talk much, but when they spoke, they both noticed a remarkable similarity between themselves. Toni liked Antoine’s way of seeing and approaching things, and Antoine also seemed to have sympathy for Toni, although Toni didn’t know why. As it was getting dark, Antoine pulled a crippled joint out of the bag and proudly presented it.
“Look at this. I made some bounty, in spite of everything!”
They smoked together by the window. Later Toni could not say whether it was because it was the first time for him to smoke pot, but his dreams that night were bloodier than usual.
He was in a pasture at nighttime. A herd of dead foals with their dead mothers trampled him to a pulp, although they all had no more hooves, but only fibrous leg stumps, from which torn tendons and sharp-edged bones emerged.
When he woke up bathed in sweat, he felt a hunger he had never known before. Outside it was still dark and the breakfast therefore still in far distance. At some point he managed to fall asleep again.
***
The religion teacher, Mr Feretti, was a lean, slate guy with a gray wreath of hair, who spoke more with a croaking of ravens rather than with a real voice. In this lesson he seemed to have decided to analyze the parable with the splinter and the wooden beam in the eye again and again until one simply had to metaphorically vomit. The circumstance that each of the students should know this story since early childhood, or if not that each listener had already understood it when he heard it for the first time simply did not stop the man from his intention, and at the latest after the third explanation on the subject of hypocrisy, a certain restlessness spread through the classroom.
Such stupidity on the part of an adult not only annoyed Toni, no, it caused real feelings of hatred in him. At the beginning he mainly paid attention to the voice of the teacher and had held his head down, but now he took a closer look at the man as a whole.
He noticed the many small stains that were distributed irregularly but omnipresent over the dark corduroy of his suit. The badly groomed, partly chewed down fingernails and the yellowish teeth. The shoes had worn off and at one point near the heel the sole of the left shoe had already come off.
Toni wondered how long the man must have owned this suit. A decade at least, he estimated. Then Toni’s gaze caught a spot on the religious teacher’s jacket. Something there glistened in the light of the humming neon tubes of the classroom. A metal pin. The head of the needle was about the size of a twenty-lire coin and was a perfectly round shape. Something inside Toni woke up when he noticed this pin.
On one of his never ending rounds through the classroom, during which the teacher constantly monologized to himself and passed by Toni’s table, Toni could once again take a look and see the details. It was a kind of cross with two horizontal beams, the lower one longer than the upper one, and at the foot of which a lateral eight had been added. The whole thing was very finely crafted, and when the light fell on it as Feretti moved on, Toni realized that the strange symbol had been engraved into a circle with a pentagram. Toni had seen this symbol before. On the cover of one of Azrael’s books. LaVey, he thought. Toni was confused. What did a man like Azrael have in common with some weakling like this teacher?
Toni nudged Antoine, who, as in all other lessons, had sat next to him.
“Do you see that?”
Toni nodded towards the pin and then whispered on.
�
��What’s that thing?”
“I don’t know. Never seen anything like it,” Antoine replied in an equally soft tone.
Toni used the rest of the lesson to make a sketch of the symbol, adding a new detail each time Mr Feretti passed by his table. For Antoine, the matter was already settlet, but Toni’s thoughts went round and round in never-ending circles. They were swarming around the mysterious symbol. Strange. It was both attractive and threatening to him, but in any case it seemed to call for his attention.
The rest of the day went by agonizingly slowly. It almost seemed to Toni as if time was even running backwards just to spite him. In the afternoon, he discovered that the boarding school had numerous opportunities for the young students to do some sports. There was a soccer field, a room with weights, a basketball court, an ash track, a long jump pit and many other sports facilities. But he didn’t feel like romping and sweating. His wounds still did hurt and he simply had other things on his mind. He briefly considered attending one of the voluntary lessons offered in the afternoon. It was expected of every student that in the afternoons he would try improve in those disciplines in which he was worst.
That was to be found written in the house rules they had all received on arrival. Toni was not really interested in this order, because he was a grade A student all around. The disadvantage of his quick comprehension was that he was bored just as quickly as he could understand all kinds of relations and interdisciplinary connections and internalize facts with ease. Nevertheless, he decided - symbol or not - to fulfill the expectations placed in him by attending the advanced lesson in mathematics. Not in religion. Mr Feretti’s monotonous Sermon was really an imposition, which he was not willing to bear at the moment.
As he entered the just half-filled classroom, where Mr. Donati explained the formulas and calculation paths that he had been teaching this morning in more detail and with much more patience than before, Toni was surprised to discover that the redhead and his two henchmen, sitting side by side on the eastern wall of the classroom, were not particularly interested in doing any nonsense behind the math teacher’s back. They seemed not to be in the mood for that.
Antoine obviously had dealt quite a few. Especially the one he had knocked down first looked pretty dented. Yesterday, when Toni and Antoine had licked their wounds, he had asked his new roommate if they would get trouble from the teachers. It was more than obvious that a bout had taken place when one looked into the young faces and noticed how carefully the boys were moving.
Antoine had thoughtlessly dismissed that question.
“Oh, come on, that’s more or less normal. Teachers are usually happy when we settle our differences ourselves and not get on their nerves.”
He was right, Toni thought. When this mornings’ third lesson had been over, he had finally realized himself that none of the teachers paid any attention to their damaged visages. Now the mathematics teacher did exactly the same. The unwritten, yet universal law that adults were not allowed to get involved in internal disputes seemed to apply even here at the boarding school.
His opponents from the day before did not bat an eyelid when Toni had entered the room. Relieved, he took a seat at one of the tables and took out his notebook.
However, this agreement, which all the children and young people of the world had entered into, did not prevent the redheaded bastard from giving him a poisonous look once in a while. Toni did his best to conjure a mask of icy superiority into his face, and - at least he thought so - meet the looks with majestic composure. Mr. Donati completed the lesson by drawing a complicated and unnecessarily bloated logarithmic equation on the board, which was to be solved in group work. The redhead even kept to the silent agreement when they had to team up and was cooperating well with Toni.
Toni didn’t know exactly what to make of this. Was that a real truce? Was that merely etiquette? Or was the freckle boy just trying to make him fell safe?
***
In the evening, when Toni left the crowded and noisy hall in which dinner had been served and walked towards his room, all thoughts concerning the redhead and his minions had vanished. They now revolved once again around the mysterious symbol on the lapel of the religion teacher. Immersed in his thoughts, he climbed the stairs to the second floor and entered his and Antoine’s room. The Swiss boy just lay on his bed with his underpants on and read. He looked up when Toni came in.
“Tell me, weren’t you hungry?” Toni asked his roommate, whom he had missed in the dining hall.
“No. Everything’s fine. I’ve been saving some of my lunch.”
Antoine pointed to an empty plate on the floor in front of the bed, which Toni had not noticed before.
“I’m in the mood for a fine goodnight joint.”
Antoine made a movement with the hands that imitated smoking.
“But we have nothing left,” Toni shrugged indifferently. After last night’s dream and the miserable feeling of hunger that had followed, he was not particularly enthusiastic about the idea of smoking weed again.
“This will change very soon. Don’t worry.”
“So you have a plan?”
“Yes, of course. I always have a plan.”
Toni just nodded and carefully settled on the bed. He was not yet sure whether he wanted to experiment with drugs again and therefore did not know whether he had any real interest in Antoine’s plans in this regard. The fact, however, that his new companion had criminal energy, ambitions and obviously a somewhat different view of the world than the stupid peasants with whom Toni had had to spend his youth up to then, extraordinarily appealed to him. Stretched out on his back and with his eyes closed, Toni told him about the behavior of the redhead, who, as he had also learned in mathematics class, was called Fabrizio, and asked Antoine what he thought about this.
Antoine just shrugged his shoulders.
“Who knows? But if I had to guess, I’d say Fabrizio won’t forget and neither will he forgive.”
Then Antoine sat up and looked directly at Toni.
“Come, let me check on your injuries again.”
The two lay on their beds for a while, and everyone hung on to his thoughts. When Antoine’s breathing told Toni that he was asleep, he quietly sneaked out of the room.
The corridor lay in a slightly disorienting twilight, and was illuminated only by the faint, yellowish light that was burning in the shared bathroom at the very end. Toni had thought about what he should do if he was caught. That’s why he didn’t put his shoes on. He had also largely dispensed with his other clothes. With bare feet and only pyjama pants on his body, he carefully put one foot in front of the other. Sleepwalking - that was his prefabricated excuse for the nightly outing.
Of course, the director and the other teachers knew his background. They would believe he was having trouble sleeping. He wondered how thick his file was, and what it said about him. Then he had to smile. No matter what it said, the whole truth hadn’t been written down anywhere.
While he was watching out for noises and trying not to make any himself, he thought about Antoine. His touches when he examined the large bruise on Toni’s upper body and then cooled it with a wet towel, which he had taken out of the bathroom especially for this purpose, had been surprisingly tender. Toni thought that he should take advantage of the boy’s obvious affection for him. If he did it right, he might be able to maneuver him into a similar relationship as Azrael had done with Toni’s mother.
Toni reached the stairwell.
The living quarters of the religion teacher were upstairs, on the third floor. Toni listened in all directions. From below, from the ground floor, a squeaking noise could be heard, as if someone was pushing a chair or a table over the floor. Probably one of the janitors. On his toes he climbed the stairs leading upwards. The large, semi-dark corridor along which the doors to the teacher’s apartments where lined up, was completely different from the one that led to the boarding school students’ rooms. While in the second floor the walls were painted white
and dotted with abrasions and small graffiti that the teachers had long since given up fighting, up here a colorful wallpaper with a large floral pattern had been installed. Small, noble-looking chests of drawers and cabinets were distributed at irregular intervals on both side walls. Here a mirror, there a copy of a Rembrandt, there back that of a Bosch. Also, the corridor was not as gloomy as the one below, but was instead illuminated by small lights dimmed down quite far, which were mounted at regular intervals to the right and left slightly above head height.
Toni ventured deeper into the corridor. When he arrived at the first door, a feeling of unpleasant realization crept upon him. No name tags. Not like down with the students. Damn it. He should have thought about something like that. How would he find out which of those rooms was the religion teacher’s? Besides, the man was in there right now. In his room. And how would Toni be able to search this room if the stupid guy was in it? He couldn’t just turn on the lights and say hello in the middle of the night.
No, he was approaching clearly too hasty, too imprudent, too stupid.
I’m an incredible idiot, he thought. Not one bit better than all the others.
Right when he wanted to retreat and sneak back into his room, still insulting himself in thoughts, one of the doors opened, barely five meters in front of him. Panicked, he watched out for a place to hide. As swiftly and quietly as he could, he scurried into a corner formed by a chest of drawers with an almost arm-thick mirror attached to it and the right wall of the corridor, huddling together. The soft, barely understandable voices of a man and a woman came to his ear. Although the two tried to really be very quiet, he recognized them anyway. The woman’s voice was that of the Director. The man’s voice was clearly the raven cawing of the religion teacher.
Under Ivans Knout: The Gospel of Madness (Book 2 of 6) (The Gospel of Madness - (A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Series)) Page 2