The School of the Undead

by Michael Woods

  Amanda removed the paper clip that held Milch’s picture to his file and brought the image close to her face. The picture was a little bigger than a passport photo, but it seemed to Amanda as if it had been cut from an even larger image as several fingers rested on Johann’s shoulder; digits which probably belonged to the same body as an ear on the very edge of the photograph. When she had seen that this person of unknown abode was male, the thought crossed her mind that perhaps she had already found a real suspect, but this notion was undermined somewhat by what she saw. The vampire she was looking at had probably been in his thirties when he died and, at least in the picture, had a shock of unruly, dark brown hair. Though it was plausible that Milch could have had his hair shaved off, he clearly was not bald and it was unlikely that he had lost his ice-blue eyes. Amanda supposed it was possible Brenden had made a mistake when he had described his attacker as having grey eyes, even though this was one of the very few things that the boy seemed to recall about the man. There was also the additional detail that Brenden had expressed his belief his killer had been overweight and pale: Milch was neither.

  As Johann’s file did not seem to be of too much help, Amanda put it to the side and made a note to herself to ask some of the other vampires in the area if they could provide a more up to date and accurate account of the whereabouts of the man. However, she did not hold out too much hope that they would tell her anything. If the school had lost track of Milch, there was a chance he had given up its rules meaning it would be no good thing to be associated with him.

  The second file did at least seem to be a little more promising; at least it included an address. The picture provided was much larger than the one in Johann’s file, about the size of an ordinary album photo, and contained an image of a woman who was possibly in her 30s. From the look of the woman’s large tinted glasses, long brown, centre parted hair and mauve shirt with an oversized collar, Amanda guessed that the picture was taken at some time during the 1970s. On the back of the picture was a scrawled note outlining that the image had been taken before the woman had even become a vampire. While this was a little odd, Amanda assumed that the woman, who on inspection of the file turned out to be one Mary O’Hare, must have still resembled the picture as otherwise, the school would surely have taken a new one.

  Amanda scanned the rest of the information in the file and discovered nothing that she thought was particularly out of the ordinary for a vampire. Mary had been intermittently employed in one job or another since she had left the Tithonus School in 1978 and, like many of the vampires Amanda knew, her blood supplies had been suspended several times during periods when she had been unable to keep up her payments due to prolonged periods without work. The file also noted that like many others, Mary had undergone some further training in the early 2000s so that she could learn to use a computer to enable her to work from home, and that she had just recently started a new job.

  Though Amanda was sure that Mary had not been involved in Brenden’s attack directly, unless she had indeed gone through a dramatic change since the picture in the file had been taken, she supposed there was still a chance that the woman might know something of importance, even if she was not aware of it herself.

  “What the hell could I ask her that would get her to tell me something like that?” Amanda mumbled to herself.

  She looked blankly at the picture for a couple of minutes, but no real questions came to mind. A feeling started to build within Amanda, a certain anxiety resulting from her conviction that it was ridiculous for the deputy to have given her the task of talking to these people: for her, it was not only clear that she was entirely devoid of any detective experience, but also at a complete loss as to where to start.

  “Sod it,” she exclaimed as the thought came to her mind that it did not matter if she did a great job as she believed the reason she had been sent was that the powers that be at the school assumed there was nothing to find anyway and so no need to send anyone with any real competence. At least she was going to get a little more blood from the school. She activated the screen on her phone to check the time: it was still the early afternoon and there was plenty of time to go and visit Mary to see what, if anything, she knew about the attack on Brenden. Rather than wallow in any doubt over why she was in Radcliff, she got going.

  ***

  “Brenden, before you go, I’d like to have a word.”

  Brenden had managed his best to hide in plain sight for the rest of the lesson and to avoid looking at his teacher. However, just as Brenden was about to leave, Adam called out the boy’s name. The other students filed out - giving an opportunity for Namenkhetamun to surprise Brenden again with her quick and sharp movements despite her dry, ancient skin - leaving the boy alone with his imposing teacher. Brenden dropped his gaze to the ground to prevent himself from looking directly in the eye of his teacher and then jumped a little as Adam’s enormous hands came to rest on his shoulders.

  “Do not worry Brenden, I’m not going to ask you to look at me. I know what I am, and I want to let you know that I understand it may take a little time for you to adjust.” Brenden shifted a little as Adam spoke these words, but he did not voice any feigned disagreement with them. “You do not need to deny the feelings you have of my form; I even know how I’m perceived in the eyes of the living, let alone the newly dead. All I ask of you, for now, is to consider what you are responding to and to contemplate your feelings on the way I look. This is not just some idle task; it is an important issue that must be tackled here in the school and in the community of the undead. Some are never able to come to terms with the bodies of their peers - or indeed their own bodies - and overcome the overbearing norms of form that exist in the living world. In fact, over the course of my teaching career, I have had several students who found it a gruelling task to look me in the eye even after their 24-month stay at the school.”

  Brenden steeled himself, then slowly raised his eyes to meet those of Adam. The teacher did not respond to Brenden’s action at first and maintained the stern expression he had been wearing since the other students had left his class. However, as the unease that was apparent in the boy’s eyes melted away, something akin to a smile - perhaps one of pride - broke across the man’s lips.

  “Good, Brenden. Good. I hope you see that there is nothing to fear here. As long as you are willing to let yourself be open to what may lie over the horizon, you will find that there is much to hope for. Now, I think it’s best for you to go along. You still have a few classes today, don’t you?”

  Brenden nodded; expelled a short laugh that was more to do with relief than anything else and made to leave the classroom, almost walking through Ms Halford as he went. He muttered a fumbled apology, before readjusting his course to get to the exit.

  “I see you’ve already been able to break through to the poor boy,” said Ms Halford after Brenden had disappeared into the corridor. “However, I do hope for his sake that you have not already started to try and use your… natural influence to induce him to go down to the Tunnels.”

  “Matilda,” replied Adam with a chuckle. “I’m so glad that you could stop by and entertain me with your insinuations. You will be glad to hear that Brenden spent almost the whole of my lesson trying to ensure that his eyes did meet my own. It takes quite some time for that fear of the other, the thing the living so often enjoy instilling in each other, to fade away. No, I only asked him a little thing and he came the rest of the way himself. I know that you are only trying to protect the boy and I respect your opinion that there is something to the life among the living. However, I would hope that you could respect me enough to believe that I will give Brenden – my other students as well, for that matter – the information he needs so that he can choose his future path for himself.”

  “Yes,” replied Ms Halford with a sting in her voice, “and I think I have a good idea of the particular conception of what you consider our students need. I have seen…” started Ms Halford, before coming to an abrupt hal
t. She had noticed that a few students were passing by in the corridor, and she waited a moment until she was comfortable they had passed out of earshot. When she resumed her point, she did so in a near whisper. “I have seen the figures for the number of students in your class who head straight to the Tunnels after you’ve finished with them: over two-thirds during your forty years here! That is higher than any other teacher by far, most are not even close to a half. Do you not even believe that it is worth allowing them to try to see what the world out there could hold for them? The ones who need it can try to use their two years allowance out there, and now with the internet, some of the most unfortunate among us can remain outside those dreary catacombs.”

  “Oh Matilda, that’s exactly the problem I have. Maybe that’s one of the reasons so many of my students go, I don’t know.”

  “Sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “The idea that there are those among us who can be considered unfortunate, that word in itself identifies them as something less than others, than the living. And I know full well that such a term applies to myself, but I have no intention of hiding under such a cloak of a word. No, instead of pandering to the standards set by the strange creature of the living’s desire chasing standard of norms, I am not ashamed to say that I believe that we must have the conditions in which we can live as what we are.”

  “I have nothing against that argument, Adam, I just do not think that it means that we have to live underground to be who we are. I have lost many friends over the years to those tunnels and find such actions saddening both personally and on another level. Not only do I lose those dear to me, I also see the move down there as a way of hiding who we are. If it were only the case that the powers that be could find some way to accept that with the changes in some places in the living world, that it might be possible to reach out to a small number of people to test the water on whether we could truly, finally, be accepted for who we are.”

  “Matilda, sometimes I forget that you can be even more radical than myself. But, no. Perhaps I agree with, as you say, the powers that be. Though you are right that times change, I do not think that the living are in any way ready for the likes of us: not yet and nor will they be for quite some time to come. From what I see from their news, they still find plenty of reasons to find differences between one another and then use these to justify the maiming and murder of one another. And what of their popular culture that deals with those who rise from the dead? Let alone their other beliefs.”

  “Adam, you are distracting me from the point I came here to make. Please, just give the boy what he needs to make his own choice. Goodness, yes I know it is difficult to give an unbiased opinion, but please do not condemn him to live down there without also knowing what it would mean to leave this world behind. Unlike many of those who make this argument, I am not just arguing from a position of ignorance: I know what it is to exist down there. I made a decision long ago to descend into those tunnels and it was an easy enough decision to make at the time: I had nothing left up here. But, I do not know how to describe the conditions down there. Yes, one is away from the need to hide from the living, but you are also exposed to the naked hunger – eternally unsatisfied so many who are trapped down there - of the vampires and others. And then, for those that lose all connection to the world above or to any source for what they need, after the hunger comes something even worse. I am not so afflicted myself to need anything to carry on, but even the sight of such need, the half-life it brings and what it leaves after it has gone was more than I could bear. Do you tell your students that there is no blood or other living matter to sate the terrible thirst down there?”

  Adam’s eyes were no longer on Ms Halford, but the doorway to his classroom. Ms Halford was about to continue, but the hard expression on Adam’s pale, scarred face made her refrain from doing so.

  “Ah, good. Mr deputy, how long have you been listening to our conversation?” said Adam.

  “Not so long at all, Adam,” replied the deputy, who stood, smiling at the two teachers. “Why, is there something that you think I need to hear? Or rather, were you discussing something that you would rather that I, and particularly our students, would not hear?”

  ***

  56 Balfour Lane was the last house on a street in a village on the outskirts of Radcliff and ended by turning into a muddy footpath that separated two patchy, grass-covered fields. The house itself was set a little further back from the street than its neighbour and was reached by an overgrown gravel path that led to a battered and rusted Austin 1100 that was clearly no longer in use due to its lack of tyres.

  It was drizzling slightly when Amanda parked her Renault at the end of the house’s drive and the rolling, grey overcast sky providing the rain was of the sort that often frequented the town on similar, early winter afternoons. Amanda checked the file again to make sure the lonely looking building before her was indeed the address given for Mary O’Hare, before retrieving her waterproof from the back seat and stepping out into the rain just as it was starting to fall that little bit heavier. A likely house as any for a vampire, thought Amanda, though she knew she would never be able to live in such a place.

  After neatly avoiding almost all the large grey, brown puddles that littered the gravel driveway, Amanda rang the bell. As no sound emanated from inside, she was not sure if the thing still worked. No one stirred inside and Amanda wondered if she had foolishly wasted her time by turning up at an empty house. Perhaps it would be better for her if there was no one in, she thought, as it would mean she would not have to confront whoever Mary might be with the silly set of questions Amanda believed her inexperience had allowed her to put together. On her drive over to the house, the novice detective had tried to ignore the fact that this was to be her first interview and that she felt more than a little unprepared for it, but as time passed by these thoughts became ever more present in her mind.

  “God,” she spat under her breath. “I need to get this crap over with.” She hammered on the door.

  A light in the hall burst into life and the misshapen shadow of a head appeared in one of the leaf-patterned glass panels of the door. However, whoever was inside the house did not seem to want to let Amanda in as they did nothing more but continue to stand on the other side of the glass.

  “Oh, come on,” muttered Amanda. “Hello! Mary, is that you?”

  The shadow shifted slightly from side to side and then started to shrink in size.

  “Wait!” cried out Amanda. “I’ve come from the Tithonus School. I just want to ask a few questions.”

  Suddenly, the door burst open revealing a short brown haired woman in a sky-blue silk dressing gown and pink moccasins, who Amanda instantly recognised as the person she was looking for.

  “Keep your voice down!” said Mary in a hissed whisper. “What are you doing here anyway? Disturbing people like this!”

  Mary looked past Amanda over to her neighbours and then the field; when she saw that that grey rainy world outside was empty of anyone but the young and pale woman on her doorstep, she relaxed a little but maintained her hard expression.

  “As I said,” replied Amanda, “I’ve come from the Tithonus School. Deputy head Chester sent me here to ask a few questions about an attack that happened here just over a week ago. A boy was attacked on a street just outside north Radcliff, not too far from here. A vampire attack.”

  “Well, young lady, why do you think I would know anything about that?”

  Amanda gave herself a second to recompose herself. The interview was going even worse than she had anticipated, but she saw no reason to give in even though she was becoming ever more uncomfortable standing out in the rain.

  “I don’t think that anyone really thinks you were involved…”

  “Well, of course I wasn’t involved! Haven’t I got enough problems trying to scrape by without having the school and who knows who else getting involved in my life. And god forbid that the police would get involved. Do you know what I’d have
to do if they poked around in my life?”

  “Look, Mary,” stated Amanda as firmly as she could without barking at the woman before her, “I’m just here to see whether you can help shed some light on the case. I’m not here to cast aspersions on anyone, but someone has broken the code and they could do so again. Just think, if more people start to be attacked around here, then the police may well end up poking around.”

  “I doubt that there’ll be another attack around here.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You know what I mean. It was probably one of those, the others, the shadow walkers. They’ll be long gone by now.”

  Amanda was fairly sure the attack had not been carried out by one of what some called the ‘shadow walkers’: the vampires who actively hunted the living and did not follow the principles on which such institutions as the Tithonus School were based. While they did exist, from what she had heard about their practices during her time at the school, Amanda did not think that these outcasts would be so foolish as to let one of their victims become a vampire and end up amongst those who followed the principles they so abhorred. One of the main reasons for this was that by letting such an attack victim fall into the hands of the school, they would run the risk of being caught. What was more, there was no indication that Brenden’s attacker had needed to flee after killing the boy. Indeed, Brenden’s broken body has just been left at the side of a quiet, rural road, almost as if the attacker had put no thought into what they were doing at all.