Dead Scared

by Ivan Blake

  Chris had been waiting with Gillian Willard for their school bus at the top of Willard Lane every morning for almost two months, but the girl was still something of an enigma. Tall and gangly, with not a hint of shape about her, she had long blonde hair that seemed forever windblown, and was always dressed in the same baggy dungarees and work shirt. Gillian Willard clearly didn’t give a damn what anyone thought of her, and in spite of her odd appearance and aloof demeanor, people generally left her alone. Perhaps that was why Chris found Gillian sort of intriguing. Everything about her shouted, “I am my own person and I don’t give a crap what you think of me,” and Chris admired that. Gillian was in grade eleven, a year behind Chris, and since juniors never speak to seniors, she dared not speak to him, not as they waited for the bus, certainly not on the bus, and not even on the rare occasion when they arrived home together. She always had her nose in a book and only ever spoke to one other person, her friend Madelyn who was every bit as shy and bookish as she. Gillian wanted nothing to do with Chris, and he was okay with that. He already had enough screwed-up relationships to cope with, not the least his dad.

  Chris fought with his dad about everything: his unkempt clothes, long hair, comings and goings at all hours, the perpetual sneer on his face and the constant snarl in his voice, his crappy grades, frequent calls from teachers, and occasional visits from the police whenever something bad happened in town, because as sure as pigeons crap on statues, the police always suspected the new guy. For all the other causes of conflict in the Chandler family, however, the root cause was blindingly obvious to Chris: his dad’s job.

  Their move to Maine was the Chandler family’s fourth—fourth school, fourth house, fourth craphole—since his father had agreed to become Allied’s killer of towns. One god-awful town after another for six hellish years. Chris figured his dad was probably some kind of victim; that his dad’s bosses had probably made promises of raises or promotions or maybe a big position in headquarters the Company had yet to keep. There had to be some reason why he`d accepted this crappy assignment, but Chris didn’t know what it was, and couldn’t forgive him for not having the guts to walk away, to save the family from all the torment and humiliation. Whatever the reasons may have been, depression and resentment now filled the Chandlers’ house like a poisonous fog, and that was why Chris tried to see as little of his family—or anyone else for that matter—as he possibly could.

  Chris’s little brother and sister were spared the worst of the abuse from the locals because they attended elementary school, not in Bemishstock, but five miles in the other direction, in the farming village of Perkin’s Pond where people cared little about the plant. The idiots at Bemishstock Secondary however sure as hell knew what having the Chandler boy in their school signified. They all knew who Chris’s dad was and what he was doing to their town, and they took their parents’ despair out on him.

  When someone trashed his locker or stole his homework, Chris got no sympathy from the teachers because they knew what his presence meant for them as well. No plant would mean no more young families; no young families would mean no more school-age kids; and no kids would mean no teaching jobs. Chris’s teachers always found a way to blame him for the pranks or the thefts or even the blood on the locker.

  A few weeks earlier, someone at school had stolen notes from Chris’s desk, one page of which had had his signature on it. They`d then used the notes to forge a hate letter over his signature accusing some local Catholic priest named Father David Raymond “and his circle” of “interfering with the choir boys.” How the hell would Chris have even known the guy? In spite of the transparency of the hoax, the police chief, to whom the letter had been addressed, had been convinced Chris was responsible. And even though Mrs. Willard called Chief Boucher to say Chris had been helping in the orchard when the letter was shoved through the police department mail slot, Boucher still considered Chris the prime suspect. The incident marked the beginning of Chris’s running battle with the cops.

  Then, just days later, a girl named Darleen Jensen, a recent drop out from Chris’s class, had thrown herself in front of a logging truck up on Bailey’s Road. Some reporter from Bangor had stopped Chris in front of the school for a comment on the girl’s death, and in an instant of ill-considered glibness, he’d said, “Can you blame her, having to live in this god-awful town?” The paper had printed the remark along with Chris’s picture. Thereafter, the whole town knew Chris on sight and hated his guts, not just for being a Chandler, but for being a selfish, mouthy and insensitive bastard in his own right.

  It had been a stupid thing to say, he knew that, but he’d made his point, and anyway, he couldn’t take it back. He just had to avoid any more blunders and keep his crap together for seven more months. Then he’d graduate, turn eighteen, and get the hell out of Bemishstock. Maybe he’d join the Army, or go to technical school or get a job, anything so long as it took him as far away from Maine and his family as possible.

  Of course, university was out because his grades sucked. Kind of too bad, since he liked history and literature: Poe and Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker and writers like that. Dracula, Frankenstein, even Castle of Otranto were great. Every night, up in the attic crawl space that passed as his bedroom, Chris read dark, spooky stories into the wee hours, scaring himself to death. He imagined strange lights in the orchard or down by the shore, or sounds and voices on the other side of the attic wall, or scratches on the roof immediately above him. He conceived the most ghastly tales of haunted farmhouses, and vengeful sea creatures, and bloodthirsty tramps, and some nights he even tried to write them down. Invariably, however, the results were garbage because he lacked the skills and tools to do justice to his fevered imagination. So if university wasn’t in the cards, then perhaps a writing program at a two-year college might accept him—if he could get the money together. That was why the Army made some sense.

  Anyway, he had six or seven months to figure something out, and in the meantime, all he had to do was ignore the idiots at school, and suck it up. Seven months, no big deal, not after what he’d already been through. Besides, how much worse could the torment get?

  Chapter Three

  Thursday, November 14

  Richard Chandler knew the day was going to be bad. After two months of “study,” the shutdown of Allied Paper’s Bemishstock plant was to begin that day. The whole process would take eighteen months but the first layoff notices were going out at lunch time. He’d recommended to management back in Wisconsin the closure process start midday with the termination of two shifts and fifty men. Fifty families were going to have a hellish afternoon, fifty-one if you included Chandler’s own.

  He finished dressing in the bathroom, and slipped back into the darkened bedroom to lean across his wife and kiss her gently on the cheek. She winced and pulled the sheets up over her head. “Try to have a good day, okay, Love?” he said.

  “I will.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “I love you.”

  “And I love you.” Richard stood motionless for a moment, staring down at the slender outline beneath the sheets. And he did, he did love her. With all his heart, after everything they’d been through, all the heartbreak and worry, he loved her still.

  Richard turned and left the room. He paused outside the young ones’ bedroom and thought about warning them of the day’s events, but then dismissed the idea. Chris on the other hand did need to know. There were bound to be outbursts at school once word of the layoffs at the plant got around town. Richard knew he should warn his son, but he just wasn’t up to the shouting match he knew would follow. It was going to be a bad day; another battle with his son would only make it worse.

  There’d been quite a few battles already. Chris had known a different Chandler family, a happier family. And he’d made it plain how much he hated what Richard’s job had cost them all.

  With every battle, he thought about telling Chris the real reason he’d accepted his soul-sucking job—that he’d in fact begged for it—but he n
ever did. He’d never explained to the children how ill their mother really was, how desperately she needed treatment, treatment they could ill afford. He’d never told Chris how he’d fought for the job of killing towns because its big paycheck—and it was big, appearances to the contrary—was the only way he could think of to pay for the help his wife needed and the medication she took every day just to get by.

  Richard didn’t want any of his kids to know how close their mother was to the precipice because if one day things went terribly wrong, he didn’t want them to ever blame themselves, or worse, to blame their mother. If one day she succumbed to her crushing depression, then he wanted to carry all the blame himself. He knew Chris was going through hell at school, knew his son hated Bemishstock and probably hated him, but Richard felt trapped; he could help his wife or his son. There seemed no way to help them both. He slipped quietly out of the house. Chris was strong, he told himself. His son would cope—somehow.

  * * * *

  Through the tiny attic window, Chris watched his father leave for work. Funny, for a moment he just stood there in the yard, not moving. Then he turned and looked up toward Chris’s window like he was thinking of him. Not bloody likely! Then the moment passed.

  He waited until his dad drove off before dropping down through the tiny hatch onto the second floor landing from the attic crawl space. God forbid there should ever be a fire in the house, but when he’d been given the option of sleeping in a death trap in the attic or in a shared room with his brother and sister, the choice had been a no-brainer.

  He managed to wash and dress and get out of the house without exchanging a single word with anyone, which to Chris was a pretty good start to any day. And that morning, even the wait for the bus with the strange Willard girl wasn’t bad. In fact, there seemed to be something different about Gillian Willard. Hair, face, he couldn’t put a finger on it. She looked…well…nice, and when she caught him staring at her, she may actually have smiled.

  The bus arrived. Driver, Fred Corbler—the kids called him the Gobbler—took forever opening the door, then said through his three remaining teeth, “Gonna rain something awful this afternoon.” The implication was obvious.

  As Chris walked down the aisle, some of the younger kids on the bus mumbled crude names and cracks about his dad and family, insults he’d heard a hundred times before: weirdo, dick-wad, queer. The young kids’ insults were nothing compared to the customary hate-filled chorus from the back of the bus: no right to be here, don’t belong, goddamned parasites, someone should burn them out, maybe kill the whole goddamned family. Chris looked around and realized in amazement most of the older kids were not in fact on the bus that morning. Then to gild his good fortune, he got a window seat on the bay side of the bus so he could pretend to be looking out at the water all the way into town.

  About two miles from town, the bus usually stopped to pick up Mallory Dahlman and her younger brother Rudy. Chris didn’t normally look at the girls in school, but Mallory was a different case entirely. No one could help staring at her—neither male nor female. Secretly watching Mallory board the bus each morning was one lascivious pleasure Chris considered worth the risk.

  Mallory was the most popular girl in school, every teacher’s favorite, and so incredibly hot she took Chris’s breath away. The way the huge waves of shiny black hair framed her pale face, the way her deep, dark eyes sometimes caught the light and flashed silver beneath her long eyelashes, the way her full, red lips seemed fixed in a permanent pucker, the way the hem of her crisp, pleated, skirt flared away from her hips and might rise up along her thigh when she sat down, the way layers of lace showed through the shear white fabric of her taut blouse, and the way the fulsome line of her breasts strained against its pearl buttons...God!

  She always had the best things and dressed, not in cheap clothes from Benoit’s Super Saver, but classy stuff from away because apparently her father could deny Mallory nothing. Yet no one begrudged Mallory a thing, not her looks, not her wardrobe, and certainly not the sway she held over the entire school. To everyone, Mallory was sweet, friendly, innocent and unassuming. She could do no wrong. But to Chris, she also seemed secretive and mysterious, and to have a wicked twinkle in her eye like she knew something the rest of her classmates did not, something dark and amusing like a nasty secret or a cruel joke, a joke that no one got except her. Was he really the only one who saw the shadow behind her mask? He longed to say he understood. “I get it too, I get that it’s all crap, it’s all for show.” Of course, he didn’t. If he did, he knew Floyd Balzer and his jock buddies would come after Chris like a pack of wild dogs.

  Floyd Balzer was the ringleader of the loud-mouthed cretins who usually filled the back of the bus, and Mallory’s boyfriend. He captained the local hockey team and was a muscle-bound jerk with the pathetic beginnings of a mustache. Even on the coldest days, Balzer still wore a skin-tight, sleeveless muscle shirt and Ray-ban aviator sunglasses like his idol, Sylvester Stallone. Floyd’s dad owned a trucking company hauling wood to the carton plant, and was a big man in town—or he would be until the plant closed. The same was true of his son Floyd, big man on campus, with the prettiest girlfriend. But Floyd wasn’t on the bus that morning, nor were his idiot friends, so Chris thought he might chance a longer than usual look at the luscious Mallory; maybe even talk to her.

  Shortly before Mallory’s stop, the wooded shoreline gave way to several acres of lawn stretching from the road to the end of the wide headland, and there, on a bluff overlooking a long pebble beach, stood the sprawling, single-story home Mallory shared with her mother and brother. Word was Mallory’s father captained some merchant ship out in Asia somewhere, and was gone for months at a time. Judging by their huge home and the way Mallory dressed, Captain Dahlman made a pile of money.

  Mallory and her scrawny, pale, younger brother, Rudy, usually waited for the bus each morning in an impressive shelter at the end of their drive. Not this morning however. As the bus slowed, Chris spotted Mallory up the lane, with a group of girlfriends in front of the house. They seemed to be examining big sheets of bristle board. Three or four other cars were parked in Mallory’s drive, and several parents were chatting with Mallory’s mother on the porch. Floyd Balzer and a couple of buddies were carrying equipment from the porch to Floyd’s pickup. So why was everyone getting a drive to school?

  Chris suddenly felt sick. Oh crap, Social Studies! The sheets of bristle board: they were posters! He had a major class project due for Social Studies that day. Starting with afternoon class and for the next several days, every student in grade twelve was supposed to make an oral presentation with visual aids, and Chris had completely forgotten. He couldn’t even remember the topic of the assignment because it had been given out at the beginning of term, and no one had reminded him since. How could they? He never talked to anyone. The only thing he remembered for sure was that the project counted for half the term mark.

  Class projects like posters and models and booklets were always crap and a complete waste of time, but everyone played the stupid game anyway, and the only thing worse than presenting something utterly ridiculous was having nothing at all to present, which was what Chris had—nothing. Chris never made much of an effort in school and his grades were the proof, but he’d never before ignored an assignment entirely, and having nothing at all to present was bound to draw unwanted attention.

  For the rest of the ride into town, Mallory Dahlman was the furthest thing from Chris’s mind. He cast about frantically for some sort of topic he could throw together in time for class. He vaguely remembered the assignment had something to do with the role of ceremony in different cultures because that was what Grade 12 Social Studies was all about, cultures and how they work. He remembered with a smile Mr. Duncan had recently shown the class an old filmstrip on coming-of-age rituals in Borneo; the teacher had practically lost control of the class during the show. Chris’s presentation should probably focus on some ritual or other. All right, good start. And i
f he’d got the topic wrong, he’d apologize, say he’d misunderstood, then sit down and shut up. Good strategy; it had worked before.

  Okay, so what ritual, what society? The only stuff Chris had been reading lately was Edgar Allen Poe. He always went back to Poe when he was feeling particularly dark. Last night he’d read A Premature Burial for the umpteenth time. Was there something in that? The editor’s introduction to Poe’s tale described how people in the nineteenth century were terrified of being buried alive, and this gave Chris an idea.

  As soon as the bus got to school, he headed for the squat brick extension at the side of Bemishstock Secondary. It housed both the town and the school libraries, merged a few years ago to save money, and, as luck would have it, the library opened at eight a.m. Chris had twenty minutes before the first bell to find a few sources, and, with a free period mid-morning and lunch hour, he might just have time to throw some kind of presentation together.

  Sure enough, the library had the same edition of Poe stories as his own, and a quick review gave him some of the detail needed to write a text. Then he flipped through the card catalogue for anything on graveyards and funerals, and amazingly, he found a lavishly illustrated book on funeral practices around the world and another on body snatching in Scotland. He probably could have found better material, time permitting, but he wasn’t looking for quality, just quantity, and with these three books, he could weave together all the bull needed. He checked out the books and hurried to class.

  For the next ninety minutes, through Chemistry and Math, Chris didn’t hear a word as he scanned the books concealed on his lap. At ten o’clock, he ran back to the library, found a quiet spot, and began scribbling. Half an hour later, he’d filled four pages.

  Next, a poster. He flipped through the book on funerals and found an illustration of the embalming process. He loved its ghoulish complexity even if it had nothing whatsoever to do with the topic. Then, in the book on body snatching, he found a bizarre picture of a cage used in the nineteenth century to protect coffins from grave robbers. Although tempted to rip out both pictures, he just couldn’t, so he forked over the cash for photocopies. Two pictures wouldn’t fill a sheet of bristle board, no matter how large he might make the labelling, he needed more. Then he had a stroke of genius: Famous Monsters of Filmland. Poe’s Premature Burial had been filmed in 1962 by legendary B-movie director, Roger Corman, one of Chris’s all-time favorites. If he could find back issues of Famous Monsters from the ‘60s, he might have all the pictures he needed. He proofed his text in English class, and then, when the bell rang for lunch, headed downtown.