To the left was the nearest boys’ lavatory, but there was another close by his homeroom, which was to the right past the main stairway and then down the corridor and around to the right again, the floor plan of the school being in the shape of a square with a small hunk taken out of it so that you couldn’t get back to corner A (the gymnasium) from corner D (his homeroom). Wherever the walls of the hallway weren’t given over to metal lockers they’d been decorated with Halloween decorations in as many styles and media as there were classrooms along the hallway. Sister Terence’s third-graders had produced a three-foot-high and ten-foot-long mural on a scroll of paper showing different rooms inside a haunted house with a wide variety of witches and monsters, none (to Billy’s mind) very persuasive. Miss Beane’s second-graders had produced, as usual, a much livelier display, a giant checkerboard with jack-o’-lantern cut from orange paper pasted on the black squares alternating with black skulls on the white squares. Everyone who’d ever had Miss Beane for second grade agreed that her art classes were the most fun of any teacher’s in the school, even though she always made you do things exactly her way.
Billy slowed as he approached the main stairwell, since this was where he was most liable to encounter a monitor, if there was one. He’d already thought up his excuse for going to the farther-off lavatory (namely, that the three stalls in the other lav were all occupied), but the best thing would be to get to his destination without being noticed at all. It might take time to weed out all the Heath bars in the bowl, more time than anyone was likely to spend on the toilet.
He could hear a voice, two voices, a man’s saying “Mm-hm” and “Uh-huh” and the voice of Sister Fidelis, fluent and flutelike. They were standing next to the double doors of the main entrance, down half a flight of stairs from the hallway. Only Sister Fidelis was clearly in view, for the man had taken a position partly inside and partly outside the double doors so as not to be officially smoking inside the school building. Even so, the smell of his cigarette cut through the usual school smells of polish and chalk dust with the force of sacrilege, like a rock and roll radio station being turned on in church.
Billy took a deep breath, got his pass ready to show, and started walking along the hall, hoping the school principal would be too caught up in her conversation to notice him. And indeed it wasn’t Sister Fidelis who called out, “Billy, hey! Billy, come down here.”
It was his father.
Billy walked down the half flight of stairs toward Henry with the lightness of knowing he was no longer responsible for anything that might happen. He had been stopped, it was out of his hands. “Hi, Dad. Hello, Sister.” He held up his hallway pass, and Sister Fidelis nodded without looking at it.
“So, how is the Halloween party going?” his father asked. “And what are you doing out here in the hall?”
“They’re showing Frankenstein, but I had to leave to go to the bathroom.”
Henry smiled. “It didn’t get too scary for you, did it?” He flicked his cigarette outside into the drizzling darkness and got down to business. “Well, you hurry up with your business in the bathroom. I’m going to have to take you home a little ahead of schedule. Your mother got sick again, so I’m afraid there’s no chauffeur service tonight.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Sister Fidelis said politely. “I hope it’s nothing serious.”
“It’s some kind of flu, she says.”
Sister Fidelis sighed. “Yes, it’s getting to be that season. In any case, Billy mustn’t go home without a share of the Halloween treats. So, Billy, when you’ve washed your hands, you can take your father to your homeroom and help yourself to some of the candy from the bowl. I’m sorry you won’t be able to see the end of the movie, but your father tells me you’re already an expert in the matter of Frankenstein.”
Billy nodded. “I’ve seen this movie before, and another one that was basically the same but in color, and then last year I saw Young Frankenstein. That one was my favorite. It’s funnier than this one. But it’s scarier too.”
Sister Fidelis offered her hand to Henry. “It was nice, having this chance to talk, and I shall pray for Mrs. Michaels’s quick recovery—and for your unfortunate mother-in-law, as well. Such a strange thing to happen. Well, duty calls, I really must patrol the halls. All that candy could tempt the saints themselves. Good night, and Happy Halloween.” Halfway up the stairs she turned around and addressed Billy. “And I expect to see you at the eight o’clock High Mass tomorrow, William. All Saints’ Day is a holy day of obligation.”
“I know, Sister.”
Henry insisted on accompanying Billy to the bathroom, but didn’t go in with him. Billy entered a stall, waited a suitable amount of time, flushed the toilet, and returned to his father. Then there was no help for it: Billy led the way to his homeroom.
And there on the main blackboard in huge white letters made with the chalk turned on its side was the dirtiest word in the English language and then the school’s initials—OLM.
And there was the bowl of candy, but now by some miracle emptied of its contents, all but a few worm-eaten apples.
Billy felt an immense elation. Even before he’d figured out logically what had happened, he knew he didn’t have to feel worried anymore, or guilty, or afraid. He understood the meaning of being “saved.”
“Is this where the candy was?” Henry asked, tipping the bowl so that the mottled windfalls rolled about in it.
Billy nodded. “It was full almost to the top.”
“What a damned rotten trick. Who in hell would have…”
“Probably kids from Weyerhauser.”
Henry had thought as much himself, but hadn’t wanted to say so to Billy. He nodded gravely but noncommittally. “We’d better go tell Sister Fidelis. But first”—he went to the blackboard and picked up an eraser—“we’d better erase this.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t,” said Billy. “It could be evidence.”
“If they ever need anyone to testify in court as to what was written on the blackboard, we can both be witnesses, okay? Meanwhile—” He erased the giant obscenity, but even erased the letters left ghosts of themselves and FUCK OLM remained legible if you concentrated.
“Write something else on the blackboard, Dad, like ‘Happy Halloween,’ and no one will notice what’s underneath.”
“Right,” said Henry.
That done, they returned to tell Sister Fidelis about their discovery. Her main concern was whether there had also been vandalism, and learning that there had not, she said, “That’s a blessing. Of course, it’s a terrible thing, but if it’s only a matter of candy being taken, that can be remedied easily enough.”
“How do you suppose they got in?” Henry asked.
“A school isn’t a fortress, Mr. Michaels. Anyone able to climb the fence about the playground can get onto the window ledge of that room. We try to keep the windows latched shut for that reason, but sometimes—” She lifted her hands in a gesture of resignation. “I realize that you’re anxious to get home, Mr. Michaels, but I’d appreciate it if you would take my place here at the door for a short time, say five minutes, while I go about and restock the bowl for Billy’s classroom from the bowls in the other rooms. The children never need know what happened if I do it now.”
“Of course, Sister. I’d be happy to.”
“Billy, you come help me.”
Billy followed Sister Fidelis back to his homeroom, and then, with Billy carrying the gradually weightier bowl, they went from one schoolroom to the next, taking larger portions where the supplies were more abundant. The first and second grade classrooms were definitely the best supplied. By the time they had reached the seventh grade classroom upstairs there was more candy in the bowl Billy was carrying than in the classroom’s bowl, and Sister Fidelis decided that they had gathered enough. They took the filled bowl back to his homeroom, where Billy would have forgotten to take any candy at all for himself if Sister Fidelis hadn’t told him to. “Oh go on, don’t be shy�
��take more than that. But do me a favor, will you, William?”
“Sister?”
“Don’t mention to the other children about what you and your father discovered. Of course, if anyone were to ask you about it directly, you would have to tell the truth. Lying is always a sin. But if no one asks you…”
Billy nodded. “Yes, Sister, I’ll keep it a secret.”
“Good,” she said, and rewarded him with a final handful of candy from the bowl.
As they approached the stairwell, they could hear an argument going on between Billy’s father and some people insisting they be let in to the school. Henry was saying, rather angrily, that they would have to wait until Sister Fidelis was back and could identify them as students, and they were insisting on coming in right away.
Sister Fidelis quickened her pace so that Billy almost had to run to keep up with her. As Billy and Sister Fidelis came to the stairs leading down to the doors and could see them, the boys who had been trying to push past Henry suddenly reversed course and backed out onto the sidewalk.
Sister Fidelis went right out the door after them and demanded to know what they wanted. There was no immediate reply.
Billy pressed his face up against the lowest glass panel of one of the doors to see what was happening. There were four older boys, seventh- or eighth-graders probably, and all four were wearing identical Richard Nixon rubber masks. You couldn’t tell if they were black or white, even by looking at their hands, because they were all wearing gloves. But they had talked the way that colored kids talked when they’d been arguing with Henry. “Hey, man, you can’t do that!” and “Who you anyhow says we can’t come in here?”
“Take off those masks and let me see who you are,” Sister Fidelis demanded.
“I’m Richard Nixon,” one of the boys said in a tone of loud defiance, and the other three laughed and chorused his claim. “Yeah, that’s who I am, I’m Richard Nixon.” They held their hands up with fingers spread out to make V’s.
“Yeah,” said the first boy, “I’m Richard Nixon, and I ain’t no crook.”
This time their laughter sounded less forced.
“Well, Richard Nixon, I’m afraid you’ll have to find somewhere else to celebrate Halloween. The party here is only for students at OLM. I’m sorry, but that’s the rule.”
Having made their defiance, the four scale-model Richard Nixons headed away from the school and out into the street. Reaching the opposite sidewalk, they turned around and shouted aloud the same obscene message that had been written on the blackboard in Billy’s homeroom. Then they turned and ran off into the darkness.
“You know, Sister,” Henry said, as Sister Fidelis returned indoors. “I’ll bet those were the same kids who made off with the candy from Billy’s classroom.”
“Returning to the scene of the crime? That would be bold of them, but I suppose we’ll never know. Thank you for service beyond the call of duty.”
“I’d say it was exactly what my duty called for, Sister, and I’m glad I was able to be some help. Will you be all right here by yourself?”
“They were just children acting up. It is Halloween, after all.” She laughed lightly. “This isn’t the blackboard jungle, yet. And I’ve already kept you too long from your poor wife. So thank you again, and good night to you both.”
Henry stepped out the door, opened up his umbrella, and waited for Billy to crowd in under it with him. They set off home at a carefully measured pace, so as both to keep out of the rain as much as possible. As they walked they ate candy from Billy’s knapsack, and Henry spun more tall tales about the origins of Halloween and Billy told him what he’d read on that subject in the Junior Universe of Knowledge. They agreed that the ancient Druids must have been interesting people.
24
Henry couldn’t sleep. He’d lain in bed an hour listening to Madge’s irregular snoring (she’d taken one of her blue angels from the bottle she kept hidden in her stocking drawer), and he was still as wide awake as ever. I’ll read a book, he thought, and raid the icebox. In pajama tops and bathrobe he went out into the hall and, after checking to see that Billy was sleeping well, down the stairs. The house had developed a deep-rooted chilliness, the funereal cold of a stone church or some other building where the furnace doesn’t regularly operate. His feet cringed at each step and his bare legs began to get goose bumps. November already. Heating bills. And this old Victorian mastodon ate up oil almost as fast as you could pump it into the tank. Combine that with the taxes, and the monthly bite was nearly as much as an average family paid for rent. Maybe he should finally do what he was always threatening to and set up a wood-burning stove in the living room. The chimney and flue for the fireplace seemed to be in good enough shape. But without a steady supply of firewood, would it really represent a saving?
As so often, Henry’s daydream of a heroic undertaking had led him to recognize what it was he wanted in the way of instant gratification. A fire in the fireplace! There was just enough wood stacked beside the fireplace to get a cozy blaze going. Before fixing himself a snack, he formed a little tepee of kindling under the three slenderest logs from the stack and set it blazing. By the time he was back with a drink and a sandwich of cheese and catsup on toasted rye, the logs had caught and the flames were having their own Halloween celebration, leaping and crackling.
There is something primordial about fire, something almost religious. Henry only had to sit watching a fire for ten or fifteen minutes and his mind was off in another dimension. It was hard not to believe that a fire wasn’t alive, that the flames weren’t more than excited gases. Hadn’t one of the Old Testament characters seen God inside a burning tree? And there was something else, something he’d just heard about lately, what was it? Ah yes, the thing Billy had told him about the Druids (the kid had a memory like a steel trap, nothing got away), how they set special bonfires on Halloween and put the stones in them, one for each member of the family.
Henry was not superstitious as a general rule. He didn’t worry about walking under ladders or doing things on Friday the thirteenth. He treated black cats exactly the same as white cats, and he had no lucky coins or key rings or such as that. But sometimes things did happen that were hard to explain, such as the time a friend had got him to ask a question to the I Ching and the question he’d asked was whether or not to get a Honda 650 he’d seen advertised and the I Ching’s answer had been “The prince shall receive a gift of many horses.” That certainly had to be more than blind chance. Henry had a similar respect for the messages in fortune cookies, but only when he felt an inner prompting that said this particular fortune cookie was one to be heeded.
And he had that feeling now. He didn’t act on it at once, since he was just starting to enjoy the glow of the fire, but he couldn’t get rid of the idea about the Druids and the stones they put in their Halloween bonfires. But even after he’d returned from the kitchen with a second drink, he didn’t seriously consider going out into the alley with a flashlight to find four appropriate stones. Five, with Ned.
Then it dawned on him that, thanks to Ned, there was a good supply of stones all over the house. Ned had been a collector of “interesting” sticks and stones and had always been bringing home weeds with pretty flowers or an odd-looking rock. The flowers would get stuck in a water glass and die in a day or two and get thrown out, but the rocks had been deposited, like so many never-to-be-hatched eggs, in the pots of the various houseplants. After Ned’s accident these nests of rocks had become so many little domestic shrines, commemorating the Ned of that earlier, happier time.
He went into the dining room, turned the light on, and began to collect rocks from among the potted houseplants: three largish stones for the three grown-ups, and smaller ones to represent Ned and Billy. The largest, smooth and slightly pink, would represent Grandma O., as symbolizing her baldness. The black stone (basalt?) would stand for Madge, and the one flecked with what looked like bits of mica would be his own. Ned’s stone looked like a small gra
y potato, and Billy’s was a chalky white shard of what might be marble.
He placed all five stones on the hearth and used the fire shovel to push them back so they were dead center under the blazing logs. Then he laid two more logs slantwise across the fire, hiding the stones from sight. The new logs began to hiss and crackle, and Henry soon had to push the chair farther back from the fire to keep the hair on his shins from getting singed. He sipped his screwdriver and watched the flames and enjoyed the fire’s heat and felt the tension draining out of his muscles like water from a tub. What a day. But it was over. He didn’t even need a third drink to go to sleep. He just put down the empty glass on the floor, drew up his legs into a fetal position so that his bathrobe would cover them, and conked out.
He woke at 5 A.M. to the muted chiming of the grandfather clock from Mrs. Obstschmecker’s bedroom. He knew a moment of confusion as to why he should be waking in a chair in the living room and freezing his ass off. Then it all came back, and he looked at the fireplace where the logs—all but one charred stump—had been reduced to a smooth mound of gray ashes.
This is stupid, he thought, dipping his hands into the mound of ashes and feeling about for the stones. He found Grama O.’s stone first, and then Ned’s. Neither had been affected by the fire. Madge’s stone had got knocked to the back of the fireplace, probably by the falling of a log from the andirons, but it too was intact. His own, however, had split right down the middle. Weighing the sundered halves in his hands, he wished he’d never started his experiment. You didn’t have to be a Druid priest to know that this had to be accounted an ill omen. Enough of this shit, he thought. I’ll make breakfast.
But by that point it was too late to stop. He had to find the fifth stone and to make sure that no similar harm had come to it. He continued feeling around in the ashes, but all his fingers could discover were small charred knobs and knots of wood undevoured by the flames. He became more systematic. He spread a newspaper beside the fireplace and began to sift the ashes through his fingers, shovelful by shovelful. Billy’s stone seemed to have vanished, and that simply wasn’t possible.
THE M.D. A Horror Story Page 13
