The Job of the Wasp

by Colin Winnette

  The boys were rocking now, in and out of sync, like blades of grass.

  “That same afternoon, this plump punisher had been assigned garden duty with poor Thomas. Our loving, sweet Thomas, who was always taking the fall for our more complicated pranks, absorbing what might have been several terrible punishments into a single compounded punishment, which he always endured without complaint. Poor Thomas, who had never even met his biological parents, who had only just arrived at the end of the year before last but had quickly and cordially made inroads with each of us, helping us when we needed help, listening when we needed to be heard. This bound bully before us led Thomas down to the garden, where they promptly unearthed the corpse of our attentive schoolteacher, Ms. Klein. With what silent pleasure did this haunt reveal the corpse to Thomas and, so quickly after this dreadful magic trick, with what direct and unhesitant malice did he attack poor Thomas, hitting him square in the face and sending him down onto the blade of a facility garden hoe. Now, I assure you, from where I stood watching, the act appeared not only calculated but celebrated, as the boy stood over the two corpses, bouncing from one foot to the other, then lining them up, the bodies of our loved ones, laid out in the garden—the macabre yield of this year’s harvest. And yet, I still couldn’t be sure, not one hundred percent sure, that I hadn’t simply witnessed a brutally timed accident: a misstep on behalf of a bumbling ball of butter. In over his head, no doubt, but not necessarily murderous, and certainly not yet demonstrably supernatural. And how preferable it would be to realize it was all a terrible misunderstanding. What relief I would have felt at any explanation for what I had witnessed, other than its having been the sick revels of someone bent on stamping out the peace of our small facility with his horrible, haunting heel.”

  The alliteration! The sheer histrionics! If I could have swallowed the gag crammed in my jaw, I might have. I couldn’t stand to see Fry going on in this way, presenting such an elaborately twisted case, warping the details and casting everything in the most negative of imaginable lights. I would have been in awe of his talents if they weren’t so naggingly superficial, meant only to impress our cohort and draw them into an elaborate lie that made him out to be the hero and me somehow the villain. He was a carnival barker. A trained seal. A beat poet. He was all style, and whatever substance there was to be found in his presentation was misguided and sick, meant only to subvert the humanity of these poor children and turn them over to his line of thinking. I watched him, trying to understand whether these thoughts were truly his own or if he was setting up the next nest of traps into which we all might unknowingly wander. Was this part of a grand scheme, the edges of which had not yet come into focus? Or was Fry simply trying to do what was right? To punish the one he perceived as the source of their collective danger? The only way to know was to hear him out and parse the tale he had to tell, however unbearable it was for me to have to listen to him speak.

  Fry raised the edge of his hand to his forehead. “I won’t go into what I saw next, boys. I will tell you the information, but I can’t describe the gruesome goings-on in detail. It is too much. I lived through it once, and that was more than enough for me. There is no reason the lot of you should be forced to picture it in your minds. But, for the sake of being thorough, I will relate the broad strokes. With a cold precision that chilled me to the bone, our prisoner lifted the bodies of Ms. Klein and poor Thomas into the facility’s own wheelbarrow, provided for him to transport whatever edible crops were found in the garden back to the facility for lunch the next day. He then wheeled that grisly barrow, with unearthly strength, down the hill and to the lake, where he anchored the bodies with a rock and set them in the deepest parts of the water.”

  A gasp traveled the room.

  I shook my head at my misfortune, letting frustrated tears fall to gather in the gag.

  “And then, boys,” said Fry, “he came straight back to the school, into the Headmaster’s office. I wondered if it wasn’t to confess his crimes, so urgently had he returned, but he soon emerged with frightening focus, heading straight to his room where, through his own window, I watched him draw additional nude images of Ms. Klein. Why? I can’t begin to imagine. Our minds are not one and the same. But it was obviously sinister. You could see it in the way his tongue held in the corner of his mouth, jutting out like a pink cigar. As the storm grew, I wasn’t able to shadow him as effectively, and I lost him for some time following his departure from his room with the pictures. I wandered in the rain, trying to stay out of both the Headmaster’s sight and the sight of the boy who, it was clear to me now, was at least a murderer, if not something far darker. And yet, of that I still could not be certain. That he is relatively new and none of us know his history, that he has trouble remembering us, that he so calmly murdered two of ours: These pieces came together to evidence the disturbed nature of an unpleasant individual, but, still, not necessarily our ghost.”

  The other boys were looking at me now. Some were squinting. Others were leaning behind the boy nearest them, watching me over a protective shoulder.

  “It was by luck that I happened upon him again at the gazebo, only a few moments before he knocked a nest of wasps onto our poor brother Nick.”

  Nick nodded, his eyes still on me.

  “I watched as our prisoner ran through the rain, not a single wasp sting to his person, and hid beneath the ivy on the far side of the yard. It was around that time that I heard a commotion coming from the dormitory and I headed inside, where I was presented with the corpse of Hannan.”

  “Hannan?” said a boy I did not know.

  Looking more closely, though, I might have known him. I studied his face. There was something there that I did in fact recognize, but I could not tell what it was.

  Fry nodded. He shook his head. He held up his hand as if to ask for a minute. It was all so disgusting.

  “Yes,” said Fry, finally. “Hannan is gone too. His body was discovered in the closet of this vile virgin.”

  I shuddered but all was not lost. The gears in my head were turning. Fry had revealed himself to me, though I could not yet express what I was already coming to understand.

  “A few of the more rash among us had already left to go after the young thing we have presented to you this evening. They wouldn’t find out about Hannan until after their return. Having seen the wounds Nick received, they were hungry for justice, and they sought out our new nightmare, bound him as he is now bound, and set him back in the fortress of wasps, knocking down several more nests in order to adequately administer that justice. While I couldn’t condone their actions, I could observe the evidence that act revealed, which I will report now: the final stamp on a well-prepared document declaring his true nature, at least in my eyes. From his own dormitory window, the corpse of Hannan splayed out on the floor behind me, having fallen from the closet only a short while before, I watched as the wasps swarmed this young body. Instead of screaming, as any red-blooded boy would, he rose effortlessly from the ropes that bound him, brushed his adversaries from his hair and arms and back and legs, and returned to the dormitory without a single sting. Not a single sting. Not an ounce of visible fear. He rose, as the dead, we’ve learned, do rise, and made his way home. I ask you to look at Nick’s face, the face of a living and breathing boy who has received dozens of stings in the presence of a single wasps’ nest broken open on the gazebo floor. This bulletproof bastard was encircled by up to five wasps’ nests, and yet here he sits, unbroken, not a single wound to his bulbous body. Add to that the absence of a scab or scar behind his ear where I directly nicked him earlier this semester. He receives no wound. He feels no pain that isn’t performed for our benefit. He is no boy at all but a spirit wandering our halls, intent on dragging those unfortunate enough to be left alone with him down to the underworld, so that he might linger longer.”

  The other boys were nodding. If any hadn’t been looking at me a moment before, their eyes were now l
ocked on my gagged visage.

  “You may recall his speech from before,” said Fry, “designed to gain your trust and draw you under his influence. I am not here to ask the same. I am only here to present my case and allow you to make up your own minds. Setting aside the question of his incorporeality, we nonetheless have a murderer bound before us. And it is our charge now, alone as he has rendered us, to decide what we will do with him.”

  “But what’s happened to the Headmaster?” said the boy I believed I recognized.

  Fry nodded yet again. I feared his bobbled head might come tumbling off, so frequently was he nodding it, like a man about to collapse in the street.

  “Upon hearing reports that the Headmaster was locked in his office, Anders and the others took matters into their own hands and brought down the door. They discovered there not only the corpse of our beloved Headmaster, but these pages.” Fry waved his arm for effect, and Anders dumped a bag of torn pages from the Headmaster’s office onto the table.

  The other boys rushed over.

  “Pictures of Ms. Klein!” said one.

  “This says my name,” said another. “Why does it say my name?”

  “The boy whose glasses are ill-fitting,” read the boy whose glasses would not stay on. “What are these?”

  “Pictures,” said Fry. “Our names. Descriptions. The desperate notes of a mind that cannot hold on to this world. A mind stuck between two realities: that of the living and that of the dead. We all know the symptoms. We understand the measures taken by these unfortunate creatures, still clinging madly, methodically, to a world that is no longer for them.”

  “We’re all here,” said another boy.

  Fry nodded. I imagined his neck breaking like a stalk of celery.

  “Yes,” he said. “A great deal of work has gone into them.”

  “It’s giving me chills to be in the same room with them,” said another boy, dropping a page and shuffling away from the table. “Something has to be done.”

  “I agree,” said Fry. “Something has to be done, and done soon. We’re at four, gentlemen, as you already know. Annually, for as long as any of us have been aware of it, the count ends at five. If one more is due, let us make it the source of all our woes. Let us not lose yet another innocent like Hannan, like Thomas.”

  “Something has to be done!” said another boy.

  “Seconded,” said another.

  “Thirded,” said yet another.

  “We’re all in agreement then,” said Nick. “And any who aren’t in agreement should speak now.”

  The room was silent as a tomb until suddenly, with suspiciously precise timing, the lights of the facility clicked on, filling the room with a golden glow and the warm, dull hum of electricity coursing back through its veins.

  illumination

  A twin tightened the ropes that held me then wrapped a fresh braid around my gag. With their latest suspect securely bound, the other boys made a plan for what to do with me, and I worked out the truth about Fry. He was a natural bully, a force without subtlety or decency. He’d likely started small, as bullies do, and gradually, year after year, pushed himself beyond the comforts provided by discreet acts of casual violence and onto a more public stage, opening himself up to the possibility of doing true harm.

  I couldn’t say exactly where, when, or why it had begun; maybe there was an accident one day, a boy found at the bottom of a well, a broken neck in proximity to a tipped-over ladder, something the world would look to sweep under the rug, would thank God to have a reason to believe was an accident, something that, with enough precaution, care, and attention, could be avoided in the future. I thought of the poor Headmaster, blaming himself for some mysterious harm that had come to a child in his charge. Fry would have been emboldened by that, would have found his new extracurricular activities too thrilling to quit, too satisfying to revert to anything less, and he would have kept them up, refining them into bolder, more malicious, more grandiose schemes. Then, completely immersed in his own malevolence, he might have found himself suddenly facing a number of corpses beyond simple explanation. Confronted with a suspiciously high body count, he might have circulated a rumor that the halls were haunted. Casually at first, but consistently. The Headmaster wouldn’t have believed it, but at the very least it would have put the other boys on edge, confirming their fears, possibly making them suspicious of one another or doubtful of their own minds, turning any nighttime sounds into the laughter or celebration of a malicious spirit. The possibility of a ghost would have infected them, as it had infected Nick. Fry had also likely made the rounds, scaring the other boys night after night, keeping up the momentum of their mounting sense of dread, so that they would fall quickly in line when he presented a route to safety. By giving the other boys something to believe in, something to fear, Fry had given them something to band together against. As the orchestrator of their shared delusion, he could easily direct the incredible force of these boys as he pleased. Though this was technically a goal we’d shared, a punch he’d simply beaten me to, I did not lump myself in with Fry. His execution relied on delusion, whereas mine relied on truth. Effective as it was, his approach allowed me to understand the most important distinction between myself, admittedly not without guilt, and Fry, whom I believed to be, if not evil, then the closest manifestation this secular world could produce. Fry had taken a position of power based on lies and manipulation, and for the purpose of personal gain. It was true he’d provided a kind of unity, but it was a false unity, and one that ran the risk of someday forever dividing those who believed themselves to have been unified. When they discovered it wasn’t actually a banding together but a being bound, how would they respond? They would turn their backs on the very idea of unity. Or they would turn to it only in the spirit of Fry. Those who were unsuccessful in taking power as he had would be destroyed by a world that resents being bent to the will of the weak. Those who were successful, few as they might be, would only further divide humanity, having the same long-term effects that Fry had had on their group and adding to the ever-expanding reach of this ultimately divisive method of unification. The cycle, I realized, could go on forever, until someone selflessly made an effort to end it.

  My jaw was aching from the gag, and my wrists were raw. How many hours had we been at this? How many more were left?

  “We could burn him,” said one of the boys.

  “No,” said another. “He could survive it.”

  “We could put him in the lake with his corpses,” said Nick.

  Fry shook his head. “And leave him for future generations to surface?” he said.

  “What about a cave?” said another. “We could put him in a cave in the mountains and seal it with an enormous rock.”

  “Boys,” said Fry.

  They turned.

  “Why do ghosts haunt?”

  “Because they’re evil,” said one of the many I’d once considered a brother.

  “Because they are looking to right the wrongs they suffered in life,” said another.

  “Because something terrible happened, and they are like a bruise on the world of the living,” said a third.

  Fry shook his head. He stood again at the front of the room and lifted his hands.

  “Brothers,” he said, “forget what you’ve heard. These are mere metaphorical imaginings, dreamed up by those who would seek to find meaning in our nightmares. Ghosts haunt because they simply do not know any better. They haunt because they are confused. They don’t know what they are, or what they are to do, and they act according only to impulse, habit, and routine. They circle the familiar places of their life, not lovingly but compulsively. Our captive will forever be a captive, either ours or at large in the world of the living, until the moment he realizes this isn’t where he belongs. This isn’t his home. If that doesn’t happen, he will only make smaller and smaller circles, as his consciousness di
ms and his memories fade. And as his emotional and psychological connections to our world deteriorate, he will cling more desperately, and increasingly he will act out, with growing violence and anger. The world of the living can’t be made sense of by the dead. It is that simple. It’s beyond them. He needs to be shown that he is dead. That this is not his world. And then, maybe, he will cease to haunt it. He has to see that a line has been crossed before he can go back to the other side.”

  “How do we know he’ll listen?” said the boy whose face I could not remember.