by Safari,B. C
‘What exactly are you doing Junior…breaking and entering the headmaster’s office?’
‘Would you lower your voice!’ snapped Junior, angrily, ‘Quabble left only a few moments ago, this is my only chance.’
‘Chance for what!’ shrieked Sasha, ‘chance to get expelled!’
‘You won’t understand, there’s something I need … something in the headmaster’s records.’
‘What!’
‘I need to find out about a man, Arthur Mannox, he lived in Shorebridge and probably went to St. Andrews…they’ll have his files here.’
Junior pressed his forehead against the headmaster’s door, unwilling to be moved. The reality of what he was attempting suddenly hit. Shockingly, he had thought the plan over many times. In fact, it had kept him from sleep last night and when he finally slept, he dreamt of executing the very same mission which he was attempting now…getting Arthur Mannox’s file.
‘You’re out of your mind Junior…out of your mind!’ cried Sasha, ‘you’ll get into so much trouble.’
Junior expired a sigh of desperation, ‘I need this,’ he whispered, ‘it’s to do with my dad…I need to get this information.’
In her right mind, Sasha would’ve pushed Junior away from the door as soon as she had learned of his foolish operation, but there was something bizarrely sincere in the face of the young man. It affected her deeply and she found herself unable to reproach him.
‘I cannot believe I’m doing this,’ whispered Sasha, plucking a pin from her tresses of hair. She plugged the pin into the keyhole and began to twist until the lock gave way.
When the heavy door finally swung open, Sasha smirked, ‘gotcha.’
She tossed Junior a nod of approval, ‘okay, I’ll keep watch…you’ve got five minutes.’
Junior sped into the large room and scanned it in one twist of his neck. The walls were decorated more bountifully than the other St. Andrew’s offices. When Junior’s eyes met the glare of Headmaster Williamson, he was momentarily distracted. Blimey. The headmaster’s portrait was abnormally lifelike. The idea that Mr. Williamson, wherever he was, did not know that his swanky office was being raided was strangely amusing. Junior caught sight of an enormous block of grey cabinets at the left wing of the office. The large marker ‘Student files’ suggested that the storage units contained exactly what Junior was looking for. The cabinets spanned an entire wall. He was certain that the information of all the students who’d ever attended St. Andrew’s was stored within it. The ‘1900 - 1940’s’ drawer was particularly attractive. From Junior’s calculations, Arthur Mannox would’ve passed through St. Andrew’s during the early twentieth century. He dragged forth the cabinet and filtered for family names beginning with M.
‘Mannox, Mannox...where are you?’ he mumbled.
Anxiety crept…what if he did not find the file in time?
‘Hurry up!’ called Sasha, from the doorway, ‘you’ve got two minutes left!’
Each word she muttered excited Junior’s nerve endings a little more than the last. Suddenly, Junior’s eyes fell upon Arthur Mannox’s file.
‘Bingo’ he muttered, sliding the document into his schoolbag.
‘You’ve got it, let’s go!’ cried Sasha.
Junior studied the cabinets again and silently considered the risks of searching for Dr. Willow’s file. Without hesitating, he lunged into the next cabinet. When Junior had powered through two large drawers, he suddenly came to the conclusion that Dr. Willow did not exist in St. Andrew’s directory. Sasha, who was panicking at the ticking clock, raced into the room and urged Junior to abandon his half-completed mission.
‘We need to go, now!’ she barked. Junior was sprawled over the floor, digging through a deep pool of documents. Sasha scooped up the remaining files and shoved them into any open cabinet. When Junior saw that the clock hand was edging dangerously close to lunchtime, he mirrored Sasha, clearing away the last of the files. Sasha returned the last file and bolted to the office door. In her stride, she almost didn’t notice the heavy bronze bust that had been catapulted from its podium. Sasha shrieked, expecting the bust to fly to the ground and take her with it. To her surprise, the bust remained, suspended horizontally in the air. It was somehow still attached to the podium. Slowly, a large block of bookshelves at the right-wing wall slid past each other, giving way to an impressive dark hole. It took a moment for Junior to realise what had changed in the room. Instantly, he understood that the bust was not a piece of extravagant decor…the bust was a lever and it had activated this mysterious passageway.
‘J-J-Junior?’ stammered Sasha, ‘please tell me that I’m hallucinating. Tell me that a hole-in-the-wall did not just appear out of nowhere.’
‘Not out of nowhere …the lever,’ replied Junior, examining the bust, ‘you activated it somehow, there’s something down there.’
With wide eyes and a trembling bottom lip, Sasha replied, ‘this is our queue to leave.’
To some degree Junior agreed, but an overwhelming sense of curiosity over how a secret passageway came to be in Mr. Williamson’s office dominated any feeling of imminent danger. Clasping a hand over his nose, Junior gasped, ‘there’s something down there…can’t you smell that?’
A repulsive odour swam from the dark hole, forcing Sasha to also clasp her hand over her nose. Junior edged into the passageway, with Sasha a few steps behind him. The potency of the odour grew as their proximity to the source increased.
‘Use the torch on your phone,’ muttered Sasha, tip toeing into the dark passage.
Junior did as he was told. The radiance of Junior’s phone screen illuminated the entire wall opening, which had once been a row of book shelves. A downward spiral of steps was revealed behind it. Junior rotated his phone until all four walls of the passageway could be seen in the light. He observed that bold inscriptions of the letter ‘P’ had been scribbled over all corners of the narrow passageway. When the young man projected his light source to the end of the spiralling steps, the horror that met the eyes of Sasha Fling and Junior Roterbee was enough to stun a garrulous man dumb. However, the sight of a frozen corpse at the bottom of the steps had the opposite effect on Sasha, who proceeded to scream at the top of her lungs until she had no air left to project. Soon, the frightful combination of Sasha’s endless wail, and the echoing ding of the commencing lunchtime bell, attracted a large crowd of curious students to the headmaster’s office. From the size of the crowd, Sasha’s cry would’ve reached every corner of St. Andrew’s college. The deputy head, Mrs. Quabble, fought through the crowd of onlookers.
‘What in the name of Sylvester are the two of you doing in the headmaster’s office?’ yelled Mrs. Quabble. A moment passed, in which she analysed the distressed expression that laced both Sasha and Junior’s faces. Unwilling to delay her angry teacher speech a moment longer, Mrs Quabble cried, ‘dear girl, you look mortified! Whatever is the matter?’
‘He’s ... He’s dead!’ Sasha sobbed, pointing into the wall. The befuddled expression on Mrs. Quabble’s face was replaced by the same lines of horror that Sasha and Junior modelled. Naturally, the teacher was perplexed at the presence of a gaping passageway where a bookshelf should have been. So, when her eyes caught the familiar face of Headmaster Williamson, lying dead at the bottom of the spiral steps, Mrs. Quabble’s knees gave way. First, although, she pronounced a scream that was almost as excellent as Sasha’s. Mrs. Quabble circled the air twice and made as if to faint. She would’ve surely banged her head if Junior did not catch her fall. Soon after, Charlotte surfaced from the dense crowd of students. It was Charlotte’s first inclination to preview the spectacle that had rendered Mrs. Quabble unconscious. When she did, she was horrified. Invariably, the verdict would be ruthless murder. It took a single glimpse to confirm so. His eyes were wide open, frozen still, as if fright and terror occupied his last moment. Junior wished that he could disremember Mr. Williamson’s vacant eyes, but there was something scarily fami
liar in them. Williamson modelled the same dying gaze as Allan Roterbee. It was the very same expression of unadulterated shock. Post mortem analysis revealed that Allan Roterbee had probably struggled when he realised he was moments away from death. But why would a suicidal man ever want to fight for his life? Surely, there was something deeper behind Mr. Roterbee’s pain-filled eyes. As for the headmaster, rumours for his own cause of death had only just begun to swirl.
No one ate that lunchtime, no one dared talk either. To the best of the school board’s knowledge, Mr. Williamson had been away on a conference for the past two weeks. To find him very dead, at the underside of a secret pathway, was a scandal that would shake the foundations of Shorebridge town forever. To the disappointment of avid theorists, the secret passageway was found to lead to nothing but the basement of the school, which contained a large network of pipes and spider webs. The basement contained no obvious evidence as to who or what was responsible for the death of Mr. Williamson. It was presumed that the murderer must’ve been able to bypass all the security measures of the school. This presumption would have been made concrete if the murderer was, indeed, an outsider to the school. But what if Mr. Williamson’s murderer was someone who knew the school well? Someone who’d worked inside the school, alongside teachers and students. Undeniably, Percy Williamson was one of the most charismatic men in Shorebridge. He had been the headmaster of St. Andrew’s college for what seemed like a lifetime; not many of the Shorebridge locals could even remember his predecessor. Regardless, Williamson was a most revered citizen of Shorebridge. He often told anyone who was fortunate enough to meet him, ‘if I had not been a headmaster, I would’ve probably ended up as a watchmaker because it’s my greatest delight to make order out of disorder.’ No one ever seemed to know what the old man was talking about, yet one could not help but warm to the always-cordial Mr. Williamson. Unlike the draconian headmasters of schools in neighbouring towns, Mr. Williamson did not rule over St. Andrew’s with an iron fist. He held all pupils and staff in a type of esteem that compelled them to show him equal respect… and, of course, abide by school regulations. Because of this, St. Andrew’s College had been a harmonious, progressive school for several years. It was difficult to fathom how someone could ever murder Mr. Williamson, as aside from healthy competition with other headmasters, which he sparingly engaged in, Percy Williamson had no bad blood with anybody in Shorebridge. By the time the police had arrived at the scene, Mr. Williamson’s body had already been layered with pristine white blankets and wheeled out to the ambulance van at the school gate. The students and teachers watched in bewilderment, some crying and many unable to talk. The police decreed Williamson’s office an official crime scene. All classes were dismissed effective immediately, at least until the school grounds could be deemed safe.
When Mrs. Quabble recovered to a fully conscious form, it was as if she no longer remembered that Sasha and Junior had been caught trespassing the headmaster’s office. She was rather insistent that, in wake of events passed, neither of them bother coming to school over the next few days. She even offered to drop them home. Mrs. Quabble was acting on this notion: if the sight of Mr. Williamson’s dead body was enough to make a grown woman collapse, then the two teenagers must have been a great deal more traumatized than they were letting on. What exactly the pair were doing inside the office in the first place would be a question for another day…a day when the whole escapade had blown over. For now, Mrs. Quabble’s foremost goal was to safely deliver Sasha Fling and Junior Roterbee to their homes. She had no idea how she would begin explaining the disturbing events of the day to their guardians. Somehow, Quabble knew she ought to recommend a session with the school’s counsellor. On informing the guardians of Sasha Fling and Junior Roterbee of Mr. Williamson’s passing, Mrs. Quabble was not at all met with the responses she had expected.
‘Dead, him dead!’ Ma Joelle squealed, ‘me knew it, him muurdad…me told Sasha but she tink me mad!’
Mrs. Quabble nodded politely, feigning she had understood a word of what Sasha’s barmy grandmother had said. Dr. Willow however, appeared physically distraught at the news of Percy Williamson’s death. This was a surprise to Mrs. Quabble, who had not known the two men to ever be acquaintances. When she questioned Dr. Willow as to whether he had ever met the headmaster, she was answered with, ‘no, no... our paths never crossed, I’ve heard he was a brilliant man is all.’
‘He was,’ Mrs. Quabble replied, not completely convinced that the doctor had spoken the whole truth.
When the deputy head departed the Willow Lodge, Luchia, who had been eagerly eavesdropping from the kitchen corridor, appeared in the hallway. The Roterbee’s and Dr. Willow stood in silence. Any moment now, Junior was expecting the doctor to ask him to recount the events of his day – from waking up, arriving at school, breaking into the headmaster’s office and finding a dead corpse. The young man remembered his first day in Shorebridge, he remembered how Dr. Willow had questioned him so particularly on how he’d saved little Maddie Brown. Junior had not given him the satisfaction of knowing the truth back then, and he certainly wasn’t going to start now. In the short drive home at the back of Mrs. Quabble’s car, he passed Sasha a scribbled note:
If anyone asks – We were truanting from lessons, found Williamson’s office door open. Went in. We discovered him dead. I’ll explain everything tonight- get to the Willow Lodge for 9.
Sasha ripped up the note as soon as she had read it; Junior was not sure whether her reaction was solely a mechanism to prevent Mrs. Quabble detecting the note, or a demonstration that she had no intention of meeting him at all. If the latter was the true reason, Junior would understand why Sasha would want nothing to do with him. After all, it was Sasha who attempted to dissuade him from breaking into Williamson’s office in the first place, but he’d managed to drag her into the chaos. Sasha deserved to know why she had found herself assisting Junior’s raid of the headmaster’s office. Junior planned to come clean to both Sasha and Charlotte. He was to present them with the newspaper cutting that told of Arthur Mannox’s death and the thick file, which was still tucked away inside his school bag. The young man had less than four hours to ruminate over why his intuition about Mannox and his father was worth breaking and entering Williamson’s office. He hoped, though doubted, that the file would produce some concrete evidence. Strong evidence was what he needed to shape his theory that Allan Roterbee and Arthur Mannox were related. The news of Percy Williamson’s death had blurred his theory in some small, inexplicable way.
‘Up to your room then,’ said Dr. Willow, disrupting Junior’s trail of thoughts. The doctor appeared to usher the twins up a steep flight of stairs.
‘Doctor!’ cried Junior, astounded, ‘are you not going to ask me anything about what happened today?’
Dr. Willow creased his thick, dark brows, ‘do you want me to?’
‘Well, no but ... I thought’
‘Let me tell you what I think boy,’ said the doctor, ‘I think that you need to stay out of trouble. From the moment you stepped into Shorebridge, you’ve done nothing but–’
‘Doctor Willow!’ exclaimed Luchia, ‘do not tell me zat you really think ze boy knows anything about Mizter Williamson’s death!’
This was the first time the Roterbee twins had ever heard the housekeeper raise her voice to Dr. Willow. Their astonished expressions told that they were also impressed. Dr. Willow was briefly dumbfounded, but a second was all it took for him to recompose himself.
The doctor inhaled deeply and replied, ‘then how on earth did the boy find himself in Williamson’s secret chamber?’
‘Secret chamber?’ muttered Junior, his eyebrows creasing together dubiously. ‘Mrs. Quabble said nothing about a secret chamber… how did you know that?’
‘I’m sure she must’ve mentioned it,’ replied Dr. Willow, ‘yes…she said you and Miss Fling found the headmaster in his secret dorm.’
‘I’m pretty sure that’s not what
she said,’ snapped Charlotte, puzzled by the doctor’s distortion of Mrs. Quabble’s words. ‘I remember what she said exactly "If Miss Fling and Mr. Roterbee had not found Percy in his office, I would’ve thought he was still overseas" - that’s what Quabble said.’
‘Yez, if I remember correctly, she said nothing of a secret dorm,’ Luchia concurred.
Reddening to a luminous hue, Dr. Willow barked, ‘to your rooms, ALL OF YOU!’
Directly at Luchia, the doctor spewed, ‘including you!’
If one had not known better, it would’ve been the general assumption that the Willow Lodge was not inhabited by two temperamental teenagers but three, for the manner with which Luchia forcefully slammed the kitchen door demonstrated that she no longer amassed any fear of the doctor. The twin’s, impressed by Luchia’s feistiness, mimicked her. When they reached the second floor, Dr. Willow was affronted with two more boisterous, slamming doors.
‘Need to establish order in this house,’ the doctor mumbled, before disappearing into his study.
Chapter eight
‘The Oath of secrecy’
‘Strange.’
‘What’s strange?’
‘I had a feeling that this would happen,’ muttered Charlotte.
Junior creased his eyebrows incredulously, ‘Charley, I know you can somehow predict the weather, but no one is that good,’ he replied.
‘I could swear on it!’ exclaimed Charlotte. ‘Just like when dad died, I had a feeling that something bad was bound to happen today…poor Mr. Williamson.’
Shuddering as an image of the headmaster’s decrepit corpse reappeared in his thoughts, Junior muttered, ‘with all these strange disappearances, you’re not the only one feeling strange …even Luchia is on edge.’
‘I’ve never seen her so feisty before,’ sniggered Charlotte, ‘even Dr. Willow was stunned to silence.’
