More Horowitz Horror

by Anthony Horowitz

  Kate couldn’t bear it anymore. The hearing aid was screaming and buzzing in her ear. She opened her textbook and buried herself in it, hoping that if she concentrated enough on the words, she could make the voice go away.

  And it worked. Her head was still filled with interference but somewhere, in the distance, she could hear Mr. Spencer walking across the room—squeak, squeak, squeak. The sound of his new shoes was one thing that transmitted perfectly. Now he was talking to the rest of the class. “The conditional tense is formed by taking the infinitive, aimer, and adding . . .”

  Somehow she made it to the end of the lesson although it was the longest fifty minutes of her life. At last the bell went off, followed by the usual shuffling of books and slamming of desks.

  “I will see you tomorrow,” Mr. Spencer called out over the din. Then . . . “Kate! Can I have a word with you, please?”

  Kate stopped dead in her tracks. She glanced despairingly at Martin, who shrugged helplessly, already on his way out. For a moment she was tempted to run. But that was ridiculous. Where would she go? She forced herself not to panic. There was nothing Mr. Spencer could do. Not here, in school, in the middle of the day. She turned around slowly and looked at the teacher, who was sitting by his desk. The hearing aid crackled. She walked over to him. Suddenly there were only two of them in the room.

  “Is something the matter?” Mr. Spencer asked.

  “What do you know? How do you know? I killed Dina! Killed my wife! Stabbed her with a knife.”

  “Nothing’s the matter, sir,” Kate said. She had to concentrate. Listen to the first voice. Ignore the second.

  “You were behaving very strangely in my class.”

  “They can’t find the knife. I’ve got the knife.”

  “My hearing aid . . . it’s . . . it’s not working,” Kate said. She was begging him to stop. She didn’t want to know.

  “It’s in the spare locker.”

  “You should get it seen to,” Mr. Spencer said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “In the spare locker. In the spare locker. Nobody will look there. Nobody knows.”

  Mr. Spencer was staring at her now, as if he were trying to see inside her head. Kate forced herself to look ordinary, to pretend that nothing was happening. He was suspicious. She knew it. She had to make him trust her.

  “I was very sorry, sir,” she stammered. “I mean, we were all very sorry about what happened to Dina. I’m sure the police will find who did it. You must be very sad.”

  “I am very sad,” Mr. Spencer said. But then he frowned. “Why did you call her Dina?” he asked.

  The hearing aid was howling.

  “I thought that was her name,” Kate said.

  “Her name was Geraldine. I used to call her Dina, though. But I’ll tell you something very strange, Kate. I was the only person who called her that. And nobody else knew. It was a private name.”

  “I thought . . .”

  “What did you think, Kate? How did you know that name?”

  “I just thought it was her name, sir.”

  Mr. Spencer’s eyes went blank and for the first time the noise in Kate’s head stopped. He stood up and, despite herself, Kate took a step back. She was afraid of him. And he knew it. It was obvious.

  “Make sure you get your hearing aid seen to, Kate,” Mr. Spencer said. “We don’t want you missing any French.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right. You can go.”

  Relieved, she gathered up her things and walked over to the door, but just as she was about to leave, he called out to her.

  “Stop, Kate. There’s something I want to say.”

  “Yes, sir?” She stopped and turned around.

  And knew that he had tricked her.

  Mr. Spencer hadn’t said anything at all. He had thought it. As crazy as his suspicions had been, he had decided to put them to the test. And now he knew.

  Kate opened her mouth to speak but she could see the sudden flare of cruelty in those dark eyes and knew that Geraldine Spencer would have seen exactly the same before the knife sliced into her.

  She ran through the door and down the corridor, never once stopping to look behind.

  VIII.

  What could she do?

  She could go to Mr. Fellner. But she knew that the principal would never believe her. The main difference between adults and children isn’t that adults are older, bigger, smarter, or more experienced. It’s that they don’t believe. Adults always have to find explanations for everything and Kate knew that if she went to Mr. Fellner he would think she was either hysterical or crazy but he certainly wouldn’t believe her.

  She could go to her parents. But that wasn’t easy. Her father was at some bank in Zurich for three days. Her mother had gone to visit a new client in Edinburgh and wouldn’t be home until the weekend. That left Heidi but it would be a day’s work just to get the au pair to understand what she was saying, and even then Kate doubted there would be anything she could do.

  Could she telephone the police? No. The police were adults too. At best they would treat the telephone call as some cruel sort of hoax. The fact was that, apart from Martin, there was probably no one in the world who would believe her story of . . . telepathy or whatever it was. She still wasn’t sure that she believed it herself.

  “The trouble is, you’ve got no proof,” Martin said. During lunch she had told him what had happened and once again he had surprised her. He hadn’t questioned a word of what she had said. And once again he was right.

  “Proof?”

  “It’s your word against his. And if you go to the police talking about telepathy and that sort of thing, they’ll think you’re raving mad.”

  “I’m not the mad one!” Kate remembered the look in Mr. Spencer’s eyes and shivered.

  “What about the knife?”

  “What about it?” Kate didn’t even want to think about it.

  “You know where it is!”

  It was in the locker. That was what Mr. Spencer had said—or thought.

  Brierly Hall had been around for about a hundred and fifty years. Even in Victorian times it had been a school. Of course, most of it had been rebuilt more recently than that. The more successful the school had become, the more money it had attracted, and in the eighties and nineties they’d built the auditorium, the music wing, three new classrooms, and a heated swimming pool. But the core of the school was old. The central building (A Block) belonged to another century, with thick, tile-covered walls, bare wooden floors, arched windows, and—in the basement—a series of dusty rooms and passageways containing hot-water tanks, heating systems, and generators. The dining hall and the principal’s office were in A Block. So was the staff room. And on the other side of the staff room there was a row of wooden lockers, one for every teacher in the school.

  “It’s in the spare locker.”

  “I bet it’s got his fingerprints on it,” Martin said. “And bits of his wife’s blood . . .”

  “Shut up, Martin!” Kate didn’t want to hear this.

  But Martin went on, excited. “If you got the knife, they’d have to believe you. It wouldn’t even matter how you found it. Didn’t you read what the police said? They said it was a vital clue.”

  “Yes! But how am I supposed to get it?” Kate asked miserably. “The lockers are next to the staff room and we’re not allowed anywhere near them.”

  “You could sneak in . . .”

  “With everyone there?”

  “You could do it after school.”

  “When?”

  “Today! I’ll help you. We could do it together.”

  “But if Mr. Spencer knows that I know about the knife . . .”

  “He won’t know!” Martin said. “I mean, you only know because you heard him thinking about it. But how could he know that he was thinking about it just then? If you get the knife, then you’ve got the proof. And if you’ve got the proof, you can go to the police . . .”

  �
�I’m not sure.” Kate sighed. “What happens if someone sees us? And it’ll be dark . . .”

  “It’ll only take us two minutes.” Martin smiled and Kate saw that to him this was just some crazy adventure, something to boast about afterward. It was different for her. She had been inside Mr. Spencer’s head. She knew what was there.

  “You promise you’ll stay with me?” Kate said.

  “I promise!”

  “OK.” There were games that afternoon and naturally the two of them were on different teams. “I’ll meet you over by the toilets. At a quarter to four.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  IX.

  He wasn’t there, of course. It should have been easy. But everything went wrong.

  Later that day, Kate found herself watching the last of the children pour out of the school and into the waiting cars. After lunch, she had telephoned Heidi and told her that she was going to be late. Heidi had agreed to come at four-thirty. “Halb funf.” Kate had translated it to be sure. She looked at her watch. It was already ten to four. But there was no sign of Martin.

  There was a movement close by and she saw another of the boys, Sam Twivey, hurrying past, late as usual. She called out to him. “Sam?”

  The other boy saw her and stopped.

  “Have you seen Martin?”

  “Didn’t you hear? He got hurt playing football.”

  “What?”

  “Someone kicked him in the . . . you-know-where. He got carried off. His mom came for him and he went home.”

  The boy looked away into the gloom. “My dad’s here. I’ve got to go . . .”

  So she was on her own.

  The sensible thing, of course, would have been to have gone. To have left the school and gone home. It was dark and there were a few wisps of fog in the air, hanging across the road, a screen that cut her off from the world outside Brierly Hall. As far as she could tell, all the teachers had left. She was completely on her own. Heidi wouldn’t be here for another twenty-five minutes. It was cold. She would be better off waiting inside . . . that was what she told herself. But even as she turned around and walked back into A Block, she knew what she was going to do. She had to find the knife.

  She simply couldn’t take any more. Waiting for French class, wondering what she was going to hear. She wanted the whole thing to be over with, and with or without Martin, she was going to do it now. Find the knife. Take it to the police. Tell them her story. Whether they believed her or not, they would have the evidence in front of them. They would have to act.

  It was strange, walking through the school on her own. Normally the corridors would be full of movement and color, children hurtling from class to class, doors swinging open and shut. Empty, everything was different. The ceilings felt higher. The corridors felt longer. The photographs of teachers and old boys on the walls were suddenly ghostlike and Kate shivered. Many of these pictures had been taken decades ago. Many of the black-and-white faces watching her as she tiptoed back toward the staff room would indeed belong to the dead.

  She reached a set of swinging doors. The emptiness had made them bigger and heavier and she felt she was using all her strength to open them. It was as if they didn’t want her to pass through. Something moved. She stopped and twisted around, expecting to see someone behind her, but there was nobody in the corridor. Just shadows creeping in on her from all sides.

  This was stupid. This was a mistake. But it was too late. She was almost there. She might as well get it over with.

  She opened the door of the staff room. Children were never allowed in here, not at any time, and Kate felt a twinge of guilt as she crossed the threshold and went in. The room was so shabby and untidy. Half the armchairs were worn out (a bit like some of the people who sat in them, she thought). She could smell cigarette smoke even though the principal was always lecturing them about the dangers of smoking. It was like going backstage during a magic show. Or peeking into the kitchen of a classy restaurant. This was a side of the school that Kate wasn’t meant to see.

  She went through as quickly as she could. The passage with the lockers was on the other side. It connected the staff room with another exit that was only used during fire drills. That was how Kate knew where the lockers were. She wished now that she had thought to bring a flashlight. There were only two windows and they were high up. The fog, pale and white, nuzzled against the glass. Little light came in.

  Eighteen lockers, gnarled and wooden, stood shoulder to shoulder along one wall. Fourteen of them were in use. Each of these had a rectangle of white cardboard with a name written in black letters: ELLIS, THOMPSON, STANDRING, PRIESTMAN . . . Padlocks of different shapes and sizes, some with keys, some with combinations, fastened the doors. The four lockers at the very end of the corridor were unmarked. One of them had a broken hinge and a door hanging off at an angle. Spare lockers. This was what Mr. Spencer had been thinking about. This was where he had hidden the knife.

  The first locker was empty. The second, the one with the broken door, contained a pile of moldy books. Kate opened the third locker and jerked back as a spider, brown and hairy, scurried out and across the floor. That just left one locker, the farthest one away. She reached out for the door and pulled it open. There was a bundle of what looked like old clothes thrown into the corner. Was there something wrapped inside? She reached in.

  Her hearing aid exploded into life inside her ear.

  A hand touched her shoulder.

  “Are you looking for this?” Mr. Spencer said.

  Kate jerked around and fell back against the wall, shock and disbelief coursing through her. The French teacher was hovering over her, his eyes glistening in the dim evening light, his lips drawn back. There was a kitchen knife in his hand.

  “I wondered if you’d come,” he whispered. “I couldn’t be sure. In the classroom. But somehow I knew you’d found out. You knew about the knife! How did you do it, Kate? Can you read my mind?”

  “I have to kill her . . .”

  “Do you know what I’m thinking now?”

  Kate tried to speak but the words wouldn’t come. She couldn’t move. Sheer terror had swept away all her strength. She forced herself to take a breath. “You killed your wife . . .”

  Mr. Spencer nodded. He was sweating. She could see globs of perspiration on his forehead. A trickle of sweat snaked down the side of his face. When he spoke, his voice was low, the words tumbling out one after another. “Yes. I killed her. You’re just a child. You don’t understand. That woman! Always nagging me. I was never good enough for her. She never left me alone. Seventeen years of it! No children. No love. She enjoyed being cruel to me. But I couldn’t divorce her. It was her house. Her money. She’d have taken everything. And every day, she went on and on and on at me. I hated her. And in the end I couldn’t bear it anymore . . .”

  “I have to kill her. She mustn’t tell . . .”

  Kate could hear what he was thinking. The words were as clear as the ones he was speaking. She had to distract him. Play for time. Keep him talking. Someone would come . . .

  “Why did you hide the knife here?” she asked.

  “I had to put it somewhere! The murder weapon. They’re clever . . . the police. They’d know it was mine. I couldn’t dump it. It would be found. So I hid it. Not in my locker. They looked there. I knew they would.” He smiled. Saliva was flecking his lips, hanging in the tangle of his beard. “But in the old locker. Under those clothes. Nobody thought of that.”

  “Except you. Did you read my mind? Are you reading my mind now?”

  “You can’t do anything to me,” Kate began.

  “Yes, I can.”

  “I told lots of people about you. My mom and dad . . .”

  “She’s lying.”

  “If you hurt me, people will know . . .”

  And then Kate saw it. Not words this time. Pictures. The horrible pictures that were inside Mr. Spencer’s head. The knife stabbing forward. Going into her. He was going to kill her because he ha
d decided he had no choice. She would disappear and maybe he would get away with it. What did it matter anyway? He was already a murderer. One more death would make no difference.

  She saw his thoughts. She saw him draw back the knife a second before he actually did it. And that was what saved her. She screamed and threw herself forward, into him. He was caught off balance. Half a second later and the knife would have been swinging toward her, but she had been that half second ahead of him. Somehow Kate managed to scramble to her feet and then she was off, back down the corridor and into the staff room, knowing that Mr. Spencer was only inches behind.

  “Come back! Kill her! Little brat! Die!”

  The words shuddered through her hearing aid and into her skull. Static howled and hissed. Blind with panic, Kate stumbled through the empty staff room, crashing into a table and almost losing her balance. Her hand flailed out and caught hold of an upright lamp, standing near the door. She jerked and pulled it down behind her. The lamp hit Mr. Spencer, the wire tangling around his feet. She heard him cry out and fall. And then she had reached the door. She slammed it behind her, wishing it had a key that she could turn. Without stopping to breathe, she headed off down the corridor, hurtling into the darkness of the deserted school.

  She had gone the wrong way. She felt the wind on the back of her neck as the door crashed open behind her and knew that she should have headed back toward the exit and out into the street. Ahead of her was the dining room, the secretary’s office, stairs going up to classrooms and down to the basement. Which way now? She threw open the door of the dining room. Long rows of empty tables stretched down with the hatchways into the kitchen beyond them. No. Not that way. She’d be trapped. She left the door open, thinking she could fool Mr. Spencer into thinking she’d gone in. Instead she took the stairs. Up or down? Down was faster. But that was a mistake too. The stairs led to the basement. Another dead end.

  “Where is she? Where is she? Where is she?”

  She could only just hear what he was thinking. He had slowed down. He must still be in the upstairs corridor.

  “In here . . . ?”