“You must be here about the custodial position.”
Matt turned to find a woman standing beside him, watching him with a welcoming smile on her face. She was good-looking, he decided, though in a severe-kind of way. Her corn silk-colored hair was bound up atop her head, accenting the sharpness of her cheekbones and her piercing blue eyes, and she was tall enough to look him in the face without straining. She was dressed conservatively, in a white blouse buttoned high on her neck under a suit of charcoal grey, both of which accented her shapely figure in all the right places. Her high heels only added to the look.
For a moment he was caught flat-footed, having no idea what she was talking about. Then his eye caught the headline of a flyer on the bulletin board.
Part-time Custodian Wanted
Regular Hours – Good Pay
It seemed fate was giving him the very opportunity he’d been looking for just moment before.
Why not? he thought. It would get him on the inside and possibly put him in a position to do something to thwart Mr. Dark’s plans when the time came.
He smiled and put out his hand. “Matt Cahill.”
“Julie Stevens, Acting Principal.”
The phrasing struck Matt as odd. “Acting?”
Julie smiled, but there was nothing warm or inviting in it. “Mr. Denton, our regular principal, was involved in an accident and had to take the rest of the year off.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yes, we all were,” she replied, but from her tone Matt suspected she wasn’t sorry at all. “Why don’t you come into my office and we’ll see if you’ll be a good fit for the position.”
Within five minutes it was clear to Matt that Stevens didn’t care whether he was a good fit or not. All she wanted to do was fill the position as quickly as possible. His previous experience, or lack thereof, was pretty much irrelevant. She gave him a bunch of forms to fill out for payroll purposes which he fudged his way through, leaving some of the answer, such as last known address and personal references, purposefully blank.
Stevens explained that it would be a temporary position; their usual janitor, Hal Williams, was out with a back injury and would be off work for two months. They had been very happy with his work at Harpers Bay Academy over the last ten years and didn’t want to replace him. They just needed someone to fill in until his recovery was complete.
“Since the custodian is on call twenty-four seven to help with emergencies, the school provides a furnished apartment. We would prefer that you live there while you are employed with us. We’ve had Mr. Williams’ possessions boxed up and put in storage for the time being. Is that going to be a problem for you, Mr. Cahill?”
“Not at all,” Matt replied.
In fact, it answered the question of where he was going to sleep tonight and for that he was grateful. The town didn’t seem big enough to have a hotel and while he was no stranger to sleeping under the stars, this late in the season it was getting damned cold at night and he rather avoid that option if at all possible. The apartment covered that need nicely.
Matt was hoping that all of this would be resolved in just a few days and he could move on, continuing his search for answers. He figured he had a week, at best, before the false social security number he’d put down on the form got spit out as invalid by the system.
Stevens dug around in her desk and produced a big ring of keys. Handing them to him, she said, “Welcome aboard. Come on; I’ll show you to your apartment and then we can visit the rest of the ground. You can get settled tonight and start first thing in the morning.”
And just like that, Matt Cahill became the head of the custodial staff at the Harpers Bay Academy for Academic Excellence.
Julia led him outside to where an electric cart was parked at a charging station on the side of the building. “This will be your vehicle for use while you’re working. I’ll take you around, show you the campus, and then you can just drop me back off at the office. How does that sound?”
He told her it sounded just fine.
The apartment turned out to be a one-room bungalow with a tiny kitchenette and a view of the large brick building next door that Stevens identified as Facilities Maintenance. She took him inside the latter, showed him his office, the supply locker, and the maintenance/repair bay where the more extensive repairs were carried out. Ever the dutiful administrator, she showed him where the radios were kept and got him outfitted with one so that the staff would have means of reaching him.
After that they continued on the tour of the campus, with Stevens driving and pointing out various landmarks as they went. The property was arranged like a giant, four-leaf clover, with each “leaf” containing a set of dorms and classroom buildings. At the center of the clover were the common areas, like the administration building, the student center, and the cafeteria.
“We have twelve-hundred students here,” Stevens told him, “split almost evenly between four grades, ninth through twelfth. Eight hundred of those live on campus year-round; the rest commute from as far away as Chicago on a daily basis. Two hundred and seven faculty members are employed here, including teachers and general staff.”
She glanced over at him. “Two hundred and eight now, I guess,” she said with a laugh.
Matt smiled politely.
“We have one hundred and nine classrooms, twenty-four separate laboratories, a language lab, a state-of-the-art theatre complex, and even a five-acre arboretum.”
“Impressive.”
“Within the last year we’ve built a brand new sports complex with facilities for thirty different sports, including two swimming pools, a diving pool, a hockey rink, eight squash courts, two basketball courts, three dance studios, a fitness center and wrestling room, ten tennis courts, a baseball field, a boathouse for the crew team, both an indoor and an outdoor track, and of course the appropriate locker rooms and facilities to support it all.”
Another large building came into view on their left and Stevens pointed toward it. “Over there is the campus library with more than 120,000 volumes on its shelves and access to millions more through our various electronic databases. You’ll be responsible for...”
So it went. It took them about forty-five minutes to make their way around the entire campus and return again to the main office. Matt’s head was spinning; it had been a lot of information to take in at one time, but he was confident he could handle it.
It was just for a few days. Long enough to smoke out what Mr. Dark was up to and put an end to it as fast as possible.
CHAPTER FOUR
Given the urgency he’d felt after the subway incident, the next few days proved to be anti-climatic. Matt threw himself into his new job, cleaning toilets, washing windows, sweeping hallways, doing all the little things that were necessary to keep an operation of this size running, never mind running smoothly. The blue jumpsuit he was required to wear on duty made him practically invisible to the teenagers around him. The janitor? Totally not cool – but, more importantly, when combined with the maintenance keys he carried for every building on campus, it allowed him to go pretty much anywhere he wanted without interference.
After a bit of trial and error he managed to get the general layout of the campus memorized. That made it easier for him to respond to the various calls for repair or clean up throughout the day with a minimum of stress or delay. By the time school let out on Friday, Matt had settled in to life on campus.
Saturday and most of Sunday were spent doing odd jobs here and there while using the time in between to drive around in the electric cart and keep an eye on the kids.
Like every high school in America, this one had divided itself into class lines that were as specific and impenetrable as the caste system in colonial India. Matt very quickly saw that the jocks hung with the jocks, the geeks with the geeks, and so on. Heaven forbid there be any interaction between the groups, either. So much had changed since he was in school and yet so much had stayed the same; he didn’t envy any o
f them. There were tough years ahead, there was no doubt about that, especially if Mr. Dark had his way with them.
And yet, in more than seventy hours, Matt had seen no sign of his mysterious enemy and he had to admit that he was starting to get worried. He’d been here for close to three days now and hadn’t seen or heard anything to make him suspicious. No festering sores, no decaying flesh. The kids were full of attitude and braggadocio, using both in equal measure to cover a host of anxieties and insecurities as they tried to figure out just who they were and what they were going to do with their lives. In other words, your typical teenagers. Nowhere had Matt seen the hand of Mr. Dark at work.
He was starting to wonder if he had guessed wrong. There were two other public high schools in Harpers Bay; perhaps it was one of those? He’d been watching the news every night on the little black & white television he’d found in the custodian’s office, but he hadn’t seen anything that might indicate trouble brewing elsewhere. That should have been reassuring, but it wasn’t. Matt knew how Mr. Dark operated. Everything might look perfectly normal on the outside, but a person could be rotting away on the inside and no one would know it until it was too late.
The one thing that Matt had going for him was his ability to see that rot as it manifested on a person; to see the evil lurking inside before it revealed itself full bore to the rest of the world. But even that seemed to be failing him. He’d been watching the students and the staff very carefully, looking for signs that Mr. Dark had his claws in them, but so far hadn’t seen anything that alarmed him or even raised his suspicions. It was extremely frustrating.
He did as much student-watching as he could without looking suspicious. Or like some middle-aged pervert, he thought. A call came in from a teacher in the mathematics department with a backed-up toilet, so he had to deal with that. That call led to another, which in turn led to a third and before he knew Matt had spent most of the morning caught up in one task or another.
The weatherman had been predicting rain all weekend and it finally arrived Sunday afternoon. To Matt’s surprise, the gentle rainfall that had been forecast soon turned into a thunderstorm of fearsome proportions. All afternoon the skies had been growing darker and the few folks who were out and about on campus quickly found other places to be.
The rain started around one and by three that afternoon it was a torrential downpour, coming down so hard that Matt would almost swear he could hear it slapping the ground when it hit. Having retreated to the maintenance office when the weather had first turned sour, he stood looking out the front window, cup of instant coffee in his hands, watching the storm. The sky, what he could see of it through the rain at least, was an angry black, the storm clouds churning wildly in the high winds. Anything that wasn’t secured down was picked up and tossed about the school grounds. Matt watched a lawn chair and a bulletin board go tumbling past and that was just in the few minutes that he’d been standing at the window. He suspected there would be a lot more of that kind of thing before the night was through.
He leaned closer to the window glass in order to see the area to the left of the building and watched the trees swaying in the wind.
They looked like they would hold for now, but if the storm got any worse...
He turned away, walked through the office, and out into the repair bay. He’d found an old Yamaha 750 under a tarp buried at the back of the room earlier that afternoon and with the weather being so miserable, he figured he’d spend some time and see if he could get it up and running.
Even if the storm didn’t get worse, he thought as he pulled out his tools and got to work, there was still going to be a hell of a mess to clean up in the morning. He was all too well acquainted with the unlucky bastard who was going to have to do it.
* * *
The watchers stood in the downpour outside, staring in through the maintenance bay windows with unblinking eyes. They were as oblivious to the freezing rain and they were to the repeated clashes of thunder that shook the night sky; nor did they notice when a slash of lightning split a tree less than a dozen yards away.
They stood there in the midst of the storm, oblivious to Nature’s fury around them, and stared at Matt Cahill.
CHAPTER FIVE
Early the following morning, Matt took the cart out and drove around campus, surveying the damage. To his surprise, it wasn’t too serious. There was debris everywhere, of course - broken branches were in abundance, as were uprooted bushes and scattered piles of assorted junk – but aside from a few cracked windows and the odd sign that had been carried halfway across campus, that was the worst of it. A decent-sized tree had come down in the vicinity of the library, but it had managed to miss the building, thank goodness. A few hours with his axe and a decent chainsaw was all it would take him to clear it away.
No time like the present, I guess, he thought, parking the cart and getting his gear out of the back.
Matt started with the stump itself, cutting the rest of the tree completely free and giving him a natural chopping block as a result of his efforts. Grabbing a chain saw out of the back of the cart, he cut the major branches clear of the trunk and then cut the trunk into sections roughly two feet in length. At that point he was ready to start chopping and he set to it with a grin.
Chopping wood was more ritual than exercise for him at this point in his life. Sure, it loosened his muscles up and got his blood pumping, but it was also his way of getting right with the world, of aligning himself spiritually and emotionally with everything around him until it was all moving together in harmony like a well-oiled machine.
He grabbed one of the trunk sections, put it upright on the tree stump, and with one swing of his grandfather’s axe split the wood in two. He repeated the process with each of the two new sections, until he had cut the wood into four, decent-sized fireplace logs. He threw them into a pile and moved onto the next piece of wood. He kept it up for almost two hours, which wasn’t an uncommon exercise for him and one reason he had a physique born of physical labor - a lived-in look, it had once been called.
He was deep into the task when he felt a pair of eyes on him, eyes that didn’t feel friendly. The hair on the back of his neck was standing on end as he hefted the axe over his shoulder and turned to see who was there.
The library sat at the base of a long, sloping hill that acted as a natural divider between this group of buildings and the dorms and classrooms on the other side. The two areas were connected by a paved pathway that angled up the hill and along the crest before heading down the opposite slope.
Matt saw that an electric cart was parked on the crest of the hill and someone was standing beside it, looking in his direction. The distance was great enough that he couldn’t be sure who it was, but something about the way the individual stood made him think it might be Principal Stevens.
Checking up on the new guy, Matt thought, as he waved in her direction.
She didn’t wave back.
He frowned, then shrugged it off. Stevens hadn’t struck him as the waving type anyway.
No sense in letting it bother him.
But that sense of being watched continued even after the watcher drove off, leaving Matt feeling uneasy for most of the morning.
* * *
It took him most of the morning to finish cutting the wood into manageable pieces and get it stacked neatly for later removal. He was taking a break, leaning against the side of the electric cart and staring off into the woods nearby when he noticed something peculiar.
There was a gap where several large branches had been knocked down by the storm and the newly-made gap in the tree line revealed the roof of a building he hadn’t noticed before. The rest of the structure was tucked away deep among the trees, all but invisible from the paved walkway, and if he hadn’t been looking directly at it he probably would have missed it.
Curious, he climbed in the cart and drove across the lawn to the edge of the woods. He grabbed his flashlight out of the toolbox in the back of the cart in c
ase the building didn’t have electricity and began moving back and forth along the edge of the woods, looking for a path.
He’d only gone a few yards when he found one, half-hidden in the undergrowth. The paving had been torn up at some point in the past, but the vegetation was only just now coming back and it made the path easy to follow. A few minutes later he was standing right in front of the mysterious structure.
Which wasn’t so mysterious once he was up close. Faded letters above the double doors read Susan B. Thompson Aquatics Center. He remembered Stevens saying something about the new sports center that had recently been built; this was probably one of the buildings it was designed to replace.
A thick chain was threaded through the door handles at some point in the past, but now it lay discarded beside the door with the lock that had once secured it a few inches away.
One of the doors was slightly ajar.
Matt frowned. Clearly someone had been inside, but the question was how recently and were they still in there?
Only one way to find out.
The door creaked as he pulled on it, but it opened without too much resistance. The smell of mildew and rot and air that had been trapped too long in a confined space that came wafting out of the depths of the building nearly made him gag, but he stifled the reflex and stepped through the doorway.
Matt flicked on the flashlight and shined it around.
The place looked like any other high school gymnasium he’d seen over the years; a wide lobby with trophy cases lining the walls and banners hanging from the ceiling. There was nothing in these trophy cases by cobwebs and dust, and the banners, those few that remained, had long since started to rot in the humid air.
The entrances to the locker rooms loomed a short distance ahead of him, the girls’ on the left and the boys’ on the right. He took a few steps into the boy’s locker room, playing the beam of the flashlight over the benches and empty racks where the metal lockers had once hung.
The Dead Man: Eater of Souls (Kindle Worlds Novella) Page 2
