Gated

by Matt Drabble

  For the fourth time in the last ten minutes, she checked the corridor to make sure that she was alone. She felt a deep instinct to keep the diary hidden; whatever lay inside the scribbled pages were for her eyes only. Once she was sure that she was unobserved, she opened the book and continued reading. Jessica was becoming more paranoid and Emily was uncomfortable at the similarities that she began to see in herself.

  THURSDAY 6th – Thirlby is all over me at the minute; every time that I turn around she’s there, creepy-ass woman! School is becoming a real drag, just so damned tired all the time. Matty keeps nagging at me to go back to the doctors, but Dr Lempke seems as weird as the rest of them. You can’t swing a cat for hitting some concerned neighbor; need a holiday!!!

  MONDAY 10th – Casper came to the house today, spoke to Matty for what seemed like ages, took him aside so that I couldn’t hear. Matty said that it was nothing, but he seemed strange afterwards, wouldn’t talk about it.

  FRIDAY 14th – Had a long talk with SJ today after school was out today; don’t know what I would do without her, she’s my rock. Feel like I can tell her anything and she won’t think I’m nuts!

  Emily checked and reread. Sarah-Jane had told her that she did not know Jessica very well at all and yet Jessica was calling her “her rock”. A little troubled, she read on.

  SJ told me to be wary of Thirlby. I pressed her for details, but she just seemed scared of our boss. For one second, I thought that she was going to tell me, but then Thirlby appeared like magic and SJ looked terrified. I always thought that Thirlby was a little creepy, but she scares the life out of poor SJ. What is it with this damned “Woodland Festival” anyway? Everyone is going nuts over it.

  TUESDAY 18th – Matty dragged me to Dr Lempke this morning. I hate that guy - he’s always poking and prodding, doesn’t seem to care about me at all, and he’s only ever interested in the baby. I’m starting to feel like a delivery truck where everyone only wants the package inside. Matty thinks I’m paranoid.

  THURSDAY 21st – Darnell, the handyman, kept looking at me strangely today when he came by to clear some hornet nests out of the garage. I’m a little over three months along now and showing; the freak kept staring at my bump the whole time.

  MONDAY 24th – I AM NOT GOING CRAZY. Matty keeps telling me to go back to Dr Lempke, but I’m not letting them pump me full of anything else; the pills that he keeps giving me make me feel just tired and foggy all the time. He says that they’re only vitamins, but I don’t believe him. I don’t believe anyone at the minute.

  SUNDAY 30th – SJ came by today. She said that she’s worried, but I could see it in her eyes - she’s one of them now, or maybe she always was; the whole town must be in on it. I told Matty that I’m leaving, with or without him. I have to get my baby away from here.

  TUESDAY 2nd – It’s Thirlby, I just know it. I caught her snooping around my bag at school. I’m sure that I’ve seen her following me around town; can’t think straight sometimes, but I’m sure that I keep seeing her face around town.

  WEDNESDAY 3rd – They want my baby, they want my child, I can feel them waiting, and I can feel their eyes everywhere. They’re all in it together. I can hear them whispering as I walk past. Matt wants to have me committed. I fear they’ve got him too. I fear they’ve got everyone. They dragged me out of the school today when I started freaking out. I know that Thirlby has something to do with all of this. I’ll get that bitch!!!

  SATURDAY 7th – I can’t stay awake. Someone must have slipped me something. My head doesn’t work too well … can’t think straight … sleep, now. Sleep.

  Emily struggled to understand the writing as it slurred and scribbled incoherently as Jessica’s mind wandered.

  SUNDAY 8th – Got To leave today, got to go now, got to escape, everyone will be at the Woodland Festival tonight, the whole town should be there, got to take this chance, it might be my only one.

  The writing ended suddenly. Emily swiftly looked up from the book; she could feel her space being invaded and she spun around quickly from the sofa and looked up into the face of Sarah-Jane.

  “What’s that you’re reading?” SJ asked a little too casually, her eyes narrow and watchful.

  Emily’s first thought was to hide the diary and deny its existence. A stab of fear shot through her guts at Sarah-Jane’s interest. She quickly scolded herself. This wasn’t Thirlby - this was her friend.

  “Can I ask you something, SJ?” she said gently.

  “Sure,” Sarah-Jane smiled.

  “How well did you know Jessica Grady?”

  “I told you,” Sarah-Jane said, avoiding her gaze, “I didn’t know her really at all.”

  Emily passed her the diary and watched as Sarah-Jane’s face fell and darkened with desperate unhappiness. SJ scanned through the pages quickly.

  “Oh,” she said sadly.

  “Well?” Emily asked.

  “Jess was a deeply troubled woman, Em.” Sarah-Jane’s words were slow and awkward; her normally pleasant and cheerful face was creased with concern. “After she got pregnant, she started going a bit…, a bit strange.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “She started getting paranoid. She was convinced that the whole town was staring at her. She thought that everyone was talking about her; it was downright weird. Did you ever see the Truman Show movie with Jim Carey?”

  “The one where he lives on a reality show, only he’s the only one who doesn’t know it?”

  “Yeah. She started to think that the whole town revolved around her. Like we were all standing and waiting for her to walk past before we’d move. It started to get pretty scary. She freaked here at school one day. She thought that the kids were all robots with cameras for eyes. Mrs. Thirlby had to call the sheriff in and Jess was taken to the hospital, kicking and screaming. The poor kids were terrified.”

  “Who’s Dr Lempke?”

  “He was the doc here before Samuel.” At the mention of Dr Creed’s name, Sarah-Jane’s cheeks flushed a little in a way that Emily found endearing. “I think that Dr Lempke retired somewhere out near Maine. I think that he had a daughter out there.”

  “What about in the diary when Jessica says that you warned her about Thirlby? What did you mean?”

  SJ leant in closer and lowered her voice, “Nothing sinister. Only that Mrs. Thirlby could be a bit of a cow sometimes, and Jess was starting to come into work later and later. I was worried that she might get fired.”

  Emily leant back into the sofa and processed the information; the impression that she got from the diary was of an increasingly disturbed woman. She was also concerned at her own somewhat paranoid feelings only this morning when travelling into work. On top of that, she was also starting to feel that everyone was watching her in the same way that Jessica described. What did that mean? Was it a common side effect of pregnancy? Was there something in the water in Eden? Or had Jessica had genuine cause for concern? She suddenly realised that it had been an age since she had spoken and Sarah-Jane was staring at her with growing worry etched on her face.

  “Emily,” SJ asked softly, “are you okay?”

  “Do you mean am I seeing my students replaced by camera-eyed robots?” She had meant to speak lightly and with humor but she didn’t feel that anything was funny here. “Don’t worry, SJ, I’m fine; just a little tired.”

  “Maybe you should take it a little easier. I’m guessing being pregnant can’t be easy.”

  “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Emily!” Sarah-Jane said, shocked but smiling shyly.

  “Oh come on, Sarah-Jane. You and the good doctor will be married before you know it,” Emily teased. “And you’ll be squeezing out a classroom full of your own students before long.”

  Sarah-Jane turned embarrassedly and walked back towards her classroom, slowly gathering the children returning after lunch. “You’re terrible,” she said to Emily as she walked, her face alight with the thought.

  Emily stuffed the diary de
ep into her shoulder bag and hefted it onto her shoulder as she walked slowly back to her own classroom. She stepped into the hallway outside the lounge and moved along the gloomy corridor. Suddenly, she felt eyes upon her at the far end. Silhouetted in the shadows was the unmistakable form of Mrs. Thirlby. Emily shuddered under the distant gaze of the headmistress. Her obscured features made her all the more intimidating. Emily had to walk several feet towards Thirlby and she positively ran the last few paces towards her classroom and the noise within. She wrenched the door open and jumped gratefully into the sunny room.

  ----------

  The clock crawled by slowly; the hands almost seemed to move backwards at times, dragging the day interminably. Thom stared wistfully out of the window. The sun was bright and warm and the day was passing him by.

  Eden High School was home to the town's teens aged between 14 and 18 and it was the sister school to the elementary school that was across town. The classroom held fifteen students; it was the limit in Eden, and it also meant that there were never any hiding places. Back in LA, Thom had been able to drift to the back of the class and fly under the radar. The teachers at his old school had only seemed pleased to get out of the building unscathed at the end of the day; education had come a distant second to self-preservation. Here in Eden, however, it appeared to be deemed necessary for the educators to actually educate. Thom was an intelligent young man; he knew that he picked up subjects quickly and easily, and he had always performed on standardized tests with distinction. His attention problems seemed to derive from boredom. He could pick up the basics of any subject in a flash, but once his brain grasped the subject then it would switch off and search for the next injection.

  “Mr. Bray?”

  Thom looked up in surprise, caught in his wanderings. Mr. Stark, his biology teacher, was staring at him, awaiting a response. Thom had to actually stop and think in order to place the teacher and the subject.

  “Sorry, sir?” was the only response that he could muster.

  “Have you been listening at all, Mr. Bray?” The tone was more than a little condescending.

  “Of course, Mr. Stark,” Thom smiled.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?” Thom asked politely.

  Mr. Stark crossed his arms across his narrow chest; he was around fifty years old, balding, with a retreating hairline that had long since abandoned the front lines. He wore a peppered white goatee and small round glasses. Stark favoured a wardrobe that had long since witnessed better days, consisting of several brown and tan checked jackets, and grey slacks. He was the sort of teacher that Thom’s previous school would have eaten alive. But this was not LA - this was Eden.

  Thom glanced around the class at his colleagues; none were his friends. Since the move, he had been unable to really connect with any of the other students in school. His tastes and interests just didn’t seem to mesh with anyone else’s. Where he had a voracious appetite for horror and metal, his fellow classmates seemed pasty-faced replicated teenagers. The school didn’t actively dissuade him from his tastes; no one had ever dragged him aside to chastise him for his proclivities, and he was just simply left on the outside of all circles. In his experience of life and movies, most schools had their various cliques and gangs, nerds, brains, jocks, Goths etc. But here, everyone seemed content and happy. There were no divisions of race or color, no segregation of the popular and the not so popular. There seemed no in-house competition, as though Eden was all one team and they were all team players. In theory, it would seem an ideal environment and Thom certainly did not miss the constant violent threat that his old school had possessed. But in reality it was just simply dull.

  “The question was, what is cell theory?”

  “Oh right.” Thom processed quickly and effortlessly. “Cell theory asserts that the cell is the constituent unit of living beings. Before the discovery of the cell, it was not recognised that living beings were made of building blocks like cells. The cell theory is one of the basic theories of biology,” he recited, as he watched the clock tick closer to 3pm.

  “Very good, Mr. Bray.” Mr. Stark sounded as though he was struggling to gain the upper hand again. “You see what happens when you listen to me in class?” he announced. “Even Mr. Bray here can learn a thing or two.”

  Thom’s smart mouth had often been his downfall but the school bell rang loudly saving him from himself for once. The class trooped out in its usual slow and considerate fashion . Not for the first time, Thom thought of tripping up a classmate, or slapping the teacher just to get a real emotion even if it was anger. On the occasions that he had bumped into students in the halls - regardless of the fact that he was the accidental aggressor - he was always apologized to. He had been scared taking the keys from his mother’s office, and then fearful sneaking around the suicide woman’s house. He had been terrified when he’d pushed open the bathroom door, only to then be painfully accosted by the giant sheriff. As frightened as he’d been, at least it was a real emotion; his heart had pounded violently against his chest, but it was real. Since the move here, there had been a dearth of reality in his world; his mother floated through the day with a smile tattooed onto her face as did most of the town it would seem. The sky was always blue and the sun always shone brightly. The only other person he had met that seemed real to him was the writer. He had spent the previous afternoon at Michael’s house and they had talked about books and movies all within the horror genre. Michael’s knowledge had been vastly superior to his own and he had gone away with a mountain of research to pursue. For an old guy, Michael was alright; his taste in music and horror reminded Thom enormously of his absent father. He did, of course, recognise this fact and was aware of his own need for a figure to fill that void.

  Thom moved along the hallway slowly. He didn’t have anywhere in particular to go this afternoon. Michael had told him to call by anytime but he felt that he didn’t want to outstay his welcome already. The hallway was by now deserted; the long rows of metallic lockers were all clean and graffiti free. The floor squeaked and sparkled as his lonely footsteps echoed off the abandoned walls. Thom always carried a small notebook in his backpack; he used the book to jot down his own story ideas. His imagination often ran at dizzying speeds and without a notebook, most would be lost to the ether. The dark hallway began the churning of tales within his mind as the gloom closed in around him and he felt the telltale increase of his heart rate as he delved into the recesses. He started to see long slithering tentacles sliding their way around the lockers, the metal boxes buckling under the power of the deep. Great suckers opened and closed hungrily with rows of flesh-shredding razor teeth. The monstrous arms snaked their way ever closer to his juicy bones. The school was empty and no one would hear him scream in the dark. But the tentacles were only arms; somewhere hidden in the blackness was the body, a cavernous devouring monster that would send mortals into madness with only a glance at its hideous form.

  Thom scribbled furiously, catching the prose before it fluttered away from his mind on distant wings. He could hear the wet slithers and he could feel the cold reptilian skin as it brushed his own. He could feel all of this as he wrote until sweating hands grabbed him for real and he screamed.

  “Watch where you’re going, boy!”

  Thom was jerked back into the here and now; the darkened corners of his imagination retreated reluctantly. He was standing face to face with a rather disappointing monster - his biology teacher.

  “Sorry, Mr. Stark,” he muttered.

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it, Mr. Bray; look at the mess you’ve made.”

  Thom followed Stark’s pointing to the spreading brown stain on the front of his pants. The teacher had been carrying a large mug of coffee that was now half emptied in the most inconvenient of locations.

  “Come with me, Bray.”

  Thom noted the drop in Stark’s angry tone; the biology teacher now had hold of his shoulder and was dragging him in his wake towards the teachers’ lounge.


  Stark barged open the door and pulled him inside; Thom was immediately struck by the lack of offending odors. Back in his old school, the teachers’ lounge had been a place of refuge, stale coffee and sweat, and the aroma of fear hung on the air whenever the door was cracked open and the sour waft ventured into the hallways. This lounge, however, looked like a plush apartment. There were several long and deep sofas, reclining armchairs, and large bookcases with both reference and fiction books. There were also excellent catering facilities. Two large vending machines stood tall and proud against the far wall; even from this distance, Thom could see that the monetary facility was disabled. Fresh fruit and pastry crumbs sat happily on serving platters on long wooden tables as did two industrial coffee machines. Thom didn’t eat this well at home.

  “Sit, Bray.” Stark pointed to the furthest sofa from by the sink, grabbing some napkins and wetting them at the sink.

  Thom obeyed the instruction and sat, enjoying the comfort, but less so when Stark sat down a little too close to him.

  “Look at the mess you made, Thom.”