She walked for a time she knew not how to measure. It might have been for thirty minutes, or it might have been for hours. And even more carefully than before, she maintained her direction – of that she was certain.
Yet once again, she came upon the clearing in the forest, the trailer, the glint of tombstones on the other side of the water.
For the first time in her life, Miss Mack felt real and uncontrollable fear. By no means could she get away from Gavin Pond. There was no turnoff from the circular track. All ways out through the forest led directly back to the clearing. She had no food in the cabin, and no bait with which to fish. Her lamp oil would not last forever, and tomorrow morning would never come. Miss Mack’s one hope was that she was asleep and dreaming. With this single thought, Miss Mack went inside the trailer, lay down upon the bed, and went to sleep. When she waked, it was night – still Halloween night. The moon hadn’t moved.
SCHOOL CROSSING by Francis King
Francis King (1923-2011) was one of the most distinguished men of letters of his generation, publishing fifty volumes over a sixty-four year career, comprising novels, story collections, poetry, criticism and autobiography, and he was also well known as a book reviewer and theatre critic. His early novel The Dividing Stream (1951) won the Somerset Maugham Award for best novel by a young English writer, and two later books, A Domestic Animal (1970) and The Nick of Time (2002) were nominated for the Booker Prize. At first glance, King, who was known for his literary fiction, much of it gay-themed, might seem out of place in an anthology of horror stories, but as critic Paul Binding has written, King had a ‘darkly penetrative vision of existence’, and a tendency toward the dark and macabre runs though much of his fiction. Though he was not a prolific author of horror stories, King wrote a half-dozen or so fine ones, including ‘School Crossing’, a wonderfully understated tale that first appeared in The 20th Pan Book of Horror Stories (1979). Unlike some of the stories in this volume, King’s is rendered more chilling by what is left unsaid: Why did Mark lose his post at the school? Why does he hate his children so much? Why does he wear eyeglasses for which he has no medical need? Even if its ending is not entirely unforeseen, this story still packs a punch and will linger with readers long after they have finished it. King’s first six novels are available from Valancourt.
These days it seemed as if his glasses were never clean. Yearning, importunate or mischievous, the small hands would reach out, soiling and smearing; and it was as if they soiled and smeared everything at which he looked. The garden at which he had laboured for many years, the house filled with the antiques inherited from his first and now dead wife, even the youthful face of his second wife: all seemed to have lost their pristine bloom. ‘Don’t!’ he would ward off the hands. But the twins would think this some kind of game and, laughing hysterically, twisting and lunging, they would hurl themselves upon him. Sometimes he would be rough with them, repelling them with all his force, and then a bewilderment would suddenly freeze their half-formed features and he would see the same bewilderment on the face of their mother, as though he had all at once changed into someone else. He was always wiping the glasses. On a handkerchief. On the end of his tie. On a paper-tissue or a table-napkin or a sheet of lavatory paper. But the imprints of those two pairs of hands perpetually renewed themselves, just as the imprint of those twin lives now perpetually marked each hour of his existence.
It must have been the glasses: the obvious explanation. The glasses and some freak of light as the late sun filtered down through a jagged line of conifers on that late autumn afternoon. It was the old drive that he knew so well, up the hill from the town. He had passed the Smugglers’ Rest, with its faked creosoted beams, its plastic chairs and tables set out in the hope that some hardy travellers might be tempted to eat or drink outside, its neat hedges, neat flower-beds, neat paths; then the low line of red-brick Council houses; then the notice, glinting briefly in the setting sun, SCHOOL CROSSING. School, his school. Or what he had thought of as being his school until they had taken it from him. Teaching English part-time to foreigners now, he tried not to think of that brutal dispossession. Never went near the school. Never wished to see any of his former colleagues, unless a little furtive, a little guilty, a little shame-faced, they themselves sought him out. Never spoke about it, not even to Clare, the young science teacher whom he had married.
SCHOOL CROSSING. The Aston Martin, which he could no longer afford to run, leaped effortlessly up the hill; and suddenly, for a moment, there they were, boys and girls straggling across the road. Faces turned at the sound of the engine. Some drew back, others scuttled over to the further side, jostling, ungainly, undignified. But why should they be out of school as early as this? School holiday? No. He had braked to a halt. And then, to his amazement, he had seen that there was no one there at all. The late sun glinted on the crown of the road; the conifers soared up on either side, their green encrusted here and there near their summits with rust; somewhere far off an owl hooted. Odd. He could have sworn. But it was the glasses of course. He took them off, fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief, found he had none and then, as so often, used the end of his tie. The tie seemed only to make them worse, leaving a halo over the left lens where before there had only been a streak. The sun sank with a strange abruptness, as though that patch of fire on the crown of the road had been doused with an invisible pail of water. Behind him a van was hooting. He looked in the mirror and saw that the driver looked like that Mason boy, son of a butcher, who had been one of the ring-leaders. . . . But he wasn’t going to think of the school, never, ever.
He engaged the gears and the car leapt forward, like some beast suddenly unleashed to seize its prey. Odd.
He did not tell Clare. One of the twins, the boy, had grazed his knee in a fall; and the other twin, the girl, had somehow contrived to break a Crown Derby cup. He had to hear about both accidents and he had to pretend that he cared more about the knee than the cup. Would he have mentioned what had happened on the hill if he had come home to peace instead of turmoil? He did not know. Probably not. There was a lot that he never mentioned to Clare: a whole secret life of hurt feelings, humiliation, disappointment and resentment. She herself was so candid, telling him all her most intimate thoughts and feelings, that she could not guess at the depth of his lack of candour.
‘A good day, Mark?’
‘Oh, not too bad. Not too bad.’
He had picked up the Times; but as he was opening it, the boy twin began to scramble up on to his knees. One hand went out, crushing the paper. A shoe kicked his shin. Then the other hand was at his glasses. The child crowed with pleasure. Mark wanted to fling him from him. But instead he forced himself to laugh as he held the child’s arms, one in either hand, and asked him: ‘Well, how is that knee of yours?’
Again the child tried to lunge; but his father held him firm. Then the girl came up from behind and her greasy fingers. . . . He looked across at Clare and he could hardly see her face. The smears seemed to be across it, not on his glasses.
‘Oh, do take the children upstairs or into the kitchen or somewhere.’
She got up silently and again he fumbled for the handkerchief that he had not got and again he raised the end of his tie.
Several days passed before it happened again. Now it was dark and he was returning from a farewell party given by a group of jolly, noisy students from Norway. They had kept filling his glass even though he told them, ‘Look I’ve got to drive home. I don’t want to be breathalysed, now do I?’ He felt old and tired; a sour envy had invaded him, like the aftertaste of the acid Spanish wine, for the youth not merely of the students but also of his colleagues. He wondered how soon he could decently make his escape. A plump coquettish girl, with a downy moon-face and eyes of an arctic blankness and blueness – she had always sat just under his desk, arriving at class long before anyone else in order to secure that place – had swayed up to him and enquired tipsily: ‘You do not dance, professor?’
‘My dancing days are over.’
‘But you will dance with me? A last dance?’
He shook his head. He forced himself to smile. ‘Neither a last dance nor a first dance. Not after all these years. Not even with you, my dear.’
Surprisingly she had seemed not to be angered but delighted by the rebuff. It was what she must have expected. She laughed, throwing back her head and showing large, white, even teeth. Then she told the others: ‘Professor Clark says that his dancing days are over! He will not dance with me!’
‘Shame!’ cried one of Mark’s colleagues, a spotty boy whom he particularly disliked.
‘Oh, come along, Mark!’ another colleague, a girl, cajoled him, taking him by an arm and attempting to drag him among the dancers. He had never asked her to call him Mark and he always tried to avoid calling her by any name, surname or Christian name. Some of the students began to clap her as she tugged and tugged at him, her face growing red under its swaying fringe of jet hair. But he would not yield. ‘No, I’m not going to dance. But you can give me something more to drink.’
A Norwegian boy splashed some more of the vinegary white wine into his glass.
Well, it could have been that wine. Because he had been a little drunk as he had walked out, long before any other of the teachers, into the frosty December air. He had dropped the car-keys and he had felt uncomfortably top-heavy as he had searched over the asphalt of the yard for them, the tips of his fingers grazing themselves on its uneven surfaces. It must have been that wine and not his glasses, because as soon as he had got into the car, he took off the glasses and wiped them on a corner of a handkerchief that was still neatly folded in the trouser-pocket in which he had put it before setting out. Yes, it must have been that wine. What else could it have been?
It was misty as he drove up the hill and he passed only one car, crawling beetle-like ahead of him. He liked that surge of power as the Aston Martin devoured the little Fiat or whatever it was. It gave him a feeling of exhilaration; it never failed to do so. Which was why he had kept the car while at the same time urging on Clare a number of economies. The daily, holidays abroad, drinks before dinner, the laundry for his shirts: all must go before that car would go. Now that his joints so often ached and were stiff with rheumatism in the mornings, now that he found himself out of breath at the top of a hill or even of the stairs, now that one set of tennis, one swim, one orgasm, was enough for him, he found a compensation in the undiminished ferocity and pounce of that engine.
He could not see the crests of the conifers because of that pervading mist; at times he could hardly see the sides of the road as it curved up to the brow of the hill. The trees seemed to have merged into huddled, opaque masses as the fierce headlights picked them out. SCHOOL CROSSING. The cat’s eyes winked at him and then died as he raced past. Slam on the brakes. Their terrified faces. Some began to run. Others frozen. The tyres screeched. The car all but went out of control. He peered into the mist, the car door half-open and one leg hanging through it into the icy air. He had been about to rush out and shout at them. You bloody clots! Couldn’t you hear my engine? Didn’t you see my lights? And what are you all doing at an hour like this? Don’t tell me that you’re coming home from school! You might have got yourselves killed! But there was no one there, no one there at all; no target at which to direct his near-hysterical shock and rage.
He heard a chug-chug-chug behind him and the little beetle crawled up past the sign, slowed, all but stopped and then passed on. The driver was probably saying to himself, Odd. Why should he have stopped there? Alone too. But he seems all right. Better not to get mixed up in whatever it is. Perhaps he just wants a piss. The silence closed round the coughing of the little engine as it disappeared from view.
He raised the end of his tie; took off his glasses. But of course it had been the wine, it must have been the wine.
After that he began to dread having to pass the notice. But there was no other way to drive up from the town to the house: not, that is, unless he made an enormous detour. Enormous and costly too – that car devoured petrol with the same greed that it devoured the distance between itself and any other car. It was some silly kind of optical illusion. The trees with the sun low behind them or with the headlights thrust against them. Some trick of shadow. And the fact that he was tired, the glasses, the wine. Nothing odd about it really. As a child, waking up and seeing what seemed to be a stranger seated in the chair, a dark, humped stranger, with a white luminous face, he had screamed and screamed and screamed; but all it was (his mother rushing in) was his own clothes with the moonlight on them. . . . Silly. She had said that to him. Silly, silly boy. Why it’s nothing!
It was nothing. But still the dread remained. As the Aston Martin climbed effortlessly up the hill, he would feel his mouth go dry, his heart would start to thump and he would peer ahead, wondering . . . would it happen again this time? But days passed and it did not happen and soon that tension of both the body and the brain no longer gripped him. He had still not spoken of what had happened to Clare or anyone else; and now he would not do so, since obviously it was not going to happen again.
Going into the town one Saturday to shop, they left the two children for a moment in the locked car while they changed their books at the library. It had been a day of nagging rain; and when they returned, they found that the seats of the car, its sides and even its roof were imprinted with the marks of small muddy feet. He could understand how, without meaning it, they might have soiled the seats by scrambling over them or even the sides by kicking out; but to reach the roof they must have made a deliberate, malicious effort. ‘Christ! What the hell have you been doing? Look at this! Look! Look!’ He pointed here and here and here and the twins cowered and giggled, while Clare, in an effort to placate him, her face suddenly pinched and grey with apprehension, pulled a tiny, pathetic wad of a handkerchief out of her handbag and began to make ineffectual efforts to wipe away the mess.
‘You’ll only smear it! Leave it! I’ll see to it when I get home.’
‘It’ll all come out. You’ll see. . . .’ As so often, her fear of him made her turn on the twins. ‘Oh, stop that silly sniggering!’
‘Why can’t you control these bloody brats?’
‘They’re your brats too.’
But somehow, deep inside himself, he never thought of them as his brats at all. They had come too late; and they had come unwanted.
Clare took the girl on her lap, leaving the boy in the back of the car. The boy was her favourite and so it was the girl to whom she gave this kind of preferential treatment. ‘Look, pet. I’ve got this lovely book for you. Look. That’s a dog like the one that Ann has got, isn’t it? A big dog, with a big bushy tail. And big teeth. But a friendly dog. Like Anna’s dog. A dog with long, long ears.’ From time to time she would glance sideways at him with wary apprehension, wondering whether he would forget about the stains all over the interior of the car or whether they would make him difficult for the whole weekend. He drove thinking, Christ, what inanities!
The car seemed even smoother and even more powerful than ever; and that began to soothe him, as he pushed it up the steeper and steeper gradient, passing one car after another. Everyone seemed to have been shopping; every car was laden with children and baskets and carrier-bags and dogs and toys. SCHOOL CROSSING. There was a ramshackle saloon ahead of him, just beyond the notice; and then, as he pressed the accelerator to catch it up too and leave it in his conquering wake, suddenly, without any warning, the children began to stream across the road. In twos and threes. Shouting to each other. Laughing. One boy pushing another boy into a tall, solitary girl.
The impact of the braking threw the boy twin forward so that he struck his forehead on the seat in front. Fortunately Mark and Clare had both fastened their safety-belts, and the girl was secure in Clare’s hands. The boy began to whimper, rubbing his forehead with a look of bewilderment on a face that had begun to pucker. Cars passed,
the cars that they themselves had passed. Faces looked round. What a bloody silly place to stop! That’s the way to cause an accident. Idiot. Someone hooted.
‘Are you all right, darling?’ The child began to wail. Clare touched the spot with blunt, cool fingers. ‘Does it hurt?’ The child wailed louder.
‘He’s not hurt. You know how he always makes a fuss over the smallest things.’
‘He could have been hurt. Badly. What on earth did you stop like that for?’
‘Didn’t you see. . . . ?’ He broke off.
‘See? See what?’
He thought quickly. ‘The hedgehog.’
‘Hedgehog?’
‘In the middle of the road. I was afraid I’d run over it.’
‘I saw nothing.’
‘I saw it, Mummy! I saw it!’ the girl began to shout. ‘I saw it! Big, big hedgehog!’
The boy was sobbing now. Clare said to the girl: ‘You’d better climb over to the back and change places.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’s hurt his forehead.’
‘No!’
‘Now, Sally, do what I tell you.’
‘It’s my turn to sit in front!’
‘You sat in front last time.’
‘Didn’t.’
‘Did.’
Oh Christ! It was with a cold, murderous rage that he engaged the gears and once more resumed the journey home. Would they never allow him any peace? Such was his fury against them that he hardly thought of those phantoms suddenly emerging out into the road. It was only later that he began to worry.
Bill Edmonds – ‘Big’ Bill as he was known all over the town to differentiate him from his partner, also Bill, who was small and fox-like – had once been Mark’s closest friend as well as his doctor. Perhaps he still imagined that he was Mark’s closest friend, since he was not particularly perceptive; but Mark had never felt the same towards Bill since that whole school business. Bill had not been loyal; or at least not loyal enough to say ‘my friend, right or wrong.’ His view that Mark had been partly wrong he had never concealed from him, even though he had conceded that Mark had also been partly right. ‘You can’t run a comprehensive as though it were a small and select grammar school. You know exactly what you’re doing and a lot of that staff of yours have no idea what they’re doing at all. But that doesn’t mean that you can ride roughshod over them.’ Later, when the affair had smashed Mark’s career and smashed so much else, it had also smashed the peculiar intimacy that had joined the two men. They went on seeing each other; Bill went on prescribing drugs for Mark’s blood-pressure, his insomnia and hay-fever; Mark went on tutoring Bill’s bored, backward daughter in mathematics during the vacations; the two couples went on entertaining each other to dinner and going on holidays together and playing tennis with each other. But, as far as Mark at least was concerned, the friendship had ended.
The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories Page 4
