9 Tales Told in the Dark 16

by 9 Tales Told in the Dark

  9TALES TOLD IN THE DARK #16

  © Copyright 2016 Bride of Chaos/ All Rights Reserved to the Authors.

  First electronic edition 2016

  Edited by A.R. Jesse

  Cover by Turtle&Noise

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  9TALES TOLD IN THE DARK #16

  Table of Contents

  MISS MARTINEAU’S CLASS by S.L. Dixon

  THE MOLD by Simon McHardy

  CURIOSITY by Joseph Benedict

  LIFE CYCLE by Adam Phillips

  WHORE ABLE TO DIE by Sara Green

  THE RAISING by Ace Antonio Hall

  HEARTLESS by Calvin Demmer

  THE ORCHARDS by Derek Morrison

  A STORM CAME AND SO DID THEY by George Strasburg

  .

  .

  .

  .

  TALES

  TOLD

  IN

  THE

  DARK

  #16

  MISS MARTINEAU’S CLASS by S.L. Dixon

  The eyes gave away nothing. All seemed equal parts innocent and concerned, but that couldn’t be, not all of them were innocent. Hard and fast, glued, Miss Nellie Martineau looked back to the blackboard stretching nearly the entire width of the front of the classroom. The pictures of the naked people and almost naked people, cut from at least a dozen publications as far as she could tell from a glance, had become part of the scenery.

  “If you don’t admit it, you’ll all lose your lunch hours for a week!” said Nellie, she turned back, red-cheeked as she peeled her eyes from a monstrous veiny light brown penis over her right shoulder.

  The class stared forward, looking at her, not the pictures.

  The students must’ve defaced the blackboard at lunch, had to. It was her only time out of the room on Mondays. Those faces together were something like an iron wall, held by nuts and bolts. Pull one bolt and it would all fall apart.

  “Ally, who did this?”

  Ally, timid and bashful, her cheeks alight under the blonde freckles riding atop her flesh, “I don’ know,” she whispered.

  “Is that right? All right, how about you, Lars? I know you didn’t have anything to do with this, you don’t want to take punishment for something you didn’t do, do you?”

  Lars was another supposed weak link, but he shook his head.

  “I didn’t do nothing. I don’t know who done it!” Lars lowered his gaze below the mop of dark black hair.

  Nellie pounced. Rushing to his side, “Look at me!”

  He kept his eyes down.

  “I said look at me!” he did and Nellie did her best to hold the severe gaze, “Now tell me, who did this?”

  “I don’t know. I swear on my hockey cards. I swear on all my Christmas presents, I don’t know!” Tears ran Lars’ cheeks.

  The bell rang and startled Nellie, amazed she’d wasted the entire period after lunch scolding children for the pornographic desecration of her classroom. It was only the fourth grade, she wasn’t supposed to need worry about this kind of thing. It’s part of the reason she chose the younger grades. There were other parts too, stress, inexperience and her glaring youthful ignorance. The main thing was that she felt she could manage pre-pubescent students.

  She’d had it planned for weeks, they’d spend time every afternoon watching seasonal movies, it was to be the first half of The Polar Express, but not anymore, not after what they’d done.

  The children didn’t break into chatter as usual after the bell rang. They waited on Nellie’s lead, fear in their faces.

  “You’re going to wish you told me,” she said as an idea rose to her mind. She stepped to the call box and pressed the button, “Mrs. Lundowner?”

  “Yes, how can I help you, Miss Martineau?” the voice came through nasally and tinny.

  “I need the janitors to my room. I have a mess, I’m taking my students out for gym class now and I’ll need the mess, at very least covered up. Please and thank you.”

  “All right, I’ll check on who’s available.”

  Nellie let go of the button. The children had been whispering and stopped as soon as she faced them.

  “I hope you’re all feeling energetic.” Nellie sneered and frightened the students all over. “Get your coats and your boots, we’re going outside.”

  “But it’s freezing!” Laura Vernon demanded, she was one of three Lauras in a class of twenty, only half were girls.

  “And this isn’t smutty scrapbook class! You should’ve thought about the temperature before you glued that stuff to the blackboard!” Nellie shouted, she planned to interrogate runners until one of them spilled. The problem had a solution. It was manageable.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Nellie didn’t shift her gaze, “Put your coats on!” She turned to the door and waved Malcolm Gold into the room.

  “What’s the trou…” the words caught in the janitor’s throat as he saw the blackboard. He fought a smile, “Someone playing a trick I see.”

  “That’s right and they’re all going to run until I find out which of them did it,” said Nellie as she scooped her jacket from the back of her chair.

  “Dress warm, it’s finally getting nippy,” said Malcolm, his smile won the battle and surfaced on his face.

  Nellie ignored it and demanded that the students line up at the door. They’d never seen her so upset. Miss Martineau was newish, only her second year at the school and she had a reputation as a light and easy teacher, nothing like she seemed at that moment.

  “Just tell me and we’ll stop!” Nellie shouted. A puff of steam rode the air on her words. The children jogged around the crunchy track, stopping often to breath. One of two Shauns leaned forward, hands on his knees.

  “We don’t know nothing! We’d tell, I’d tell. I promise!”

  “Run, Shaun,” said Nellie.

  Round and round, the children slowed into a sluggish drag, most had tears freezing on their cheeks. Nellie didn’t feel the cold. She was furious that her plan had failed. For a moment, she felt sorry for any of the innocent ones.

  Trouble finds the innocent just as easily, you know that, she mused.

  “All right, go in and get your things,” she called out and the sad children grouped together as they streamed from the track back into the school parking lot. There were whispers and whines. “You zip it until you’re out of my sight!”

  The children silenced and hobbled past their teacher. They’d spent the entire afternoon in fear, that alongside physical strain. It left them hopelessly exhausted.

  Nellie returned to her class and all the students had made their way to the bus lines and to the reception area at the front of the school where in-town parents retrieved their children. There were one or two that had to walk home, but it wasn’t far.

  It was a surprise to see the blackboard clean and fresh. The troublemakers used soluble glue, apparently, and she had a guilty sting in her chest. She’d overreacted, but why hadn’t one of them snitched?

  “Because they wer
e all in on it,” she whispered to her empty classroom.

  She picked up her purse from the locked drawer of her desk and flicked the light switch. She drove to her small bungalow on the outskirts of town, fed her cat and sat down in front of the television, wondering how she’d deal with all the phone calls from angry parents.

  By the time she turned in, she’d had three calls on her cellphone. Parents with some sway got the number out of someone above her (she had to assume). Nellie explained what the children did and why she made them run, the angry parents swore their children had nothing to do with it and that Nellie should lose her job.

  “Just a little exercise,” Nellie whispered to her pillow as she dropped away into sleep, thinking about how the children deserved everything they’d gotten, “Worse things have happened to better children, better people… Oh, Aimee.”

  “Where’d you put them?” Nellie screeched at her students just after lunch hour.

  It was Wednesday and after the verbal tirade from the group of angry parents, the principal demanded Nellie let her students go unpunished for the pornography. Demanded that she not punish the group for what must’ve been a few bad apples, especially this time of year.

  It freed her lunch hour as well and she decided that she’d step out, take a break from school and grab a bite from Forkin’ Scrumptious, a surprisingly tasty food truck that parked in an old Pontiac dealership lot. She sat in her car munching a steamy pork sandwich thinking it would be her last Christmas with Aimee. The hard realization made her want to run away from life.

  Nellie came back to class to find once again her room defaced. All of the books and learning materials had been replaced. There was Superman, Buffy, Spiderman, Black Bastard, Howard the Duck and Wonder Woman. Maps of Clive Barker’s Abarat replaced the roll-up maps of World and stacks of Archie Comics stood in place of the math booklets.

  The students remained silent once again, the fear was there and it was a reasonable emotion. Their teacher had seemed a different person all month.

  None of them knew that her sister, the only member left of her immediate family was sick with a quick-spreading bronchial cancer. How could they?

  Nellie felt like stretched elastic, ready to fly or ready to snap, either way, there was something coming and it would sting.

  “We didn’t do it!” a boy named Jan demanded.

  “Somebody did and I know it was one of you. Why would anyone else? You think you’re paying me back? You started this! Get your coats!”

  A general groan filled the air and Nellie glared at the students until they quieted and dressed for the outside.

  It was another cold day. Winter had finally begun and snow pounded the county. Nellie wasn’t about to make the kids run again, that didn’t work, but she had another idea.

  “Come on, come on!” she shouted over the blustery breeze.

  Snow fell sideways on the wind and the children covered their faces with their arms. They started out toward the track.

  “Soccer field,” Nellie instructed and the students veered.

  They stood, all twenty of them, waiting for instruction. All assumed they’d run for what happened in the classroom. Replacing school stuff with comic books was pretty funny.

  “Spread out,” Nellie ordered; drill sergeant with a troop of hopeless cadets. “Stretch your arms out, make sure you can’t touch anybody else.”

  “Miss Martineau, I’m cold,” said Penny, one of Nellie’s prime suspects.

  “I’m sure you are and if you admit to doing this, I’ll let everyone back into the room.”

  “But I didn’t. I don’t know who did, it wasn’t us, must’ve been someone else,” said Penny.

  “Zip it unless you’re going to confess,” said Nellie.

  The students stood with their arms out in a scattered grouping. Those arms began to fall and students began more complaints.

  “You can only talk if you tell me who did this!” Nellie screeched, she was freezing herself.

  An hour passed and the Lauras had crept together and decided they needed to go inside. They made a break for it, eight boys saw the lead and chased.

  “Stop right there!”

  “Suck it!” a boy named Jake shouted back over his shoulder.

  “You stop, you stop!” Nellie screamed as she chased.

  The remaining students all burst off into a run, back toward the school. The boys ran to washrooms, the invisible wall protecting them from a female teacher entering. The girls did the same, but used physical walls, grouping in empty stalls. Some others hid out in stairwells and in the dark cafeteria. The three Lauras had a plan and went straight for the principal.

  Nellie stalked through the school, yelling into the boys’ washrooms that if they didn’t come out, she would go in.

  “You will not!” Mrs. Peps demanded.

  Nellie turned to see the principal and the Lauras from her class standing with their arms folded, scowls on their faces.

  “You should see my room. Again!” Nellie argued.

  “Show me,” said Mrs. Peps.

  It was just as Nellie left, comics and fantasy artwork, “See!”

  Mrs. Peps frowned. She knew Nellie’s personal trouble and saw disruption of the highest degree. It left her to play middle ground.

  “Girls, do you know who did this?” Mrs. Peps asked the Lauras.

  “We think she did it,” suggested Laura Munt, a fat girl with greasy hair and yellowy skin.

  “Why would I do this?” Nellie demanded.

  The bell rang.

  “Girls, get ready for home,” said Mrs. Peps and then stepped closer to Nellie, “I’ll figure this out and I’ll get to the bottom of this. You don’t worry about a thing.”

  There were nine calls to her cellphone, all demanded an explanation and when that explanation didn’t fit well, the callers demanded her resignation.

  Nellie wished she could turn off her phone, but she awaited the call, the death ring. She’d never forgive herself if Aimee went into the hospital a last time and Nellie wasn’t there to see her away. Nellie wanted to take leave and stay with her sister, but Aimee wouldn’t allow it.

  No choice, Nellie waited for one call, but took all others. She only half-listened to the angry parents and thought about her sister, wishing they’d branched further away from each other, took husbands, had kids, or moved to foreign countries. They hadn’t and since their parents died in an auto accident a decade earlier, Nellie and Aimee had only each other.

  Nellie fell asleep with her phone in her hand.

  “In this together to the end, huh?” Nellie seethed as she stomped out of the classroom.

  It was Friday, she came back from lunch to find her room littered with red cups, each cup had a hole drilled and glue poured into the base. Red cups on every surface, including the teacher’s desk, the floor, the ceiling, the walls, everywhere.

  The students laughed and then realized they’d once again face the consequences.

  “Who did it?” demanded Jan, he was sick of getting crap for somebody else.

  Nobody fessed up.

  “Come on, you’ll be a hero. This is, like, the best one yet. Who did it?” Jan asked again.

  Nobody answered.

  Nellie stomped back into the room, crushing cups underfoot. She carried a large box, skipping ropes poked above the flaps, “Line up at the door,” she said.

  “We’re not going out to the track or the soccer field, are we?” asked Laura Anderson, possibly the plainest girl in the county; medium brown hair, shaped like a plank, small facial features, moderate skull.

  “Nope, line up,” said Nellie.

  They did.

  She tied children to each other as if in a conga line. Once she’d finished that, she rooted down into the bottom of the box from the equipment room. She took cloth football flags, doubled them, and then tied a gag over every student’s mouth.

  “Together to the end,” said Nellie as she scooped up her jacket.

  She could h
ardly fathom the principal’s flip-flop. The woman told Nellie that she’d get to the bottom of things and then, the following morning, she told Nellie that if one more thing happened that she’d lose her job. It was impossible that these kids would beat her.

  “Together to the end,” Nellie whispered thinking of herself and her sister. If she lost her job, then she could spend more time with Aimee.

  The students stared at the teacher with fear in their eyes. Nellie grabbed her jacket and opened her desk. She pulled out a small knife she’d confiscated at the beginning of the year. She showed the knife and poked the boy on the front of the conga, “March!”

  “For she’s a jolly good sister,” the identical retirees sang, they carried a cake.

  “Oh you guys,” said Miss Horner. She wore dyed blonde hair riding atop a soft face, the extra weight beneath her skin helped to stave off much wrinkling. “I thought you said you were going to get me?”

  One of the Horner brothers scratched his head, “We tried sis.”

  “I think we owe someone an apology,” said the other.

  “We thought you were in the room at the end of the hall.”

  “Oh no, you’re the ones been doing stuff in Mrs. Martineau’s room? It’s been a real stink around here. You didn’t do anything else, did you?”

  The men both shrugged playfully.

  “Oh you didn’t! Come on! Let’s go! She’s about to lose her mind. She’s been punishing the whole class for your shenanigans. Parents are furious, the principal’s furious, jeepers creepers, you’ve got the whole school in a tizzy,” said the old teacher.

  She wondered how she missed the connection when she heard about the porn and the comics. Her brothers were never swift and they’d promised that they’d get her when she retired. She should’ve retired the June prior, but said she’d stay on until Mrs. Lyons’ maternity leave ended.

  “Ugh, I should’ve guessed,” she mumbled as she charged to the room.

  Miss Horner stopped in the doorway of Nellie’s classroom.

  “You made this mess? What’s with the skipping ropes?” she asked, there were a few ropes on the floor amid the crushed cups.