Episode 9: Student Bodies

Click*

*We hear the repeated work of a shovel and faint bird song*

Voncid: Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

Pip: Well, I’ve got this stupid sense… 

Voncid: Second Sight.

Pip:  Double vision, whatever.  Might as well use it. (pause) I think it’s been getting stronger.

Voncid: I agree. I can barely sense the curse that killed this man and he’s nearly unearthed completely.

Pip: (grumbles) Awesome.

*the shovel hits coffin*

Dod:  O, there we have it.

Luca: was starting to wonder if it was down there…

Dod: stand clear messrs, m’lady, i’ll heft the coffin up now.

Luca: by himself?

Voncid: he’s a good man.  Reliable.

*We hear wood creaking and dirt displaced as Dod hoists the coffin out of the grave.*

Luca: … strong.

Voncid:  Yes.  And very very strong.

Pip: If you don’t need me for anything else…

Luca: you don’t want to see the reclaiming?

Pip: Yeahhhhh, the idea of watching a dead person come back to life is a little too fresh for me right now.

Voncid: Of course. Before you go, I’ve been recording my work recently.

Pip: I see that.

Voncid: Would you go over how you discovered our Mr. Wyland here was killed by black arts?

Pip: Well, I was walking Gizmo around the lake, past the cemetery, and I caught the faintest little twinge of…something?... from inside.  Thought for a moment I heard some whispering.  I followed the sense here, to this grave and then I called you.

Voncid: thank you.  Fine work.  Anything else you can tell us before we release you?

Pip: *snort* “release me.” 

Voncid:  Apologies, let you take your leave.

Pip:  Uh, I think whatever is in that coffin, it’s more than just one voice?  More than one spirit? That doesn’t make sense. Does that make sense? 

Voncid:  Ah, a strong enough hex can take on a life of its own. That’s likely what you’re picking up. Luca would you retrieve a witch-glass jar, we have plenty in the back of the car.

*pause*

That’s all you sense?

Pip: All I sense about the dead man.

Voncid: oh?

Pip: Do you know your new assistant has…holes? In his… ghost body?  Soul?  Whatever you wanna call it.

Voncid: yes.

Pip: Does he?

*silence*

Pip: Alright then. Sooooooo….

Voncid: (sigh) Payment has already been deposited in your account.

Pip: Fan-tastic. In that case, good luck, Owen.

Voncid: thank you Philipa.

*Click*

*Wood creaking as the coffin is opened*

Dod: There you are Mr. Voncid 

Voncid:  I see.

Luca: She didn’t need to leave, he barely looks dead.

Voncid:  A common side effect of a victim killed by hex.  Black magic is incredibly toxic.  Animals, fungus, insects, even bacteria will refuse to eat meat corrupted by a strong curse.

Luca: he looks like he could wake up.

Voncid:  Let’s hope we can get him to do just that.

*Silence, a chime, whispering*

Mr. Wyland:  The children.  Something is wrong with the children.

Voncid:  I am afraid I cannot answer that just yet, Mr. Wyland.  It has been some time, but tell me what children you fear for and what took your life and I will try to protect them.

Mr. Wyland:  You don’t understand.  Something is wrong with them.

Voncid: Help me to understand then.  

Mr. Wyland:  I didn’t.  Understand.  I didn’t know why she left. Sherry just left. Up and left.  Everything made me think of her, the house, the neighborhood, the trees on our street.  Every time I smelled the flowers from the garden I thought she’d walked back in.

She was alive, but she was haunting me.  I don’t know why she left.  I didn’t know what I did, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was torturing myself.

I needed a change.

Some of the admins took pity on me and a phone chain led to an opportunity at a school a few hours north: Morebarrow.  I’d never heard of it. I remember thinking it wasn’t a very Minnesotan sounding name, but I didn’t look the gift horse in the mouth. A teacher had died. They needed someone to finish out the school year and I needed to stop having nightmares about Sherry’s face as she noticed I’d seen the suitcase.

When I drove up to the school for the first time I thought I must have gotten turned around.  Certainly I had taken a wrong turn and wound up at a factory, or a storage building.  It was so gray.  Too brutalist.  It had windows, but they were thin, few and far between. It was also far taller than I’d ever seen a school, at least three stories.

The trees on the grounds were ancient, gnarled things.  As little character as the building had, the trees surrounding it looked positively alive. Hooked, gnarled hands like a giant, buried witch had just started to claw her way out of the dirt.

I tried to shake it off.  It’s ninth grade English, you can teach it in your sleep, I told myself, but stay focused, if they smell blood in the water, they’ll eat you alive.  I put on my game face, confident, but approachable, tried not to think about how Sherry had called it my “nice coach face” and went inside.

I knew something was wrong immediately.

The moment I set foot in that building I was struck with unease.  I tried to tell myself that it was nerves, but I wasn’t nervous.  I was excited to be somewhere new, to have something to distract me.

I’m glad to be here, I realized.  So why do I feel cold?

One of the students, a boy with black hair approached me. *affecting a higher voice* “Are you Mr. Wyland?” he asked politely. Had a big smile.  Made direct eye contact.

I told him I was.

*Affecting a higher voice* “I’m supposed to take you to your classroom.  Follow me,” he said before walking away down the hall without looking back.

It was odd, both that a student was showing me around, and that he’d apparently been waiting at the door for me, but I couldn’t spare a thought for it. All I could focus on was my rapidly increasing sense of discomfort.

The halls were full of students preparing for class, going in and out of lockers, talking and shouting, full of the nervous energy you expect before class on a Monday. The students seemed happy enough, I saw plenty of smiles, but I never shook that feeling my whole first day.

Students seemed bright, but not jarringly so.  All of my classes were focused, but not so much more than usual. The other teachers seemed run of the mill miserable, guzzling coffee and chewing nicotine gum at a slightly higher than average rate, but one of their colleagues had died that month, so I chalked it up to that.

The administration was exactly the brand of obtuse I was ready for.

Days went on and I was nearing the end of my first week without successfully pinpointing the ebb and flow of disconcerted I felt.

I was walking through the hall on the way to my last class of the day when I walked past a motivational poster.  The famous one of the cat hanging from a branch with a very upset look on its face. I chuckled to myself at the silliness of it and then stop, dead cold.

It hit me.

What I had been reacting to but not able to name all week.

It was the children. Something was indeed wrong with the children.

I had been there for five days of classes, hours worth of passing time and lunch breaks and all the while…

I had never heard a single student laugh.

*Eerie music begins very faintly over the whirring of the recorder*

I wracked my brain, certainly that couldn’t be true.

I stood still, staring at the poster of the cat while students swirled and passed all around me.

No laughter.  Now that I was listening for it, it was deafening.

I’d been teaching for twenty five years and I could say for certain that laughter was at least a part of the soundscape.  Its absence was all I could hear now.

The cat in the poster looked scared to me now.  

Over the weekend I drove around the town.  It was normal.  I went online and looked at the town’s history.  It was normal.  I didn’t know what I was looking for, maybe some cult or orthodox religious strain that might push a restriction like that.

I went to Sunday service, but it was average in every way.

At school the next week I looked at everyone and everything differently.  Suspiciously.  It took time but I finally spotted something out of the ordinary.  I caught a woman at the front desk, Edith.  She was staring at a group of students taking turn at the water fountain with the strangest look in her eye.

I had just realized that it was contempt when she caught me watching her and snapped her gaze away, pretended to be busy with paperwork.

I passed her desk a few times that week, looking for any other clues as to what might be going on with her.  I spotted something tucked behind the clutter of her desk.  It was hidden by office supplies, only visible from a certain angle, but I saw it.  At first I thought it was a crucifix, but something was wrong with the shape, it had loops in the metal.  I looked closer and I saw the shape of a hand, with a human eye peering out from the middle of the palm.

I couldn’t get more than that with a passing glance, but I told myself I would find a way to get a closer look at it.

I don’t know what I thought.  It was quite a stretch to think that the strange, stiff behavior I was now noticing in the students could somehow be connected to, what, witchcraft?  No, that was ridiculous.  But maybe that was intimidation, abuse? I didn’t know what I thought.

Sherry had called me paranoid more than once.

I didn’t have time to second guess myself, because it all went wrong later that day.

I was just heading to lunch when I heard a strange thump from down the hall behind me. During the lunch hours students would travel in batches to the lunchroom, so I supposed it could have been students getting into or up to something, so I doubled back away from lunch to investigate.

I was not prepared.

A student I didn’t know was standing close to the brown brick of the wall. He was holding perfectly still, staring into the bricks like he was looking for some hidden message. I was about to call out to him and ask what he was doing when he folded backwards.

I don’t want to give you the wrong idea, he didn’t bend backwards, which would imply that he leaned and his knees curved and his neck arched back. No. He folded backwards.  In half.

There was a crack *sharp creaking* as his upper half snapped backwards at a clean ninety degree angle.  One moment he was staring at the wall, the next he was staring up at the ceiling.

And the moment after that he snapped forward and cracked his forehead against the brick with a sickening thump. *thump*

Blood splattered out with such force that I heard a few drops patter onto the leather of my shoe.

I made a shocked scared gulp in my throat and the boy's head snapped towards the sound.

*A strange, high voice* “Oh hi Mr. Wyland!” he said cheerfully.

I was too stunned to respond.

*A strange, high voice* “I think… I think I hurt myself,” he said.  “Don’t worry.  I’ll go to the nurse.”

Then he walked past me smiling towards the nurses office.

I didn’t know what to do, or what to say.  All I could think to do was follow him.  I had to make sure he was ok.  Whatever was happening was so much worse than I had ever imagined.

As I followed the boy I realized that I did recognize him.  He had been one of the students Edith had been glowering at earlier by the water fountain.

Had she done something to him?

The boy did not make it to the nurses office.

He started stumbling, walking sideways, making this lurching, jerking motion with his right shoulder.

I called out to him, and when I did, other students took notice of him.  The chronic vacant smiles left their faces.

The student picked up his pace suddenly, putting distance between us, and as he passed a bathroom he ducked inside.

I saw a student I knew, Bryan.

“Bryan, someone is hurt.  Go get the nurse, now please,” I demanded, trying to stay calm and sound authoritative and not scared out of my mind.  Bryan nodded that he would.

*In a higher voice* “Is something wrong Mr. Wyland?” he asked.

“No, it’s fine,” I lied.  “It’s just someone is hurt.”

I told him again to go and followed the injured student into the lavatory.

I don’t know what I expected to see.  

The young man had taken a container, some sort of plastic container for soup out of his backpack. It was at least half a gallon of thin red liquid.

His head was tilted back. He’d drunk nearly all of it.

The smell coming out of the container was sickening, it wasn’t like anything else I’d ever smelled, but I gagged instantly.

The boy was gulping it down greedily, *slurping noises*  like he was starving.  Thick chunks in the liquid would get caught in his mouth ever few seconds and he was have to inhale with more pressure to get them to pop into his mouth so he could keep drinking.

I felt disgust like I’d never known.

Maybe he did too.

Because the next moment he turned to the sink and vomited with such explosive force that it cracked the mirror.

He made a hideous gurgle and flailed wildly. *speaking in a different voice*  “I don’t feel so good,” he said as he knocked the sink off the wall.

*speaking in a different voice* “I think there might be something wrong with me, Mr. Wyland. *The voice distorts and deepens*  I know that there’s something wrong with you.”

The voice wasn’t human.  It’s face was bulging pushing row after row of teeth out of the gory red soup of his face.

I backed away in utter horror, but bumped into something.  I turned around and to my further shock I found Bryan and dozen of his classmates.

*In a higher voice* “I’m sorry Mr. Wyland” he said.

Then he tapped a finger on my chest.

My heart stopped.

The shock of numbness that pitched through me… I can’t describe it.  The sudden loss of blood pressure sent me to the ground.

*In a different voice, distorted and echoing* “Fuck you Davy,” Bryan hissed at the boy that was contorting and vomiting strange red liquid all over the bathroom floor.  “Fuck you, I liked Mr. Wyland.  You’re such a fuck up.”

The last thing I remember is Bryan and the others ignoring me and berating the hideous writhing thing they called Davy.

Voncid:  I see.

Mr. Wyland: Do you understand?  I don’t understand.  What had Edith done to them?  What was that thing on her desk?  Was it related?

Voncid:  not a cause, but a response I imagine.  Luca, could you hand me the notepad and a pen.

*Pause*

Voncid: did the shape Edith had on her desk look like this?

Mr. Wyland: it did… what is it?

Voncid:  a symbol of protection.  It’s very old.  It’s called a hamsa.  

Mr. Wyland:  I see.  I was a little off the mark wasn’t I?

Voncid: I suppose, but I don’t suppose it would have made any difference.  Well, you wanted a change, I know it isn’t the trip you hoped to take, but safe travels as you go afar.  

Luca: It’s a Hamsa.

Voncid:  Indeed, it would appear that this Edith is in the know, perhaps she’s even one of ours.

Further inquiry will be required and will be filed under Student Bodies.

Luca: I thought my time in highschool was scary.

Voncid:  Hmm… 

Voncid: You know Luca… you are very short, and quite youthful looking.  One could easily mistake you for a high school student, couldn’t they?

*Click*