Rook & Tooth and Claw Page 4

  Jim shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mrs Vaizey. I don’t believe in life after death.”

  “Even though you probably saw some spirits for yourself?”

  “I was very young. I was probably dreaming.”

  Mrs Vaizey took hold of his hand again, and ran her fingernail up and down his lifeline, again and again. “The point I’m trying to make to you, Jim, is that if you’ve seen spirits once, you can see them again. Coming close to death, that gives you a facility, if you understand what I mean. An extra sense that you never lose.”

  Jim said nothing, but watched and winced as Mrs Vaizey pored over his palm. After a few moments, she frowned, and peered even more closely at his lifeline.

  “Something wrong?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know … I can’t understand what this means. You have a double break and then a loop, almost, like an oxbow. You’re going to have a strange meeting, unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before. Then something very frightening is going to happen. But that’s all that I can decipher.” She drew her fingernail along his lifeline yet again, and as she did so, Jim felt a searing pain. Her fingernail scratched against his skin like a safety-match, and flames sprang up behind it, right out of the palm of his hand.

  “Jesus!” he shouted, and instantly clamped his hand shut. But flames burst out from between his fingers and engulfed his whole fist.

  He tried to jump up, but Mrs Vaizey shouted, “No!” She snatched a cushion from the couch and pressed it over Jim’s hand. She held it down for a long, long moment, and then she cautiously lifted it up again to make sure that the flames had been extinguished. Slowly, Jim opened his fingers. The fire had vanished, leaving nothing but a pattern of faint red marks.

  “Does it hurt?” Mrs Vaizey asked him.

  Jim raised his hand and turned it this way and that. “Not really. There’s a dull kind of a burning sensation … but I guess that’s all. What the hell happened?”

  “It’s a warning,” said Mrs Vaizey. She was so shaken that her hands were trembling. “I’ve heard about it but I’ve never seen it, not for real, not right in front of my eyes.”

  “A warning? A warning about what?”

  “I can’t tell you. There are some things that people shouldn’t know.”

  “Come on, Mrs Vaizey. My goddamned hand just caught light. You have to tell me.”

  She pressed her hand over her mouth for a while, thinking. Then she said, “All right … I suppose you have the right. Sometimes, when the danger of death is very close, people show signs of it on their bodies. The more sensitive a person is, the clearer the signs. I knew a woman in Santa Barbara whose lips went blue; and three weeks later she was dead of cyanide poisoning. Then there was a movie producer in Westwood who kept getting these red bite marks on his arms. Before the year was out, he was attacked by two Dobermanns when he was visiting one of his friends. They practically tore off his face.”

  She paused for a moment, and then she said, “I’ve seen burns before, too, on people who have died by fire. Arm burns, facial burns. But I never saw actual flames before. Never. You must be even closer to the spirit world than anyone I ever met.”

  “But what are you saying?” Jim asked her. “You’re saying that I’m going to be burned to death?”

  Mrs Vaizey didn’t answer. All she could do was to stare at him in sorrow.

  “It’s not inevitable, though, is it?” Jim demanded. “I mean, I can change my own destiny, can’t I, now that I know?”

  “I never heard of anybody managing to change their destiny before,” said Mrs Vaizey, laying her hand on top of his. “Maybe you can. Who knows?”

  Jim said shakily, “How about another drink?”

  Chapter Three

  Back at college the next morning the students of Special Class II were quiet and subdued, but nobody was absent, with the exception of Amanda Zaparelli who was having her braces removed. Jim wasn’t surprised that they had all shown up. They badly needed to share their grief; and they needed to come to college to see for themselves that Elvin’s desk was empty, and that he really had left them for ever. Jim knew that during the college semester, a class can be closer than a family, and to lose a classmate can hurt even more than losing an uncle or a cousin.

  Jim came into the room tucking his blue denim shirt into his chinos. He looked and felt particularly bleary. He hadn’t slept well. He had dreamed all night of shadowy figures in wide-brimmed hats, and fire; and of voices that whispered in languages he didn’t understand. He had switched on the light several times to look at the marks on his hand. He had made himself a mug of hot chocolate and had stirred it and stared at it for half an hour before emptying it, undrunk, down the sink.

  “I never heard of anybody managing to change their destiny before,” Mrs Vaizey had told him. “Maybe you can. Who knows?”

  “Okay,” he said. “This is going to be a special day and a very difficult day. Yesterday we lost Elvin but we also lost Tee Jay, too. The police have charged him with murder in the first degree, and so far as I understand it, they’re not looking for anybody else.”

  He walked through the lines of desks to the back of the class, so that he was standing next to Sue-Robin Caufield. Sue-Robin was wearing a very tight black V-neck T-shirt, and a thin black ribbon around her neck. Tiredly, Jim thought: trust her to make mourning look sexy. In the far corner, Greg Lake was frowning fiercely and blinking as if he were riding a motorcycle in a high wind. Greg suffered from a lack of co-ordination, and every facial expression was a deep struggle. If anybody told a joke, the rest of the class had finished laughing for at least a minute before Greg managed to arrange his face into a smile.

  Jim said, “I want you all to remember one thing. As sad as we are that Elvin has gone – as angry as we are – and let’s not make any bones about this, anger is as much an ingredient of grief as sadness – the justice system says that nobody is guilty until they are proved to be guilty. Tee Jay has been charged, but he hasn’t been tried. So let’s be mature, and wait for a jury to decide whether Tee Jay was really responsible.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Ray Vito, turning around in his seat. Ray had a shiny black pompadour, a pasty, triangular face, and a narrow, eagle-like nose. “And I suppose OJ Simpson was innocent, too?”

  “A jury found OJ Simpson innocent. Whatever I think about it, that’s good enough for me.”

  “Oh, come on, Mr Rook. We all watched the trial. There was no way.”

  “You watched the trial but you weren’t presented with the facts in the same way that the jury was. They listened to the facts, and they ended up with reasonable doubt. I have reasonable doubt that Tee Jay didn’t kill Elvin. I saw somebody leave the boiler-room just before I found Elvin dead. I don’t know who he was, or what he was doing there. I can’t understand why nobody else saw him. But he must have been the last person to see Elvin alive; and he wasn’t Tee Jay; so let’s at least keep and open mind.”

  Russell Gloach put up his hand. Russell had black short-cropped hair and eyeglasses so thick they must have been bulletproof. He weighed 215 pounds and had an eating disorder which had severely disrupted his schoolwork. He couldn’t sit through a forty-five minute lesson without a cake or a candy-bar or a sandwich. In spite of his size, however, his mind was quick, and he could be very irreverent. “I don’t believe you saw nobody,” he said. “I think you’re covering for Tee Jay … trying to make people think that maybe he didn’t do it, just maybe … so they’ll have to let him off.”

  “Why would I do that?” Jim asked him.

  Russell shrugged. “Tee Jay belongs to Special Class II, doesn’t he? Whatever he’s done. He belongs.”

  Jim looked at Russell for a long time, and then he nodded. “Sure,” he said. “Tee Jay belongs.”

  “The point is, though, Tee Jay’s been acting real weird lately,” said Muffy. Muffy was small and pretty, with one of the most complicated braids that Jim had ever seen. It was looped and butterfly-bowed and decorated wit
h ribbons and beads. She must have woken up at about five in the morning to get it right in time for college. Tee Jay and Muffy had dated for two or three weeks, but Tee Jay had been quiet and laconic while Muffy was like an explosion in a firecracker factory.

  Up until yesterday, of course, when Tee Jay had exploded, too.

  “What do you mean by weird?” Jim asked Muffy.

  “Well, he was always so cool, wasn’t he?” said Muffy. “Like nothing ever fazed him, ever. But in the last two or three weeks, he went right into himself. He didn’t hardly speak to nobody. You must have noticed in class.”

  Jim said, “I didn’t notice at the time, no. But now you come to mention it.” And he thought of the paintings that Ellie had shown him, the skewered men walking through the jungle, the woman devouring her new-born baby.

  “I think he had some kind of trouble at home,” said Muffy. “He wouldn’t talk about it, but I know for a fact that he slept in his car one time; and another time he called me up at two in the morning and asked if he could crash at my place. I mean, I couldn’t. My parents would’ve wigged.”

  Jim walked slowly to the front of the class. “Did anybody else notice that Tee Jay was acting strange?”

  “He started bringing me down for being Jewish,” said Sherma Feldstein – a dark, plump, pretty girl with a beauty spot and thick black eyebrows. “He kept saying there was only one religion and that was his. He said that all Jews were – well, he used a rude word.”

  “Did he tell you what his religion was?” asked Jim.

  Sherma shook her head. “He tried to explain it. He kept on talking about crows and mirrors and candles; and there was something about dust, too. Breathing in dust.”

  “Could you make any sense of that?”

  “Unh-unh,” said Sherma. “And he wouldn’t explain himself, either. He said if I didn’t understand it now I never would.”

  “I noticed something else, too,” put in Beattie McCordic. “He was out playing that game where you throw one of those round things over a net. It was hot and he stripped off the thing he was wearing on his top. He had all these marks on his back.”

  “You mean a tattoo?” Jim asked her.

  “No, no. Like lumps, when you cut yourself. What do you call them?”

  “You’re talking about scars?”

  “That’s right, scars. In all these kind of like circles.”

  “Well, I guess if anybody wants to have circles on their back, who are we to say that they can’t? He’s probably had them for years.”

  “No, he hasn’t. They’re really new. Like they’re still red-raw and all.”

  Sharon Mitchell put up her hand. Sharon was as militant about black rights as Beattie was for women’s rights. She was strikingly pretty, but she was very tall, almost 6ft 1ins, and she had suffered all of her life for being gawky, and black, and a girl. She always signed her essays ‘Sharon X’, in honour of the Black Muslims, and Jim never called her anything else. This was a time in their lives when his students needed to be taken seriously, no matter how rebellious and irrational they seemed to be. They felt bad enough about themselves as it was. They didn’t need anybody else making fun of them.

  Sharon said, “Some people in Africa do that. It’s a manhood thing. It’s supposed to show that a boy can put up with pain; but also it shows what spirit you belong to.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Well, some tribes have these guardian spirits who are supposed to look after them all of their lives. The same as godparents, you know. When a boy reaches manhood, the elders choose a spirit for him, and that spirit is supposed to protect him and give him good advice and kill his enemies for him.”

  Kill his enemies? thought Jim, remembering the dark-suited figure coming out of the boiler-house. He said, “That’s interesting, Sharon. I’d like to know some more about that.”

  “I’ve got plenty of books at home. I’ll bring them to college and you can read them for yourself.”

  Jim looked around the class. “I’ll be going to see Elvin’s parents later today, and I’m sure that you’d all like me to take a message of condolence. Tomorrow I’d like you all to pool your efforts and make a sympathy card, so that you can all sign it.

  “I’ve been thinking all night of what I could say to you today about Elvin. But I believe the best I can do is read you these words by Emily Dickinson.”

  He picked up a book and opened it. The class was so quiet that he could hear them breathing.

  “ ‘Because I could not stop for Death,

  He kindly stopped for me;

  The carriage held but just ourselves

  And Immortality.

  “ ‘We passed the school, where children strove

  At recess, in the ring;

  We passed the fields of gazing grain

  We passed the setting sun.

  “ ‘Since then ‘tis centuries, and yet

  Feels shorter than the day

  I first surmised the horses’ heads

  Were toward eternity.”

  He lowered the book. Sitting right in front of him, Jane Firman had tears trickling down her cheeks. She and Elvin had both suffered from dyslexia, and they had spent hours together, struggling to make sense of their books. Elvin’s sudden absence was more than she could bear.

  Even Ricky Herman was wiping his eyes with his sleeve, and Sherma had her face covered by her hands.

  “Okay,” said Jim, gently. “Let’s have a minute’s silence, shall we, so that we can all say our own private prayers.”

  The class sat with bowed heads. For the first time ever, Mark and Ricky weren’t giggling and shuffling. Russell’s stomach rumbled, but nobody laughed. It just seemed to make the silence even more poignant. Life was going on as normal and Elvin wasn’t here.

  The minute was almost over when Jim’s attention was caught by a flickering shadow on the other side of the yard. It was a bright day, and the porch that led to the main building was deep in darkness. But Jim was sure he had seen something moving. He walked slowly over to the window and peered out. At first he couldn’t see what it was, but gradually he was able to make out the figure of a man, standing close to one of the supporting pillars. He was dressed in black, and against his chest he was holding a black wide-brimmed hat.

  Jim beckoned to Titus Greenspan III. Titus was wearing a T-shirt with bright pink stripes across it. With his bulgy black eyes and his nervous, querulous manner, he looked like an oversized prawn. “Titus … come here. That’s it, get out of your desk and come over here. Now I want you to look out of the window … over there. You see where the porch is? You see the right-hand pillar?”

  “Which one is that?” asked Titus, blinking.

  “It’s the pillar on the same side as your right hand. No, this hand. Now, can you see anybody standing beside that pillar? It’s pretty shadowy, but look hard. A man in a black suit holding a hat.”

  Titus stared and stared, but in the end he slowly shook his head.

  “Is this some kind of intelligence test?” he wanted to know.

  Jim looked back at the porch and the man was still clearly in sight. In fact he had taken a step forward so that he was easier to see.

  “You can’t see a man standing beside that right-hand pillar, with a hat in his hand? Come on, look again.” (For a split-second, Jim was tempted to add, ‘What are you, for Christ’s sake, blind?’ but he managed to bite his tongue.)

  Titus stared across the yard for over half a minute, the tip of his tongue gripped between his teeth. At last, he said, “Nope. I’m sorry, Mr Rook. Hff. No can see.”

  “Ricky, come here,” Jim beckoned him; and then he pointed. “Look over there. You see that man, standing in the porch? Just left of that pillar.”

  Ricky stared across the yard, but then he let out a whinnying noise and said, “No. Sorry, Mr Rook. I don’t see nobody.”

  “All right,” Jim told him. “Go back to your seat. Wait here everybody. Take out your poetry readers and see
what you can make of page 26 … Dead Boy, by John Crowe Ransom. And don’t just read it, think when you read it, think what it means. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  He left the classroom and hurried along the floor-waxed corridor. He pushed open the swing door with its wire-glazed windows, into the sunshine. He ran across the tarmac yard, toward the porch. And the man was still there. The man in the black suit, holding his wide black hat over his heart. But as soon as he saw Jim running toward him, he rolled away from the pillar in a brief kerfuffle of black, and then he was gone. By the time that Jim reached the porch, panting, the door to the main building was slowly easing its way closed with a quiet pneumatic pifff! and the man had vanished.

  Jim wrenched open the door and stepped inside. He listened for the sound of running, but the building echoed with nothing more than the voices of teachers and the slow, plangent echoing of a piano lesson. Für Elise played note by hesitant note.

  He walked half-way down the main corridor, looking into every classroom window. His footsteps echoed and re-echoed. This was where the most promising students were taught: the students who would graduate with honours, and find themselves a well-paying job. Very few of them would ever be really famous, or really rich. But the college had taught them to work hard, and to apply themselves; and in return most of them had realised that we can’t all be Michael Jackson, or Demi Moore.

  Jim’s class hadn’t learned that yet, and maybe they never would. But that was what made them Special Class II.

  Jim stopped; and he was about to turn back; when the tall man in the black suit appeared at the very far end of the corridor, half-blurred by the sunlight, and started to tug off his gloves, finger by finger. Jim said nothing for a while, but watched him, his heart beating like an overwound wrist-watch. The man’s face was so overshadowed by the brim of his hat that it was still impossible to tell if he was black or white. His head was slightly lowered and he appeared to be waiting. Jim couldn’t make up his mind if he was waiting for him, or not. He certainly wasn’t going to approach him until he knew for sure that he was unarmed; and even then he was going to be cautious. The man must have been at least six inches taller than Jim: square-shouldered, and brooding, and shadowy. Now he knew what Mrs Vaizey meant by an aura. This man carried with him a smoldering, dangerous atmosphere of his own like a thick cloud of volcanic ash. No brilliance here. No rainbow. Not even any mottled colours. He was burning up as darkly as Mount St Helen’s.