Rook & Tooth and Claw Page 5

  It sounded as if he were humming, too, a strange monotonous drone interspersed with occasional growls deep down in his throat.

  “I don’t know who you are,” Jim called out, trying to sound authoritative, “but this is college property and you’re trespassing!”

  There was a silence as long as the end of a tape-cassette, before it starts playing Side Two.

  Then – “You can see me, can you?” the man replied. His voice sounded like somebody dragging a wet sack across a concrete floor.

  “If I couldn’t see you, I wouldn’t be telling you to leave, would I?”

  “Of course you wouldn’t, no.” The man paused again, and thought about that, and then he said, “I suspected that you could see me, the way you came rushing out of that schoolroom yesterday, before nothing had happened. There aren’t too many like you, I’m happy to say. People who can see.”

  “I think you and me had better talk to the police, don’t you, sir?” said Jim.

  “The police? What would be the point of that? They wouldn’t be able to see me.”

  “A boy was killed in that boiler-house, and you were the last person to leave it.”

  “You mean Elvin. Alas poor Elvin. I didn’t know him too well.”

  The man was paraphrasing Hamlet. “Don’t mock him,” said Jim, although the man was probably mocking him, too, the English teacher.

  “I don’t need to mock him,” the man replied. “He mocked himself. He mocked his own race.”

  “And that’s why you murdered him?”

  The man said nothing for a while. Then he held out both of his hands. “Do you know something, you and me ought to be friends. I could use a friend with the gift of sight; a friend who can actually see me. I’ve had friends before, for sure.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Jim demanded.

  “Oh, come on, now, Jim; you know what I’m talking about. People who can see. Kids who were dropped on their heads. Men who were cut out of automobile wrecks. Women who tried to give birth in toilets, and almost bled to death. They could see, those people, but most of the time they were pretty slow on the uptake – even if they hadn’t been brain-damaged. Unlike you, Mr Rook. You can see; but you’re clever, too. I could sure use a friend like you.”

  “Who are you?” said Jim. He was quaking with rage, but he didn’t dare to step any closer.

  There was another long silence, but then the man said, “Somebody has to keep the faith, Mr Rook. Somebody has to keep the lamps lit. Some people say we should forgive and forget, but I can’t do neither, and I never will.”

  The man’s image seemed to shudder. Then, quite silently, he turned away, and opened up the door to the geography room. He disappeared inside and quickly closed the door behind him.

  Jim ran to the geography room and peered in through the window. It was empty apart from the man making his way between the desks, with his back turned. Where the hell was he going? This was the only door, and for safety’s sake the windows couldn’t be opened up wide enough for anybody to climb out. Jim twisted the handle, but the door wouldn’t open. He rattled it, and banged on the window with his fist, but the man kept walking across the room toward the opposite corner.

  But the further away he walked, the taller he seemed to be. He grew, stretched, as if the room’s perspective had been reversed. By the time he was half-way across the room he must have been seven or eight feet tall; and when he reached the wall and turned around, he was standing higher than the picture-rail.

  Jim stopped rattling the doorhandle and stared at the man in total dread. This time he could see his face, grinning at him from the top of his dark, attenuated body. It was the face of a black man, his eyes yellow, his cheeks marked with scars. The skin around his mouth was deeply lined, so that it looked as if his lips had been sewn together, like a shrunken head.

  But it was his height that unnerved Jim the most. His hat almost touched the ceiling, and his arms were so long that they could reach half-way along the walls.

  Für Elise continued to echo along the corridor: a plonking, mundane counterpoint to the horror inside the geography room.

  Jim looked at the man for one more hair-prickling moment. Then he turned and ran to the principal’s office, beside the entrance-hall. Dr Ehrlichman’s secretary was arranging some flowers on the windowsill when Jim came skidding in. She had big ash-blonde hair and oversized spectacles, and she always wore fussy blouses with lacy collars and cuffs.

  “Sylvia – call the cops!” Jim told her.

  “Mr Rook! The police? What on earth for?”

  “There’s a man – it’s the same guy I saw yesterday – he’s locked himself in the geography room. Now, please, will you call the cops!”

  Sylvia dithered, so Jim picked up the phone himself and punched out 911. “Yes – West Grove College – will you please dispatch somebody fast before he gets away. And if you can get a message to Lieutenant Harris – that’s right, he’s been handling the whole investigation. Yes.”

  He put down the phone just as Dr Ehrlichman came out of his office. Dr Ehrlichman was small and neat, with a bald suntanned head and a voice like Micky Rooney. He always wore grey Sta-Prest slacks and a crisp short-sleeved white shirt and his favourite word was ‘businesslike’. “Jim – what’s going on here?”

  “It’s the same guy that I saw yesterday,” said Jim. “The one who was coming out of the boiler-house when Elvin got stabbed. He’s here. He’s right here in the building.”

  “You’ve called Mr Wallechinsky?”

  “I’ve called the police.”

  “Jim, listen to me. We pay good money for Mr Wallechinsky and there’s a reason for that. He’s an ex-cop. He knows how to deal with security problems. And you know college policy, don’t you? Nobody calls the police to this college without my say-so. Can you imagine the kind of reputation we’re going to get? Yesterday’s incident was serious enough, without compounding it.”

  Jim pointed toward the geography room, his arm rigid. “Dr Ehrlichman, there’s a guy in this building who stabbed one of our students so many times that even the medical examiner could hardly count how many holes he had in him. And you think Wallechinsky could deal with somebody like that?”

  Dr Ehrlichman said, “Mr Wallechinsky is a good man. Sylvia – do you mind giving him a call? Let’s see if we can deal with this problem in-house.”

  “I’m warning you,” Jim told him. “This guy is not an ordinary guy. Not by any stretch of the imagination.”

  Dr Ehrlichman took off his spectacles and looked at Jim bulgy-eyed. “I don’t think you’re the one who ought to be talking about stretches of the imagination, Jim. Nobody else saw your man in black yesterday, and so far nobody’s seen him today.”

  “Then come look,” Jim urged him.

  “When Mr Wallechinsky’s here – then, yes, I will.”

  Jim said, “I was talking to a woman last night. She’s kind of an expert when it comes to things like this. She said that it’s possible for some people to leave their bodies and walk around. They don’t have to be dead or anything. But the whole point is, only certain people can see them. People who have come within a whisker of dying. That near-death experience gives them an ability to see things that most people can’t. Dr Ehrlichman, we have invisible spirits walking among us, all the time. But the trouble is, we simply don’t have the eyes to see.”

  Dr Ehrlichman replaced his glasses and stared at him as if he was having an afternoon off from the madhouse. “You haven’t been drinking, Jim, have you?”

  “Of course not. What do you want to do, smell my breath?”

  “You haven’t been smoking? Or snorting? Or whatever it is you people do these days?”

  “I’m a teacher, Dr Ehrlichman. I don’t come to college stoned or drunk or even impatient.”

  Dr Ehrlichman looked unconvinced, but at that moment George Wallechinsky arrived, six feet five inches of lumpy human tissue in a tight brown uniform. His face was broad, with two ti
ny expressionless eyes, buried in his flesh like two sultanas buried in a bread pudding.

  “George,” said Dr Ehrlichman, briskly, “it seems like we’ve got ourselves an intruder. Mr Rook says that he’s locked himself into the geography room.”

  Wallechinsky sniffed, and cleared his throat. “How long ago was this?”

  “Five minutes; not more.”

  “Did you ever see the individual before?”

  “Sure. I saw him yesterday, coming out the boiler-house, just before Elvin was killed. In fact he was the only reason I went over there, to see what was going on.”

  “You sure it’s the same individual?”

  “Believe me, Mr Wallechinsky, there’s only one guy like this.”

  “Okay, then. Let’s go take a look. You’re sure he’s not a college inspector? Sometimes they send inspectors by surprise.”

  Wallechinsky waddled steadfastly in front of them, all the way down the corridor, his keys jingling on his belt. “This it?” He stopped outside the door of the geography room and looked inside, stooping down so that he could see the ceiling, then angling his head close to the glass so that he could see the floors and corners.

  “This room is empty, so far as I can see,” he reported. He tried the handle, rattling and shaking it, but it was still locked, or jammed, and he gave it up.

  “Did he have any kind of weapon?” he asked Jim.

  “Is he there?” Dr Ehrlichman demanded.

  “Well, I can’t see anything, Mr Principal, sir; but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s nothing there. He could be pressing himself flat against the wall here; or behind this here bookcase; or even under the teacher’s desk.”

  Dr Ehrlichman pressed his nose flat against the window. “No,” he said. “He’s gone. That’s if he ever existed at all.”

  Jim said, “He was there, Dr Ehrlichman. He even spoke to me.”

  “I’d like a talk with you later, Jim,” Dr Ehrlichman told him. “Mr Wallechinsky, you’d better call the police and tell them it was a false alarm.”

  “I’d like to check the room first, Dr Ehrlichman,” said Wallechinsky. He lifted his keyring, heavy with all kinds of keys, and picked out the one which would open the geography-room door. He inserted it, and turned.

  “It’s not locked,” he said, in surprise.

  “What do you mean it’s not locked?” Dr Ehrlichman demanded. He seized the handle and shook it until he almost pulled it off.

  “No disrespect, Dr Ehrlichman, sir. But I mean it’s not locked.”

  “Then open it.”

  Wallechinsky reached out for the handle, but Jim lifted his hand and stopped him. “Let me,” he said. He hesitated for a moment, and then he opened the door with no trouble at all. He pushed it, and it swung open, so that sunlight fell across the corridor and illuminated their shoes. Dr Ehrlichman’s brown rubber-soled lace-ups; Wallechinsky’s highly-polished black boots; and Jim’s balding blue suede sneakers.

  Wallechinsky tried to push his way his inside, but Jim held out his arm to stop him. If Mrs Vaizey was right, then Wallechinsky wouldn’t be able to see the man in black anyway. Jim stepped into the classroom, looking right and left, ducking down so that he could check under the desk, then turning around to make sure that the man in black wasn’t hiding behind the bookcase.

  It was then that he saw him. He was no longer dressed in black, but all in white, and even his face was white, although it was still the face of an Afro-American. He looked as if he had been rolling in flour, or ashes. Even the pupils of his eyes were white, like lychees.

  He was up on the ceiling, lying horizontally against the cornice, his hands crossed over his chest as if he had been laid out in a funeral parlour. He wasn’t dead, though: he was staring at Jim with those milky white eyes and he was grinning in triumph.

  Wallechinsky came into the classroom and circled around it with the clumsiness of a purblind bear, peering behind bookcases and wallcharts as if a man could hide in a space less than an inch wide. He turned to Jim and saw that he was staring at the ceiling, and he stared up at it, too.

  “You want to tell me what you’re looking at?” he asked. “You don’t expect the guy to be up on the ceiling, do you?”

  Jim whispered, “You can’t see him, can you? You really can’t see him.”

  “See who?”

  “The intruder, that’s who. He’s there. Look. Use your imagination.”

  “You’re not trying to tell me he’s invisible? He’s up on the ceiling and he’s invisible? Come on, Mr Rook. Is this some kind of a practical joke?”

  Up above them, the man grinned even more widely. Jim couldn’t take his eyes away from him. He felt so terrified that he couldn’t speak; but what was worse than his terror was his sense of helplessness. In all his years as a remedial teacher, he had always been able to cope. But he couldn’t cope with this. Not logically, or emotionally, or any way at all. He had to stand in the middle of the geography room and admit to himself that there was nothing he could do, and that was the most horrifying feeling of all.

  Testily, Dr Ehrlichman said, “Are we done now? I’m extremely busy.”

  “Ain’t nobody here but us chickens, Mr Principal,” said Wallechinsky, giving Jim an exasperated shake of his head.

  “All right, then. You’d better call the police and tell them it was a false alarm.”

  He turned away. As he did so, the door slammed shut with such violence that the glass cracked and plaster dropped from the architrave. Dr Ehrlichman’s face immediately reappeared in the window, and he was shouting something, but Jim couldn’t hear what.

  Wallechinsky went for the door-handle and tried to pull it open, but it was stuck just as fast as it had been before.

  “Give me a hand here!” he called. But Jim could see what he couldn’t see; and that was the white-faced man slowly sinking from the ceiling, slowly turning around, so that he landed feet-first on the floor only four or five feet away from them. His shoes touched the floor completely silently, and with exaggerated grace. Jim backed away, colliding with one of the desks. The white-faced man lifted his hat and dust fell off it and sifted to the floor.

  “Will you please give me a hand here, sir?” Wallechinsky repeated. Outside the room, Dr Ehrlichman hammered on the door with his fist and shouted, “What’s going on? Will somebody tell me what the hell is going on?”

  The white-faced man was gliding toward Wallechinsky, smiling and gliding. When he was only two feet away, he stopped. He grasped his right wrist with his left hand, and twisted; and to Jim’s horror, his right hand rotated, around and around, until it came off altogether. A false hand, carved out of ebony and smothered with ash. But the white-faced man was left with more than a stump. Out of his right wrist protruded a long, wide-bladed knife, which looked as if it had been grafted into his bones. It gleamed in the sunlight, wickedly sharp; and the white-faced man mockingly waved it from side to side in front of Wallechinsky’s face, because he knew that Wallechinsky couldn’t see it.

  Jim said, “George, I want you to step back from the door.”

  “Trying to get the damn thing open,” Wallechinsky protested. “There’s no reason why it shoulda jammed.”

  “George! Get away from the door! Now! Quick! As fast as you can!”

  “Why? Do you think there’s some kinda—”

  Jim lunged forward and shoulder-tackled the white-faced man as hard as he could. He went right through him, as if he didn’t exist, and collided with the door, splitting the wood and hurting his shoulder so badly that he spun around, saying, “Shit, shit, shit,” over and over. He had felt the briefest of draughts when he passed through the white-faced man, like a fridge door opened and shut, but that was all.

  The white-faced man silently laughed, and circled his arm around and around, so that his knife actually whistled.

  “Don’t touch him,” Jim warned him. “You’ve done enough goddamned damage already.”

  “I haven’t done anything,” Wallechi
nsky complained. “Begging your pardon, sir, it’s you that broke the goddamned door.”

  “Just stay back,” Jim warned the white-faced man, edging away.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Wallechinsky. “Stay back from what?”

  But the white-faced man had made his way behind him, and was grinning at Jim over his shoulder, and there was something in those milk-white eyes that told Jim what he was going to do.

  “Listen,” he said. “You want me to be your friend? I’ll be your friend. I’ll do anything you want.”

  Wallechinsky looked deeply uneasy. “Listen, Mr Rook, I’m a married man. Three kids. A wife who’s put up with me for twenty-eight years.”

  “I don’t care what it is, I’ll do it,” said Jim.

  “Mr Rook, sir—”

  At that instant, with a sharp racketing noise, the door was kicked open from the outside, and two police officers came bursting into the geography room. Instantly, the white-faced man whipped up his knife and drew a line of blood down Wallechinsky’s right cheek, a razor-thin cut that Wallechinsky could have scarcely felt, because he didn’t even flinch. The white-faced man turned to Jim and said, “You’ve made me a promise, Mr Rook. I expect you to keep it. Otherwise, I’ll be back for this fellow, and then you’ll see what a knife can do.”

  He turned around and flowed out of the room as if he were no more substantial than a cloud of smoke from a summer bonfire. Jim was about to call out after him, but now he had two sceptical-looking cops in the room, as well as Wallechinsky and Dr Ehrlichman, and he decided it would be wiser for him to keep his mouth shut.

  “You hurt there, buddy?” asked one of the cops, pointing to Wallechinsky’s cheek. A thin scarlet stream of blood was running into his uniform collar.