The Collected Short Fiction

The Old School (1989)

The house was locked. Dean strolled around the outside for a quarter of an hour, gazing through the tall windows at displays of roped-off rooms, and then he climbed the wide steps to the balcony. A lawn broader than his eyesight offered shrubberies and formal gardens and tree-lined walks. At the edge of the lawn, almost half a mile away, woods blotted out every vestige of the further world.

He'd known for years that the house was less than an hour's drive from home. Even better, it was only half an hour from the new town and the school. He could drive here after teaching, when he needed to relax and be taken out of himself. He was gazing at a distant shrubbery, where either mossy statues were hidden in the foliage or the topiary itself was shaped into faces, when the August sun found a gap in the flock of fat white clouds. Sunlight wakened all the drops of rain that still lingered from the afternoon, seeds of rainbows everywhere he looked, and the sight washed away his thoughts.

As he leaned on the parapet, no longer aware of the cold stone through the leather that patched the elbows of his jacket, he heard a sound he would have hoped to have left behind in the new town. Someone was kicking a tin can. He sighed and straightened up, automatically brushing his hair back over as much of his scalp as it would cover these days. Perhaps the tinny footballer was a gardener, and would desist when he saw the place had a visitor.

Dean heard a more determined kick, and the can landed deep in a bush. Three children appeared around the side of the house, two boys and a girl who wore high heels and lipstick so crimson Dean could see it even at that distance. The boy with a black eye poked at the bush with a stick while the other boy, whose pate looked dusty with stubble, danced hyperactively around him. Branches snapped, the can sprang into the air, and the boys jostled after it towards the steps.

The game ended when the hyperactive boy leapt on the can and trod it flat. His friend made a gesture of generalized menace with the stick and chopped twigs off bushes as he went back to demand a share of the girl's cigarette. The children were about eleven years old, Dean saw. He ought to interfere, though he felt as if there were nowhere his job would leave him alone this side of the grave. When he saw the children whisper and glance warily about, not noticing him, before converging on the nearest window, he went down the steps.

The children veered away at once. The girl blinked over her shoulder at him and nudged her companions, who glanced back, whistling tunelessly. The boy with the stick turned first, raising his shoulders like a boxer, and Dean saw that the bruise around his right eye was a birthmark. "Hello, sir," the boy said like a challenge.

They were from the school where Dean taught. He'd seen the boy in the junior schoolyard, thumping children for calling him Spot the Dog. Surely Dean needn't play this scene like a schoolmaster. "Enjoying your holidays?" he said in his best end-of-term voice.

They stared at him as if he'd made an insultingly feeble joke. "They're all right," the girl mumbled, treading on her cigarette.

"So long as you don't enjoy them at other people's expense. Spoiling them for others might mean you'll spoil them for yourselves."

The hyperactive boy jiggled his head as if to a beat only he could hear, the boy with the black eye swung his stick like a rod divining violence, the girl dug her hands into the pockets of her short faded second-hand dress and stared morosely at her budding breasts. "So have you something to do?" Dean said.

"Like what?" said the boy with the stick.

"Surely you know a few games."

"We've nothing to play with," the girl complained.

"Can't you play with yourselves?" Dean said, and had to laugh at his choice of words. At least that prompted the children to laugh out loud too. "If I were you," he said, "I'd be using this place to play hide and seek."

"Why don't you, then?"

"He won't play with us," the boy with the birthmark said with what sounded like bitterness.

If he were in Dean's class Dean wouldn't treat him with undue sympathy, would insist he join in activities like everyone else. "Of course I'll play if you want me to," Dean blurted, and added when they smirked incredulously: "I'm off school too, you know."

"Suppose so," the girl said as if she were humoring him. "You know how to play Blocko, don't you?"

"Remind me."

"Whoever's It has to count fifty and then try and find us, and run back here and shout 'Blocko Tina one two three' if they've seen me, or Burt if it's him, or Jacko if it's him. Watch out with that stick, Jacko, or you'll hit someone."

She had already been addressing the teacher in the same maternal tone. She began to point at each of them in turn as she chanted:

"Girls and boys come out to play, The moon does shine as bright as day. Eeny meeny miney mo, Bone in the wind and it points at you."

"It's sir," Burt shouted, eager to be running. Jacko struck his own thigh several times with the stick while Tina removed her shoes so as to be quicker. Dean covered his eyes and turning to the steps, began to count. "You have to count so we can hear you," Tina told him.

"One!" Dean pronounced in a voice capable of traveling the length of both schoolyards. "Two! Three!..." He heard the children scatter, and then only his voice. "... Forty-nine! Fifty! Here I come!" he shouted, and swung around to find a couple in their sixties staring warily at him from beside a corner of the house. "I beg your pardon?" the woman said in a voice that refused to admit where she came from.

"Blocko," Dean explained with a conspiratorial grimace.

The man's face grew alarmingly like empurpled blancmange, and he pointed at Dean with his knuckly cane. "What did you say to my wife?"

"Blocko. The children's game, you know. You'll see the children any minute."

The woman grabbed her husband's arm. "What's that about children? Is he raving?"

"Everything's under control, madam. I'm a teacher."

"He says he's their teacher," the man communicated even more loudly.

"Not their teacher," Dean said, and gave up. He crept towards the shrubberies while the couple watched him suspiciously. They distracted him, and so did noticing that there weren't any statues or anything like faces where he thought he'd seen some. He was out of sight of the steps when Tina announced her return there and the boys joined her, shouting.

The suspicious couple had stayed near the steps. As Dean jogged back the woman announced, "He said he wasn't their teacher."

"Then he's up to no good."

Tina brandished her shoes at them. "You leave him alone. He's from our school."

Burt commenced swinging his stick in defense of her or of Dean, and the teacher said hastily, "Time for another game. Off you all go."

This game wasn't too successful. When he pounced on a movement which he glimpsed beyond a shrubbery he came face to face with the elderly couple, though he'd thought he had heard them retreating around one corner of the house. They glared at him as if he'd invaded their bedroom, and he could only jog away as if he hadn't noticed them, trying not to swing his arms too vigorously and yet concerned that he might appear sloppy otherwise, feeling as if he were trapped into miming enjoyment while pretending that he had no audience. When he turned tail and ran back to the steps they followed him, though he was running because he'd seen Tina lurch into view beyond a hedge behind them. "Blocko Tina one two three," he declared.

Tina put on her shoes and stamped. "That wasn't fair. Burt or Jacko scared me, whispering behind me."

The boys appeared around opposite corners of the house, and Dean counted them out. "It couldn't have been the boys, Tina. They were nowhere near you."

"Thank God something frightens her," the woman told nobody in particular. "Children respect nothing these days."

"We aren't frightened of you," Burt said, punching the air.

"You wouldn't dare say that to anyone if you were from the boarding school," the man rumbled, jabbing his cane in the direction of the woods. "That's what teaching should be. You'd be terrified to open your mouth until you were told."

"You're right, Tina, it isn't fair. I'll be It again," Dean said. He began counting very slowly, staring at the couple until they moved away. As the children ran off between the shrubberies, arguing in low voices about something, he closed his eyes.

Now that he'd started counting so slowly he found that he couldn't speed up. In the pauses between numbers he heard the wind in the leaves, the footsteps of the couple marching regally away along the gravel drive, stealthy movements that must be the children tiptoeing around him at some distance, though once he thought he heard a whisper unexpectedly close to him. "Fifty!" he shouted at last, and looked.

The lawn was deserted. He'd already deduced from the movements he'd heard that the children had crept around the house. He was cupping each ear in turn towards the ends of the facade when he caught sight of a child among the trees at the edge of the lawn.

It was a boy—he wasn't sure which one. Dean might have called out, but that wouldn't be fair until he could say the name. In any case, the child wouldn't be able to reach the steps before Dean. He paced towards the trees, keeping his gaze on the boy's face.

At first he thought the child was staying still and hoping that Dean hadn't seen him, and then he realized that the small face was withdrawing through the tall undergrowth at exactly the speed of Dean's approach. The sight made Dean's eyes feel shaky, the child's face seeming to appear and vanish as the shadows of foliage camouflaged it, made it shift and turned it greener. He sprinted towards the woods so as to be able to put a name to it, and at once he couldn't see it at all. Presumably the other children were also in the woods, or they would have been able to saunter to the steps by now. He peered between the trees as he ran to the edge of the lawn.

He could see no obvious path into the woods. Here and there the undergrowth had been trampled, but not for any great distance. Dean headed straight for the place where he had last seen the boy, who must have reached it by another route, since the undergrowth between it and the lawn was undisturbed. Stepping over ferns and spiky grass, raindrops speckling his trousers and darkening his shoes, Dean stole into the woods. As soon as he was out of the direct sunlight, he saw a child's face blurred by shadows, watching him from the undergrowth between the trees ahead.

The sound of children's voices made him glance towards the house. Three children were walking away along the drive: Tina and the two boys. If they'd tired of the game, who was Dean tracking? He swung round, and glimpsed the boy's face in the instant before it fled, leaving a patch of ferns and grass swaying. The boy was several years younger than Tina and her friends. The idea of such a young child roaming the woods, especially so close to nightfall, dismayed Dean. "Hold on," he called. "I wasn't chasing you. Don't run away."

The trees had begun to vibrate with his scrutiny when he saw the face again, five or six trees further off. He held up one hand and was opening his mouth when the face was swallowed by shadows again and reappeared deeper into the woods. "Don't be frightened," Dean shouted. "I'm a teacher."

The child's face quivered and disappeared. The movement was so violent that it must have been mostly of the low foliage through which the child had been watching. Dean was wondering if he should pretend indifference—if that would coax the boy into the open— when he realized that the child had fled because he'd identified himself as a teacher. He had to assume that the boy was from the boarding school beyond the woods.

Sometimes Dean found it necessary to play the ogre with his classes, but he didn't enjoy it much. The idea of relishing children's fears, as the elderly couple had, disgusted him. When he managed to locate the boy's face again, in the midst of a cluster of leaves, he went forward. He wanted to see the child safe, but also to judge whether the school was as terrible as the couple would like to believe, though he didn't know what he would do if he found that it was.

The woods proved to be even more extensive than they had appeared from the balcony. He must have walked in as straight a line as the trees and patches of marshy ground would allow for nearly half an hour. Before long he saw that there was more than one child. As soon as he glimpsed any of the faces in the foliage or undergrowth, they retreated into the leafy shadows. They were letting him see them, he realized: they were continuing the game he'd started with Tina and the boys. He wished he could enjoy it more. Once when he was sick in bed with a childhood fever, he'd seen the wallpaper piled high with faces like skulls in a catacomb, and since then the kind of picture puzzle where you had to discover faces hidden in foliage had made him feel feverish too, but now he was nervous also because the boys—five or six of them, he thought there were—seemed to be fleeing from him as much as playing.

By the time he came close enough to the far edge of the woods to be able to distinguish a building through the trees, he was having to pick his way over roots. In the growing dimness the faces of the children were barely visible, through a bush at the edge of the woods. He wasn't even sure that he was seeing them, for when a breeze rustled through the foliage, the greenish faces appeared to separate into fragments that recombined grotesquely. Increasingly nervous, he stumbled out of the woods.

The sight of the school made him catch his breath. For a moment he thought that the long Victorian building, all gloomy red brick and high pinched windows, looked decaying only because the twilight was filling the windows with darkness, and then he saw that it was derelict. The windows were empty of glass, the grounds were rubbly and overgrown; the school must have been abandoned years ago. All the same, he knew instinctively that it had been almost as grim and daunting when it was in use.

A movement at one of the windows overlooking the woods drew his attention. A face was watching him from inside the school—the face of the boy he had followed into the woods. "Stay right where you are, son," Dean shouted. "Don't run off in there, it could be dangerous."

He gritted his teeth as the face vanished. The boy must have stepped back into the dimness. In the poor light the face had seemed to collapse into itself. "What's the matter with you?" Dean said through his teeth, and ran towards the school, across lumps of stone that had been a harsh schoolyard.

The entrance door nearest to the woods was ajar. Presumably that was how the boy, or however many of them were inside, had got in, since the windows were too high for even Dean to reach. He squeezed past the door, which appeared to be wedged open, and halted in the corridor.

He was standing still in order to listen for movements that would help him locate the children, but more than that had halted him. Something was wrong with the place, with the long bleak stone-floored corridor that led past a series of classroom doors, their upper panels gaping. He hadn't time to stand there, he had to take the children somewhere safer before night fell. He strode along the corridor, pushing the doors open.

He could see nothing of significance in any of the rooms. In the corner of one a legless desk crouched, its distorted lid grinning beneath the single blotchy socket of the inkwell; in another classroom a few chalk marks glimmered on a blackboard like bones hovering in darkness. Despite the emptiness, something was waiting for him beyond the doors, accumulating like the twilight as he went from room to room, as he stared at the desertion where ranks of desks trapping children had stood, no doubt silent as the emptiness was now except for a single voice and a timid response: it was fear.

It wasn't his, he told himself, except insofar as the place reminded him of the worst of his own schooldays. How afraid must the children have been for their fear to have lingered almost palpably in the air? They wouldn't have been able to see the outside world from their desks, and the outside world wouldn't have been able to see in, not that it would have bothered to look. The children must have felt they were in prison without visitors, at the absolute mercy of the staff.

Dean tried to think he was exaggerating, but that would mean some of the fear was his. Certainly the rooms were beginning to make him nervous, because he'd realized what was wrong with them: they were too empty, and so was the corridor. Where were the dust and cobwebs and dead leaves that the building should have accumulated? He was also wondering how the child had managed to look out at him from such a high window when there was nothing to stand on in the classrooms; the broken desk wouldn't have served. He could only think the boy had balanced on someone else's shoulders.

He'd peered into at least a dozen rooms, which seemed more and more to him like huge pitiless cells, when he came to the assembly hall that divided the corridor from its twin. The hall would have held several hundred children, and he felt as if it had retained their fear, imprisoned or awakened by the growing dark. He mustn't let the place or his imagination get to him. He was heading for the opposite corridor when he noticed a door under the stage at the far end of the hall.

It was half open. In the dark beyond it he thought he saw the glint of an eye, watching him. He crossed the hall quickly, his footsteps echoing through the school as though to demonstrate the extent of the darkness. Fumbling a book of matches out of his pocket, he ducked under the stage. His fingertip counted the matches: one, two, three, only four. He tore one out and struck it, and the gleam leapt at him.

He hadn't seen an eye after all, but the smashed glass on a school photograph. Photographs were stacked as high as the underside of the stage, and a few leaned against the stack. Apart from the photographs, the space was as bare as the rest of the school so far. The picture in front of him was older than the wars, he saw from the date on the frame. Tiny faces brown with age stared at him through the broken glass as the match burned down, and just as it singed his fingers he thought he recognized some of the faces. He shook it out and struck another, and shuffled forward on his knees to pull the photograph towards him. Among the unsmiling teenagers in the tallest rank of schoolboys lined up in front of the building, there were older versions of the faces of all the boys he'd followed through the woods.

The boys in the photograph must have grown up to be their grandparents, he thought, but what possessed the parents to let their children play here so late? He let go of the photograph, intending to back out from under the stage. The photograph fell flat, taking several with it and revealing the one closest to the stack. Pressed beneath the glass of that photograph were faces more familiar than those he'd just seen.

Dean hobbled forward, bruising his knees, holding the match high, hoping to be proved wrong—but there was no mistake. At the front of the photograph, where the youngest boys sat crosslegged, were all the children whose faces he'd seen in the woods. He lowered the match shakily to the frame, and read the date. The photograph was ten years older than the other he'd examined. The match went out, burying him in darkness.

The photograph was too old for the boys to be still alive, let alone looking like children. His mind flinched from that and from an even more dismaying thought: why would they have come back here, when there could have been nowhere they were more afraid of? He was staring into the dark, no longer searching but trying to hide, when he heard movement behind him.

He scrabbled round on all fours, afraid to see, more afraid not to. The fear around him was almost suffocating, and he felt as if it had changed the texture of the floor beneath him. Just beyond the doorway under the stage, dim shapes that looked thin and malformed were crowding, blocking his way. Though his hands were trembling so badly that he almost dropped the matchbook, he managed to light the third match.

The figures—far more numerous than in the woods—were mostly faces and spidery limbs. The nearest face was the one he'd first seen. This close he was able to see that it and its companions had no eyes to speak of, though they appeared to have done their best not to look imcomplete. The substance of the faces and of their token bodies was shifting, not only because the match was quivering. All at once the wind that he could hear blundering about the school flung the figures at him.

As Dean shrank back, they collapsed like discarded puppets. The nearest face fell inward, as it had when he'd seen it at the window, and the materials of which the figures had been composed fluttered across the boards at him: dust, dead leaves and other vegetation, cobwebs loaded with husks of insects. The wind that was driving all this blew out the match, and he was crouching in the dark when he heard the wind slam the entrance door with a click of the lock that resounded through the school.

Dean pressed his hands and his scalp against the underside of the stage as if that could give him strength or at least stop him shivering, but the wood felt softened by fear. Only his brain seemed capable of action, his thoughts chattering desperately as though an explanation could somehow end what was happening. Suppose, he thought, the experience of finding yourself suddenly dead and bodiless was so terrifying that you would use anything you could grasp to persuade yourself that you still had substance, however temporarily? Suppose finding yourself dead was so reminiscent of the greatest terror of your life that you were snatched back to it? Suppose you felt so vulnerable that your mind could only take refuge in the familiarity of remembered terror and imprison you there? None of these ideas helped him deal with the movements he could just see between him and the doorway, shapes wavering up from the floor, remaking themselves. He was struggling not to retreat further under the stage, away from any possibility of escape, when he heard the remains of a voice, hardly a whisper, more like a thought that wasn't his. "He's a teacher," it said.

The shapes leaned towards him, jerrybuilt heads wavering on rickety necks. "Not like the teachers who were here," Dean pleaded in a voice whose smallness shocked him. "I wouldn't have treated you like that."

There was a rustle of dead things as they crowded around him. "Chase us," said part of the rustling.

They wanted to be frightened, Dean thought in dismay: it was all they knew now. He needn't be frightened, his mind babbled; they were nothing but cobwebs and litter. He wouldn't play, they couldn't make him play. He brandished the unlit match at them as if the threat would keep them off. Perhaps when they saw he wasn't playing they would leave him alone, give him the chance to escape without having to touch them, and if not, he had only to stay still. "I won't ever come back here," he was muttering over and over, like a promise to them or to himself. "I mustn't come back here." He need only stay still until he could see his way out, until dawn.

At first he managed not to run, even when they started touching him to make him chase them. Eventually the touch of spindly disintegrating fingers proved unbearable. He crawled sobbing from under the stage and began to run back and forth through the lightless building, up and down the corridors, in and out of the rooms, leaping at the inaccessible windows, turning tail whenever he ran into something hiding in the dark. Soon he didn't know if he was giggling with fear or they were, nor whether he was chasing or being chased. He only knew that he was willing to play. Indeed, it seemed he might never stop.