Graveyard Shift (5 page)

From what I could see of his face, there wasn't too much of it left. Most of the flesh on its left side was gone. Half of his hair had been singed away, leaving a scorched black scalp.

Standing on either side of him, holding his hands, were the two children from the blazing building I'd read about, Mitch and Molly. It had to be them. They looked the right ages. They weren't in the same terrible shape as the adult, but their little round faces and clothing were sooty and smudged.

The girl wore a pale yellow nightdress and clutched a rag doll to her chest. The boy had on blue pajamas and held a teddy bear. They had the same shiny fair hair and sleepy blue eyes. They could've been twins.

“I need to sleep and I don't know how,” the boy murmured, rubbing his eyes.

“We're lost,” said his sister. “We're locked in and can't get out.”

“And you,” I said to the burned man. “Were you in the building too? How come there's no mention of you in the newspaper?”

“Ben?”

Miss Whittaker again, still a murmur, even farther away.

A distant sound of stifled laughter. The gasp of twenty-four students catching their breath.

Across the room, the threesome began slowly backing up to the door. “Help us,” they said, all three together. “Help us sleep.”

“But how? Tell me how. I don't know how!”

Uncontrollable tears filled my eyes, throwing everything in front of me out of focus. I took a step around the desk, meaning to follow them. The sudden pressure of a hand on my shoulder brought me back.

“It's all right,” Miss Whittaker was saying. “Whatever you saw isn't there now. Come with me.”

She took my arm, guiding me past the desk to the door. I couldn't look at the others as we passed.

I didn't need to, either. I knew they were staring at me in openmouthed wonder.

Sniffing back tears, I wiped my eyes with a forearm and followed Miss Whittaker out.

“This way, Ben, this way.”

She ushered me out to the dim corridor, her hand still holding my arm.

“We'll get you to the nurse,” she said.

“I don't need a nurse.”

“Let her have a look at you all the same, just to be sure.” Poking her head back inside the classroom, she said, “Now, children, no noise. Matthew, you're in charge while I'm gone.”

As she closed the door, I glanced inside the room. The man and the children were gone. She'd been right about that, even if she hadn't seen them herself.

There was a dark patch on the varnished floor more or less where they'd been sitting. Ashes, maybe, or a fragment of burned clothing. Or maybe only a scuff mark caused by the friction of chair legs scraping back and forth over it all down the years.

T
hrough the closed door of the nurse's bright but small office, I could hear them whispering out in the corridor.

Miss Whittaker said it must be first-day nerves, a little migraine perhaps. She said I seemed to be highly strung.

The nurse, dark-haired with a thin, unsmiling face, shone lights in my eyes and checked my throat and took my temperature. Temperature was a tad high, she said, but otherwise I was well enough to go home.

She scribbled something in a notebook, gave me an aspirin with water, and sent me on my way. It was a waste of time, and I didn't dare imagine what the others thought of me after what had happened back in the classroom.

But I knew what I'd seen.

 

Before going home I cut around from Middleton Road onto Henryd Street. If anyone had asked why I'd gone there, I wouldn't have known how to answer, except to say I needed to.

Above the fence that had been erected to protect the remains of the building, I could only make out the very top of the roof. Blackened and slimy, with smoke still rising faintly above it, it looked ready to crumble apart. The air still hung heavy with the stench of soot.

A TV antenna was still in place up there, warped out of shape by the heat. A raven perched on one of its conductors, staring straight down at me.

It sat there a minute or so, not moving. Then something disturbed it — the slam of a car door up the street. The bird took off above the rooftops, heading for London Fields.

Around the side of the block, the top of the fire escape was just visible. It had blistered and broken loose and now hung slack against the wall like a busted limb.

I turned toward home. I didn't feel like looking anymore, and I didn't know what I'd expected to find. It must've been the thought that Mitch and Molly might come back here. Then again, if they were lost, how would they know where to go?

 

Mum was still at work when I got home. In the kitchen was a note she'd left in a shaky hand reminding me not to eat too much; she'd treat us to more takeout tonight. I poured a glass
of milk and drank it on the balcony, watching workmen at a house they were refurbishing across the street. From there I could see barbecue smoke drifting above the park, and a handful of urban ravens above that.

Up in my room, I tried to sketch the two children from memory. They were still fixed clearly in my head, and I caught their likenesses much better than I had Mr. October's. At first their eyes came out too dark, so I softened them by dabbing away with a small round of Blu-Tack. Soon I was staring into the same sleepy gazes I'd seen in the classroom.

But I found I couldn't do the man at all. His injuries were so severe, there weren't many features to draw. What I didn't understand was what he'd been doing there, what connection he had to the children.

Maybe he'd been in one of the other apartments and they hadn't found out about him yet. Or maybe he'd been in another fire at another time.

Born helper
. That's what Mr. October had called me. And now I was being asked for help and I didn't know where to begin.

Help how?
I thought.
Help
who?

 

Days two, three, and four at Mercy Road weren't much of an improvement. The word about me had spread, and it wasn't only 8C who kept their distance now, watching me for signs of another meltdown. Kids from other years gave me a wide berth in the yard and corridors. Teachers spoke to me in
hushed tones, the way you might speak to an elderly relative at the funny farm.

They all treated me with respect — the kind of respect that comes out of fear.

All of them except Raymond Blight, who didn't care either way.

“Weirdo,” he whispered behind me during algebra on Tuesday morning. “Crybaby. Space cadet.”

At lunchtimes I went to the crypt across the street. No one else from school went there, so it seemed the best place to avoid them. Midmorning and afternoon breaks I spent in the library. I went back there each day after school, killing time until I could be sure the other students had left.

Sometimes when other kids see you as different, especially when that difference makes them afraid, they tend to pull together against you. They keep you outside. Sometimes they even attack.

No one had attacked me yet, except Raymond, and he'd only done it with words. It was only a matter of time, though, I thought, before things got worse.

I couldn't talk to Mum about it, couldn't tell her truthfully how things were at school or about the fire children or anything else, just as she couldn't talk to me about Dad.

On Thursday night we ate supper in silence and watched an hour of TV. Afterward I lay awake in bed till the early hours, unable to settle, dreading the first light of Friday.

 

Three things happened that Friday. Three things that turned the week around, that in the end turned my whole life around.

The first involved Becky Sanborne from the gang of six; the second, Mr. October, just when I'd given up any hope of seeing him again; the third, a red-haired woman in a green dress throwing a tantrum on a street corner in Soho.

I would never be any kind of hero, not in 8C or anywhere else, but by the end of day five at least I wasn't a zero anymore. And I'd begun to understand what my true calling was.

The art room at Mercy Road was upstairs and faced due south, so the lighting there was the best in school. At the start of last period, Mr. Redfern explained the day's assignment. He would divide the class into pairs, with each pair sketching a portrait of their partner using pencil, Conté crayon, or any other drawing medium of their choice.

Then he moved around the class, naming names. “Raymond and Mel. Curly and Tommy . . .”

Chairs scraped and crashed as students flitted between tables.

“Dan, you go with Liam. Matthew with Ryan. Becky with Ben.”

Everyone stopped at that. You could tell from their faces that Becky had just drawn the short straw. She'd landed the weirdo.

I picked up my things and started toward her desk, but she was already on her way to mine and motioned me to sit. Her
face was pink with embarrassment. Slapping her bag on the desk with a sigh, she looked back at her friends as if pleading for help. She took pencils and an eraser out of her bag and set right to work.

Becky had a hard-set expression, which I preferred not to draw. It wasn't a natural look, but I couldn't think of how to make her relax. A joke might've helped, but I'd forgotten the punch line of the only joke I could think of. It wasn't that good a joke anyway.

On a clean page of my sketch pad, I roughed out the general shape of her head and shoulders, then softened the lines with my thumb. After ten minutes her outline seemed about right and her features were coming together. It felt strange, though, having to draw someone while she was drawing me. All I got were concentrated frowns, plus Becky had a habit of poking her tongue from the corner of her mouth, which I decided not to include. It didn't flatter her.

As the period went on, she spent more time checking what I was doing than focusing on her own work. Her lines were too clean and precise, and although I was seeing it upside down on the desk, I could tell the portrait looked nothing like me.

“Very good, Dan,” Mr. Redfern said, moving between desks. “Too harsh, Kelly. You're not supposed to carve it into the page.”

Apart from Mr. Redfern, you could've heard a pin drop. Everyone was engrossed in their work. For once there were no blank stares, no whispered insults from Raymond.

“Raymond,” Mr. Redfern went on. “You're a budding Picasso. Nose on one side of the face, eyes on the other. Intriguing. And Mel? Some advice if I may. Look closely and you'll see Raymond has two eyes, not just one slap-bang in the middle of his forehead. Observe!”

Then he stopped behind me. My pencil faltered over the page. I heard the whistle of his breath above my shoulder, but he didn't comment before moving on.

I was close to finishing. All I had to do now was correct the light in Becky's eyes, soft white orbs, which I managed with a tiny ball of Blu-Tack, dabbing it around them. I did the same to lighten the freckles on her nose. Becky watched in wonder as if she'd never seen a blob of Blu-Tack before in her life.

The portrait looked as close as I could make it. I put down my pencil and turned the sketch pad around to show her.

She flushed, not looking at me as she spoke — which was the first time she'd spoken to me at all.

“That's really good. Wow!”

Then she looked at her own unfinished effort and planted her forearms across it to cover it.

At the end of the class, we were invited to circulate the room to see what everyone else had done. Constructive criticism was encouraged. Smart remarks and insults were not. The wide variety of styles included stick figures, abstracts that looked nothing like human beings, and one portrait in two separate pieces which Kelly had torn apart in frustration. Oddly, Mr. Redfern had chosen to seat the twins
together. Their work wasn't bad, but it was hard to tell whose portrait was whose.

Most of the class crowded around the desk I'd shared with Becky, pushing and prodding one another and straining their necks for a view. There were gasps and approving looks I hadn't seen before, even an admiring nod from Devan, one of the gang of six.

“Looks just like her,” he said to Ryan, loudly enough to make sure I heard.

At the back of the commotion, out of earshot of everyone else, Mr. Redfern waved me toward him and took me aside.

“Exceptional, Ben. Looks like we've found ourselves a talent.”

“Thanks, sir.”

The last bell sounded, and while the rest of 8C were packing up and leaving, I noticed Becky still at the desk, going through the other work in my book. She paused at each page, taking it in, then moved on to the next without comment.

“You coming, Becky?” Matthew called from the door.

“Yeah, just a sec.”

With a fleeting glance at me, she followed him out, leaving me alone in the room. As she went, I heard Raymond Blight's voice booming in the corridor.

“What a creep. Thinks he's something special.”

Then a heartbeat later another voice — Matthew's.

“Give it a rest, Blight. You're so boring.”

I knew then that if I ran into the others on the way home, it wouldn't be too bad. I'd shown them something I could do
well, something that might make me less of a freak and a joke around class.

So I decided I wouldn't kill time in the library that night. No need to hide. At the same time, I wasn't in a hurry to catch up with anyone, either. They'd liked my work, but that didn't mean anything else had changed.

Hanging back in the classroom, I listened to the voices and footfalls fading away downstairs and outdoors. From the window I watched them pouring out of school: a sea of gray-and-maroon uniforms spreading along Mercy Road like a soccer crowd after a match.

Some headed for the bus stop. Others piled into parents' cars, which clogged the street from end to end. One by one the jammed-up vehicles drove away at walking pace, and a silence fell over the school.

Leaving the art room behind, I set off into the gloom. Stale smells of varnish and cafeteria food followed me along the corridor and into the stairwell. Halfway down, I heard sounds from a downstairs classroom — a faint scratching and squeaking like a rat clawing its way through a baseboard.

It sounded louder from the heart of the building where the two corridors met. As far as I could tell, it seemed to be coming from one of the rooms at the north end.

Miss Whittaker's room.

I started toward it, pausing along the way to listen. Perhaps the children were there again, waiting for me. Perhaps
they — or the burned man — would be able to explain what was happening and what I was supposed to do.

As I peeked inside through the glass panel, another door slammed elsewhere in the building. I froze on the spot. Some of the staff were bound to still be in the building, and if they found me they'd question what I was up to down here by myself.

I waited a moment, but no one appeared. A telephone rang and rang, but no one answered. Inside the room the clawing noise stopped abruptly. I grabbed the door handle and pushed.

Goose bumps crawled over me the second I stepped inside. A window was open and a cold breeze whistled across the desktops. On the teacher's desk was a pile of newspapers, their pages fluttering open and shut in the breeze.

“Anyone here?” I whispered.

The sun moved behind a cloud and the classroom suddenly dimmed, its corners filling with shadows. I looked at the long desk-table where the three figures had sat. Moving closer, I could see the mark on the floor was only an ink or paint stain. It had probably been there for years. Taking hold of the nearest chair, I swept a hand across the seat to be sure no one was sitting there invisibly, then flopped down into it myself.

Staring around the room, into the dark corners, I wondered where the children were now. Not here, not at the place on Henryd Street. Why had they shown themselves in the first place if they weren't coming back?

“
Are
you coming back?” I asked the empty room.

And then I saw it. I saw what was written on the board, and my blood turned to ice. Suddenly I knew what the sound had been, the scratch and squeak that had brought me here.

Across the board, in bright blue letters large enough to fill it from top to bottom and end to end, the message read:

Welcome to Pandemonium, Ben
.