Get it on, she thought, relax the wrist, stay alert, give Tweed’s classmates every fair chance.
Over driveway and blacktop, Jenna’s fragile cone of light moved in deadly earnest.
Tweed walked arm in arm with Dex to the band room. In the empty hallways, her dress rustled an unbearable rustle.
Silent lockers serried by.
In her free hand she held the sealed envelope Wattle Murch’s brother Daub had given Dex at the front table. It had grown sticky with palm-sweat.
The band room door wasn’t locked.
They ventured in.
No one there.
A dim bulb on a lamp pole with a pullchain struggled to throw light over the wooden risers where the French horn section sat. Dark shadows choked the rest of the fan-shaped room, and Tweed had to trust to sense memory to know when to step up and when not.
“You see okay?” asked Dex. He had reached the cache of saxophones in back, set midway in the tall gray doors angled polygonally about the outer edge of the room.
He fumbled out his key.
“Yes, if I don’t look at the lightbulb.”
Tweed threaded through a tangled forest of stands, shoving the black nuisances aside. She touched the leather thong of her key, unpursed it, and felt for the right orientation.
The trombone closet unlocked.
Musty odor inside always, like the inside of a ventriloquist’s dummy’s mouth. There stood her trombone case.
Tweed hesitated, an irrational fear gripping her that someone was hiding a few feet inside the closet. She and Dex had once knocked on its back wall. Knowing that the slasher’s secret byways wrapped around the band room, they had heard then the hollow reverb and wondered if this very panel had ever afforded him entry for the kill.
Eight years past, a couple had been butchered by Mr. Dunsmore right where the trombone players sat. Just yesterday, Tweed had emptied her spit valve upon a painted-over blood patch.
But fear was absurd.
It wasn’t yet time for the kill, nor was it likely that she and Dex had been assigned to sit in the band room. Still, this might be the place again. Preparations may have been underway before they had interrupted them.
Something touched the back of her hand. A sound strained in her throat.
“Hey, it’s okay, it’s just me.” Dex squeezed her hand.
“Don’t scare me like that,” she said.
“Sorry,” he said. “Here.” He lay down his alto sax case and snapped it open, flan flan, right-angling the lid. “I’ll put the envelope in my case. Get your axe and let’s go. Mr. Jones will start worrying about us.”
Swooping her instrument out of the closet, Tweed walked cautiously with Dex to the band room door, breathing easier when it had swung-to behind them.
Rather than circle back past the front table to get to the gym, they continued counterclockwise along the first floor corridor.
On the left, science labs gloomed by, site of the hillside creep and the polar creep in geology, memorable goads-to-learning, and the place as well where chem, bio, and physics had been crammed into their skulls.
On the right, thick glass doors to the barn and the slaughterhouse areas made a valiant effort to hold in the stench. Not so long ago, that area of the school had terrified Tweed, despite the gradual progression from primary school petting zoo, to junior high’s dissection of frogs and pig embryos, to high school’s more demanding course of instruction in slaughter, rendering, meat-packing, tanning, butchery, and taxidermy. But now these skills were old hat. She felt as if part of her life was over. She would miss the down-to-earth Lily Foddereau, her loamy wisdom, her steady hand, her lethal axe-blade.
They turned left at the water fountain.
Far ahead, by the gym door nearest the front of the school, a clump of seniors congregated, the boys high- fiving and lobe-tugging as though they were wearing jeans and jerseys and topsiders, not tuxes and ruffed shirts.
No reason not to go in. They were waiting, it seemed, for the lights and the music to draw them out of the hallway.
That’s us, she thought.
“My God, Tweed, look at it!” said Dex as they reached the entrance to the gym.
She paused beside him, her eyes at once drawn to the Ice Ghoul. Even with the lights not yet low, he seemed suddenly larger and more menacing. Fog swirled about him from pedestal vents, a low white roll of guile and menace.
“Jenna told me over dinner that they’d filled in detail.” The vast gymnasium seemed to swallow her voice.
“Yeah I know. You mentioned it,” Dex said. “Some brushwielder, some real sicko, understands what high school is all about. That face really captures the feeling.”
It made her shiver. She wondered, once they survived the stalking, whether it would seem less horrific. “Why’s it… oh look, Dex, the roof must be leaking.”
“Too bad,” he said. “But when the lights change, it’ll look like just another effect.”
A voice called to them from the bandstand, off to the right. Festus Targer at his drumset softened a cymbal and twirled a brush at them. The bass drum thumped.
Farther along the same top riser, Butch and Zinc were de-belling low furious arpeggios from their down- directed trumpets. They were seniors, a couple in the throes of breaking up on account of being college-bound in different directions, Butch to the east coast, Zinc to the west.
Zinc had the blush-pink look of a tender, unflogged for days, and it was clear, had been clear since last week’s lottery, that Butch felt guilty piggybacking his salvation on his lover’s monthly reprieve from beatings and the luck of the draw. Some students resented those who escaped the slasher’s knife that way, but Butch was much harsher on himself than were any of Tweed’s friends.
Tweed took her seat on the middle riser. Dex sat below and to the left, next to Wyche Fowler, ego insufferable, but man could he blow Dex out of the water on the sax.
Tweed snapped open the case and threaded her horn together. Colored lights toggled at random. As she sprayed mist along the length of her cold-creamed slide, Tweed glanced up and saw, at the far end of the gym, Gerber Waddell by the light bank struggling to recall, with his genial feeble half-mind, the precise combination intended for this part of prom night.
“Where the fuck’s Buttweiler?” Bongo asked in her right ear, an unruly low F struggling to speak at the end of his arm.
“Um.” Tweed looked around. No sign of their principal. Not at the punch bowl where the other chaperones clustered. Not at the longer stretch of table near the janitor, where the seniors would pig out and glug down.
A blue vision crossed the gym on a diagonal.
Nurse Gaskin.
She stopped on the sawdust to stare up at the Ice Ghoul bore continuing toward the other chaperones.
Tweed and Dex had a crush on Delia Gaskin. If only she weren’t so old.
“I don’t see him yet,” said Tweed. “Maybe he’s doing paperwork in his office.”
“Yeah, or in the bafroom.” Dimbulb Bongo. Still some years of growing to do, and he was nobody’s genius.
“Tweed.” Dex caught her eye, his neckband a shiny black against the white tux. He glanced at the nurse, then back at Tweed.
Tweed nodded, resigned.
The lights took on harsh red and green casts. At the far door, fluff and fine lines of clothing began to drift in.
