They passed a door marked PROPS on the left. Then BOYS’ DRESSING ROOM, GIRLS’ DRESSING ROOM, and finally, partly ajar, COSTUME SHOP. Blayne, hand to handle, zagged in, Condor behind.
The ceilings were high, but the place felt cramped and confined for all the crap jammed into it. Box after box serried and rose to their right and left. Scrawled labels vied with brittle typed ones for the truth about the boxes’ contents.
Shoes lay heaped like war dead below. But before Condor could spook himself too much with the ghostly limbs akimbo’d bodiless out of them, they turned the corner into another larger room, where rack upon rack of fluff and color greeted them, a crazy salad of cloth, sequins, and odd-buttoned garments.
Blayne picked his way through, a jungle hacker amid old-outfit smells. “Yo!” he said. “Anybody home?”
“This way,” trilled an amused voice.
Then Condor followed his date around one last switchback of gray-wheeled racks and faded finery gimcracked together.
There the girls waited.
Altoona and Pimlico, two incredible blips of life grinning and shifting and sexing over by the sewing machines, their legs crossed at the ankles, leaning back everywhere.
Futzy’s mind churned like a washing machine agitator. Pumps and clunky polished boy-shoes in vast mooing herds of babble were moving along the hallway outside the gym. As the scum scurried by, Futzy nodded at them.
It had been all he could do, speaking over their heads from the band risers, to control his anguish at the papier-mache creature before him and to keep from blasting the little shits with both barrels of his anger.
Now a few of their number were dead, waiting to be discovered and brought to the gym.
Futzy had thought that once this part of the evening arrived, once the Poindexter kid and his date had been dispatched, he’d be in for smooth sailing.
But his bloodlust was nowhere near sated, and he guessed he had known that all along.
“Hello, Mr. Buttweiler.” High fluted voice, Charmina Fuchs bubbling by alone. She would make a couple of young studs an obliging breeder some day.
“Charmina,” he muttered, stripping her with his eyes, imagining an impossibly long whiplash sweeping swifter than jag-lightning down the young girl’s cream-curved torso, her skin blushing beneath the whip sting’s fury.
Adora Phipps, wearing her granny clothes and antiquated lobebag, had been strangely attentive tonight. Weird duck, her hair up and wrapped in a tight bun, one strand astray. After the speech, over chaperone refreshments, she’d made feints toward kindness.
Futzy had kept his replies superficial and moved on.
As he watched flocks of boybuddies quickwalk off toward the labs, swivelbutted and gawk-armed, he wondered what the strange lady English teacher, this Adora, would think of his homelife, his cold wives, the spattered blood on his bedroom walls.
Would it shock her?
Would it turn her off?
Or on?
Kitty, holding back her hair with one hand, bent to a drinking fountain.
A rush to Futzy’s brain.
Not his daughter of course, but maddening-without-meaning-to-be Wyn Wynans. She stood up, oblivious to him, licking her lips, and went into the gym with her unworthy date.
A sob escaped Futzy’s lips. Luckily no one was by to hear. They had to pay-they’d pay in spades -for the Ice Ghoul’s return.
He would see to it.
By God, he swore he would.
First, Tweed tried the phone bank near the science rooms by the north exit.
“The phones are hosed,” said Tad Verle, headed back to the gym in a pink bowtie that accentuated his outstuck ears.
She tried both phones. Tad was right. No dial tone. Dead air.
“That’s weird,” she said.
“Your dad’ll be okay,” replied Dex. “Come on.”
“He’ll be worried.” She could feel fret marks on her brow and a tightening in her belly over delaying Dex’s stupid hunt for the slain. “Let’s try the ones by the front door.”
Dex, saying nothing, trailed after her.
Tweed wished he would grow up.
Principal Buttweiler, pacing the hall like a circus bear restive and unbicycled, looked stunned to see them.
He broke eye contact and edged away.
Tweed chalked it up to his unhinged state of mind-the Ice Ghoul, his rumored sado-mates, all of that.
Four phones were located near the entrance, silver corded and stained. Wood partitions scored with graffiti provided token separation between them.
A gaggle of girls were crowded about the left phone. “Shit on a stick,” said a knobby-elbowed girl named Relda Weep, whom Tweed had known since first grade and not spoken to once in all that time.
The girls moved off and Tweed found the same damned dead lines here too.
“This is spooky,” she said.
“Wonder what the deal is.”
“Dad’ll be worried, Dex. He’ll climb the walls.”
Dex looked concerned. “You’re really torqued, aren’t you?”
She nodded and bit her lip.
Dex hugged her.
Her fears conjured her father at home, his voice shifting into a soft dithering dirge as he eyed the phone and bullets beaded his brow.
“I’m sorry,” said Dex. “I wish I could do something. Hey. What if we found Mr. Waddell?”
“The janitor?”
“Sure. He could fix it.”
Dex was right. Soft doughy congenial Gerber Waddell, head janitor of the quiet ways and kind smile, would rummage around in his hollowed-out skull and come up with the fix, a found treasure glittering in his brain. She hadn’t seen much of him since he had switched on the colored lights. “Where do you think he might-?”
A cheer went up beyond the table where Mr. Dunsmore and Daub Murch had sat, signing seniors in. A back-walking, front-walking band of kids appeared, surrounding and egging on a pair of football jocks who were carrying the corpses of two girls.
Oh lovely, came Tweed’s first thought. Female dates, just like twenty years before. Wouldn’t that non- linearize poor old Mr. Buttweiler!
Then she fixed on the victims, their heads rollicking jerkily in the crooks of elbows.
The one with the O’d mouth and not a drop of blood anywhere was Flense, a math whiz and a quick wit. It chilled Tweed to see the wan, slack-jawed face of a long-time friend approach so.
And lumbering by beside her in a crewcutted jock’s arms, her fingers missing from the hand in front and a bib of blood splashed like a riotous poinsettia where her belly should have been, was Pescadera Carbone. Pesky. Flighty, funny, and now lifeless.
“Oh, God,” said Dex. “It’s so…”
“Yeah, no kidding.”
Tweed stared at them.
The slow parade rhythmed by, some of the students sobbing, strange grins lighting other faces, all of them awkwardly taking up the pace no one in particular had established.
Dex and Tweed, latching onto the tail, made their way toward the gym. A great pain lanced through
