hadn’t been so when they carried her in. An inner wound only now soaking through? Jonquil didn’t think so.
“You have passed a very important stage in your life, a stage that
…” Futzy paused.
A blotch suddenly bloomed on Flense’s right breast, a bright red blotch completely separate from the ribside Jonquil had been looking at.
The blood wasn’t coming from inside Flense at all.
From Pesky? Not a chance. Her corpse faced another way.
Jonquil looked up, noting moisture on the Ice Ghoul’s cheek, a drop at the tip of its beakish nose. Leaks in the roof, Claude had guessed. She watched the drop elongate and detach. A spangle of rain. She fancied she could see the spatter hit Flense and widen the red blotch.
A neuron fired in Jonquil’s brain.
Not water. Not water at all.
“My friends,” said Futzy, departing from his text, “I have to admit to some confusion. Sheriff Blackburn should have been here by now.”
That was true, thought Jonquil. Futzy had made no big deal about it, which was perhaps why she hadn’t noticed it before. Ordinarily, the sheriff would remove the padlock from the gym’s outer door and slip in. By now, he should have been standing by the bandstand, ready to spout his drivel about the community, their new role in it, all that grown-up crap.
“What gives?” Claude came up beside her.
“I don’t know.”
“But there’s something far worse,” said Futzy, “than the sheriff’s absence.”
“Oh my,” Claude murmured, “our beloved leader’s about to lose it.”
“With good reason, I’m afraid,” she said. Through a sea of bobbing heads, near chaperone corner, she noticed the strange couple, Brayton and his date. They had this look, a look that bespoke knowledge.
Interesting.
Something more than bloodlust wriggled its sensuous way through Jonquil. She felt, in that tip-tilted gym, as if they were all standing on the deck of a vast ship. Below them, a boiler stoked with rage-more rage than Jonquil had felt in years-was poised to explode.
Futzy’s halting words, the blood dripping from above, the odd couple whose presence somehow tied it all together-these things caressed her so violently, she teetered on the brink of jumping her snooty colleague’s bones right there on the dance floor.
On Flense’s chest, fingers of blood stretched to grope the dead girl’s breast, a clotted palm moist upon her nipple.
“The slain pair you have brought in…,” said Futzy.
Oh my God, Jonquil thought. Sometimes you knew, by the way someone began, how they’d end.
And he did. “The slain pair you have brought in,” he repeated, “are not those who were slated to die.”
There was a beat before the sound began.
Then it was suddenly there, like waves of ants scurrying underfoot at the destruction of their anthill.
Jonquil herself gave a sharp ah, her hand to her mouth. She saw Brayton squint and grab his date’s arm. Raven had gone white, but the starch hadn’t left her face, that stubborn grit Jonquil had found so alluring when they met.
“Pescadera Carbone and her escort are not the designated victims.
I…”
“Great,” said Claude over the tumult. “Just when the school needs a true leader, our beloved Futzy crumbles.”
Then the tenders whose birth timing and the luck of the draw had spared came deadmarching into the gym with their dates. A couple of wrestlers carried the corpses of Butch and Zinc.
“Oh my God.” This over the mike. “Sheriff Blackburn should be.. . does anyone know where the sheriff is?”
A second dead couple, one of them a tender.
Jonquil felt her knees buckle at the sight. She clung to Claude’s arm, moved in, wanting so badly to kiss him.
But he reared back. “Wait now,” came his objection.
Then she heard the sound above, like a diver leaving a springboard. She looked up and saw the falling body.
Impressions through colored light. Something unraveling. A sandbag. Stocky like their missing sheriff. It was Sheriff Blackburn, his eyes bugged out in disbelief, thin glistening erections of zoom. It made not an ounce of sense.
Then he hit the end of the rope, a groan and hold above, and the glistening erections shot from his eyes.
What were they?
One smashed on the floor and skittered like a scattering of hockey pucks. Ice, thought Jonquil. Icicles. But the other hurtled through the air, a javelin, straight toward Jiminy Jones.
If instinct hadn’t made him wince and try to sidestep it, the icicle would have whisked past him. As it was, he flinched into its path, took it full in the right eye, and reared back like a catcher’s mitt on the rebound.
Without a sound of protest, he fell backward. His trumpet dropped from his hands. A clatter of crumpled brass rang out where it fell. The dying bandleader twitched on the risers.
At his rope’s end, the sheriff jinged this way and that, a naysaying puppet saying No! No! No! then oscillating into dead sways.
Amid the screams and shouts that surrounded them, Jonquil, helpless in Claude’s capable arms, rang in with a triple orgasm, wave upon wave of fear and lust and anger informing it, full out.
15. Buttweiler in Charge
Futzy felt baffled, befuddled.
Never in the history of Corundum High had things gone awry at the prom. Sure, one or two inept slasher- teachers had been killed by their intended victims. But that was a turnabout to be expected every so often.
What confronted the principal tonight was sheer madness.
He spoke above the hubbub. For a time, his personal problems took a back seat to this new urgency. His head felt as if it might explode, but somehow his words gathered authority.
“Students,” he said. “Students.”
They ignored him, churning like thick taffy.
“Students.” Calm, persistent.
At the corner of Futzy’s eye, Jiminy Jones’s body twitched. Brest and Trilby, standing with Bix by the refreshments, rushed into the hallway and were gone. Futzy had heard a rumor that their daughter was holed up in the school. More than likely, they had gone to check on her.
A nub of crowd started to drift that way. Futzy couldn’t have that.
“Students.”
They were quieting. The sheriff’s sway at rope’s end had settled slow and easy, like a tire swing.
“You all need to get a grip on yourselves. Get a grip. Calm down and get a grip.”
He repeated the phrase, trying to seize on their chattering minds.
“Get a grip. That’s it. You can do it. Stay here. Stay right here in the gym. It’s the safest place to be. The killer could be anywhere out there. There’s safety in numbers.”
Use fear to halt the mass exodus before it begins.
“I want you to spread calm. Not panic. There’s no need for panic. Hold one another. Assure one another. We’re in control here.”
Jesus, what a lie.
