seemed to expand the ghoul’s dominion, as though the huddle of frightened seniors between the creature and the wall behind the bandstand now fell beneath its sway.
“Whynchu take Fido aside and talk it over?”
“I don’t know,” said Bowser, stunned all over again. “I guess I oughta do that. But I feel like saying, Fuck it to hell and back. He’s not worth it, walking away like we meant nothing to one another. We were everything, Peach, I shit you not, everything to one another.”
“So take him aside and tell him that.”
And do it, oh please God yes, she thought, do it before he touches those blubbering tent-sprawls of noxious girlflab.
“I won’t,” said Bowser. He gritted his teeth and flexed his fists. “I can’t, but I will.” But before he took his first step, the teachers at the mike were saying, “Make way for her.”
Make way? Who was there to make way for?
Peach, hearing fresh rumblings ripple through the crowd, craned her neck to see.
Nurse Gaskin’s bobbing head moved off to the left, her hands raised to slice through a dappled sea of bodies. Someone near Peach passed along rumors of blood on her dress.
“They’re saying her dress is bloody,” said Bowser.
“I hear them,” said Peach.
Beneath a glisten of blue and pink and orange lights, the nurse passed through a jostle of students to the risers and the mike.
She looked shaken as she shouldered the two teachers aside and clung to the mikestand, a grasp at salvation.
“It’s…”
She covered the mike and spoke briefly to Mr. Versailles, then back, as distraught as Peach had ever seen anyone.
“It’s the janitor. We were in the band room, me and Bix Donner.”
On Peach’s right, a high hoot sounded from a woman holding a little girl. The woman raised a hand to her mouth. Brest Donner, Peach’s biology teacher, gripped her fiercely in her arms.
Oh yeah, Ms. Donner’s wife.
“I…” The nurse brushed off Jonquil Brindisi’s hand.
The stains on her dress sickened Peach.
She pictured Ms. Donner’s husband-this Bix guy the nurse was yammering on and on about, who had helped Mr. Dunsmore cut down the sheriff’s body-being stabbed by the feeb janitor, blood from the wounds spraying upward to splash Nurse Gaskin’s dress.
“I yelled at Gerber,” she said. “I tried to stop him. He just kept coming at Bix. Then he swung the lampstand up and slammed it down—”
The nurse covered her mouth, her eyes hot with tears.
In an instant, Ms. Brindisi was beside her again, speaking words Peach couldn’t hear.
Nurse Gaskin nodded.
A final thought occurred to her.
She dipped again to the mike: “Trilby? Brest? I’m sorry.”
She almost seemed to regret her own survival.
“I’ve always treated the poor man well. We all have. Gerber couldn’t help what he was, and what he’s become again. He vanished through the band room doors into the backways. I…”
Her hand fumbled for a tissue in her right pocket.
That’s when the lights went out.
There was a loud noise, like a big switch being thrown ker-chunk.
The image of Ms. Brindisi and the nurse hung in a ghostly afterglow, then wiped away to black.
Peach, fear ballooning in her like a sudden burst of fever, found Bowser’s waist and clung to him.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
Peach saw the janitor coming at her from all directions, that benign wisp of a grin cracking open to reveal madness, bloodlust, a rapacious urge to kill.
A voice began, booming from the PA system.
At first, she thought it was the janitor’s. But the fear that quavered in the words and their deeper pitch identified the dead sheriff, speaking no doubt under duress.
“Boys and girls,” said Sheriff Blackburn’s voice, “the front entrance to the school is open. You must not stay in the gym. If you stay here, you will die. I repeat—”
But the voice repeated nothing.
Peach could almost see him looking up from a scripted text, looking up to see a sudden blade come sweeping in. A rushed shoved grunt of impalement had been caught on the tape, chilling in how nearby it sounded.
Faintly, over a renewed sweep of crowd noise, Peach heard Ms. Brindisi.
“Stay where you are!”
But that was futile advice.
Peach wanted out of there that instant, and every one of her classmates wanted the same.
The babble surged.
The bodies moved her, shoved her, precisely where they all wanted to go. Screams lanced through the panic. A few seniors went down in the crush. Or maybe Gerber Waddell had swept in to slaughter them. Who could say? Peach only knew she had to escape, and fast.
The opening to the dim hallway loomed before her. She shoved the kid in front of her, Sorry on her lips. But she wasn’t sorry at all. Nor were those in back who propelled her forward.
Above the melee, loud and distorted, a sad gentle singer from the fifties sighed, “I’m Mister Blue, wah-o- wah-ooh.” Interspersed, Gerber Waddell’s familiar chirp stole in, sharp and piercing: “Hi there, hi there.”
“Oh my god, he’s got me,” shouted some frightened boy. The janitor strode among them, cutting, slashing, killing whatever got in his way.
Peach squeezed through the dim rectangular archway. A crush of bodies threatened to snap her ribs, so great was the pressure on all sides. But she made it to the corridor, holding miraculously to the back of Bowser’s suitcoat.
The air cooled.
The flow of students carried her as swiftly as before, but with less threat of violence.
They would escape.
She knew they would.
She and Bowser, they’d be all right, no matter who else fell to the killer loose in the school.
The corridor still lit with its dim lights, the crowd rushed and shuffled toward freedom.
But screams arose from those who reached the front entrance first. Word rippled back, even as they pressed on, of fresh corpses awaiting them there.
Peach and Bowser rounded the corner.
Miss Phipps and the principal, ashen-faced, stood beside a grotesque clothesrack they had just wheeled in. It bore four broken bodies.
Elwood Dunsmore, the shop teacher, his face blasted and blackened by a smashed blowtorch, lay propped against the padlocked doors.
And impaled on the upraised knife-arm of a sculpted Ice Ghoul, dripping blood and water down the cold crystal of its body, were the corpses of Brandy Crowe and Flann Beckwith. A fresh icicle jutted from each eye, crazy antennae in a mad game of Cootie.
Frenzy surged in Peach.
And in the crowd.
Bowser’s face looked ready to explode. “We’ve gotta get out of here,” he yelled. Peach could hardly hear him through the din.
She grabbed his hand and together they raced off through fractures in the crowd.
Everybody had been set off, ping-pong balls and mousetraps.
