Shadowland

    When I left, Skeleton was still idling at the back of the corridor, pretending to adjust his watch.

    Later that afternoon Mr. Broome passed word down through Mrs. Olinger and Mr. Weatherbee that he wanted Morris' Jazz Society and the Magic Circle to demonstrate their skills to the entire school in an hour-long program to be scheduled in April. Mr. Weatherbee read the memo to us at the end of the day: Morris looked nervous, Tom and Del were obviously excited.

8

Christmas break was the usual happy respite from school, except for one boy in our class. We went to visit my grandparents in Los Angeles; Morris and his parents went for a skiing holiday in Aspen, and Morris used the long slopes to work out in his head which songs his trio might play least badly during their half-hour. Everyone else stayed home for the traditional Christmas. When my family returned from California, I took a bus to Tom Flanagan's house and was told that Tom was out. There was no tree, no Christmas decoration, merely an enor­mous random- looking pile of books and games on the living-room floor. His mother was very haggard. The evident worry on her face, the lack of seasonal decoration contrasted with the job lot of presents: desolation.

9

The semester examinations, held over four days in the drafty field house beneath ancient photographs of football players with their arms about each other's shoulders, the uniforms, stances, and even the faces dated, were difficult but fair, proving that what the school appeared to be and what it was could occasionally mesh. Long, staggered rows of boys wearing crew-neck sweaters scribbled, blew their noses and sucked at lozenges, scratched their heads and gazed at the dead youthful football players. Mr. Fitz-Hallan and Mr. Ridpath, reading The Far Side of Paradise and Quarterbacking respectively, sat at a long table at the head of the rows. For Tom Flanagan the long exams in the field house seemed like hours entirely out of time, perhaps out of space as well — the world beyond the rows of desks and sneezing boys could have changed seasons, been taken by hurricane to Oz, or gone dark at midday and turned to ice. The results, in most cases similar to those of the previous examinations, contained a few surprises. When we thronged around the notice boards outside the library two weeks later, Tom saw that he had managed one B, but otherwise had his usual C's; Del had failed nothing, had in fact done astonishingly well — a row of B's. And when Tom and Del risked a glance at the seniors' list, they saw that Skeleton Ridpath had five A's.

10

Fads

Things returned to superficial normality when the half-dozen suspected juniors and seniors, none of them Skel­eton Ridpath, had been quizzed; school narrowed down into a tunnel of work. A few minor sartorial fads swept through the school in February and March. After a few seniors began wearing their cowboy boots to school, everyone appeared in them until Mr. Fitz-Hallan started addressing students as 'Hoss' and 'Pecos' and 'Hoot'; one week, everybody wore the collars of their jackets turned up, as if they had just stepped in out of a strong wind.

    Closer to the bone was the wave of sick jokes: these were some sort of release from what I now see was the hysterical illness at work in the school's unconscious. What did Joey's mother say when he wouldn't stop picking his nose? Joey, I'm going to saw the fingers off your wooden hand. What did Dracula say to his children? Quick, kiddies, eat your soup before it clots. What did the mother say when she had her period? Same thing. We actually laughed at these awful jokes.

    Even closer to the bone was the 'nightmare' fad which took over the school in the hiatus between the quizzing of the last senior and Laker Broome's outburst in chapel at the end of March. Much more than grisly so- called jokes, this demonstrated that something ill was growing at the school's heart, and fattening on us all — that what was happening secretly to Tom Flanagan was not exclusive to him.

    Bambi Whipple released this fad in the course of his free-association chapel talk. Each of the teachers took one chapel a year. Mr. Thorpe's had been the week before Bambi's, and that too may have contributed, being overheated and inflated with Thorpeish emotions. Thorpe's speech began with references to a mysterious 'practice' which undermined boys' strength and un­manned those who gave in to it. Thorpe grew more vehement, just as he did during class. Saliva flew. He raked his hair with his fingers; he referred to Jesus and the Virgin Mary and President Eisenhower's boyhood in Kansas. Finally he mentioned a boy who had attended Carson, 'a boy I knew, a fine boy, but a boy troubled by these desires and who sometimes gave in to them!' He paused, drew in a noisy breath, and bellowed, 'Prayer! That's what saved this fine boy. One night, alone in his room, the desire to give in grew on him so fiercely that he feared lest he commit that sin again, and he went on his knees and prayed and prayed, and made a vow to himself and to God . . . ' Thorpe reared back at the podium. 'And to have a permanent reminder of his vow, he took a knife from his pocket . . . 'At this point Thorpe actually removed a pocketknife from his own pants pocket and brandished it. ' . . . and he opened the knife and gritted his teeth and put the blade to the palm of his hand. Boys, this fine young fellow carved a cross in the palm of his right hand! So the scar would always remind him of his vow! And he never . . . ' And so on. With gestures.

    Bambi Whipple's effort on the following week was considerably less forceful. As in the classroom, he spoke with little preparation; the effect of Whipple's rambling monologue may have been as much due to Thorpe's horror story as to what he himself said. But in the course of his ramble, something reminded him of dreams, and he said, 'Gee, dreams can take you to funny places. Why, I remember dreaming last week that I had committed a terrible crime, and the police were looking for me and eventually I holed up in a kind of big warehouse or something, and suddenly I realized that I didn't have anywhere else to go, that was it, they were going to get me and I was going to spend the rest of my life in jail. . . . Boys, that was a terrible feeling. Really terrible.'

    That afternoon a sheet of paper appeared on the notice board outside the library which read: Last week I dreamed that a fat bore from New Hampshire was beating me to death with a pillowcase. That was terrible. Really terrible. Mrs. Olinger tore it down, and another appeared: / dreamed about rats moving all over my bed and crawling up and down my body. When Mrs. Tute emerged from the library and shredded that note, the board was clear only until the next morning, when someone put up the sign: I was looking into a snake's eyes. The snake opened his mouth wider and wider until I fell in.

That was how the fad began. The notice board became an array of such notes; as soon as Mrs. Tute or Mrs. Olinger ripped them down, dozens more appeared, open­ing the door to what lay behind all of those well-fed suburban faces.

    . . . wolves were ripping at me, and I knew I was dying . . . all alone in the middle of icebergs and huge mountains of ice . . . a girl with long snaky hair and blood on her fingers . . . I was up in the air and no one could get me down and I knew I was going to blow away and be lost. . . something like a man but with no face was chasing me and he was never going to get tired . . . and directly inspired by William Thorpe, a man was cutting at my hand with a knife, swearing at me, and he wouldn't listen to what I was screaming at him . . .

There must have been faculty meetings about it. Poor Bambi Whipple appeared one day looking very cautious and chagrined. Mr. Thorpe thundered on in his usual way — no one would have dared to rebuke him. Mr. Fitz-Hallan quietly led us into a discussion of nightmares, and spent fifty minutes relating them to the Grimms' stories we had read.

    But the real sign that the faculty was distressed by the 'nightmare' fad was Mr. Broome's chapel.

    He was a surprise substitution for Mrs. Tute, and when we saw him twitching at the podium instead of the librarian, the entire school knew that whatever was going to happen would be explosive. Laker Broome resembled a wrapped package full of serpents. After his short peremptory order to God ('Lord. Make us honest and good. And lead us to righteousness. Amen'), he whipped off his glasses and started twirling them by one bow.

    The shouting began in the second sentence.

    'Boys, this has been a bad year for the school. A terrible year! We have had indiscipline, smoking, failures, and theft — and now we are cursed with some­thing so sick, so ill, that in all my years as an educator I have never seen its like.

    'NEVER!

    'There is a poison running through the veins of this school, and you all know what it is. Some of you,