Slaughterhouse High

18. Fear and Weapons

In the spiffy outfits the State had given them for their delivery into Zane Fronemeyer’s hands, Bray felt-as they explored Corundum High’s backways-like a prince with his princess passing through the scullery, the cramped living quarters of the poor.

Winnie’s gown snagged on a nail and ripped.

The backways were ill-lit and dank, choked with spiderwebs and the threat of rats. The air was close and confining, hot enough to make Bray wish his tux were made of lighter stuff.

“Where are we?” asked Winnie.

“Let’s see,” Bray said, moving toward the next dim lightbulb, waist-high on his right.

Randomly placed along the walls, the bulbs were of minimal wattage. They glowed rather than shone. That and faint copying made the map barely readable, even when it was held inches from the light.

The designated slasher clearly needed a tiny flashlight. Bray supposed that whoever had killed Fronemeyer had taken one from the packet.

Why hadn’t he taken the map? Perhaps he was already acquainted with the backways, a slasher from years past.

“I think we’re beyond the auditorium. We’ve dipped under the corridor on the east. That way,” Bray gestured right, “is the band room. See how it curves off?”

“I’ll take your word for it. What’s over there?”

“Cafeteria, I think. Can’t tell though if it’s the dining area or the kitchen.”

Truth was, they could be completely turned around. Disorientation crowded all about and may already have claimed them. An adventure that had begun with confidence, as they slipped through a panel by the auditorium, now felt full of uncertainty and trepidation.

“Let’s peek out and see.”

“What if there’s someone there? A couple of seniors?” he asked.

“What if?” Winnie was exasperated.

“They see us, they think we’re behind the killings, a crazed student body somehow gets us, it’s all over.”

“Christ, Bray,” she said, “do you expect to spend the rest of your life in here?”

“It’s just safer, that’s all. It’s the prudent thing to do. He’s in here somewhere, I know it.”

“You’re a fucking wimp.”

“We’ll find him. Or he’ll find us.” We’ll fight him and kill him, he thought. “You can talk to him, you’re good at that.”

“That’s why you jumped your prom. That’s why you ran.”

“You can reason with him, bring the poor guy out into the public spotlight like you want to.”

“You’ve got no guts,” she said. “I say we have a look.” Even in insulting him, she was beautiful.

No way was their friendly slasher going to hold still for a dollop of argument. It was kill or be killed. That’s what it would come down to.

And he’d have to save Winnie. He’d have to rip the bastard’s guts out, to keep Winnie from harm and to prove to her he was no coward.

“You’re wrong about me,” he said.

“If only.”

“Okay, let’s have a look.”

The panels were clearly marked, bold and readable. A large white number, in this case a 975, was painted above the release.

Bray pressed the release and the panel slid open. Cooler air and indirect light rushed in, sudden unexpected friends.

No one there.

He breathed easier.

“Bunch of tables,” said Winnie behind him.

“Yes.”

Six chairs were upturned on each tabletop, their metal legs like TV antennas aligned, roof after roof. Bray peered out, his thumb keeping the panel retracted.

Somewhere in the distance arose a muffled hubbub. But other than pillows against the walls and posterboard with student numbers inscribed, the cafeteria was empty.

Winnie shouldered him aside, angling for a clearer view. Her body was warm and wonderful beside him. “I guess this shows you can read a map, at least,” she said.

Bray had a sudden image of someone creeping up on them in the narrow passageway, behind their backs, a knife raised, ready to fall.

“What is it?” Winnie asked.

He realized he had tensed.

“Nothing,” he said.

But he drew back and Winnie came with him. He let the panel shut with a faint whoosh.

It was damned dark in here. The dank heat, woody as a fresh pine box, crept in around them again.

Bray wished his eyes would adapt more quickly to the darkness. But even when the faint outlines of the backways resolved themselves, he had the persistent feeling that someone or something held them in its gaze, waiting, waiting to rush them or to strike as they passed by.

“This is hopeless,” said Winnie. “It’s an endless maze. He could be anywhere. Maybe even gone home by now.”

Winnie was full of surprises, thought Bray. Fired up one moment, now suddenly discouraged.

“Nope, our killer’s still here,” he said. “I can feel it.”

“Maybe.”

“No maybes. He’s not finished. Sooner or later, we’ll meet him. And somehow we’ll stop him.”

“We’ll talk him down. Coax the fight out of him,” she said, more assured.

“You got it,” said Bray, imagining a quick tussle with an unknown assailant, tackling him from the darkness, a flashing blade, Bray’s hand seizing a descending wrist to keep death at bay.

It could come at any time, from any place.

Or the knife blade might slip into them now, now, with no chance to fight back.

No.

He couldn’t afford to think that way.

They’d be prepared, they’d have their chance.

He and Winnie would subdue him, slay him or deliver him up to Corundum High’s freaked-out kids and faculty. Winnie would have her media moments of glory and persuasion. And one way or another, society would welcome them back into its embrace, where they could begin a life together, unharassed and free.

“All right,” said Winnie with renewed resolve. “What are we waiting for? Let’s press on.”

“Why not,” he said.

And on they pressed.

Kyla had never seen Patrice so worked up, so turned on by Fido’s sudden interest in them and off by the dangers that surrounded them.

Thank God that she at least had kept her wits about her.

To be sure, she tickled her fancy with the riotous times that awaited their threesome, should they be lucky enough to survive prom night. But survival came first in Kyla’s book, and it fell to her to figure out how to assure it.

“Keep up, you two,” she said.

Behind her, a sequoia to a sapling, Patrice hugged Fido to her and hurried along, her eyes impossibly large with fright.

They had left most of the kids by the front entrance, where a futile attempt was underway to ram open the heavily reinforced doors.

Ranks of peach-colored lockers marched by on either side, any one of them ready to explode into violence. Kyla kept them moving down the center of this gauntlet, their ultimate destination Lily Foddereau’s butchery wing in the back part of the school.

The least they could do was to arm themselves with real cleavers, not the futtering ones, sharp but small, that hung from everyone’s belt.

“Kyla, I’m scared,” whined Patrice. It had become an annoying mantra, as if admitting her fear could ward off the thing that frightened her.

Kyla’s cowardly lover didn’t even expect an answer. But Fido, who had settled into a litany of reassurance, piped up: “We’ll be fine, honey lamb. He won’t get us.”

Kyla understood they were both stressed to the max. But so was she.

And she didn’t like how it felt when the three of them were under pressure. If indeed they survived the night, she thought there was a good chance their relationship wouldn’t.

Kyla held open the glass door to the butchery wing, nose-wrinkling whiffs of gore lifting off the tile and wood as they passed. She followed after Patrice and Fido.

The stench of slaughter raised her hackles.

Curiously, it comforted her as well.

Very few students were roaming these blood-encrusted halls. Kyla guessed it was because butchery, the favorite subject of few, was far too near the night’s events.

Patrice, on the other hand, loved it.

As did she.

The two of them had in fact first met, first touched eyes, over the bloody spews of a lopped chicken head. Their love, such as it was, had grown out of the slaughter of pigs and lambs and wide-eyed cattle, neck slice, abrupt collapse of unsteady legs. They had a history here, she and Patrice Menuci.

“I don’t like this,” said Fido.

Maybe, thought Kyla, Fido were best to have remained a fantasy. The reality was beginning to wear thin.

“It’s okay, baby,” Patrice simpered back. “We’ll get us some steel and hole up somewhere until they rescue us.”

“In here,” Kyla said.

Over many years, mists of gore, especially during finals week, had turned the grout between the tiles from tan to rust. Ditto the hinges of the doors. This door’s pattern of bloodspray was nearly invisible, so much a part of the woodgrain had it become.

They slipped through.

A wall of cutlery winked at them from behind Miss Smiling-Bitch Foddereau’s chopping block. On the pegboard, chalked outlines surrounded each tool.

There were missing knives. But then a few knives had always been missing, gone astray over years of instruction and never replaced.

“Take two each,” said Kyla.

She reached her heavy arms upward for her favorite hackers and hewers, huffing from the exertion. Kyla loved the heft of them, their shaped grips and perfect balance.

Fido and Patrice obeyed, laying hands on the pegboard as if it were a prayer wall and they were penitents. They came away clutching the handles of honed steel.

“What now?” Patrice asked.

She held two long carving knives, severed leg ends of a gleaming insect.

Fido had found a pair of meat cleavers.

Kyla looked at Fido and Patrice. Bedroom longings rose in her at the sextuple threat of violence that filled their fists.

In the meaty air, soft wafts of lust blew past her nostrils.

If this be life, thought Kyla, let it last forever.

Outside the band room door, Trilby hugged her little girl. Delia Gaskin had taken Brest inside to view Bix’s body. Soon she would come out for Trilby.

Pill had stopped talking altogether.

Trilby thought she had seen Pill at her most frightened. But her father’s death, announced so vividly at the bandstand by Delia, had driven her deeper into herself. She had shut down, drawn in tighter, her skin almost bloodless, near as white as meringue.

“It’s okay, Pill,” she said.

But it wasn’t.

The door opened.

Delia and Brest emerged arm in arm. Brest’s eyes were moist. She gave Trilby a dour look.

It seemed out of place, since Brest had, many years before, confided having fallen out of love with their husband. But even withered feelings of affection tend to sink their hooks deep into one’s heart, early and enduring.

“Pill?” The girl clung to her, trying to bury herself in her mother’s body. “Stay with Brest now. I need to leave you for just a little while.”

Pill’s fingernails deepened uncomfortably, crab claws at Trilby’s back. The child moaned.

It was unbearable.

Trilby wanted to embrace her always. But she needed to see Bix in death’s grip, needed the grim closure it would provide.

Brest knelt and tried to pry their daughter free. Pill’s moan became a whine, then a keening.

“There, there,” Trilby soothed.

Pill was a sight. A shattered child who couldn’t bear, for one second, the denial of her mother’s embrace.

But at last, the three of them overcame her resistance, and like a magnet giving up one steel surface for another, she lunged for Brest, almost knocking her over with the zeal of her need.

Brest awkwardly patted Pill’s back, starting several times to speak but saying nothing.

Delia prompted Trilby to rise. How kind and full of caring she is, Trilby thought.

Inside the band room, the air was rank with warring odors of death.

Bix’s bowels had emptied. The night before, Brest had made spaghetti. From years of marriage, Trilby knew how spaghetti altered Bix’s bathroom smells. That smell now infused the band room, stenchy, homey, strangely comforting yet out of place.

Her eyes fixed on his corpse.

Bix lay there like a tosser-and-turner in a mattress ad. He had grown a little chubby around the waist as Pill advanced beyond toddlerdom.

His frilled shirt was wrenched out of his cummerbund. Trilby could see his navel and the wiry black hairs that surrounded it. The skin at his paunch did not move.

One never noticed a motion so perpetual until it ceased.

No inhale at all. No exhale.

It was maddening.

It terrified her.

Her breath caught, refusing to release. She raised a hand to her mouth.

Delia Gaskin hugged her from the side. “You okay?” she asked.

Trilby nodded. She suffered Delia’s embrace, leaning on her for support.

Bix’s face was an outrage.

His skull was broken and bashed. The skin at his exposed ear had shifted, a fallen fracture of shale. Blood spilled from that fracture.

His nose, crushed-the bone snapped upward at an obscene angle-sat atop a deep spewed gash, the punch of a steel fist having left moist wrinkles in the crater-edges of his flesh.

His skin had been rent asunder, as if the killer had wanted to see the man beneath the face, the secret Bix that Trilby had always suspected was there. But all that showed was inert muscle and bone.

Trilby felt faint.

But she could not tear her eyes away.

The next thing she knew, she was sitting on the edge of one of the band room’s rising levels, something sharp and bitter broken under her nose. She reared back and felt Delia’s arms supporting her.

“Steady, now,” the nurse said.

“I’m okay,” she tried to say.

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Her face seized up in a cry. On the inhale, she smelled her husband’s corpse behind her. Then the tears subsided.

Delia offered her a tissue.

Trilby blew her nose and daubed the edges of her eyes. “You’re so kind,” she said. Poor lonely woman. Poor Delia.

Brest had been after her to start an affair with Delia. She had heart. Depth of character. She really cared, not just in a nursely way. It was more genuine than that.

Society called same-sex threesomes perverse.

What did society know of such things?

It wouldn’t be perverse, not in the least. It would feel good and natural.

Now was hardly the time for it, but Trilby felt the nub inside her, the pull she hadn’t quite felt before, the feeling Brest had, with far too much zeal, urged upon her.

Its eventuality lay before her.

“Help me out the door?” she said, her words faint.

“Of course,” came Delia’s concerned voice.

And the nurse’s firm grip, surprisingly strong in one so trim and feminine, came about Trilby.

She rose to her feet.

19. At the Mercy of the Ice Ghoul

Life was such a bitch, Sandy thought as she followed Cobra and Rocky along the second floor corridor.

Things had been thrown topsy-turvy.

There were rules. If you obeyed them, everything went fine for you. Yet, somehow-

(Just one crazy. Keep reminding yourself. It’s one wacked-out maniac.)

– the rules had been thrown out the window. No rule book at all.

Waiting in the boys’ locker room, Sandy and Rocky had thought themselves immune. Designated slashers never laid a finger on potential prom royalty. But now? Sandy shuddered. They hadn’t been safe at all. Flann and Brandy had bitten it in the refrigeration room. Rival nominees. Then an exempt tender had been killed, for the love of Christ. No one was safe from the rogue janitor.

It put her entire world in doubt.

Striding alongside Rocky, Cobra reached back an index finger, hooked it into her cleavage, and pulled Sandy forward as though she were wearing a harness.

“Come on, bitch, keep up,” he said, nearly pulling her off her pumps. “The Ice Ghoul’ll getcha if you don’t.”

Cobra chuckled, digging the weirdness around them. The turn of events had confusedly torqued Rocky. Her too. But their new boyfriend seemed to be getting way the heck into it.

Crazy strength.

When Peach jilted him, they had waifed the poor dejected creep in. Then the killings began to multiply, the world tilt into Cobra’s sullen territory. Now Mister Bigshot Heel-Clicking Hood was steering the threesome wherever he liked.

Did that concern her?

She had no idea.

Nothing made sense but survival and Sandy’s mind could only hold to that one overriding idea. There’d be time later to sort out their lives.

Twice they had counterclockwised the vast square that was the second floor hallway. Twice they had passed the same damned lockers and clocks, the same damned classrooms where she had been forced to endure Home Ec and Art and Algebra and Spanish and the ill-named “teachers” who had inflicted all of that boring crap on her.

Visions of hell.

Sandy guessed that Cobra’s strategy, if he had one, was to keep going, to stay within the maundering crowd and steer clear of doorways.

He released her and lit up a cigarette, never stopping, moving forward in a confident stride.

“Hey,” said Rocky, “you can’t smoke in here.”

“What’re they gonna do?” Cobra asked with a sneer. “Kill me?”

“No, but they might expel you.”

Cobra, bemused, flashed Sandy a look of exasperation. “I’ll take my chances, jocko.”

Rocky pointed. “There’s Mr. Buttweiler’s office.”

“I’m acquainted with it,” said Cobra.

Some kids shuffled through the principal’s door, their chosen place of refuge. Had he left it unlocked? Or had the janitor’s key opened it as a lure?

“Our next set of corpses.”

“Come on, Cobra,” said Sandy. “Don’t joke about it.”

“Who’s joking? Those dweebs are dead.”

Bloodslicks stained the tile floor outside Futzy’s office. Drippings from the zippermouths. Sandy had been royally grossed out by what the killer had done-not to mention what the zipheads themselves had done-to their bodies.

“Can we settle someplace?” she complained.

“Good idea,” said Rocky.

“No way.” Cobra nixed it. His heels clacked as they walked. “Shut your traps a sec and let me think.” Fumes drifted past his ears. “I got it!”

Abruptly he veered off.

They followed.

There would be time, when this was over, to right the balance. For now it was okay with her to let Cobra set the agenda.

Humming a soft song of grim determination, Matthew Megrim pressed on through the backways.

Ten minutes before, he had stepped off the elevator; it felt as if an eternity had passed.

He’d had a similar feeling years before, descending a tower of spiral stone steps in an ancient cathedral. The sameness of what passed before his eyes, then and now, drew him into a sort of circular time, his footsteps seeming not to advance him at all.

In the obscurity ahead, Matthew thought he saw a flash of white, the distant rustle of bunched cloth. An organdy dress?

He hurried onward, suppressing the urge to call out. No need to alert the slasher or put him or her on the defensive.

By the time he had gained the bend where the vision had appeared, it was gone.

Still, he pressed on more hurriedly, losing his way but trusting to luck to bring him at last into the presence of Tweed’s killer.

Earlier, he had attained the walkways above the gym, a dizzying drop downward past balloons and crepe hangings and a flat-browed Ice Ghoul.

Why, he wondered, was the gym without lights? And it was so quiet, as though everyone had fled elsewhere. The only illumination came from bulbs around him, light-hoarders as always, and from the doors to the backways below.

Matthew’s fancy strained downward, a platter of corpses trying to resolve itself before the Ice Ghoul.

Were there any bodies lying there at all? He couldn’t tell. One moment, there were none. The next? Two, or three, or four. Inert lumps of black on black that might just as well be tricks of the air.

He thought to call out but felt it would be useless. There was no one down there to answer. And if there were, they’d know he was breaking the law and have him arrested.

Instead, he had made his way along the narrow path, crawling, feeling the smooth edges with his outstretched fingers, then taking laddered steps down into the backways again. Their familiar cloy and hug had seemed comforting for a moment. But quickly, they became once more a bewildering and hopeless maze.

The tune that circled in Matthew’s head was low and ominous. Limited in scope. The noble revenge of “I’ll get them” had been replaced with a cavelike chant in Latinate grumbles.

It didn’t echo.

Even if he had let it out full instead of hoarding it inside his mouth, it wouldn’t have echoed.

The close, airless wood and stone of the backways absorbed all sound, closing over it like rent skin healing after a flurry of welt-wounds. Matthew felt as if he were in a diving bell, cut off and confined, steeped in his surroundings but observing apart from them.

Into this cauldron of physical and temporal disorientation fell his hopes and fears about Tweed. One moment, his daughter was already dead and he was embarked on a fool’s errand. The next, she had survived and the two of them, aided by an anti-slasher groundswell, would turn this nation around.

They were only two people.

But sometimes you got lucky. Sometimes, forces came together like waves, and you rode them and fed them until things changed.

Yes, and sometimes idiots deluded themselves and fell off the deep end into quixotic crusades. Naked emperors on parade they were, thinking they were arrayed in the finest cloth, hearing not the hoots of the mob but high hosannahs.

Something caught Matthew’s eye. A shadow of darkness straight ahead roiled with movement.

Once one saw a real being in this impossible obscurity, one’s imaginings dropped away as obvious frauds.

This vision was distant, the slow roll of a back perhaps, dark restlessness upon darkness, a form reaching for existence as it passed weak bulbs, then lapsing again into nothingness.

But always a restless motion forward.

Matthew stalked it, thinking he was gaining on it, thinking it had disappeared into the gloom, then catching sight of it once more.

An excitement grew in him, the soft melody acquiring an upbeat rhythm in its steady movement onward.

Tweed didn’t like leaving Dex in the hallway. But she had to pee and this was the girls’ room.

Inside, she found the lights on full. That was a relief. No one here, she thought.

But as she rounded a baffle, an ankle came into view, a dress hem, telltale red slut-heels. And there was Peach the floozy, leaning against Bowser McPhee.

“Hey, come on, you guys,” Tweed said. “Boys don’t belong in here.”

The back of Bowser’s dark combed head, an odd warped plane of skin and hair, reflected in the mirror. His coatback creased like twists of milk against the shiny jut of a sink. Dreamy-eyed, he wallowed in bliss.

“Buzz off, Tweediebird,” said Peach. “Me and him are sticking together for protection.”

Bowser said, “Maybe I should—”

“Hey, baby,” said Peach, rubbing herself against him, “we’re just getting started. Don’t you move a muscle. Not this one anyway.” Her hand slid down along his zipper, gripping the cream-white bulge below.

“Sure, cool, why not?” said Tweed, not trying to disguise her disgust. She flounced to the nearest stall, went in, and locked the door.

Let them suck lobe. Let them strip and do it right there on the scuzzy tile floor, within reach of sink pipes, scurries of hair, and decades of impacted scum no janitor’s mop would ever touch.

Tweed didn’t care.

Peach was a slut and Bowser was bratty and obnoxious. Fuck ’em, she thought, fuck ’em both to hell and back.

She set her purse on the silver shelf and rustled her gown and panties this way and that, planting her naked bottom on the commode’s cool seat. She leaned forward intently. Her rustlings fell away. In their place, low moans and groans assaulted her ears.

Her bladder refused to cooperate.

Jesus, at a time like this!

Dex was waiting outside in the hallway, skittish as a colt, while her dad fretted at home.

By all report, the backs of restroom stalls were solid. But what if this one wasn’t?

An insane janitor could do whatever he liked. He could prepare for years, breaking every rule in the book just like he’d broken a bunch tonight.

Then there was Bowser and Peach.

Sure, they were into each other. That much their ugly gruntings made clear.

But Tweed bet they each had half an ear on her, picturing her bare-bummed, waiting for that first quick splash of liquid on liquid, then a full stream.

The seconds crept by.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Soon they would notice.

They would stop what they were doing and giggle. Peach would chime in with a crude remark and Tweed’s bladder muscle would seize up tighter than ever.

The pressure mounted, but the dam refused to burst. Come on, she thought, come on.

Think of something else. Let the body take over. The past hour’s killings came welling up: blood, icicles, Sheriff Blackburn dropping like a sack of flour.

Strangely enough, for all his prim stiffness while he lived, it was the death of Jiminy Jones that prompted much of Tweed’s shock. Short in stature, an imitative trumpet player, Mr. Jones nonetheless displayed always an infectious love of music, a love that had inspired her and Dex, that made them reach beyond the norm in their playing and in what they listened to.

She couldn’t believe Mr. Jones was dead, his corpse tarped upon the risers he would no longer break down or set up. His short fat arms would no longer wave a baton at them. His tinny dictator’s voice would no longer bark, “Don’t rush,” in time to the strict beat he heard in his head.

Tweed’s bladder let go.

Thoughts of Peach and Bowser came rushing in. But the process had been set in motion, a steady stream that would go to completion.

Did she detect any increase in their moans, anything to signal an untoward interest in her bodily functions?

None.

Surely, it had all been in her head. As usual, she had been too damned self-conscious. Her father had made a Broadway show tune out of it, even softshoeing to it and brandishing an imaginary cane and straw boater. “Get out of your head,” he had sung, “and into my heart, bah-pitty bah-bah bah-pitty bah-bah- bah.”

Tweed wiped, stood, adjusted her prom dress, and flushed.

When she emerged from the stall, she spied Bowser’s white sleeve, the gold cufflink, where his right hand had disappeared in a flurry of red frills hiked high up on Peach’s stockinged outer thigh.

Tweed couldn’t see what Peach’s hand was up to. But from her arm movements and Bowser’s muffled ung ung where their lips met, it was easy to guess. He was so turned on that even his friendship lobe appeared to blush and swell.

Tweed pretended nonchalance.

Standing at the sink next to them, she took out a tube of lipstick, leaning forward to apply it. Smart pert babe in the mirror.

She appeared untouched by the horrors around her. But she wasn’t. You couldn’t tell anything from a person’s outer show.

Fingers fell on Tweed’s waist.

She froze.

It was Peach’s free hand, caressing clumsily, working its way down the curve of her butt.

“What do you think you’re doing?” asked Tweed, moving abruptly left so that the hand withdrew as from an oven burn.

Peach turned upon Bowser’s lips, speaking through his mindless unfocused barrage of guppy kisses. “You want us, Miss Prissy Perfect. It’s the end of the world. Join in, indulge your whims, share the fun.”

Tweed said, “Why don’t you go find Cobra? Or Fido?” She put a spin on it. I’ve got Dex, she was saying. You two creeps have dumped your boyfriends like noseblown kleenex.

“You’re here,” Peach said. “They’re not. Bowser’s hard, I’m wet, and you look pretty tasty. Doesn’t she, Bowser, sweetie?”

“Arf, arf,” he said, giving Tweed a dark, zitful leer.

Tweed glared. “Not interested.”

She looked back at herself in the mirror.

One last touchup.

Somewhere nearby, she had the sudden sense of… something awful.

She couldn’t pinpoint it.

It felt all-surrounding, as if the mirror’s reflexiveness threw off her instincts, her fight-or-flight response.

“Fine,” said Peach. “Be that way, bitch.”

Tweed blushed, warm from the insult but also reacting to something else. There was something very wrong here, a thing more terrible for being undefined and out of reach.

An image of Dex waiting in the corridor came to her. She had to get back to him. She had to be sure he was all right.

Tweed stuffed her lipstick in her purse, then glanced over. Bowser McPhee, staring at her, was fingering the slut’s lobebag, tugging it down, down, down, not intending to stop, not being stopped by his new lover. It slipped lower, then fell to the floor, sweet aroused girlflesh hanging there naked and exposed.

The sight thrilled Tweed.

She was dumbstruck, frozen where she stood, wanting to be with Dex right now, wanting just as much to stay and watch, maybe even partake in the events unfolding before her.

This is crazy, thought Tweed. This is way past crazy and I oughta move, go, get out.

Right now!

Dex stood there in the hallway spooked.

Why hadn’t they headed for a more heavily trafficked area, instead of these out-of-the-way restrooms?

He could stand to go himself, but the frosted glass door with BOYS etched on it was dark and foreboding. He would have to snake a hand inside it to turn on the lights.

Why were the lights off anyway?

It was a trap. Gerber Waddell waited inside, knife dripping. If Dex held really still, he could probably hear drops of blood hitting the tile floor.

Besides, what if Tweed emerged, missed him, went off by herself to look for him? She would be attacked for sure, and Dex would live his life knowing that his negligence had led to her death.

No. He would wait here. His bladder could wait too. No matter that it was spooky here and there were far too many shadows oozing up out of the age-old grime where wall met floor. No matter that things gleamed in those shadows.

He had his moves down.

He just needed to be vigilant.

Ah but what if the mad janitor was in the girls’ room right now, holding his hand over Tweed’s mouth and readying his blade for her throat?

Dex felt like bursting in.

But no. No sound other than a flush came from inside. No scuffles. His ears were attuned to the slightest noise, even imagined ones.

I can’t trust my senses, he thought.

But there’s stuff you know your mind is making up, and there’s no mistaking the real thing when it happens.

Yeah, but by then it’ll be too late.

It’s the girls’ room, he kept telling himself. The girls’ room.

No boys allowed.

Only pervies would be interested in sneaking in. And he was no pervy. Dexter Poindexter was a straight arrow, and always would be.

It was good to be a straight arrow in a world that was falling apart. His parents said so. They told him they were proud of him for it.

Just be on the alert, he thought. Be ready to fend off attack, darting out from any doorway or any secret snap-back-able portion of any wall. Steer clear of walls.

And try not to piss your goddamn pants.

Explain that to the tuxedo rental place.

He laughed. Here his life was in danger, and he was worried about being embarrassed in the face of some dumb-ass clerk.

Dex checked his watch.

What was taking her so long?

Something snapped in the distance. His ears went up. Was it close by? Had it come from the restroom?

20. A White Knight Felled

Delia Gaskin slipped into her third janitor suit. There were two clean ones left, lying before her on a folding chair in the backways.

The thought of trying to tug a soiled pair of coveralls back on over her legs and up her torso appalled her. The stench of gore-soaked denim, the clammy feel of it as it slid over skin, nearly turned her stomach. At night’s end, she would fling them all into the basement furnace. That would happen soon after Gerber Waddell had been thrust into the frenzied masses to be scapegoated and futtered.

Ahead of her hung two floating rectangles of light, innerlit jellyfish exhibits in a darkened aquarium. She recognized them as belonging to the ground floor restrooms in the school’s northeast sector. Fluorescent light bled out of one-way mirrors above the restroom sinks, casting short swatches of light into back corridors, the wood here gone to mold, dust, and disrepair.

Each restroom was viewable from an alcove, a four-foot recess from the backways to the surface of the mirror. On Delia’s first pass through this area, she had chanced upon a folding chair leaning against the alcove wall, CORUNDUM HIGH SCHOOL stenciled in white on the back.

Damned janitor had been a guilty little bugger after all, breaking legions of laws by being in the backways for other than upkeep (and precious little of that there had been), wanking off no doubt to flashes of girlflesh. Delia hadn’t yet checked the showers in the girls’ gym, but she was willing to bet that Gerber the perv had a peephole and a folding chair there as well.

She turned into the first alcove, hoping for victims. Bingo! Three of them. A girl and a guy going at it hot and heavy, right up against the sinks. And Tweed Megrim, pooching out her lips as she painted them.

Delia gripped the handle of her carving knife. This kill would be easy. A quick swing of the mirror panel and a lunge.

She told herself she ought to wrap things up soon. Have the janitor snuffed, comfort Brest and Trilby, free the rest.

But she liked setting the superior little snots a-scurrying.

She loved to terrify them, reducing smug instructors to fear and quivering, slashing the life out of yet another wretch and watching the river of panicked ants roil and boil and jump its banks, a seethe of insectual panic that empowered her after years of powerlessness and scorn.

She reached for the mirror’s catch.

Behind her a voice spoke up.

Or rather it sang.

Delia nearly leaped back in fright. She bit down upon a scream. Blood pounded in her brain. As she turned, she had the wherewithal to conceal the carving knife at her side.

“Wait now,” he sang, “just wait now.”

There stood Matthew Megrim, history teacher and daddy to the bitch who’d been slated to die tonight. By chance, Delia had spared this man’s daughter, though now she was preparing to strike the unlucky girl down in the restroom.

“Hello, Mr. Megrim,” she said.

All the teachers used first names with each other and with the staff. But the staff, herself included, were expected to use titles when they addressed the faculty. It made her feel small. Tonight, she felt bigger.

Her greeting sounded a tad sardonic.

“A question,” he sang. “I have a question.”

Seniors loved this man, whose history lessons were always spontaneous and sung. To Delia, it seemed an affectation.

This sad sack’s past had dealt him an unknown blow, one that drove him into this vocal refuge. His singing voice was smooth and beautiful. It would be a shame to silence it, but she clearly had no choice.

He was wary. Would he think she was the designated slasher? For an instant. Then he would realize that a mere nurse had no business in the backways.

In an instant he would run. Or more likely, he would stand and defend his little girl. Either way, she had to regain the advantage.

“Matthew,” she said in sultry tones.

“What’re you doing back here?” he sang, his notes and rich delivery starting to falter as he registered her words and her manner of speaking.

Her free left hand flew to her sexlobe and snatched off the bag. Her head tilted at a bold come-hither angle.

With thoughts of love did Delia light her eyes. But deep inside, an impulse traveled from head to hand. Her right arm rose, the steel blade as rigid as her guile was soft.

He saw it. Saw what she hid.

Observant bastard.

The teacher’s resolve was swift. He tried to leap at her, to seize her attacking wrist.

But he bobbled. The forbidden sight of the nurse’s sexlobe threw him.

It was enough. The honed blade sheared through his moving fingers, no stop, no averting as it swept up to cut where his shoulder met his neck.

They danced a brutal ballet.

His death leap threatened to hurl them both against the mirror. The kids, frightened off by the report, would slip out of her grasp.

She spun their axis about, even as she swept the knife across his throat. He pitched forward and she slithered behind him, gripping his hair, letting go the knife, and yanking him backward with all her might.

Matthew’s neckslit grinned open.

But Delia had succeeded in slowing him to a dull soundless thud against the glass. A gush of blood sheened down his daughter’s face as she put the finishing touches on her lips and headed past the necking couple.

A death wheeze burbled from Matthew Megrim’s throat: melodic, rhythmic, optimistic even in the grip of excruciating pain. The poor fuck had once more saved his child, who walked oblivious out of the girls’ room, flouncing away from death for the second time this evening.

Delia let his corpse collapse and retrieved the knife from where it had fallen. Not sharp enough for the neckers.

She recovered her blue chiffon lobebag and slipped it back on. From the gym bag lying beside the folding chair she drew a thick rubber mallet. Hefted it. She would stun ’em and drag ’em off to the machine shop for fun and games.

No time to waste.

Kitty Buttweiler’s memory demanded far more honoring. Love by death stolen away could never be regained. But by God, that love could be revered, and she was determined to revere it.

There was nothing like human skin split wide-down to muscle, organ, bone, and marrow-to rouse the blood and focus the attention.

Delia unlatched the mirror and swung it open.

The lust bunnies, Bowser and Peach, an odd pair, separated their kissy lips and arched back to check out the noise, the cool draft, the sudden disorientation.

Delia reached over the sink, a perfect swing to her arm, and smacked the bare-lobed slut first. The fallen Peach pinned her mate, which made it a breeze to lay open his forehead. He fell silent, inert, as she had done before him.

The girl first, then the boy, Delia drew up into the alcove beside the dead teacher. With wraps of twine, she secured their wrists behind their backs.

The going was rough, the way tight.

But foot by foot, Delia dragged them along the backways, fired by thoughts of the machine shop and its possibilities for mayhem.

The restroom door swung shut behind Tweed, a rush, then a catch, slowing a foot from closure.

Dex wasn’t there.

Then he emerged from the shadows. She ran to him, let him gather her into a bear hug.

“I was afraid for you,” he said.

“Me too, for you,” she said. “It was awful.”

From the restroom came a boy’s voice, lonely, hurt, and anxious. His yelps of pleasure sounded like pain.

Dex tensed.

“It’s only Bowser McPhee,” said Tweed. “Him and Peach. They’re going at it.”

The high-pitched voice fell silent, falling off its odd orgasm. Tweed imagined white ribbons of sperm jetting across the red frills of Peach’s dress. The image fascinated and revolted her.

She was glad to have resisted, glad to be in Dex’s arms.

A group of promgoers swept past them.

In their midst moved the old chaperones with the notched jawflesh. Arm in arm they went, their eyes aglow with perverse delight. If you shut your eyes, you could smell wilted violets.

“Where to now?” Tweed asked.

He shrugged. “Back to the dance?”

She pictured the Ice Ghoul rising out of the darkness the gym had been plunged into. “No way. I bet he’s there waiting for the first stragglers to wander in.”

Dex snapped his fingers. “The band room.”

Not more than an hour before, her biology teacher’s spouse had been killed there. His blood would be lying in fresh pools on the planking, near where the French horns sat. Moreover, the room held fond memories of Mr. Jones.

Tweed didn’t want to go there.

But how likely was it that the slasher would return to the site of a recent kill?

“Let’s do it,” she said, taking Dex’s arm.

Against the counterclockwise flow they walked, pressed uncomfortably near the lockers. But the band room lay less than half a corridor away.

When they entered, fresh death-smell still befouled the air. The corpse, thank God, had been removed. No one else was there. The lampstand, bloodstained from the bludgeoning, gave off its feeble glow. Tall gray doors curved around the room, menacing and quiet.

“I don’t think we should…”

“This is home,” Dex said. “I say we take our chances here. Don’t worry. I’ll die before I let him hurt you or get near you.”

Though Tweed had misgivings, she relented. “I feel safe with you.” That was both true and untrue.

“Good, let’s get comfortable.”

In the obscure gloom, Dex removed his white tuxedo jacket, folded it, lining out, and draped it on the floor against the tall door which on a normal day held sax cases. He was gambling, and Tweed went along, that it didn’t hold something else tonight.

Dexter Poindexter, risk taker.

She loved that about him.

She loved lots of things about him. Pulling herself over, she planted a kiss on his friendship lobe.

“What’s that about?” he asked.

“It’s about how I love you.”

He smiled and gripped her hand where it rested on his arm. “I love you too,” he said.

And he did.

Cries of pain interrupted Bray and Winnie’s embrace there in the backways. It was unclear to either of them how far or from what direction the cries came.

A young male voice.

Two sharp grunts.

It raised Bray’s hackles. Winnie’s too, to judge from her reaction.

Bray had halted her onward hurtle, drawn her into his arms, felt her body melt against his, her mouth open to his lips.

Now the pitch of another victim’s pain shot lightning bolts through her and split them apart.

“Come on,” she said, pulling him along.

“Wait. Where?”

“I’m pretty sure it came from over there.” She pressed forward again.

Winnie must have the night vision of a cat, thought Bray. Or my kisses have energized her.

She gripped his hand as the close warm air breezed past them. The walls swept by like batter made of rotting wood, curving out of the pitch black on either side, dim disconcerting rollers crashing without sound about them. An occasional nail snagged his suit.

The bulbs were burnt out in this section of the backways, but that didn’t stop Winnie. It felt to Bray like an endless roil of dreamtime. He had to remind himself that a knife-wielding maniac might leap out at them from anywhere at any time.

“Are you sure you’re—”

“Quiet,” she shot back.

In their first moments behind the scenes, Winnie had spoken of trusting to instinct. Now she had clearly slipped into that mode.

Shifts in temperature and air currents and an impression of black-on-black crossings signaled intersections. Winnie barreled through them, taking her and Bray left or right without a moment’s hesitation.

Abruptly she slowed, stopped. “That’s the place. I’m sure of it.” She raised her arm and pointed.

Two boxes of light floated ahead, canted at a peculiar angle. Bray felt imbalanced in their presence. They hovered there like pointillist paintings stippled in gradations of gray, a sense of menace emanating from them.

“Careful now,” said Bray, tensing to grapple with their killer friend.

To the right of each box was a recess, the place from which the light was coming. Bray imagined a figure crouched to spring. Winnie wouldn’t have a chance.

“Let me by,” he said.

He gripped her, turned her, maneuvering past her. Do it, he thought, don’t let fear creep in. He raised his hands defensively as he walked into the light and turned toward the recess.

Nothing.

No… but… tricked!

The slasher was there below, ready to spring. Bray’s skin flushed with quick sweeps of heat. His eyes were still adjusting. The slasher charging at him had the advantage.

A knife lunged from the darkness.

Nothing.

No movement at all. No slasher. No knife.

Winnie came up to him. She peered down, then averted her eyes. “Christ,” she said.

Crouching closer, he saw what Winnie had seen. Another victim, some old guy, a teacher type, someone he’d never seen. The angle the man’s head lay at made no sense.

Then Bray saw that his neck had been brutally sliced open. There was blood everywhere. A crude parabola of gore coated one segment of the glass, a window onto an empty restroom.

I’m not seeing this, he told himself.

“Bray?” Winnie’s throat was flayed raw.

He rose, the shock flooding him.

He wanted someone, anyone, to comfort him. Winnie. She would do. Her arms came about him, and he realized him.

Frantically, they embraced, grappling for elusive assurance, finding it and craving more.

Dumb, he thought.

He and Winnie had laid themselves wide open for attack.

They would die here. At any moment the mad slasher would leap out and cut them to ribbons. But even as he let his mind career about in panic, Bray held Winnie in a numb, shocked embrace, his body as calm as a grave.

Deadened. Dead. One way or another, they were as good as dead already. They would become victims. Or they would be accused and convicted of tonight’s killings.

The cards were stacked against them.

Winnie tensed. A soft cry issued from her. Her head lifted as she seemed to sniff something new and terrible, a sharp miasma of misery on the cloying air.

“What?” Bray thought he said.

But Winnie’s head was angled back, frozen in attentiveness like the snapshot of a mustang, its mane tossed about, its nostrils flaring wide from the scent of a predator on the wind.

21. Aerated and Tumbled Dry

Two things awakened Peach.

A warm slap of fluid across her cheeks.

And Bowser’s screams.

Aches sang all over her body. Her knees and elbows, her thighs and back, her now-unshod feet, and every part of her head. All of it felt as if she had been drubbed unmercifully. Her hands lay like two comatose crabs, trapped and numb beneath the weight of her torso.

Peach opened her eyes, one puffy eyelid like a nagging fear in her peripheral vision. Shiny snips of tin, like crimped moons, lay scattered about a blunt iron base. Washes of blood coated the dull gray metal.

A low ominous hum came from above.

The machine shop. Elwood Dunsmore’s preserve, where humiliation of the inept held sway. Peach hated it.

Fluid spattered her face like gobs of hawked spit. Some of it landed on her lips and splashed into her mouth, salty and rude.

Bowser’s screams redoubled.

Peach looked up.

Like a piston frozen in an upthrust position, a silver square plattered Bowser above the blunt iron base. His head hung down, bent back at the neck, hair askew. His shoulders angled awkwardly as he lay upon his bound hands, the white coat of his tux scored and scuffed with dirt.

Off the other side of the square, his legs hung dumbly asplay, the bottoms of his trousers puffed up like wads of bloody gauze, dripping, drinking, o’erspilling.

Peach saw janitor overalls rising from odd shoes, powder blue and dressy. A woman’s hand grasped a red knob in a cross of knobs and eased it down.

Nurse Gaskin!

How could it be Nurse Gaskin?

Her eyes were taut, intense, narrowed to an insane point.

Again the hidden drill bit into Peach’s new boyfriend, a spew of screamed denial issuing from his lips. Blood shot out from above, swatted her brow, forced her eyelids shut.

She opened them, the sting of blood prompting tears. Wimpy old nurse lady, mateless, over the hill. When they had spoken of her at all, it had been with sneers or innuendo. Now she’d gone over the edge.

A skilled hand reversed the cross of knobs, dropped to tug Bowser a few inches farther on, then found again a red knob. She was punching buttonholes deep into Bowser’s body, working her way toward his head as if she were making a human cribbage board.

And Peach was next.

She wanted to cry out, to scream for help.

But all sound had drained from her. Her body, an empty gourd, shook and shivered. Like a sudden blush below, her bladder released. The warmth became clammy and chill. The odor of undiluted urine invaded her nostrils.

Above, a new gush of blood fountained. A spurt of Bowser’s heartpump rained again across Peach’s face.

Bray felt like a mule tugged along by some crazed prospector, as twists and turns of backway were carved out of nothingness by the womanshape that impelled him on.

Winnie’s instincts were up.

Since they’d left the restroom victim, Bray had lost his sense of direction. For all he knew, they had reached China.

Winnie’s step did not falter.

“Are we getting closer?” he called out.

Her hand raised to wave him silent. Then he abruptly ran into her halted body. He clutched her as if he had meant to.

“Oaf,” she said. “Listen.”

Bray couldn’t hear anything but his own heart and the settling of ancient dust. Then he made it out: The faint whine of a buzzsaw, a gnat at his left ear.

Winnie said, “This way,” and again they were off, like Alice and the Red Queen trying furiously to stay in place.

He concentrated on staying near the receding rustle of Winnie’s dress. His eyes struggled to keep it in view.

Oddly, there in the oppressive confines of the backways they swept through, Bray’s thoughts turned less to the danger they were in and the corpses they had seen, than to Jonquil Brindisi.

It was almost as if the obscure grayness in front of them were a moving projection screen.

Upon it he saw the thick-lipped looker, the flaming redheaded instructress of the greater vices, sizing him up, sizing them both up, from their first meeting.

There she stood at the mike, keeping the kids from panicking. Her strength thrilled him, turned him on, setting off flares of worry at the thought of her accusatory finger suddenly pointed in their direction.

Generous breasts, earlobes to die for, a hot steely look in her eyes: He craved it all, the promise, speaking perhaps only in his mind, that this woman would be the perfect complement to his and Winnie’s love.

They stopped again.

The whine was louder.

Winnie’s mouth touched his ear. “We’ve got him!” The triumph, the high flush of arousal in her voice thrilled him. Then she took off again, hurtling faster, a great bird of prey swooping down the obscure passageway, drawing him along in her wake.

He loved Winnie. He loved her determination, her naivete, her shape and smell, the totality of her. If they survived this night, their life together would be glorious.

Another halt. This time, he nearly knocked her off her feet.

The high whine came louder still, edged this time with a scream, a piercing girl-sound. Then that was choked off and the whine ceased.

Dead silence descended upon the backways.

Winnie swore.

“We’ve lost him,” said Bray.

“Not yet,” she shot back, nearly sniffing the air to find their killer. “We’re almost on him.”

“He’s gone.”

She thrust her face into his. “Look, there’s no time for your bullshit, okay?”

No recrimination in her words. Just love and a forgiving, a statement of fact, a simple urging to follow her as she turned and flew off once more on sheer hunch.

Seconds later, an eternity later, Bray saw a flash over Winnie’s right shoulder.

It fluttered. A distant figure came through a panel. A moving smudge. He was headed straight for them! Then clearly no.

The closing panel sheered away the light and Bray saw the figure recede, something swinging from its right hand.

“Wait! Hey you! Stop!” Winnie shouted.

After the briefest of pauses-would he kill them?-the flat sound of running echoed along the backways. Their savior had no interest in chatting. Nor it seemed in confrontation. Not now, at any rate, while he and Winnie had the upper hand.

Bray saw a sickly white 654 above the panel as they passed it. “Shouldn’t we—” he began, but Winnie flew on, then jerked to a halt.

A muffled thud. No running sounds.

Another panel had shut.

They were alone in the backways.

He felt Winnie deflate. “He’s escaped.”

“No, he hasn’t,” protested Bray. “We can still catch him.” His body was suddenly in overdrive, straining to go on. “How many panels can there be up ahead?”

“I had the bastard.” She made a gesture, an expression of despair, her certainty gone. “Now he’s vanished.”

“Yeah but couldn’t we—”

“It’d be a waste of time. I’ll bet he wants us to do that. Then, while we’re mucking about looking for him, he’ll kill again. A few more victims.”

“Speaking of victims…”

“Yes,” said Winnie. “Let’s. He may have left a clue to his identity.”

They doubled back and found 654 again.

Bray found the catch and released it.

And the abattoir that had been a machine shop opened its vile red stench to them, an outrageous glimpse into hell.

In the school’s basement where they had gone to ground, Kyla looked upon the antics of Patrice and Fido with sheer disgust.

She could understand giddy. Hysterical was even in her purview. But throwing caution to the wind, acting like puppystruck schoolkids, shouting juvenile defiance at the walls? It drained the love right out of her, new as well as old.

For years, Patrice had felt like part of her, a hairy wen one accepted and even grew perversely fond of. It stunned Kyla how fleeting eternal love could be, how in one instant over something that seemed trivial, it could crumble, leaving you alone again in the ashes of solitude.

She was sitting crosslegged against a cheaply paneled wall. But the wall felt solid. You could sense- she could anyway-whether or not a wall was hollow. This one had no boobytrap, nothing to give the slasher an advantage.

Out on the concrete floor, Fido brandished his cleavers, Patrice her knives. They circled one another at a safe distance: Jack Spratt sparring with his wife.

“Quiet, you two,” said Kyla.

Again they ignored her.

Giggles.

High-pitched come-out-come-out-wherever-you-are’s.

Safe feints at mutual mayhem.

By God, Kyla wanted to slaughter them both. Impulse twitched in her hands, there where she clutched her own cutting tools.

All part of this evening’s madness, she thought. It would be easy to best them, to put her past behind her, to blame two more deaths on the janitor-who was futtermeat, surely, as soon as he showed his face.

“Me ’n’ Patrice are ready for you!” crowed Fido.

His skin, whose touch for the longest time she and Patrice had craved, seemed loathsome to her now. She despised as well the visual blat of his friendship lobe, an odd bit of flesh that last night she had dreamt of kissing.

Patrice’s knives danced like daggers of rain in the harsh light, a safe distance from Fido’s.

Few kids knew the school had a basement, let alone how to reach it. Fido had hit upon the idea of hiding here. He had convinced them it would be a swell idea, the slasher concentrating on the upper floors for his victims. Now Kyla had her doubts.

Their new beau was too damned cocksure.

Patrice had soaked up his confidence, going giddy in the head, her chubby figure twirling like a hippo in heat.

The gargantuan furnace hummed low and ominous, a row of double bass players bowing hushed subliminal tones from their instruments. Angled pipes rose and fell like thick strands of dark spaghetti, their shadows and smudges hiding just about anything, any one, Kyla’s imagination could conjure.

Beyond the mad dance of her companions, a laundry chute curved down. Its indistinct length faced her squarely.

There was something dark and nasty, something threatening, about it. It hung there like a big gaping elephant’s trunk, the light of a lone bulb throwing shadows into it that glinted, suggesting moisture where dryness surely prevailed.

It reminded Kyla of her fluxidermed granny, her vulval opening as big and blaring as a tuba mouthpiece. Daddy had kept his dead mother in his bedroom closet. He hadn’t bothered to have his fathers fluxed, which made him an oddity among grown-ups, Kyla had later realized. One parent only had been fluxidermed.

Nor did he display it in the vestibule, as normal grown-ups did. When Kyla came home before her father, she would go into his dark bedroom and peer into the closet, past forests of hanging suits and shirts, at the bare buttocks of her grandmother. From that dusty dark ruddy pucker had her daddy dropped, a dark ominous ancestral privacy. That’s what this gaping laundry chute reminded her of, as the huge furnace rumbled in Kyla’s gut and Fido and Patrice flurried knives at one another.

An ancient laundry basket on wheels, its canvas sides bulging with huge mounds of soiled towels and sheets, awaited the laundry chute’s next disgorging.

“Will you two shut the fuck up?”

She said it loud if laconically, knowing they would blow her off. But some things just got said cuz they needed saying. Maybe a failed warning would be sufficient to ward off the killer.

Maybe not.

Probably not.

Then something clanged overhead.

It put a halt to her companions’ silly little dance of death. It raised the hairs on the back of Kyla’s neck, blasting prickly heat straight up into her backbrain.

“What was that?” Patrice wondered aloud.

A rumble began like distant muffled timpani, as the clang reversed itself. Some sliding door wrenched up, then juddered decisively shut, almost the confident slice of a guillotine blade falling home into its groove.

The rumble bumbled about above, growing louder, the beat of it coming faster and more violent.

Kyla couldn’t fix on it. Then her ears peeled the sound from its echo. She focused on the dark downdrop that gaped before her.

Fido and Patrice gazed about wildly. A brandish of knifes angled out to ward off any attacker.

Before Kyla could warn them, even as words took shape in her confused brain, she saw the thing tumble into view, a dark furball in the darkness, coming quick, separating itself from the chute and leaping free.

Was it a huge black spider rolled into a ball, ready to spear out its legs and scuttle murderously toward them, stinger out, its dark dangle of limbs silently going dandle-dandle-dandle?

The thing bounced once on the heaped laundry, leaving a blotch of gore across the white expanse. Then it smacked the concrete by Fido’s feet. The crack of a bat upon a skull. Splintered bone. It rolled furiously, flop-flop, hair-face-hair-face.

Bowser McPhee, Fido’s ex-boyfriend.

His skin was gray verging on blue, bruised, upsplashed with blood to the jowls.

The neck had been sheered through in one clean sharp slice.

Kyla wondered why Fido’s screams sounded so high. Then she realized all three of them had merged their screams, a braid of terror tightly stranded together.

She froze. The head before her, with its baleful blinkless stare, held her in thrall.

If the killer happened to appear now, Kyla realized, she would be as helpless and doomed as a deer startled into dumbness on a dark highway, creamed by the rig that pinned it to the night with its high beams.

22. A Proliferation of Deaths

Dex and Tweed huddled together on the band room floor against a ten-foot-tall gray-painted door. A fan of such doors swept off in either direction. Theirs housed sax cases, the others timpani, trombones, tubas, every band member’s weapon of choice.

They couldn’t be sure, of course, that the storage space behind one of those doors hadn’t been emptied out before anyone arrived, an easy point of access for the killer.

One level down, the lone dim bulb atop its stand feebled light into the room. At its base was a dried pool of blood, hastily mopped, from the death of Bix Donner, the husband of Tweed’s tenth grade bio teacher.

Dex had thought the rogue slasher would not return to the scene of his crime.

He wasn’t so sure any more.

The crazy bastard’s preternatural vision, Dex was starting to fear, had them in his sights. The slow cold hand of paranoia slid its fingers along his spine and dug its nails into his brain.

Yet perhaps the cause of his rising panic was not paranoia at all, but survival instinct.

“Poor Mr. Donner,” Tweed whispered, breaking the silence like a shout.

Dex raised a finger to his lips. At her ear: “Keep an eye out. He could rush us from anywhere. If you even think a shadow moved, let me know. Don’t assume you’re imagining it, okay?”

Tweed nodded.

She mouthed something soundless. Dex thought it was “I love you,” though the weak light made it impossible to be sure.

The bulb flickered as if a moth flitted back and forth over it. Then it went out. Blackness rushed in to surround them.

One squat upper window glowed with enfeebled moonlight that shot down head-high to carve a far sliver out of one wall.

We’re sitting ducks, thought Dex, we’ve got to get away from these doors.

He took Tweed’s hand and helped her up, the rustle of her dress concealing perhaps the groan of a tall gray door’s hinges.

Dex felt a breeze. The passing of someone’s body before them? At any moment, Tweed would cry out from a lethal wound. Or a knife blade would violate him, pricking out the heart of his life.

“Hold me,” said Tweed.

Dex gave her a quick fierce hug, then said, “Come on.”

Holding Tweed’s hand, Dex slid his right shoe along the platform. He was no longer certain of the four-inch drop to the next level, where the trumpets and French horns sat.

It wouldn’t do to trip and tumble. They’d be dead in an instant.

Tweed said, “Not so fast!” Panic at being dragged along in the darkness. She bumped him, then regained her balance.

“Another level now, watch your step,” he said. “Clarinet section. Okay, we’re off the risers. Past the piano. I can make out the band room door, coming up on the blackboard now.”

He felt along it. Soon the door.

The killer’s eyes burrowed into their backs. He would never let them escape.

But what if he were right outside the door, waiting for them in the hallway?

Tweed tugged him to a halt. “Dex, I heard something. Out there.”

And the band room door opened, gray on black. A figure slipped through. The door hissed closed behind it. Dex rushed whoever it was, grappling with the shape, his fists darting out, trying to stun their attacker, to get the upper hand.

No resistance. A woman’s voice shouted out, “Hey, wait… what-?”

“Miss Phipps!” said Tweed.

Adora Phipps, Dex thought. She’s safe. But he felt down her wrists just in case.

Empty hands.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s us. Me and Tweed. We thought you were—”

“I’m not. But I’ll be damned if I know who is. Listen we’re trying to round everyone up, get them back to the gym. It’s the safest place, and Mr. Buttweiler’s got a plan. Come with?”

Dex nodded.

“You bet,” said Tweed relieved.

“Ditto,” said Dex, realizing his nod had failed to register.

“Good, let’s go.”

After groping about for it, the door made a vertical gray line. Then that line gaped into a rectangle wide enough for them to pass through one at a time.

Jonquil Brindisi walked as if she had been thoroughly oiled, her lubricious limbs animated by sheer desire. She loved the mayhem, the chaos, loved them to distraction.

Once Gerber Waddell was found, she would join in the futtering. But if she found him first, she planned to fuck the simple dweeb, feeling his lovely violence invade her as she tied him down and rode him.

Just imagining it made her gasp.

She had already dragged Claude into a supply closet after Elwood Dunsmore had been found torch-faced by the entranceway and Futzy’d rolled in the mutilated zippermouths. Claude kept up his but-I’m-married routine until she yanked his fly open and filled her throat close to choking.

Then his pretzel of words, the syntactically convoluted bullshit he had made a part of himself, turned into barnyard grunts and oh-yeahs and suck-me-darlin’s. She had left him panting, his organ still thick despite its hot spew. He tasted like pea soup pureed with pearl onions.

Thus, Jonquil had mused, do the greater vices ever overwhelm the lesser.

Now she was on Gerber’s trail.

More precisely, she was up for whatever the fates delivered. She craved the killer. And she felt that the strength of her craving ought to be enough to draw him out.

Until now, Gerber had been a sexless dolt of muscles and nods, thinning hair and stupid grins. Who would ever have guessed at the dynamo of hatred which had clearly simmered inside him for years, exploding at last into this amazing orgy of bloodletting?

Swimming upstream of the fleeing students, Jonquil had heard talk of terrible screams and the whining of buzzsaws. Up ahead, she saw the closed classroom door.

No noise came from the machine shop. But a bright light inside cut through wires of opaque glass in the lower half of the door, throwing sprays of dark diamonds across the corridor.

Something had gone on here. She sensed it. Perhaps her demented janitor awaited her, crouched to kill but ready for seduction if she played him right.

Jonquil grasped the doorknob and moved boldly inside, into the full light of the shop. Bulks of machinery stood gleaming and silent everywhere.

Tensed to repel attack, she took in Brayton and Raven standing by the far wall. Their soiled prom clothes had been torn. Their faces were forlorn and bereft, their eyes unable to stray from what they beheld.

Then she strode toward them. A large lathe moved out of her way, and there before her-wafts of deathstench turning the air moist and oozy and charged with sexual energy-were a pair of mauled, mutilated kids.

An unidentifiable male, headless, lay akimbo upon the tile floor. His off-white tuxedo was as pinkish red as bleeding gums. His chest looked as if it had, from neck to navel, once sprouted teeth, all of them yanked out now. Gaping holes pooled there, crimson fleshcups that made Jonquil swoon.

But it was the female that truly got Jonquil off, what with its slutty red-frilled frock and the sizzling-as-hot-blacktop body, no mistaking it, of Peach Popkin, whose face alone would have made identification problematic.

The Popkin girl had been caught in a swan dive, her arms extended, her bare back arched up into a U upon the platform that housed the table saw. Her breasts met the table’s smooth surface at nipplepoint, their tips pushed flat beneath her blanched aureoles.

Beyond the blade, the girl’s strawberry blond hair, streaked a deep red, wisped forward. Her coiffure had been mussed from the killer’s having pressed her forehead forward into the gray blur of a spinning blade.

At rest now, the blade stuck deep, through skin and skullbone, parting the halves of her brain. Though sprays of gore had spattered her flesh, most of it had shot across the room like spoutings from a dying whale’s blowhole.

The scene was breathtaking.

“We can explain,” came Brayton’s voice, a warmth to it that moistened Jonquil further.

“Oh no you can’t,” she said, not accusing but filled with the wonder she felt.

“We were in the backways,” said Raven. “We saw the killer come out of here. He had the boy’s head by the hair. He got away.”

“Marvelous,” said Jonquil. The woman before her was one succulent saucy wench. Then it struck her. “How did you break into the backways? Only the slasher’s supposed to know the combination, him and the janitor.”

“Should we tell her?” Brayton asked.

Raven made a face. “What choice?”

He shrugged. “Zane Fronemeyer was chosen to be your school’s slasher. He’s dead. The janitor axed him in his basement. Fronemeyer’s wives are dead too.”

Jonquil shuddered. “Zane was a scumsucking zit from the word go. He wanted to suck my scum. He kept nagging, long after I made it clear he was less than zero in my book. Camille and Hedda deserved better. But the question remains: How do you two know all this?”

Brayton tried to speak, then gave up.

“Let’s show her,” his date said. She raised her hand to her left ear.

Brayton did likewise.

Christ! In the presence of death, these two sexy people, thought Jonquil, are about to expose their sexlobes to me. They’re as turned on by all this as I am.

Ripples of come—need treadled through her loins. The right word, the right look, would set her off without a touch.

Their lobebags fell away.

And there, in all their glory…

But Raven’s exposed lobe was dyed a godawful green, some ridiculous protest among the homeless-by-choice. And Brayton yanked and peeled and his sexlobe, his friendship lobe too, came away in his hands like some spent Cyrano’s nose putty.

The crude puckers of flesh which punctuated the question marks of his ears meant but one thing.

“You and Raven… you’re—”

He nodded.

“My name’s Winnie,” the woman said.

“They took us off the streets, drugged us, delivered us to Fronemeyer. But Gerber Waddell killed him before he could kill us.”

This changed everything.

A couple of freaks.

From the look of his severed lobes, Brayton was a promjumper. No way would Jonquil deign to suck on the vestigial stump of anyone’s sexlobe, least of all some joker who had dodged his prom. Why, blowing a fucking eunuch would be about as frustrating and far more humiliating.

Jonquil sublimated her lust and grew cool.

“You’ve got no business being here,” she said. “I ought to have you, I will have you arrested.”

Brayton raised his hands. “Hey now—”

“We’re your best chance of catching the killer. You need access to the backways, and we’ve got it.”

The feisty little slut was right.

Jonquil still had the hots for Gerber Waddell. If she expected to fuck him before he was futtered, that could only happen by playing along with these two.

She deflated and stood down. “I give,” she said. “The backways it is. Let’s find him.”

“This way,” said Brayton, putting his lobebag back on. He punched a tiny keypad over the panel they stood before.

Winnie entered first, a soiled doll returned to the dingy package it had arrived in.

Jonquil went next, loving all over again the musk Brayton wore as she passed him and regretting what she’d learned about him. He’d have made an irresistible bedmate.

Brayton trailed after her.

The panel slid shut as the musty backways swallowed them up. Fired up at the prospect of finding the janitor, Jonquil moved between the homeless pair as though she were a convict and they her jailers.

Sandy glanced about nervously.

The larger stairwells, wide and step-scuffed at the four corners of the school, always teemed with students between classes.

But halfway along the east, north, and west sides of the school were less-frequented stairs, shut off at top and bottom by steel safety doors. The lights burned harsh here, throwing hard-edged shadows across pink-tiled walls.

The stairwell, which stank of Lysol, was a place of loneliness and crushed cigarette butts.

Rocky was squatting against one wall.

Beside him stood Cobra, his knee bent and one cleated heel stuck to the wall like a magnet. His back bent, he puffed on a coffin nail.

Sandy feared the lulls, those times when the three of them were here alone. Rushes of kids would come by from above and below, the bars of the steel doors clanging and releasing, latches raucously catching as they swung shut. Then for a time, no one. Ominous stillness. All a-fidget, she would long for the next wave of promgoers, her friends, Rocky’s friends.

Or total geeks, it didn’t matter.

Anyone to suggest safety in numbers.

They had hit another lull.

“Let’s go some place else,” she said.

Rocky, on automatic, began to rise.

Cobra’s free hand restrained him. “Stay put. Don’t get me wrong. I like Sandy’s sweet ass and I’m planning on having plenty of stiff-poled fun licking her lobes and knockers. But I’m calling the shots now. I say we hang here.”

The door opened below. Then it swung shut. Faster than usual, Sandy thought.

From the landing, only part of the upper door was visible.

A snapping, like the quick sharp shake of a chain, sounded below. The door rattled as if the person who had come through it were trying to open it again.

Then a woman dressed in blue appeared, her short hair in mid-shake as she-Sandy recognized Nurse Gaskin-bounded up the stairs, clutching a large brown folder, the kind with accordion pockets like a briefcase. Bloodstains dappled her dress, reminders of her having witnessed the death of Mrs. Donner’s husband in the band room.

The nurse glanced at them as she sped past, her face full of frowns like grown-ups often got, her fists clenched into tight balls.

She wanted to say something as she went by, but she held back until she was almost at the top. Then: “The bastard locked the door behind me.”

Sandy didn’t need to ask who she meant.

None of them did.

They glanced at one another, then moved as one in sheer terror. Sandy’s head surged with hot flushes of panic.

Gripping the gray railing, she followed Cobra and Rocky, gearing that the janitor would somehow magically rise about them, bursting out of one of the panels fitted into the tile walls. Her flats pounded up the steps. A gray wad of gum lay like squashed putty on the edge of one step.

As Nurse Gaskin shot her hand to the door, Sandy heard another sharp snap, twin to the one below.

Did the sound come before, at, or after the nurse touched the door? It was too confusing to tell. It must have been just before.

Ms. Gaskin’s hand pulled back from the door as if from a jolt of electricity. She jammed the folder under one arm and hit the bar, full force, with both hands, leaning into it.

The door refused to budge.

Sandy and her men had nearly reached the top platform.

Her mind raced.

They would die here. At any moment, darkness would come crashing down upon them. Hands would shoot out in a quick grasp at her ankles, yanking her off her feet.

No! They would shove the door open, the four of them exerting maximum effort to gain freedom.

But what lay in wait for them when the door flew open?

The nurse turned to them. She glanced with sudden alarm over Rocky’s shoulder. He had one foot on the top step and began to look backward.

Sandy was spooked to the max.

She felt the janitor behind her, ready to grab them, skewer them. He was ready to unleash another outbreak of bloodletting.

Then the nurse’s face bloomed with hatred.

She slammed full-force into Rocky, upsetting his balance, sending him flailing off the step.

Then she grabbed Cobra by the hair, yanking him across eight feet of ineffective arm-waving, head-first into the tile wall.

“Whoa,” he had said, “wait a—”

But the headslam cut off his rising protest, and the nurse repeated that headslam as if she had been possessed by a mad plan to butt their way to freedom. A bullseye reddened on the tile wall.

Down below, Rocky landed badly, crying out in pain and disbelief as his body struck stairs and railings, meat and bone out of control.

Sandy froze, unable to move or think.

This wasn’t happening.

The nurse was kind and meek and dorky. It was Gerber Waddell they had to look out for.

But kindly Nurse Gaskin released Cobra with an upward flurry of hands and bent for the brown folder.

Rocky was crawling painfully up the steps toward them, his legs weirdly skewed, his right temple smeared with blood.

Cobra fell, no sound from his mouth, just a resounding smack as his skull struck the floor.

“Don’t,” Sandy whimpered or thought she did.

The brown folder tumbled end over end like a flipped playing card, and in the nurse’s hand was a ball peen hammer. As she passed, she threw Sandy a look of contempt that pinned her to the wall like a moth to cardboard.

Sandy trembled. She was unable to summon the will to cry out or stop the attack on Rocky.

The nurse’s arm swung up.

It swung down.

And Sandy watched the hammer crack open a crater in her boyfriend’s skull, staving it in like the thin hollow shell of a chocolate bunny. His body shook with the viciousness of each blow. Sandy couldn’t look away, no matter how much she wanted to.

Rocky’s cries stopped.

He became a big bloody ragdoll.

Only the nurse’s savage grunts remained, a counterpart to her swung thunks into red flesh. Above those sounds sailed the wisps of Sandy’s whimpering.

At last, the nurse turned away from Rocky and fixed Sandy in her stare. She rose up the steps toward her. Sandy’s legs gave out and she slid down the wall.

Tears blurred her vision.

She was falling and the monster was rising.

“Three’s a charm,” said Nurse Gaskin, low, heavy, and harsh.

She crouched before the girl.

Cold wet metal touched her brow. A tickle slanted across it, a cool drop of blood.

The hammerhead lifted.

Another diagonal, crosswise to the first, traveled Sandy’s forehead.

“Don’t,” she whimpered.

“Hold still now.” Ms. Gaskin gripped Sandy’s ponytail and wrenched it tight. “This will only hurt for a second.”

The blur pulled back and then the punch came swiftly in, leaping beyond all bound, violating Sandy, opening her up.

The stairwell vanished and a rush of stars rode in on a black wave of night.

23. True to Their School

Despite the chaos that had befallen Corundum High, and faced with mounting reports of fresh victims, Futzy Buttweiler had never felt so much in command.

Some enterprising jock had brought several dozen small flashlights from one of the science labs. Their beams now angled crazily across the gym. They had ended up primarily in the hands of natural-born leader types, but other kids held them too, infiltrating the privileged few around the bandstand.

Beyond the people Futzy addressed, the Ice Ghoul loomed out of the darkness. But the papier-mache monster didn’t cow him any longer. Neither did it bring forth memories of Kitty’s death and futtering.

Tonight, Futzy would strike back.

He would triumph over the Ice Ghoul.

Before the night was out, he would see that Gerber Waddell was tracked down and torn apart.

Adora Phipps hugged him.

There would be no more bullshit in his life. He loved this woman. Why should he hide it? He wanted every godforsaken soul in the world to know that Futzy Buttweiler loved Adora Phipps.

He returned her hug. Then he spoke to the crowd massed before him.

There stood the Borgstroms, their eagerness to savage some deserving bastard, any deserving bastard, shining out even in darkness.

Beside the Borgstroms were Dexter Poindexter and Tweed Megrim, the night’s intended victims who had by some strange chance escaped their fate and were now willing, brave souls, to tempt it again.

And, for all Futzy knew to the contrary, beyond their narrow perimeter of flitting torches, sick dimwitted Gerber Waddell himself lent an ear, knife in hand, ready to rush them at any moment.

Futzy kept his voice low, both to draw close their conspiratorial circle and to shut out the janitor, if indeed he were listening in.

“We’re in the midst of a grave crisis, my friends,” he began.

“Hey, Futzy,” one of the newer teachers piped up. “Cut the crap, will you? There’s no time for it.”

That stung.

Futzy felt tempted to sting back.

Then he admitted to the merits of the remark, simplified, clarified, and began anew.

“I suggest,” he said, “that we stay in pairs, divvy up the school, and move out, one flashlight to a pair. Everyone is to be armed. Adora and I have gathered some cutlery.” He gestured to a pile of knives at his feet. “Take a couple. If you find the janitor, strike first and save your questions for later. Don’t be jittery and don’t go off half-cocked. Be fully cocked and ready for anything.”

“What about the students?” asked Claude.

It struck Futzy for the first time: Jonquil Brindisi, who usually cleaved to Claude at these affairs, was nowhere to be seen. He prayed she hadn’t come to a bad end. He would miss her spice and spirit.

Nurse Gaskin was absent as well, she who had witnessed the death of Bix Donner and been unable to stop it. Futzy hoped the poor woman wouldn’t be permanently scarred by that experience.

“The students,” said Futzy. “An excellent point, Claude. As you comb your portion of the school, gather them up, keep them close about you. And shout out to Gerber to give himself up. Offer him clemency, leniency, anything to lure him out of the backways. Our kids are smart. They’ll go along to save their necks. But Gerber, despite the cunning he seems to have displayed tonight, is still at heart a simple-minded feeb. He’ll buy into the big lie. Then we’ll savage him.”

It was tempting to speak up, but Futzy kept his remarks close to the chest. The Ice Ghoul seemed to strain forward to hear, struggling to split itself off from the darkness, rise to its full height, crane its bull neck, lumber forward, and kill them all.

A crazy notion came over the principal: He fancied that the janitor had squeezed up into the Ice Ghoul’s hollowed-out head, directional mikes in its ears, and heard his entire plan.

Futzy dismissed that as paranoia.

Directly before him, hand in hand, stood Dex and Tweed. Adora, finding them hunkered down in the band room, had persuaded them to come along to the gym.

She gave Futzy’s arm a squeeze.

It was time.

“Mr. and Mrs. Borgstrom, you two explore the butchery wing. Claude, I want you and… and Brest-Trilby, you stay here with Pill-to scour the science labs. Dexter and Tweed, you’ve got the stairwells.”

Futzy’s inner map of Corundum High flashed by as he doled out sector after sector. He didn’t want any place overlooked. To himself and Adora, he assigned the band room.

“Take time to do it right,” he said. “Don’t skimp, don’t shortchange. When you’re finished, bring yourselves and any kids you’ve rounded up to the auditorium. If you find Gerber Waddell, send runners there.

“And good luck to you all.”

Crowding forward, their flashlights crazily stabbing downward, they delved into the cutlery, as somber a group as Futzy had ever seen. He was reminded of the solemn clatter of communion trays passed hand to hand, tiny glasses of grape juice lifted out with a clink.

Adora squeezed his hand and brought it to her lips. “Good plan, darling.”

“We’ll get him,” he assured her.

“I love you, Futzy,” said Adora, her eyes beaming with pride.

“And I love you, dear lady.”

Futzy felt no cause for confidence.

Yet oddly enough he was confident.

He looked forward to tossing Trusk and Torment out of his life for good-they would be amazed at the new vigor in him as he threw their sorry asses off the front porch-and installing Adora Phipps there instead.

She would glow.

So would he.

And Kitty, at last, would be laid to rest.

But first—Futzy stooped and grabbed a shish kabob skewer to complement his snubnose—they had a rogue janitor to subdue.

Trilby sat in a folding chair behind the refreshments. Pill lay slumped on her lap, a thumb stuck deep in her mouth.

Stroking her daughter’s hair, Trilby made soothing sounds and gently rocked her.

Above them, among the rafters, floated the dim shape of a basketball hoop and backboard that had been cranked up and away. From the ill-lit expanse before them rose the Ice Ghoul, the lines of its frame harsh and cutting, its face obscured by shadow.

But Trilby was unafraid.

A madman had murdered her husband, spooked her little girl, and thrown her household into chaos. Yet she feared neither for her life nor for Pill’s.

They would survive and grow strong.

Before Brest left with Claude Versailles to check out the science labs, she had hugged Trilby and Pill. “Sit tight,” she had said. “We’ll be back soon.” But as she said it, she had worn her stone face, tight and drawn, her eyes clamped down upon her feelings. There was no telling how tonight’s mayhem had affected her, nor how it had affected their future.

Don’t think about it.

Pay attention to Pill.

Pill had witnessed a murder, under threat of discovery and slaughter herself. She had heard her father’s death announced before a frightened crowd of promgoers.

“There, there,” she said. “That’s my Pill.” Her hand stroked the angel-smooth hair above her daughter’s neck. Tonight’s terrors might cause Pill to develop too early her lust for blood.

Or she might never do so.

Trilby didn’t know which would be worse.

No, that wasn’t so.

If Pill were inadequately socialized, she would be treated as an odd duck, open to taunts and jeers and the most hurtful kind of bullying.

Worse, she might join the anti’s.

Pill had a fiercely independent streak. If she were permanently damaged over this-and the magnitude of tonight’s trauma threatened to make that a certainty-she might join the crazies who, as they claimed, used violence to end violence. Eventually, she would be taken out by government forces.

Stop, she thought. You’re hurtling into a terrible future. This will not come to pass!

“We’ll come through this okay, honey,” she said, her voice catching. “We just have… to be strong.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

Pill lay against her like an inert sack of pudding and bone, her eyes open but unfocused, slow blinks lidded upon them like an infant dull with sleep. Her thumb-sucking came and went but the thumb stayed firmed ensconced in her mouth.

Random shouts issued from distant hallways, coming from bunches of aroused, terrorized kids joining in a hunt for the slasher. At some point, that sick soul would be found and futtered. Then they would all be free.

She stifled a laugh.

Free.

Free to build a new life around the obsessive kernel of this night, a nightmare forever revived, recreated, relived.

No, she thought. We will get beyond this. We will process it and go on.

“We will, honey,” she said. “We will.”

It was almost time to thrust the drugged fucker into the mob. Almost time for him to be royally futtered.

Delia had developed a taste for blood.

But for the sake of Kitty, and to assure triumph in her pursuit of Brest and Trilby, she would wrap things up now. Call it quits. Slake the frenzied bloodthirst of the crowd with good ol’ Gerber Waddell.

And emerge a survivor.

There’d be time enough, after bedding her grieving girlfriends, to maraud and slaughter once more, carefully, selectively, at random intervals.

The janitor lay propped against the wall of a corridor, a lone lightbulb throwing a harsh glare across him. Alarm lit his eyes.

She wondered if she had trussed him up too tight. Had she cut off his circulation? Would his walk be convincing? Or would they see evidence, assuming there was anything left to autopsy, that he had been bound and gagged for over an hour?

Slumped that way, Gerber looked so small.

Her toy, her plaything.

It was an odd responsibility she had taken on, this being in charge of lives and deaths, this manipulation. It made her feel creepy, and virtuous, and powerful all at once.

Stooping she put a hand on his shoulder and felt his muscles strain in resistance.

“You okay, big fella?”

Sweat stood on Gerber’s blunt brow.

“Yeah, I thought you were.”

Beyond the wall, not six feet from her roped hostage, lay the gym’s north side, the bandstand where the principal spoke in low murmurs.

A squat stool on her left held a small kit of medical supplies. The syringe was out and ready, resting upon a leather pouch.

She worked Gerber’s right sleeve up under the ropes, baring his arm just above the elbow. Tied him off. Smacked two fingertips against his skin. Squinted in the dim light. Found what felt like a vein and jabbed the needle in.

“This will only hurt a lot, and for a long time,” she said.

She had drawn the entire ampule of liquid into the hypodermic. Now she shot it home, hard supreme power in the steady closure of her thumb, encircled by metal and slowly pressing down to dope him up good.

The janitor’s eyes glazed over.

Needle out. No need for cotton. Let him bleed. Soon there’d be plenty more blood.

Delia returned the syringe to the stool and worked at his bonds. They were tight, but they were not impossible. Soon she had them off.

Gerber’s eyelids had grown heavy. She undid his gag and vigorously rubbed his legs.

“No more pins and needles,” she said. “It’s meat-cleaver, serving-fork, and carving-knife time for you.”

She had to get him up. Walk him about. He had to be convincing when she shoved him out.

At first he stumbled.

Heavy, drugged guy.

It felt as if they were on an unsteady deck, rolling and heaving with the waves.

Then he grew used to it, moving more like an obedient automaton.

His arm lay heavy across her shoulders. His big, denim-clad body stank of confinement.

“Only a little farther,” she said, hoping she was right.

Years before, there’d been a math teacher, a designated slasher, who had, contrary to all law, ushered Delia into the backways the day after the prom. He had shown her about, doing his best then-and his best was piss poor-to prick her, up against the outer curves of the band room.

Her memory had sponged up the details, where they were, how they had arrived there.

Even so, the backways tended to disorient. She concentrated on direction, staggering under Gerber’s unsteady weight. The things she needed to complete his condemnation waited in the walls behind the auditorium stage.

He mumbled something, his breath close and reeky.

“That’s right, Gerber,” she said. “It’s time to die. Would you like that?”

Gerber’s head lolled, his lips open and drooly. He looked vacuous and thirsty.

His janitorial boots galumphed obediently along as they walked. Though they threatened to stomp her blue bloodcaked pumps, they never quite did so.

They turned a bend.

Ah!

The series of panels on stage left appeared. A cramped three feet separated that wall from the black legs, the array of curtains that hid actors about to enter the stage proper.

A tiny table held a rag.

On the rag was an ice pick. And next to it, soaking the rag, lay an icicle, one of many Delia had found in an obscure corner of Lily Foddereau’s refrigeration room, where a leak in the overhead pipes had created an inverted forest of them.

A noise sounded behind her.

Delia froze.

All night, a pair of somebodies had been cramping her style. They had almost caught sight of her leaving the machine shop with the McPhee boy’s head swinging from her hand.

Again it sounded, an exchange of words.

Still distant, but that wouldn’t count for shit if they saw her.

“Stand up,” commanded Delia in a whisper. A large 525 hovered ghostly white above them.

The dumb fuck cooperated.

She grabbed the ice pick. Then the icicle, cold, wet, stubbornly sticking to the rag.

“Take these,” she said.

Gerber’s hands opened at the touch of them and closed again feebly. She gripped them tighter about the handle and the icicle.

Huge hands, loam hands.

Fumbling for the catch on the panel, she jabbed it, missed, jabbed again, and felt the mechanism obey. The panel slid open, a soft shuck sound. At her feet, a shaft of light fell.

The intruders were almost upon them.

“Go!” she told Gerber. “Through those curtains.”

By some miracle, she got him over the lip of the panel. He moved away from her, marching like an obedient clockwork toy, just where she wanted him to go.

“Yes, that way lies good things, Gerber.”

Not a moment to lose.

Should she step through after him, or hide in the backways?

Her mind dithered.

Delia chose to step through, swift in the instant of decision, feeling eyes about to light on her.

Gerber was moving, brushing black velvet but passing between the hanging legs.

Any second now he would be visible. The clamor would begin.

Fleeing to a prop closet upstage of the legs, Delia hid herself behind it.

The space was maddeningly shallow.

All it would take was one glance her way and the game would be up.

But the strange, soiled couple that emerged from the backways, and Jonquil Brindisi behind them, had eyes only for the denim-clad man making his slow entrance onto the stage.

From the first, as she and Dex explored the stairwells, Tweed had been bold in calling out to Gerber Waddell.

Reckless even.

She had known it, but her giddy state led her to take risks. And because they were brandishing some pretty mean cutlery, she felt safe.

Tweed could tell the wandering students were impressed by her and Dex’s role as deputies. They had picked up strays in the hall and in the first two stairwells they examined.

In the close confines of tile and steel and gum-encrusted steps, their shouts to the janitor doubled back upon them in weird echoes.

When they reached the east stairwell, they found an odd lot of sober kids outside the door. Another lot stood inside the stairwell, their eyes fastened upon a trio of corpses.

The old feeling of helplessness flooded into Tweed again. Suddenly she had no will to hold up her knives.

Her heart held not much fondness for Cobra, Rocky, or Sandy. But violent death levels all victims.

Somehow Dex rallied.

Somehow he said just what everybody needed to hear to start them on their way toward the auditorium. Something about the principal having a plan, though Tweed couldn’t recall Futzy saying anything planworthy in the gym.

Now they were sitting with their contingent of strays in the left front block of seats, as other unsuccessful troops straggled in emptyhanded.

Their flashlight beams did a feeble dance along the sloping aisles as they walked.

Someone slow-scanned, high across the auditorium’s stage-right wall, the motto painted in large gold letters: “The strength of a nation lies in the regimentation of its youth.”

No one said much.

Faces were drawn.

Young shoulders slumped forlornly.

Mr. Buttweiler and Miss Phipps sat side by side on the edge of the stage. They had no plan. Dex had been speaking from some wishful place in his head. But no one, certainly not Tweed, seemed in any mood to ding him for it.

The principal’s spindly legs rhythmed at random, shoe heels nearly knocking against the stage front. Hands clasped earnestly in his lap, he leaned to say something to Miss Phipps.

She nodded.

Grimacing, he began to rise.

But when he was halfway up, Tweed’s attention shot to the right.

Onstage, someone was emerging from between hanging dark curtains.

Hands, arms, chest.

Objects gleamed from his fists-

It was Gerber Waddell!

– shiny objects, a thin one, a thick one.

The janitor’s face was shrouded in washes of death, the deaths he had brought about.

Futzy stood in shock, a hand at one pocket. His head hung dumbly, as if he’d just been told his best friend had died.

Tweed’s brain teemed.

It’s the slasher, said one part of her mind. Run!

But voices, high and fast and full of anger, were rising all about her. Another part of her mind latched onto them, found resonance with that feeling, and rose with them.

Dex shouted beside her, his face as red as a newborn robin cheeping for worms.

Sounds were issuing too from her.

The air was full of movement. Flutterings. Hard young bodies rushing forward.

Across the black floor of the stage staggered the head janitor, a dumb slow feeb of a slasher. Tweed wondered how he had surprised or bested anyone.

Futzy stood transfixed. Then his hand was fumbling in his pocket and he pulled out a gun, the great unequalizer, death-power packed in a fistful of metal. With a deafening blow, Futzy punched the air before him.

The feeb’s left shoulder yanked back. A man and woman entered from the wings behind him.

Far from stopping Tweed and the others, the gunshot drove them into a greater frenzy. Down the aisles they teemed, surging up the stairs in a rush of bodies.

Tweed watched the couple-odd correspondence student types-seize the janitor and wrest the ice pick from him. The man drove it into his neck and left it there.

Jonquil Brindisi came onstage.

Then Tweed swept into a surge of prom fabric that rushed past the principal, rudely thrusting Futzy Buttweiler aside like flotsam in a stream. The steel gleam of futtering cleavers winked in every hand, her own hand, Dex’s too, their long knives absurdly left at their seats.

But that was okay.

One cut, one slice among the hundreds now sweeping in, would be enough.

The stage thundered as a choke of bodies came in all about. Despite the collisions, one purpose thrived. One thirst that kept the bodies honed in on the falling janitor, the hacked man whose denim suit shredded off in tufts of cloth and flesh.

In they dove, young birdbodies, a sharp hack and away, circling to swoop down for more.

Deep-hued as barbecue sauce, Gerber’s blood splashed suits and dresses. Tweed’s dress. She grew high and giddy, gaiety and rage intermingled in the sounds she made.

A man lay stripped before her, more exposed as each moment passed, bits of cloth, flesh, and organs filling the air like blood-tinged chokes of cottonwood.

She breathed meat.

She breathed madness.

Their victim’s mind, sick and vicious even under attack, unspooled itself in death, flinging out darts of vileness.

But she-and all of them, this happy band of hackers and hewers-resisted those darts. In the shaping of communal grave-clouts were they caught up, weaving it, shuttled, hack by flurried hack, upon a loom of common cause.

Righteous was their wrath and beautiful.

She would tell all of this joy to her dad.

Her sister Jenna too, whose prom would be a cakewalk after this.

Through a turmoil of bodies, slapping and smacking in earnest-by God, the dance only hinted at it-Tweed saw her means of ingress. She seized it, rode it in, war whoops in her throat, her hand coming down, no choice really in what prize she would slice off, all of it a matter of fate and luck.

Like a coelacanth’s mouth still moist from feeding, a meaty flesh-hole wuttered up at her. Its wet, red, ragged regret ovaled out to yield a slice of organ.

Slash! She held it against the blade as she pulled out, a nub of gore trapped between thumb and steel. Ms. Foddereau’s butchery class paid off in spades.

“I got a nipple!” Dex screamed. “I got a nipple!”

Tweed became Dex’s magnet, retiring with him upstage. Behind them, the pounding and battering of bodies kept up. In another moment, the killer would be reduced to bone, and soon that would be divvied up as well.

Tweed tugged at Dex’s sleeve. “Look,” she said. “Our teachers are up to their elbows in it too.”

The air was misty with blood. But the spray was fine enough, atomized even, that they clearly saw Nurse Gaskin sail in; Claude Versailles, whose outsized body belied the deftness of his killer cuts; Ms. Brindisi, Miss Phipps, Mr. Buttweiler, and the others.

Tweed billowed with pride in Corundum High.

Out of a night of trauma, they were pulling together. Students and faculty alike.

For all the hell they had endured, a special bond would unite them forever, a bond as tight and conjoining as the mad janitor’s futtered body was loose and undergoing disjointure.

Tweed gripped her bloody prize and smiled at Dex, who beamed back at her and held up the ruddy whorl of his catch.

Something jinged like a spun quarter at her feet. She looked down. “A key,” she said.

It was gold and thick and angled. The word YALE gleamed upon it.

“The key to the padlock on the front door is my guess,” said Dex. He bent to pick it up. “The one he took from the sheriff.”

Tweed touched it in Dex’s hand. Hard planes. The key was wet from the janitor’s futtering, warm from his pocket.

She slid a finger along its length. She kept sliding, clasped Dex’s hand, palm to palm, the key to their salvation trapped between.

Then she lost herself in her boyfriend’s eyes.

24. The Mouths of Babes

Friday, October twenty-sixth.

Jonquil Brindisi, her long legs crossed, sat in Claude’s generous futon chair, sipping a banana daiquiri as she listened to Futzy Buttweiler and Delia Gaskin hold forth from the couch.

Futzy had called them all together, the major players who had survived the prom. They needed some sort of closure, he said, and he was right.

A lot of changes had come down.

Claude had divorced his wives and swiftly remarried. His new mates? The couple Jonquil herself had lusted after until the state of their earlobes had cooled her passions.

The three of them sat now in clunky dining room chairs, listening and nodding.

Lovey-dovey motherfuckers.

Futzy had replaced his pair of hellions with Adora Phipps. While they insisted a third would surely come along any day now, Jonquil doubted they were looking in any serious way.

And no secret to anyone and not a scandal to the unbigoted, Delia Gaskin, while maintaining the fiction of a separate residence, was deep in lust with Bix Donner’s widows, Trilby and Brest, their threesome a virtual marriage.

Trilby’s little whistleblower knelt alone on the living room carpet. Pill busied herself with a deck of cards, some weird sorting exercise whose rules only an eight-year-old could divine.

Near Pill sat Tweed and her kid sister Jenna, crosslegged on pillows. They bookended a chipper Dexter Poindexter, who had replaced a slaughtered bank clerk at First National soon after the prom.

“Now that the media brouhaha has died down,” continued Futzy, Adora’s loving eyes on him, “I thought a nice quiet evening of putting the pieces together would benefit us all.”

Claude nodded and spoke. “A final look at things, one last breath and benediction before we move on with our lives. Is that what you mean?”

Jonquil, bemused, said nothing.

What a load of crap this was. Were they a bunch of fucking wimps? She could take on such a night again easily. Truth be told, she missed it already. The terror, the hunt, the futtering of the crazy janitor whose bones she had wanted to leap but had ended up breaking instead.

Might it somehow happen again?

She thrilled at the thought.

“Yes,” said Nurse Gaskin. “Victims of major traumas tend to obsess about them. We should look on this retelling as a ritual signpost, a mark of punctuation on the way to healing.”

“Back to normal after tonight, eh?” said Jonquil. The looks Bray and Winnie gave her reinforced her doubt.

“By no means.” Nurse Gaskin’s eyes flared with hatred.

Then she smoothed it over.

Delia Gaskin, in Jonquil’s opinion, needed to be taken down a few notches. The upstart bitch in whites had far too lofty an opinion of herself.

“The horror of that night,” the nurse said, “will haunt us for the rest of our lives. But going over the ground again may make it in some sense manageable.”

With that, she and Futzy launched into a retelling of the events of prom night.

Like obedient little androids, the others, everyone but Jonquil, chimed in with one part of the story or another.

Jonquil clinked and sipped, remarking what odd ducks she had fallen in with. Between bouts of savage fucking in the supply closet, she liked to regale Benji Rubblerum, the new head janitor, with stories about her colleagues and how very odd they were.

Then the weird thing happened.

Futzy and the school nurse, caught up in their tale, came to the killing of Pesky and Flense in the faculty lounge.

Jonquil saw seeds of worry sprout in Trilby Donner’s eyes.

Her little girl looked up from her playing cards, listening and staring.

Jonquil might have jumped in to deflect the telling. But she loved to witness the fruits of violence, especially violence inflicted in all innocence.

“Then,” said the nurse, who wore a stylish denim dress, long-sleeved, with embroidery that suggested cowboy motifs, “it’s my guess that old Gerber took a pellet of dry ice in his gloved fist and forced the poor girl to swallow it.”

Her hands illustrated as she spoke.

“Miss Gaskin!” said Trilby, ever the mom.

Then Pill’s eyes bugged out. Her eyelids fluttered and she keeled over. No one was near enough to break her fall.

But the girl, on her knees already, did not fall far. In a glancing blow, her scalp knocked against the futon frame. The cards she cupped in her hands fanned out over the carpet, a sprawl of red and black and white.

Jonquil observed it all coolly.

She clinked her ice.

It looked as if the poor girl was choking on her tongue.

She would die if no one helped.

But the nurse barreled in to clear the girl’s passageway, hovering like a benevolent angel. She rubbed Pill’s hands vigorously, feeling for pulse and heartbeat, moving deft fingers everywhere on her body. “She’ll be all right, I think. Claude, do you have maybe a day bed Pill can lie down on?”

“There’s the guest room upstairs, with the coats. Just shove them aside.”

“Trilby, why don’t you stay with her, out of earshot of the rest of this?” Delia said.

Upstart bitch.

Granted, Little Miss Nursiepoo was caught up in a minicrisis. But that gave her no excuse for addressing Claude as Claude, for calling Trilby Trilby. It ought to have been Mr. Versailles and Ms. Donner, even outside working hours.

In the privacy of her threesome, the bitch could use first names all she liked. But in mixed company, it was unseemly, an affront to all decent Americans.

The two women took Pill upstairs.

Delia Gaskin returned and the tale continued. But no one was into it much any more.

Jonquil, when she wasn’t mulling how best to puncture the nurse’s inflated ego, saw that Pill’s fainting spell had brought back the terror of that night in everyone here.

Jenna Megrim, a sweet senior whose prom would occur six months from now, who had lost her father and almost her sister as well, seemed most upset.

But the pall lay upon them all.

Delicious.

When they stood up to disperse, Brest checked with Trilby and Pill upstairs.

Then she left with Delia Gaskin.

It saved time, lots of time, Jonquil later realized, that the rest of them were still mixing and milling when Pill, holding her mother’s hand, appeared on the stairs and began to tell them why she had fainted.

When Pill awoke, she didn’t know at first where she was. Mommy was holding her hand and feeling her forehead, and Mommy’s new secret sort-of-wife Delia was standing over her, saying, “I think she’s coming out of it.”

A huge turned-away snoozing bear lay beside Pill on the bed.

Coats.

A lamp with a frilly green shade cast a soft glow from the nightstand. The overhead light had been switched off.

Then Pill remembered.

But she managed not to show it, not even when Delia stared right into her eyes.

“You okay, Pill?” Mommy asked.

“Uh huh.”

Delia said, “You gave us a scare.”

“I’m sorry, Delia,” she said.

Mommy bent and laughed and kissed Pill on the cheek and told her not to worry, that she was just delighted to have her back among the living.

Delia examined her, holding her wrist tight with a concentrated frown, and then moving Pill’s head in strange ways by the neck and jaw.

Pill didn’t much like Delia. She hadn’t much liked her since Daddy died, or even before. But her two mommies seemed to like her a whole bunch, especially Brest.

So Pill only shared the way she really felt with Gigi the goat. In whispers, late at night, under the covers.

But now, she especially didn’t like Delia.

Luckily Delia left and Mommy stayed behind.

“Mommy?” Pill said.

“Yes, dear?”

“I need to tell you something.”

The telling was hard. At one point, Mommy began to cry and Pill almost wished she hadn’t told her anything at all.

But in spite of her crying, Mommy was a tough lady. Pill knew that already, from the rough love her mommy sometimes shared with Daddy and Brest. She knew it from her limps and winces and from the way moonlight lit her bruises when she came in late at night to kiss Pill on the cheek, and Pill pretended to be sleeping.

Mommy cried and sighed and blew her nose.

But when Brest came up and said she and Delia would be off and asked was Pill okay, Mommy said, “She’s fine.”

Then her face got all dark. She added, “Make some excuse. Drop Delia off at her place and come back without her.”

“I don’t understand,” Pill’s second mommy said. “Is there—”

“I’ll explain when you come back.”

Pill was proud of her mother.

“Don’t let on that anything’s out of the ordinary, okay?”

Brest said she wouldn’t. She found her coat in the pile on the bed, Delia’s too, and left the room.

Mommy held Pill. She told her she was her sweet pumpkin. “We’ll give them five minutes,” she said. “Then we’ll go downstairs.”

But Mommy kept looking at her watch and Pill knew that nowhere near five minutes had passed when Mommy told her it was time, hustle her buns, chop-chop.

It felt strange, like being in a fishbowl, to leave the bedroom holding Mommy’s hand and see all the grown-ups standing in clumps downstairs.

They stopped when Mommy said something. They all looked up.

Then Pill told them.

Just like she told Mommy.

It was really hard this time. It felt as if she were back in that closet again, but this time Mommy was with her.

It was okay to see the hand moving again, Delia’s hand in that same gesture, the dry ice pellet in her glove.

And it was okay to hear Miss Gaskin!.

Pill worried at first that she wouldn’t be able to tell it the way it happened, so the grown-ups would get a clear picture. But she saw from their faces that they did.

They got it clear all right, Mr. Buttweiler, the principal, most of all. Pill could see that in the blush of his blotchy skin.

And in what came next.

Futzy looked at little Pill on the landing, listening as she drew the correct conclusion from that terrible night. She was an angel, and this was her annunciation.

If he tried, he could hear her voice deepen into his slain daughter’s voice. He could see her sprout a foot taller, her breasts plump out, her first lobebag being slipped over her lovelobe when she came of age. She was Kitty all over again.

Kitty had come back, his beloved girl, to set things right.

Adora had enriched his homelife.

Now his daughter had returned to fix the rest of it.

When Pill finished, she gazed up at her mom.

“Oh wow,” said Jenna Megrim.

Heads turned.

“What is it, Jenna?” Futzy asked.

“I was parking cars that night. I remember, after it was all over, wondering why the janitor’s car was parked in the faculty and staff lot. But then I figured he knew the combination into the backways and didn’t need to drive into the so-called, not-really-secret garage everybody knows about and use the underground elevator.

“What I didn’t see, until Pill was talking just now, was that-and I’ve gone over this a hundred times in my head-the nurse’s blue clunker was never in the parking lot, at least not up to the moment the school was padlocked shut.”

“She was inside long before then,” Jonquil said coolly.

Futzy recalled how quickly Delia had left that night, not through the front door like floods of relieved seniors did. Ten minutes later, when Jonquil, Adora, Winnie, and Bray joined him in exploring the backways, Matthew Megrim had been discovered. Soon after, they found the hapless history teacher’s car by the elevator. Hints of gas fumes suggested that the motor had recently been on, though that made no sense.

It hadn’t been his fumes at all.

It had been Delia’s.

So Futzy told the gathering of survivors.

“Something else,” Winnie said from the couch, holding Claude’s hand and Bray’s. “The coroner’s report repeatedly mentioned right-handed stabs to the bodies. Now I remember the janitor at the light bank lifting a hand to adjust the lights just before the music started. Did anyone else see that?”

Tweed spoke up. “We were on the bandstand. Me and Dex.” She looked up to recapture it. “The janitor was raising his left hand, kinda drifting it hazily over the switches, struggling to recall which ones he was supposed to throw.”

Futzy brought back other scenes. Gerber Waddell screwing in lightbulbs, triangulating an American flag, weeding flower beds in front of the school. He saw Gerber’s left hand moving, ever moving, his right hand idle or thumb-tucked into his belt.

Futzy looked at Trilby Donner’s little girl. “Pill,” he said, “which hand did you see holding that dry ice pellet? Can you remember?”

“I think so,” the little girl said.

Gripping the oak railing, she brought the scene back with a squinch and a twist to her face. The narrow crack through which she had seen the killer’s arm.

Her hands let go, shaping a slow fog before her. First the left rose, then stopped, falling back into place. Then with increasing certainty, the other, the right, lifted, finding its fixed place in the air, holding the invisible pellet, the arm, the hand, a gesture of strength mixed with delicacy.

The movement of Pill’s hand matched precisely Delia’s gesture on the couch, right before the little girl had fainted.

Trilby Donner, once more in shock and torn umpteen ways, listened as the questions confirmed what all this had been leading to.

Delia Gaskin, Brest’s hush-hush lover and her own, had, by dint of damning evidence, just been convicted of multiple deaths: Zane Fronemeyer and his wives, Sheriff Blackburn, Jiminy Jones, a slew of seniors in the midst of a night of terror, and then, to redirect the finger of accusation, poor innocent Gerber Waddell, a feeb falsely futtered, his reputation forever besmirched.

Trilby felt shame.

And violation.

How could a person seem so decent, mouth all the words of love one could ever hope to hear, yet beneath that facade be monstrous?

She and Brest were still deep in grief over Bix’s death.

Now, their relationship had once again been ripped raw. A betrayer had wrapped herself about their ailing hearts, a snake whose hooded guile had penetrated deep to the soul.

Trilby’s hand went to her mouth.

Her eyes teared up.

Keep it together, keep it together.

Focus on Pill.

Focus on her beautiful innocent girl, nodding to this or that question from the gathered adults, her words pure and carefully chosen.

Pill was not the easiest child to raise. She tested for boundaries. She gave guff. She pushed back.

But always, Trilby sensed her child’s secret delight in being reined in, in knowing where the limits were.

Trilby had feared, coming off the prom, a shattering. She had seen Pill move this way and that in new psychic space, struggling to keep her balance in a world rearranged, a world from which her father had been violently ripped.

But now, here in Claude Versailles’ living room (how she wished Brest could witness it), Pill was taking confident steps onto solid ground. In this precious eight-year-old girl, her childlike honesty in full display, Trilby had her first glimpse of the proud woman her daughter would become.

This vision anchored her.

These were her friends and colleagues, their eyes afire with appalled awe at the deception and temerity of Delia Gaskin. But primarily their eyes brimmed with wonder at the emergence of Pill, her Pill, her lovely daughter, getting near to being gangly of limb, a slim barely-there little girl in bib overalls and close-skulled brown hair.

Her friends could not save Trilby from the madness of the moment, but Pill could. For all her quiet frailty, Pill would pull her mother through; Trilby sensed it deep in her heart.

So too would it be with Brest.

Somehow they would survive this time, keeping a dread secret from the monster in their lives, as would Pill (her innocence wily enough not to tell Delia a thing), until this close-knit community took its proper revenge upon her.

That revenge would not be long in coming.

Already, as the final questions to Pill were asked and answered, Trilby saw wheels turning.

In Futzy Buttweiler.

In Jonquil Brindisi.

In Claude Versailles.

Retribution would be swift and sure.

She and Brest, newly wounded and raw, would be seen after.

More important, Pill would see her father’s murderer dealt with. She would forgive her mommies for their bad choice, rectified at once and explained when she was much older. And she would find firm footing in this marvelous society in the greatest country on the face of the planet.

From the midst of torment, a new seed of hope and solidarity would sprout.

Trilby had never loved her daughter more than she did at this moment. That’s what her tears, freely flowing now, announced to all who cared to observe them.

Hope was justified, she thought, even when life seemed most hopeless.

25. Piecing Together What Was Torn Asunder

Bray looked up at the sound of Claude’s front door opening. In walked Brest Donner from having dropped Delia Gaskin home.

Brest was a hard woman, he thought. Beauty edged with greed, an inturned nature. Before too many years had passed, her great-eagle sweep and flare would droop into something vulturish.

Bray considered the abomination this woman had instigated: a female threesome.

He couldn’t help but be judgmental about such a perverted combination of partners. Despite his years as an outcast and the prejudicial treatment he had suffered, there were certain personal choices that struck him as simply wrong. Three women in a sexual entanglement was one of them. Didn’t the Bible have a few prohibitions against that sort of thing? He believed it did.

“Okay, what’s up?” said Brest. “A surprise party?”

Everyone spoke at once. While the confusion was sorting itself out, Bray whispered to Winnie, “They’ll slap us in jail.”

She goggled at him. “Jeepers, Bray, now what’s your problem?”

“We were heroes, weren’t we? You and me, the two social pariahs, especially. We did the media circuit and the world changed, a tiny bit anyway.”

“So?”

“So now the story will turn way the fuck around: We made a mistake, we got fooled, we fucked up. They’ll take everything back, they’ll try us for Gerber’s murder, they’ll demonize us, it’ll be Notorious for sure.”

Claude leaned to Winnie. “Is our handsome yummy-nums lapsing into Bray-mode again?”

“He sure is,” Winnie said.

“Be not dismayed, hubby ours,” Claude said. “Everyone in this room, without exception, was Delia’s dupe.”

That was true. Claude had a way of cutting to the heart. He was also a mean flogger when the mood struck him.

“ All of us made a mistake,” continued Claude, “which we simply must, with all deliberate speed, rectify. If we visit right retribution upon our wayward school nurse, they’ll make us heroes all over again. The public loves seeing justice meted out. Calm down, Bray, sweetie. Let come what may.”

Claude sat back, not waiting to see if Bray followed his advice. Claude knew he would. His confidence, Bray thought, was irritating, but it wasn’t misplaced. Claude knew him.

Claude knew them both.

Had sexy Jonquil Brindisi not been so deeply bigoted, it would have been sweet and savory for them to have tripled up with her. But Claude, the more he and Winnie got to know him, was a pretty decent companion. He treated them well, he was fun to listen to, and he cooked a mean omelette.

“I just don’t like it,” Bray muttered, but only for form’s sake.

Winnie’s look said, I love you, you doofus, despite your fretting and moaning.

Meanwhile, Brest had clearly been struggling to make sense of the babble. As everyone spoke up, fitting in this or that piece of the puzzle for her, Trilby held her hand.

Pill leaned against her mother and listened, looking tired but otherwise like any other eight-year-old up past her bedtime.

Bray twiddled his fingers at her, a spastic butterfly caught chest high. Pill gave a wisp of a smile and twiddled back.

The plan for dealing with Delia Gaskin came in part from Futzy Buttweiler and in part-indeed the killer part-from Jenna Megrim.

Bray listened in fascination as their plan gathered shape and momentum. Carrying it out, he sensed, would provide the healing for which they had come together. As one part of the plan meshed with another, their conspiratorial circle took on centripetal force. Heads angled in like sharpened stakes in a concealed pit.

Only Jonquil held back, sipping her drink.

Bray gave her a brief look of wistful lust, to which Jonquil dutifully shot back an intolerant glare full of fire and fuck-you.

Still, her compact, killer, curvaceous legs, crossed just so, boggled Bray’s brain. He longed to uncross them, to shred those dark stockings, to dip down into the warm moist fire of her loins and tongue up the juices that sizzled there.

Right, he thought. Not in this lifetime.

Winnie elbowed him. Listen up, Bray, her look commanded him.

Bray listened.

Dex sat on the floor against an overstuffed armchair, intent on the grown-ups’ conversation.

Tweed sat huggably close on his right, her sister Jenna’s head on his left thigh.

Despite Dex’s graduation the previous spring and his coming-up-on six months at First National, clerking away as if he’d done it forever, he still felt very much a kid.

The terrors of the prom had indeed aged him. And this evening’s revelations went even further toward drawing his youth to a close. But maturity wasn’t something you snapped on like a toolbelt.

It was strange being a boy.

Boys were expected to show strength. Not to cry, or only on special occasions.

But really the girls were in charge.

With decent boys anyway.

He had heard of the rougher sort of guys, who threw their rage around and made things nasty for the women in their lives. They were just wacked-out dudes, far as he was concerned.

But among normal people, the women held sway and everybody knew it.

There were even jokes about it.

Now he had learned that it wasn’t sick-guy Gerber Waddell, but sick-girl Delia Gaskin, who had been the prom killer.

Poor Gerber, a kind retard with a nasty past and a brain pruned back to cut out his nastiness, they had futtered by mistake.

And Miss Gaskin walked about, bold as brass, wearing a mask of innocence, even trysting on the sly with the widows of the same Bix Donner whose life she herself had ended.

She had to be insane.

To think that he had visited the nurse’s office, what, at least half a dozen times during his four-year stint at Corundum High. She could have sliced him up, fed him poison pills, or God knows what -all.

She could have done that to anyone.

Maybe she had.

No doubt there would be an investigation. Odd incidents at the school. Rumors of excess pain, of prolonged illnesses, the examination of pill bottles in medicine chests.

Dex didn’t think anyone had died, but maybe he was wrong. Probably though, what with all the ribbing the nurse took, she had simply snapped.

On his left, Jenna stirred.

Tweed cuddled against him, almost hiding her head beneath his arm. Perhaps she was reliving those awful moments at the prom, and the death of her father. Dex would have to soothe her tonight, to assure her that she was safe in his arms and adored to the max.

But Tweed’s kid sister squirmed in a most delightful fashion at his thigh. As he watched her take in each speaker in the room, Dex could feel the tension in her body.

Jenna was a pert thing, a little more compact than Tweed but otherwise a knock-off of her.

And a knock-out.

Dex mused.

Sister-wives were not unheard of.

Jenna was currently nursing a crush on the sprightly Pish Balthasar and on Bo Meacham, a hot-shot quarterback with nothing but brawn and looks to recommend him.

Maybe after her prom, she would wise up and gaze upon her brother-in-law in a new way.

Dex hoped so.

But he thought it best to let that unfold on its own. It was inconceivable to bring it up with her. Maybe he could plant a seed in Tweed’s ear, letting sisterly magic weave its gossamer web.

Shame on him!

With all the upset and outrage sweeping through Mr. Versailles’ living room, here he was firmly focused on lust.

Maybe Tweed would chastise him tonight.

He loved their Private Flogger.

And he was glad it made such a racket, the buzz-build, the thwap!

Jenna, down the hall from their bedroom, was most likely listening, lying there stroking her lovelobe. Most likely, she had Pish and Bo on her mind as she stroked, but maybe not, maybe not.

He could dream, couldn’t he?

Tweed clung to Dex.

She missed her father’s melodious voice.

At first, her house had seemed empty without him. But Dex’s love for her had so filled it, and so filled her heart, that the ache of her father’s death had lost its edge in recent months.

Jenna’s presence helped too.

Their sisterly rivalry, always minor, had vanished completely in the sudden maturity prom night had brought on.

Jenna had recently taken up with Bo Meacham, whose outsized nose and dorkish grins were more than offset by his dropdead looks and a stellar career this year as lead quarterback. She had dropped hints to Tweed, snickering over popcorn while Dex was off hitting the bars with his work buddies, that noselength, at least in Bo’s case, did indeed nicely correspond to genlength.

But more important to Tweed was her sister’s near-certain crowning as prom queen. Next spring, the designated slasher’s victim would come as usual from the pool of the non-exempt, a pool which would not include Jenna.

Proper protocol would be observed at Corundum High. Mr. Buttweiler would see to it. No doubt, the entire Demented States of America would tune in that night to witness the restoration of order in Corundum, Kansas.

Pillowed on Dex’s thigh on the floor, Jenna was following intensely the how-shall-we-kill-her debate which filled the living room.

Tweed watched a lightbulb struggle to go on in her sister’s head. Later, she swore she heard the tinny tinsel clink of the pullchain as Jenna’s eyes lit up.

“Wait! I’ve got it!” she said, interrupting a savage suggestion from Jonquil Brindisi. Jenna had always been bold with adults. “We mustn’t rip her apart. Not quickly. Not slowly. Not with drops of acid steaming pain into her wounds. Not with starved, rabid rats dangling within a jaw’s bite of her flesh. Nope! We’ve got to keep her skin intact!”

A razor stropped in Miss Brindisi’s voice. “The woman deserves slow dismemberment.” End of argument.

Had Jenna already taken her course in the greater vices? Yes. Tweed remembered the B+ on her sister’s report card the winter before. No reprisals were possible from that quarter.

“Jonquil,” said Mr. Buttweiler, “let’s hear what Jenna has to say, shall we?”

“She’s a real pistol,” whispered Tweed to Dex, who nodded and squeezed her hand.

Jenna’s prodigious zest, her zeal when she latched onto the meat of an idea, was a favorite topic of conversation between them. That, even more than Jenna’s beauty, explained her popularity.

“ Here’s how we’ll kill her!”

Tweed observed the others as Jenna talked.

Trilby and Brest, torn by warring emotions, nodded with enthusiasm as her plan unfolded. Miss Phipps’ eyes saucered behind her gold wire rims. Futzy Buttweiler’s eyebrows looked like a couple of fat caterpillars working overtime at pushups. Claude Versailles and his formerly homeless lovers were utterly enthralled by Jenna’s words.

Even Jonquil Brindisi’s defiance softened to neutrality there in that armchair. Her sips grew more deliberate, her body shifting in what Tweed suspected was growing arousal.

“Once she’s dead,” said Jenna, “we’ll have her fluxidermed. Her body will be on display just inside Corundum High’s front door. Kids’ll get to paint her. Or scrawl graffiti on her. Or maybe do some other stuff the prom committee thinks up or approves. But nobody’s allowed to steal her. And no one can, like, remove her arms or legs or anything, because everyone will understand what her role at the prom will be and just be dying of anticipation all year.”

Jonquil Brindisi’s long legs dandled against one another as she leaned forward.

“Her role at the prom?” she asked.

Ms. Brindisi’s friendship lobe blushed with bloodlust, her lovelobe’s gray-paisley bag seeming to throb with a stung-thumb swelling.

Tweed’s pride in Jenna flowered as her plan spilled out with renewed energy. The living room, once solemn, was now abuzz with fresh dreams of collective revenge. Jenna’s stunning imagination pictured the gym, months in the future.

She showed them, all of them, how it would be on that terror-filled night.

Where precisely the slaughtered couple would pillow their heads.

And how the climax of the evening would at last put the community’s anguish-and the anguish of an entire nation-to rest.