The Academy (50 page)

And was in a one-room wooden schoolhouse.

She stopped, blinked.

The schoolhouse was old. It was not just old-fashioned but dilapidated, and in the corners were layers of cobwebs and pieces of broken writing slates. JOHN TYLER SCHOOL, read the barely visible letters on the crudely carved sign above the blackboard. The teacher’s desk, illuminated by a blue light that came from nowhere but seemed to suffuse the room, was covered with dust and had on it some crumbling books, the core of a rotted apple and, on a stick, a small shredded flag whose colors were so faded she could not make out what it was. Behind the teacher’s desk, in a glass case mounted on the wall, was a yellowed document of some sort.

But she was not alone, and that was the scariest part. Seated in the rows of antiquated writing desks, facing forward, were students, several of whom she knew. She saw Van Nguyen, who’d been missing since before the beginning of the semester, as well as Kyle Faber and other kids who had supposedly been “purged” from the attendance rolls. Together in the rear of the class were Myla Ellis, Brad Becker and one of Brad’s friends. A couple of other students looked familiar to her as well, and while she thought she knew them, she couldn’t be sure. All the kids seemed pale and faded, their faces white, their clothes drained of color. The only exceptions were Myla and Brad and Brad’s friend, who looked just as they always did, and she wanted to go to them, but she was afraid.

At the front of the class stood a teacher, a heavily bearded man wearing a dusty black topcoat and a stern expression. He carried in his hand a switch, and it was clear that he was ready to use it on anyone who misbehaved.

Except . . .

Except no one was moving. They might as well have been wax dummies or figures in a museum diorama. Everyone in the classroom was locked in place. Like the schoolhouse itself, they seemed frozen in time.

There was movement outside, though, and through the windows she could see a playground in the fog where children were running about, laughing, screaming. They appeared to be having fun, but their voices were old and far from innocent, and the laughter to her ears sounded mocking, derisive and decidedly sinister.

Linda wanted to leave, wanted to get out of here and find some way back to the real world. But the fact that Myla, Brad and the other boy still seemed so alive gnawed at her, and she would not be able to live with herself if she didn’t try to help them. She took a tentative step forward, and when no one moved, when the teacher did not bellow at her or attempt to hit her with his switch, she gained confidence. “Myla!” she whispered. “Brad!”

There was no response, but she hadn’t expected any, and she reached out and touched Myla’s shoulder. It felt normal, with some give beneath the clothes, but there was absolutely no reaction on the part of the girl. Linda looked into her face, waved a hand in front of her eyes. Nothing. As an experiment, she touched the faded shoulder of the girl to Myla’s left. It was hard and cold, like an ice statue.

Frowning, Linda looked at the face of that girl more carefully. She was one of the students Linda had thought she’d recognized but had not been able to place.

She recognized her now.

Suzanne Johnson.

The social studies teacher was a teenager here rather than an adult, but Linda could still tell it was Suzanne, and she was filled with not only horror but sadness. She took a closer look at two of the other boys who seemed familiar. One was Carlos as a high school student, the other Rakeem.

These were the people the school had captured; these were the people the school had caught.

There was the sound of nails scraping across the chalkboard.

Linda jumped, startled. Jody was now standing at the front of the class next to the bearded man. She looked, if possible, worse than she had in the hallway outside Linda’s classroom only moments before. Her hair, never her most attractive feature, was falling out in clumps, and the bones of her face protruded in freakish and unnatural ways. Her mottled skin looked cracked and rubbery, her eyes were pulled into menacing slits and her mouth remained permanently in that perfect O shape, tiny teeth now abutting two big fangs inside. The principal’s hands were clawed, one considerably larger than the other, and her legs seemed to have grown simultaneously shorter and thicker.

She used her right claw to once again scrape across the chalkboard. “Caught you,” she said. Her voice was slurred and raspy. “Bitch.”

The principal was not yet done changing. Before Linda’s eyes, what appeared to be the nub of a fledgling horn pressed out from the middle of her wrinkled forehead. In the real world, Linda realized, Tyler High School students were supposed to be taking their tests right now. Many of them were not, and of those who were, some were intentionally failing. Jody’s right cheek turned red, split open. Every second that the school’s overall test scores continued to drop, the principal grew more monstrous. She
was
the charter school, and anything that helped bring it down affected her.

“We voted to rescind the charter,” she announced.

“You can’t do that,” Jody spit out. “Only I can authorize a vote.”

“Oh, we did it, all right. You’re finished. And so is your charter.”

“
You’re
finished!” Jody yelled, her voice thick. “Why do you think you’re here?”

Here.

The sides of Jody’s deformed mouth crept upward into something approximating a smile. She gestured around her at the interior of the schoolhouse, at the unmoving students in their seats, at the cobwebbed corners.

Linda suddenly understood.

This was where Jody had hidden everything. All of the school’s secrets were in this schoolhouse.

Here.

Linda’s eyes went to the small glass case on the wall behind the teacher’s desk. With sudden insight, she realized what the yellowed document in there was: the original charter.

This was where it had been hidden.

She had to get over there somehow, grab it and burn it.

Burn it? With what?

She had no lighter, she realized, no matches, nothing that could conceivably be used to start a fire. Assuming she could make it past Jody to steal the charter, there was nothing she could do with the manuscript except try to tear it into pieces, which she was not sure would even work.

And she was afraid to go anywhere near the principal. She didn’t even want to look at her.

The bearded man frightened her, too.

Jody laughed wheezingly. “Is this where you thought it would end? Is this where you thought you would wind up?”

Linda’s heart lurched, and a bolt of panic shot through her.
End? Wind up?
She hadn’t had time to think about it, hadn’t even considered it until this moment, but how
was
she going to escape? She looked behind her to make sure the doorway was still there and still open.

It was.

And she saw something else at the same time.

To her left, built into the back wall of the schoolhouse, was a fireplace. Like those pioneer prairie schools, this room was heated by wood. Careful not to let her gaze linger too long lest the principal get suspicious, Linda quickly scanned the hearth. She saw a small pile of chopped wood, some tongs.

And a tin of matches.

Once again, she directed her attention to the front of the room, her mind racing. They were long matches, the kind that could usually be struck anywhere and still light up. But how could she take one of them without Jody seeing it?

Still afraid to look at the principal for any length of time, she focused on the sign above the chalkboard: JOHN TYLER SCHOOL. Somehow, it gave her strength.

In the real world, Tyler’s test scores were still dropping. The principal winced, crying out in pain, as another horn pushed its way out of her forehead. At the same time, Brad’s arm moved slightly on his desk.

Jody was losing control! She was getting weaker, and as she deteriorated, her hold on the school and everything in it slipped. The dead were dead—those faded people weren’t going anywhere—but Brad, Myla and the other boy were still alive. Trapped here like her, incapacitated somehow, but still alive.

“We all burned our copies of the charter!” Linda said.

“No!”

“Yes!”

Brad swiveled his head. So did Myla and Brad’s friend. She touched them, pushed them. “Help me!” she yelled. “Get up!”

Jody lurched toward her. The principal could no longer walk normally, but she could still propel herself forward on her thick unbending legs, and wheezing heavily, she started down an aisle between two rows of students. Behind her, the bearded man moved, fixing Linda with a piercing gaze and cutting the air with his switch.

“Help!” Linda screamed.

“What?” It was Brad’s friend who spoke first, and he looked around in confusion, not knowing where he was or what was going on.

She didn’t have time to get the kids up to speed. Jody would be upon her any second, and the bearded man was right behind her. “Stop them!” she shouted. “Don’t let them get me!” And then she was running over to the fireplace, grabbing a handful of dusty matches and hurrying on. She didn’t have time to look behind her to see what was happening; she could only move forward and hope she wouldn’t be stopped. Running along the side wall, past the windows overlooking the foggy playground where the dead children frolicked, she slipped behind the teacher’s desk, yanked open the glass case and pulled out the charter.

The pages of the document were not secured or fastened together in any way, and a few stray sheets escaped from her clutches and floated to the ground independently, but the bulk of the charter held together as she dropped it on the floor. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the bearded teacher changing directions and trying to return to the front of the room as Brad and his friend shoved their desks into his legs. Linda struck a match on the side of the desk, praying it would work.

It did, and when she touched the flame to the corner of the top page, it instantly started to burn.

“No!” Jody yelled, and her voice was echoed by that of the bearded man.

Linda scrambled to pick up the stray pages and touched them to the growing fire, dropping them onto the pile once they’d caught.

The schoolhouse was dissolving around them. With each page that burned, something disappeared. The children outside first, their voices suddenly cut off and silent. Then the fog, as the world on the other side of the windows turned black instead of white. The students faded away, and their desks. The walls, the ceiling—all the physical elements of the schoolhouse seemed to run like paint and be absorbed into the floor.

Jody and the teacher were the last to go. Clutching each other and screaming in tandem as though their bodies were being torn apart, they merged into one, and as the flames devoured the last of the charter, and the charred and blackened pages crinkled into ash, they, too, were consumed, fused into a black square that looked like a book.

Another world came into focus around them. The real world. They were in what looked like an empty storeroom completely devoid of furniture save for a bookcase in the middle of the floor. There were books on the shelves, and one on the floor, all of them smoking and smoldering. Linda looked around, confused, not knowing where they were.

“We’re in the library,” Brad’s friend said in wonderment. “Special Collections.”

Myla pointed to the book on the floor and the black smoke seeping out from between its covers. “That’s them,” she said fearfully.

Linda still had the rest of the matches in her hand, and she moved over to the book and kicked it open. The front cover flew back, and the blank pages inside started to burn more easily. She reached down, put the heads of the matches in the fire and, once they caught, dropped them on the book.

There didn’t seem to be any sprinkler system in this room. A logical, responsible part of her was outraged—this was a
library
! At a
school
! How could it not have a sprinkler system? But another part of her was grateful.

Brad’s friend had gone over to a door and opened it, and Brad and Myla hurried out, coughing. Linda waited a moment longer, using her arm to cover her nose and mouth, watching the book burn. When she was certain the fire was not going to go out, she exited the room as well.

She closed the door behind her, faced the students. Smiling, she addressed the boy next to Brad. “And your name is . . . ?”