Night School

Besides, if Andrew went along with what Ned said, it would be as tedious as taking on Bevin. Andrew’d be wearing those two sad-sack boys like lead weights on his shoulders. He’d never be rid of them.

  People have to learn to make it on their own, Andrew told himself; you can’t always be hauling them to the surface. That’s called enabling.

  A little psychiatric jargon always made Andrew feel better. I can’t be an enabler, he reminded himself.

  The night closed in, like the end of class, or the end of hope. They clung to each other, and walked on carefully, uncertain of the terrain.

  Well, I did the right thing, Ned consoled himself. I suggested quitting. I can’t help it if nobody actually did.

  He began to look forward to tonight’s work. Ned wanted to be there when Julie got hers, but at the same time, he didn’t want to be.

  Oh, that’s nice, he thought, you’re a really nice guy, Ned. It’s fine with you if Julie suffers, as long as it isn’t actually your fault she suffers.

  Ned had forgotten how the instructor had access to his thoughts, how the silent speech penetrated like tiny bright lasers.

  You are so right, Ned, said the instructor. If the SC panics, it isn’t your fault. It’s theirs.

  How could it be their fault, thought Autumn, when we’re doing it?

  Julie, reminded the instructor, has been very, very cruel in the last several years. And not just to you. Think of her as the piranha she is, slicing open vulnerable kids, attacking the weak. It is her turn.

  We won’t actually hurt her, will we? said Autumn. I’ve spent the night at Julie’s a hundred times, thought Autumn, had dinner with her a hundred times, done homework with her … and now Julie is nothing but homework herself.

  We do nothing. Of course, the effect often continues even after our departure. Last year the Scare Choices clung to each other, trying to figure out what had gone wrong in their lives, trying to find somebody to blame. They lashed out at everybody who was different. It was quite wonderful.

  Were people hurt?

  Oh, yes. But we didn’t do it. The Scare Choices did it.

  So this is never our fault?

  Never. We just start things. It isn’t our problem if it goes on and on, its own little ripple effect.

  Even their thoughts were nothing but shadow, meaningless swirling miasma.

  The closure of the class was tight around them, like nooses around the throats of the doomed.

  Julie started her beloved car. There was a strange moment before the key turned the motor over, as if something were lying on the engine. She felt faintly uneasy.

  Her headlights didn’t penetrate the night the way they should have. She was driving in a sort of fog. A darker dark. And the dashboard no longer lit the interior the way it usually did; the inside of the car was blacker.

  She had forgotten to check the backseat before she got in. With a sickening lurch, she sensed the presence of somebody else in the car. Somebody was in there with her.

  Julie whirled to look behind her, and saw nothing, but it was so dark, thick as black pillows. She reached to turn on the overhead light, but the bulb was out, and nothing happened. She even opened her car door to turn on that light but all that happened was she nearly lost control of her driving.

  She actually put her hand between the two front seats to pat the leather backseat, to reassure herself that nothing was there.

  Something was there.

  Her hand was taken by another hand and squeezed. The hand was sweaty and thick.

  Julie screamed and yanked the car to a stop, leaping out in the middle of traffic.

  Cars honked, and braked, and swerved, and narrowly missed each other.

  Julie stood panting on the yellow dividing lines of the pavement and stared into her own car. It was fully illuminated by the street lamps and it was empty. Completely empty.

  She felt like a colossal fool. How could she have frightened herself so badly? It was not like Julie to get hysterical over zilch. She didn’t even get hysterical when circumstances made hysteria reasonable.

  She got back in the car, waving apologies to furious drivers on all sides, trying to smile, feeling like a jerk. Her knees were jelly and she could hardly find the accelerator. If she had to brake, she was in trouble, her ankle wasn’t going to move from one pedal to the other.

  She drove slowly, but her pulse went faster and faster. Traffic vanished. Streets were empty. She turned the radio louder and louder.

  None of the stations were playing; she could get nothing but static, as if broadcasting had ceased; as if some huge catastrophe had struck California and missed only Julie. When she got home, she would put the TV on a news station and see what was going on.

  The drive home seemed endless and unknown. She might as well be driving in a foreign country. The road seemed to have land mines she must constantly swerve to avoid. She was gripping the wheel so tightly she got cramps in her fingers and finally took her right hand off the wheel to shake it up and down and loosen the joints.

  Outside the passenger window, people were looking in at her.

  Their faces were like moons, blue and shivery. No features, just skin. They were pressed right up against the glass, flattening themselves, gaping in at Julie, the zoo exhibit.

  They were laughing, and pointing at her, and getting ready.

  Julie slammed her brake to the floor, leaving black stripes on the pavement, and then leaving the pavement, too, ending up half in a drainage ditch.

  The faces were gone.

  Perhaps she had flung them off into space by stopping so fast.

  If so, she had better not think about space, and what creatures filled it now.

  Julie locked the doors, punching at the automatic controls, but she must have done something wrong.

  The back left door opened by itself, and something got in, and shut the door after it.

  Julie couldn’t see it. But it was there, chuckling softly, and relaxing on her backseat.

  She sat very still for a very long time.

  It didn’t go away, but it didn’t attack, and she couldn’t sit there in the ditch like an idiot; she had to drive home. She was not the sort of person to go screaming through the night to some stranger’s house and ask for help because something invisible was sitting in her car.

  Julie backed into the road again and drove on home, waiting for something to happen.

  But of course nothing happened, and when she entered her own driveway, she was sweating with fear, but mostly she was angry with herself and ashamed.

  Boy, am I easy to scare, she thought.

  The words seemed to hang in the night air, as if other people had heard them, and liked them, and planned to use them later.

  Easy To Scare.

  Her parents were not yet home, although it was after eleven. It was their bridge night. They were card fiends, and played very seriously. “Playing” was incorrect; the way her parents did bridge, it was work. Maybe even war.

  Julie’s property was dotted with signs that said DO NOT TRESPASS: ARMED RESPONSE. Each window had a little sticker: WIRED FOR ARMED RESPONSE. ATTACK DOG signs began and ended the driveway.

  Although there was no dog, there was a sophisticated alarm system, and Julie went in quickly, slamming the door behind her, and punching in the code that reset the alarms.

  It did not matter how quickly she shut the door, however.

  Night Class did not concern itself with doors.

  Chapter 10

  THE DARK LIVED.

  It breathed, and Julie could hear it.

  Julie held her breath. Around her, breathing went on.

  There was somebody, or something, locked in the house with her.

  She wanted to hold her breath for a long time; it was like holding onto her life. But it was impossible. Her lungs acquired a life of their own, dragging in air with great sucking wheezes, giving away her position. Giving away, thought Julie, the best place to stab me.

  So this was shortness of b
reath! This shrieking of lungs: Panic equals oxygen failure.

  Get out of the house, Julie told herself. Unlock the door. Run for it.

  A home is a sanctuary; a home is a safety zone. But not this one. The squashed faces of the demons outside her car … were they inside here with her?

  She could not move. Like the fawn hoping to escape the wolf’s notice, Julie froze. She could not walk, could not lift her arms, could not call out.

  The room was full; the house was full; the furniture was full.

  Of what?

  Julie’s poise washed away as if it had been nothing but temporary dye, and now her true colors were going to show. The color of fear.

  Every hair on her skin stretched upward, tentacles on a sea anemone searching strange waters.

  And the waters around her were very, very strange.

  Julie whirled, grabbing for the doorknob, thinking, I’ll drive away, I’ll—

  —and once more, another set of fingers were there waiting for her. She touched skin, not metal. She touched a hand, not a knob. The same fat, damp palm closed on her own.

  “No!” screamed Julie, jerking her hand back. She scrunched up on herself, getting thinner, taking up less space, thinking don’t notice me, don’t touch me, don’t come after me, and from the other side of the room came a soft chuckle.

  It was the softness that horrified her. A possessive sound, as if Julie belonged to that chuckle. No matter what Julie did now, no matter where she ran or how she screamed, the chuckle would be there first.

  Julie tucked her hands up under her own arms, to protect them from being held and fondled by that horrible, invisible, sweating palm. But to protect her back, her neck, her face?

  “Go away,” she whispered. She meant to scream, but there wasn’t enough air. Where had the air gone? She was going to suffocate.

  She reached for the lights. Better the devil you can see than the devil you can’t. But the fingers, of course, lay sprawled across the switches. Julie slammed her fist down against those fingers, flicking the switches anyhow.

  The architect who had designed their house had been in love with lights: frosty round bulbs were sunk into the ceiling, dimmer switches and chandeliers, half-moons here, full globes there; light, light, light.

  And light of course, as light always does, disproved her fears.

  The house contained only Julie.

  There was no hand on any knob, no fingers lying across any switches. There was only Julie, panting and sweating as if she had showered in fear.

  Julie dragged oxygen into starved lungs, panting like an old dog. She blushed at the thought that somebody might have caught her! Julie—calm, poised, tough, sophisticated Julie!—behaving like an hysterical idiot over nothing. This was like draping your own jacket over a chair and ten minutes later, being scared by the profile of an intruder who was nothing more than your own jacket.

  Good grief, thought Julie. “I’ll just sit in the Jacuzzi for a while,” she said out loud, comforted by the sound of her voice. She popped a CD into the main music system and flicked the indoor control for the outdoor whirlpool. The water was wonderfully hot and the family enjoyed the Jacuzzi most of the year. It sat on the outermost edge of a huge expanse of redwood deck cantilevered out over the steep hillside. Pots of flowers bloomed year-round at its edges.

  From inside, Julie watched the water bubble and churn.

  Now she had too much air, and blew it out in a long calming spout like a surfacing whale, and actually managed to smile at herself. She shook her head ruefully.

  Then she headed for the stairs: long wide slabs of oak between the thin white wire sides. She would get her favorite towel, a thick, thick terry blanket of snow-white, and she would—

  At the top of the stairs, her little night-lights glowed. But the hall light, which had been Cinderella that morning, was no longer a flowing ball gown. It had become a chalky rectangle, with a thin leering crescent moon. Its edges were sharp as razor blades.

  On the outside of the glass deck doors came the distinctive sound of fingernails scraping.

  Julie tried to turn slowly, tried to take her time, tried to think rationally, tried to bottle her terror back up, cork it.

  The Jacuzzi burbled, like a friendly creek.

  Shadows encircled the whirlpool, lost interest, and drifted over the empty deck: the shadows of people … but there were no people. The shadows seemed to wave at her. Then they advanced on her, like people she had once known.

  Julie’s scalp prickled and her eyes filled with tears. The doors are locked, she said to herself, they’re weather-stripped and solid and in perfect condition and nothing, not a draft, not the thinnest sheet of paper, could come through the cracks.

  The shadows sifted right through. She heard them chuckling as they bypassed the locks.

  The lights went off. All of them. Together. A power failure of the house, while Julie herself had a power failure of the heart.

  No, no, no, no, not me, I’m not brave enough for this, don’t pick on me, please don’t pick on me!

  She had a queer little flashback of all the times she had picked on others, surrounding them with her sharp, vicious remarks and her taunting, haunting laughter.

  The shadows wrapped themselves around her body and tangled themselves in her ankles.

  Julie’s scream was a solid thing, a great cancerous ball in her throat, rolling out to fill the room with its terror. The scream had left her throat and reached her mouth—and the phone rang. It rang only once and Julie snatched it up by instinct. Nothing else would have functioned for Julie at that moment.

  It was the last person on earth she would have expected to call her number, and yet what that person had to say did not surprise Julie at all.

  “Fascinating,” said the instructor. “Julie certainly did not turn out to be an ETS, did she?”

  They were back in the library, complete with flesh and bone and clothing and hair, staring at each other.

  “That’s what is so enjoyable about this,” said the instructor. “You cannot predict. I was getting a little bored, because Julie was caving in so predictably. A shiver here, a shudder there, followed by a scream, probably the effort to run. It can be so repetitive. Of course, enticing her out on the deck into her whirlpool would have added interest, but the fact is, we lost her.”

  He was not in the least sad about losing Julie. He was elated.

  Autumn felt a deeper fear than any fear yet. “What are you going to do next?” she whispered. “I don’t want you to do anything next. Julie turned out to be too strong. Let’s just leave her alone. She wasn’t an ETS and that’s that.”

  The instructor’s head wobbled a little, not shaking no or nodding yes. Perhaps the instructor was not even there; was a fading hologram; and this would all go away and could be forgotten.

  “She wasn’t an Easy To Scare,” said the instructor, “which was, of course, your assignment. You have failed in your assignment. However, Julie is an excellent find. As a Scare Choice, I have none better at the moment. I have advanced classes, of course, and I will assign Julie to them.”

  “No!” cried Autumn. “That isn’t fair.”

  “Fair?” repeated the instructor. “How extraordinary,” said the instructor, “that you ever thought anything here would be fair.”

  He was deeply amused. His laughter welled up from some black and bottomless hole in their lives and expanded to fill their eardrums and skulls and souls.

  The instructor shook his head. “Andrew, the film.”

  The film was dull, because Julie hadn’t reacted as visibly and quickly as Mr. Phillips. And yet Julie turned out to be very photogenic, her lovely willful face alternating fear and ordinary embarrassment, deep panic and quick relaxation, hideous knowledge and mere puzzlement.

  The house itself was photogenic, with its sharp angles and gaudy lighting and wonderful deck riding the sky out toward the Pacific Ocean. The opening soundtrack was quite wonderful: love songs on the CD and bubbli
ng water from the Jacuzzi. It was the kind of film opening where you knew something terrible was going to happen … but what?

  Nothing terrible had happened, though. The phone had rung, Julie listened, asked a few sharp meaningless questions, slammed the phone down, grabbed her car keys, stomped out the front door, and drove away.

  Even the instructor had not been a problem for Julie at that moment. Julie walked through him as if he were nothing.

  But he was nothing, thought Autumn. How did Julie know, all of a sudden, that our threat was nothing? She wasn’t being brave, in the last moment; she lost interest. She had better things to do. What were they?

  Autumn, who thought she knew Julie, had no answers. Who could have called Julie right then, except herself, or Brooke, or Danielle? Yet she knew from Julie’s face that it hadn’t been one of the group. What brief conversation could have ended terror and so swiftly replaced it with an errand greater than fear?

  Autumn could no longer remember why Julia was chosen as an SC. It was disgusting. It was wrong. Julie was her good, good friend. It didn’t matter that Julie could be bossy and demanding and arrogant. They were friends. How could Autumn have turned on her?

  “I’ll keep the film,” said the instructor to Andrew. “My advanced classes will get the next episode. You’ll view what happens to Julie at the party. Andrew, I must admit, you are a better producer than I. Your film is award-winning. Mine is merely documentary.”

  I wanted a life of love and sunshine, thought Mariah. I wanted a life of real sweet.

  Andrew on a date, and real popular Julie-Brooke-Autumn-Danielle for friends. How did I get this far away from them? I thought I was going in the right direction.

  “You are going in the right direction,” said the instructor, his smile so sharp it practically gave Mariah paper cuts. “My direction,” he said. “Evil.”

  Autumn laughed out loud. “You always wonder,” she explained to the others, “that if you are faced with evil, will you do the right thing? Will you be the hero? Will you save the baby from the burning building? Will you stop the bad guys? Well, now we know. We join the evil. We are the evil.”

  “No, we’re not!” said Andrew. “No, we are not,” he said again, to reassure himself. “It isn’t our fault that anything is happening. Besides, nothing is happening. Julie is safe, she got away.”