Fossil Lake: An Anthology of the Aberrant (28 page)

Moderate pandemonium erupts. People stand stunned, or rush screaming toward town. The thing in the lake submerges again, taking its grisly trophy with it. Water churns and seethes in its wake. The other chunks of Uncle Sticky slowly sink.

“See?” Lloyd says after a while. “I told you.”

A.J. belatedly remembers the camera he holds, and swears.

“Well.” One of Ramsey’s boys hooks his thumbs in his belt loops. “That made a hell of an impression on the tourists.”

“Made a hell of an impression on
me
,” says Mel. She wedges her toe under a manuscript and kicks it into the lake.

“This is going to complicate the rest of the season, isn’t it?” Poppy asks.

Kane removes his hat, wipes his brow and puts it on again. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, it is.”

There they stay, watching until the last of the frothy scum and greasy hair tangles melt away, and Fossil Lake is calm once more.

MAKE ME SOMETHING SCARY

Patrick Tumblety

Ghosts are always white. Sometimes on the cartoons they are see-through, or their clothes are colored, like the green jackets on the three brothers that chase Mickey, but their bodies are still white. Sometimes ghosts wear sheets, but the sheets are white, too.

Should she have used the white crayon? That didn’t make much sense to her, but maybe that’s what she should have done…

The door to the teacher’s office clicked open, and Annie snapped to attention, standing up from the hallway linoleum and brushing her wrinkled dress down with the palms of her hands.

“Annie,” Mr. Beakman called from inside the office, “You can come in, now.”

Annie deflated when she saw that her mother’s lips were pursed and her arms and legs were crossed. She lifted herself into an empty chair and kept her head lowered. The picture of the ghost lay on the desk in front of them, its top corner fluttering from the chilly breeze through the open window.

Mr. Beakman set a finger down on the paper. “Annie, can you tell me why you didn’t complete the assignment?” he asked.

Annie didn’t understand how to answer the question, because she thought she
had
completed the assignment.

“Annie, please answer me,” Mr. Beakman said, more forcefully, almost angrily, “Why didn’t you color in the ghost?”

The teacher’s skin was turning a shade of red, the same color her father turned when she had done something wrong. Her mother’s silence was terrible enough, but Mr. Beakman had scared her since the first day of school. He was very loud, very forceful, and never particularly nice to any of his kids.

When she was coloring the picture and thinking about ghosts and monsters and things that were scary on Halloween, she thought that nothing could scare her more than Mr. Beakman. As Annie concentrated on coloring, she wished that a ghost would haunt Mr. Beakman and scare him this Halloween.

“Ghosts are white,” she whispered, almost inaudibly.

Mr. Beakman breathed in deeply and the color in his face darkened. “Are you mad at me, Annie?”

Why would she be mad at him? What did he do wrong?

“You colored everything but the ghost, Annie. I can’t help but think that you did this on purpose.”

Annie had taken the brown, orange, red, and yellow crayons and applied each color one after the other to fill the empty space. Then, with her thumb, she rubbed across the lines where each color met in order to blend them together. When she was finished, the ghost was floating in the autumn dusk that Annie had seen above her house the night before.

“I colored the outside, because the ghost is white, and the paper would be blank if I didn’t add color to the outside. So I colored it like the outside. Like a Halloween sky.”

“Are you happy now?” Her mother’s loud scolding voice made Annie flinch. But when she looked up, she found her mother’s punishment face staring at the teacher. Was she not in trouble?

“Your daughter failed the assignment, Mrs. Reese, and this isn’t the first time she took liberties with assignments.”

“Took liberties? She’s in Kindergarten.”

“And is showing early signs of behavioral inconsistencies. I think it would be beneficial to everyone if you allowed the guidance counselor to evaluate her for potential withholding from graduating to the first grade.”

“All because she thought outside of the box? Aren’t you supposed to encourage that kind of thinking?”

“The project wasn’t about artistic ingenuity, Mrs. Reese, it was about following instruction. Your daughter failed.”

“I’ll be talking to Principal Anders about this.” Annie’s mother picked up her purse from the floor and stood. She took the ghost off of the desk and handed the paper to Annie. “And I’ll be putting this on the fridge when she gets home. I don’t know how your previous school nurtured children, but here we expand their minds, not force them to color inside the lines.”

Annie didn’t want the picture to go on the fridge. Only good work went on the fridge, and that paper had a big, ugly red F stabbing through the ghost she thought was supposed to be white.

She tried to avoid eye contact with her teacher as he escorted her back to the classroom. As she navigated through the rows of wooden desks he grabbed a stack of papers from the work closet. He began to place a single sheet in front of each student, moving slowly from row to row. When he reached her, he slapped the paper down so hard that she almost tipped her chair back when her body jumped involuntarily.

He must have been waiting for her to meet his gaze because he paused and hovered above her before moving to Jimmy’s desk. The students noticed the hostility, and they all exchanged glances and smirks at the possible trouble Annie had caused.

“I want you to make me something scary to hang in the gymnasium for the Halloween party on Friday. You have one hour.” Mr. Beakman sat down at his desk and flipped open a notebook as the students slid open their drawers and took out their crayons and colored pencils.

Annie was still upset, and she couldn’t take her eyes off of Mr. Beakman. It was like he was a big dog she had to watch just in case he decided to pounce. The teacher looked up from his notebook as though he could feel her stare. His face turned red, and he looked like he was about to shout. Instead, he looked back down at his notebook and stared at it as his hands clenched into fists. Annie didn’t take her eyes off of the man until the red drained from his face and he began scribbling in his notebook.

She slid out her desk drawer slowly, carefully, silently, and placed her coloring tools on top of her desk. She plucked her orange crayon from its box. On the bus ride to school she saw a lot of houses had Jack O’ Lanterns on their porches. The smiles carved into them were creepy, but not too scary, so drawing one was safe. She started by scrawling a big orange circle in the center of the paper. She was about to outline the placement of the eyes and mouth inside the surrounding orange line, but the image of the white circle cautioned her to think about what she was making.

She had colored the ghost wrong the day before, and her teacher was furious. If she failed again, what would he do?

Annie’s hands trembled; what was she expected to do? She could feel her eyes welling with water and her fear threatening to collapse her body onto the desk and weep. If she showed how afraid she was of doing the assignment wrong, then surely Mr. Beakman would be even more mad. Mr. Beakman had once refused Christopher from going to the bathroom in the middle of class. Annie had never seen an adult yell that loudly. Mr. Beakman had been her teacher only for a month and a half, but he got upset more often than any adult she had ever known.

So what would happen to her if she failed or cried again?

Annie’s mother taught her to learn from her mistakes, so she concentrated on discovering what she had done wrong the first time. Mr. Beakman said to “color the ghost,” and he was mad because she “colored everything but the ghost.”

This time, Mr. Beakman said to make something scary – that’s it! Mr. Beakman never said to draw anything, but to “make” something. It was a test just for her, to make up for not following directions the first time. Her fear was pushed away by excitement; while the other kids wrongly scribbled and colored on the paper, she would complete the assignment exactly how her teacher wanted. He would like her so much for being a good listener that it would make up for her previous failure.

She peeled off the crayon’s covering and frantically filled all of the white space with orange. She slid open her drawer once again and pulled out a pair of scissors. She used the scissors to round out the edges of the paper and poked holes for the eyes and mouth, then carefully snipped until she created triangle eyes and rectangle teeth. When she was satisfied, she proudly lifted the paper Jack O’ Lantern up to the ceiling to let the light shine through the face she had created …

Mr. Beakman’s eyes filled the Jack O’ Lanterns’, and the paper fell from Annie’s fingertips and fluttered toward the desk like fall leaves from a tree.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Mr. Beakman asked, his face again the color of apples.

“I made you something scary out of the paper,” Annie said proudly, and managed a smile despite her nervousness. 

Mr. Beakman lifted quivering hands and hid his face as though he were about to play peek-a-boo with a baby.

Had she not made the paper scary enough?

Her teacher lowered his hands and closed his eyes, breathing heavily as though he was snoring.

“Class,” he said calmly, “how many of you are done with your assignment?”

Some of the students raised a hand while some raised their paper.

“For those of you who have correctly completed your assignment, I want you to take a piece of tape and hang it up in the coat closet.”

Though every child was confused by the request, they sheepishly and silently complied, moving all of the coats to one side and taping their monsters around the corner of the closet, covering the back and side walls until the tiny space was filled white with speckles of color on top.

Annie tried to pick up her creature from the desk, but the moment she touched the paper, Mr. Beakman slapped it against the wood with great force and ferociously screamed, “Don’t you move!”

All of the students looked frightened. Annie was sure that she failed again, and so she cried. That seemed to enrage Mr. Beakman more, because he grabbed her tightly around the arm and continued onto the back of the room toward the closet. The force pulled her out of the chair and a sharp pain stung her shoulder. Her teacher dragged her across the dirty floor and then pulled her forward, sliding her into the closet. He slammed the doors, and Annie found herself in darkness. Only a sliver of light from where the closet doors met bled through, and then she heard the door latch.

“Think about your behavior, Annie,” said Mr. Beakman’s voice, muffled through the wooden doors, “and study what you were supposed to make.”

Annie crawled backward and huddled in the corner. She cried until the bell rang for lunch, and then she cried some more when she heard her classmates leave the room and the classroom door shut without her teacher letting her out of the dark closet filled with monsters. She peered through the small slit in between the doors, but she couldn’t see Mr. Beakman either. She felt better being closer to the light, so she stayed sitting against the door.

With the little light that came through she could see the different creatures lining the walls – a Frankenstein, a zombie, a vampire – one with bloody fangs and one that sparkled. After a while of staring at those pictures in the dark, silent and alone, Annie no longer saw them as children’s drawings, but actual nightmares staring back at her, mocking her for failing so miserably. She was being punished, but wished she knew what she had done. She had followed her teacher’s instructions to the word.

“Don’t be afraid,” a child’s voice whispered to her, and she immediately turned toward the light to peek through and see who had come back. She pivoted her head against the door as though she were trying to squeeze through the thin opening and tried to look around the classroom. Her Jack O’ Lantern slid underneath the door.

“I can’t see you,” Annie cried out, desperately, “where are you?”

“Behind you,” the child answered, and Annie could hear that the voice was truly coming from behind, within the closet.

Annie turned, screaming, using her feet to push her back against the wooden doors that buckled under her desperate retreat.

A boy was kneeling in front of her, holding his hands in the air and smiling.

“Don’t be afraid, Annie, I’m a friend, and I know you don’t want to get your teacher’s attention.”

The little boy seemed friendly, and he was right, she didn’t want to get Mr. Beakman even more upset with her crying and yelling. If the boy didn’t want to upset the teacher, than he must be a nice boy. However, the longer she stared at the boy’s face the more she realized that she could see the pictures of the monsters behind him, through his face.

“It’s okay, Annie. I’m a ghost but I’m not scary.”

Annie’s body shook with fright and she felt another welling of fear threatening to belt out of her throat.

“I used to be normal, like you. Look at my shirt!”

Annie looked down at the boy’s shirt that she hadn’t noticed he was wearing until he mentioned it. It was bright blue and had the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles eating pizza on the front. That made Annie smile, but she was still a tiny bit afraid, because the shirt, too, was see-through.

“Have you seen the cartoon where Mickey, Donald, and Goofy, are being chased by the three ghosts? You could see their clothes too even though they were almost invisible! But in the end they were friendly too, weren’t they?”

Annie nodded. The boy was right. Her tension eased slightly, though she was still very nervous.

“I’m Annie,” she said.

“I’m Michael. That Mr. Beakman is a bad man, isn’t he?”

Annie thought about it, but ended up shrugging. Adults got mad when kids didn’t do things right, so it wasn’t his fault she had to be punished. “I did the assignment wrong.”

“No, Annie,” said the boy, and for the first time he looked angry, making Annie push backward slightly against the doors again. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”