Garden of Evil (2 page)

‘Earthy. Yes, I know what you mean. I have an earthy uncle, up in San Francisco. Uncle Ned. Swears like a longshoreman, drinks like a dolphin, but he always picks the winners at Golden Gate Fields, I'll give him that. Doesn't have to work for a living, like you and me.'

Dr Ehrlichman lifted the clipboard in his hand and flipped over three pages. ‘Ah, here it is. You have an extra student joining Special Class Two. Simon Silence.'

‘Silence? What kind of a name is that?'

‘He's the son of the Reverend John Silence.'

‘Never heard of him.'

‘Well, neither had I, until this morning.'

Dr Ehrlichman leafed through two or three more pages on his clipboard, and then he said, ‘Yes, here it is. The Reverend John Silence is the Supreme Pastor of the Church of the Divine Conquest, 8136 Lookout Mountain Avenue, Laurel Canyon.'

‘Still never heard of him. Nor the Church of the Divine Whatsitsname.'

‘Conquest.'

‘Whatever. But OK. What's his background, this kid?'

‘Apparently he's been homeschooled up until now, but now the Reverend Silence is anxious that he mixes more with students his own age, and becomes a little more worldly.'

‘Worldly? He'll get plenty of worldly in Special Class Two, I can promise you that.'

Dr Ehrlichman lifted up his hairy wrist and peered at his weighty gold Rolex.

‘General assembly at eight thirty. You
will
try and be there, won't you, unlike last semester, and the semester before that? I have some very critical announcements to make.'

‘Hey . . . seriously impressive watch,' said Jim. ‘How much are they paying you these days?'

‘This watch was fifty Bulgarian lev, at the flea market outside of the Alexander Nevski Cathedral in Sofia. That's about thirty-five US dollars.'

‘OK, Dr E., I believe you.'

Jim walked along the corridor until he reached Special Class Two. The door was freshly painted a dull slate blue, which had obliterated the graffiti that had appeared at the end of last semester: HERE BE DUMMIES! He took hold of the door handle but for some reason that he couldn't quite understand, he hesitated before he opened it. He thought:
here I am, at the start of yet another semester. How long have I been doing this? How many more times am I going to be doing this? Is this all my life is going to be about, opening this door year after year and facing yet another class of slackers and slow learners and kids who simply can't understand why ‘cough' and ‘bough' and ‘ought' are all pronounced differently, and never will understand it, as long as they live.

He hesitated a moment longer and then he opened the door and stepped inside. The classroom smelled strongly of lavender floor polish and through the windows Jim could see that the smog was gradually lifting, and the sun was shining through. Outside, students walked through the gilded haze like ghosts.

Sixteen desks stood in front of him, in four rows of four. He walked slowly up and down between them. In an hour's time, fifteen students would be sitting here – white, African-American, Chinese, Hispanic, who knew? Fifteen confused and reluctant young minds to be dragged out of the briars of semi-literacy and text-speak and slang. He didn't expect them to be able to write like Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson, so long as they could fill out a job application, although now and then they surprised him.

Jim went back to his own desk, opened up his briefcase and took out a sheaf of papers on which were printed the first lesson of the day. It was a list of twenty sentences, and all his students had to do was underline any which were grammatically incorrect or misspelled. ‘I are playing baseball tomorrow with my freinds.' ‘Me and Kim wented out and us et cheseburgers at Burger King.' ‘My Dad went fishing and court a sammon and a cold.' ‘I ran through hoards of people looking for my mom.'

He walked up and down between the desks again, placing one questionnaire on each desk. In the distance he could hear the bell ringing and the sound of doors banging and scores of sneakers squeaking and shuffling as the students poured in from outside. Before long, he would be meeting this year's Special Class Two, face to face.
If I were religious
, he thought,
this is when I would cross
myself. Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch.

He returned to the front of the class to take out the list of students. As he did so, however, he heard a sharp
plip
! like water dripping. Then another. He looked around and saw that on the sheet of paper which he had just placed on the third desk from the front, in the second row, there were two crimson spatters, almost like two large poppy flowers.

He went back and picked up the questionnaire and frowned at it. The two spatters were wet, like paint, or blood. He sniffed them. They didn't
smell
like paint, so he could only assume they were blood. But where the hell had they come from?

At that moment another drop landed on the back of his hand, warm and viscous – and yet another, almost simultaneously, on the sleeve of his pale blue linen coat. It was then that he looked up and saw what was nailed to the ceiling.

He opened and closed his mouth, but he couldn't speak. He didn't know how he had walked into the classroom and not seen them immediately, but then he had been too busy handing out papers and thinking about this year's students. Not only that, they had been fastened in between the two long fluorescent light fittings which hung down about two feet from the ceiling, so when he had been standing at the front of the class, they had mostly been masked from his view.

In the center of the ceiling, a naked girl had been pinned face downward, with her arms and her legs spread wide. Nails had been driven through her hands, her elbows, her thighs, her knees and her ankles. She had been whitewashed all over with some kind of thick distemper, which had made her all the more difficult for Jim to see her when she had first walked in. Her eyelids were closed and her hair was stiff and fanned out. She looked more like a stone statue than a human being, but the blood that had been dripping down had fallen from her cracked but partly open lips.

Around her, in a circle, had been fastened eight pure-white Persian cats, each with at least four nails through their bodies, so that their legs were splayed out like hers. The whole grisly arrangement of girl and cats had the appearance of a ritualistic black-magic symbol.

But on the
ceiling
? In a college classroom? For the past few days, the entire college had been undergoing cleaning and refurbishment for the new semester. Jim couldn't even begin to imagine how anybody could have done it, or when, without being seen or heard. Or, for God's sake,
why.

He stood staring up at the girl and the cats for nearly half a minute. He felt totally numb. He had seen all kinds of apparitions and spirits in his life, but he had never seen anything like this.

Very slowly, he walked backward toward the door, lifting his cellphone out of his inside coat pocket as he did so. Just as he reached the door, however, it burst open, and the girl with the scraggly hair and the pink T-shirt pushed her way in.

‘This is the right room, yeah? Special Class Two?'

Jim immediately turned around pushed her back out again, so that she collided with the spotty red-haired boy who was right behind her.

‘
Out
!' he told them. His voice was much higher than he had meant it to be, almost a scream.

‘What? We was told to come in and find our classrooms!'

‘Out! Something's happened. You can't come in. Go back outside for a while and wait until I come to talk to you.'

‘What's happened? What?'

‘I don't know, to tell you the truth. I don't have any idea.'

He gave her arm a last push, firmly but gently, and then he closed the door, and locked it. He could see the lanky African-American boy peering in through the circular window, his nose flattened against the glass.

‘I don't know what's happened,' Jim repeated, under his breath, and then he dialed 911, and said, ‘Police?'

‘L
ieutenant Harris told me about you,' said Detective Brennan, with a thumping sniff. ‘You remember Lieutenant Harris? Retired now. Runs the pro shop at Rancho Park Golf Course. Nine bucks for a bucket of balls.'

‘How could I forget him?'

‘You know what he told me? “If anything really weird ever happens at West Grove Community College, you can bet your ass that the first name that comes up will be Rook.” Those were his exact words.'

‘I hope you're not trying to suggest that I had anything at all to do with this.'

Jim was sitting at a paper-cluttered table in the faculty room. Dr Ehrlichman's secretary Rosa had brought him a mug of strong black coffee, but he still felt badly shaken. All he could think of was that dead girl's alabaster face, with a skein of blood slowly sliding out of the corner of her mouth.

The police had arrived within fifteen minutes of his calling them. Now the college parking lot was crowded with five black-and-white squad cars and two Humvees, as well as four assorted panel vans from the county CSI, the LA Coroner's Office and the Department of Animal Care and Control; and TV trucks from KABC and Fox 11 News.

All five hundred and sixty students and most of the faculty had been sent home, leaving Dr Ehrlichman pacing up and down the corridor in frustration, a diminutive king, like Lord Farquaad in
Shrek
.

‘You didn't happen to see nobody around who didn't have no legitimate business being there?' asked Detective Brennan. He was a big, sallow man, with skin like candle wax, who looked as if he never went out in daylight. He had an iron-gray widow's peak and glittery near-together eyes, which made him appear to be permanently suspicious. He was wearing a crumpled khaki suit with pants that were two inches too short for him, and saggy beige socks. His belly hung over his belt.

Jim put down his coffee mug and shook his head. ‘I didn't see anybody at all, apart from Ms Colefax. And let's face it, nobody could have nailed that girl up on to the ceiling on their own. Not to mention all of those cats. They would have needed two or three guys at least, and some kind of a platform.'

‘Maybe it'll help when we can identify her,' said Detective Brennan. He took out a crumpled Kleenex and fastidiously began to unfold it.

‘Maybe it will, maybe it won't. I certainly didn't recognize her.'

Detective Brennan blew his nose and then folded up his Kleenex again. ‘I hate this spooky shit. You don't know how much. Couple of weeks ago we had a call from the Whispering Palms Hotel. The chambermaid went into one of the rooms to turn down the beds and found two heads lying on the pillows. Two heads, a man and a woman. We still don't know who they are or where the rest of them's at.'

He paused, and made a gesture toward the ceiling. ‘But this . . . this is a hundred times more spookier. I really hate this shit.'

Jim said nothing. To him, it was more important to understand
why
the girl and the cats had been nailed to the ceiling like that, rather than how. He was sure that the way in which they had been arranged was symbolic, but he couldn't begin to think what it symbolized. He had seen pentacles and spirals and inverted crosses. But a girl smothered in whitewash and surrounded by eight white cats?

Just then, there was a soft knock at the faculty room door.

‘Come!' said Detective Brennan. But the door remained closed, and nobody answered.

After a while, there was another knock. Soft, again, but insistent.

Detective Brennan went across the room and opened up the door and said, ‘Yes?'

A tall, skinny boy was standing outside. He had long blond hair tied back in a ponytail, and a very pale, angular face. He was quite handsome in a bloodless, bleached-out, hippie-ish way. He was wearing a loose white open-necked shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and loose white linen pants, and Jesus sandals. Over his shoulder he was carrying a white canvas bag, like a gunny sack.

He said, ‘Excuse me, sir, I'm looking for Special Class Two.' Jim would have placed his accent as Louisiana or Mississippi – Deep South, anyhow. Soft, like his knocking at the door, but insistent.

‘College is closed for today, son,' said Detective Brennan. ‘Didn't nobody tell you that when you was coming in? They should of.'

‘Closed?'

‘There's been an incident. You'll see it all on the TV news.'

‘We don't have a TV, sir. My father doesn't approve.'

‘Oh. Well, you'll read all about it in the papers.'

‘We don't have any papers delivered. My father—'

‘Your father don't approve of papers, neither. I see. Well, no news is good news, that's what they say, ain't it, although I don't see no harm in the funnies.'

Jim said, ‘Wait up. Let me guess. You're Simon Silence, right? And your father is the Reverend John Silence.'

‘Yes, sir. That's absolutely correct, sir.'

Jim stood up and walked across to the door. ‘In that case, welcome to the wonderful world of mass education. You and I should be meeting each other tomorrow morning, if and when the police have finished combing the college for forensic evidence. My name is Mr Rook and Special Class Two, that's my class.'

‘Pleased to meet you, sir. I've never been in a class before. Well, I've never even been in a
school
before. My father taught me, mostly, although I did have outside tutors for physics and math. I'm sure that I'm really going to enjoy it.'

‘You are? Good. I'm glad about that. But before you get too ecstatic, why don't you wait until you meet your classmates? Even
I
haven't met them yet.'

‘Go on, kid,' said Detective Brennan. ‘Push off home now, come back tomorrow.'

Simon Silence ignored him, and said, ‘May I just ask you one question, Mr Rook?'