Shadowland (18 page)

 
10

 
Fads

 
Things returned to superficial normality when the half-dozen suspected juniors and seniors, none of them Skeleton Ridpath, had been quizzed; school narrowed down into a tunnel of work. A few minor sartorial fads swept through the school in February and March. After a few seniors began wearing their cowboy boots to school, everyone appeared in them until Mr. Fitz-Hallan started addressing students as 'Hoss' and 'Pecos' and 'Hoot'; one week, everybody wore the collars of their jackets turned up, as if they had just stepped in out of a strong wind.

 
   Closer to the bone was the wave of sick jokes: these were some sort of release from what I now see was the hysterical illness at work in the school's unconscious. What did Joey's mother say when he wouldn't stop picking his nose? Joey, I'm going to saw the fingers off your wooden hand. What did Dracula say to his children? Quick, kiddies, eat your soup before it clots. What did the mother say when she had her period? Same thing. We actually laughed at these awful jokes.

 
   Even closer to the bone was the 'nightmare' fad which took over the school in the hiatus between the quizzing of the last senior and Laker Broome's outburst in chapel at the end of March. Much more than grisly so-called jokes, this demonstrated that something ill was growing at the school's heart, and fattening on us all — that what was happening secretly to Tom Flanagan was not exclusive to him.

 
   Bambi Whipple released this fad in the course of his free-association chapel talk. Each of the teachers took one chapel a year. Mr. Thorpe's had been the week before Bambi's, and that too may have contributed, being overheated and inflated with Thorpeish emotions. Thorpe's speech began with references to a mysterious 'practice' which undermined boys' strength and unmanned those who gave in to it. Thorpe grew more vehement, just as he did during class. Saliva flew. He raked his hair with his fingers; he referred to Jesus and the Virgin Mary and President Eisenhower's boyhood in Kansas. Finally he mentioned a boy who had attended Carson, 'a boy I knew, a fine boy, but a boy troubled by these desires
and who sometimes gave in to them!'
He paused, drew in a noisy breath, and bellowed,
'Prayer! That's
what saved this fine boy. One night, alone in his room, the desire to give in grew on him so fiercely that he feared lest he commit that sin again, and he went on his knees and prayed and prayed, and made a vow to himself and to God . . . ' Thorpe reared back at the podium. 'And to have a permanent reminder of his vow, he took a knife from his pocket . . . 'At this point Thorpe actually removed a pocketknife from his own pants pocket and brandished it. ' . . . and he opened the knife and gritted his teeth and put the blade to the palm of his hand. Boys, this fine young fellow
carved a cross in the palm of his right hand! So the scar would always remind him of his vow! And he never
. . . ' And so on. With gestures.

 
   Bambi Whipple's effort on the following week was considerably less forceful. As in the classroom, he spoke with little preparation; the effect of Whipple's rambling monologue may have been as much due to Thorpe's horror story as to what he himself said. But in the course of his ramble, something reminded him of dreams, and he said, 'Gee, dreams can take you to funny places. Why, I remember dreaming last week that I had committed a terrible crime, and the police were looking for me and eventually I holed up in a kind of big warehouse or something, and suddenly I realized that I didn't have anywhere else to go, that was it, they were going to get me and I was going to spend the rest of my life in jail. . . . Boys, that was a terrible feeling. Really terrible.'

 
   That afternoon a sheet of paper appeared on the notice board outside the library which read:
Last week I dreamed that a fat bore from New Hampshire was beating me to death with a pillowcase. That was terrible. Really terrible.
Mrs. Olinger tore it down, and another appeared: /
dreamed about rats moving all over my bed and crawling up and down my body.
When Mrs. Tute emerged from the library and shredded that note, the board was clear only until the next morning, when someone put up the sign:
Iwas looking into a snake's eyes. The snake opened his mouth wider and wider until I fell in.

 
   That was how the fad began. The notice board became an array of such notes; as soon as Mrs. Tute or Mrs. Olinger ripped them down, dozens more appeared, opening the door to what lay behind all of those well-fed suburban faces.

 
   . . .
wolves were ripping at me, and I knew I was dying . . . all alone in the middle of icebergs and huge mountains of ice
. . . a
girl with long snaky hair and blood on her fingers . . . I was up in the air and no one could get me down and I knew I was going to blow away and be lost. . . something like a man but with no face was chasing me and he was never going to get tired . . .
and directly inspired by William Thorpe,
a man was cutting at my hand with a knife, swearing at me, and he wouldn't listen to what I was screaming at him . .
.

 
There must have been faculty meetings about it. Poor Bambi Whipple appeared one day looking very cautious and chagrined. Mr. Thorpe thundered on in his usual way — no one would have dared to rebuke him. Mr. Fitz-Hallan quietly led us into a discussion of nightmares, and spent fifty minutes relating them to the Grimms' stories we had read.

 
   But the real sign that the faculty was distressed by the 'nightmare' fad was Mr. Broome's chapel.

 
   He was a surprise substitution for Mrs. Tute, and when we saw him twitching at the podium instead of the librarian, the entire school knew that whatever was going to happen would be explosive. Laker Broome resembled a wrapped package full of serpents. After his short peremptory order to God ('Lord. Make us honest andgood. And lead us to righteousness. Amen'), he whipped off his glasses and started twirling them by one bow.

 
   The shouting began in the second sentence.

 
   'Boys, this has been a bad year for the school. Aterribleyear! We have had indiscipline, smoking, failures, and theft — and now we are cursed with something so sick, so
ill,
that in all my years as an educator I have never seen its like.

 
   'NEVER!

 
   'There is a poison running through the veins of this school, and you all know what it is. Some of you, perhaps led on by a certain ill-considered remark from this podium' — here a freezing glance at Whipple — 'have been indulging morbid fantasies, giving rein to that poison, exactly in the way that Mr. Thorpe preached against a month ago.

 
   'Now, I know what causes this. Its cause is nothing more or less than guilt. Nightmares are caused by
guilt.
Caused by a guilty mind and soul. And a guilty mind and soul are dangerous to all about them — they
corrupt.
All of you have been touched by this disease.

 
   'First of all, I am going to order you to stop this sick indulgence in a corrupt practice.'

 
   Behind me, in the second freshman row, I heard Tom Pinfold whisper to Marcus Reilly, 'Does he mean beating off?' Reilly snickered.

 
   'There will be no more —
no more —
talk of nightmares in this school. If some of you continue to be troubled in this way, I suggest that you see our school psychologist. If anyone continues to trouble us by bragging about bad dreams or by putting accounts of them up in a public place, that boy will be expelled. That is that.
Finis.
No more.'

 
   The glasses went on again, and his face settled into a grim, lined hunter's mask.

 
   'Secondly. I am going to root out the corruption in our midst and expose it here and now. The boy at the bottom of this perverse craze does not deserve to stay among us a minute longer. We are going to rid ourselves of him during this chapel, gentlemen, we are going to expose him. The boy who stole from Ventnor School will be cleaning out his locker by the end of the hour.'

 
   I risked a glance back at the seniors' rows, and saw the face of Skeleton Ridpath, tilted back, moony and empty.

 
   Mr. Broome darted forward from the podium and pointed at Morris Fielding, who was seated at the right-hand end of the first row.
'You.
Fielding did you steal that owl?'

 
   'No, sir,' Morris got out.

 
   
'You.'
The finger moved to Bobby Hollingsworth.

 
   Astonished, by the time he had passed me and reached the second row of freshmen, I realized that he was going to question every one of the hundred boys in chapel.

 
   He finished with the freshmen and moved on to the sophomores. The rows were close together, and as he swept through the aisles, he bumped against the backs of seats in front and sometimes cracked against them so hard as to jolt them sideways; he took no notice. Our class had turned around on its seats to watch. Each time, the jabbing finger, the accusing shout.

 
   
'You.
Shreck. Did you steal it?'

 
   I could see his shoulders tremble beneath the fabric of his blue worsted suit.

 
   Mr. Thorpe, who had been sitting at the front in the second wooden chair, stood and walked quickly down the side of the auditorium to confer with Mrs. Olinger. As with the boys whose chairs he had knocked aside, Mr. Broome took no notice. The other teachers clustered around the Latin teacher and Mrs. Olinger.

 
   
'You.
King. Admit that you stole it. . . .
You.
Hamilton. You're guilty. Admit it.'

 
   Finally he got to the seniors, leaving a maze of twisted chairs to show where he had been. The trembling in his shoulders was more pronounced, and his voice was ragged from all the shouting.

 
   
'You.
Wax. Wax! Look at me! Did you?'

 
   ''No, sir.'

 
   
'Peters!
You, Peters. Was it you?'

 
   'Uh-uh, sir, No.'

 
   I watched with dread as he approached Skeleton, half-hoping, half-fearing that Skeleton would begin to shriek. As Broome worked down the aisle toward him, Ridpath never looked his way but kept his dazed, empty face pointed toward the ceiling, fixing it on the spot where thecolor wheel had revolved during the homecoming dance. Then Broome was there.
'You. Ridpath! Ridpath!
Look at me! Did you steal it?'

 
   
'ANSWER ME!'

 
   ' . . . ' Still that weird silence.

 
   'DID YOU?'

 
   Then we all heard Skeleton's drawling answer. 'Not me, Mr. Broome. I forgot all about it.'

 
   
'AAAAH!'
Mr. Broome raised his fists in the air and wailed. The teachers at the back of the auditorium leaned forward, afraid to move — all except Mr. Thorpe, who took a brisk two steps toward the headmaster. Broome waved him back.

 
   'Okay. Next boy. You,
Teagarden.
Was it you?'