The January Featured Story is by Chris Castle

Please feel free to email Chris at: chriscastle76@hotmail.com

THE FAVORITES

by Chris Castle

The lights went out one by one, pop-pop-pop. The teenagers in the class yelped a little and then followed it with the first ripple of laughter. Then, inevitably, came the busy, excited chatter amongst themselves.

“Quiet down,” the teacher said and they immediately subsided. They feared him and the knowledge of that burnt like a beacon inside his heart. It had lasted him twenty-seven years and the feeling had yet to weaken in the slightest. Sometimes the fear was all that made him get out of bed in the mornings. The power he held, that surge, made others weak but it made him grow stronger. It was, to a fifty-five-year-old man, the closest he knew to breathing the same air as god.

“Now, this must be the ghost haunting us,” he said slowly, the classroom in darkness, a few faces outlined by the low hum of mobile phones. They looked up, wanting to question him but not quite having the strength to actually do it. Instead they kept peering at him, one part scared, and another curious.

He loved seeing their young faces looking back at him; the desire for answers was offset by the anxiety that only he could create. He felt a low burr of energy run over his skin as he slowly cleared his throat.

“Yes, this school is haunted,” he went on, keeping his voice intentionally low, making them lean forward and strain to them to follow each word. “I thought that was common knowledge.”

He shrugged and looked out to the doorway briefly, as if the rest of the story was written on the corridor walls. He heard the other teachers scrambling, looking for torches to alter the darkness. They feared him and loathed him just as the students did, and he enjoyed that knowledge. They did not trust him, but not one of them would stand in his doorway and ask what it was he was doing.

“Yes, yes, it’s quite common knowledge in the local area. A ghost presides in these halls, sometimes causing power outages like what we have right now, and fooling with the school equipment. It’s written in the town library as a course of public record, I believe.” He felt the next twinge of joy run through his body; he used unfamiliar words to confuse them, and then lies to keep them suspended inside his story. It was against the rules and inappropriate, of course, but all the best things were, he found.

“The story is familiar with your parents, if you’d ask them.” He knew they would do no such thing. Teenagers communicate as much with their parents as he did with the ghost in question. He allowed a thin smile to run over his mouth; it was so tight and unfamiliar, he thought the children would mistake it for a grimace. He pulled himself off his seat and away from the desk.

“The ghost in question was a former student, of course. One that misbehaved terribly throughout his time at the school. Whatever rule was established, that student sought to break it in double-quick time.” He slowly walked down the aisle that separated the two sets of desks. Some looked up to follow him and others looked away, pretending to be distracted, but no less rapt. The young listened to those they feared.

“He was, in short, a monster.” He reached the back of the classroom and stood in the dark for a long, perfect moment. He let his mouth open slightly and quickly bit into the air, almost tasting it. The anxiety in the room was almost tangible now.

“But this monster was to have quite a comeuppance, I’m afraid. Yes, young monsters always do, in real life.” He began to walk back up the aisle; he let his hands trail a little loosely, catching the nape of a neck, brushing an arm. Every one of the students he touched jolted and made the atmosphere even more charged.

Halfway down, he stopped. The two students sitting next to him now, to his left and to his right, were his Favorites. He had these in each class and he favored them above the rest. He enjoyed the hurt it created in the others, enjoyed it as much as the pride and beaming he found in those he singled out. Yes, he almost said out loud, a teacher must always have his Favorites.

“The monster-student went on in his way, causing his merry hell, much to the joy of the classmates and the frustration of the teachers in question. But then, on one day, a simple day, he no longer showed up at the school. At first poor attendance and absenteeism were offered up, as they always were with such troublemakers, but then the absence went on longer, the reasons not forthcoming. It was as if the student vanished,” he told them, popping his hands open in a flourish; his Favorites winced and he walked on, hiding the smile that was almost threatening to burst wide open now.

Yes, troublemakers often do have their comeuppances, he thought, almost idly. Over the years, he had seen to that. Not at the time, of course, not while the miscreants in question were still sloping through the school gates, but after. A year after, two; enough time for them to drift, to fail, to become vulnerable enough to accept a seeming harmless invitation, a ride and a retreat from the cold and the bitterness of everyday life. Yes, there had been trouble makers in the school over the years, but each had learnt their lessons, whether inside the school or out in the vast sprawl of the real, cruel world.

“The trouble maker was never found of course, but there were stories of his disappearances, tales too sordid, too unpleasant to go through now. But suffice to say, there can be no rumors without a kernel of truth, and no suspicion without a drop of possibility.”

He walked on and felt an unfamiliar sting on his fingertip as he made his way to his desk. He snapped his hand up and looked down to the child in question. For a second the boy, Davies, seemed darker than the others, shrouded deeper than the others, almost not looking like the boy at all. Then, in the next instant, the familiar image of a nervous boy snapped back into place. But the cool feeling on his fingertips lingered.

“Well…” he said, temporarily thrown off. He cleared his throat and reached his desk. The coolness of his fingertips seemed to crawl higher inside him and he flexed his arm. “The boy was never found, but they say his spirit returned here soon after…whatever happened to him.”

He tried to smile as he turned but what he saw in-front of him took his breath away. Each of them, sitting at their desks, were shrouded in the same darkness; every one of them something other than children, something darker. Their eyes appeared hollow, their hair dry and course, as if made from straw.

“He was…he was,” he tried to continue, peering into the image before him, the way rubber-neckers did at car-crashers, trying to see that little extra piece of horror. Their hands were all bone, their fingers little more than burnt coat hanger wires. But still gripping their pencils and their books, even in the darkness. Was that what horrified him more? The fact they were still…in attendance?

“They say he haunts the corridors, causing mischief from time to time,” he went on weakly.  He was supposed to be the once to create fear in others, not to feel it himself. He blinked and pulled the glasses from the bridge of his nose. He blinked again, deeply and looked up, seeing the horror show receding. Faces were returning, skin was slipping back over wire bones. He drew a breath and found his voice. He continued, trying to dispel the foolishness.

There was only one thing that was stopping him; even though the teenagers had mostly reverted to their real, present form, each of them clung onto the hollowed, sunken black eyes.

“They say…they say he never left the school. That his presence is retained in the walls, the very bricks of the building.” His voice was growing weak, even though he was drawing stronger, thicker breaths.

For a moment he looked to the door, but found it had slipped almost shut. He listened for the voices of the other teachers but couldn’t hear them. The commotion of a few minutes ago seemed to have disappeared entirely. Where there was once a sort of good natured chaos, he was now only aware of the utter silence of the place. And more than that, too; a stillness he had never felt before, not in all his years.

“They say he was buried in the foundations of the school,” he said, aware now that his voice was barely more than a whisper. Was he really saying that out loud? The story was becoming too involved now, growing too close to the truth of the things he had done over the years. He wrung his hands, trying to burn himself back to reality; he was practically confessing in front of his students!

He tried to shake his head clear, but found himself too weak; too weak to move, too weak to stop himself. He was faintly aware of crossing a boundary and being unable to stop himself, the acceleration too powerful, the drag too consuming.

“The boy was trapped, trapped in the walls, that’s what they said.” He felt dizzy now, and found himself clawing for the support of the desk. The desk was his shield, his protection from the monsters, the unruly mobs. If he could just settle his hands on the desk, feel the cool sting of the wood, then he would regain his footing and recover. But the desk itself seemed to morph into something else, something the consistency of butter and he slipped away from it. There was a sensation of almost being pushed and he stumbled forward, falling almost neatly into the spare chair kept at the front of the room.

The naughty chair. It was the chair he had forced children to sit in over the years, removed and isolated from their friends and shamed. A chair that he had grown to love for the loathing it inspired. A chair he had sought out and ordered, a replica which he kept in the cellar of his own house, for when those poor strays followed him home, looking for solace and a friendly smile. The chair that had become a sort of throne, that he sat on, in the darkness…after, after it had all happened, feeling exultant and something like a king. Now, he found himself in the self same place.

He had wanted distance, but the room had conspired to force him even closer to the class. He forced himself to look up and once again the monsters had stripped away any pretence it had once held; gone were the children, their true monster form on display.

Back were the wired hands, the hollowed sockets running deeper now; the straw hair sat at angles covering the face, leaving other, rotting spaces open and gaping. Mouths opened, the teeth stumps or dirty jewels in the mouth. Some had tongues, while others had clumps of dark pink flesh in their place. All of them looking at him, all of them expectant and hungry. And finally a voice came, one long and hollow chord, asking him for more, wanting to hear the next confession, the next story, the next truth. All of them hungry to consume the dirty truth of his heart. All of them flicking tongues and stumps and phlegm, hungry to hear each sordid act lay bare.

He continued to talk, now unaware of whatever it was he was saying. He had no sense of time in the darkness; no real understanding of what it was that was happening to him. All he knew was he was sitting in the victims’ chair and he was telling a gallery of terrible, un-dead things, all the secrets that were packed deep within his soul.

At first he spluttered, muttered, tumbled over words, and licked dry lips. But then the bone wire fingers reached out to him. They held his hand and almost caressed him. They nurtured him and stroked the stories out of him.

Then the grip tightened and they grew impatient. When they reached his darkest secrets they had no patience at all. The wiry thumbs reached higher, jamming fingers into his throat, pulling back the fat flaps of his lips. They loosened his teeth and scratched at his tongue.

When they grew more restless still, they tired of forcing the words from his throat and grew greedy; they plunged deeper into him, their reach probing deeper, sinking further into him up to their dirty elbows and they rooted around for the blackest, oiliest things they could find. They plundered him with greed and desire and when they were done, their arms were blood black and their straw hair was damp with sweat. They each took their turn and each savored their secret until they were all sated and their bodies full.

He slipped out of the chair and slid onto the floor. His insides were outside, he thought idly. His mind was torn and his flesh was laying over him, like some rain soaked mackintosh. The tangled mush of his mouth could no longer speak, but it did not matter anymore. He slumped into the darkness, feeling his own wetness all around him; once he lifted his hands, seeing torn stumps where his fingers should have been, making out the harsh pattern of the teeth-marks.

He tried to stroke the cheeks of his Favorites just one more time, but they moved out of his reach. Instead, the straw bodies shifted back into their seats, their work done and not one of them even thought to look down to the dying man. He watched them from the floor as they re-positioned themselves in their seats and angled their backs neatly against the desks. In a final, perfect act, they gripped their pencils tight in their hands, their lessons learned and hungry for the next.

The lights came on and the other teachers opened the door to the classroom and found Mr. Newman dead on the floor. Later, it would be confirmed he had suffered a massive heart attack and would have been dead before he hit the floor. Not many tears were shed, and in truth, jokes in the staff room abounded as much as in the classroom.

There was just one note that struck the people involved as eerie; the collective amnesia of the students in the classroom. There were factors; the darkness for one, the shock for another.

But the blanket of non-recognition when they tried to coax anything out of them left the other teachers feeling unnerved. It wasn’t that the teenagers’ eyes changed exactly, but it was almost as if something else, something brighter, burned behind them. The teachers who were questioning them decided to stop the talk then and there and let them go back to their friends. It just seemed safer that way.

Chris Castle is English but works in Greece as a teacher. He has been accepted over 150 times in the last year and a half, ranging from sci-fi to horror to straight drama. He has also been published in several end-of-year anthologies. He is currently beginning work on his forth book. His influences include Stephen King, Ray Carver and PT Anderson. He is also working on a poetry collection.