Slaughterhouse High Part 20

12. Zipped Lips and the True Meaning of Fear.

Condor had been flying on whatever beautiful s.h.i.+t he had swallowed in the car.

He'd been letting the dance music unfold new eternities inside him. Earing the fear, eying the terror that flaked skin from familiar faces, as old mush-jowled Futzy dispersed 'em all, skelter and yon.

He felt heaven come stairstepping closer as they shuk-shuk-shuked upward and the handrail, with its hacked worn inked germ-infested splendor, gave them guidance toward a way-the-f.u.c.k-up-there staggeringly simplistically functional cla.s.sroom where once, two years before, Mr. Fink had tossed chalk bits like an outfielder zinging third base to get some kid's attention.

Blayne, darkly brooding all night, had grown darker still, muttering bunches of creepy s.h.i.+t as they sat there alone under the chalkboard behind Mr. Fink's desk.

They had named each possible teacher, looking for a slasher. Their yammering faces oozed out of floor tiles or from the shadows beneath the desk, or they fell from the chalk tray overhead.

Zane Fronemeyer, conjured by an unrelievedly morbid commentary from Blayne, had misted up from a fallen eraser, an oblong devilcake dusted with snow, to menace them with a paintbox of horrors.

Condor had convinced him.

It was Fronemeyer.

Their wacko art teacher!

Then the bell clamored like a floodlight all ablaze. No light shone, yet all was light.

Brilliantly limned with light ineffable was this place of salvation. An industrial strength vacuum cleaner of light. A beam of elation. A c.o.c.kjacking, lobesucking epiphany of hot white jangling lumens.

"We made it!" exclaimed Condor, the drugs surging high in him.

"Yep and it was tough to make," said Blayne. Beneath his continuing brood, an imp peered out from those wide amazing eyes.

"We're continually making it, aren't we?"

"The windows, the wastebasket. It's a dull make." Blayne's face turned nasty and smug. "But there's a more interesting make waiting for us out there."

The girls.

"Yeah!" said Condor.

Blayne had lipped Altoona.

Or so he had said in the car.

All night, Condor's radiant head had waggled between death-dread and the black-laced duo they had avoided talking to, relying instead on odd across-gym antic.i.p.atory stares and bizarre but weirdly neat circlings, so close they could touch but pretending to ignore one another insteada"all of it a buildup to survival and the costume shop.

"I am one primed monkey!" said Condor.

"One prime mate!" Blayne corrected.

"Ugh. Squirrelly, real squirrelly." b.a.l.l.s of ticked fur opened up and skittered across the room.

"Squarely so."

"Double ugh, " said Condor. "Let's go get 'em."

He got to his feet and gave one last look at the last place of instruction he'd ever have to be in. The cla.s.sroom was a fist relaxed into an open palm, reluctant to release him but not all that unfriendly, despite the years of mind-wounds it had inflicted.

In the corridor, puffs and creases of student body flurried by, relieved, hunting, hunting.

f.u.c.k the hunt. live game.

A flutter of wings brushed against his face, as two chiffoned quail went birding by: Contusa and Calibrianna, caught up in an unending web of in-turned chatterboxing.

Down the stairs, down the stairs, down the stairs.

A mewling slight spewed like a spitwad from Capper McGee's twist of a mouth as he bounded past them up the stairs. They gave one another f.u.c.k-the-silly-b.a.s.t.a.r.d looks and wiped McGee's hurl off like so much fartwind.

Condor loved the building's dark dead funk at this time of night.

The place was dying. It was yielding them up. And in the bowels of this bowel of a f.u.c.kin' school, behind the scenes, some blood-splashed teacher was right now crimsoning a sink.

As they hit the first floor and headed left toward the auditorium, Condor stopped.

"Hey, watch it!" Blayne b.u.mped him. "What? A gla.s.s wall? What?"

"I just had a terrible thought." Condor saw the girls splayed wide, huge fingers punched deep into their bodies, prying then open like so many crabsh.e.l.ls. "What if he got them?"

"Leapin' Christ, Condor," said Blayne. "Then they'd be dead, we'd be ess-oh-ell, and I'd be so p.i.s.sed, I'd toilet-paper the t.u.r.dsucking slasher's front yard for a whole freaking year. Now keep moving, will ya? They're waiting for us."

Condor moved.

Humiliation clamped about his head.

d.a.m.n it, Blayne was deep, Blayne was smart.

Whereas he was dumb and pokey. He'd never amount to much. Even Pim and Altoonaa"a couple o' trash-talkin' gals doomed to lives of dirt, snot-nosed brats, squinty-eyed crooked-lipped drags on ciggies that wrinkled their faces toward cronedom years before their time, and endless ineptly-done housework, as far as he could seea"would probably reject him, make him watch, get it on in front of him with his best bud, steal him away, and leave poor Condor forever bereft.

"Oh s.h.i.+t, come on." Blayne hugged him as they moved, a cheer-up look on his flushed crazed swirly face. "Look, I'm zipping up my slagging mouth." He did so with a yank, then unyanked the zipper and brushed a finger along the crenelated niobium lining his lover's lower lip.

"I'm sorry," Condor said, feeling better.

"Pas de pro-blay-mo." Blayne tugged open the door to the backstage area and they went in.

Condor heard yells from the auditorium off right. No bodies found yet, though it sounded as if all the seats were being rocked furiously down-up-down-up in the futile search.

They pa.s.sed a door marked PROPS on the left. Then BOYS' DRESSING ROOM, GIRLS' DRESSING ROOM, and finally, partly ajar, COSTUME SHOP. Blayne, hand to handle, zagged in, Condor behind.

The ceilings were high, but the place felt cramped and confined for all the c.r.a.p jammed into it. Box after box serried and rose to their right and left. Scrawled labels vied with brittle typed ones for the truth about the boxes' contents.

Shoes lay heaped like war dead below. But before Condor could spook himself too much with the ghostly limbs akimbo'd bodiless out of them, they turned the corner into another larger room, where rack upon rack of fluff and color greeted them, a crazy salad of cloth, sequins, and odd-b.u.t.toned garments.

Blayne picked his way through, a jungle hacker amid old-outfit smells. "Yo!" he said. "Anybody home?"

"This way," trilled an amused voice.

Then Condor followed his date around one last switchback of gray-wheeled racks and faded finery gimcracked together.

There the girls waited.

Altoona and Pimlico, two incredible blips of life grinning and s.h.i.+fting and s.e.xing over by the sewing machines, their legs crossed at the ankles, leaning back everywhere.

Futzy's mind churned like a was.h.i.+ng machine agitator. Pumps and clunky polished boy-shoes in vast mooing herds of babble were moving along the hallway outside the gym. As the sc.u.m scurried by, Futzy nodded at them.

It had been all he could do, speaking over their heads from the band risers, to control his anguish at the papier-mache creature before him and to keep from blasting the little s.h.i.+ts with both barrels of his anger.

Now a few of their number were dead, waiting to be discovered and brought to the gym.

Futzy had thought that once this part of the evening arrived, once the Poindexter kid and his date had been dispatched, he'd be in for smooth sailing.

But his bloodl.u.s.t was nowhere near sated, and he guessed he had known that all along.

"h.e.l.lo, Mr. b.u.t.tweiler." High fluted voice, Charmina Fuchs bubbling by alone. She would make a couple of young studs an obliging breeder some day.

"Charmina," he muttered, stripping her with his eyes, imagining an impossibly long whiplash sweeping swifter than jag-lightning down the young girl's cream-curved torso, her skin blus.h.i.+ng beneath the whip sting's fury.

Adora Phipps, wearing her granny clothes and antiquated lobebag, had been strangely attentive tonight. Weird duck, her hair up and wrapped in a tight bun, one strand astray. After the speech, over chaperone refreshments, she'd made feints toward kindness.

Futzy had kept his replies superficial and moved on.

As he watched flocks of boybuddies quickwalk off toward the labs, swivelb.u.t.ted and gawk-armed, he wondered what the strange lady English teacher, this Adora, would think of his homelife, his cold wives, the spattered blood on his bedroom walls.

Would it shock her?

Would it turn her off?

Or on?

Kitty, holding back her hair with one hand, bent to a drinking fountain.

A rush to Futzy's brain.

Not his daughter of course, but maddening-without-meaning-to-be Wyn Wynans. She stood up, oblivious to him, licking her lips, and went into the gym with her unworthy date.

A sob escaped Futzy's lips. Luckily no one was by to hear. They had to paya"they'd pay in spadesa"for the Ice Ghoul's return.

He would see to it.

By G.o.d, he swore he would.

First, Tweed tried the phone bank near the science rooms by the north exit.

"The phones are hosed," said Tad Verle, headed back to the gym in a pink bowtie that accentuated his outstuck ears.

She tried both phones. Tad was right. No dial tone. Dead air.

"That's weird," she said.

"Your dad'll be okay," replied Dex. "Come on."

"He'll be worried." She could feel fret marks on her brow and a tightening in her belly over delaying Dex's stupid hunt for the slain. "Let's try the ones by the front door."

Dex, saying nothing, trailed after her.

Tweed wished he would grow up.

Princ.i.p.al b.u.t.tweiler, pacing the hall like a circus bear restive and unbicycled, looked stunned to see them.

He broke eye contact and edged away.

Tweed chalked it up to his unhinged state of minda"the Ice Ghoul, his rumored sado-mates, all of that.

Four phones were located near the entrance, silver corded and stained. Wood part.i.tions scored with graffiti provided token separation between them.

A gaggle of girls were crowded about the left phone. "s.h.i.+t on a stick," said a k.n.o.bby-elbowed girl named Relda Weep, whom Tweed had known since first grade and not spoken to once in all that time.

The girls moved off and Tweed found the same d.a.m.ned dead lines here too.

"This is spooky," she said.

"Wonder what the deal is."

"Dad'll be worried, Dex. He'll climb the walls."

Dex looked concerned. "You're really torqued, aren't you?"

She nodded and bit her lip.

Dex hugged her.

Her fears conjured her father at home, his voice s.h.i.+fting into a soft dithering dirge as he eyed the phone and bullets beaded his brow.

"I'm sorry," said Dex. "I wish I could do something. Hey. What if we found Mr. Waddell?"

"The janitor?"