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Six

I shook my head. Why was I thinking such nonsense? Where were these random, silly, thoughts coming from? There were more important things to worry about. A death. A killer.

A premonition.

I was pleased I was standing with my back against a wall. If I hadn't been, my legs would surely have buckled and I'd have been trampled and swept along in the tide of frantic schoolchildren.

Their faces, again, seemed to melt. Their eyes dripped down at the sides, sloping to mix with the corners of their mouths. Their noses flattened and sludged outwards. I could only think of it as 'sludging'. It reminded me of walking through mud in my wellington boots, mud so thick my boot would be stuck and come loose as I pulled my foot. Their noses moved as if stuck in thick mud. They moved as if being pushed by an unseen hand. And then the walls began to bleed. But they didn't bleed blood, they bled fire.

A door was close to my right hand side. It led outside to the lower school playground. I pushed it and fell out into the open air. As if I'd pulled a plug from the bottom of a bath, the crowd of children were sucked through the opening and expelled outside.

Within moments, though, Mr. Hoylen, our Chemistry teacher, a man of equal parts geniality and generosity, appeared and ushered us into his class and the other children on to theirs.

"It's fine," he said. "Miss Temperley simply banged her head. An ambulance is on the way to take her to hospital, but I'm sure it's just a formality. She'll be back tomorrow, I don't doubt."

I did doubt. We all did. Mr. Hoylen was a wonderful teacher, but a terrible liar. We had seen the lid of the desk was pushed to far down for Helen's head to properly fit inside - at least whilst still in its proper shape. No. It was squashed. Flattened. Crushed.

Still, our teacher had fired up the Bunsen burners and insisted we all turn to page 47 in our text books. We were children. Teacher knew best. Well, that was how it was meant to be. I didn't think such was the case this time. I thought teacher, this time, knew very little.

Just as I'd seen blood creeping towards me in the shower room, teacher knew nothing. Just as I'd seen blood pouring from the desk days before, teacher knew nothing. This wasn't something a text book could tell you. This was death. This was... something.

What? How could I see these things before they'd happened? Had I caused them? Were Ian and Helen dead because I'd seen it happen? And what did it have to do with Smudge Man? Who was he?

I didn't have time to think. Mr. Hoylen was bustling around the room, talking too fast to each pupil he passed. He was babbling, his attempt to appear calm only serving to dangle his nerves over the lit Bunsens.

I tried to avoid looking at the flames. If I did, I couldn't help, then, looking at the walls to see if the flames were creeping along them too. They weren't. All was as it should be, apart from our uncharacteristically manic teacher and a dead friend along the corridor.

Sorry, not dead. Just a bop on her head. If her ghost decided to walk through the non-burning walls, I'd be sure to tell it that. It was a bop, a knock, a tap. Nothing to worry about.

I heard the wail of an ambulance siren coming along the main road and a screech as it must have turned too quickly into the car park near Reception. Mr. Hoylen's chemistry class was only a few doors away from the entrance. We'd probably be able to see the paramedics running past and then back again as they carried Helen's body out. Or escorted her to hospital, just to be sure.

The siren stopped abruptly and I heard the smash of large windows, the shards of glass dancing across the parquet wood floor which ran through the entire school. A screech of tyres too close to be in the car park. Too loud to be outside. A crash as a wall interrupted the journey of the ambulance as it drove through Reception instead of waiting patiently in a parking bay. A boom as something exploded.

I looked up at the window in the classroom door and saw the face of the driver just before it was engulfed in the explosion. Just before the ball of flames swept past him towards us. Towards me.

The driver didn't have a face. He had a smear. He had a melt. He had a whirlpool.

Then the flames blasted through the door as if it was so much paper. And the desks burned. And my friends burned. And the gas lines to the Bunsen burners burned...

They say I am lucky. Even today, when the memory of what happened when I was a child drifts across the floor, mixed in with the dust of the past. I am lucky. I survived. I lived and was relatively unhurt.

A few scars. Minor burns. These things heal, given time. My friends were not given the luxury of the time to find out if it is the great healer we are told. I am testament to the fact it is.

And it isn't.

Physical scars heal. They fade. They, even, become trophies to the events which shapes them. But physical scars have a shadow. One needing no light to cast its dark wound across the landscape of our skin. Emotional scars may also fade, but they can be impervious to time's attempts to brush them away. They can stick two fingers to time, telling it that no, they are going to stay. They are going to keep aching long after the visible marks have disappeared.

They didn't find out who had killed Ian and Helen, or why. At first they thought it was a teacher, but we all knew that was absurd. Apart from hushed rumours of unofficial liaisons by errant members of staff, both of the opposite and same sex, our teachers were 'normal'. Sometimes they might be stressed with a pupil, but a low flying board rubber would relieve any tensions they might have had. Murder was a little severe for talking in class or not handing in your homework.

It was suggested the ambulance driver was to blame. Somehow he had set out to seek vengeance on the bullying of one of his children and had taken it too far, the final, deliberate, crashing of his vehicle through the school entrance and the cataclysmic repercussions being his way of ensuring it didn't happen again.

Except his daughter was two. And she had only taken her first steps the weekend before.

The investigation fizzled out. I had been interviewed by the police on multiple occasions, to my mother's protestations, but couldn't help them.

Premonitions? Melting faces? No. I didn't mention them. I took a shovel to my mind and buried the memories. I left the grave unmarked, with no cross or headstone to show where they lay.

Still, they couldn't, I suppose, remain buried forever. Like zombies thrusting their hands to the moonlight, they burst from their tomb. I let them rise, their undead fingers grasping for me. I allow them to take me.

For so many years I have forgotten those few weeks. I bore the scars but couldn't remember why, or from what. I remembered the deaths and the fire and the rest, but not the faceless man, or the television, or the dreams.

Now I remember. Now the tears escape from the prison of my eyes, incarcerated since my youth. I have not cried before, not since being a boy. My emotions seemed spent, as if the horrors of that time had used them all up, drying them out for the rest of my life. Now the well was full once more and I let the tears come.

They rebuilt the school once the police had realised they had nowhere left to turn. They had a ceremony to honour the dead. Each had a class named after them. The mayor cut the ribbon.

The school remained open for three years. No one wanted to go. It felt cold. Dead.