"Come to the place where the angels fear, cut your wrist and bleed your way here."
"Laugh at the fools who still have hope,
and cry for the people who cannot
cope."
This short rhyme was written all over the greenish grey school lockers. Who ever wrote this, whatever wrote this had snuck in at night and written the taunt on all 750 lockers. The text was written in blood. The dry blood stained the lockers. Oddly still rich in colour and pure in scent, nothing the groundsmen did could remove it. Some believed it to be a sign of something to come, a warning or maybe an order.
All the kids were acting normal about it, except for Johnny Jit. Everybody called him Jitters for short, well not really called, more like labelled. He was the small and weak type. He was scared of nearly everything and had heaps of allergies. His skin was ghostly pale and his eyes were a grey-ish blue colour. Constantly teased by bullies and the whole school in general, he gets verbally abused for every mistake he makes.
The day was going normal until I noticed him in the corner, invisible to the rest of the world I approached him,
I gently touched his arm to get his attention, he was vividly staring at the. floor huddled in a corner hugging his knees. Rocking back and forth shaking as if it is a cold winter mourning. As soon as my hand made contact with his arm a boom of sheer cold crawled down my arm and covered my entire body, it was like being in the harsh blistering icy winds wearing nothing but a t-shirt and shorts. He looked at me with cold steel eyes
"What do you want?" he whispered in a sharp tone.
Surprised by the sound in his voice I look at him straight in the eye and compassionately say, "Whats wrong?"
He looks back at what ever he was staring at before my arrival and said,
"There coming?"
"Whose coming," I ask.
"There coming?"
Shaking he lifts his finger and points to the empty wall across the hall, through the legs I can make out a face shaped picture drawn low on the wall, not in the same medium as the other graffiti.
I get a short time to glimpse at the face and realise its a mask, with a strange symbol on its left cheek. The mask is plain white like a blank DIY mask from the store. It resembles a human face, but with no emotion being shown. The symbol on the mask is black and is unrecognisable to me. He lowers his outstretched arm a cradles his knee returning to his previous position.
I sit there beside him staring at the mask through the moving forest of legs, suddenly the bell goes. He stands up right and walks to class getting mixed into the fog of kids. After a while after all the other students had gone into their classes I approached the mask. I had the sudden urge to touch it. My hand touches the symbol on the mask and instantly I feel the same cold as I did when I touched Jitters. But this was more intense, it moved to the centre of my chest and took a grasp of my heart. I couldn't breathe, every time I tried breathing in it was like a think smog that couldn't get through my throat. As soon as my hand retracted from the mark on the mask every thing went back to normal. I glimpse a lurking shadow behind me but give it no recognition of the figure hidden behind the shadows.
