The night class, p.1
The Night Class, page 1
RAVE REVIEWS FOR THE NIGHT CLASS
AND TOM PICCIRILLI!
WINNER OF THE BRAM STOKER AWARD!
“Piccirilli is, bar none, one of the best writers working in the field today.”
—Mindmares
“Loaded with grim characters, an unusual plot, and a murky, almost surreal atmosphere, The Night Class is a must-read for fans of the macabre.”
—Masters of Terror
“Tom Piccirilli’s work is full of wit and inventiveness—sharp as a sword, tart as apple vinegar. I look forward to all his work.”
—Joe R. Lansdale, author of Mucho Mojo
“A hyperventilating horror mystery. The Night Class draws on the venerable tradition of stories that plumb the unbridgeable gulf between school learning and life lessons.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The Night Class has characters, plot, and story that all work beautifully—but the atmosphere works best of all. A first-rate book.”
—Ed Gorman, author of The Dark Fantastic
MORE ACCLAIM FOR TOM PICCIRILLI!
“A gifted and imaginative author. Piccirilli’s is a matter-of-fact world of magic and demons and ghosts, a world any Clive Barker fan would recognize.”
—Bentley Little, Hellnotes
“Tom Piccirilli delivers the goods. I’m a big fan.”
—Richard Laymon, author of Night in the Lonesome October
“If you don’t know the brilliant Mr. Piccirilli, you should. He makes you believe in his magic, in much the same way H. P. Lovecraft made us believe in his Mythos, and he can scare the hell out of you.”
—Brian McNaughton, author of Throne of Bones
“Piccirilli splices genres, combining elements of supernatural horror with hardboiled fiction to produce a narrative that sizzles. This is whiplash fiction that takes dangerous curves at 150 m.p.h.”
—Deathrealm
“Piccirilli is an author who knows how to terrify.”
—Jack Ketchum, author of Red
MORE RAVES FOR TOM PICCIRILLI!
“Tom Piccirilli brings the scares home and will have you jumping at things that go bump in the night. To read a Piccirilli novel is to become a fan.”
—Fearsmag.com
“Piccirilli doesn’t write with ink. He writes with blood and fire, his words burning across the page and into your mind.”
—Frightmares
“Tom Piccirilli never backs away from a disturbing or disgusting scene in the dubious interest of self-censorship, but neither does he seem to relish it as some perverted writers do (guilty, guilty, guilty). He faces it and follows it through to the consequences, and that requires bravery.”
—Poppy Z. Brite, author of Lost Souls
“What’s most fascinating about Piccirilli’s work is how successfully he has translated a true sense of the Gothic into very contemporary settings.”
—The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
“Better start revising your favorite author list—Piccirilli deserves to be at the top.”
—BookLovers
AN OMEN OF DEATH
Blood spattered the snow, speckling the white.
Someone’s dead.
He finally got to his own dorm, legs throbbing and weak and feeling horribly twisted, but no worse off than the inside of his own head. Even through the explosion of noise he’d made rushing into the building, slamming the heavy door behind him and huffing for breath, bleeding all over the place, the girl sitting at the security desk didn’t look up. She was reading Stephen King’s Bag of Bones and listening to Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” in her Walkman so loudly that the music spilled from her headphones. Cal wanted to scream but she only would have ignored him.
He skirted the empty lounge and took off toward his room, fumbling for the key, hands and coat now sticky with his drying blood. His scalp tightened as sweat trickled down his sideburns and hail melted in his hair. Bloody palm prints were all over the place.
The keys fell through his hand. A wave of dizziness shook him, and he held his breath to keep from vomiting.
As he bent to retrieve them, leaning against the knob, the door opened…
Other Leisure books by Tom Piccirilli:
FOUR DARK NIGHTS
GRAVE MEN
A LOWER DEEP
THE DECEASED
HEXES
A LEISURE BOOK®
November 2002
Published by
Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
276 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10001
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
Copyright © 2002 by Tom Piccirilli
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
ISBN 0-8439-5125-7
The name “Leisure Books” and the stylized “L” with design are trademarks of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Visit us on the web at www.dorchesterpub.com.
To Michelle, the girl in the front row
And for Vince Harper, fellow student
I’d like to thank the following for their friendship and continuous encouragement over the years: Ed Gorman, Lee Seymour, Dallas Mayr, Douglas Clegg, Gerard Houarner, Jack Cady, Don D’Auria, and Matt Schwartz.
We are creatures of a day.
What is one, what is one not?
Man is the dream of a shadow.
—Pindar
Pythian Odes
CONTENTS
Part One - Creatures of a Day
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Part Two - Dream of a Shadow
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Part One
Creatures of a Day
Chapter One
Cal’s ethics class was enough to drive him to murder.
Professor Yokver ranted in front of his mahogany desk, leaping around the aisles like a lunatic minister preaching judgment and hellfire, just waiting for the speaking in tongues to take him over: He threw up his pipe-cleaner arms and gestured wildly, fingers waving like tendrils as he chanted, “What is evil, children? What is good, what is evil? Do you know?” He bashed erasers against the blackboard for emphasis, and everyone else in the class actually seemed to be enjoying the show. “Do you know, children? Do you?”
A freshman in the first row scribbled notes so quickly he looked like a Boy Scout trying to make a campfire by rubbing two sticks together. Intent on recording every word of Yokver’s tirade, the kid’s tongue hung panting from his mouth. What could he possibly be writing?
Cal looked at his own empty pages.
It was a good question, though, and he wondered if he had the answer.
On the other side of the room sat Candida Celeste, smiling that say-cheese, sensuous leer that still made his entrails buck when he wasn’t ready for it, showing off those perfect teeth. They made him squint, and he couldn’t stare at her lips straight-on without groaning. She kept primping night-sky black hair, her cheerleader sweater opened to the fourth button—the way she’d done it back in freshman year—and dragged a pink fingernail down the length of her perfectly tanned cleavage. His first thought was that she must’ve gone to Florida over the Christmas vacation. And then, with sudden awful clarity, he realized, Oh, hell, the Yok’s actually turning her on. Cal felt a painful twinge behind his eyes, this scene so surreal in its own way.
He coughed, shook his head, and checked his watch. 8:15 A.M. Another hour and twenty minutes of doom in the morning.
“Are we keeping you from some appointment of great importance, Mis-tah Prentiss?” Professor Yokver asked, wheeling in mid-stride, pacing down the aisle, up the aisle, down the aisle. The Yok knew how to throw in this funky Southern drawl when he wanted to, playing into the juice of a Flannery O’Connor character, or maybe a Georgia Peach from Carson McCullers.
At last, he stood before Cal’s seat and bent to examine him with a humorless smirk.
Glancing to the left, Cal gave the professor the slow once-over as they watched each other, nearly chin to chin. Up close he saw the polka-dotted tie hanging askew, the finely trimmed goatee slightly off center and pointing at an odd slant, long hair tied into a ponytail that trailed to mid-spine. Chalk dust clung to him like mist. His spindly arms flailed so fiercely that he knocked his own glasses off, made a wheeling save, and caught them before they hit the floor. It was a nice move, actually, like the kung fu guys who toss the knives and catch them spinning as they come down, and Cal was sort of impressed.
“Please, don’t let us stop you, Mr. Prentiss. Huhhh. Hessssss.” Yokver hissed against the lenses of his glasses and wiped them on his lapels. The swank patterns in the hipster sports jacket entranced Cal for a mom ent as he tried heading into the swirls. You could ease yourself down into them, diving deeper, and never surface again. “And where were you, hmmm? What reverie snared you away from us, eh?”
An oncoming migraine set a tightening pair of pincers that took a mean hold. Early morning rush of red sunlight streamed in and caught Cal directly across his face, brighter than Candida Celeste’s smile, the venetian blinds open just wide enough to nail him. He winced and reared his head back out of the glare.
Everyone turned in their seats and stared at him. It got like this sometimes. What were they all checking out?…as if someone was going to stand and point a finger and shout, “J’accuse!” It was easy to get a complex in a place like this, and he felt himself heading in that direction. The freshman in the first row overtook his burning notes, slowed his incessant writing, and finally stopped. The kid now swiveled in his chair and looked too.
Candida Celeste chuckled when the Yok repeated his, “Hmmm?” and so did the neckless football player sitting diagonally from her trying his damnedest to play footsies from that angle. He wasn’t going to make it, straining so hard that Cal heard the guy’s ankles pop. A couple of the others picked up on that “Hmmm” as well, echoing the tone and swinging into it. Willy and Rose added even more exaggerated “Hmmmms?” of their own, Willy swaying in his seat, doing a little Stevie Wonder. They kept it up until they were in tune, key of F flat. Cal almost grinned. The girl seated directly in front of Candida Celeste made eye contact with him and smiled. It took a couple of seconds, but then she winked, startling the shit out of him.
“Eh, Mr. Prentiss? Where are you?”
“Right here in my seat,” Cal answered.
“Not true.”
“S’trewth.”
“Not so.”
“Okay, I’m not here at all.” Maybe it was true. Sometimes it seemed to be. Anyway, the Yok liked droll answers, so let him chew on that one for a while. All Cal wanted to do now was get up and bolt. The paranoia came on pretty damn strong for this early in the morning, his high blood pressure—160 over 90 at twenty-two—jack hammering in his wrists, other thoughts caterwauling beneath the moment. The bottoms of his feet felt way too slick, as if the tile floor had been freshly waxed, and you’d take a header if you got up too quickly and tried to run.
Yokver liked to frolic in your nerve clusters. Cal said, “I’m nowhere,” and tried to let it go at that, knowing, a part of him even hoping, it wouldn’t be so easy.
“Hmm, Hhh-mmh-hhhmmm hmmm hhmm ammm,” Willy and Rose went, bonding in laughter, gazing lovingly at each other even though they had no idea what they were really doing.
“Eh?” Candida said, those incisors so white and lovely.
Yok gaped, eyes filled with pride, a sorrow of some kind in there, but also a rich gratitude and appreciation for the focus. Cal knew that Yokver liked picking on him because it drew the rest of the class together. Perhaps they’d find out what was good, and what was evil, right here and now.
Cal swallowed, searching for saliva and finding only grit and moss on the roof of his mouth. “Sorry,” he said, doing his best to sound sincere. Could that really be the end of it?…could he shimmy off the hook? It was an okay effort, but that probably wasn’t going to cut it.
Yokver didn’t go away.
Like a wooden clack puppet, the professor flapped around the chair with arms akimbo. He had real rhythm and athletic grace. “I didn’t quite catch that, Mr. Prentiss. Did you say you were sorry?” He’d dropped the drawl, and didn’t sound half as pleasing without the Dixie lilt. “And what are you sorry for?”
Plenty, Cal thought, concentrating on the middle dots of the Yok’s tie. There was a stain there. Cal sniffed. Garlic. Shrimp scampi sauce? He glanced up and saw that Yokver was actually waiting for an answer. What was the point of this kind of a drag-out? Why keep on pushing even after you’d shoved somebody up against the wall? For the theater of it? To impress the Boy Scout, to bag Candida? Could be, but probably not. Those reasons were too identifiable, too human.
Cal already knew that his one other class of the day, The Art of Romantic Poetry in the Modern Age, had been canceled. He just wanted to get some scrambled eggs with extra bacon at the diner, go back to his room, get a few more hours of sleep, maybe drink a six-pack later on this afternoon. He could flop for the rest of the day, do laundry, tool around on eBay for a while, and finish reading a novel he’d borrowed from Willy.
He’d wait for the night before daring to slip into the library basement and getting some real work done.
Clearing his throat, Cal made the effort to grin but couldn’t get his lips to skid the right way. “Sorry for becoming distracted in the middle of your lecture. I wasn’t anywhere special at this particular instant, Professor Yokver, sir.” That should have been more than enough, really, Jesus. But sometimes he just couldn’t stop. The cloying need in him started rising, an urgency to press back some. He couldn’t tell if he was breathing anymore and really hoped he hadn’t begun to pant. “Maybe I was fondly recollecting the pleasures and safety of the womb.”
The Yok held his pale hands over his head, those long pale bony fingers going on and on and on, and said, “Pshaw, young master. Don’t be sorry.”
Cal nodded. “I’m not, really.”
“No?”
“No.”
He heard Jodi gasp in the seat behind him, one of those peevish, oh-please-don’t-get-us-into-even-greater-misfortunes sighs. She had them down cold. She knew better than anyone how he dreaded this course, but she still expected so much out of him while he was here, and he didn’t exactly understand why. Jo was the reason he’d taken Yokver’s PHILO 138 class in the first place. An 8:00 A.M. meeting usually proved to be more than enough to scare him off, but they spent so little time together lately that he signed up for it at pre-registration anyway. The timing also made it more convenient to sleep over in her room, although that hadn’t been playing out quite the way he thought it would, either.
The chummy light that danced in Yokver’s eyes last week when Cal dropped the withdrawal slip on the professor’s desk showed just how big a kick the Yok got out of him, now that he knew Cal hated being in here. The air had gotten so frosty that Cal thought he had seen his breath. Crumpling the slip silently, Professor Yokver dumped it into his waste basket and went back to crossing out large sections of Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols.
Ten days ago Yokver had lectured that there was no such thing as motion—using an arrow as an example, saying that at each interval of time the arrow was stationary, solidified within the space it occupied at that precise instant. It was the kind of capricious rationale that could open kids’ minds so long as they’d never taken physics. He drove the point home by doing cartwheels across the front of the classroom, shouting, “I am not moving!” That sounded fun when you told it, but being there threw a different, ugly spin on everything.
Later, Cal told the dean, who had doctorates in physics and chemistry as well as theology, the entire situation. Cal begged him to over-rule the drop-add forms and set him free. But the dean only gave him a lingering glare that told him he should know better than to involve the man in something like this.
Catch the Yok’s good side as he smiled and waggled his eyebrows now, putting on a whole floor show, doing some vaudeville. “You’re not sorry, eh? No, of course you’re not. Then why…?”
Hey, everybody had their breaking point. So just quit tearing at—
“…did you say…”
—my scabs—
“…that you were…”
—damn you.
“…Calvin?”
Okay, so there they were. It was the wormy, depreciating accent Yokver put on Calvin that did it; the same way a bully taunted you by singing your full name while holding your lunchbox out of reach. By jabbing you in the chest, just under your heart, until the bone hurt. His name was Caleb, not Calvin, so the cheap shot failed anyway. But that wasn’t the point. Were things really this out of control? Was the Yok waging a serious head game, or was it just his cholesterol getting to him again?
Cal’s breath came in bites. “I thought it would be a polite way to get you off my back.” He closed his empty notebook. He sort of looked forward to receiving a failing grade now. Anything to get the hell out of here.
