“Fuckin’ Futzy’s up,” muttered Cobra, “ready to spout more prom bullshit.”
The principal held folded papers in one hand and tapped the mike with the other. He was gazing out, white in the face, beyond the gathered masses toward the Ice Ghoul.
Mr. Buttweiler, a really nice man who winked at Sandy a lot, looked seriously psycho tonight. Too bad the prom committee, many of them friends of hers, had trampled on his feelings.
But he would get over it. Maybe it would help him overcome his twenty-year-old funk.
And if it didn’t?
Well fuck him, she thought, amazed at the crudity of her musings. Fuck him to hell and back. He was nothing, now that school was out, over, and done with forever. He was pasteboard where power had stood. Wink at some other piece of tail, you jackass, she thought.
It made her laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Rocky asked.
“Yeah, babe. What gives?”
“None o’ your beeswax,” she said.
Soft sadness through the speakers. “Can you all hear me?” A squeal. He backed off. The feedback died.
“Maybe not now,” Cobra said with a leer, “but me ’n’ old Rocky here’ll crop it out of you later. See if we don’t.”
“Yeah, Sandy.” Rocky adopted Cobra’s macho stance. “Double welts for you tonight!”
“Promises, promises,” she said.
She caught Mimsy and Bubbler pointing at her, fellow cheerleaders who were a longstanding item. The prissy pair of boob-and-panty-flashers acted stunned.
Well, fuck them too, she thought.
Futzy Buttweiler tapped on the mike, leaned around looking, tapped it again, looked closer and flicked a switch on its neck, then tapped it once more. This time, thunks sounded.
He cleared his throat.
Gerber felt like a shirker.
He’d done the flag thing, the colored light thing, the setting up of the mike, the series of bells by which the senior class got herded here and there for the slaughter and the okay-you-can-get-up-now stuff.
All that stuff.
From where he stood, looking down on the prom, he had done all the right things. But he hadn’t hovered as he usually did. He hadn’t been seen by all the right people.
Gerber was spooked.
Maybe it was the big red monster in the center of the gym. Its face was plenty creepy. The ferocity of its stance made electricity shoot up his spine and into his partial brain. He could shut his eyes, or go as far away as his shoes would carry him. But still, them lightning sparks did their upshoot thing and the cold eyes stuck in that wicked red face penetrated deep inside him and urged him to do bad things.
He gazed down.
Ants. The spotlit bandstand. The big red monster and the dead girls. Spiffed-up seniors milled or stood in clumps on the sawdust.
Something kept Gerber company that night, but he didn’t really want company.
Shadows moved.
Even up here.
Was it him? His feet suggested where to go next. He could already see himself there.
Life weren’t fair.
You grew up, got overzealous, maybe one or two people died what ain’t hadn’t oughta.
So what?
But that weren’t how society saw it. Nope, they cut the bad urges out of your brainpan and chucked the cut part in the trash. Made you safe again. They thought. Made you productive and put you in a janitor suit so’s you could serve a good function for your fellow man. They thought.
Huh.
Their knives weren’t so smart.
But he wasn’t about to tell them so. Maybe he knew shit little, like they said. But he knew that if he told them, they would open up his skull all over again, take out the whole damn thing this time, and toss it in the trash.
Ol’ Gerber was too wily for that!
But he was spooked tonight, for sure. He would catch hell for doing or not doing some shit, though he’d done everything he was sposta oughta. Maybe that was the meaning of the shadows and the sounds.
Guilt goblins.
Conscience. That thing without which he’d been operating before they sliced his head open. Maybe it was filling in the empty spaces.
Great. Useless stuff. Hope I don’t catch any o’ that, he thought.
Then he saw the shadow again, even way up here. And he lowered his head and put his big hands on top of it, cringing and feeling tears come into his eyes.
Go away, he thought. Go away.
His feet wanted to move again.
Jonquil stood less than ten feet from the slain girls, sniffing the as-yet subtle smell of death.
No, that wasn’t quite right.
Pesky’s ribboned belly had begun to steam with a stenchy redolence that pleased her, that stoked her lust and made her think of later.
For the past many years, Jonquil had taken to marauding after the prom. She would find some neighborhood in an obscure section of Corundum, draw a bead on some lonely guy or gal or couple through their window, and fuck the juice out of them. Totally anonymous, dressed like a slut on the troll, she acted with complete abandon.
She loved it.
“Ladies and gentlemen…”
Futzy’s voice faltered. He struggled to regain his composure.
Jonquil wondered where Gerber Waddell was. He hadn’t been around all night. Usually he hung about on the periphery of the prom. In some ways Gerber was the prom, hints of violence behind his soothing exterior.
She found other reasons to wonder.
There was something strange about Flense’s body. The solid white of her gown was now wet with blood. It hadn’t been so when they carried her in. An inner wound only now soaking through? Jonquil didn’t think so.
“You have passed a very important stage in your life, a stage that
…” Futzy paused.
A blotch suddenly bloomed on Flense’s right breast, a bright red blotch completely separate from the ribside Jonquil had been looking at.
The blood wasn’t coming from inside Flense at all.
From Pesky? Not a chance. Her corpse faced another way.
Jonquil looked up, noting moisture on the Ice Ghoul’s cheek, a drop at the tip of its beakish nose. Leaks in the roof, Claude had guessed. She watched the drop elongate and detach. A spangle of rain. She fancied she could see the spatter hit Flense and widen the red blotch.
A neuron fired in Jonquil’s brain.
Not water. Not water at all.
“My friends,” said Futzy, departing from his text, “I have to admit to some confusion. Sheriff Blackburn should have been here by now.”
That was true, thought Jonquil. Futzy had made no big deal about it, which was perhaps why she hadn’t noticed it before. Ordinarily, the sheriff would remove the padlock from the gym’s outer door and slip in. By now, he should have been standing by the bandstand, ready to spout his drivel about the community, their new role in it, all that grown-up crap.
“What gives?” Claude came up beside her.
“I don’t know.”
“But there’s something far worse,” said Futzy, “than the sheriff’s absence.”
“Oh my,” Claude murmured, “our beloved leader’s about to lose it.”
“With good reason, I’m afraid,” she said. Through a sea of bobbing heads, near chaperone corner, she noticed the strange couple, Brayton and his date. They had this look, a look that bespoke knowledge.
Interesting.
Something more than bloodlust wriggled its sensuous way through Jonquil. She felt, in that tip-tilted gym, as if they were all standing on the deck of a vast ship. Below them, a boiler stoked with rage-more rage than Jonquil had felt in years-was poised to explode.
Futzy’s halting words, the blood dripping from above, the odd couple whose presence somehow tied it all together-these things caressed her so violently, she teetered on the brink of jumping her snooty colleague’s bones right there on the dance floor.