There was a hole in this wall, a hole starting six or eight inches above the stone cold floor (how could there be another basement below a stone floor?) and rising almost three feet. Tubby could see fresh plaster dust on the floor and rotten lathing sticking out like exposed ribs.
Other kids had been working on this since Tubby had been down that morning. That was OK. They could do some of the work as long as Tubby got to kick the final shit out of the thing.
Tubby crouched and peered into the hole. It was wide enough to stick his arm in now and he did, feeling a wall of brick or stone a couple of feet deeper in. There was space to his left and right and Tubby felt around, wondering why somebody'd put up this new wall when the old wall was still back there.
Tubby shrugged and started kicking. The noise was loud, plaster cracking, lathing tearing, bits of wall and clouds of dust flying every which way, but Tubby felt fairly certain that nobody would hear him. The stupid school had walls thicker than a fort's.
Van Syke haunted these basement rooms like he lived here . . . maybe he does live here, thought Tubby, nobody's ever seen him live anywhere . . . else . . . but the weird custodian with his dirty hands and yellow teeth had not been seen by the kids for days, and it was obvious that he didn't give a shit if some of the boys (Boy's, thought Tubby) kicked in a wall in the intermediate John. Why would Van Syke care? In a day or two, they'd be boarding up this big old shithouse of a school. Then they'd be tearing it down. Why would Van Syke care?
Tubby kicked away with a fury he seldom showed, putting all the frustration of five years of suffering, even in kindergarten, and being called a "slow student" in this rotten heap of a school. Five years as a "behavior problem" having to sit there, tucked up close to old bags like Mrs. Grossaint and Mrs. Howe and Mrs. Farris, his desk rammed up right next to theirs so they could "keep an eye on him" so that he had to smell their old-lady stink and listen to their old-lady voices and put up with their old-lady rules . . .
Tubby kicked at the wall, feeling it give quickly now as the hole enlarged, until suddenly plaster tumbled across his sneakers, a two-by-four collapsed, and he was staring into a real hole. A big hole. A fucking cave!
Tubby was fat for a fourth grader, but this hole was so big that he could almost fit in there. He could fit! A whole section of wall had come down so the hole was like a hatch in a submarine or something. Tubby turned sideways, forced his left arm and shoulder into the opening, his head still out of the hole, a big grin beginning to form on his face. He moved his left leg into the gap between the fake wall and the old one behind. It was a goddamn secret passage in here!
Tubby crouched and stepped into the hole, pulling his right leg in until only his head and part of his shoulders protruded.
He crouched lower, grunting a bit as he settled back into the cool darkness.
Wouldn't Cordie or my old man shit if they came in and saw me now! Of course, Cordie wouldn't be coming into the boy's restroom. Or would she? Tubby knew that his older sister was pretty weird. A couple of years earlier, when she was in fourth grade herself, Cordie'd followed Chuck Sperling, the hotshot Little League baseball player, . track star, and all-around-asshole, out to Spoon River when he was fishing alone, tracked him for half a morning, and then jumped him, knocked him down, sat on his stomach, and threatened to pound his head in with a rock if he didn't show her his dick.
According to Cordie, he'd pulled it out, crying and spitting blood, and showed her. Tubby was pretty sure that she hadn't told anybody else, and it was damn sure that Sperling wasn't going to tell anybody.
Tubby leaned back in his little cave, feeling the plaster dust in his crew cut, and grinned at the dimly lit restroom. He'd jump out and scare the shit out of the next kid who came in to take a leak.
Tubby waited a full two or three minutes but no one came. Once there was a scuffle or rattle way down the main basement corridor, but the sound of approaching sneakers didn't come and nobody showed. The only other noise was the constant trickle of water in the urinals and a soft gurgling in the overhead pipes, like the damned school was talking to itself.
It's like a secret passage in here, Tubby thought again, turning his head to the left to look down the narrow passageway between the two walls. It was dark and smelled like the ground under the front porch of his house where he'd hid from his ma and his Old Man and played when he was smaller. The same musty, rich, rotten smell.
Then, just as he was feeling a bit cramped and weird in the little space, Tubby saw a light at the far end of the passage. It was about where the end of the restroom and the outer wall might be ... maybe a little farther. It wasn't really a light, he realized, but a kind of glow. Sort of like the soft, green light Tubby'd seen coming off some fungus stuff and rotting mushrooms in the woods at night when he and his Old Man went out coon hunting.
Tubby felt his neck grow cold. He started to step out of the hole, but then he realized what the light must be and he grinned. The girls' (the sign painter had got that right) rest-room next door must have an opening in it. Tubby imagined peeking out of whatever hole or crack in the laths was letting that light out of the girls' bathroom.
With a little luck he'd see some girl taking a leak. Maybe even Michelle Staffney or Darlene Hansen or one of those stuck-up sixth-grade bitches with their underpants down around their ankles and their secret parts showing.
Tubby felt his heart pounding, felt the blood stirring elsewhere in his body, and began shuffling sideways, away from the hole, deeper into the passage. It was a close fit.
Panting, blinking cobwebs and dust out of his eyes, smelling the under-the-porch richness of earth all around him, Tubby shuffled toward the glow and away from the light.
Dale and the others were lined up in the room, ready to receive their report cards and be dismissed, when the screaming started. At first it was so loud that Dale thought it was some strange, high-pitched thunder from the storm that was still darkening the sky beyond the windows. But it was too high, too shrill, and lasted too long to be part of the storm, even though it sounded like nothing human.
At first the noise seemed to come from above . . . from up the stairwell on the darkened high-school level ... but then it seemed to echo from the walls, from downstairs, even from the pipes and metal radiator. It went on and on. Dale and his brother, Lawrence, had been out at their Uncle Henry's and Aunt Lena's farm the previous autumn when a pig had been prepared for butchering, its throat cut as it hung upside down from the barn rafter above a tin basin set to catch the blood. This noise was a little like that: the same falsetto squeal and screech, like fingernails being dragged along a blackboard, followed by a deeper, fuller scream, ending in a gurgling noise. But then it began again. And again.
Mrs. Doubbet froze in the act of handing a report card to the first student in line-Joe Allen-and she turned toward the doorway and stared at it for a full moment after the terrible noise stopped, as if expecting the source of the scream to appear there. Dale thought that the old lady's expression combined terror with something else . . . anticipation?
A dark shape appeared in the gloom of the doorway and the class, still lined up alphabetically to receive their cards, took a collective breath.
It was Dr. Roon, the principal, his dark, pinstriped suit and slicked-back hair blending with the darkness on the landing behind him so that his thin face seemed to float there, disembodied and disapproving. Dale looked at the man's pink skin and thought, not for the first time: Like the skin of a newborn rat.
Dr. Roon cleared his throat and nodded toward Old Double-Butt, who stood precisely where she had been, report card still half-extended toward Joe Allen, her eyes wide, her skin so pale that the rouge and other makeup on her cheeks looked like colored chalkdust on white parchment.