The rows of old-fashioned desks were in the same place. The teacher's desk was where Mrs. Doubbet had left it. The portrait of George Washington was just as Dale remembered it.
Nothing else was the same.
A thick Carpet of fungus had grown up from the bare-board floor and covered the desks in undulating folds of blue-green. There were bumps rising from most of the desks -soft curves like the heads of children hiding under blankets, the sharp angles of shoulders, the gleam of bare bones where fingers emerged from the carpet of algae and mold. Dale choked as the foul air filled his lungs; he tried not to breathe, but finally he had to gasp in the miasma of decay or pass out.
He could barely see across the room for the hanging webs of tissue that covered the windows, filled most of the space between the desks and the twelve-foot-high ceiling, and clung to the walls in great, bulbous clusters. It looked like living muscle tissue; Dale could see veins and arteries through the moist, translucent surface. Occasionally something soft and fibrous shifted in the broader strips of tendon-web and eyes seemed to blink at the visitors.
Mrs. Doubbet and Mrs. Duggan sat behind the teachers' desk in front of the room. Both were erect, alert, and dead. Mrs. Duggan showed the effects of months in the grave. Something small and furtive moved in the socket of her left eye. Mrs. Doubbet looked as if she had entered the room alive quite recently, but her eyes were now filmed over with the thin cataracts of death, and the ligamentlike material grew from her body at a dozen places, connecting her to the chair and desk and walls and web. Her fingers twitched as Dale and Harlen stumbled in.
The class was assembled.
Harlen made a sound in his throat and turned as if to throw himself out the door.
Karl Van Syke came through the strands of hairlike filament where the door had been. For a second Dale thought that the Negro from Mrs. Moon's story had returned: Van Syke was totally black except for the pure white marbles of his eyes, but the blackness was from skin and flesh charred to a scaly caricature of a man. His chin and lower jaw were gone, most of the muscle of the arms and legs burned away, the fingers transformed to curled claws of bone that looked like some semiabstract sculpture of a man made from carbon. Pale liquids oozed from the interior of the thing. It turned its head toward the two boys and seemed to sniff the air like a hunting dog on a scent.
Dale grabbed Harlen and backed away until they were touching the first row of desks. Something shifted in the mound of fungus at their backs.
Tubby Cooke rose from a desk at the back of the room and stood standing there. The bloated fingers on his remaining hand were twitching like white worms.
Dr. Roon came through the door. "Take your seats, children."
Staring, consciousness skidding like a car on unseen ice, Dale moved to his regular seat and lowered himself into it. Harlen took his desk near the front . . . where the teachers could watch him.
"You see," whispered Dr. Roon, "the Master rewards those who do His bidding." He opened a pale hand toward the figure of Karl Van Syke. The thing appeared still to be sniffing, feeling the air with bent fingers. "There is no death for those who serve the Master," said Dr. Roon, moving to stand next to the teachers' desk.
The Soldier and what once might have been Mink Harper came into the room, carrying the chair in which Lawrence sat still enmeshed in fleshy strands. His head was back and his eyelids were fluttering.
Dale started forward but stopped when the Van Syke thing circled in his direction, sniffing, feeling the air like a blind man. The white form that had been Tubby moved through the shadows behind Dale.
"Now, we're all ready to commence," said Dr. Roon, glancing at a gold watch he pulled from his vest. He looked up at Dale and Harlen and smiled one last time. "I suppose I could explain . . . tell you all about the wonderful Age which now begins . . . talk to you about what small inconvenience your little escapades have caused us ... go into great detail of how you shall serve the Master in your new forms. . . ."He clicked the watch shut and set it back in his vest. "But why bother? The game is over and it is time for your part in it to end. Good-bye."
He nodded and the Soldier began gliding forward, legs not moving, arms coming up slowly.
Dale had tried not to look at the face of the Soldier and the other things in the room, but now he stared. The face was no longer even a simulacrum of humanity: the long snout looked as if it were the crater remaining after something had erupted from the elongated skull. There were other, deeper rents in the white flesh of the face. Smaller things moved in the orifices there.
The Soldier glided toward Jim Harlen while the black Van Syke felt its way toward Dale. Dr. Roon and the shredded thing that wore part of Mink Harper's face moved to block the doorway. Dale heard a creaking and soft groaning that seemed to come from the walls and floors, and the web of ligaments and nodes seemed to flush a deeper pink. Liquid dripped from the ceiling in viscous strands.
"Fuck this," said Harlen, getting out of his desk and backing up until he reached Dale. His lips were trembling almost uncontrollably as he whispered to Dale, "I knew I never liked school."
Together they leapt the first row of desks, wading through mounds of fungus toward the back of the room. The Soldier glided effortlessly to their right. The corpse of Tubby Cooke lowered its face to the algae and disappeared under it like a child crawling under its favorite blanket.
Dale and Harlen leapt to the top of adjacent desks, ducking their heads to avoid the pale egg-sacs above them. Mold clung to their jeans and sneakers in long strands.
Dr. Roon looked impatient and snapped his fingers. The entire building seemed to hold its breath as Van Syke and the Soldier crawled over the first row of desks. Downstairs, there was the sound of a gunshot.
Mike had come into the central hall of the basement assessing his losses: the flashlight was broken, he had lost one of the squirt guns filled with holy water and smashed the second one when he had rolled on it coming out of the tunnel, his pants were ripped at the knees and soaked in the front and back-the squirt guns-and the only advantage of that, he thought, was that no vampire-thing was going to bite him in a crotch damp with holy water.
Despite the windowless basement, he found that he could see once his eyes adapted to the glow-both from the phosphorescence that seemed to be seeping from the walls and the brighter glow of the burning lamprey-thing in the central hallway.
Mike presumed it was dead. Its flesh was charred in a thousand places, embers burned where its entrails should be, and the maw had quit opening and closing. He presumed it was dead but he gave it a wide berth, creeping past against the wall, staring in some awe at the mass of debris the dying thing had shoved in front of it for the length of the basement hallway. Heavy clouds of smoke and the smell of burning fish rose from the carcass.
Mike decided to assess his resources as he climbed the sticky stairs to the first floor. He had Memo's loaded squirrel gun and four extra shells left; the rest had been fired or lost in the hasty exit from the tunnels. He was bruised and bleeding and shaking from head to foot, but otherwise fine. Mike stepped over the shattered door into the main hall on the first floor of Old Central.
Mike had only a few seconds to stand blinking, taking in the changes that a few weeks of summer had wrought in the old school, staring up at the pulsing red sac of legs and eyes forty feet above him in the now-open belfry. He had taken a step and put his foot down on Dale Stewart's Savage over-and-under when a motion in the shadows froze him in the act of crouching.