The classroom smelled like a morgue. Chemical odors occupied every corner, dancing a sickly tango with the stale musk of abandonment. Should a man linger too long, it could even perhaps churn his stomach. Howbeit large windows would've provided both light and a pretty view to daydream, they were boarded up, blacking out the room. Thankfully, artificial light beamed from their snug little jacket pockets in its stead, and provided for them just fine.
Midwich High had investors by the dozen, so it appeared. Their flashlights uncovered a biology room that looked as big as a goddamn house. With the tables pushed together in the center of the room - counting five rows in total and two surprisingly long tables wide - the already expansive layout became exaggerated, making the tables look as small as dollhouse furniture. On the walls flanking them were two eyewash stations for oopsies, goggles hanging from hooks, and a customary (hopefully) plastic skeleton standing watch in the back corner. A few expensive microscopes sat on the counter there, keeping the skeleton company under a ripped, blocky, cloudy white protective sheet that embarrassingly failed its one job.
The landscape of dusty workspaces set the stage for the advertised cast of characters. There were boxes and frames aplenty storing dead insects, handwritten descriptions of them taped to the table. Most selections were visually mild for the average or squeamish person, the (at one time transparent, now muddy) glass cases allowing a preview of its residents just in the event that anyone wanted to drop out of the line. Homemade embalming fluid preserved the bugs and long pins shaped like T's impaled them to cloth cushions custom fitted for each box.
Conversely, the creepier crawlies were banished to solid wooden cases, its window lid concealed by a black satin cloth. Only the spunky, brave, and bold could unmask the horrors within those boxes, their morbid fascination goggling at them like viewing a special feature sideshow.
James shambled along the first row as slow as a retiree, stoic interest thoroughly examining one insect at a time. Harry, none too pumped up at the moment to see a bunch of kabobed beetles, grasshoppers, worms, or whatever else the exhibit had to offer, strayed. Spotting the teacher's desk, he decided to screen its files and drawers for anything worthwhile. He was reaching for the first drawer when to his right, his peripheral vision clocked a whiteboard nailed to the wall, and he reflexively looked up at it.
Huge, famously trendy, chubby bubble letters welcomed visitors of all ages to the senior class's final project. To set the mood, the class artist had drawn cartoonish butterflies, dragonflies, and beetles that swarmed every available inch that wasn't taken up by a second message spanning across the board. The announcement, unmistakably penned by a teenage girl's neat, but energetic hand, read:
Mrs. Lounds, THANK YOU for being such an AWESOME teacher! EVERYONE is going to miss you SOOOOOO MUCH! We had a great time being your students. YOU ARE A SUPERSTAR! We will NEVER forget you!
Everyone enjoy the exhibit and THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING! GOD BLESS!
Mrs. Lounds. Harry recognized the name, and pulled his brows together as he mulled it over. Didn't they find something that had to do with a Mrs. Lounds..?
"Hey, James?" He dropped his head to the side, still contemplating the whiteboard when a 'what?' answered to his back. "Doesn't the name 'Mrs. Lounds' ring a bell to you?"
A beat went by. "Yeah."
"Where'd we see it?"
"Uhh.. the note on the principal's door."
"You remember what it said? I think I recall something about a key. Right?"
".. uhh.. yyyeeeeaah. I think she was supposed to return them to someone."
"Can you remember the name? I feel like it was one of those old-fashioned names that're coming back in sty— oh, shit! Uhh, there's an actress with that name! Oh, fuck, fuck, what's her name!" Harry rapidly snapped his fingers by his head, pinching his face hard, and trying with all his might to remember normally easy trivia. "Uhhhhh, she played Harley Quinn in that stupid Batman movie, Heather likes her, I think it's 'something' Robbie— ooooooh, aw fuck, c'mon—!"
"Margot."
"YES! That's her fuckin' name!" Harry's finger struck the international sign for 'eureka!' over his head, then half-turned to grin back at James. "You smart son of a bitch. I know we're not talking about the same people here, but damn if that wasn't perfect coincidence."
The conduit opted out on sharing the celebration. "She was supposed to return the keys to Margot."
Harry tapped his forehead. "And we're gonna remember that. Hopefully. You've got a lot more brains than I do helping you out up there, James, but for you, I'm gonna try to be the best fallback guy I can be."
"Okay."
"We're comin' for your keys, Margot."
James gave him surly regard, then left the conversation.
Any smidgen of possible cheer got, for the lack of a better word that wasn't insensitive to their company, squashed. Harry passive-aggressively sneered at the back of James's head, and returned to the desk drawers. Unsurprisingly, the four of them faithfully followed Silent Hill's proper jamming procedure, so all he could do was sigh.
All else on the workspace were classwork files and evaluations, so nothing, really. Skirting the tables, Harry went to the back of the room to go fishing for an excuse to lollygag for as long as he could get away with. He paused at the dust caked, medical-quality skeleton mounted on its upright stand. Assessing the bones slightly bored him, but a small brass tag nailed to the skull apparently named the anatomy, "Harold". Harry scrunched his nose at it. Harold.
What an ugly name.
He reflected on the creepy old story about a scarecrow named Harold when he spotted four stacks of pamphlets and flyers on the counter, evidently promoting extracurricular activities. They were also askew. The responsible person in Harry painstakingly reorganized them to perfection.
There! Now that was better. Adjusting his light, the visiting father read over his options:
JOIN GOD'S TEAM ! Build your relationship with the LORD! Sign up to study the GOOD WORD in the beauty of His NATURE!
The Cuckoo Chess Club Invites You To Test Your Skills And Tease Your Brian
Who's that DJ? YOU are!Join the radio broadcasting workshop and become the personality youwant to hear on the waves!
Midwich Truth-Seekers and Researchers: Are youlistening?
Standard fare for a high school, Harry thought. The ironic misspelling of 'brain' on the chess club advertisement led him to pick it up first.
Yikes, what a mess. Poor design compounded by clipart made the whole thing hell in a gaudy Easter basket to read. Comic sans in all colors punctuated how every single word was capitalized, as well as the distressing amount of spelling errors. The visual noise invented by the aforementioned clip art was all spread out with zealous abandon, nary an attempt at informative flow to be seen. If he were a prospective member for the club, it all would've made lose interest in a nanosecond. Hideous as it was, Harry sincerely had to find the whole thing rather charming for peddling a chess club.
But he was alarmed that it'd been printed in color. Quickly glancing at the other three flyers revealed they were all printed in color. Harry couldn't believe it. They must've eaten ink, and funds, like a beast.
He wondered whose bright idea that was.
Moving on, the DJ club was a little better in terms of graphic design, though it could stand to find a second opinion on structural guidance. It intrigued Harry to see a radio club. There were a couple of them in his school days, but he'd assumed they'd fallen out of fashion by the time Heather had reached high school. Nevertheless, this club knew that radio was a huge entertainment industry, especially in the 90s, and personalities were broadcasting by the dozen every day. Young, outgoing, creative minds were undoubtedly inspired by the concept of being the literal talk of the town, gaining a little fame; and it seemed like good money, too. He skimmed the paper, happy nostalgia gliding through his memories, then he put it down with a wistful smile.
He picked up the neighboring ad. Oh, god. If comic sans had a rival, it'd lawfully be the Papyrus font. This so-called truth-seekers club - no, wait, the flyer made it abundantly clear that they preferred to call it a guild - was contaminated by it. The font a size a bit too small, confusing and straining Harry's eyes as he tried to get a gist of what the guild was about. Paragraphs that weren't double spaced even once were crammed between clipart pillars and braziers, which were no help to read the ridiculous amount of information. It was pretty much a huge block of text. Despite that, Harry took up the challenge to read every last word, even if it killed him; this was too exquisite to pass up. He fixed his light, brought the paper closer to his face, and squinted to read.
To summarize in its own words, the guild delineated how their covenant's express purpose was intended for insatiable working minds in the pursuit of wisdom and notoriety, commissioning promises of quintessential status and jaundice formulated by a superlative, conjugated fraternity comprised of savants existing amongst the tragically anti-sagacious lessers they involuntarily intermingled with. Candidates would be scrupulously pruned by the way of tenuous, cerebral battle royal for the endorsement of the guild's finely-culled, appointed congress. Their prodigal league ensconced an eminent society embarking on an indefatigable pilgrimage into unmasking the follies religiously fed to the citizen drones of a ramshackle world these apocryphal, erudite minds were recalcitrantly betrammeled in.
This was no sanctuous hearth for the feeble-minded. These cavalier, pedantically-chosen, logician philosophers were harkened to be Odysseus, and the world tantamount to his adjutant, bumbling, dimwitted ogres. No koan was too austere; no riddle unfathmoness. Every day would be a competition to eradicate veridical, cogent data lamentably taken as fact; thwarting flagitious caricatures of truth; and rescuing lugubrious simpletons from ignorance. These altruistic, benevolent souls journeyed an indomitable quest to sensitize the pedagogically penniless paupers inhabiting this unlettered, sanguinary earth incognito as scholarly, unsung, polemic heroes.
Jesus, Mary, and holy fucking Joseph!
Harry was mesmerized. Whomever had written this outrageous handbill used so much flowery language that it would discredit a thesaurus. To tell the truth, it was so pretentious that it bordered on crass, and Harry could count on both hands (and maybe even his feet) how many words this idiot pettifogger hadn't bothered to reference; they obviously had no idea what half of them meant.
Well, fuck the dictionary!
Harry jumped his eyes over the advert again. Oooh yeah, he thought, some little jerk had been way too cocksure about their writing and vocabulary "prowess". It was extraordinary. He assumed too that half the problem was that some words simply looked too learned and pretty on paper to refuse them.
And just to top it all off with a heaping portion of a rock salt sundae melting on an open wound, there were at least three made up words in that despicable word salad. Wondering who this supercilious perpetrator was, the actual appreciated and published wordsmith scoured the flyer and found an eye-rollingly-titled name: President Truth Assayer Vincent Smith.
Harry stuck out his tongue at it.
In his opinion, this kid needed a good literary wallop for his flatulent, almost villainous, conceited prose. It went without saying that Harry didn't know Vincent, but he could, unfortunately, imagine him being hated by teachers and students for one reason or another five. But in that supposition lived an awful truth, and that never sat well. Putting all of Vincent's conjectural imperfections aside for a spell, Vincent was human, and he didn't deserve to be bullied. Harry felt sorry for him, pouting sympathetically at the paper. Poor guy.
Even so, Vincent, as most teenage boys were commonly wont to be, still seemed like a dickhead. Harry trusted that expanding his social circles and getting through puberty did something about that.
Harry dropped the page on its pile, and took up the crisply folded bible study pamphlet.
Out of the four, it was the most modest; how appropriate. Again, none were safe from clipart; but in spite of that, the stretched, shadowed crosses were orderly. Italicized Times New Roman was proportionate for tri-folds. Although the brochure was humble, it was also elegant, and a delight to read. For a high school amateur's skill, it was damningly impressive, and the wayward soul found it a pity that there wasn't a name listed anywhere to take credit. Harry scanned the standard call to Jesus, sniffed, and put it down.
"What're you learning?" he asked the class, bouncing the steel on his calf. He partially turned to observe James's unhurried snaking through the aisles.
"Uhh.. most butterfly pupae are called chrysalids."
"Mm. Better remember that one, it could be on the test."
James softly frowned. "Mmm.. nah. I'll probably just copy off someone else."
"Ooh. A cheater. Didn't see that one coming from you, James. Did you eat a lot of pumpkins back in the day?"
The conduit looked up. "Huh?"
"Yeah, you know - 'cheater, cheater, pumpkin-eater.'"
".. no?"
"Really? God!" Harry huffed. "There's no way you haven't heard it before. Nnee-aaaahh," he discounted, "I wouldn't believe it. So c'mon, tell me seriously, you never learned any nursery rhymes? Never read any Mother Goose? What, did your childhood suck? Do you remember Ring Around The Rosie ? That one's about the Black Plague, y'know. How about Frère Jacques? C'moooon, who doesn't get a kick out of butchering French? Throw me a bone here, James! Gimme something to believe in."
James flatly stared. "Your experiences aren't universal, Harry."
"In some regard, they should be," the man objected, serving James the view of the pipe's hook. "But only the fun parts."
"What you consider 'fun' is up for debate."
"Hardly. As you've just seen, I have a spectacular grasp on what constitutes as 'fun', and I have an unshakeable belief that the council would be glad to agree with me on every point I'd have to make."
Harry received the vapid glare with a smile. James gestured to the displays. "Are you going to look around?"
"I did! Interesting pamphlets back there for clubs," he said, thumbing over his shoulder. "Some of the presentation could use some work, but I doubt graphic design was an elective here."
James's mood didn't change. Harry sighed, combed his fingers through his hair, and began his reluctant tour. He'd never been a fan of insects. Roaming along, he spotted a few suspiciously naked pins, and here and there, shattered glass panes from nearby shadow boxes. Pauses were made to read the blurbs and peek at the specimens.
The Visualization of Insects was droll.
The men reconvened in the middle of the back row, looking down at a set of two fixtures. Maybe they didn't look like much, but they certainly were significant. One was a plain, medium sized, rectangular case; the other was thick, stout, and square. Harry immediately recognized the curated butterflies occupying the bigger display; it at one time hung on the wall of a little girl's nightmarish prison. As for the other..
"Isn't that the moth from Midwich?"
"Mm. Good eye." Harry picked up the small shadow box. The moth was all by itself in its voyeuristic coffin, looking oddly hateful on its pin. One could wager, perhaps, that its angry aura was in part due to its left wing having been cleanly amputated from its body. How foreboding, he thought; then wondered if James sensed it, too.
Blowing a sigh through his nose, Harry drew a weary frown, and turned the frame's backside to himself.
"Huh. L. Wolf." Harry peered at the moth again, then looked down at its card. Right at the bottom, tiny handwriting attributed the moth as an anonymous donation. Harry peeled the card from the table, found nothing behind it, and so again reviewed their boxed clue. "Says it's an anonymous donation, but they forgot to scrub the name. Hm."
"Hm."
"Hm. Hmm, indeed." The two contemplated on it together, then James walked away. Harry watched him go retracing his steps around the gallery, then settled his eyes on Alessa's prized collection.
It'd been so long since he'd seen the butterflies that their details had begun to fade in his dreams. As Harry prowled his gaze from one to the next, he inwardly complimented her on her devotion to them, and bore a tender smile on his face - until he realized that something was wrong.
Like a pandemic, their vibrancies were systematically overtaken by a rotting gradient that transformed the butterflies to strangely chalky, brownish husks. Harry was shocked, and crushed. Those were sacred. More worryingly, he couldn't remember if they'd looked like this just seconds ago. His slipping memory was getting worse.
This was getting to be too much.
Harry suddenly noticed the frame was imbalanced on the table. It prompted him to prod one of its corners, causing it to rock side to side. Something small was propping it up.
Harry picked it up in both hands, only to realize there was no room at his right nor left for it. After quick deliberation, he gently stood the case on its edge, pushed away the frames at his left, then placed her shadowbox in the clear. He picked up a key living on a ring with an old paper tag, the long years having worn its fibers and creases soft as cotton.
"Janitor's closet," Harry announced, jiggling it in the air by two fingers. "Boy oh boy, that was easy." He jumped and caught the key from the air, grinning at James wandering back to him. "We got a lead, Watson."
Upon arrival, James judged the messy, accidental mosaic he'd heard Harry shove together from the other side of the room. He felt mildly incredulous about it. Flicking his green eyes up at him, he nevertheless scrutinized the veteran tucking the key into a brown leather pocket. Meanwhile, swiveling at his torso and sweeping the flashlight to and fro, Harry checked out the room once again, landing the beam on James. "Well, that might be it in here. You wanna take a look at the clubs in the back? Might be something there of interest to you, some educational way to kill time after school."
"No."
"Suit yourself. M'kinda interested in the radio DJ club. After all our adventures with the radio.. ooooh, changed your mind?" Spiking his brows, he watched his companion conduit pass by him to the back counter. A slant of his head signaled curiosity, patiently waiting for his commentary.
James turned around with the flyer in hand, seemingly pouring over every little detail. He fingered the page, that routine frown charting his mouth. A stanza floated by, then Harry broke the silence. "What're you thinking?"
His lips tucked inward. "I'm thinking we should keep this."
"Any reason why?"
"Just thinking we should keep this."
"Whatever you say, boss." Harry took the handout from him, folded it, and stored it on James's back. "Anything else?"
James glanced at the others. "No."
"Okay, then." Harry looked back at the biology room-turned-temporary-museum. He felt like they didn't uncover much in terms of discovery, in spite of it all. Alessa's butterflies, however, made him paranoid that they could be missing something. With the hope that feeling had no fruit to bear, he threw a look over at James.
"Well, this was a great little venture. I'm glad we did this."
"Mm."
"After all, no one should give up the chance to learn something new about the small wonders of the world." He smiled. "Might even come in handy, huh? Handy around here, at the very least. You know how it is."
"Mmn."
His eyes followed James to the doorway. Harry, now alone, cast his gaze to the shadow box that'd long ago belonged to a girl who had struck out on life.
It suddenly looked more like a casket.
Harry slowly ground his teeth. There was nothing else here to validate a reason to stay, nor validate his purpose, whatever it was. Nausea from moldy stink in the air was getting to him and starting to breathe up his throat. The classroom menagerie was done with him, and he was done with it. It was time to go.
Harry lamely rapped his knuckles on the tabletop and studied her butterflies a final moment longer, then slid his fist from the table as he walked away.