‘No!’ said Mr. Benedict, falling to his knees, ‘Oh, you terrible man!’ sobbed Mr. Merriwell Blythe. ‘To think this has gone on in our town all these years and we never knew the things you did to people! Oh, you monstrous monster!’ ‘No,’ whispered Mr. Benedict, trying to get up, falling down, palsied and in terror. ‘The things you said,’ accused the old man in dry contempt. ‘The things you do!’ ‘Sorry,’ whispered Mr. Benedict.
The old man tried to rise. ‘Don’t!’ said Mr. Benedict, and held on to him. ‘Let go of me!’ said the old man. ‘No,’ said Mr. Benedict. He reached for a hypodermic and stabbed the old man in the arm with it. ‘You!’ cried the old man, wildly, to all the sheeted figures. ‘Help me!’
He squinted blindly at the window, at the churchyard below with the leaning stones. ‘You, out there, too, under the stones, help! Listen!’ The old man fell back, whistling and frothing. He knew he was dying. ‘All, listen,’ he babbled. ‘He’s done this to me, and you, and you, all of you, he’s done too much, too long. Don’t take it! Don’t, don’t let him do any more to anyone!’ The old man licked away the stuff from his lips, growing weaker. ‘Do something to him!’
Mr. Benedict stood there, shocked, and said, ‘They can’t do anything to me. They can’t. I say they can’t.’
‘Out of your graves!’ wheezed the old man. ‘Help me! Tonight, or tomorrow or soon, but jump up and fix him, oh, this horrible man!’ And he wept many tears.
‘How foolish,’ said Mr. Benedict numbly. ‘You’re dying and foolish.’ Mr. Benedict could not move his lips. His eyes were wide. ‘Go on and die, now, quickly.’
‘Everybody up!’ shouted the old man. ‘Everybody out! Help!’
‘Please don’t talk any more,’ said Mr. Benedict. ‘I really don’t like to listen.’
The room was suddenly very dark. It was night. It was getting late. The old man raved on and on, getting weaker. Finally, smiling, he said, ‘They’ve taken a lot from you, horrible man. Tonight, they’ll do something.’
The old man died.
People say there was an explosion that night in the graveyard. Or rather, a series of explosions, a smell of strange things, a movement, a violence, a raving. There was much light and lightning, and a kind of rain, and the church bells hammered and slung about in the belfry, and stones toppled, and things swore oaths, and things flew through the air, and there was a chasing and a screaming, and many shadows and all the lights in the mortuary blazing on, and things moving inside and outside in swift jerks and shamblings, windows broke, doors were torn from hinges, leaves from trees, iron gates clattered, and in the end there was a picture of Mr. Benedict running about, running about, vanishing, the lights out, suddenly, and a tortured scream that could only be from Mr. Benedict himself.
After that — nothing. Quiet.
The town people entered the mortuary the next morning. They searched the mortuary building and the church, and then they went out into the graveyard.
And they found nothing but blood, a vast quantity of blood, sprinkled and thrown and spread everywhere you could possibly look, as if the heavens had bled profusely in the night.
But not a sign of Mr. Benedict.
‘Where could he be?’ everybody wondered.
‘How should we know?’ everybody replied, confounded.
And then they had the answer.
Walking through the graveyard they stood in deep tree shadows where the stones, row on row, were old and time-erased and leaning. No birds sang in the trees. The sunlight which finally managed to pierce the thick leaves, was like a light bulb illumination, weak, frail, unbelievable, theatrical, thin.
They stopped by one tombstone. ‘Here, now!’ they exclaimed.
Others paused and bent over the greyish, moss-flecked stone, and cried out.
Freshly scratched, as if by feebly, frantic, hasty fingers (in fact, as if scratched by fingernails, the writing was that new) was the name: MR. BENEDICT.
‘Look over here!’ someone else cried. Everybody turned. ‘This one, this stone, and this one, and this one, too!’ cried the villager, pointing to five other gravestones.
Everybody hurried around, looking and recoiling.
Upon each and every stone, scratched by fingernail scratchings, the same message appeared:
MR. BENEDICT —
The town people were stunned.
‘But that’s impossible,’ objected one of them, faintly. ‘He couldn’t be buried under all these gravestones!’
They stood there for one long moment. Instinctively they all looked at one another nervously in the silence and the tree darkness. They all waited for an answer. With fumbling, senseless lips, one of them replied, simply:
‘Couldn’t he?’
Let’s Play ‘Poison’
‘WE hate you!’ cried the sixteen boys and girls rushing and crowding about Michael in the schoolroom. Michael screamed. Recess was over, Mr. Howard, the teacher, was still absent from the filling room. ‘We hate you!’ and the sixteen boys and girls, bumping and clustering and breathing, raised a window. It was three flights down to the pavement. Michael flailed.
They took hold of Michael and pushed him out the window.
Mr. Howard, their teacher, came into the room. ‘Wait a minute!’ he shouted.
Michael fell three flights. Michael died.
Nothing was done about it. The police shrugged eloquently. These children were all eight or nine, they didn’t understand what they were doing. So.
Mr. Howard’s breakdown occurred the next day. He refused, ever again, to teach! ‘But, why?’ asked his friends. Mr. Howard gave no answer. He remained silent and a terrible light filled his eyes, and later he remarked that if he told them the truth they would think him quite insane.
Mr. Howard left Madison City. He went to live in a small nearby town, Green Bay, for seven years, on an income managed from writing stories and poetry.
He never married. The few women he approached always desired — children.
In the autumn of his seventh year of self-enforced retirement, a good friend of Mr. Howard’s, a teacher, fell ill. For lack of a proper substitute, Mr. Howard was summoned and convinced that it was his duty to take over the class. Because he realized the appointment could last no longer than a few weeks, Mr. Howard agreed, unhappily.
‘Sometimes,’ announced Mr. Howard, slowly pacing the aisles of the schoolroom on that Monday morning in September, ‘sometimes, I actually believe that children are invaders from another dimension.’
He stopped, and his shiny dark eyes snapped from face to face of his small audience. He held one hand behind him, clenched. The other hand, like a pale animal, climbed his lapel as he talked and later climbed back down to toy with his ribboned glasses.
‘Sometimes,’ he continued, looking at William Arnold and Russell Newell, and Donald Bowers and Charlie Hencoop, ‘sometimes I believe children are little monsters thrust out of hell, because the devil could no longer cope with them. And I certainly believe that everything should be done to reform their uncivil little minds.’
Most of his words ran unfamiliarly into the washed and unwashed ears of Arnold, Newell, Bowers and Company. But the tone inspired one to dread. The little girls lay back in their seats, against their pigtails, lest he yank them like bell-ropes, to summon the dark angels. All stared at Mr. Howard, as if hypnotized.
‘You are another race entirely, your motives, your beliefs, your disobediences,’ said Mr. Howard. ‘You are not human. You are — children. Therefore, until such time as you are adults, you have no right to demand privileges or question your elders, who know better.’
He paused, and put his elegant rump upon the chair behind the neat, dustless desk.
‘Living in your world of fantasy,’ he said, scowling darkly. ‘Well, there’ll be no fantasy here. You’ll soon discover that a ruler on your hand is no dream, no faerie frill, no Peter Pan excitement.’ He snorted.
‘Have I frightened you? I have. Good! Well and good. You deserve to be. I want you to know where we stand. I’m not afraid of you, remember that. I’m not afraid of you’ His hand trembled and he drew back in his chair as all their eyes stared at him. ‘Here!’ He flung a glance clear across the room. ‘What’re you whispering about, back there? Some necromancy or other?’
A little girl raised her hand. ‘What’s necromancy?’
‘We’ll discuss that when our two young friends, Mr. Arnold and Mr. Bowers, explain their whispers. Well, young men?’
Donald Bowers arose. ‘We don’t like you. That’s all we said.’ He sat down again.
Mr. Howard raised his brows. ‘I like frankness, truth. Thank you for your honesty. But, simultaneously, I do not tolerate flippant rebellion. You’ll stay an hour after school tonight and wash the boards.’
After school, walking home, with autumn leaves falling both before and after his passing. Mr. Howard caught up with four of his students. He rapped his cane sharply on the pavement. ‘Here, what are you children doing?’
The two startled boys and girls jerked as if struck upon their shoulders by his cane. ‘Oh,’ they all said.
‘Well,’ demanded the man. ‘Explain. What were you doing here when I came up?’
William Arnold said, ‘Playing poison.’
‘Poison!’ Their teacher’s face twisted. He was carefully sarcastic. ‘Poison, poison, playing poison. Well. And how does one play poison?’
Reluctantly, William Arnold ran off.
‘Come back here!’ shouted Mr. Howard.
‘I’m only showing you,’ said the boy, hopping over a cement block of the pavement, ‘how we play poison. Whenever we come to
