The Fallen Parler: Part One (A supernatural mystery thriller) (7 page)

‘The Headmaster’s Office’

Fourth period was dragging. If it was the will of Monsieur Antionne to bore his class numb through longwinded explanations of French verbs, he had succeeded. Most of his students disengaged as soon as the lesson commenced. This was evident from the growing number of paper aeroplanes set to fly about the room. Also, the silly girls at the back of the classroom had since constructed detailed scribbles, which were passed sequentially, from desk to desk, until they returned to the original distributor. Once in a while, Monsieur Antionne would intercept a note and demand that the person responsible own up to it. Each time, he was answered with a set of mischievous giggles. Fortunately, the note labelled Mr. Antionne, which depicted an overweight balding man with a thick moustache, was not intercepted by the irritated teacher (though it set a loud chorus of chuckles around the class). Charlotte was particularly humoured by that note so she passed it to Sasha, who let out a loud snigger. Monsieur Antionne’s angry eyes scanned the room for the source of merriment.

‘You, Miss Fling,’ he said, casting a finger at Sasha, ‘out, now!’

Sasha rose from her seat, smirking. She would’ve been the twelfth student Monsieur Antionne had dismissed from the class; at this rate, he’d have no class left to teach. As Sasha departed the classroom, she winked at Charlotte. She was secretly relieved that she could start lunch a whole twenty minutes early. It was uncommon for students to be out of class at this hour; Sasha power-walked to the dinner hall and noted the unusual bareness of the corridors. There was a small figure at the end of the corridor. He was kneeling by the headmaster’s office; as Sasha approached him, he became larger and more familiar.

‘Bunking again, eh?’ she asked, ‘if you were trying to avoid Mrs. Quabble, I certainly wouldn’t hide outside the headmaster’s office.’

‘I’m not bunking,’ snapped Junior
, ‘and you should go.’

Droplets of perspiration collected on Junior’s forehead, he had both hands wrapped around the handle of the headmaster’s door. The young man appeared unusually troubled.

‘What exactly are you doing Junior…breaking and entering the headmaster’s office?’

‘Would you lower your voice!’ snapped Junior, angrily, ‘Quabble left only a few moments ago, this is my only chance.’

‘Chance for what!’ shrieked Sasha, ‘chance to get expelled!’

‘You won’t understand, there’s something I need … something in the headmaster’s records.’

‘
What!’

‘I need to find out about a man, Arthur Mannox, he lived in Shorebridge and probably went to St. Andrews…they’ll have his files here.’

Junior pressed his forehead against the headmaster’s door, unwilling to be moved. The reality of what he was attempting suddenly hit. Shockingly, he had thought the plan over many times. In fact, it had kept him from sleep last night and when he finally slept, he dreamt of executing the very same mission which he was attempting now…getting Arthur Mannox’s file.

‘You’re out of your mind Junior…out of your mind!’ cried Sasha, ‘you’ll get into so much trouble.’

Junior expired a sigh of desperation, ‘I need this,’ he whispered, ‘it’s to do with my dad…I
need
to get this information.’

In her right mind, Sasha would’ve pushed Junior away from the door as soon as she had learned of his foolish operation, but there was something bizarrely sincere in the face of the young man. It affected her deeply and she found herself unable to reproach him.

‘I cannot believe I’m doing this,’ whispered Sasha, plucking a pin from her tresses of hair. She plugged the pin into the keyhole and began to twist until the lock gave way.

When the heavy door finally swung open, Sasha smirked, ‘gotcha.’

She tossed Junior a nod of approval, ‘okay, I’ll keep watch…you’ve got five minutes.’

Junior sped into the large room and scanned it in one twist of his neck. The walls were decorated more bountifully than the other St. Andrew’s offices. When Junior’s eyes met the glare of Headmaster Williamson, he was momentarily distracted.
Blimey
. The headmaster’s portrait was abnormally lifelike. The idea that Mr. Williamson, wherever he was, did not know that his swanky office was being raided was strangely amusing. Junior caught sight of an enormous block of grey cabinets at the left wing of the office. The large marker
‘Student files’
suggested that the storage units contained exactly what Junior was looking for. The cabinets spanned an entire wall. He was certain that the information of all the students who’d ever attended St. Andrew’s was stored within it. The
‘1900 - 1940’s’
drawer was particularly attractive. From Junior’s calculations, Arthur Mannox would’ve passed through St. Andrew’s during the early twentieth century. He dragged forth the cabinet and filtered for family names beginning with M.

‘Mannox, Mannox...where are you?’ he mumbled.

Anxiety crept…what if he did not find the file in time?

‘Hurry up!’ called Sasha,
from the doorway, ‘you’ve got two minutes left!’

Each word she muttered excited Junior’s nerve endings a little more than the last. Suddenly, Junior’s eyes fell upon Arthur Mannox’s file.

‘Bingo’ he muttered, sliding the document into his schoolbag.

‘You’ve got it, let’s go!’ cried Sasha.

Junior studied the cabinets again and silently considered the risks of searching for Dr. Willow’s file. Without hesitating, he lunged into the next cabinet. When Junior had powered through two large drawers, he suddenly came to the conclusion that Dr. Willow did not exist in St. Andrew’s directory. Sasha, who was panicking at the ticking clock, raced into the room and urged Junior to abandon his half-completed mission.

‘We need to go, now!’ she barked. Junior was sprawled over the floor, digging through a deep pool of documents. Sasha scooped up the remaining files and shoved them into any open cabinet. When Junior saw that the clock hand was edging dangerously close to lunchtime, he mirrored Sasha, clearing away the last of the files. Sasha returned the last file and bolted to the office door. In her stride, she almost didn’t notice the heavy bronze bust that had been catapulted from its podium. Sasha shrieked, expecting the bust to fly to the ground and take her with it. To her surprise, the bust remained, suspended horizontally in the air. It was somehow still attached to the podium. Slowly, a large block of bookshelves at the right-wing wall slid past each other, giving way to an impressive dark hole. It took a moment for Junior to realise what had changed in the room. Instantly, he understood that the bust was not a piece of extravagant decor…the bust was a lever and it had activated this mysterious passageway.

‘J-J-Junior?’ stammered Sasha, ‘please tell me that I’m hallucinating. Tell me that a hole-in-the-wall did not just appear out of nowhere.’

‘Not out of nowhere …the lever,’ replied Junior, examining the bust, ‘you activated it somehow, there’s something down there.’

With wide eyes and a trembling bottom lip, Sasha replied, ‘this is our queue to leave.’

To some degree Junior agreed, but an overwhelming sense of curiosity over how a secret passageway came to be in Mr. Williamson’s office dominated any feeling of imminent danger. Clasping a hand over his nose, Junior gasped, ‘there’s something down there…can’t you smell that?’

A repulsive odour swam from the dark hole, forcing Sasha to also clasp her hand over her nose. Junior edged into the passageway, with Sasha a few steps behind him. The potency of the odour grew as their proximity to the source increased.

‘Use the torch on your phone,’ muttered Sasha, tip toeing into the dark passage.

Junior did as he was told. The radiance of Junior’s phone screen illuminated the entire wall opening, which had once been a row of book shelves. A downward spiral of steps was revealed behind it. Junior rotated his phone until all four walls of the passageway could be seen in the light. He observed that bold inscriptions of the letter ‘
P’
had been scribbled over all corners of the narrow passageway. When the young man projected his light source to the end of the spiralling steps, the horror that met the eyes of Sasha Fling and Junior Roterbee was enough to stun a garrulous man dumb. However, the sight of a frozen corpse at the bottom of the steps had the opposite effect on Sasha, who proceeded to scream at the top of her lungs until she had no air left to project. Soon, the frightful combination of Sasha’s endless wail, and the echoing ding of the commencing lunchtime bell, attracted a large crowd of curious students to the headmaster’s office. From the size of the crowd, Sasha’s cry would’ve reached every corner of St. Andrew’s college. The deputy head, Mrs. Quabble, fought through the crowd of onlookers.

‘What in the name of Sylvester are the two of you doing in the headmaster’s office?’ yelled Mrs. Quabble. A moment passed, in which she analysed the distressed expression that laced both Sasha and Junior’s faces. Unwilling to delay her angry teacher speech a moment longer, Mrs Quabble cried, ‘dear girl, you look mortified! Whatever is the matter?’

‘He’s ... He’s dead!’ Sasha sobbed, pointing into the wall. The befuddled expression on Mrs. Quabble’s face was replaced by the same lines of horror that Sasha and Junior modelled. Naturally, the teacher was perplexed at the presence of a gaping passageway where a bookshelf should have been. So, when her eyes caught the familiar face of Headmaster Williamson, lying dead at the bottom of the spiral steps, Mrs. Quabble’s knees gave way. First, although, she pronounced a scream that was almost as excellent as Sasha’s. Mrs. Quabble circled the air twice and made as if to faint. She would’ve surely banged her head if Junior did not catch her fall. Soon after, Charlotte surfaced from the dense crowd of students. It was Charlotte’s first inclination to preview the spectacle that had rendered Mrs. Quabble unconscious. When she did, she was horrified. Invariably, the verdict would be ruthless murder. It took a single glimpse to confirm so. His eyes were wide open, frozen still, as if fright and terror occupied his last moment. Junior wished that he could disremember Mr. Williamson’s vacant eyes, but there was something scarily familiar in them. Williamson modelled the same dying gaze as Allan Roterbee. It was the very same expression of unadulterated shock. Post mortem analysis revealed that Allan Roterbee had probably struggled when he realised he was moments away from death. But why would a suicidal man ever want to fight for his life? Surely, there was something deeper behind Mr. Roterbee’s pain-filled eyes. As for the headmaster, rumours for his own cause of death had only just begun to swirl.

No one ate that lunchtime, no one dared talk either. To the best of the school board’s knowledge, Mr. Williamson had been away on a conference for the past two weeks. To find him very dead, at the underside of a secret pathway, was a scandal that would shake the foundations of Shorebridge town forever. To the disappointment of avid theorists, the secret passageway was found to lead to nothing but the basement of the school, which contained a large network of pipes and spider webs. The basement contained no obvious evidence as to who or what was responsible for the death of Mr. Williamson. It was presumed that the murderer must’ve been able to bypass all the security measures of the school. This presumption would have been made concrete if the murderer was, indeed, an outsider to the school. But what if Mr. Williamson’s murderer was someone who knew the school well? Someone who’d worked inside the school, alongside teachers and students. Undeniably, Percy Williamson was one of the most charismatic men in Shorebridge. He had been the headmaster of St. Andrew’s college for what seemed like a lifetime; not many of the Shorebridge locals could even remember his predecessor. Regardless, Williamson was a most revered citizen of Shorebridge. He often told anyone who was fortunate enough to meet him,
‘if I had not been a headmaster, I would’ve probably ended up as a watchmaker because it’s my greatest delight to make order out of disorder.’
No one ever seemed to know what the old man was talking about, yet one could not help but warm to the always-cordial Mr. Williamson. Unlike the draconian headmasters of schools in neighbouring towns, Mr. Williamson did not rule over St. Andrew’s with an iron fist. He held all pupils and staff in a type of esteem that compelled them to show him equal respect… and, of course, abide by school regulations. Because of this, St. Andrew’s College had been a harmonious, progressive school for several years. It was difficult to fathom how someone could ever murder Mr. Williamson, as aside from healthy competition with other headmasters, which he sparingly engaged in, Percy Williamson had no bad blood with anybody in Shorebridge. By the time the police had arrived at the scene, Mr. Williamson’s body had already been layered with pristine white blankets and wheeled out to the ambulance van at the school gate. The students and teachers watched in bewilderment, some crying and many unable to talk. The police decreed Williamson’s office an official crime scene. All classes were dismissed effective immediately, at least until the school grounds could be deemed safe.

When Mrs. Quabble recovered to a fully conscious form, it was as if she no longer remembered that Sasha and Junior had been caught trespassing the headmaster’s office. She was rather insistent that, in wake of events passed, neither of them bother coming to school over the next few days. She even offered to drop them home. Mrs. Quabble was acting on this notion: if the sight of Mr. Williamson’s dead body was enough to make a grown woman collapse, then the two teenagers must have been a great deal more traumatized than they were letting on. What exactly the pair were doing inside the office in the first place would be a question for another day…a day when the whole escapade had blown over. For now, Mrs. Quabble’s foremost goal was to safely deliver Sasha Fling and Junior Roterbee to their homes. She had no idea how she would begin explaining the disturbing events of the day to their guardians. Somehow, Quabble knew she ought to recommend a session with the school’s counsellor. On informing the guardians of Sasha Fling and Junior Roterbee of Mr. Williamson’s passing, Mrs. Quabble was not at all met with the responses she had expected.