(For crying out loud, don’t bother reading to the end of this if you have anything else to do at all. Watched pot-boiling or nail-clipping or anything. Your satisfaction is in no way guaranteed. I just watched a pot boil a wee while ago and it was 2.7 times more entertaining than this story.)
It was dark in the headmaster’s study, save for the stygian glow from the fireplace. Muriel caught her breath as the door closed behind her and the creaky old chair behind the vast desk turned around to face her. Shadow and light licked the features of the headmaster as her eyes began to adjust to the dim light. Slobbered on the features actually, for the headmaster had an inordinately large nose which would have confounded even an affectionate Irish wolfhound’s tongue. And dried it completely up, most likely… Anyway this is getting us nowhere. Suffice to say he had a nose of great bearing and probably its own magnetic field judging from the way his twirly thin black moustache curled like iron filings around a Physics experiment. Muriel remembered with a pang that she had a test right after breakfast tomorrow on the very subject.
It was hot and it was stagnant and stuffy, as if someone soft and silent and possibly padding, (although Muriel could not tell from which part of her mind this adjective had come from) had released a vial of gaseous dread with the aim of compressing the dry air and sharpen the senses. Muriel was suddenly thirsty and she felt her feet prickle uncomfortably inside their woolen socks. She had never been summoned to the headmaster’s office before. She had never even seen him. None of the pupils in Erstwhile Academy: School For The Very Promising had. The only way they knew he existed was from rumour and the grey wisp of smoke that curled from the chimney of his office in the old part of the school – the part that had once been the sanitorium.
“Well now, well now,” said The Headmaster, steepling his long white fingers into a creepy little church. Muriel could have sworn she saw a small bat fly out from under its roof, but that was just crazy. She straightened her self up and waited. But nothing happened.
There was a long pause and a space that Muriel felt she had to fill with something. “Um, Miss Borscht sent me over from the Chemistry Tower,” she said, after she’d managed to get her lips unstuck.
“Ah, Miss Borscht, yes, yes. Exemplary member of the teaching staff. Fascinating complexion, yes. Miss Borscht, yes.”
Again there was a silence. For a time the Headmaster knitted his smooth (too smooth?) brow contemplatively in apparent appreciation of the great wonder that was Miss Borscht’s complexion. To be fair, thought Muriel, Miss Borscht was quite veiny. Muriel shifted weight to her other hip and all at once felt slapped with the full and entire meaning of the word pate. For the Headmaster’s ashen forehead and slick black widow’s peak surely constituted the pateiest of all possible pates in the pateiest of all possible worlds. It would be a long time before she could eat meat spread of any sort again.
A log shifted in the fireplace and a shower of saffron sparks shot up the chimney. This seemed to break the Headmaster’s reverie. He glanced up at Muriel as if noticing her for the first time. He gave her a long appraising stare during which Muriel could feel her brain peeling away from her skull and gently turned as if under a lapidarist’s magnifying glass. Spiders crawling in her spinal chord agitated her into a cough and a mumbled “Um, you asked to see me, sir?”
“Yes, child, why, yes I did” The headmaster seemed surprised for no reason Muriel could discern. “Quite right. You see, I’ve been watching you, I’ve been watching you carefully Muriel Anne Malloy, and I think that you might be just the person for a little task I need doing. Such insouciance you have, child. Such a studied calmness about you. Yes, yes, I think you’ll do just fine.”
Another decade long pause. The fire crackled, Muriel’s feet prickled and she became aware of a fat, tortoiseshell cat over by the poker. The cat was beside the point really. More to the point was what the cat was stuck to: a pair of poisonous green eyes which had glommed on to her spectacled ones. Again with the sickening brain turning thing. Muriel began to feel queasy.
“Sir?”
“Muriel Anne?”
Despite this being the first time she had seen the famously unseen headmaster, this befuddled old duffer routine rang about as true to Muriel as wet spaghetti on an Oriental gong but awareness of that meant nothing. She knew she was not the prime mover in this little charade She had no power to direct the, for lack of a better word, conversation . All she could do was stand there. And thirst. The thirst was becoming unbearable. The heat, how could he bear it? he must be stewing in that big black cloak.
“This task, sir?”
“Hmmm?”
This was becoming unbearable. “The task you wanted me to perform, sir?”
“Ah, yes, forgive me, child. You will find, as you get older, that the mind often wanders. But what could you know of age, dear child, dear Muriel Anne Molloy. Nothing, nothing at all and you are quite sensible not to care twoo hoots for your elders and betters…”
“But…but I have the greatest respect for my elders,” Muriel began to protest.
“You are quite right,” continued the Headmaster, smoothly. “We must look to youth for our spirit, our energy when our bodies fade and wither. Come here, my child. Draw near so that I may see your youth more closely.”
Muriel stepped forward into the full burning glare of the fire, calculating how many steps it was back to the heavy wooden office door as she did so. The cat hissed, “Khhhhhhhhh!”
“Closer, my dear, closer. That’s it.” Suddenly, the Headmaster made a surprisingly fluid movement, producing a piece of paper from somewhere within the folds of his cloak. Muriel jumped.
“I want you to go to a rather special little shop in the town for me, and read this message to the assistant there. But it is very, very important you read these exact words. Do you understand?
Muriel nodded and exhaled, a sense of relief washing over her as she realized that she going to be allowed to go, that she was not going to have her blood sucked by this creepy man after all. She took the note and turned to leave. But she was too slow. A bony hand reached out and clutched her’s – it felt dry and tissue-papery…and icy depsite the heat in the room.
“But, I haven’t told you where to go yet, my child, Miss Muriel. Anne. Malloy.” She felt the full stops like sharpened pencils poking her forehead.
“Oh, of course, sir, yes. I’m sorry. Where would you like me to go, sir?”
“So eager to get along, so eager,” said the Headmaster, a smile like a snake wriggling mirthlessly across his mouth. “You young people, I wish I had your energy.”
Was she right…could he…? Did he just lick his lips just before he said the word “energy”? AND WAS THE TONGUE THAT LICKED THEM…FORKED?? Muriel felt her stomach curl up like a hedgehog as a wintry chill ran through her body. It would be some days before it came out of hibernation and was able to digest anything again. She desired nothing more than to be out of that study.
“Now, listen carefully, I intend to say this only once. Repetition is so tiresome. Between the olde bookeshoppe and the NU SHOP4LESS, there is a small alley. Down that alley is an unmarked door. Do you know it? No, I thought not, few people do. Go through that door. You will find yourself in a tailor’s shop. It is not what it once was, I’m afraid, but there are so very few people left who are willing to pay for exquisite tailoring these days. You will approach Murgatroyd, the shop assistant, or the tailor’s dummy as he’s known ahahahahaha. Few stitches sort of a fully serged seam is young Murgatroyd.”
Muriel was shocked at the Headmaster speaking like this about somebody who struggled academically.
“You will have no trouble finding him though because he will be the only person there that looks like me. In fact he will be the only person there at all. He is my son – not the scholar we’d hoped for but capable of the finest stitching up outside of the LAPD. Don’t mind the boils, they are almost never contagious.”
Muriel felt her mouth fall open but didn’t correct it. What was all this madness? What had she stumbled into? Who was this Murgatroyd person with the boils? Why had the headmaster picked her? God, she needed some water.
“Then you will open and read the note to him. Let us practice this now, for it is imperative that you get it right the first time. Child? Don’t gape like that, read it! Do as I say.”
Muriel opened the note and read aloud the tall Gothic letters:
I, Muriel Anne Malloy, Have Been Sent By The Headmaster of Erstwhile Academy To Get A Round Tuit. Thank you.
Somewhere in the back of Muriel’s brain a little warning bell rang. She frowned and studied the long sloping handwriting. What was wrong with this? A Round Tuit, what was that? A Round Tuit? Slowly, understanding began to dawn…but, eh? Really?
She looked up from the note in astonishment and saw the Headmaster shaking, his mouth covered by both hands, small muffled noises emerging from them.
“BMPPHWAHAHAHA,” he exploded. “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Oh! Oh! Oh! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh, oh my sides!” the Headmaster wheezed like an emphysemic moose, “Oh your face! Priceless!”
Muriel was confused and flustered and not a little alarmed at the helpless, gowned figure before her, now lying prostrate on the rug in front of the fire, beating it with clenched fists, tears of laughter running down either side of his huge pale nose. She turned and fled for the door.
“Oh, and i want you to ask him for a long weight too!” shrieked her headmaster after her. “And some round envelopes for the circulars I have to send out later hahahahahahahahaha! Oh my stars, that was a good one…!”
As Muriel burst, heart hammering, down the dark corridor and out of the horrible old building into the bright afternoon, she could still hear the extraordinary cackling.
By the fire, the cat blinked greenly and purred something softly. The Headmaster arose, brushing off his long black robes and retwirling his, by now, rather dishevelled moustache.
“Yes, yes, I know I shouldn’t,” he said. “I know it’s a risk to let them see me, but once every century or so, I need a little diversion, you know, just a giggle. A headmaster’s afterlife can be so very … dry sometimes.” Turning with a great sweeping of robes, the breeze from which was not registered by the fire at all, a change came over his bloodless face that rendered him almost the antithesis of the gleeful creature of just moments before.
“Enough! Lets back to work, Percival. These souls won’t slowly liquidate into drinkable form through horrifically boring teaching practices, themselves, you know. I have people to feed. Ex-people,” he corrected himself, reaching across the desk for a sheaf of papers, a new report detailing the boring of a painless hole into the elbows (contrary to popular belief it is indeed the elbow that is the seat of the soul, not the heart or the brain) of sleeping pupils to extract minute amounts of soul that they would hardly miss at all.
The cat blinked again.
