On the way to his office, Futzy wracked his brain for a suspect, sharing those that came to mind with meek mousy Miss Phipps.

Maybe Zane Fronemeyer had gone insane. But anyone acquainted with Zane would scoff at the very idea.

Might it be the mean-eyed, blubber-chinned cashier in the cafeteria, Skaya something, whose face looked as though she'd been pickled in bile from the moment she was born?

Or one of the newer faculty members, the untried, untested, unknown, indeed unknowable ones fresh out of college?

"Gerber Waddell," Miss Phipps suggested.

Futzy stopped on the stairs.

The building smelled musty, layered with dust.

"Gerber," he repeated, mulling it.

They continued upstairs. Futzy was deep in thought. He hadn't seen the janitor since the lights dimmed and rainbowed. Had Gerber, in his years of subservience, finally somehow triumphed over the intent of his lobotomy?

Each year, Gerber changed the designated slasher's combination to the backways. He wrote it on the map contained in the slasher's packet. Did anyone else know it? No one at all. Gerber always surrept.i.tiously slipped it in, last thing before delivery. Futzy himself made a special point to avert his eyes when he gaped the mouth of the envelope to receive it.

Futzy opened his office door for Miss Phipps. As she walked past him, he caught a hint of her perfume. Lilac? Some old lady scent. Her dress was dark velvet, swaying at the ankles. Old lady dress. A crime. Behind her gold-rimmed gla.s.ses, her young face made a thin oval.

"Find the snubnose," he said. "Top drawer, I think. I'll check the phone. Be careful with the gun. It's loaded."

"All right."

He moved to the desk and lifted the receiver.

No dial tone.

The lines had likely been cut somewhere deep in the building. But it felt as if his lair had been violated.

Gerber, the shy feeb.

It had to be him. Somehow, Futzy would find him, put a bullet in what was left of his brain, spare him the torment of being sentient when the graduating cla.s.s sailed into him.

Miss Phipps rummaged in the desk drawer and lifted something out. She raised it. Against her delicate fingers, Futzy saw the velvet backing. "Is this her?" she asked. "Your daughter?"

"How . . ." dare you, he was about to say.

She picked up on it, fl.u.s.tered: "I'm sorry, Ia""

"No, wait. It's all right." Futzy approached Miss Phipps, her look of fright softening at his rea.s.surance. "That's her. Yes. That's my little girl. My Kitty."

"She's beautiful."

"She is," he said. "She was."

Miss Phipps sensed the rawness in his voice. She set the picture facedown in its drawer, which she closed. Her eyes glowed with compa.s.sion. Her body moved closer.

"Now wait a minute," he said.

Something was blossoming in her eyes, behind those prim frames.

"I don't want to wait any more," she said.

Futzy took in her ache, her mouse-beauty, the look he had always a.s.sumed meant nothing more than bland respect. Now, as she came near, that look softened into something else, something warm and inviting.

"You're . . . I'ma""

She surged toward him, a velvet dream, her lobebag angling as her head tilted in. A tight lipline puffed and swelled and touched his mouth, tasty, warm, moistening beneath the flicker of her tonguetip.

Some women came at you, when the moment finally arrived for such a bold move, tentatively, their hips seemingly dead, their torsos not much better. Adora Phipps wasn't like that.

Her whole body, behind its deceptive folds of old-lady velvet, exuded urgency, pushing against him in a solid wave of give me, give me.

Futzy's hands glided past her waist to her rump. The fabric slid over naked curves of flesh.

No undergarments.

Adora broke the kiss and hugged him fiercely, grinding herself into him.

"I don't think we shoulda""

"Shut up, you!" she said, forcing his lips open with hers, tonguing him as her hands snaked below his belt and found his zipper. The mousy little English teacher, bold as any wh.o.r.e, had backed him up against his desk.

His hands rose and clutched as they bunched up vast acc.u.mulations of velvet, shoving them up her body like rolls of hippo fat, gathering more and more of the stuff to make them heavier still.

His organ popped out into Adora's hand, just that little bit longer and fatter for the Tuffskin he had beefed himself up with.

She eased him back. Futzy felt hem, naked thighs, and perfectly cuppable b.u.t.tocks, her cleft moist and jesus christ warm and wondrous where his fingers brushed it.

Something, a pen set, jabbed against his coat. Then it gave way, propelled off the front of the desk to smash against the floor.

Adora pillowed Futzy's head on an unabridged dictionary and climbed aboard him, an animal, this prudish covert brainy genius thrusting her taut love-sleeve down about him, deep to the b.a.l.l.s, riding him, her hips in s.e.xy sway, her face hypnotic, her eyelids shut, a sheen of lovesweat even now beginning to glow upon her brow.

Futzy swam in revelation.

Opaque encounters now came clear, the many odd looks she had given him: her love for him, and, far stranger, his love for her.

He wanted her, he needed her, he adored her.

In a matchless conjoining of flesh, Adora rode him, her balance precarious but for Futzy's hold upon her waist. He worried about her knees, a hard polished gla.s.s surface to either side of the blotter. But Adora, consumed in ecstasy, paid them no mind. She m.u.f.fle-moaned into his mouth, getting off, her hip thrusts and her fierce climax bringing him off as well.

Into her sweet waiting lovewomb, Futzy arced his seed, the pair's urgency fueled by years of denial and by what was transpiring in the gym.

Adora collapsed upon him, exhausted, laughing aloud. He fancied the gla.s.s top, stretched almost to shattering, might give way beneath them.

"Whew."

"No kidding," he said. "I think you found the gun."

"I most a.s.suredly did." Her eyes glistened above their shared laughter.

He looked at her. "You're my wife!"

"I don't think so."

"No, I mean really you are. We're in a tight spota""

"Well you certainly are." She gave his c.o.c.k a v.u.l.v.al squeeze.

"a"we, unnngh, I mean there's no time for bulls.h.i.t at a time like this. We could die at any moment. You and me are crazy to be doing this and I love it. I love you. In the morning, if we're still alive, I'm reclaiming my life, I'm putting my foot down, I'm ordering the sorry b.i.t.c.hes I married to pack up and get out."

"They've hurt you," she said. "I've heard stories."

"I let them do it. I needed it. I don't need it any more." It was true. Adora had broken a logjam in him, one that had robbed him of years of happiness.

Right now, however, he had a school full of terrified students to save. but they're all mine. Eventually the little savages would throw off their inanities and insensitivities, straighten the warps in their warped little noggins, and grow into the imperfect adults we've somehow managed, the rest of us, to become.

"I love you, Futzy."

"I love you too, my sweet Adora Phipps." He gave her a quick kiss. "We've got to go." She nodded. "But this isn't over. This has only begun, you understand?"

"I do."

A humming kicked on. The service elevator on the far side of the wall was in operation. During school hours, a host of sounds masked it. But here, at night, with the throb of music no longer pounding in the gym, the elevator's hum could not be mistaken.

They heard its door open.

Something rumbled out, into the hallway, just outside the princ.i.p.al's office.

Futzy helped Adora off, the flesh that joined them reluctant to let go. The snubnose lay in the middle drawer. He drew it out, moving swiftly and soundlessly to the door.

Adora swayed behind him.

Get back, he motioned. Then he yanked the door open.

The stench of death a.s.saulted them.

A clothesrack. A confused tangle of limbs, oddly bent, more flesh than went with two bodies.

Then Adora gasped and Futzy resolved what he was seeing.

Not two but four bodies.

The zipper-mouthed boys zipped together, clothed and b.l.o.o.d.y.

And the girls who went crazy over them, naked, broken-limbed, somehow joined at the crotch. b.l.o.o.d.y gleams of zipper. The rumors about them were true.

Adora gripped him from behind. She bit his shoulder through a thickness of suitcoat, saying nothing. Then her sobs took on volume, and the depth of her fright set his own mood plunging.

Matthew Megrim had never been the designated slasher. But he knew, as did most teachers, the location of the una.s.suming, vine-hidden, slightly rundown garage a block east of school.

It was tucked into a quiet residential alley. A punch code that ought to have changed each year, but never did, secured the garage. The teachers knew it and kept it secret to avoid the inevitable student pranks.

Rolling down his window, Matthew punched in FUTZYB. The garage door opened. His mind dwelt on the unknown slasher, on his daughter, and on his drowned wives, fluxidermed in the vestibule of his home.

Cam and Arly's death had been terrible and swift, an act of G.o.d.

Tweed's death, if indeed it had happened, would be a perversion, the a.s.sumption of G.o.dlike power by mere mortals.

Inside, a bend of lights lit a ramp that corkscrewed down out of sight. To h.e.l.l with the law, thought Matthew, and drove ahead. In the rearview mirror, as his descent began, the garage door rumbled shut.

The dirge once more filled his mouth, wordless, full of ire and regret, an opera hero, treacherously murdered, gone down to death. The song, as did his mind, danced with fire. Someone must pay, it said. Wrongful death must not go unpunished.

But hope burned strong as well.

On the phone, the woman's voice had spoken of possible salvation, as if she, whoever she might be, would do her best to stop it.

Matthew had pa.s.sed the school, its skull-flag flapping in the night breeze.

Now, parallel fluorescent lights led the way down the ramp, affixed where the damp gray cement walls met cement ceiling. A slow steady half-block of driving drew his car beneath Corundum High.

The ramp widened onto the slasher's parking area. There sat a bulky powder-blue car waiting for its owner.

Whose was it?

On school days, Matthew tended to arrive early and leave late. So his knowledge of other teachers' vehicles was spotty.

No time to rummage. It would be clear once he met the slasher, and there'd be only one such roaming the backways.

Matthew parked beside the powder-blue car, yanked up on his handbrake, and killed the engine.

"I'll get them."

On the driver's side of the slasher's car, in harsh light, stood an elevator.

What a joyless grimy h.e.l.lhole this was. It ought to have been more inviting, a dark version of the faculty lounge perhaps.

What was he thinking?

More societal indoctrination. Years of it drummed into him, into them all.

They ought rather to shut down this vile place, bulldoze earth into it, strike flat the garage, close off the backways at school, close off all backways everywhere at every last high school in the Demented States of America.

It was nothing short of barbaric, this ritual slaughter of the young.