LJ Idol 10: Week 21: Current Events
[Warnings Under cut]Here Be Horror, graphic descriptions of violence and death
Liminality
Felix Clark was officially the oldest student at Cooper Creek. His fellow students were chanting about how he was such a jolly good fellow. The youngest of them standing on the long benches and clapping along.
This moment would remain his happiest memory for a long time to come and Felix is surprised at the realization. How can he be so sure of such a thing?Felix wonders as the students are dismissed for the day. Watching as they scatter over the boundary into the city of Crossroads Felix heads toward the Teacherage where a dormitory of sorts had been set up for charity cases; orphans who showed a skill in academics and were worth the investment.
As he steps around the long squat building he squints into the afternoon sun. Felix had been attending Cooper Creek long before they built the bat roost that now sat at the eastern end of the property. A triangular shaped building with a cross on the top, as if someone had lopped off a church steeple and stuck it into the ground. He’d only ventured close enough to experience the smell of their droppings once in all the years since it had appeared. Most of the time the students stayed quite away from the regal looking bat house but the rustle and swish of the bats in flight had become as familiar a sound to Felix as chalk whispering across the surface of a slate.
The cemetery had been there long before the school was built, however, he thinks turning to the south. Felix used to climb the low brick masonry wall that separated the Cooper Creek school grounds from the bone-yard to read the names off the weathered headstones. He repeated them to himself quietly as he fell asleep, assuming the boy in the next cot would think he was saying his prayers.
Felix knows who is truly in charge, in this place most of all, knows that he couldn’t pray loud enough, if he had the desire to try, to be heard over the squall of restless spirits.
Professor Salazar is his favorite teacher because he once loaned Felix a book with beautiful, strange symbols along the spine and embossed in gold leaf in concentric rays across the front cover. Alchemy, the professor had said and Felix still practices the word to himself, likes the feel of it on his tongue.
Professor Loconnis favors Felix too; gave him a blue ribbon in Latin recitation. He had even taught Felix a longer piece to perform for just the teachers after class as they’d all smoked cigars and sang songs with melodies that stuck in Felix’s head for days afterward but he could never recall the words.
Three days after his birthday Felix pushes Susie Marie down the old water well and is beaten for it by the headmaster. Susie is rescued; somehow surviving the initial fall but she is crying and coughing and falls ill. Felix is locked into the room and made sit by her bedside while she cries out in odd tongues during fever dreams.
Felix tries to calm her by placing damp cloths on her forehead but she will not be soothed. It is three days before she dies and the headmaster finally returns.
“Have you learned?” He asks placing a hand on Felix’s shoulder and Felix nods, because he has. Staring into her still open eyes he imagines he can hear the bats circling the building.
The doctor arrives the next day.
The same one who had built the bat roost the year of the quarantine, it was a word Felix only understood to mean “away from something else.” He and the other children were kept at the school to be kept away from whatever the bad thing was for months and Felix had never left the grounds again. The first time he had met the doctor he had given Felix a small toy to play with while he asked Felix questions about himself - a spinning top, Felix thinks but isn’t sure, can’t quite remember.
As he approaches the front of the schoolhouse the doctor looks straight at Felix where he is standing lined up with the other 9th grade boys to greet the esteemed guest. Felix wants to tell him that history will forget Dr. Charles A.R. Campbell. They will think him a crackpot searching for a hokey holistic approach to disease, symbiosis among species, bats in the belfry…
Felix is instantly sure that it is so much more than that when the man turns from him and the connection is broken. Felix wasn’t chosen. They had all been expecting him.
Susie’s death is reported and ruled to have been an unfortunate accident.
Felix sneaks out after his curfew and goes back to the well. He sits with his back against the laid stone ring staring up at the shifting shadow of bats swooping to capture the ever present mosquitoes that he slaps at against his own skin even now the wee vampires, blood-sucking, demon spawn…
He stands then and screams for the bats to eradicate every last one of them, it echoes across the wind and fades away. For a single moment there is silence and then doors creaking on their hinges and boot heels on wooden steps, lanterns swinging in the darkness as the teachers come to stand around him.
“Speak to them Felix,” Professor Eustace urges him and so he does. The night is filled with awful screeching that to Felix becomes the cacophony of a symphony; the Victrola played in Susie Marie’s auntie’s parlor in the big city.
Felix becomes aware that he is being held by the elbow. He is trying to run but he is being dragged back from the swooping bats and back toward the well. Susie was so small.
He grabs her by the wrist and drags her, easily, to the well. He can’t stop himself even though she is begging to be set free.
She had to be sacrificed. Surely they knew. Surely the dawn was approaching even now. They were his teachers but he would lead them into the new day.
There is a murmuring all around him; soft words being said in the first language Felix had ever been taught.
Yes, they were saying. You can speak to them. Yes. You are one of us now. We understand. You must be patient. All will be revealed in time.
Felix lets himself be lead away. He sits through classes the next day unable to speak aloud in any language but passes notes with those sitting closest to him; wonders what Betty Ann Warren’s blood might taste like.
That night he becomes an initiate of The Cooper Creek Order of Locus Amoenus. He swears an oath not to reveal the existence of the order to anyone. Afterward he returns to the cemetery. The doctor is there.
“I have been waiting a long time for this day,” he says.
“Do they speak to you as well?” Felix asks.
“The bats?” The doctor chuckles. “Oh dear boy you have so much yet to learn. No. No. The bats are only agents of true power. They do not speak to you because you are you, because, you are not you at all. You are Ainesford Neath-” The doctor reads from a nearby headstone. “You are Evangeline Morehouse,” he reads from another. “And eventually this body will be buried here and you will be whoever you are then remembering Felix Clark.” The doctor tells Felix waving dismissively at his person.
“Do you wish to know your future Dr. Campbell?”
The man smiles in such a way that Felix knows might intimidate a lesser being. “Your teachers have coddled you, you ungrateful wretch.” The doctor declares and begins to walk away. Felix shouts after him.
“Did you make a bargain doctor? Did you crawl to our father? Or did He seek you out as I was? Where you special enough to have been in His presence by His choosing or are you simply in His debt?”
The old man is already gone and Felix stamps his foot feeling every bit the petulant child he was accused of being. The headmaster’s unsaid words echoing within him. His final test. You must look into their eyes as the soul slips away Felix.
Felix turns toward Fishtrap road, his back to the main schoolhouse. He walks until the grassy lawn gives way to packed earth.
In a few years he will return. Perhaps he will take up the post of classical studies from Loconnis. He imagines it as he crosses the road and humming to himself. For he’s a jolly good fellow. For he’s a jolly good fellow, which nobody can deny.
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Inspiration:
http://wfla.com/2017/06/13/pasco-county-fire-station-closed-over-50-bats-found-inside/
Additional Sources:
http://www.popsci.com/charles-campbell-smallpox-and-bed-bug
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3c/Bat_Roost_San_Antonio_Texas.jpg
http://soilandhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/0302hsted/030212campbell/campbelltoc.htm
http://apps.dentoncounty.com/website/HistoricalMarkers/PDFs/Cooper-Creek-Historical-Narrative-Final-Sept-26.pdf
http://tiny.cc/JournalOfMedicine1919
All hail the great and powerful Gary! and many thanks to the LJ Idol community for their consideration.