steps and had to pull herself slowly upward, gripping the iron railing with her gnarled left hand as her right hand clenched against the pain.
She wouldn’t give up.
She’d never give up.
She’d keep teaching, and keep browbeating her students to do better and work harder, until the day she died.
The boy smiled slightly as he remembered the last time he’d been subjected to one of her tongue-lashings. She’d called him in after school and flung a homework assignment at him, her eyes fixing accusingly on his as she announced that she was considering failing him.
He’d studied the homework and discovered two mistakes, which he didn’t think was so bad. When he’d voiced that opinion, her eyes had only mocked him: two mistakes might be fine for most of the class; from him she expected more. Much more. He was smarter than the rest of them, and the work shouldn’t have been a challenge.
He’d squirmed, but she’d kept on: if he wasn’t going to try in high school, how was he going to get through college, where there would be a lot of people smarter than he?
That was when he’d told her he wasn’t going to college. Even now he wished he hadn’t.
Glaring at him, her fist had smashed down on the desk with a force that should have caused her to scream with agony. But he had been the one who flinched at the blow, and she had smiled in triumph.
“If I can do that,” she’d said, “then you can damn well go to college.”
He hated to think what she would say, at the beginning of his senior year, when she found out he was thinking of dropping out of high school.
But there were other things he wanted to do, things he didn’t want to put off.
The teacher glanced surreptitiously at the clock once more. Just two more minutes. She could go home and sit in her back yard, ignoring the shade of the cottonwood trees to bask in the sun, letting the full heat of the afternoon penetrate the pain as she worked on her lesson plans and graded the examinations she’d given the class that morning.
She began straightening up the clutter on her desk.
She frowned slightly as a strange odor filled her nostrils. For a moment she couldn’t quite identify it, but then realized what it was.
It was a malodorous scent, like a garbage dump on a hot day.
She sniffed at the air uncertainly, her frown deepening. The dump had been closed years ago, replaced by a treatment plant.
She looked up to see if anyone else had noticed the odor.
A flash of pain shot through her head.
She winced, but as quickly as the pain had come, it faded.
She shook her head, as if to shake off the last of the pain, then looked out at the class.
A red glow seemed to hang over the room.
She could see faces—faces she knew belonged to her students—but tinged with the red aura, seen dimly through a wall of pain, they all looked strange to her.
Nor could she put names to the faces.
The knife inside her head began to twist again.
Just a twinge at first, but building quickly until her skull seemed to throb with the pain.
The reddish glow in the room deepened, and the odor in her nostrils turned rank.
A loud humming began in her ears.
The aching in her head increased, and turned now into a sharp stabbing. She took a step backward, as if to escape the pain, but it seemed to pursue her.
The hum in her ears built to a screech, and the redness in the room began to flash with bolts of green and blue.
And then, as panic built within her, she saw a great hand spread out above her, its fingers reaching toward her, grasping at her.
She screamed.
The boy looked up as the piercing scream shattered the quiet of the room. For a split second he wasn’t certain where it had come from, but then he saw the teacher.
Her eyes were wide with either pain or terror—he wasn’t certain which—and her mouth twisted into an anguished grimace as the last of the scream died on her lips.
Her arms rose up as if to ward off some unseen thing that was attacking her, and then she staggered backward, struck the wall and seemed to freeze for a moment.
As he watched, she screamed once more and sank to the floor.
Her arms flailed at the air for a few seconds, then she wrapped them around her body, drawing her knees up