The Indians of Bending Creek

After eleven years, this class was still one-focus, English-centered - bullshit.

Kelly Levitta sat in her eleventh grade English class. The day was slowly winding to a close, and she watched with sleepy eyes as the clock ticked toward three o'clock. The quiet ticking echoed through the classroom, which was silent besides for the scratching of pencils and the occasional student shifting in their seat. Light streamed in through the wide-pane windows, illuminating the classroom in a strange yellow sort of half-light. She yawned, raising her hand to the back of her mouth.

Suddenly, something caught her eye. She ignored it, until she saw the action again. A brief flitting of darkness pasted the frosted glass window. Looking up from her notes on Ezra Pound's "Poems and Translations", she narrowed her eyes and adjusted her thick glasses on her pointed nose, the thick black-plastic rims a struggle to keep centered.

She was a pretty girl, though she was by no stretch of the imagination breathtaking. Tall, with wavy brown hair and doe eyes, she was dressed identically to the other seven girls in the room; a grey dress which fell to just below her knees, a white undershirt, and squeaky black shoes. Pinching her pencil between two fingers, she tapped the eraser lightly on the desk and licked her lips.

There is was, again!

A third shadow passed by the window. It was strange. Definitely a person, hunched low as they hurried across the ground, as though trying to stay hidden. There seemed to be something long and narrow sticking from the back of the figures' head. A backward baseball cap, maybe? She narrowed her eyes, waiting to see if another figure would pass by. After a moment, when none did, she turned back to her work.

"Miss Levitta?" the teacher, a dry shrew of a man named Mr. Daniels, chirped at her. "What seems to be the issue with your concentration today?

He said that like she hadn't gotten perfect on his last test and crushed his class average into the dust. She turned her eyes on him and shrugged slightly.

"I thought I saw someone outside the window." she said.

The man laughed -laughed!- at her, and then shook his head slowly.

"Miss Levitta, this classroom faces out onto the parking lot."

"I know." she said quietly, nodded. "But I saw someone outside."

"Nutcase." she heard one of the boys in the back whisper, and his friends chuckled around him. One of the other girls, Amanda, told them to shut up and there came the sound of a hand striking skin.

"Do you need to go to the infirmary?" Mr. Daniels asked in his reedy, nerve-pinching voice. "If you need to take the afternoon off-"

"I am not sick, Mister Daniels." she said, her prim voice cutting. By "sick" she really meant psychotic. For a brief moment, she considered it, and then pushed the consideration from her head. When people with schizophrenia spoke about shadowy figures, they were always close and menacing. These figures didn't seem threatening, just ... mysterious.

"Enough of that tone, Miss Levitta." the teacher snapped, his beady eyes narrowing in a gaunt face. He lifted one hand and ran his long fingers through thin chestnut hair that seemed like it would snap at the roots, gelled back over his skull of a head. "It's simply not possible that-"

The sound broke through his sentence, high and piercing. It was unmistakable, a sound Kelly had heard a hundred times in horror movies and cliche thrillers - a girl screaming. The sound was raw and high-pitched. It ripped through the silence in the classroom and sent icy claws poking down Kelly's spine. Her eyes went wide, and she watched as the teacher paled. The sound faded into the afternoon sunlight, and it was followed immediately by another, even more haunting sound.

War cries.

They rose and fell, like the wind. Shrieks and howling - it was music of the soul. She turned in awe toward the window, disbelieving.

"Ghosts."

It was a word that had been all but an unwritten rule not to be said. There were things happening around the school that seemed impossible. Things that shouldn't be happening. Students alone in the halls at night who heard whispers and laughter. Students who sat in their rooms studying all night but found their shoelaces - sitting by the locked door - tied in the morning. Random items disappearing and reappearing in strange places. One girl, Shanee Robins, had woken up on the football field behind the school - both her dorm partner and herself claiming she had gone to sleep in her own bed. That story had brought some laughter, but more than laughter - it had brought shivers. Stories told by flashlight past curfew.

"Winawee."

And there it was. Every rumor, out in the open - broken open in plain sight for everyone to see. The teacher shot a sharp look into the classroom, and then hurried for the door. The faculty said they didn't believe in ghosts, that the troublemakers would soon be caught and apprehended - but they still stomped down a little too hard on the rumors. They eyes moved a little too quickly when the door blew closed in the wind.

As the teacher left, the class exchanged uncertain looks. Kelly was the first one on her feet and making her way through the rows of desks. When she reached the door, she looked back at her class and blinked, once. Two dozen sets of multi-coloured eyes stared back at her, every last pair wide and waiting. Some were scared, some were excited, some were just plain awed.

"Coast is clear." Kelly said, a small smile tugging at one corner of her mouth. "Let's go."

She hurried from the classroom, hearing the squeaks and squeals of metal and rubber on linoleum flooring as the class followed. They rushed down the hallway and into the main foyer. Miss Dominique glanced up as they entered, her brown eyes widening in surprise.

"Class field trip?" she joked, but the humor died on her lips as she saw their expressions. Instead she simply made her way around her squat, dark wood desk and walked behind them as they crowded against the stone-and-glass front doors. Mr. Daniels stood just outside, one hand scratching at his head and the other tucked into his brown suit pant pocket. He seemed lost.

But it was what stood in front of him that caught their attention. The cardboard cut-out was immaculate and detailed. Every inch was coloured by Sharpie marker to look life-like. The flames seemed to dance and glow in the afternoon sunlight. The disturbing part, however, was the man. Dressed in a tuxedo-style suit of black and white, he had a handsome smile and stubble-covered jawline. Dark brown eyes stared lifelessly from the cardboard surface, but he seemed ... real.

Mr. Samson - their principal.

As if in chorus to the gasp let slip by Miss Dominique, there was a snap and a click. Barely audible through the glass doors, but easily heard in the enveloping silence of the foyer. A click, and then a whoosh. And suddenly the fake flames were consumed by real. The fire licked at the cardboard, climbing up over the tongues of fake fire and turning them to ash - as though insulted by their pale imitation of its strength. They wrapped around the body of the cardboard cut-out, turning the white of the suit to black, and the black to crumbling dust. The head was the last to go, the ink of the Sharpie colours running down the front of the suit and feeding the flames. It must have taken minutes, but they passed like second. In what seemed to be the blink of an eye, all that remained of the cardboard demonstration was a pile of burnt ashes, which the wind blew across the black tarmac, and a red Bic lighter attached by string to a mousetrap. In the sunlight, a nearly invisible cord could be seen - running from the mousetrap to the door hinge.

"Whoa." she whispered, her voice bowing low in a mixture of fear, respect, and awe. "That was something else."