Voice of Chalk
Voice of Chalk
1st Period
It was a pretty average classroom. Thirty-five simple wooden desks filled the room, in five rows of seven. A few of the desks were empty, for most classes rarely had more than twenty-five students. There was a projector at the front, which was off, and beyond it stood the blackboard. Messy algebraic scribbles covered its face. Most of the students,- all but one, in fact- had their full attention upon said board.
The odd-one-out sat in the centre of the room. He was Jimmy Maxwell, a fairly average kid with less than average test scores. In fact, his less than average scores had led to afterschool classes, lest he fail the year.
Despite all this, Jimmy Maxwell was engrossed in a drawing. The blue pen strokes crisscrossed and the brown emptiness at the back of his notebook slowly shaped and moulded into a demonic visage. It had started out as a skull, but with more and more layers of ink, he had added horns, a gem in-between the large slanted eyes, a pair of large monstrous fangs and a long and plaited goatee.
Jim’s pen slowed to a stop. He sat back and gazed at his latest masterpiece. It was pretty crappy compared to professional standards, but to him it was “awesome”. He exclaimed as much a bit too loudly and the teacher, who had been rambling on about how a’s plus b’s equal c’s, turned and his cold stare fell upon a smiling Jimmy.
“Is there something you would like to share with the class, Mr Maxwell?”
Jimmy’s smile dropped away and he swallowed.
“No sir, just really enjoying this math lesson sir.”
The teacher, a Mr Abrams, twisted his mouth slightly and there was an overall giggle that echoed around the room. Jimmy could feel his peers’ eyes upon him. He exhaled when Abrams turned back to his beloved board. The chalk began to scrape and click noisily once more. Jim folded his arms and rested his head on top of them. He tried to focus, but the math was excruciatingly boring, and it was a double period to boot. A whole hour and a half of math!
After some time the teacher’s usually clear words began to scramble. Jimmy hardly noticed. His mind was wandering, his eyes searching for something more stimulating. They found a motivational poster featuring Albert Einstein’s face, stuck at the top of the blackboard. It seemed out of place because Jimmy had heard that even though Einstein had been “a genius” he had failed math at some point or another.
The poster held a quote that read: “Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.”
Jimmy snorted at this and caught Mr Abrams glaring at him again. The teacher went back to his tapping and scratching and mumbling nonsense about a’s, b’s and c’s. Jim wondered if that meant that Mr Abrams, and all teachers - or better yet, all adults, were actually insane. They spent their lives repeating the exact same day over and over again. This thought was still grinding inside his head when the bell rang. For a second his heart was uplifted, but then he remembered that it was only the first bell. There was still one more period to go.
Mr Abrams asked if anyone needed to take a leak. Jim wanted to go for a smoking break, but he hardly thought that such a suggestion would impress his teacher. It would more than likely get him into detention and the after school lessons were already wasting enough of his time. No one else made to get up, so Jim decided to remain in his seat too. He had managed to grab the teacher’s attention more than enough for one day.
Mr Abrams resumed his lesson after the hubbub in the hallways died down. Jim was admiring his demon sketch. It was like owning a new toy, look away for just a bit and it reignited that spark inside of you. That spark that drew you back in every time. It made him happy and a small smile crept onto his lips. At the back of his mind he could still hear his teacher’s ramblings.
“Algebra algebra, blah, blah, blah. Blah blah, blah blah blah blah.”
Jimmy’s eyes narrowed. Is that really what Abrams just said? He slightly raised his head to glance towards the front of the class room. The teacher was still writing with his white piece of chalk. The screeching and tapping was very apparent within the silent classroom. Jim could see the crumbs flaking off of the tip of the chalk stick and raining down in constant streams, crashing onto the wooden floor. For a moment he could imagine them as boulders in a landslide. Each crumb smashed loudly against the wood. So loudly that Jim feared that the floor might break and splinter apart.
Despite Abrams’ excessive hammering of the chalk stick, the blackboard remained empty except for one small line of algebra in the centre of the board:
a + b = time, where a = reality and b = humanity
time = infinite
What the hell does that mean? It was nothing Jim had ever heard of. Mr Abrams kept scratching at the board to no avail. It was as if the blackboard was protesting. We don’t want your chalk until our demands are met! Jimmy chuckled softly, drawing his teacher’s icy glare for a third time.
“Do you understand Mr Maxwell!? Do you!?”
There was a hint of madness behind Abrams’ usually calm eyes, a madness that Jim had never seen before. The maths teacher cracked his neck first to the left and then to the right. The way he did it gave Jimmy the chills. He looked much like a stop motion animation puppet, more dead than alive.
“Please, enlighten the rest of us! Why won’t the board accept my chalk?”
The second statement came out no more than a whisper. Jim started hearing bleating sounds. He looked around. All his fellow pupils were staring at him. Their mouths were shut and their faces were expressionless. Still, he heard faint bleating coming from them. He could see no sheep. Jim shook his head. Am I losing my mind?
“Well Jimbo, we’re waaaaaiting.”
Jimmy stared at his teacher. He had no idea what was happening. Slowly he began to shake his head. Abrams sneered at him with his teeth bared. Small drops of spittle oozed from between his slightly stained teeth. He lifted his hands and Jim could see his fingers were tensed into stiff hooks. The teacher slowly curled his stiff fingers, releasing small cracks and popping sounds. All the while his eyes remained on Jimmy.
“As I thought Maxwell. You are nothing but a worthless parasite. Worthless!”
Jimmy’s heart sank and he dropped his eyes. The demon he had so recently drawn had disappeared. The back of his book was once more completely new and empty. He heard more bleating from around him. The sound was slightly louder than before, but Jim did not dare raise his eyes this time. He had been yelled at before, but never in such a personal and vindictive way.
As the wrathful teacher turned back towards the board, Jimmy felt the pressure of his gaze leave him almost immediately. The bleating however, grew louder still. It took all his courage to look up. His classmates still stared at him, but he could no longer recognise any of them. Their humanity had vanished. Each and every one of them had turned into a sheep. Their hands were still human, their chests were still human, but at the collar was where the sheepishness began. White wool covered their heads. Large bulging globs of jelly stood where their eyes should be. Their mouths were open and their tongues flapped all about, showering large droplets of spit across the floor. They all bleated in unison.
Jimmy could feel his heart beating uncontrollably. He was breathing loudly.
“This must be a dream, this must be a dream, this must be a dream...”
He repeated the phrase over and over, but the nightmare simply would not come to an end. Mr Abrams had returned to his favourite pastime, slapping the chalk against the board. His aggression was palpable. He hammered away with the chalk stick which met the chalkboard with loud screeches. Yet there were no marks to be seen.
“Why won’t you work!?”
The teacher’s head suddenly whipped all the way around to face the class. Jim gasped. Under normal circumstances the man’s neck would have snapped.
“Why Jimmy!? Why!?”
Finally, the stick of chalk snapped loudly in two. Jimmy cringed thinking that it was his teacher’s neck that had finally broken under the severe strain. Mr Abrams howled in frustration. He was still looking at Jim when his right hand began to claw at the blackboard of its own accord. The teacher was pressing hard and his fingernails screeched across the surface. Shivers ran down Jimmy’s spine. The sneer on Abram’s face turned into an eerie grin. Pop! His first finger nail tore off. Pop! Another one, and then another, until only four bloody digits remained. The bleating of the sheep had grown intense by then. Jimmy shut his eyes and placed his hands over his ears.
“Please let this be a dream, please let this be a dream, oh please God, let this be a dream!”
The bell rang.
2nd Period
Jimmy felt a hand on his shoulder. He nearly screamed until he saw that it was only Peter, the guy who sat next to him in math class. His heart was still racing and he struggled to breathe. Seeing Peter’s face took some of the bewilderment away. At the very least Peter was human.
“Whoa, that’s pretty cool man!”
Jimmy looked at where his classmate pointed. The demonic visage had reappeared. His eyes found the blackboard and saw it was filled with normal algebra again. No bloody fingernails covered the wooden floor and he could see no snapped chalk sticks. Another shudder ran through his body. Was it a dream after all? For a moment he felt slightly disappointed. Despite all his nightmarish fear, it had been the most exciting mathematics class ever.
Jimmy saw that everyone was making their way out of the classroom. Math class was finally over. The second period felt almost short. Jim wondered if he had fallen asleep. He could not remember closing his eyes for more than a few seconds.
Jimmy closed his notebook, stashed it in his black single strap shoulder bag and left the room. He really needed a smoke. Chances were he would be late for his next class, but he really did not care. A good solid five minutes of nicotine would calm his nerves. He had to dodge a few students before making his way over to the restrooms, which were right across from the mathematics classroom.
As the door shut behind him he noticed that the toilets were empty. Good. Jimmy went to the middle cubicle of the three. He locked the door behind him and fumbled inside his blazer for his lighter and pack of tens. The box felt rather empty. Jimmy found only two cigarettes inside. That was fine, he only needed one. He hardly ever smoked. It had been about five months since he had bought the box of tens. They were his happy sticks, but Jimmy was usually happy enough and that was why they had lasted so long.
His hand shook uncontrollably as he flicked at the lighter. Jimmy gave a nervous chuckle. Time’s a wasting. He liked being on time, or rather he hated being late.
“Come on man!”
At last the flint snapped up a narrow pathetic excuse for a flame. He would need a new lighter soon. Jimmy was careful not to burn himself as he lowered his face, with the cigarette in his mouth, closer to the flame. He dragged deep and the calm took hold of him almost immediately. He exhaled the blue smoke through his nose and sighed.
As the ring of embers reached the filter Jimmy dropped the cigarette bud into the toilet. It hissed once and then died. He felt a hell of a lot better than he had moments before. His hand reached into the right pocket of his blazer. Jimmy took out his small laminated timetable. Shit. His next class was English and the English teacher, Ms Mathews was a bit of a bitch when it came to tardiness.
Jimmy looked at himself in the mirror before he ran to his next class. He appeared rather normal. His brown hair was neat, perhaps neater than usual. He was clean shaven, but that was not much of an achievement. The bum-fluff that he called a beard had only started showing the year before. There were some dark rings beneath his eyes, but he blamed that on his recent smoke. He smiled and left the hazy restroom behind.
As he had anticipated, Ms Mathews bitched at him for being ten minutes late. Jimmy apologised and blamed it on an upset stomach, which made his classmates spit up a soft chuckle. Despite his rather valid excuse, she still wrote him a demerit slip. He did not bother arguing with her. The woman was difficult under normal circumstances. Jim had seen her hand out up to twenty such detention slips in one go. Five slips were enough for a Friday afternoon’s worth of detention. Four Fridays in a row? No thank you.
He took his usual seat at the centre of the room. Despite the posters and some other minor changes, the English classroom was pretty much identical to the mathematics classroom. Jimmy dug out his English notebook and paged to the back. A smile touched his lips when he saw his last few drawings. It was some sort of merman swimming upwards with bubbles and speed lines all around him. In the left bottom corner he had drawn small rectangular patterns and perpendicular lines. He often drew such things all across the notebooks pages, not only at the back. It trimmed away some of his usual boredom.
Ms Mathews was talking about setwork. Jimmy loved reading, but not books or novels. He enjoyed reading signs or random bits of text in TV guides or similar magazines. Sometimes he would read them out loudly, to show-off and show that he could in fact read, and quite well. Usually his parents ignored him when he did so, or they would look at what he had read and make a comment about that shop or business whose sign he had read aloud.
Their current setwork was some difficult play by Shakespeare. The dated English was horribly confusing. Jim sometimes wished he was in a second language class. The second language students got to read much better books. At least they read books that were still fairly relevant. Not some four hundred year old play about lust and loss.
A motivational poster with Shakespeare’s creepy head on it was stuck in-between those of several other deceased writers and their famous quotes. There was one by Charles Dickens and another by Oscar Wilde. The Shakespeare one read:
“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.”
He did not know what that actually meant, but it stood out among the rest.
Jimmy’s attention was drawn away from the posters by Ms Mathews’ tapping on the blackboard. She was writing something about their current setwork book. The taps and squeaks brought back memories of the mathematics class. As if a valve at the back of his mind had been opened, he began to hear the bleating again. It was soft but rapidly growing.
Jim’s eyes swooped across the room. All his classmates were once more giving him unblinking stares. No. The teacher’s chalkstrokes grew louder and more aggressive. It was happening all over again. No, no, no! Despite his pleas the bleating continued. On the blackboard, written in thick capitals was:
2B or not 2B
It was repeated over and over and over again. A sheep bleated into his ear loudly. Jimmy gasped and jumped out of his chair.
“Where are you going Jimmy!?”
He ignored the teacher, whose voice was now terribly deep and demonic. Jim looked across the room and out the windows. A strange darkness had enveloped the day outside. The sheep-headed hybrid students all rose from their chairs. They looked and moved like zombies. Jimmy turned and ran, taking care not to get trapped.
“Jimmy? Jimmy!? Jimmy!?”
His teacher’s voice was cut off as he slammed the door behind him. Jimmy ran.
The hallways were empty. As he ran Jim realised that he was no longer in school. The corridor was straight, very long and strangely dark. There was enough light to see, but where the light came from he could not say. There were no lockers and Jimmy could see no other classrooms, or doors. As he looked back he noticed that the doorway he had run out of had also vanished. The ceiling was chequered with black and white squares, very much like a chessboard. The walls were dark. Jimmy began to slow and after several moments he finally stopped. The corridor felt infinite. Time is infinite.
It took some time before he stopped gasping for air. Jimmy then noticed that the walls were made of blackboard material. All along the bottom of this infinite chalkboard ran the metallic sill which many pieces of chalk and chalk dusters called home. An identical blackboard wall sat opposite the first one. Jimmy looked back at where he had come from and then further down the passageway. Both sides led to what seemed to be an infinite amount of nothingness. The sight grabbed at his heart and squeezed. He felt trapped. Stuck in a loop. Was it a dream? No. He no longer thought so. It felt far too real to be as simple as that.
His eyes searched across the wall of green. It was very clean. He could see no dust or marks. There was not even a scratch. The same could be said for the chalk tray. It was shiny and looked very new, scratchless. His eyes found a single piece of white chalk resting neatly within the metal groove.
Jimmy walked closer to this chalk stick. That it was a brand new piece of chalk, he had little doubt. There were no visible finger-marks on it and the edges were crisp and sharp. It was the quintessential perfect piece of white chalk.
Jimmy took hold of the chalk and without thinking about it began to write:
“What is going on?”
3rd Period
Jimmy caught himself near the end and looked at what he had written down. What is going on? There was a blank spot in his mind where he could not remember picking up the chalk stick. Yet, when he looked at the piece of perfect chalk clutched between his fingers, he clearly remembered thinking that it had looked new and unused.
Despite the gap in his memory Jimmy agreed with what he had written down. He wanted to know what the hell was going on. It was not every day that your fellow student body turned into sheep-headed mongrels and your teachers lost their minds before your eyes. A screeching sound came from the board wall right in front of him. Several clicks and more screeches followed. Slowly from right to left white chalk letters appeared across the board. The letters were in reverse and it took him some time to read them.
Draw a picture for us.
The command did little to sate Jimmy’s growing confusion. He reached over and wrote another question.
Who are you?
Jimmy waited patiently. A strange sense of calm had shrouded over him. Curiosity had gotten the better of him.
We are the voice of chalk.
Care to explain?
Draw us a picture. A portrait would be best.
Jim took a deep breath and swallowed. He felt slightly frustrated. What in the hells was “the voice of chalk”? His hand began moving across the board before he knew what he was doing. Click, click, click. Chalk crumbs showered down and bounced onto the silver metallic shelf. Jimmy dipped his fingers into the heaps of chalk dust and used them for shading. Slowly a replica of his demonic visage drawing appeared onto the wall. It was much bigger than the one in the back of his notebook. The top of the drawing was about two meters from the ground, while the bottom was about a meter from the same ground.
As Jimmy came to the end of his drawing his hand pulled away and he took a few steps back to admire his work. Just as he came to a stop the demon head’s pupils began to move and its face began to push out from the wall. It became a chalk relief of sorts. Jim only stared in amazement. His personal opinion was that the muttonheads had been far more terrifying. The head began to cough and puffs of chalk dust blew out from its nose making a white mess on the floor. As the demon’s coughing fit came to an end, its eyes opened again and looked at Jim.
“We thank you for this window.”
The voice was deep and he recognised it. It was the demonic voice Ms Mathews had used when Jimmy had fled from her classroom. 2B or not 2B? He remembered the words scrawled all across her blackboard. Jim cleared his throat.
“You were the hand on the other side?”
He meant the other side of the mirror. It felt like the right thing to ask. The letters written by the phantom hand were all in reverse, like the letters reflected back within a mirror.
“Yes,” the demon replied.
“Then do you care to explain to me, please. For I fear I have lost my mind.”
The demonic visage laughed sending more dust flying.
“We must apologise. What you saw before was the first few glimpses of sub-reality. This occurs when a line of communication is forced across realities.”
Jimmy had no idea what that meant. He said as much to the demonic face that he had seemingly created. The one that was now alive and talking to him, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. A sudden onslaught of laughter crept into his throat. The laughter grew and in almost no time Jim found himself gasping for breath, wiping tears from his eyes. The demon waited patiently. It took quite a while before Jimmy could catch his breath and his mad outburst had faded. He turned
Impressum
Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG
Texte: Morné Steenekamp
Bildmaterialien: Morné Steenekamp
Lektorat: Katya Wagner
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 19.04.2014
ISBN: 978-3-7368-0199-8
Alle Rechte vorbehalten
Widmung:
Dedicated to my mother, whose constant hounding made me actually publish something. Also I'd like to thank my girlfriend who proofread and edited all my tense and grammar mistakes.