Slaughterhouse High

Old Futzy would be in his element tonight, the focus of punishment, wallowing in misery. A fitting climax to weeks of increased student floggings, his admission of impotence after the prom committee announced the Ice Ghoul as its centerpiece at the dance.

"In his office is my guess. He'll slip in under low lights, keep himself apart from the kids, maybe even from us, until the ceremonies."

"A prom he'll never forget," said Claude.

"Yes. Expect new bylaws next year. No more Ice Ghoul at the prom as long as he's in charge."

Claude nodded. "The one in seventy-six was appalling, but only after Futzy's daughter and her date lay dead before it. The teacher who slashed them worked out a transfer. He'd really gone to town that night."

Jonquil thought back. "Let's see. I was all of fifteen then. My prom took place two years after that in seventy-eight." Someone, after the bodies had been retrieved, had arranged Quill and Dane arm-in-arm, their staved heads angled together, against the hard concavity of a black angel's sorrowing embrace. The deaths of her dearest friends had given Jonquil a backbone of steel.

"So are we going to blow the whistle on these two?"

"Let's not," she said.

"By which I take it, the left lobe of one or both of our crashers-the genitalia as well?-are at risk of being loved, for lack of a better word, by a certain sexy, horny instructress of my near acquaintance."

"Cruel, cutting, and unkind," she demurred, "and quite possibly true."

"I minored in the study of Jonquils."

"Who knows? The night's young. Survivors grow unusually festive at these things, and the spirit's infectious. Let me observe them, maybe have a little fun with them. We've seen really ugly souls buy prom passes from correspondents in the past. There's nothing new about that."

"It provides an additional pinch of terror."

"Which is all to the good," she said. "Let 'em hover at the periphery, add atmosphere, then throw 'em out after the futtering's done and the padlocks have come off. But what is new is this: These two don't strike me as your typical bogus grads-by-mail. There's something different about them."

"A new mix of body parts, Jonquil dear?"

"Never discount it, Claude. People don't couple enough in my opinion-which is the right opinion. They don't inflict enough violence. And when they do, there's no creativity, no spirit of inventiveness to it."

"My wives yammer on the same way, at least about indulging in the crude fluidities of sex," he said. "Your take on cruelty is, I hasten to admit, entirely your own-and a vast part of what draws me to you as a friend. That and your lobes of course."

"Kidder." She knuckled his shoulder, enough to make him wince. "But beyond that, they're out for something, and I can't tell what. They seem wholesome and apart, somehow. Here in body, yes, but headwise elsewhere. I'm determined to tease out their little secret before the night is over."

"May the Ice Ghoul watch over you," he said, patting the rough red rump of the beast.

"And you, Claude."

"More cheese!" he demanded, heading off into the music toward the chaperones' corner, swirling up wisps of dry-ice fog as he went, not bothering to see if she followed.

*****

Futzy Buttweiler sat alone in his spacious office, an ache of loneliness echoing inside him with each muffled thump of the bass drum. Below him lay the gym and its vague layers of sculpted sound. As he stared through muted darkness, Futzy fingered the cache of confiscation strewn across his desk.

A bolas from one ferret-eyed defier whose spine had nearly cracked beneath the payback of its stones.

Cattle prods, thumbscrews, portable planers and sanders, the paraphernalia of torture lifted from the parental bedroom.

Pornocrap that would have raised Jonquil Brindisi's ire, so inept were its staged bloodlettings, so low and lackadaisical its standards for cruelty. These sorry tapes dulled a wondrous world of hurt into the turn of a fast buck.

Futzy had left the lights off.

Parallel slats of moonglow fell in cream slants across the carpet before his desk. Welts of moonlight that recalled to mind the flaying he had endured beneath his wives' fury, lacking only the wounds and the cutting words.

But inside his head, words came, redirected words as he redirected daily the abuse he got at home.

A victim there, a victimizer here.

They were all scum, thought Futzy. School culture artificially divided the student body into good kids and bad kids. A false divide. He saw that now.

It hadn't all been flogging and flaying, his exercise of discipline here.

Yet not one student, not one beneficiary of his many kindnesses, had objected to an affront so egregious and humiliating as the Ice Ghoul's return to Corundum High's senior prom.

Futzy forced himself to his feet.

His anger at them was greater than he had thought possible.

The walk to the barred window seemed beyond bearing, so wild and dense with passion the night made the air. Ordinarily, daylight contained his savagery in this office, giving it sanction and a blessing.