Anthony Marshall had never been more frightened than when the men locked him in the back of that van and drove him away from home.He believed he would never be as frightened again, but he was wrong.Now, in the dark of Spero’s dormitory, he was so frightened, he thought he might die.He needed to go to the bathroom, but that meant venturing into the darkness.
And the darkness was alive.
Chapter 29
The Spero School had four dormitories: two large, each containing ten beds, in one building; and two smaller dorms, totalling twelve beds, in a smaller building connected to the first by a tin-roofed corridor added during renovations.But the school never reached full capacity due to staffing issues: Spero’s principal and founder, Dante Santopietro, adhered to a student-teacher ratio that maintained a minimum level of supervision while not overly depleting funds.(It had been touch-and-go for Spero during the first two years, until student numbers firmed up, which Santopietro had never forgotten.)
In addition to the dormitories, a room containing two beds was located at the end of the classroom building, close to Santopietro’s cottage.During the pandemic, it was used to house students required to quarantine, but had remained unoccupied since.At present, just eighteen students were in residence at Spero: fourteen in the larger dormitories, and two boys each in the smaller rooms.The latter were older students deemed to have earned the privilege of not having to share space with their younger peers, who were noisier, and like Anthony Marshall, frequently more distressed.Some—again, like Anthony Marshall—were also prone to bedwetting, which was one of the great sins at Spero.While all the beds had rubber mattress protectors, an accident at night still resulted in damp sheets.Apart from the humiliation of having to strip the bed, wipe down the protector, and remake the bed with fresh linen, all under the eyes of one’s fellow students, punishments included being deprived of treats for a second offense (everyone got one pass), which meant no soda, no ice cream, no TV for three days, and no phone for three days.Further breaches would result in the deprivation of privileges being extended to aweek or more, with cleaning duties added, and nobody wanted to clean bathrooms used by eighteen teenageboys.
The school had a resident janitor and groundsman named Tim Sadlier who didn’t like cleaning those bathrooms either, and was content for the task to devolve to one of the kids who had probably previously left pee on the bathroom floor as well as in his own bed, just as Sadlier was happy to supervise trash collection, paint stripping, and the planting or picking of vegetables while he snuck a smoke and read a fantasy novel, or caught up with TV shows on his iPad.Sadlier had learned early on to arrive at Spero prepared, even if it was prepared to do nothing.
Sadlier was not an unkind individual.He felt sorry for many of the kids dumped at the school, because “dumped” was the operative word in many cases.He was less sorry for a handful, since it couldn’t be argued that the worst of them were anything other than sonsofbitches, and Spero was just a taste of what they could expect in later life, when they’d like as not end up in prison.The nicer kids he’d supply with candy, or even a cigarette if he was in the right mood; the bad ones, he tried to steer clear of, as much out of what he feared he might do to them as of what they might do to him.Sadlier was a big, gentle man, but on more than one occasion he’d been tempted to educate a student the old-fashioned way about the importance of showing respect to one’s elders.Yet even on the lousiest days, Sadlier could rely on being able to go home each evening and forget the school existed, which was more than any of the students could do.
Lately, Sadlier was happier than ever that he didn’t have to spend nights at Spero, and he had been pretty darned happy about it already.Since the death of Scott Theriault, Spero was different.Sadlier had liked Scott, who was among the better kids encountered in his decade at the school, maybe even the best of them.What happened to him was a damn shame, and in common with the peace of God, passed all understanding.Whatever Scott’s reasons for striking out north, they’d resulted in his death, and it had cast a shadow over Spero that wouldn’t lift.Wrongnesses manifested after the sun went down: doors standing open thatshould have been closed, because Sadlier had locked them himself; the contents of closets thrown into disorder; faucets left running so that sinks overflowed; and most disturbing of all, holes ripped—clawed—in the seed bags he kept in his toolshed, which was Sadlier’s personal fiefdom and to which only he had the key.
The natural response from staff was to blame the students, but none of them would admit to any wrongdoing, not even under the threat of collective punishment.For a week, all students were confined to the dormitories, with the teacher on overnight duty required to sleep in a spare room instead of in one of the on-site cabins; and still there were incidents, including the smearing of honey on the main kitchen stove and five panes of glass broken in the greenhouse.Had any better employment alternatives presented themselves, Sadlier might have handed in his notice immediately, but jobs were scarce in The Plains and Spero represented steady money.For the present, Spero it was and Spero it would remain.But as the fall days grew shorter, and night settled in earlier and earlier, Sadlier realized he had begun to fear the coming of winter, and Spero.
Chapter 30
Anthony Marshall really,reallyneeded to use the bathroom.Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have been a problem.Each of the dorms—which were all named after Maine notables, Anthony’s being John Ford—had a bathroom at one end, with a trough urinal and three stalls, but the ones in the main building were out of action because of a leak in the pipes, so the water had been shut off and the doors locked.It wouldn’t have been such a big deal if Anthony only had to pee, because that was one of the reasons the Lord created empty soda bottles and plastic chamber pots, but unfortunately the chili from dinner was disagreeing with Anthony in a serious way, and no bottle or pot was going to be up to the task, not at all.
The dorms were housed in what had formerly been high stone sheds built for the Trappists’ livestock.While within sight and sound of the two cabins maintained for teachers on overnight duty, they offered a degree of independence from the staff, and therefore scope for mischief, including the kind of bullying inflicted on Anthony Marshall since his arrival, especially after his second and third incidents of bedwetting.Anthony had asked to be moved to the old quarantine room, even temporarily, but at that stage he hadn’t learned one of Spero’s most important lessons: Hardship was character building, so if you requested anything that might improve your circumstances, it would be refused.Being the target of bullying required the victim to find a way to deal with it by fighting back, which taught the virtue of self-sufficiency, or enduring it until his tormentors got bored and sought a new outlet for their sadism, which taught the virtue of stoicism.The third option was to kill oneself, as a boy had done back in 2020when the restrictions imposed by the pandemic caused him to lose all hope.Since then, ropes and electric cabling were kept under lock and key, and Sadlier marked off the lengths of each with a permanent Sharpie, foot by foot, so he’d notice if anyone was stealing.
But Anthony hadn’t yet reached the stage of outright despair when it came to the bullying.Right now, all he wanted to do was empty his bowels, but that would mean leaving the dorm, going down the stairs, and crossing the campus to the gym, where bathrooms had been designated for day and night use pending the repairs.A door was left unlocked so students could enter and leave, and they were required to sign a sheet if they used the restroom after lights out to encourage them not to make a mess, or clean up after themselves if they did.
Anthony’s bed was by a window that looked out on the green space between the dorm blocks and the main school building, with the pathway illuminated by four weak, solar-powered lamps.When he realized what he had to do would require leaving the safety of the dorm, he spent a good two minutes staring through the glass at the path, and more particularly, the blackness to either side.Having determined that the way was clear, he was about to kick back his sheet and slide into his Spero-issue Crocs when one of the lights appeared to flicker.Had he not been looking directly at it, Anthony might have mistaken this for a fault, or the waning of the battery.
But the light hadn’t just flickered—it had been blocked.Then the obstruction moved on, or might not have been there at all were a person disposed to call themselves delusional, though Anthony Marshall was not so disposed.He’d glimpsed a similar shape before, and he knew that at least three other students had too, but nobody wanted to say anything to the staff because it wasn’t unknown for boys to be outside after dark, even if it was a serious breach of school rules, with penalties to match if they were caught.The likelihood of being spotted was greater since Scott Theriault’s death, when motion-activated cameras were installed at the gates, the cabins, and over by the main school building, a textbook example of barring the stable door afterthe horse had not only bolted but also broken a leg and drowned.On the other hand, Jamie Hanscomb, whose dad worked in security, claimed the cameras were just for show and the school’s internet was too primitive to support that kind of system.
So Anthony regarded the dark, and waited.
When the subject of someone moving about out at night was first raised among the students, no one would admit to being involved.This kind of evasion wasn’t without precedent.Also during COVID, two boys were expelled for what Mr Santopietro later described as “succumbing to unnatural urges,” being queer for another boy rating one step below murdering a teacher on Spero’s scale of wrongdoing.
“What if it’s one of the local kids trying to break in?”
This from Kaspar Filipowski, who was the second youngest of the boys at thirteen, and might have been even more scared of the world than Anthony.Kaspar wouldn’t reveal why his parents had sent him to the Spero.Most of the other kids came up with some reason, even if it was just a shrug followed by “I hated my school,” “I didn’t get along with my mom’s new husband/father’s new wife/family’s new dog,” or whatever, but Kaspar gave them nothing.
“There are no local kids,” said Jamie Hanscomb, “or none that give a rat’s ass about us.”
Which was true.You could currently count the number of non-Spero kids in The Plains on one hand.Everyone else, as far as the students could tell, was old, weird, or dead.
“It could be a ghost,” said Troy Cafferty, but he sniggered as he said it.Troy was one of those who had set out to make Anthony’s life as miserable as possible, but he was an instrument rather than the instigator.The real malevolence at Spero took the form of the boy who spoke next: Leonard Levesque, sixteen years old, with the face of a baby, the body of a mature man, and a quick mind that, were it not so damaged, might have destined him for a distinguished adulthood.Leonard was so good with numbers that Mr Santopietro, who also taught math and science, now left him to his own devices during class, supplyinghim with workbooks that were checked as they were returned, all at Leonard’s pace, which varied according to his mood.As for the rest of the curriculum, Leonard largely declined to participate, but he knew a lot about history, geography, and even literature, and if asked a direct question, he could usually answer it.But the teachers rarely so inquired, preferring to leave Leonard undisturbed.The shadow side of him was a morass of random acts of violence, destruction, and sadism, as well as an inability to view even the most modest exercise of adult authority as anything other than a personal affront.Since his features naturally assumed an expression of placidity, even when he was roiling beneath, gauging whether it was appropriate to involve him in lessons was a hard task, so it was deemed wiser to let Leonard decide for himself.
Oddly, despite his volatility, Leonard and Mr Santopietro had reached an understanding, one that extended to the rest of the staff.This understanding could be summarized as: The dorms are your fiefdom and the students your subjects.Don’t leave bruises and don’t break bones.If you cross us, you’ll suffer the consequences.The rest is up to you.
Now, in the recreation room, Leonard Levesque uncoiled from a chair and blinked once, slowly, at Troy Cafferty, who stopped giggling.
“If it’s a ghost,” said Leonard, “whose ghost might it be?”
“Stewie Daigle,” suggested Austin Bernier.Stewie Daigle was the boy who’d killed himself during COVID.
Leonard blinked again.
“Any other bidders?”he said.
Nobody spoke.Leonard’s gaze flicked to Anthony Marshall.
“What about you, piss boy?”
