Chapter 19: Chapter 19 - Test

The hallway that ran through the center of the math department was dark and forbidding. All the doors were closed, all the classrooms empty. Except the last one.

“Do you think Donaldson put us onto that cryptid site on purpose?” Amy whispered as Tyreen led her slowly down the hallway.

“I’m pretty sure he did,” Tyreen replied. “He moved some other stuff off his screen so I could see it. Then he came over and started gassing about the Loch Ness Monster. He wants to talk to us.”

“But he was in your dream,” Amy replied. “How could he get into that? I mean, why are you dreaming about the teachers in the first place?”

“I don’t think it was a dream,” Tyreen said, squeezing Amy’s hand tighter. “It was too real. It felt like something else…”

“Yeah,” Amy complained. “That’s what I’m worried about.”

“Look, if he does anything sketchy, we’ll kick him in the balls and scream as loud as we can!” Tyreen declared.

Amy smiled and squeezed Tyreen’s hand back.

*

“Oh, you came,” Mr. Donaldson said in a low tone as Tyreen lingered in the doorway to the math room. “And you brought your friend.”

“I’m worried about spiders too,” Amy explained, a little incredulously. “Don’t wanna get bit by one.”

“Or swallow any in our sleep,” Tyreen added, doing her best to play it cool and casual.

“Yes,” Mr. Donaldson said, reservedly. “You’d better both come in then.”

Tyreen suddenly wished she’d thought this through a little more. They couldn’t be certain that Donaldson was on the up and up. They couldn’t be certain he wasn’t one of those spider-things. They couldn’t be certain he wasn’t just a regular teacher, who’d refer them to a child protection officer for having wild delusions.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” Donaldson asked as they entered the room and sat a few rows back from the front. He let a long pause breathe before he asked, “On the computer? The Cryptid Case?”

“The website was blocked,” Tyreen replied as noncommittally as she could.

“But we did find something,” Amy added, and was about to bring up the photograph when Donaldson fixed them both with a serious gaze and said,

“It’s happening again, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Tyreen replied, even as Amy deflected, “What do you mean?” at the same time.

“I mean the bugs, Miss Sinkler,” Donaldson replied, without skipping a beat. He met her confused look with another one of his disarming smiles: warm and classy and non-threatening. “I knew you’d come, and I knew I could trust you when you did,” he added.

“How did you know—?” Amy began, but Tyreen cut across her.

“—What do you know about the bugs?” Tyreen asked him.

“I was a boy when it happened last time. And there was a different man in my role,” Donaldson began, enigmatically. “It was fifty years ago, nearly,” he went on. “But I can still remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday.

“There were three of us. Alfred, Nurse Hallam and myself. When the bugs came to St. Anthony’s.”

“What do you know about them?” Amy asked, putting her other question on hold.

Donaldson fixed her with a haunted look and replied, “Everything…

“They’re not from this world,” he went on. “I don’t know where they come from, but I do know how they get here. They come in through someone,” he explained.

“Shauna,” Amy whispered to Tyreen.

“Poor Miss Price,” Donaldson commented, overhearing. “I had rather hoped she might have really run away; rather hoped it might have happened to Ricarda instead.”

“Dr Dick!” Tyreen asked, then caught herself and drew an apologetic hand up to her mouth.

“Vile woman,” Donaldson replied, not engaging with the cursing at all. “It’s a cycle, you see?” he explained. “They come here to spawn. Something prevents them from doing it where they come from. I don’t know, some kind of energy or frequency of sound – I don’t really understand it. But here – they are free to reproduce. So, they come. Drawn by those from the last cycle, those who stayed behind. They convert the hosts’ bodies to eggs, the same way they convert us into those husk-portal things, shadowskins, I believe they call them.

“Most of the eggs hatch and the spiders go back to wherever they come from. But a few hosts they compel to stay behind. To hide in secret places, underground, away from the world, where the spiderlings won’t be bothered. Once the eggs have hatched, over the next five decades the spiders

"– eat –

"each other.

"The ones that survive get to take hosts and the process begins again.”

“But we killed them,” Tyreen informed him. “Drowned them. When the pool went up.”

“They can make more,” Donaldson replied. “A single spider can grow another one, clone itself if you will, though the process can take days, even inside a human host. If even one creature survives, they survive…

“I rather think that’s what Arthur was trying to achieve at St Anthony’s,” Donaldson added. “You see, last time they came, it was our friend Nurse Hallam that was their shadowskin. We used water too. Lured them into the basement and burst the water pipes. We were children then, Arthur and I. Not even your age. We both vowed if this ever happened again that we’d stop it. For good this time. Naïve of us, really. I suppose he thought fire was a more permanent solution at the boys’ school.”

“Your friend was a teacher at St Anthony’s?” Tyreen asked.

“He was the bursar,” Donaldson replied. “He handled the, ah, money. I’d all-but dropped out of contact with him until the fire. Afterwards I couldn’t find him at all. And now they’re here. Looking for girls. They need females to be their gateways,” he explained. “I don’t know why…”

“How do you know all this?” Amy asked him, still a little in shock that a man she had known for the past two years could have been hiding such a dark secret. But then, it was like Tyreen said, the best secrets stay that way because they stay untold. So why was he telling them now?

“There was a man last time. An old man,” Donaldson went on. “He told me the same thing happened to him. When he was a boy. Fifty years earlier. Said someone had passed knowledge onto him then, just like he was passing it on to me. Like I’m passing it on to you now. A woman, it was for him, I think. A governess. They always go where young people go. And now they’re here: it’s your turn to survive and pass on your knowledge.”

“So, this just keeps happening?” Tyreen asked. “Every fifty years?”

"Or so," Donaldson replied. "For at least a couple of centuries. And people like you and me do what we can."

"How do we beat them?" Tyreen asked.

"We don't!" Donaldson replied. "Hallam told me – as she was nearing the end – there are billions of them. Wherever they're from is teeming with life. Life enslaved to some dark master."

Tyreen wanted to ask – if there were so many of them – why they only sent a few here, but Donaldson was in full flow and he cut her off before she'd even opened her lips.

"We don't win this struggle, I have learned; we merely survive it."

"I won't accept that," Tyreen replied. "We can't just give up."

"We don't!" Donaldson cried, becoming more animated than the girls had ever seen him. "We fight," Donaldson went on. "With every fiber of our being, we fight. To limit the damage. And this time we've got an edge!"

The old man reached into his pocket and pulled out a little book of tiny strips of card. It looked to Tyreen like a roach-book for rolling-cigarettes.

"I really do have something for you both," Donaldson explained. "It's not ointment. But you can use this to find them."

He handed them the book of cards with a disarming smile.

"The strips are impregnated with a chemical that turns blue if it comes into contact with their blood. Or the blood of someone they are using as a host."

"Does it work?" Amy asked.

"It works," Donaldson replied.

"Have you tested it?" Tyreen asked.

"I have," the kindly old teacher replied.

"On who?" they both asked together.

Donaldson knitted his brow, as if in a moment's confusion. "You said you found something," he asked, unapologetically changing the subject back to Amy's earlier remark. "What did you find?"

"We saw your photograph," Tyreen answered. "From the Breine Beacon. When you were at St Anthony's."

Donald's complexion changed again. “Oh. So, you don't know then, yet?” he replied, his eyes falling on Tyreen. “Test everyone,” he instructed, his eyes flicking between them. “Even if you think you know them. Do it soon.”

The kindly look was still there, on the surface. But now something else bubbled underneath. It was pity.

“How did you know you could trust us, Mr. Donaldson?” Tyreen asked, suddenly catching the idea that this was perhaps the only question that mattered.

Donaldson stopped. He had something in his eyes. A memory? A tear? It was impossible to say. He placed both hands on Tyreen's shoulders and leaned in so close that—if he had been anyone else—Tyreen might have been worried he was about to kiss her.

“Because I can't hear you…” he whispered in her ear.

Something clicked in Tyreen, and like a clockwork animus, it led her thoughts through inescapable process.

Shauna had said that too.

That exact phrase.

‘I can’t hear you…’

And Dr. Dick.

Right before they tried to put one of those things in her.

Tyreen turned her head to Donaldson and instinctively pulled back from him at the shock of the realization. His hand was still on her shoulder, even as she twisted her body away from the truth of it.

There could only be one person Donaldson had tested the chemical on; only one person he knew had one of those things inside of them.

‘I can’t hear you…’

The words resonated through the pit of Tyreen's stomach, through fear and meaning. Donaldson had tested the chemical on himself!

Tyreen looked at him, shock fusing with pity fusing with betrayal. Then she heard it, loud and indignant and demanding, brash as the hand still on her shoulder. Cold and unforgiving as a lack of context can be.

“Mr. Donaldson?! What do you think you are doing to that child?!”

It was Manners.

And there was thunder in her eyes…