"Once she's dead," said Jenna, "we'll have her fluxidermed. Her body will be on display just inside Corundum High's front door. Kids'll get to paint her. Or scrawl graffiti on her. Or maybe do some other stuff the prom committee thinks up or approves. But nobody's allowed to steal her. And no one can, like, remove her arms or legs or anything, because everyone will understand what her role at the prom will be and just be dying of anticipation all year."
Jonquil Brindisi's long legs dandled against one another as she leaned forward.
"Her role at the prom?" she asked.
Ms. Brindisi's friendship lobe blushed with bloodlust, her lovelobe's gray-paisley bag seeming to throb with a stung-thumb swelling.
Tweed's pride in Jenna flowered as her plan spilled out with renewed energy. The living room, once solemn, was now abuzz with fresh dreams of collective revenge. Jenna's stunning imagination pictured the gym, months in the future.
She showed them, all of them, how it would be on that terror-filled night.
Where precisely the slaughtered couple would pillow their heads.
And how the climax of the evening would at last put the community's anguish-and the anguish of an entire nation-to rest.
I was a blackened corpse among the living, and in this hour
I am the fire of life and my flame burns up the darkness in the world.
My face must be whiter than the glowing white face of the moon.
…
Do you see my face?
Do you see the light that shines out of me?
Ah! Love kills!
But no one dies without having known love!
– Richard Strauss's Elektra,
– trans. Holland and Chalmers
… the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet moon.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
– "Frost at Midnight"
Futzy Buttweiler and Adora Phipps, bundled up in overcoats, observed from the sidewalk in front of the Bleak residence, where Gerber Waddell had once been housed and fed.
"It's marvelous," said Futzy, "how everything came together in little more than a day."
"It is, darling," came Adora's reply. "I'm glad Tweed and Dexter suggested it."
Adora had softened him.
Students he had thought of as rapscallionly turdsuckers on prom night, he now saw anew.
On this chilly Halloween eve, an hour after sunset, candles wuttering in one hand, Futterware containers clutched in the other, grim-faced grads made their way in slow procession along the street and up onto the lawn.
Singles, couples, and triples, Futzy forgave them all, loved them all.
The Bleaks, touched by the attention, stood on their front porch. Shyler Bleak, looking old and stooped, waved and nodded at no one in particular. His hefty wife dabbed at her eyes with the corner of a hanky. From all accounts, they had treated Gerber well.
Along Halloween sidewalks, costumed rug-rats, some holding a parent's hand, roved from house to house, ringing doorbells, shouting a high-pitched threat, and suffering the toss and smack against face or torso of twisted bags of candy, coins, or God knows what, before the doors slammed in their masked faces.
Sensing perhaps that an event of great import was transpiring outside the Bleak residence, not one of them crossed the long parade of processing students to demand treats there.
Dex and Tweed did them all proud.
They stood at one corner of an old brown comforter unfolded on the lawn, softly greeting each penitent, or simply nodding, as he or she laid down a futtered cut of janitor within the stenciled outline of the slain man.
Bits of bone.
Nubs of sun-dried flesh.
Snailings of some internal organ.
Only by an extraordinary feat of imagination could this symbolic feint at defuttering be said to reconstitute the poor man these promgoers had hacked to pieces.
Yet it felt to Futzy that Gerber Waddell did indeed, in some significant way, manifest in these feeble tailings.
Amidst the moonlit scumble of his flesh, good old Gerber returned to forgive and forget, to fire them up for the revenge that lay ahead.
A lone child in a skeleton suit and mask, its pre-teen lobes absurdly scored with painted bone-shapes, stopped to tug on the principal's sleeve and ask, "Aren't you Futzy Buttweiler?"
The girl (or boy) held a grocery bag weighted with goodies, half of which, if statistics compiled the previous year held, were tainted with rat poison, razors, or finely ground glass. From the tone of the question, Futzy's TV notoriety had sunk a deep set of roots into at least one little mind in Corundum.
"Yes, I am," he admitted.
"You could use this," said the kid, reaching into his bag and drawing out a wrapped lollipop, which thrust up from a skeletal hand: a scepter, a sucker, a challenge.
Futzy took it. "Thank you," he said.
"You need to put it in your mouf, Futzy."
That was what TV fame did for you. It gave everybody the right to call you by your first name. Even some upstart brat.
Adora's hand tensed on his arm.
"I'll have it later," said Futzy.
