But this time, it would change the fate of the entire known universe.

                                                                               ***

S. was a fortunate kid. Born with the union of Henry Crowns. and Mrs. Lisa, two decent fellows amongst so many others. Henry and Lisa had decided to name their first boy with the shortest name ever allowed in America: “S.” And now, the long years of his adolescence were now clinging at their end; he was seventeen, and he was a ‘big’ boy.

Newbery High School extracurricular program had offered one activity he deemed liking so far: the H.L.C (Horror Literary Club). Indeed, S. was born to be a writer. Instead of two arms, the H.L.C saw in him two Nakaya Wajima Nuri (the best of the kind) extraordinarily golden coated fountain pens with the Book of Life burning in his eyes, and according to some students, it was even rumoured that his body produced blood ink which could ressurect the dead, if poured with the right method.

***

S. dropped the silver fountain pen, stretched his Huxley top, and dusted several pencil leads off his denim jeans. It was almost noon. He closed his laptop which played “You Run Away” from the Bare Naked Ladies and quickly headed downstairs. His mother, Lisa, was reading a gazette of church announcements and she hid the compendium quickly when S. barged in the spacious living room. “It’s 7 o’clock, mother. The H.L.C’s night is starting in ten minutes.” he said, looking at the obvious pile of papers behind the canapé. He quickly snuck on his white converses and walked to the entrance. “Be careful, darling” Lisa answered behind him.

***

“I hear the wake of murderous, supernatural killing sprees in Salt Lake City usually originated with the students in our school. Newbery High School. There was a famous place in it where some of those killers had been in before. Some say the spirits inside corrupted their minds..That place, is the Classroom—” S. looked up. "What's that?"

He pointed his finger to the back of the classroom, where uncertain shadows reflected on the wall flickered to motion with the movements the students had created in a brief panic.

"Stop with your bullshit, we know there's no one around' here this late except us."shouted Tom, an H.L.C member with a bald head.

"Nevermind, then. Thought I heard something in the back, but anyway." S. replied.

"A lot of students entered the Classroom; most of them would leave Newbery High School without any serious incidents happening," S. continued, "and you would make it out safely too, probably. But some just didn’t make it out. Some just weren't as lucky. Because the Classroom was a place of light and darkness, of mysteries and fairies—”

“No fuckin’ way! Not fairies; make it monsters, creepy, bloody monsters.” hollered Kevin Fordham, his voice shaking as a ring rolling on the floor.

Kevin had stood up from his chair yelling, a hen amongst chickens.

S. looked at him, and said: “I’m the one who writes this story. Me, and no one else. Got that, brick head?"

Kevin sat back, head tilting around to see who laughed and who didn't.

S. grinned and twitched his ankle. "Good.”

S. and the others called Kevin Fordham (K.F) the Brick. He wore the name well with his thick, sturdy skin. His face was as rugged as a brick and his whole body was as flat as a flat tire. But calling him the Brick was just a friendly way of saying they liked him just how he was.

"Now you sit and listen, just like a brick."

“ Just stop calling me that, you son of a d—”

A big hand ran on his mouth from behind and shut it up for good. “—dick? ... Oof!”

Now the Wally whispered quietly in his ears, “Sheesh, Kevin. He’s not through yet.”

“Thank you, Boris.” S. quietly said. Boris Betters (B.B) was called the Wally for his massive figure. The biggest student of the sophomore and the seniors, that’s what he was. And yet, Boris could not harm a fly even if he would be paid a million dollars.

S. was called the Puppeteer. That's the name they had given him. "The Puppeteer." A dark tremor resonated deep within his imagination when he heard the name. S. was the one who wrote the horror literary club’s (H.L.C) best horror stories, but he himself could easily recall how it wasn't always that way. As a kid, he remembered how, always, when he passed in corridors, other kids would shout: "It's the freak, run for your lives." They'd all go in and out, leaving him alone with the books and some seniors.

A senior would walk by and whisper, "When you're older, make sure they pay. Twice." But it never happened, and S.'s family moved to Newbery, where he still grew up as a freak, until he had found the H.L.C and hit the high stage of puberty. At seventeen, his teachers considered him as a "bad ass kiddo with potential".

“You guys better be ready for the rest of the story. You haven’t heard the scariest part yet.” S. stretched my arms briefly as my classmates whispered to each others with low voices.

The H.L.C gathered each Friday night in Mr. Nicholas’s math classroom to share whatever spooky or of relevant interest happened during the week in Newbery’s High School. Student council refused to give the H.L.C an independent local, so consequently we had to pick whatever was left, and that was the math classroom. Today was the day S. had to speak of the Classroom; S. described the Classroom as an eerie trap-bound killer mansion whereas it was only Mr. Nicholas’s math class.

“So, the Classroom was—and still is—a place of light and darkness, of mysteries and fairies. But principally of fairies.” he continued.

Everything except a flash light placed on the ground and the beam it projected was in the dark. One looking from outside the room through the small glass window would see a dozen of shadows, some with longer hairs—girls—and the rest all crumpled on scattered chairs surrounding one chair, and that was S.'.

The Brick and the Wally shuddered together.

“But Fairies of the Classroom weren’t the gentle, naked little dollies you see in Peter Pan,” S. continued after pausing to drink a Coca cola, “no, the fairies I’m talking about are the Fairies, which most were real clever, that circulated in chain-letters. That Internet phenomenon, you know. They poured their grudge into those chain-letters, playing a game with the life of their victims, who often lost at it.”

Wally dropped his callused hands from Brick’s mouth. “Are those letters the ones saying some shit like, if you don’t resend this mail to five people within ten minutes, a little girl without legs and a head will spawn in your bed tonight at 3.am and stare at you with a knife in hand?”

S. told it was correct.

“On a more casual routine, they made chalks break during class or they brushed away crucial notes on the board when nobody looked. I found that you can tell a Fairy’s there if you feel a breeze of hot and cold wind at the same time. Anyway, those extreme cases where they picked on students are few rare cases recorded in our school’s secret archives, thanks God for that. But they happened. They really happened.”

“Say, what do we know about the students who received chain-letters from Fairies?” asked Billy, an unimportant kid with a rotten head, who sat beside Kevin Fordham.

“Some students claimed having received some of those letters, obviously no one believed them. Everybody thought it was a hoax. To get attention. That sort of shit. The myth lies in that some of them actually died, and the police had discovered chain-letters printed all over their printer. What was also strange to them is that how the chain-letters described the cause of the death accurately fitted with the victim’s death. Hour and time were included in some letters,” S. dramatically said, “anyway, the investigators refused to establish a link between chain-letters and Fairies (as some had signed their kills with a “Fairies are real” inscribed on the chain-letter). Eventually it got covered up by the Newbery Commission that was on the case.

Silence fell as the H.L.C awed with horrified expressions, while dozed off on their chairs.

“Shortly after the Commission had killed the case, the stories about the Fairies and their chain-letters began to swell and then disappear amongst the students over the years, with the increasing popularity of Don’t mess with a Fairy tattoos rising among Newbery Seniors. It left only known to the most devout of myth seekers, such as me.”  

S. lit the flashlight on my face and hollowly chuckled. “Consider the possibility that some of them might still be lurking around here.”

“Do you think there’s any around now?” squeaked Dolly Marie (D.M), the Doll. She was a tall, dumb blonde. We called her the Doll because she looked like a doll, and acted like one. “Do you think they’re watching us?”

He didn’t answer.

S. rocked back and forth on his chair, tapping his foot on the ground. “A year worth of time meant at least four hundred students that hadn’t changed shoes and stained the floor of the Classroom with their sweaty running shoes after Phys. Ed.” he said. “But so they disturbed the Classroom, so they disturbed the Fairies. In the record of our school’s history, some bitches have been declared unfound. But we know that it was the Fairies that did it, because—”

“Just how did they choose their victims? Why are they so angry over prom-goers, students that are about to graduate? What if they don’t have printers or computers?” interrupted Dilly, a kiddo without pubic hair.

“They didn’t just kill them for nothing, if they were ever angered in the first place, it’s probably because the student did something during class the Fairy didn’t like, or I’m guessing. Now don’t ask me why Fairies can be angry, that would lead us to question their origin and that’s spoiling the tale, silly.” S. replied, still rocking on the chair.

S. had brought a nail polisher to kill time, and at that moment he decided he would polish his index nail.

Unsatisfied, Dilly asked again, “And did the fairies poop? The corpses, do they eat them so that means—”

The Wally sent Dilly a strong backhand slap on the mouth. “Sheesh, Dilly. He’s not through yet.”

“Anyway, according to my research, the most famous of the Fairies in our school was the Clown. The Clown was a smiling clown statue that sat on Mrs. Jenny’s desk, the math teacher in the Classroom, about twenty five years ago or so. Mr. Nicholas would have been an awful little kid in kindergarten at that time.” S. paused.

It was getting cold in the Classroom, and the atmosphere got tenser and darker. Horror defiled the face of Dolly who grinned at Beatrice, whose head sat on her shoulders with the perfect neutrality. Common knowledge was that girls did not like clowns, least of all smiling clown statues. S. stopped rocking on his chair, and leaned forward to accentuate his tone.

“What students didn’t know, was that the Clown was a damned serial killer of a Fairy. It hid peacefully in that painted clay stone during class behind that smile but inside, it was hungering for bloody murder. However, th—”

He suddenly stopped. His eyes were wide open and his mouth was slicking off his jaw. S. stared at something behind Dolly, something horrifying. Slowly, he rose from his chair, trembling and blank. He tumbled on the desk behind him, raised a shaking arm and tried to point the thing that crept behind Dolly.

The thing moved swiftly, with two arms reaching forward.

“Oh my God! Dolly run for it—”

S. couldn’t end the scream. The thing that crept in the shadows behind Dolly jumped forth and grabbed her white neck, thirsting for food. It was Johnny, the Underwear Hunter.

“Shit! Shit!” Dolly screamed. She stood up as she was screaming and stormed past S. through the exit door. After the clashing doors had battered to each side of the room, we could still hear the echo of Dolly’s shrieking noise.

“Damn, I didn’t think she would overreact like, that much.” S. said, still laughing. “We better leave, that scream’s going to leave us out to the Fairies or to the janitor if he’s still there.” The H.L.C broke into laughter—and relief—as all stood and headed out. Some were still confused and swore out the hell and the Lord. Johnny hooked S. on the arm and asked, “Hey, I did it, now where’s my penny?” He handed over a buck and tapped him on the shoulder. “She’s going to hate you, buddy.” He stopped, as if stung.

“No shit.”

Chapter 2 ________________________________________________________________

Morning was radiant with bright sunrise and squealing birds hovering over the school’s campus. First period. Dolly had come over to S.'s desk and berated him and Johnny's with deliberate brutality. On second period, the lights flickered out all of a sudden, and it reminded Billy of the Classroom. He asked S. if the story was a really true real story, and S. said it was. It made Billy squeak and squat on his chair the rest of the period. In truth, S. wasn’t sure; it could’ve been a hoax of some kind amongst the students in Newbery High School at the time. The fruits of his research on the cases were either from the Internet or from ’85 school editorial’s newspapers; and both would be considered clumsy sources, twenty five years later. Then S. thought about the Brick who had gone completely silent after Wally had shut him up. On third period he decided he would go and apologize the sucker out of him, and so he went.

“Look, I’m sorry for yesterday, just don’t sullen up the rest of the year, man. It’s gone wretched boring without your funny voice flying about, y’ know?” S. said.

“Well…" Kevin hesitated, "Actually, I’ve been thinking about your story on the Classroom. I was hooked on a subtle thing you said—something that had to do with the breeze of hot and cold and how it could tell the presence of a Fairy.”

S. stared at Kevin, part of him wanting to laugh at this kid’s awful credulity, and another part of him was intrigued. “Yeah, according to a survey made in 1985 by the club of Art and Culture in Newbery High School, three students on four that claimed of having seen a Fairy during class reported having felt a breeze of cold… and hot air on their skin, although the windows were closed shut.”

“Well I’m just asking because when I came back home… I-I actually felt it… the breeze, I mean, it was cold but it was hot, hot but cold, y’know, you told it wasn’t true and I—”

“Stop doing that, and perhaps the breeze’ll stop,” whispered Collins, who sat behind the Brick. S. could see his smile over the Brick’s shoulder, and it was like a dork’s smile. He kept on smiling and smiling at Kevin so S. told him to stop or he’d throw a rock on him. “Stop doing that,” Collins smiled again at Kevin, this time with leer eyes. A jut of disgust ran over S.'s whole body.

The Brick looked at Collins with horror on his face. “Fuck n-no! That was so not what I meant; that’s so wrong. No, just now, you see—”

S. glanced at the window that was open to his right, told him he should close it and perhaps the breeze’ll stop, he did, and slowly nodded away—the face was blank and soulless, yet filled with unspoken shame—and S. returned to his seat. The bell rang, and Mrs. Timpson began preaching on the evolution of life with the hairy Darwin. S. dozed off after a while, only to be squashed by the ugly voice of Cindy Jowells, the Underdeveloped Bitch, squawking about two seats in front of him. He woke and started to reflect on the purpose of Life. S. was bored the living shit out of himself. A thought of Dolly squeaking and screaming away made him chuckle out loud; Mrs. Timpson glared lustfully strange eyes, and S. shutted away in terror, for she was one big lady. 

The fourth period was not a slight air less of a mess. Alicia Ainsley (A.A), the teacher of English Sec. five, got pissed beyond salvation at Boris Betters, who had borrowed a bottle of liquid that eased the swiftness of condoms during intercourse, the Astroglide (from the Sexual Education class this morning), and started to glue things from his case on the hair of Cindy Jowells, who groaned like an orc. “Turned her into a living garbage, that’s what I did sir,” he boasted before Principal Kurtis, a.k.a Dick Head, who put him into detention with two days of suspension.

 After that day that was full of shit, S. thought he had mastered the art of dozing off ninja-style and he also remembered that Darwin was one hairy man.

From the Newbery Editorial Students Newspaper (Article of February 2010, p. 6-7):

One would think that weeks and days in Newbery High School were dull and most of all, devoid of meaning. With seniors laying traps to juniors (i.e. the explosive pee incident in the West wing department of Sciences) and the extreme temperature that seems to be caused by the neighboring industrial pollution, Newbery High school is at the hands of Jesus (someone had lined over the word). It has been reported that Boris Betters has glued the hair of Cindy Jowells with a bottle of lubricant called the Astroglide, a new formulae tested by the Beyond Seven industry, which contains a special dose of aloe and a dosed concentration of—

Some stains had ruined the rest of the newspaper. She folded it in her hands, threw it away in the empty lot behind her. She went back inside Newbery, where she found another newspaper that lay on a table where no one sat. She bent and picked up the clean newspaper, curious to read the rest of it.

From the Newbery Editorial Students Newspaper (Article of February 2010, p. 8):

...The alleged cause of all this turmoil may have been caused by the new transfer student, whose head and body seemed to hold great power. Indeed, the transfer student, Angela, hailed from overseas: Wales of England was her hometown. According to a research, she has two eyes, bright blue; a delicate mouth; long brown hair with curly ends that fell to her breasts, a slim overall body, but one thing about her is difficult to deal with. “She’s unapproachable, and she’s the macabre coldness of evil, which I fear, may attract more than one lost soul in this High School,” reported Kim, the head reporter of this tremendously important event, last afternoon at three o’clock, “It was a two-dog night confrontation.” Aside from this small detail, her sizes are: 38 DD, 29…

Angela let the newspaper slip from her soft palms to the ground, making a light clattering sound. She had the unnerving ability to distress herself from glamorous idiocies since Primary School, where kids more than often made fun of her ‘self claimed maturity’, that in fact, was really years ahead other kids her age. However, she also had more than often captured the heart of many young boys who dreamt of mature women such as her, and they did not know what butts and kisses were. Between her female companions, she cultivated either admiration or raw scorn. Neither of them bothered her much, and truly twice as much as the way she learnt to breathe air. Now, it was the court of big kids and girls which, according to America, truly involves wearing mini skirts and transparent bras, smoking weed or Benson & Hedges tobacco, before or during exams, cancelling Sunday’s mom and dad’s church picnic for tall ass Billy’s house party at the expense of beer bottles and virginity, and most of all, bullying. The art of bullying was a long process of evolution, first since the watery duck wars with the red head fatty kid in the municipal pools, to the high ass end of High School hierarchy discrimination. When a kid had come to her in hopes her leaf-killer face would scare away the two of them punk fuckers, she had said to him, “Why are you running away to me? The only reason they haven’t picked on me yet is that an unfortunate kid like you also existed, and the choice in life between unfortunate people and complementary people is obvious.”

Two days had passed since she moved from Crane Lake’s Vanier High School to Newbery’s Newbery High School, although not much had changed so far in her eyes: on the first day, she saw there was still the proud and ugly students artworks scotched on walls, and the corridors still harbored strange clay statues of sitting gnomes without colors. The high spaced ceiling that left the awful impression of standing in an airport, the large ceramic tiles with thin lines spacing between them, dirtied with footsteps of mud and water; even the blue cases had contributed to the goofy sensation of living in a dream—or in a nightmare. Yet, the worst of it all, Angela thought, was the cold acclimatization, which set up only for the administration department. The sweaty smelly boys and girls had spawned in great numbers in corridors and classes, dying on June, resurrecting on December. When it happened, the temperature would easily climb the thirties, and on the rarest occasions, to the forties. “It’s a way we keep the students in discipline and through hard temperatures they learn hard work,” claimed Mr. Kurtis and the administration department, who loathed with fat, gel donuts and trifled under the cold, comfortable freeze of their offices.

Angela had climbed the West Wing stairs to meet her new classmates, and she had the sort of insecurity nervous spokespersons had in their career start. The West Wing included the faculty of Sciences—now heavily monitored with cameras after the explosive urine incident (see in Annex three : Accidents and incidents in Newbery High School)—the A-1 to A-9 classrooms, the History Club, two bathrooms for each sex, and the H.L.C’s seat, class A-3 Mr. Nicholas’s math classroom.

She stood at the door of the Classroom.