Resurrecting Ravana (13 page)

Willow felt foolish the second she sat down in front of Mila’s desk. Her throat stung from crying on the way to the guidance counselor’s office and her cheeks were sticky with tears. She rubbed a hand downward over her face, then swept a knuckle across each closed eye.

“Willow, what’s wrong?” Mila asked.

“I don’t know,” Willow replied with a sniffle. “I wish I did. I mean, if I knew, there wouldn’t be anything wrong because maybe then I could fix it.”

Mila leaned forward and locked her hands together on the desktop. “You seemed just fine in the cafeteria a few minutes ago. Tell me, Willow, what is the matter?”

“My friend,” Willow said, trying not to cry anymore. “My best friend in the whole world, Buffy.” She stopped to wipe more tears from her eyes.

“Have you two had a fight?”

“Well, that’s just it. We haven’t. But for some reason, it feels like we have. There’s so much tension between us all the time. In fact, all my friends seem . . . well, preoccupied. But with Buffy, it’s different. Worse.”

“Perhaps they are all just concerned about the tests coming up,” Mila said. She smiled encouragingly. “With that many tests all at once, most students tend to become preoccupied.”

“That’s what I thought at first,” Willow said, nodding. “And that may be the case with the others. But with Buffy, it’s something different. And what’s worse is . . . well, I sometimes find myself . . . y’know, getting, um . . . getting really angry with her. Like just now in the cafeteria. She said something about the gift you gave me, and I snapped at her, and she seemed to get angrier, and . . . I don’t know.” She bowed her head and let more tears fall.

Mila took a tissue from an ornate wooden box and handed it Willow, who dabbed at her eyes, then blew her nose. She tossed the tissue into a small wastebasket at the end of Mila’s desk, then stood.

“I’m sorry,” Willow said. “For bothering you with this, I mean. It’s silly, and I should probably —”

“No, no, Willow,” Mila said. She stood, too, and came around the desk. Sitting on the front edge of the desk, she took Willow’s hand in hers. “Nothing is silly that makes you hurt this much, so you mustn’t talk that way. I’m glad you felt you could come to me with this. And I’m going to give you a piece of advice, so listen up.” She grinned. “The only thing that will solve this between you and your friend is communication. You must talk to one another with no interruptions, with nothing to get in the way. You can do that whenever you wish, of course. But I think you should do it right now. Go back to the cafeteria, find Buffy, and go someplace quiet where you can talk. You’ve still got most of the lunch hour ahead of you.”

Willow thought about it a moment, although she didn’t really need to. She knew immediately that Mila was right. It wouldn’t be easy, but she knew it was the only way to close the gap that had opened between her and Buffy.

Willow thanked Mila for talking to her, then headed for the cafeteria. She walked at a brisk pace, wanting to get it over with before she changed her mind or just plain chickened out. Things had become so tense between herself and Buffy that the idea of approaching her and asking to go someplace where they could talk was a bit unnerving . . . and the fact that they were best friends made that part, the unnerving part, disorienting, head-spinning. It felt so unnatural, so unreal to her, and yet it was very real.

As she neared the cafeteria, Willow frowned at the loud noises coming from inside. What sounded like cheering was accompanied by erratic clattering noises. Something heavy slammed against the cafeteria’s double doors; the safety glass in the left door shattered into tiny hail-like pieces and the leg of a chair appeared for just an instant, then fell away.

Uh, oh!
Willow ran the rest of the way and pushed her way into the cafeteria.

A large group of kids were gathered in a semicircle, cheering and pumping their fists in the air. The broken door had brought an explosion of laughter from them, but their attention was not diverted for long.

They were cheering on a fight, and when Willow saw it, her eyes became almost as wide as her mouth. Miss Gasteyer and Mrs. Truman were fighting like a couple of punks in the street . . . and no one was stopping them! Mrs. Truman’s left eye was swollen shut, Miss Gasteyer’s lower lip was twice its normal size, and both of them bore bloody scratches and cuts on their faces.

Beyond the group of enthusiastic observers, Willow saw Buffy and Oz coming forward.

Miss Gasteyer got Mrs. Truman with a hard uppercut. Mrs. Truman’s sensible shoes left the floor for a moment and she fell back onto a table. Miss Gasteyer grabbed something off the table, something shiny, and lifted it high, then brought it down.

“No!” Willow cried at the last instant.

Miss Gasteyer buried a fork halfway up the handle in Mrs. Truman’s throat.

The second she saw the fork, Buffy yelled, “Stop her! Somebody stop her!”

But the students crowded around the two fighting women were too busy cheering and yelling to hear her.

Miss Gasteyer brought the fork down once, twice, a third time. As warm blood spattered from Mrs. Truman’s gurgling throat and landed on some of the onlookers, the voices died down. A girl screamed. Then another.

Buffy knocked her way through the crowd like a wrecking ball through an old concrete wall. By the time she got through, Miss Gasteyer was going out the door into the hallway. Buffy slapped a palm on the tabletop, vaulted over to the other side, and hit the floor running. Mrs. Truman was still alive on the table, but barely. Someone would try to help her, but Buffy knew they would not succeed. Blood spurted in rhythmic strings from Mrs. Truman’s severed carotid artery, which Buffy knew could not be repaired.

She went through the doors and saw Miss Gasteyer nearing the corner at the end of the hall to her right, her bag slamming and rattling against her left hip as she ran. The woman disappeared around the corner in an instant.

Buffy ran at full speed. A couple of students — a confused-looking guy and a clearly annoyed girl — stood in the hall with their backs pressed to the wall, staring at the corner that Miss Gasteyer had just rounded. They turned to Buffy and watched her run by.

Buffy could hear Miss Gasteyer’s running footsteps echoing away in the main hall around the corner. And something else . . . the jangling of keys. Half a second before she rounded the corner, she heard a door slam.

The hall was empty, which was typical at lunchtime. There was activity to be seen through the open doors of some faculty offices, but Buffy ignored it. That wasn’t the kind of door she’d heard slam a moment ago. It was a heavier door, much more solid. She walked at a hurried pace, looking around frantically, then stopped in front of the stairwell. She turned around and walked back, slowly this time, and stopped in front of the door that led to the school’s basement.

It was set back in a small rectangular niche, bathed in shadow. It was brown-painted steel, and it was locked.

But Miss Gasteyer might have a key,
Buffy thought, remembering the jangle of keys she’d heard. She remembered the slam of the door, as well . . . solid, heavy, like this one.

As soon as Mr. Snyder heard of the soon-to-be broken basement door, he would no doubt find some way of tagging Buffy with it, and he would love doing it.

Buffy looked around to make sure she was alone as she muttered under her breath, “Oh, well, some things can’t be helped.”

Buffy slammed her foot into the door. The deadbolt gave, the door flew open and clanged into the wall on the other side. Buffy stepped through and quickly swung the door closed behind her. It wouldn’t latch anymore, but she didn’t have time to worry about that.

The temperature in the stairwell was cooler than in the hall, and it was darker than Buffy anticipated. She hadn’t bothered to look for a light switch inside the door. At the bottom of the stairs, it was colder, but there was light coming from the other side of a tall set of shelves. She froze when she heard a sound and listened carefully.

It was more than one sound, actually. Somewhere, something was dripping steadily. A clock ticked. And something else, something wet and smacking and . . . was that a snarl?

Buffy started moving through the long shadows of the basement, following the sound.

Eating. Something was eating.

She moved faster, around the shelves, past several broken chalkboards leaning against a wall, around stacks of old wooden chairs with metal legs, past outdated classroom desks.

Slurping and sucking sounds and harsh, throaty grunting.

Sounds like more hellhounds.

Buffy tripped over several bright orange electrical cords and nearly fell facedown onto the concrete floor. She landed on her hands and knees, and her arms slipped into something coiled and pliable. She was in a dark shadow and couldn’t make it out at first. Her arms were tangled in a long, coiled garden hose. Before she could start pulling her arms out, she realized the horrible sounds had stopped.

The wet chewing and grunting was suddenly replaced by rapid hissing whispers.

Buffy pulled and jerked her arms from their entanglements, got to her feet, and rounded another tall set of shelves. She skidded to a halt.

Overhead, two tubular flourescent lights glowed through an opaque plastic cover; one of the lights hummed and flickered. Buffy found herself in a corner that was blocked into a cubicle by the shelves. There were more cluttered shelves on the two cinder-block walls that met in the corner.

Something lay in the middle of the concrete floor within the makeshift cubicle. It was the remains of Miss Gasteyer. They hadn’t quite finished with her. Nearly all of her body had been stripped of flesh, and blood dripped from her bare ribs. But most of the internal organs remained, and there was still skin on her fingers; her nails appeared to be clawing at the floor. The skin on her face and head was still intact, but her eyes were gone, and empty, bloodied sockets stared blindly upward.

Buffy looked around quickly: the shelves, the dark corner, the shadows, even the ceiling above the flickering flourescent light.

Where were they? They couldn’t have gone out without getting past her. But the basement seemed to be empty except for Buffy.

She took two steps toward Miss Gasteyer and hunkered down to get a closer look. The woman’s clothes were scattered over the floor in torn shreds. Her bag lay a couple feet away on its side, its contents spilled on the concrete.

They didn’t get past me,
she thought.
They’re here. I can feel it in my —
She glanced at the skeleton, winced, then began to stand.

There was a rushing movement in the air and several feet hit the floor around her.

Small feet.

Children’s feet.

Buffy rose to her full height and looked down on them, all six . . . no, all eight of them. Or were there more? They were dressed in blue jeans and polka-dot skirts and sneakers and pumps and a Daffy Duck T-shirt next to a
Jurassic Park
T-shirt . . . the way little kids dress. Except the small clothes didn’t look right. They seemed to have no texture. It looked as if the clothes had been painted on the children’s bodies.

They began to giggle, then laugh as they stared up at her.

They’re not children!
she reminded herself.
Now . . . hold that thought.

Buffy spun around, kicked a leg up, and fell to the floor with a gasp when her foot connected with nothing. They were gone. Just gone.

She got to her feet and stood tense, ready, because she knew they weren’t really gone. They hadn’t gone by her. Her skin prickled with the feeling of being watched. She knew they weren’t children, but whatever they were, she would have felt them go by. She looked all around Miss Gasteyer’s remains at the places where the children had been standing.

In the dark corner, the cinder-block wall rippled like the surface of a pond. The gray metal shelves did the same. No, that wasn’t it . . . those things hadn’t actually rippled. But something had moved.

There was a rush of movement in the air around her and colors and shadows blurred and blended like spilled drinks. Something bumped into Buffy on her right side, her left side, and she spun around twice before stopping to listen.

Footsteps ran through the basement, and children giggled. The sounds were getting farther away very quickly. Buffy ran after them, back around the shelves and past the desks and chalkboards and endless boxes, over the coiled-up hose without incident this time, and to the stairs.

She’d seen nothing coming back through the basement, hadn’t even felt their presence. And she didn’t feel it now as she stood at the foot of the stairs, looking around. Without waiting another second, she ran up the stairs and nearly pulled the already-broken door to the hall off its hinges on her way out.

There were several students standing around outside the door, talking quietly. Buffy looked in both directions for any sign of the . . .
What are they?

Creatures, critters, beasties, monsters, whatever,
Buffy thought.
They’re all under the same umbrella, and in the same Hellmouth town, of course.

Buffy rushed to her left, toward the front of the building, looking for any sign of them. They were gone. And yet Buffy didn’t feel they were gone. She stopped suddenly and ran a hand through her hair, frowning as she thought about those other students she’d seen outside the basement door.

Who were they?
she asked herself.
Did they look familiar? I . . . I can’t even remember their faces now.

She spun around and ran back the way she’d come.

How did they get away so fast?
she thought.
Did I really see them?
She knew she’d seen them. The fact that they were such a blurry memory convinced her of that. That was how they remained
un
seen . . . whatever they were.

As she ran down the main hall, Buffy looked around corners, peered into rooms and offices, but they weren’t there. She ran back to the staircase and went up to the second floor to search for them. But she knew they were gone. She could no longer feel their presence. She returned to the stairs to head back down.