dreamscape
02-24-2009, 10:06 AM
The New Kid
I sat staring out the window mesmerised in part by the cacophony of birds in trees, trees in wind, wind in spaces, and in part by the elusive nugget seemingly pushed further up my nose by my efforts. Ignoring the hee-hawing from the front of the room (which seemed somehow to resemble my name), my world shrunk into attaining the unattainable. The importance and impact of this globule would soon reveal itself as, latching onto a particularly adhesive section, I withdrew with some pride a string of glorious golden green which, when flicked with the right combination of height and velocity so as to do Miss Bray proud of my extracurricular scientific endeavour, would elicit from an unwitting victim across the aisle an astonished squeal.
Taking aim, I realized too late the weight of the sudden silence that had descended around me. And as I struck my target I turned with pride to see all attention squarely on me. I stood up to receive the praise and ovation I felt was my due but was met with no change to the flabbergasted faces, fused with anger in one Miss Bray’s expression. The silence was broken only by a quiet sobbing from the girl who was erasing all evidence of my precocious calculative talents from her face with a slightly trembling hand.
I turned back to see that Miss Bray had stealthily stalked to stand in front of me. As I met her gleaming red eyes her pupils focused like an 8x optical zoom, through which I glimpsed the evil mechanics at play in the wings at their rear. Her hand lanced down and captured my wrist in a steel grip. As she marched me out of the classroom I could hear the gears clicking and whirring, driving her limbs forward in perfect imitation.
Fear was rife in the eyes of my classmates. All but one – the new kid, Ramos.
Ramos had arrived at school the previous day. All the other kids appeared to be unaware of his existence, as would I be had he not approached me at lunch time that day. He spoke little English, but I managed to translate that he was from Salamanca. Ramos’ father was an interstellar government agent fighting evil in its many guises as part of a war that has raged across galaxies and eons beyond the knowledge of many, and he was his father’s freelance partner.
As I crossed into the world beyond the classroom, his eyes spoke to me as if to say, the battle has just begun.
As I was shoved down on the wooden bench outside the classroom, cunningly designed to be so uncomfortable as to make one sit down without one’s bum touching the slats, in so doing strengthening one’s upper legs to enhance our running performance for interschool events, Miss Bray’s doppelganger hissed and buzzed a series of commands which I interpreted to mean I should probably stay hovering in that position until further notice.
As I looked around, I felt my view shifting and bouncing to catch up with itself, as if all the minds in the world were coalescing to share one mind, and just at that moment too many mums had had too many of those pungent grape juices, and too many dads were reclining with their bubbly-pipes. I could hear the lessons being propounded from nearby classes, or was that just the echoes from the uninterested or exhausted minds?
What seemed like hours later the bell tolled precipitously, unleashing a stampede of humanity down the corridor. A parade of panicked faces and hunger and energy that had been waiting to spring forth for the past two hours. The drive of youth, that intense rush to get somewhere and get there fast. They didn’t know where they were going or why, but they knew they had to get there first.
Ramos was the last to leave, his knowing eyes once more meeting mine as he palmed me a short note. His head turned as if in response to a sound just beyond the range of normal hearing. As he turned and nonchalantly strode down the corridor, she came out to stand in front of me. Legs apart like a gunslinger, the dust swirling around her feet. Between her legs I could see the silhouette of Ramos as he paused between the huge double doors, the threshold of freedom and sunlight, glancing back at my predicament before being swallowed up by the whiteness.
Standing to assume the dueling position, I realized I had left my six-shooters at home. I was done for, now. But she simply turned and walked back into the room. I took it as a cue to follow, and did so.
I sat on a chair in front of Miss Bray’s desk, and as she turned away I glanced down at Ramos’ note: Cuidados! No lo sé con vindo. Que? I asked myself.
Miss Bray was then looming over me, her halo of darkness seeming to swallow all the light in the room. I felt a sweat break on my brow as I crumpled and dropped the note. “You know what your problem is?” She asked me.
“I don’t speak Spanish,” I admitted.
Fire ignited in her lenses, and she reared up like a monster drawn from the imagination of a particularly imaginative horror writer. She reached for my arm and as I snatched it away I scratched her wrist. The flesh peeled away to reveal a complex network of wires and flashing diodes framed in a flowing silver skeleton. Our eyes met – was that fear? – and she stepped back and roared, flexing her upper body.
I scrabbled back, knocking the chair over in my haste, as flesh was now shearing off her body all over, the glistening metal beneath flowing into an ever more horrifying visage. I now stood with my back to the wall, sliding down as if to sink through the floor to safety. The thing’s arms were remoulding themselves into a terrifying array of weaponry.
It tossed the tables and chairs aside in a raucous rage as it bent its left appendage - whose terminus was transforming and rotating into a tubular form, now glowing red - up. I glanced around the room desperate for an escape, and Ramos’ note came to mind. I spoke the message aloud in my head and it struck me. I glanced up at the high window second from the front. The new kid had obviously unlocked it for me, as its latch was hanging loose.
There was nothing for it, so I got up and shot across the room as the creature’s arm began rapidly ejecting needle-like red lasers at me. They followed my path over the tables and chairs and through the air as I vaulted off the ex-teacher’s desk with my well-honed upper legs and into the unlocked window which gave way easily. Landing somewhat inelegantly I got up and started running and, seeing his figure between the trees, I headed towards Ramos.
He said nothing, but glanced over my shoulder then turned to run with me. We heard glass smashing and felt the ground tremble, which spurred our efforts ever so little. We saw a ditch next to a fence ahead and dived headfirst and rolled to a halt at its bottom.
As we caught our breath and shared fearful glances we could hear rhythmic footsteps crunching leaves accompanied by a melody of pumping hydraulics and aluminiferous scraping. And it was getting louder.
I asked Ramos what now? and he looked around and pointed at a small hole in the sand, maybe a snake-hole. He crawled towards it, tugging my sleeve, and it seemed to get larger, or were we getting smaller?
We descended into the darkness of a cave, the sudden silence making me twist and grind my jaw to make sure I was still hearing right. We crawled ever further down, an ambient light allowing us to move at a good pace, a steady drip coming from somewhere far below. “Oi, you lot. How’d you get in ‘ere, then?” Our heads shot round to see eight eyes glowing down upon us, an immense furry arachnid stalking towards us. Behind him a fly was hastily covering her modesty by drawing a silk shroud around her clearly naked form.
Our jaws dropped, and we shared a quick sly smile as Mr. Spider came closer and we could make out the hints of ruby red around his menacing fangs. Seeing this, anger lit up his eyes and he started rearing up but Ramos hastily interjected, calming him in some language and gestures totally alien and totally un-Spanish.
Meanwhile, I could hear an ominous tread on the path behind us. The other occupants of the cave could hear it too and, following some more quick conversation, we all beat a retreat to a dark corner of side tunnel.
The monstrous robot who until recently wore the flesh and clothes of Miss Bray stalked into the cave. It scanned the area as if it could track me by the smell of my fear. Mr. Spider shot forward and to the right making the thing stumble as he emitted a sticky silken thread from his bulbous gland onto the thing’s legs. He scrabbled around the thing faster than it could rotate its torso, eventually rendering it immobile with his sticky excretion.
Meanwhile, the modest Miss Fly buzzed her way behind the monstrosity’s head and squeezed her way into its corpus at the neck joint. Soon the robot’s eyes lost their luminance and its head slumped forward. When I thought it safe, I crept out of the tunnel but was reluctant to get too close to the former teacher.
Mr. Spider led Ramos and I to the back entrance of the cave, explaining that the fly was an electrician and part-time interior designer and she thought that the web-covered robot would make a great lamp stand in the dimly lit cavern. After extracting our promise of silence regarding his infidelity, the spider turned and crawled back down the tunnel as we climbed out of the back-entrance into a quiet street.
Just then a car pulled up in front of us, its passenger door sliding open with a sighing hiss. Ramos turned to face me and with an almost imperceptible nod, he quirked the corner of his mouth, turned, and got into the car. As its door slid closed and the car sped off, I turned towards home.
I knew I would be seeing a lot more of Ramos.
I sat staring out the window mesmerised in part by the cacophony of birds in trees, trees in wind, wind in spaces, and in part by the elusive nugget seemingly pushed further up my nose by my efforts. Ignoring the hee-hawing from the front of the room (which seemed somehow to resemble my name), my world shrunk into attaining the unattainable. The importance and impact of this globule would soon reveal itself as, latching onto a particularly adhesive section, I withdrew with some pride a string of glorious golden green which, when flicked with the right combination of height and velocity so as to do Miss Bray proud of my extracurricular scientific endeavour, would elicit from an unwitting victim across the aisle an astonished squeal.
Taking aim, I realized too late the weight of the sudden silence that had descended around me. And as I struck my target I turned with pride to see all attention squarely on me. I stood up to receive the praise and ovation I felt was my due but was met with no change to the flabbergasted faces, fused with anger in one Miss Bray’s expression. The silence was broken only by a quiet sobbing from the girl who was erasing all evidence of my precocious calculative talents from her face with a slightly trembling hand.
I turned back to see that Miss Bray had stealthily stalked to stand in front of me. As I met her gleaming red eyes her pupils focused like an 8x optical zoom, through which I glimpsed the evil mechanics at play in the wings at their rear. Her hand lanced down and captured my wrist in a steel grip. As she marched me out of the classroom I could hear the gears clicking and whirring, driving her limbs forward in perfect imitation.
Fear was rife in the eyes of my classmates. All but one – the new kid, Ramos.
Ramos had arrived at school the previous day. All the other kids appeared to be unaware of his existence, as would I be had he not approached me at lunch time that day. He spoke little English, but I managed to translate that he was from Salamanca. Ramos’ father was an interstellar government agent fighting evil in its many guises as part of a war that has raged across galaxies and eons beyond the knowledge of many, and he was his father’s freelance partner.
As I crossed into the world beyond the classroom, his eyes spoke to me as if to say, the battle has just begun.
As I was shoved down on the wooden bench outside the classroom, cunningly designed to be so uncomfortable as to make one sit down without one’s bum touching the slats, in so doing strengthening one’s upper legs to enhance our running performance for interschool events, Miss Bray’s doppelganger hissed and buzzed a series of commands which I interpreted to mean I should probably stay hovering in that position until further notice.
As I looked around, I felt my view shifting and bouncing to catch up with itself, as if all the minds in the world were coalescing to share one mind, and just at that moment too many mums had had too many of those pungent grape juices, and too many dads were reclining with their bubbly-pipes. I could hear the lessons being propounded from nearby classes, or was that just the echoes from the uninterested or exhausted minds?
What seemed like hours later the bell tolled precipitously, unleashing a stampede of humanity down the corridor. A parade of panicked faces and hunger and energy that had been waiting to spring forth for the past two hours. The drive of youth, that intense rush to get somewhere and get there fast. They didn’t know where they were going or why, but they knew they had to get there first.
Ramos was the last to leave, his knowing eyes once more meeting mine as he palmed me a short note. His head turned as if in response to a sound just beyond the range of normal hearing. As he turned and nonchalantly strode down the corridor, she came out to stand in front of me. Legs apart like a gunslinger, the dust swirling around her feet. Between her legs I could see the silhouette of Ramos as he paused between the huge double doors, the threshold of freedom and sunlight, glancing back at my predicament before being swallowed up by the whiteness.
Standing to assume the dueling position, I realized I had left my six-shooters at home. I was done for, now. But she simply turned and walked back into the room. I took it as a cue to follow, and did so.
I sat on a chair in front of Miss Bray’s desk, and as she turned away I glanced down at Ramos’ note: Cuidados! No lo sé con vindo. Que? I asked myself.
Miss Bray was then looming over me, her halo of darkness seeming to swallow all the light in the room. I felt a sweat break on my brow as I crumpled and dropped the note. “You know what your problem is?” She asked me.
“I don’t speak Spanish,” I admitted.
Fire ignited in her lenses, and she reared up like a monster drawn from the imagination of a particularly imaginative horror writer. She reached for my arm and as I snatched it away I scratched her wrist. The flesh peeled away to reveal a complex network of wires and flashing diodes framed in a flowing silver skeleton. Our eyes met – was that fear? – and she stepped back and roared, flexing her upper body.
I scrabbled back, knocking the chair over in my haste, as flesh was now shearing off her body all over, the glistening metal beneath flowing into an ever more horrifying visage. I now stood with my back to the wall, sliding down as if to sink through the floor to safety. The thing’s arms were remoulding themselves into a terrifying array of weaponry.
It tossed the tables and chairs aside in a raucous rage as it bent its left appendage - whose terminus was transforming and rotating into a tubular form, now glowing red - up. I glanced around the room desperate for an escape, and Ramos’ note came to mind. I spoke the message aloud in my head and it struck me. I glanced up at the high window second from the front. The new kid had obviously unlocked it for me, as its latch was hanging loose.
There was nothing for it, so I got up and shot across the room as the creature’s arm began rapidly ejecting needle-like red lasers at me. They followed my path over the tables and chairs and through the air as I vaulted off the ex-teacher’s desk with my well-honed upper legs and into the unlocked window which gave way easily. Landing somewhat inelegantly I got up and started running and, seeing his figure between the trees, I headed towards Ramos.
He said nothing, but glanced over my shoulder then turned to run with me. We heard glass smashing and felt the ground tremble, which spurred our efforts ever so little. We saw a ditch next to a fence ahead and dived headfirst and rolled to a halt at its bottom.
As we caught our breath and shared fearful glances we could hear rhythmic footsteps crunching leaves accompanied by a melody of pumping hydraulics and aluminiferous scraping. And it was getting louder.
I asked Ramos what now? and he looked around and pointed at a small hole in the sand, maybe a snake-hole. He crawled towards it, tugging my sleeve, and it seemed to get larger, or were we getting smaller?
We descended into the darkness of a cave, the sudden silence making me twist and grind my jaw to make sure I was still hearing right. We crawled ever further down, an ambient light allowing us to move at a good pace, a steady drip coming from somewhere far below. “Oi, you lot. How’d you get in ‘ere, then?” Our heads shot round to see eight eyes glowing down upon us, an immense furry arachnid stalking towards us. Behind him a fly was hastily covering her modesty by drawing a silk shroud around her clearly naked form.
Our jaws dropped, and we shared a quick sly smile as Mr. Spider came closer and we could make out the hints of ruby red around his menacing fangs. Seeing this, anger lit up his eyes and he started rearing up but Ramos hastily interjected, calming him in some language and gestures totally alien and totally un-Spanish.
Meanwhile, I could hear an ominous tread on the path behind us. The other occupants of the cave could hear it too and, following some more quick conversation, we all beat a retreat to a dark corner of side tunnel.
The monstrous robot who until recently wore the flesh and clothes of Miss Bray stalked into the cave. It scanned the area as if it could track me by the smell of my fear. Mr. Spider shot forward and to the right making the thing stumble as he emitted a sticky silken thread from his bulbous gland onto the thing’s legs. He scrabbled around the thing faster than it could rotate its torso, eventually rendering it immobile with his sticky excretion.
Meanwhile, the modest Miss Fly buzzed her way behind the monstrosity’s head and squeezed her way into its corpus at the neck joint. Soon the robot’s eyes lost their luminance and its head slumped forward. When I thought it safe, I crept out of the tunnel but was reluctant to get too close to the former teacher.
Mr. Spider led Ramos and I to the back entrance of the cave, explaining that the fly was an electrician and part-time interior designer and she thought that the web-covered robot would make a great lamp stand in the dimly lit cavern. After extracting our promise of silence regarding his infidelity, the spider turned and crawled back down the tunnel as we climbed out of the back-entrance into a quiet street.
Just then a car pulled up in front of us, its passenger door sliding open with a sighing hiss. Ramos turned to face me and with an almost imperceptible nod, he quirked the corner of his mouth, turned, and got into the car. As its door slid closed and the car sped off, I turned towards home.
I knew I would be seeing a lot more of Ramos.