The Academy (41 page)

The door to Special Collections was wide open.

Ed stopped. He had opened the door just a crack.

And there was no one else on this floor except him.

The room beyond the open door was like a black maw. Waiting.

“Hello?” he called.

There was no answer, no sound, but he thought he felt, coming from within that darkness, a soft wind, like an exhaled breath, carrying that foul odor he had smelled in the first second after he’d opened the door.

He didn’t have time to fool around. The librarian could be back from the office at any moment. Either he was going to do this thing or he wasn’t. Steeling himself, prepared to run away at the slightest hint of danger, he approached the open door, reached his hand around the side of the jamb and felt for a light switch. He thought for a moment that he wasn’t going to find one. But then his fingers touched what felt like a rounded knob, and he turned it.

Lights flickered on.

He walked inside.

The smell wasn’t as bad as he’d first thought. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t unbearable. It was a damp scent, more like must or mold than the odor of rotting flesh that his mind had first conjured. He stepped forward slowly. The room was big, much bigger than he would have expected, given that this was the library’s northernmost extremity. He’d anticipated finding a narrow chamber that ran the length of the building, but the windowless room in which he found himself was a perfect square larger than any of the school’s classrooms.

And it contained only a single wooden bookcase.

Ed walked over and perused the titles on the shelves. There were no call letters, nothing to indicate they were library books, and they were all part of a set, not only bound in the same black leather as the volume on Mrs. Fratelli’s desk, but imprinted with the same red-embossed title:
The Academy.
Intrigued, he pulled one randomly from the middle of the second shelf. The photo on the cover was of—

The playground he and Brad had seen in the fog.

Like the picture on Mrs. Fratelli’s book, it was old and sepia-toned, and while there were no children visible and it had been taken on a clear day, he recognized immediately the placement of the swing set and slide, the monkey bars and teeter-totter. In fact, the photograph appeared to have been taken from exactly the same angle at which he and Brad had stood. He opened the cover, flipping quickly through the pages. The volume was a yearbook, of sorts. Although it certainly wasn’t the type of yearbook meant for students. It seemed more like a yearlong documentation of a school’s inner workings aimed at some future generation. Titles of chapters included “Administration,” “Instruction” and “Discipline.”

There were photos as well, and he paused to glance at a few of them. One showed a scowling, heavily bearded man wearing antiquated clothes who looked as though he would have been just as at home on a whaling ship or a judge’s bench. The ID line underneath read: “Principal Hawkes.”

Principal Hawkes?

Ed stared for a second at the hard dark eyes of the man. He could see no resemblance, but coincidence or not, the fact that there’d been another Principal Hawkes sent chills down his spine. He continued turning pages. There was another picture of the playground. It was occupied this time, but the barely clothed children playing desultorily on the equipment looked battered and bruised as well as poor, and even through the blurred focus of the primitive photograph, Ed could see what appeared to be bleeding wounds on the arm of one rag-clad boy.

Toward the back of the book was a picture of the schoolhouse, an old-fashioned
Little House on the Prairie
building. What caught his attention in this one was the background: rolling hills in front of far-off mountains. He would have thought nothing of it but for the fact that he recognized that view. Although the hills were bare grass and had no buildings on them, they were the hills above Brea, and the mountains behind were the San Bernardinos.

It was the same view he saw daily from the PE field.

The school in the photograph was Tyler.

A long, long time ago.

As far as he could discern with his quick perusal, the name of the school was mentioned nowhere, but he didn’t have time to read the book in detail. The librarian could return at any time, and whatever happened, he didn’t want to get caught in here. He put the volume back and counted the titles on the top shelf. Twenty-five. There were six shelves altogether, which meant there were 150 volumes here. If one volume represented one year, the school’s history went back 150 years.

But they’d been told that Tyler High had been founded in 1950.

That’s what the plaque at the front of the school said as well.

Maybe that’s when it became a high school, he rationalized. Before that, perhaps, it had been some sort of K-through-twelve institution.

Or
academy
.

Whatever the hell that meant.

He promptly reached up and took out the very first book. The photo on the cover of this one was of that bearded man—

Principal Hawkes

—and once again he was glowering, staring into the camera with a hard angry glare. Ed took a look behind him at the doorway to make sure no one was coming, then began flipping through pages. John Joseph Hawkes was apparently the principal’s name, and Ed made a note of it, intending to go online later and see what he could discover about the man.

There were fewer photos in this book, but there were several drawings, and from what he could tell, they were John Hawkes’ sketches of the school and proposed future expansions. The man was nothing if not ambitious, and in addition to the one-room schoolhouse, he envisioned what appeared to be an entire community built around his ever-growing Academy. Ed glanced at some of the accompanying text. From what he could tell, the focus of the Academy and the surrounding utopian community was to be three-pronged: spiritual, mental and physical. That meant that students and the adults they would grow into were expected to keep themselves fit spiritually, mentally and physically, according to John Hawkes’ rigid standards. Ed didn’t know about the spiritual aspect, but the descriptions of “physical activity” and “mental activity” made him think of the sports complex and the library—two locations on campus where strange occurrences seemed to be concentrated.

He wished he could stay here and read all these volumes all the way through, but time was running out. Mrs. Fratelli could show up at any moment. He quickly flipped through the rest of the book, skimming it. In a chapter titled “A Spiritual Education,” he read that John Hawkes stressed the importance of teaching religion in school, although
what
religion was a mystery,since the references to it that Ed read all focused on the appeasement of ghosts. The man also seemed to claim some sort of divine right. From what Ed could tell, John Hawkes believed he had been chosen by God to educate the youth of the United States. He had established the Academy, he was its sole director and after his death the job could be handed down only to his descendants.

Ed frowned.

John
Hawkes?

Jody
Hawkes?

Could it be?

He didn’t have time to think about it. In another chapter, “The Eternal Academy,” Ed saw that John Hawkes believed his school would last forever, that God had willed it to be so and that the increasing number of graduates and their offspring would eventually spill over into other communities, other states, until their influence was overwhelming and impossible to ignore.

Weird,
he thought, and put the book away. On impulse, he bent down and took the last volume from the bottom shelf. This cover photo was in color and showed Tyler as it looked today. He flipped the pages, saw pictures of teachers he knew and kids he recognized. He stopped on a chapter titled “The Charter.”

“Obtaining charter status for the Academy is the top priority,” he read. “Independence will allow for the reinstitution of the Academy’s original curricula and will enable us to reach our ultimate objective.”

He heard a noise behind him.

Someone was on the second floor.

Ed swiftly replaced the book. Hurrying, he turned off the light and shut the door, moving quickly but quietly, making a special effort at the last second to muffle the inevitable click when the latch slipped into place. Once out of the alcove, he stopped, listened. He didn’t hear anything, but that meant shit. He was pretty sure someone was up here.

He just didn’t want to run into whoever it was.

Especially if it was Mrs. Fratelli.

The least likely path for a person to take would be around the west side of the floor, where the unused reference desk and the small room with the old micro-fiche reader were located. Everyone usually came down one of the center aisles or along the wall with the study carrels. He quickly made his way between the stacks.

And almost ran smack into Mrs. Fratelli.

It was pure luck that he didn’t scream. The librarian looked at him with her unchanging expression, at once dead-eyed and severe. “I came to see what you were doing. I heard that you were cleaning something up here. I wasn’t aware that there was a problem.”

“Oh, there’s not,” he said. “I fixed it. I mean, I cleaned it up. It looked worse than it was, and it turned out not really to be anything at all. I was just on my way downstairs to do my shelf reading.”

She stared at him silently. He was aware that he was babbling, probably making no sense and no doubt digging himself into an even deeper hole, but he was not good at thinking on his feet.

“Show me what you did.”

He was scared. Mrs. Fratelli was intimidating under the best of circumstances, and he didn’t like the fact that she seemed suspicious. He wondered if she knew what he’d been doing. He wondered if Ann had said anything about him going into her office.

The second floor was silent.

They were the only ones up here.

Mrs. Fratelli stared at him.

“It’s all cleaned up. Everything’s fine. I really need to start on that shelf reading or I won’t get it done.” He walked away, turning and heading in the opposite direction so she couldn’t see his tense, wincing face. It was a bold gambit and one that paid off. He was prepared at any second to be stopped in his tracks, but she didn’t yell at him, didn’t say a word. She didn’t follow him either, and that made him think that she was going to go back, retrace his steps and try to find out exactly what he had been doing up here.

Was there any way she could tell? Had he made any mistakes? Had he disturbed anything? Had he put everything back in its proper place?

What would she do if she caught him?

Ed was worried and still scared, but he felt he’d been given a new lease on life as he walked down the steps and saw the front door of the library. He was safe now. Even if the librarian came after him, he could escape outside. He was no longer trapped.

He even smiled at Ann as he made his way to the fiction stacks to start on his daily shelf reading.

*

“Check this out, dude.”

Brad looked at the computer screen over Ed’s shoulder. They had Googled “John Tyler High School,” “the Academy” and “John Joseph Hawkes.” Nothing worthwhile had come up for the first two, but after scrolling through page after page of unrelated entries for similar and sometimes not-so-similar names, Ed had finally found some concrete information about John Hawkes.

According to an article on education in frontier California that was published in
American Heritage
magazine in 1956, John Joseph Hawkes was a pioneer in the establishment of standardized instruction in the United States. Now a forgotten figure, he was once hugely influential, having served as an adviser to PresidentFranklin Pierce, an early advocate of universal education. A former army captain, Hawkes later became a minister in some weird offshoot religion that believed in God but not heaven or hell. In its theology, the dead did not go anywhere after death but remained on earth as ghosts. It was Hawkes’ wish that schools be built to accommodate the needs of both the living and the nonliving, since they were destined to coexist in the same physical space.

His religious beliefs, as well as a scandal involving the death of a child at his school, which was alluded to but not spelled out, led to Hawkes’ very public downfall, and he died penniless and unknown in 1865.

Brad straightened up. “That sounds like our guy.” “Anything there we can use?”

“Not really,” Brad admitted.