The Headmaster

The Headmaster

By Tiffany Reisz

Dedicated to beautiful magical North Carolina and the beautiful magical people who live there.

Chapter One

She’d never make it to Chicago alive.

Not unless she got some coffee. Stat.

Bone-weary from driving, Gwen pulled over and parked in front of a small diner at the edge of tiny Andover. The August air felt heavy with the heat, and when she inhaled she caught the scent of the nearby Appalachian Mountains in her nose. Everything smelled so warm, moist and alive—the rich, dark soil, the beech and maple trees, the leaves taking their last breath of summer… So much life and beauty around her, and yet Gwen wasn’t part of it.

She took her phone out of her messenger bag and snapped a quick picture of the mountains that rose up behind the town. Gwen stepped inside the diner and fifty years into the past. It looked like it had been plucked from 1960—or at least a sanitized version of 1960—with the chrome stools that sat belly-up to a white-and-red bar and the waitresses in their paper hats and white dresses. The Rolling Stones crooned “As Tears Go By” from a gleaming jukebox. She couldn’t hear the song without thinking of her father singing it to her as a lullaby twenty years ago.

Inside the bathroom, Gwen noted the movie posters hanging in the stalls—
Bye Bye Birdie
and
Dr. No.
Conrad Birdie versus James Bond—she knew who she’d put her money on. Back out in the diner, she ordered two cups of coffee—one for here and one to go. As she sipped, she mentally calculated how far she’d come and how far she had left to go.

That morning she’d left Savannah, Georgia, at 10:00 a.m. She’d driven four-and-a-half hours—over three hundred miles. She’d probably sleep in Kentucky somewhere tonight, which would leave about four-hundred miles to go to get to her friend Tisha’s in Chicago tomorrow night. And then…what? Try to be the best houseguest ever while she job-hunted for a teaching position. Hopefully she would get one quickly and wouldn’t have to spend the next six months sleeping on Tisha’s couch.

“Miss?” A man who had to be in his mid-sixties sat two stools away from her and summoned the waitress.

“What can I get you, sir?” the waitress asked.

“Directions? Out to old Marshal? It’s been fifty years since I’ve been to the school. Forgot the way.”

The waitress smiled kindly at him. She patted the back of his weather-beaten hand.

“I’ll draw you a map, sir. Easy to get lost out there.” She took a pen from her pocket and doodled a map on the napkin while the older man watched and nodded. “And you’ll turn here. Be careful, because they took the old sign down.”

“Thank you, miss,” the man said and gave her a weak smile. She handed him half a dozen napkins—white with red trim, just like the diner counters.

“You take these with you. You might need them.”

He nodded solemnly and put the red-trimmed napkins in his pocket.

Gwen watched the scene. Maybe the waitress had pegged him for the sentimental type. Curious about the school, Gwen pulled her phone back out and searched for “Marshal School” and “Andover, North Carolina.” Nothing came up.

“Don’t even bother,” the waitress said to her. “We’re in a black hole out here—no 3G, no 4G. You have to drive five miles north just to pick up any internet.”

“It’s okay. I was just trying to look up the Marshal School.”

“The Marshal School’s about ten miles from here, right on the edge of town. Boarding school. Progressive, the school says. I just say it’s weird.”

“Weird?”

“Weird.” The waitress nodded. “Rich parents send their kids off to go to a school where they can’t even use their phones? What’s the point of being rich?”

“I guess the point is being rich enough to pay someone else to raise your kids. You know if they’re hiring?”

“The Marshal School? It’s usually hiring. Goes year-round so teachers get burned out there pretty fast. You a teacher?”

“I am,” Gwen said. “I was a TA at Savannah State. I didn’t get any classes for this fall.”

“You want to go teach some crazy high school students, Marshal’s the place for you.”

“I’ll take any job that’ll have me,” Gwen said.

The waitress tilted her head to the side and gave her a sympathetic look.

“Divorced?” she asked.

Gwen laughed. “No. Just dumped. And even then I can’t blame him. My boyfriend moved to Africa to teach in a village school. Something on his bucket list, he said. I couldn’t afford the apartment by myself and then no classes to teach…”

“Been there,” the waitress said. “Divorced and jobless. Ended up here.” She pointed at the diner. “Nice place. But if they don’t put some modern music on the jukebox soon I’m going to take a golf club to it.”

“I feel like I’m in a time machine,” Gwen said. “James Bond watched me pee.”

“What a perv,” the waitress said, smiling. “And this whole damn town is stuck in 1964, but that’s okay. The present wasn’t all that kind to us. Maybe the past will take better care of us—you and me both.”

Gwen thanked the waitress and finished her coffee. She paid her bill and followed the old man out of the diner.

“Sir?” she asked, and the man turned around. “Can I look at that map of yours for just a second?”

“Of course, young lady.” He gave her the napkin map and she took a picture of it with her cell phone.

“Thank you, sir. Why are you headed to Marshal?” she asked him when she returned the map.

“Went there a long time ago. Graduated in 1963, so I’m a lucky one. Thought I’d visit some old ghosts. That’s all.” He shoved the map into his suit pocket. “You be safe out there.”

“I will, sir,” she said, not knowing quite why she needed to be safe, but it was good advice in general—advice she planned to take.

As she walked back to her car Gwen considered whether or not she actually wanted to do this…drive out to Marshal and see if they were hiring. The waitress seemed to think they were. Wouldn’t hurt to ask, would it? She didn’t look much like a teacher right now. She had on jeans with brown boots, a brown crewneck shirt and a matching brown suede newsboy cap. At least she had fit right in at the ’60s-themed diner. Cary always said the newsboy hats she wore made her look like a go-go dancer. Well, if the school was as weird as the waitress said it was, maybe they’d appreciate her retro-wear. At best she might end up with a teaching job and not have to drive all the way to Chicago. At worst, nothing would come of it and she was out an hour of her life.

She got back into her car and made sure all her boxes that she’d stuffed into the backseat and passenger seat were still secure. She’d packed everything she owned into her car yesterday and found it all fit. Barely, but it still fit. She was twenty-five years old, newly single, without a job, both parents were dead and gone, and everything she owned could fit inside a Toyota Camry. So why not go begging for a job at this boarding school in the middle of nowhere?

What did she have to lose?

When she couldn’t think of a single good answer, she turned on her car and headed to Marshal. Gwen pulled up the hand-drawn map on her phone and headed out to the school. The entrance to Lexington Lane was so overgrown with ivy that Gwen missed the turn the first time she passed it. Going five miles an hour, she finally spied the turn-in. She drove two miles through a canopy of trees casting shadows and sunlight onto the road.

“Beautiful…” Gwen breathed as she rounded a corner and the school came into view. Where she’d expected a gleaming state-of-the-art industrial new school, she found a Tudor castle instead rising over moss-covered stone walls standing at least twelve-feet high. The only break in the wall was at the end of the road. The William Marshal Academy was spelled out in wrought-iron lettering at the top of the high arched opening from the road into the school courtyard. At the side of the arch hung the school crest in dazzling silver. She stared at the crest for a long time—she wasn’t sure how long. But something kept her from driving forward and something else kept her from going back.

Fear. She put a name on what held her pinned in place as if a high invisible hand pushed his fingertip to the top of her car. She imagined if she hit the accelerator the wheels would do nothing but spin impotently in the dirt.

Snap out of it,
Gwen ordered herself. She recognized this fear because she’d felt it before. It wasn’t anxiety as the doctors defined. Wasn’t a panic attack. Wasn’t a flashback. It was change. All her life, when she stood hovering on the threshold of a new experience, she froze and trembled thusly. Her first day of college, her first date with Cary, her first night with Cary, her first job teaching… Every time she stepped onto a new path in her life, she’d face the terror of the first step. It was a road in the woods and as solid as it seemed. And yet she might as well be walking on a tightrope across a canyon with no net underneath for all that she trembled, for all that she feared. The unknown lay beyond the gates and beckoned her in and shooed her out, and she didn’t know which message she believed.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw something. A flash of fur and black eyes—it seemed to dive through her car. With a scream, Gwen hit the accelerator, and the car shot forward like a bullet from a gun. The wheels caught gravel and the car slid sideways, and in a second that felt far quicker than a second, metal had twisted, blood dripped and the scent of smoke filled her nostrils. The deer that had done the deed stared at her with blank, alert eyes that did—and yet did not—see her. And with one mighty leap it was gone as quickly as it came.

And so was Gwen.

Chapter Two

Gwen came to in fits and starts. She’d open her eyes only to feel the weight of consciousness pressing back down on her. Back to sleep, it seemed to say, the voice male, imperious and irrefutable. She did as she was told. She could do nothing else.

When she woke up again, she didn’t try to open her eyes. Instead she used her other senses to gauge the damage. She sensed her body was whole and that no tubes or needles ran in or out of any veins. Pain was localized to the side of her head. Nothing else hurt. She wondered if she had a concussion. Did concussions cause hallucinations? She heard improbable dreamlike voices all around her.

First she heard a man’s voice—adult, authoritative and British. British? Yes, his accent was definitely that of an Englishman, proper and educated.

But other voices answered his—younger ones, eager ones, scared but delighted for some reason.

“How did she get here?”
a boy asked.

“I wish I knew,” the man replied.

“Will she live?” came another boy’s voice.

“Can we keep her?” asked another.

“Go back to class,” the man said, and no one dared defy him. “Let her sleep.”

Gwen did sleep again and when she woke once more, she woke fully. She could open her eyes, move her head, and see where she was and how she was.

She seemed to be fine. No broken bones. Few cuts. Few bruises. But where she was…that was the mystery.

She lay in a bed, a grand one with white sheets, an ornate carved walnut headboard, a deep green-and-gold brocade blanket over her and a Tiffany lamp on the end table at her side. A Tiffany lamp and a black rotary phone. Everything about the room she’d woken in declared it was the property and purview of a man.

With a groan of discomfort, Gwen forced herself from the bed. How long had she been in it? Why had she been brought here instead of taken to a hospital? Behind the closed bedroom door hung a polished oval mirror. She looked like herself. She had some bruising around her left cheek and a white bandage had been applied to her temple. When she ran a hand through her hair, slivers of glass came out.

She had her clothes on except for her shoes. Where they’d gone, she had no idea. Carefully she eased the door open and called out a tremulous “Hello?”

No answer.

She retreated into the bedroom again. A door on the opposite side of the bed led to a wood-paneled bathroom, as masculine as the bedroom she’d found herself in. Odd. Whoever lived here must have been an old-fashioned sort. Instead of an electric razor, a straight razor in a case sat on the bathroom counter next to a white-bristled shaving brush. A leather strop, the sort her grandfather had used to sharpen his kitchen knives, hung from a hook on the wall. The bathroom smelled of leather and soap and other pleasant male scents—bergamot, citrus and cedar.

Gwen turned on the tap and drank cold water out of her hands. How long had she been unconscious? She was dehydrated but not enough to be sick from it. Her mouth felt like sand and her head throbbed, but she sensed she would be fine. The bathtub, an old porcelain monster, beckoned to her. She’d love to wash the glass from her hair. She knew she should look for the owner of this bedroom, this bathroom, this…wherever she was, but she’d been in a car accident and had a head injury. She had an excuse to do whatever she wanted, and what she wanted was to get clean.

She filled the bath with warm water, stripped naked and sank into the heat. Sighing with pleasure she submerged herself fully in the water, letting it soak her bloodied hair, her bruised skin. When she rose up again, she felt healed. The wound on her temple was still there. No miracle had occurred, but she did feel better than she would have dreamed she would from something as simple as drinking and bathing in warm water.