Leo Gaffney, the assistant principal of Flintridge Academy, had been interviewing candidates for the open English position all week, but by Friday afternoon not a single one of them had returned his calls to sign a contract.

Word’s getting around, Leo thought grimly. If I don’t find someone soon, the district’s going to force me to teach it. Fuck that.

Just then, his telephone intercom blinked red.

“Yes, Ms. Martinez?”

“There’s a John Davis to see you. He’s here about the…position.”

Christ, Martinez, it’s been two years. Give it a rest.

“Send him in, please.”

Leo scanned the oversized calendar on his desk, but did not see a John Davis scheduled for an interview, nor did he recognize the name. In the past, the position had always been filled by someone within the district, most often a veteran teacher who understood the turbulent history of the academy and the nature of its pupils.

Davis was a tall, freshly-scrubbed man of no more than twenty-five, impressively dressed in a striped Divacci suit that sparkled in the afternoon sun slanting through the window. He moved swiftly to the desk and offered the assistant principal a long, firm handshake with just a touch of unnecessary muscle.

The two men sat down.

“Thanks for coming in, Mr. Davis. Do you have a résumé?” Leo asked.

“Right here.” Davis opened a brown leather briefcase and removed a crisp sheet of white linen paper. He handed it to Leo, who studied the résumé momentarily.

“You taught at the Harker School?”

“For one year.”

“You must know Joe Palermo.”

“Social Sciences,” Davis said. “Outstanding teacher.”

“Joe and I play golf every Sunday afternoon,” Leo said, offering a tight smile. “If I gave him a call, what do you think he would say about your teaching methods?”

“I believe he would say I am demanding, but fair. He would say that I have an impressive knowledge of both American and world literature. And he would say that I know how to communicate with troublesome parents.”

“Fair enough. Do you mind me asking, Mr. Davis—why only one year at Harker?”

“I wanted more of a challenge.”

“I’m not sure I understand. Harker is one of the most academically demanding schools in the state.”

“May I speak frankly, Mr. Gaffney?”

Leo shrugged, leaning back in his chair.

“Harker students are the elite, la croute superieure. My fondness for Conrad or Fitzgerald was never going to compete with summer trips to Europe and custom-made Rolex watches.” Davis paused to brush dust from his lapel. “It’s my understanding that Flintridge pupils tend to embrace their education more than the average student. Am I correct?”

“Our state testing scores are through the roof,” the assistant principal confirmed. “Last year we were designated a Blue Ribbon School due to our challenging standards and excellent teaching staff. But you need to understand something, Mr. Davis. If you take this job, you’ll be working with some of our most—”

Leo hesitated. Let the hotshot find out for himself what it’s like. By then he’ll already have signed a contract.“—gifted students,” Leo continued. “While having pupils who actually want to learn is a blessing, it’s not always easy convincing them you’re the authority figure in the classroom.”

Davis chuckled. “I understand,” he said. “I wandered these very same halls not so long ago.”

“You were a student at Flintridge?”

Davis clucked his tongue. “Class of 1999.”

“You don’t look familiar. You said you were in the honors program?”

“I was a quiet pupil, Mr. Gaffney…very self-absorbed. I wouldn’t expect anyone to remember me, let alone the assistant principal.”

Nodding, Leo opened the faculty roster on his desk.

“Mrs. Henry has gone on…sabbatical. You would be taking over her four sections of Literature and Life and one counseling period. You’re okay with that?”

“Very much so.”

Leo handed the résumé back to Davis, who returned it to his briefcase. “I’ll put in a call to the Superintendent of Personnel. You’re hired.”

“Thank you, Mr. Gaffney.”

“Would you like to take a tour of the grounds?”

“I doubt much has changed in seven years,” Davis said.

“Architecturally, no,” Leo said. “But emotionally, we’ve experienced quite an overhaul.”

“You’re referring to the school shooting?”

Leo felt a sudden prickling of sweat on his forehead. Relax. You’re the one who brought it up.

“I am.”

“May I ask—is it true there was more than one shooter? The media was unclear.”

Leo shook his head. “I’m convinced Derek Murphy acted alone. He attended his first morning class, then walked into the middle of campus and shot eleven students before shooting himself in the head,” Leo explained. “Eight of those eleven students died. They didn’t die in a hospital, Mr. Davis. They died here, on my campus. It’s been my job to rebuild this school—emotionally and spiritually—which I think I’ve done quite well.” He stopped, feeling an uncomfortable throbbing in his chest. “But some of our students still need help. Some are clinically depressed. Some have thought about committing violent acts upon others. The district has provided funding for one counseling section, which will be your last period of the day.”

“There are no other counselors on campus?”

“There are,” Leo replied, “but they deal mostly with graduation requirements and scholarships.”

“Mr. Gaffney, were you here on the day of the shooting?” Davis asked.

“Of course.”

“I can’t even begin to imagine it. It must have been terrible.”

“That,” Leo said, glaring at his new hire, “is the understatement of the year.”

After an awkward silence, Leo escorted Davis to the door, where they exchanged false pleasantries about the recent rainy weather and golf.

“Both your English classes and counseling period will be held in wing F, room 54,” Leo said. “You can pick up your key Monday morning.”

“Thank you, Mr. Gaffney.”

Leo waited until Davis had left the office before turning to Ms. Martinez. “Send Maria to room 54 to do a thorough cleaning,” he said, “and make sure she polishes the floor this time.”

They brought the bodies out one by one.

Leo Gaffney was standing across the street, watching as police officers, paramedics and members of the Cincinnati SWAT team ripped apart his school. The dead—they’re just children, they’re just babies, Leo thought—were hidden under stark white sheets beginning to soak through with blood.

What he believed to be brain matter glistened on his shirt.

“She’s dead,” he heard someone say. “Molly is dead.”

“Blood everywhere,” said another. “In the quad, there was a fucking pool of it—”

And the endless parade of newscasters: “A pall of horror has befallen the quiet suburb of Loveland today, after a masked gunman claimed the lives of eight Flintridge Academy students…”

“Authorities believe that Derek Murphy, sixteen, acquired the high-powered shotgun and ammunition from his stepfather’s garage, but no one can say for sure what prompted him to open fire on his classmates as they enjoyed their morning brunch…”

Leo closed his eyes and pretended it was all a dream.

He had known Derek Murphy, but only in passing—shy student, member of the astronomy club, average grades. In the upcoming weeks Leo would learn more about Derek Murphy than he would ever want to know, including the serial-killer trading cards found in the boy’s bedroom. He would read Derek’s poem, “Shattered Dawn,” in the Cincinnati Post. He would learn Derek’s favorite video game was called Paranormal Troopers, and how much he’d wanted to be a police officer when he grew up. And, late at night, after Lucy had gone to bed, he would cry for Derek the same way he cried for Derek’s victims, because he considered them all his children.

Monday, at dawn, Davis rose from bed, showered, shaved, and dressed in his blue Divacci suit. On the drive to work he played “Siegfried’s Death” from Wagner’s Gotterdammerung, an opera he found soothing despite its insistence that the world was ending.

He picked up his room key and curriculum guide from Ms. Martinez in the front office, then headed toward wing F. Flintridge Academy was not an enclosed school, and Davis shuddered in the February cold. As he walked, briefcase in hand, he was surprised to find the corridor almost entirely empty. A handful of students milled about their lockers, but otherwise he was alone. In wing F the corridor grew dim and the wind turned sharp, painful and raw as it whipped against his freshly-shaven cheeks.

His classroom was small, sparse and oddly old-fashioned. There were desks, a table with a wooden chair behind it at the front of the room, and a dusty chalkboard on the front wall. The rest of the walls were stripped clean—no motivational posters or examples of student work—and there was a pungent smell to the room. Davis wondered if a rodent—a rat or a mouse, or perhaps something larger—had become trapped in one of the ceiling panels and expired. He also noticed the recently-polished floor, the fluorescent lights above casting an almost blinding glare into his eyes.

Give it a day, he thought as he wrote his name on the board. Then talk to Gaffney about a room switch.

After the bell rang, his first section of Literature and Life students began filing into the room. They moved with a peculiar sense of urgency, hurrying to their seats and remaining unnaturally quiet. He introduced himself, took attendance, and asked the students if they had ever heard of a Polish writer named Joseph Conrad.

A few pupils raised their hands, but most remained motionless.

“He wrote many novels,” explained Davis, “but, arguably, his most famous is a tiny little book called Heart of Darkness.”

“I read that last year,” a ruddy-faced boy in the front row said. “Doesn’t the whole thing take place on a boat?”

Davis laughed politely. “Nearly,” he replied, “but I don’t want to talk about Conrad’s novels today. I want to talk about his words. You see, like any author, Joseph Conrad believed in the power of words, in what he called ‘the power of sound.’”

“Boring,” droned a girl from the back row.

“Boring?” Davis raised his eyebrows and approached the chalkboard. “Joseph Conrad was not boring. Consider this.” He picked up a stubby piece of chalk and wrote the following lines on the board:

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

“Conrad wrote these words as part of his novel, Under Western Eyes.” Davis explained. “Now what do you make of them?”

“It stinks like dead rat in here,” another boy said, which caused a stir of nervous laughter from the class.

“Wrong answer,” Davis shot back. “I’ll ask again. And this time I expect intelligent responses, or you can report to Mr. Gaffney’s office. What do you make of Conrad’s words?”

At first there was nothing but the creaky groans of old wooden chairs. Then the ruddy-faced boy slowly raised his hand. So did a girl wearing a Cincinnati Bengals jersey, her eyes lit up with promise.

And Davis smiled.

The next three periods went by smoothly. Davis used different quotations from Conrad for each class, and received a wide array of thoughtful responses. The students showed genuine interest in connecting literature to their own lives, and their new teacher was impressed with their candor and intelligence.

During lunch Davis was again surprised to find the school grounds eerily quiet. Students huddled in small clusters, and whispered rather than talked. As he wandered the campus, munching on apple slices, he was reminded of his own four years at Flintridge. The lonely years, he thought. He had never been bullied, really, but he had never fit in with a particular group either. He’d spent most of the time wandering around school, much like he was doing now, his head buried in Dickens or Twain.

His thoughts drifted toward the school shooting, and he recalled how poorly he had handled the topic with Gaffney. Take it easy. No one knows the right thing to say in situations like those.

With his conversational blunders in mind, Davis returned to his classroom for the last period of the day. He was looking forward to his counseling section, hoping that some of the students would actually seek his advice.

But when the final bell rang his classroom was empty. And he really did smell it then, wafting down from the ceiling: dead rat. Give them a minute. It’s counseling, after all. Maybe they’re allowed to come and go as they please.

Davis turned around and erased the latest Conrad quotation from the board. Chalk dust gathered in his nostrils and he sneezed, once, twice, three times total. He heard a faint shuffling in the room, and turned to face his new student.

Her face was splattered with blood. And an enormous chunk of flesh and bone was missing from the left side of her head.

“Jesus Christ, are you…?” Davis approached the girl, reaching out a tentative hand, when another student—a boy with two gaping holes in his chest—materialized in a desk in the front row. The boy’s face was pale and translucent. A beam of fluorescence shone through his eye holes and lit upon a bloody footprint on the floor.

“Do you kids need a doctor?” Davis shook his head, expecting to hear a rattle inside. “What the hell are you talking about, Davis, of course they need a doctor, get to the phone—”

He heard another noise and spun toward the door.

They were walking—no, not walking, floating…fucking floating!—single-file into the room, some with faces half-blown away, others with severed limbs and bloodied stumps; some with exposed muscle and viscera, others just walking skeletons with rags clinging to their rotted bones. Davis heard awful squishing sounds, as if the floor had morphed into a gelatinous swamp of body fluids. As the students sat down, the entire classroom filled with the metallic stench of blood. The teacher felt himself reeling, spinning, his mind shredded to pieces by what had to be some hellish dream—

What the fuck...what the fuck...what the fuck—spinning, brain whirling, Davis lunged for the telephone on the wall.

“Please,” a girl said, her voice nothing more than a sickly gargle. “Please don’t.”

He tried to find the correct numbers to press on the touch pad, but his hands were shaking, his vision distorted.

Some of the students were groaning.

“Be quiet!” Davis shouted. “I’m trying to call for help!”

“Please, Sir,” came a boy’s voice this time, soft and strangely lilting, “look at us.”

No, no, no call the police call the fire department...don’t look at them... don’t look at them…

“Look at us.”

“Please.”

Davis dropped the phone.

“Please, Sir.”

Davis forced himself to look. Though their faces were rotted, he could detect a distant sadness in their expressions. A boy with a bullet wound in his throat gripped a chewed-down pencil in one fossilized hand. A girl, blood clots in the arteries of her eyes, clung tightly to the tattered remains of a book. Davis glimpsed the title: The Collected Stories of Joseph Conrad.

He counted nine students in all.

“Please,” the girl with the book said, “don’t leave us like all the others have.”

Davis stood up straight and swallowed, trying to moisten his dry throat. The class of corpses stared at him with whatever eyes they had, and Davis was reminded of an expression that had come to him earlier in the day: the lonely years.

Clearing his throat, he asked, “Which one of you is Derek Murphy?”

A skeleton dressed in a filthy camouflage jacket and combat boots stood up in the back row.

“Me, thur,” Derek said, struggling to enunciate each word through rotted teeth.

“Can you tell me…what the hell this is, Mr. Murphy?”

“Ish my fault, thur…but thaay…thaay have forgivun me.” The Derek Murphy skeleton opened his mouth and removed a petrified slug with his hand. “Thaay call ush the Floaterrzz, thur.”

The slug fell to the floor with a sickening plop.

“The Floaters?”

All nine corpses nodded, some with creaking jaws.

“We’re yourr cownn…yourr cownnsling clash,” Derek said.

“And what…” Davis gulped, struggling for the right words. “What exactly do you want?”

Bones clacked upon bones as the students shifted in their seats.

“Someone to listen to us,” a girl with a shattered ribcage finally said.

Davis closed his eyes and opened them again, just to make sure he was not hallucinating.

They’re children, he thought. They’re just lost children.

His head still swimming, he faced the class and took a deep breath. “My name is Mr. Davis,” he began.

Leo glared at Ms. Martinez, who had been standing in the doorway studying her fingernails. “Yes, Ms. Martinez?”

“He hasn’t gone home yet.”

“So what?”

“It’s almost four o’clock. The counseling period ended thirty minutes ago.”

“Maybe he’s grading papers.”

They remained quiet for a spell, listening to the rain rattle against the windows of the office.

“Don’t you think someone should go down there?” Ms. Martinez finally asked.

It ain’t gonna be me, Leo thought.

“I think everything will be fine, Ms. Martinez. Why don’t you go home for the day?”

After everyone had left the building, Leo put on his jacket and turned out the lights in his office. On his way toward the faculty parking lot, he stopped in the darkened corridor leading to wing F. He stared down the corridor for quite some time, waiting for someone to call for help or scream.

Leo waited.

He heard nothing except the falling rain…and the faint, peaceful sound of a teacher talking to his students. 

The End

Josh Hancock, jhancock16@comcast.net, who wrote “The Floaters,” is an English instructor at West Valley Community College in Saratoga, CA. He published his first novel, Between the Rain, in 2001, and is currently working on an illustrated horror novel titled Claw. His 2003 documentary, Cabin 28: The Keddie Murders, has reignited interest in one of Northern California’s most bizarre unsolved homicides. He lives in San Jose with his wife, Angeline.