THE PROJECT

Jonathan Butcher

 

“…and it goes ‘Pew! Pew!’ whenever da dog comes near!” said 11-year-old Martha-May. Her braces glimmered as she smiled proudly at her invention.

Normally, Miss Chesterfield found the girl adorable, but the morning’s uninspired science fair had taken its toll. The teacher was counting the minutes until lunch break, when she would nip across the road to the Twin Fountain Tavern for a couple of ports to help get her through the afternoon.

It was revealing that Martha-May’s dog detector was the most impressive project so far. The pictures in her project folder revealed that she had simply attached a toy gun with a magnetised sensor to her pet’s collar, and placed the receiver next to the mutt’s food cupboard so that it bleeped whenever the pet padded close by, which it was not allowed to do. The dog detector could hardly be called a scientific experiment, but it was certainly better than the cavalcade of other shite the rest of the class had presented.

Come on, lighten up, she told herself. It’s quite funny, really.

Most students had grasped the importance of forming their title like a question, but few had hypothesised or concluded their investigations.

Little Samuel Bryan, with his bowl haircut and food-stained jumper, had handed Miss Chesterfield a folded A3 piece of pink card with the title, “How molldy does bread go aftr too months?” When the teacher had opened the card, she had found the green-and-grey remnants of a slice of a Warburtons loaf taped to the right-hand fold. Unsurprisingly, Samuel’s grade had matched his output.

Meera Luthra had offered up an enlightening investigative project entitled, “What are the noises coming from my mummy’s bedroom?” While hardly indicative of mistreatment, Meera’s findings and blurred-yet-evocative photographs had convinced Miss Chesterfield that a phone call to the girl’s mother was in order.

Peter Horváth’s work (“What is the effect of sugar on a cup of pee?”) had consisted of two labelled mugs sealed with cling film, each of which contained a yellow-orange fluid, one apparently pre-sweetened. A sheet of paper beside them bore the scrawled words, “Try them and see.” Miss Chesterfield had offered Peter the option to either follow his own suggestion or accept a week’s worth of extra homework; he had opted for the latter.

There were only two disasters left to view before Miss Chesterfield could dash off for an alcoholic distraction. The class, arranged in three rows of desks, had remained obediently quiet during the first few unveilings, but were now restless.

Miss Chesterfield couldn’t blame their frustration: most of these kids had started secondary school just a few months back, and the system was already treating them like rejects. Miss Chesterfield specialised in Art and Photography, but seeing as this class was considered to have the lowest ability for Science in their year, it wasn’t even mandatory for their teacher to be scientifically trained. Though she tried to inspire them, Miss Chesterfield felt that these children were likely to float through school on a wave of detentions and condescension, before living off the minimum wage or the benefits system.

They irritated and exhausted her, but Miss Chesterfield took her responsibility seriously and felt a deep affection for each of them.

Well, perhaps all but one.

“Hi Amanda,” Miss Chesterfield said to the penultimate pupil, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl with a skew-whiff fringe. Beside her, at the final desk, skulked Miss Chesterfield’s least favourite student.

“And what have you got here?” Miss Chesterfield asked. She glanced sideways at Ross Bolton, the last boy, who wore his usual sneer. There was something different about him today–something Miss Chesterfield liked even less. On his desk, Ross’s project was a lumpy mystery shrouded by a dirty grey blanket.

“I got an orange,” Amanda said. “An’ a Kit-Kat.”

Before Miss Chesterfield could enquire, the grey blanket covering Ross Bolton’s project jerked. Miss Chesterfield looked at Ross, and detected an odd blend of challenge and pride in his expression.

Ross lived on a farm at the far edge of the village. He was taller and broader than the rest of the class, and two full years older, as he had been held back not once but twice. This was Miss Chesterfield’s first time teaching the boy, and had been warned by the other teachers that although he would attend her classes irregularly, she should never underestimate his prowess for disruption. Mr Graves had told her that Ross was bullied during his first year at the school, and his classmates’ jeers had taken their toll and turned him insolent, vicious and distant.

“Ross Bolton, is something the matter?” she asked.

“No, Miss,” Ross replied, his smile unpleasantly wide. She hadn’t noticed at first, but his temples were glistening with sweat.

The blanket was still again. Miss Chesterfield frowned and stepped towards Ross’s table, abandoning little Amanda’s orange and Kit-Kat mystery. She often had to remove him from the classroom on the rare days he turned up. He was the kid who had introduced his classmates to the horrors of the internet video, 1 girl 1 spanner. He was also the student who had brought a bottle of amyl nitrate into class and offered it to Megan Watts, a girl born with a hole in her heart.

It was this history, plus the expression on Ross’s face, that made Miss Chesterfield take hold of the grey blanket and pull it from the table to reveal … a baby.

Half the class cooed. A handful laughed. Amanda leaned over with an “Awwwwww.” There was a scrape of chair legs as Ross’s classmates adjusted themselves to get a good look.

The hairless infant was of indefinable gender, owing to its very young age and the fact that it wore nothing but a nappy. It lay on its back on Ross’s desk, knees curled up to its stomach, hands gently gripping its own heels. It appeared to be asleep, eyes pinched shut and chubby cheeks inflating and deflating with each dream-soaked breath. It snuffled calmly, yawning as it dozed.

“Ross … Bolton,” Miss Chesterfield said. “Do you realise how irresponsible this is? How one single movement could have sent the child sprawling onto the hard floor? Is this some kind of sick joke?”

She stepped towards the desk, planning to sweep the child up into her arms, but Ross’s reaction stopped her: he stumbled away, knocking his chair over backwards with a wooden thud.

“Ross, grow up!” Miss Chesterfield seethed.

The class was stunned silent by her rage.

Miss Chesterfield lowered her voice. “You are a blight on this class and school, Ross.” She watched him, baffled by his apparent nervousness but too furious to question why. “Am I to assume that this is your sister? Your two-month-old sister?”

Ross nodded frantically. “Shannon.”

The teacher caught his eyes and saw fear.

Must know that he’s gone too far this time.

“And your mother, no doubt, has no idea that she has gone?”

Ross shook his head.

Miss Chesterfield hesitated. She held a low opinion of Ross’s short, rotund farmer’s wife mother, following a tense encounter with her at a parents’ evening the month previous. Mrs Bolton had seemed distracted and perhaps disinterested – almost anaesthetised – but Miss Chesterfield had not detected malice in her. She had carried with her an air of resignation, as if she was helpless to alter her teen son’s behaviour.

Miss Chesterfield would have loved to have engaged the woman, maybe asking what it was like to be married to a farmer, or perhaps even enquiring about the lights that sometimes glowed above the family’s fields late at night, but the teacher had failed to build even a trace of rapport.

Still shell-shocked by the presence of the baby, Miss Chesterfield asked, “Ross, where is your mother? How on earth did you get your sister away from her?”

Ross had no time to reply.

The next few moments became a single block of time. A mechanical burst of white noise filled the room. The class erupted with shrill children’s screams.

There was a flurry of movement as Ross’s tiny sister leapt above the desk, lifted by a blur of glittering, chopping metal. Beneath her, the grey desk was suddenly red.

Tables upended.

Chairs crashed.

Ross remained frozen, cowering.

Miss Chesterfield backed away towards the interactive board wall.

Ross’s sister squalled, eyes squeezed tight. She still faced the ceiling, her chubby arms and legs twitching, but although she cried out like a pained infant she no longer resembled one. Half a dozen pneumatic, arachnid legs had burst from the baby’s sides, their fleshy sources gushing red and their sharp ends digging splintered holes into Ross’s blood-sprayed desk. The baby’s head, howling with infant agony, jerked forwards, its neck now at a right angle to its torso.

Baby Shannon, Ross’s bizarre science project, opened her eyes, and their whites had become a glowing, spectral blue.

Miss Chesterfield’s limbs were immobile and her mind blank. While most of her 20-odd pupils had backed away against the opposite wall, coated with pencil pictures and cartoonish collages of the human anatomy, Peter Horváth had broken away and was tip-toeing towards the exit at Miss Chesterfield’s left.

Ross’s sister’s head rotated a full 180 degrees, screeching at the crunch of her own neck joints.

Peter was only motionless for a moment before he dashed for the door.

The creature, Ross’s “Project,” bounded from the desk and landed on Peter with a clatter. The boy collapsed beneath it and the sharp ends of two of its legs skewered his upper arms.

The class, including Ross and Miss Chesterfield, screeched. The Project’s head turned, surveying the room, and the baby yowled as its crown seemed to bulge.

Peter’s legs and impaled arms thrashed, his face an expression of abject terror.

The Project’s fontanelle split open. A blood gout hit Peter’s face. Amongst the meaty gobbets that dropped from the Project’s skull, a thick, almost phallic, metal rod climbed the air. Hinged joints allowed the rod’s needle-like point to curve in towards Peter’s head like a jerky, creaking scorpion’s tail.

Peter uttered one word – “Matka” – and the contraption snapped down, plunging into the child’s forehead. Peter’s eyes rolled back, welling with blood.

There was a clang of machinery and a wet glug, and Miss Chesterfield finally reacted. This was her class and she was their ward. She gripped the desk closest to the Project – Amanda’s, complete with its enigmatic orange and Kit-Kat – and overturned it, directly onto the creature. The metal legs skittered under the furniture and the infant’s head wailed, but Miss Chesterfield refused to feel pity. She had seen enough horror films– which she maintained were essential preparatory viewing for anyone contending with the education system – to know that sympathy for a demon was foolhardy. The Project’s insectile limbs clanged against the floor. Miss Chesterfield lifted the desk again and slammed its edge down against the child’s torso, aiming to squash it like a bug.

The Project shrieked, a shockingly human noise, and fell silent. Miss Chesterfield released the desk. The Project’s mechanical legs curled inwards and the rod withdrew from Peter’s skull with a moist slop.

Peter and the Project were motionless.

The classroom door burst open and the head teacher, Mrs Stone, pounded inside. “What in God’s name is … oh.”

“Mrs Stone, please help me take the children into the hall,” Miss Chesterfield said, her confident tone belying her trauma. “There’s been an … incident. I’ll call an ambulance.”

Mrs Stone, a large, sturdy woman with a sharp tongue but a genuine dedication to her pupils, gaped at the blood-soaked room and the two mutilated corpses. She appeared to consider breaking down in tears, opted against it, and in a shuddering voice said, “Children. You heard Miss Chesterfield. Follow me immediately, please.”

They filed out past the demonic Project and its victim: one head teacher and one maudlin queue of weeping, stunned, jittering school pupils.

“Slow down please, Ross,” Miss Chesterfield said as they followed. In the midst of her spent adrenaline she felt a dreamlike urge to comfort, flee and kill the little bastard, all at once. She would call the emergency services soon, but first laid a hand onto the boy’s shoulder. Walking beside him, she hissed, “Now, Ross, in 50 words or less tell me what on Earth is going on.”

Ross looked up at her with shocked eyes. “I can’t tell you.”

“Who said you can’t?”

“The men who came. The men you can’t see. They said that if I fed Shannon this marble they gave me, I’d win the science fair. They said I wouldn’t have to worry about the other kids anymore. Shannon stopped moving so I said that I should get mum, but they said that mum wouldn’t be able to help.”

They had almost reached the expansive main hall, with its sky-high ceiling, echoes and PE equipment. “Which men? And what did they do to your mother?”

“Shannon stopped moving, miss,” Ross said. “But she’s alive. She’s alive…”

A voice rang from the double doors at the end of the corridor. “Have you called the authorities yet, Miss Chesterfield?”

Ross scampered into the hall ahead of the teacher.

Miss Chesterfield fumbled for her mobile. Her voice was high and trembling when she spoke. “I need an ambulance. And the police. And…oh God…”

The operator tried to hustle details out of her, but conceded when Miss Chesterfield reported that two children were dead.

In the hall, Mrs Stone had taken charge. The children sat on the floor, some whispering. There were already two helper teachers, one male and one female, comforting the more traumatised-looking pupils. Mrs Stone told the children that she had sent out a group message, letting their guardians know that they should come to the school as soon possible. She said that if she didn’t hear back, she would speak to each child individually. After explaining this, she and Miss Chesterfield moved to one corner.

In a hushed voice, Mrs Stone asked, “Is an ambulance on its way?”

Miss Chesterfield nodded.

“Okay. Well just before we alert the other teachers, can you explain to me what happened?”

Miss Chesterfield said, “Not … not really. I can’t get my head around it.” She fumbled for words. “I … I think I should take a moment, please. Are we going to close the school for the day?”

Mrs Stone frowned. “Miss Chesterfield,” she said, quietly. “Lauren. Think about what you are saying. Of course we will.”

Miss Chesterfield nodded. “Yes. Sorry. I’ll tell the other junior-end teachers.”

“Lauren,” Mrs Stone said, taking the teacher by the wrist. Her face had dropped, the façade of cold authority gone for a moment. “Do you really think…”

“Let me do this,” Miss Chesterfield said, shaking off her superior’s hand. “It will help straighten my head, before the police arrive.”

Mrs Stone’s rocky exterior returned. “Fine. I’ll have Mr Ubrecht—“ She nodded to one of the helper teachers. ”—alert the seniors, and you’ll tell the junior classes. Make sure to lock your classroom before coming back, please.”

On unsteady legs, Miss Chesterfield crossed the hall. Theirs was a small village secondary school with around 500 students, and at the junior end there were just ten classes to clear. First, though, she would cover the slit of glass in the door of her own room and draw the blinds.

Her legs were firm as she approached her door. She could hear the classes from either side continuing as normal, such had been the brevity of the incident with the Project and the numb, dumb response from her students in its aftermath. She steeled herself. Through the window in the door she could see the splashed red of Ross’s desk just feet away from the entrance.

The stink hit her as soon as she pushed the door.

Ross’s Project was waiting, poised on new legs, the points of which stood in a lake of gore.

It had changed; it had grown.

Miss Chesterfield choked on a breath, unable to scream or run.

Peter’s corpse was now entwined with the baby’s spiderlike frame, with tiny Shannon’s body still on top facing the ceiling, like the pinnacle of a monstrous tower. What had been the Project’s legs now pierced Peter’s midriff, like protruding iron ribs. These were now dwarfed by six much larger appendages that had sprouted from Peter’s blood-soaked midriff and thighs –segmented, dextrous, and no doubt lethal. While baby Shannon’s head watched with luminous ghost-blue eyes, Peter grimaced from the front of its twinned form, neck twisted in a half-circle to look ahead. Peter’s eyes now shared the same cold incandescence of those of the original host, but his face was stricken, agonized.

With a clanking screech, the Project charged.

Miss Chesterfield skipped backwards and tried to yank the entrance shut, but the door-closer slowed the portal’s movement, fighting the teacher’s efforts. Two metal limbs burst from the gap, writhing and thrusting like pistons. One snagged Miss Chesterfield’s arm as she struggled to seal the door, slashing a deep furrow through her sleeve and into the flesh below.

She gasped, clutching her wrist, releasing the door and stumbling away.

The Project slammed the door wide, its scowling heads staring their blue gazes at Miss Chesterfield. The baby’s head was now as tall as her chest, and the rod that protruded from its forehead flexed backwards and forwards threateningly. Miss Chesterfield was more horrified by the prospect of the harm it could do to the students than to her.

“Please,” she breathed, unsure which part of the flesh-and-metal form she was addressing.

She was about to dash to her left to the nearest classroom door when the Project lunged. She cried out as it collided with her, toppling beneath it. The Project’s new legs hit the floor with a violent clank. Pain registered in her arms and spine, but it was Peter’s tortured face, inches from hers, that filled her with terror. The boy, apparently a mere puppet to the metal within, stretched open his mouth. Blood ran in streams from the lips as two rods, narrower and more intricate than the baby’s, emerged from Peter’s throat, unfurling as they stretched out to meet her.

Though the Project had knocked Miss Chesterfield over it had not pinned her as it had Peter. She wriggled on her back, desperate to evade the thing’s glinting, robot proboscises.

The doors to her left and right opened in unison and the Project lurched mercifully back. It spun and faced the other wall, giving Miss Chesterfield the chance to move out of its reach. She saw baby Shannon’s head rise higher, snakelike, its neck elongating a few inches to sweep between the two newly opened doors.

Mr Graves, a pot-bellied History teacher with a wisp of cotton candy for hair stood gaping to its left, while Mr Ahmad, a stern but caring Maths teacher back-stepped the room to the right and closed the door.

The Project shifted left with a pummel of heavy legs. Mr Graves’ double chin shook in dumbstruck horror. The Project rose onto its back legs and loped towards him, running him through with its forelegs. The class behind him filled with students’ cries as the Project’s limbs thrust wide apart, effortlessly splitting the teacher from shoulder to waist. He fell through what appeared to be a crimson mist, ribcage and shoulder joints exposed to the air. The Project trampled him as it bulldozed inside.

Miss Chesterfield bellowed, “Get out! Everyone, out!”

She turned to the wall behind her, ignoring the class’s chaotic howls, slamming of desks and wet sounds of impact. She slammed her knuckles into the fire alarm.

The siren sounded, rattling her eardrums. Classroom doors opened and bored-looking students began to file out, the sounds of chaos from Mr Graves’ class having been muffled by the sealed door. Upon seeing Miss Chesterfield, her eyes wet with tears and her front wet with blood, the children soon recognised that the alarm was not a drill and the school was no longer a haven. While at first some stopped and stared at her curiously, it only took the scream of one girl with a blue-tipped bob to turn the queues into an unruly mob.

One tall boy pushed the boy in front, who collided with the ginger girl ahead. She turned and hit him on the arm, and the students across the hall who watched began to emulate the violence. Some saw Miss Chesterfield and tried to run or pushed their friends, while others still were hit by the those who jostled with their peers.

In moments the hallway became a bellowing commotion, children’s cries competing with the howling fire alarm, whose own volume was challenged by shouting teachers and assistants fighting to regain control over the pupils. Miss Chesterfield’s mind was in chaos, each alternative battling for dominance. The classrooms emptied and the corridor filled and swiftly bottle-necked with frightened, struggling kids.

“Stop fighting!” Miss Chesterfield heard a teacher–probably Mr Jackson–yell, but the students were already lost to their panic.

Amidst the bobbing heads and thrusting arms, Miss Chesterfield saw a tall, freckled girl drop. Another nearby child tripped a second later, this one unidentifiable, but judging by the movements of the school-uniform-clad bodies they were both stepped upon without regard.

The shoulder-high mob moved like a churning tide and Miss Chesterfield felt herself dragged along. She was ploughed forwards, ears shrieking with the siren and the yelling of children and bewildered teachers. Realising her priority, she managed to haul herself through the packed bodies and grasp the handle of Mr Graves’ classroom to keep it closed.

There could only have been 200 students there in the junior end, but it was a marvel how full a school corridor could become once hysteria took hold.

Tugging the door back against the jamb, Miss Chesterfield saw through the portal’s glass strip that the violent energy of the children in the corridor seemed tranquil compared with what was taking place in the classroom. Inside, she saw a thrashing maelstrom of raw red flesh and undulating metal. She almost fell, but her determination to guard those she had been employed to protect kept her head clear.

She turned back to the corridor. The initial rush had slowed and the crowd of children and teachers had become less dense. Many had already filtered through to the main hall.

The window in the door burst open behind her and a lacerating pain ripped through her upper arm. She kept the door pulled to the frame and avoided allowing whatever the Project had become to escape.

An arm, slick with spilled blood and perhaps motor oil, had broken through the window. All that stopped it emerging entirely was the pair of children’s heads that jutted from where its shoulder should have been, which had lodged in the space between the broken glass and the door. Their blue eyes blazed yet appeared somehow numb, defeated by whatever horrendous force throbbed and pulsed through the Project’s gore-soaked machinery. Stubby fingers gripped Miss Chesterfield’s hair and yanked her forwards. She was flung sprawling from the door, which broke open and revealed the Project’s newly contorted form.

Finally, the children’s screams overwhelmed the still-shrieking fire alarm.

The Project no longer appeared arachnid, but more like a vast, blood-streaked caterpillar of metal and distended flesh. Its highest point, still the upward-facing shape of Ross’s baby sister, reached the height of the door frame. Behind it, Miss Chesterfield saw taut skin scatter-shot with small limbs and grimacing children’s features, while its ragged metal sections shuddered and flexed like steampunk nightmares.

The Project reared and the assembly of children seemed to halt, like a collective drawn breath.

The beast thundered forwards like a living freight train.

The deafening noise of the Project cut through both the fire alarm and the subsequent screams. Something burning hot ploughed into Miss Chesterfield and she was thrown into the crowd. She landed on the floor on her back, surrounded by pupils who had begun to flee pell-mell.

The world became a cacophony of shearing flesh and earthquake-like tremors. At last her mind switched to self-preservation and she spun onto her front and began to crawl. Grey coils and mutant once-human formations flashed above her, the Project’s lethal mandibles clattering on all sides as she pulled herself along between children’s stomping feet.

Gore slopped the ground like slaughterhouse debris.

A child’s scalp, trailing a braided blonde pigtail, landed on her shoulder before sliding to the floor in her wake.

A boy with red hair huddled before Miss Chesterfield, crying inconsolably. She saw a serpentine strip of metal noose his throat. The boy’s reddened eyes bulged as the Project lifted and impaled him with a metal lance that extended from its flank; one more organic addition to the writhing metal mass.

A bloody trainer crushed Miss Chesterfield’s hand just as a lightning bolt of pain tore into her calf. She tried to keep crawling but found she could not move. She swung her head back: her calf was nailed to the floor by the point of one of the Project’s countless legs.

Above her, a child’s face mounted within a pulsating metal underbelly screamed. Miss Chesterfield screamed in return, lost to the madness.

The Project’s leg rose, unsheathing itself from her calf, and unconsciousness swallowed her.

When Miss Chesterfield awoke, she was first hit by the silence.

Gore and discarded limbs littered the ground.

The Project was nowhere to be seen.

“They told the truth.”

She felt drained and her vision was a blur, but even in her daze she knew who had spoken.

Ross sounded smug: “They said I’d win, and I reckon I did.”

The ground shook suddenly beneath her spine, and something far-off rumbled.

“It’s an experiment, they said,” Ross continued. “It wants the young people, but they promised that it wouldn’t touch me. I put the marble in Shannon’s mouth to find out what would happen, so that makes me a scientist.”

Miss Chesterfield squinted up into the light. Ross leered. She wanted to move, but it felt as though the world was lying on top of her.

From the corners of her vision she saw a row of tall, looming figures lining the corridor. Each seemed to wear a long black trench coat and a wide-brimmed hat, and each face seemed composed entirely of shadow.

The men you can’t see, she remembered. The lights above the farm.

“Don’t ask who they are,” Ross said. “They started visiting ages ago, and they always said I don’t need to know who they are. They said I don’t need to go to school anymore, because they’d teach me everything I need to know. They said that nothing else matters”

Something distant beyond the school walls surged and bellowed.

“Let’s call my project, ‘Can It Be Stopped?’” Ross said, with a sunken twinkle in his eyes. “My hypothesis is No.”