The headmaster took a careful step back, then raised his left hand like a conjurer displaying his latest illusion.

“Gentlemen,” he said, his voice quavering with pride, “I give you…the school mascot!”

There was a round of applause from the assembled boys. On the stone slab, Smethwick ’s whole body twisted and shook as he tried to wrench his limbs free.

“No, pleeeaase,” he pleaded. “Let me go! I’m sorry for whatever I’ve done. I’m sorry. What did I do? Tell me! What did I do?”

The headmaster looked at him with what might almost have been pity.

“You, Smethwick, were born into the wrong class.”

Then the creature found at last the source of the blood. Its jaws opened and its mouth expanded and contracted as it swallowed the drops. It tensed its body again, its abdomen lowering until it almost touched the ground, and sprang up onto the slab. I heard Smethwick scream as the thing scuttled across his chest, arched its back, and, with a single scorpion thrust, plunged its tail into Smethwick ’s neck. There was a jet of red that was quickly stopped by the creature’s mouth as, slowly, it sucked the life from the boy. I tried to block my ears from the soft, rasping noise that it made, and I felt my gorge rise as its horrid body began to expand, stretching to store the blood of the unfortunate boy dying beneath it.

At last, the thing was sated. It drew away from Smethwick and staggered slowly onto the slab itself. Smethwick lay still, his eyes open and his face pale. There was a round, bloody hole at his throat. His left hand spasmed once, twice, then was still.

Gingerly, the headmaster lifted the beast by its sides and raised it high into the air, its legs flailing gently and blood dripping from its jaws.

“By this ritual of the bones, we are bonded together, all complicit, all united in the great family that is our class,” he declared. “Generations of men have learned their most valuable lesson from this little creature. The blood of the lower classes is also our lifeblood: without it, we cannot be great, and, if we cannot be great, our country cannot be great. Now, three cheers for the Montague School.”

All of the boys shouted “Hip-hip hooray!” as the headmaster lowered the creature and placed it in a small cage, then handed the cage to Mr. Dickens.

“You know what to do, Dickens,” he said, his voice carrying in the echoing chamber. “In a few days it’ll be skin and bone again, then you can disassemble it and put the pieces back into the boxes.”

Mr. Dickens held the cage away from his body and stared at its occupant, now drowsy and gorged with blood.

“It is the damnedest thing, isn’t it, Head?”

For the first time, what might almost have been disgust showed itself on the headmaster’s face.

“Indeed it is: the damnedest thing. Hyde, you and two boys take Smethwick here and dispose of him. I suggest a walk along the cliffs, but be sure to weight him down before you drop him off. Now, Mr. Bierce will lead the rest of you boys in a chorus of the school song.”

But I didn’t wait to hear it. I ran back to my room and packed my bags, and by morning I was gone. My parents were surprised to see me, and wanted to take me back to the school. My father was angrier than my mother, conscious, I think, of the opportunity that I was rejecting, and the future hardships attendant upon this decision. I cried and screamed, even vomiting with distress, until they relented. I think, perhaps, that my mother guessed something was very wrong, although she never said anything about it and I never told her of what I had witnessed. After all, who would have believed me?

And so a letter was sent to Mr. Lovecraft announcing my withdrawal from Montague. A place was found for me at a local school, one to which every child brought with him his own sandwiches and milk, and in which lice were rumored to be a constant irritant. I was surrounded by those who were like me, and I quickly found my place among them.

One week after leaving the Montague School, the headmaster came to the house for a visit and a talk. My father was at work. My mother gave him tea and scones, but politely declined to return me to his care.

“We’ll be sorry to lose him, Mrs. Jenkins,” he said, as he shrugged on his long blue overcoat. “He could have made a wonderful contribution to the school. New boys are our lifeblood, you know? Will you permit your son to walk me to the gate? I should like to say farewell to him.”

My mother gave me a push in the small of the back, and I was compelled to follow the dark form of Mr. Lovecraft to the garden gate. He paused on the footpath and looked closely at me.

“As I told your mother, Jenkins, we’re sorry to lose you.”

He gripped my shoulder, and, once again, I could feel those fingers working at my flesh.

“But mark my words, Jenkins: in the end, you can’t escape your destiny. One way or another, we’ll have you.”

He leaned in close to me, so near that I could see tributaries of blood in his eyes.

“Because, Jenkins, like all the members of your sturdy, loyal class, you’re full of the stuff that makes Britain great.”

The Furnace Room

The Thibault company once made locomotives and carriages for the railroads, famous names that ran on lines all across the Northeast: green cars for Wicasset and Quebec; green and red for Sandy River; yellow and green for Bridgton and Saco. Then the railroads closed down-first the narrow gauge in the forties, then the standard gauge in the fifties-and the trains from Boston no longer made the journey north. Union Station, once the hub of the rail network in that part of the world, had disappeared from the map, to be replaced by an ugly shopping mall. The only reminder of the great trains that had once proudly left the yards were some disused tracks, their sleepers now rotted and overrun by dark weeds. The Thibault company closed its doors, and its buildings fell into disrepair. Windows were shattered, and holes were punched in roofs. Weeds sprouted in the yard, bursting through cracks in the concrete, while the gutters filled with filth and rainwater streaked the walls. Occasionally, there was talk of knocking the whole place down and building something new and impressive there instead, but the city was in decline and no investor could be found who was willing to pump money into the economic equivalent of an open grave. After all, there were malls being constructed on the outskirts of the city, and businesses were abandoning the center of town in favor of covered streets bathed in artificial light, so that elderly walkers could pretend to fend off mortality without being troubled by either the elements or fresh air.

Then, a decade or so ago, the city stopped dying. Someone with an ounce of intelligence and imagination noticed that the port, with its beautiful old buildings and its cobbled streets leading down to the working harbor, was pretty enough to warrant its preservation. True, not every business had closed up shop and headed for the suburbs. There were old bars, and a couple of general stores, even a diner or two. They soon found themselves side by side with chichi souvenir stores and microbreweries, and pizzerias that offered more than one kind of cheese. There was some whining, of course, and claims that the character of the port had been sacrificed for the tourist dollar, but, truth be told, the old character hadn’t been much to write home about to begin with. That kind of nostalgia tends to come from folks who never had to scrape together nickels and dimes to pay the rent on a bar, or who never opened their store and sat there, all the long day, just for a couple of sales and a side order of chitchat.

Soon there were visitors on the streets for more than half of every year, and the old port became a curious mix of working fishermen and gawping tourists, of those who remembered the bad times and those for whom there were only good times to come. The developments began to expand beyond the natural boundaries of the old port, and it was decided to reopen the Thibault company yard as a business park. The old redbrick buildings were converted into specialized engineering works, and boatmakers’ sheds, and a locomotive museum. A narrow-gauge railway ran up and down the waterfront from early summer until Christmas, when the last of the tourists departed after seeing the city’s festive lights. The place wasn’t exactly bustling, since the kind of work it attracted was the low-key sort, done indoors and under cover. It was pretty quiet during the day, but even quieter at night, except for the wind that howled across the bay, bringing with it the sound of breaking waves and passing ships, their horns calling through the darkness, a sound that was either reassuring or lonesome depending upon your frame of mind when you heard it.