Blood Jobs: The Janitor

The worst job I ever had? Is this some kind of joke?

I think its pretty obvious, but since this is for the record I guess I'll do my part, again.

First of all, before I tell you, let me reiterate that I am not mad. I know the old saying that mad people never think they're mad and are the first to defend their sanity when questioned. I on the other hand know how totally insane what I'm about to write is, but nevertheless, what I tell you is the truth.

I was a Janitor at Goyrside High from August 1976 until the place closed in 1994. I recently heard they planned to build some luxury apartments on the land before the government interfered. I heard it was because of pressure from various antiquary and archaeology societies after they found that the hill the school had been on covered a very old burial cairn. Some kind of protected heritage site. I bet the landowners were pissed.

Still no one cared about any of that back in 1976. It was an ugly year with inflation rising with the temperatures and tempers. The Provos were on the rampage, Callaghan took office with a minority government. I'd just got back from Germany after finally getting out of the Army and the job seemed perfect. In many ways it was. It's only when you look back that you start to see how terrible a place it really was. It was an ugly grey slab of a building, the school. Built by some defunct council back in the late 1890's, it looked like so many other buildings of that era meaning it could have doubled for a hospital or sanatorium with it's big rooms, tall windows and walls and bars surrounding the perimeter. The very first week I got there some young boy, I think his name was Bryan, this tiny wee black haired boy, got crushed by a truck that was backing up outside the school gates. It wasn't a particularly good start.

I recall saying so to the headmaster Willins but he patted me on the back and assured me that “such grim occurrences were very rare at the school.”

I remember he said it like that because I found it so odd. What's a common rate of child deaths surrounding a school? Five a decade? Less? More? Is there an average? A tipping point where it becomes unacceptable? These days a kid with a grazed knee would probably shut down a school and leave his classmates in trauma while the local community held a silent candlelit vigil for but in the Seventies the kids got an extra two days off. They were back the following week trying to out-disgust each other with graphic descriptions of the tragedy. The school was back to normal in no time. Or at least it seemed that way.

Let me tell you I had no idea that Ms Rylands the Gym teacher had been molesting all those girls. No one did, she got away with it for years and frankly I was as shocked and horrified as everyone else when she was finally convicted in 1981. What little the press released about the case lead to vile and lurid rumours about her amongst both the pupils and the staff and there were a lot of “I told you so's” from people who never uttered one word. In 1976 though no one knew about her criminal behaviour.

'77 was an even worse year, the country was coming apart. The Micks were blowing up all and sundry, the unions were holding Callaghan's flailing government to ransom, the Yorkshire ripper was smashing in the skulls of young women. Oh yeah and you've got to remember that at the time that everyone was living with this cloud of mutually assured destruction in four minutes or less hanging over them. Race riots and football riots were in fashion along with punk. Strikes broke out like chicken-pox, even the fire brigade went out hoping to secure an outrageous pay hike. People died. Garbage littered the street. It felt like the country might end up in a civil war. All of this affected the kids too, some of the teds (yes there were still teddy boys back then) the mods and the hippies converted to snotty punk nihilists overnight. They had every right to, it felt like the end of the world was imminent. It wasn't just some vague paranoid conspiratorial delusion, it was financial and social chaos amidst an ever increasing likelihood that the cold war might turn a bit too hot to handle.

There were a lot of gang fights that year, most based off music and fashion loyalty but also, oddly between two camps who were loyal to Mr Winter the Physics teacher and Miss Coombs the History teacher. It was no secret that the two had a mutual loathing for each other and somehow this enmity spread through to the children who fought it out in the playground with fists and shoes and the occasional slice of steel. Crazy shit was happening all around the world so no one, least of all me, really thought anything of little Brenda Stephens turn up in the boiler room after she went missing for 24 hours. I swear to this day I don't know how she got in there, I kept the door locked and padlocked, I was warned to by Willins.

“No-one likes burned children, do they?” He was a weird little bugger, thinking back on it.

The girl, Brenda, was fortunately not burned but was in a state of shock when I discovered her. She recovered from whatever happened but always insisted that she had been in class one moment then what she described as skeleton men came in with a black blanket covered her with it and the next thing she knew she was in the locked boiler room, late at night. It was a weird year as I said, so I didn't think too much on it, though how she got in there always puzzled me. I certainly never saw any skeleton men in my time there, except for the plastic mock one in the Biology labs. The kids were all sniffing glue and inhaling butane, I put it down to that. I'm not so sure now.

At the end of the year Mr Winter was suspended and then fired after it came to light that he had been arrested one night after being caught masturbating in a tree directly outside Miss Coombs bedroom window. There were some titters in the staff-room about that.

The following year was just as bad, industrial action was the over-used phrase of the year again. It got so unhinged that it was a blessing that there were power cuts or T.V strikes, just to stop the same crap coming out of the newsreaders' mouths for a moment. The teachers joined in on the act once or twice, so did my union. The country was in a right fucking mess and you know so were the kids. We had three fifth years overdose on heroin in the boys toilets one day. Miss Coombs had got married and became Mrs MacIntyre and pregnant all in the same month. She miscarried in class four weeks later. This tragic event was not the first time in the schools history, there had been three teachers suffer the same unfortunate fate prior to my arrival, nor would it be the last but such stuff is a bit too personal for the people involved for me to tread all over their feelings for this account.

At the end of May of that year there was a small hysteria broke out amongst one registration class in the third year. The Class of 3C had quite suddenly become convinced that their classmate Morris Crowley was in fact the Antichrist.

It took a while to untangle exactly how this conclusion had been reached. Morris was a tubby boy with thick black hair and was really pale. This had led his classmate Danny Michaels to suspect that, given his older brother's descriptions of the horror movie “The Omen” that there was something not quite normal about poor Morris Crowley. After sharing his suspicions with some of his close friends one noted that Morris had the same surname as noted occultist Aleister Crowley. This consolidated their fears and they began keep a close eye on Morris. The rumour of course got out and soon the entire class were engaged in a conspiracy to prove that Morris Crowley was the Antichrist.

Two kids hiding while drunk on cider discovered the grave of Magna Fel while in Old Goyrside Cemetery. Fel was an old midwife and nurse from the late 19^th century, she was well loved and belonged to a Coptic Greek Christian community that resided in Goyrside until before the second world war. The Greek symbols and Christian imagery was mistaken by the kids as signs of witchcraft. The grave directly to the left was that of Anna Morris who died on June the 6th her 66^th year, 1866. Those Six sixes along with the name Morris next to a witches grave were more than enough to condemn poor Morris Crowley.

Still they weren't some crazed mob, so it seemed, they needed further proof. They started taking trips to the graves, competing anecdotes merged into compromised tales, evidence of Morris' diabolical lineage. One. Lilly Finnegan claimed she had a vision of Morris atop a large black eagle with a malformed beak. Underneath him, she said to all who asked, was the world and it was on fire. Others began to speak of whispers in the dark surroundings of those graves, shadows were spotted, unholy dreadful noises were heard. So the stories went.

It all culminated with a truly odd occurrence, one which was witnessed by myself and several members of staff. A crow began to torment young Morris, a crow with a malformed beak. Whether it bonded to him and his black hair some how I cannot say. All I know is that the crow began following the boy around. When he'd leave for school there it was, when he was in the playground there it was. In his Latin class one afternoon the class nearly erupted when the crow landed on the sill outside and started tap tap tapping and cawing, looking directly at the boy.

Mr Miller said the reaction of the children scared him half to death but the bird didn't even notice it just kept tap tap tapping on the window. After that Morris Crowley was not made very welcome at Goyrside High and for a week or so afterwards he was assaulted several times until an assembly was called to get to the bottom of it all. I was there when it all came out. It was like a Scottish version of the Crucible or something only the teachers and headmaster stared in disbelief at the accusations laid upon the boy.

Willins knew how to dispel such madness. “It's a knack you learn over time.” he said as if it was merely dealing with a P.T.A. meeting. A letter was sent to each of the parents home explaining the ludicrous nature of the claims against Morris Crowley and urged parents to join teachers in setting the record straight.

Whatever magic Willins had used in the past failed that time and failed spectacularly. Morris Crowley was found dead on the night of the sixth of June. The police suspected that it was adults that abducted Morris, tied him to a tree in the woods outside town poured petrol over him and set him alight. What led them to that suspicion I'll never know but the kids were quiet for the rest of the term. It wasn't guilt or shame that silenced them, but contentment.

Nineteen seventy nine started with the now famous “winter of discontent” the inevitable consequence of unelected socialist unions holding a nation to ransom due to a failing economy. Some of the younger staff were agitated, fomenting revolution, proselytising their red faith to disinterested teenagers. Mrs MacIntyre was Ms Coombs again and teaching her 4c History class about the rise of National Socialism in Germany by using the political climate at the time as an analogy. This had the consequence of her becoming a fuhrer-like figure among the pupils and soon the class started dressing smart, making sure their uniforms were perfect before they started persecuting their fellow students. After the previous years disaster, Willins nipped it in the bud and suspended the entire class for two weeks. Ms Coombs was disciplined. A temporary Art teacher who had been in the school all of four hours was murdered while alone in the staffroom. She was found by Ms Rylands just before lunch. The young woman was only twenty four years old. According to Ms Rylands she looked like she'd died screaming. The police said she had been strangled and then some time later molested. She was missing her underwear. That was the part that shocked me most. I've never understood how people could do things like that. I mean murdering people is one thing but to go in find a dead body and interfere with them, steal their underwear? That is beyond evil.

We were all questioned and the Police pinned Mr Kennedy the Geography teacher for it. He was the only one who didn't have a class and we'd all seen him leering over the young woman the moment he'd set eyes on her. Willins was fired after that small incident. When the school closed that summer, the board decided to clean house. Most of the teachers were relocated and new ones brought in. Some were fired. Ms Coombs became the headmistress in the autumn term.

The changes at the school seemed to me to be similar to the changes in government, a woman in charge. After the ugliness of the previous years it seemed necessary and inevitable. Willins seemed to represent Wilson and Callaghan a bit too well, bumbling and weak. Ms Coombs would sort things out, the staff, including myself hoped.

Her first term was quiet, no deaths, no gangs or missing people but as winter came in she refused to turn up the heating, claiming the school needed to cut costs. The entire Drama department was kicked out as the Government quickly streamlined the curriculum to the basics. This changed little, it was inhabited by a few useless hippies getting paid to try and convince lower class kids they could let their imaginations run riot. They were dirt poor, outside of school that is all they did. They did not need someone to educate them on that.

No one missed the Drama department. Nor did they miss the Music department when it was cut the following year. Mr Plount wasn't much of a teacher anyway. At the end of her first year all agreed that Ms Coombs was doing an excellent job.

The nineteen eighties started with some controversy. Greg Law, a violent and damaged kid originally from Wraithlin was sent to Goyrside after being expelled from his own school. According to Ms Coombs he had somehow pressured his entire class into taking L.S.D. during a school trip to Edinburgh Castle. Law was a creepy little bastard. The sort of kid who'd wring pigeons necks and watch them shudder into death. His parents had died when he was four and so his uncle looked after him, but Peter Law was known up and down the Pentlands as a drunk and an arsehole.

After a rough start the boy settled in, there was nothing more of note in 1980. Ms Rylands was brought to justice in 1981 after two six formers finally went to the police. One of the things that I thought was the most twisted things that came to light was the “trophies” she kept, pairs of knickers from each girl she'd assaulted. Sick woman. Sick sick woman.

After that ugliness things were quiet for a few years. At least I can't recall anything out of the ordinary happening until October 1985. That was the first time anyone heard “the shout.”

Mr Andrews was a Chemistry teacher, a no-nonsense down to earth fascist with Victorian sideburns and the charm of a conman. He was well liked by the kids, I even had a few beers with him. During one of those sessions he mentioned he stayed late marking the kids work and heard someone outside his classroom shout his name. He opened the door to hear it once again, echoing down the long dark empty corridor.

I thought he was imagining it until one day I was called in to see Ms Coombs. The staff had convinced her, she said, that I was playing a joke on them, trying to scare them at night. I denied it, and demanded proof. She said she had no proof but wanted it stopped nevertheless. I restated my innocence. She did not listen and threatened me with my job if I did not comply with her request. I again stated I knew nothing about it, it was then she flew into a rage. First she slapped me, before putting her foot against my chest. Using some strength she managed to push the chair I was sitting in until it toppled over and my head thudded against the carpet. I was dazed for a moment and the next thing I knew she was atop me, straddling me, squeezing the breath from my throat. Her long nails dug in and pierced the skin, there was a dazed look in her eyes. I had no choice, I know you shouldn't hit women but I value my life more than a rule of civility. She fell back, off me and I had a chance to stand up, she ran at me again but I subdued her by the wrists and pushed her back onto the table, telling her to stop. Eventually she did, it was in an instant, one moment she was struggling and spitting on my face, the next she went limp, gasped, apologised and started crying. I got out of there immediately afterwards.

She ended up sending me a very apologetic letter in which she said she did not know what had come over her and of course she didn't think I was responsible and she would be happy to let the matter drop if I would. I did but I was always a bit more wary about her after that.

On Halloween that year we had a school party for the kids, they all came in costumes and it was a fun night. Some of the kids got busted for smoking and drinking but there was no violence no odd happenings, it all went smoothly. The kids got home safely, none of the staff went crazy. I locked up relieved that it had been such a success.

As I was locking the exit to the tennis courts I heard, distinctly, an adult male voice shout my name. Even as I write this now my skin tingles and writhes at the memory. It echoed down the long hallway of the Maths corridor as if from the ground floor stairwell that was the junction between the Tech block and the Admin corridor. There wasn't anyone there, I checked. When I got there I heard the sound of chairs being dragged across flooring from somewhere above me. I thought it might be some of the older pupils sneaking about, perhaps looking for somewhere to hide and get drunk or stoned. I went upstairs but found no one. I locked up for the night.

The following morning one of the Cleaners found Mr Pascal the French Master lying dead at his desk. According to the reports his death was caused by an overdose of pain killers. He left a note which was taken as a sign of him being deeply disturbed. In the note he described how he could no longer cope with the voices calling his name. The staff got wind of this and the atmosphere became very grim. Attendance for staff and pupils became an issue that Ms Coombs had to cope with. She had heard the voices as well and so had decided, after watching a documentary on such things, that at the Christmas break, parapsychologists would be visiting Goyrside High.

Ms Coombs thought we had a ghost. I sound glib, I don't mean to, it was quite creepy and I didn't automatically scoff at her when she told me this. Nevertheless the idea of a gang of geeks turning up with equipment to measure for spirits seemed a bit laughable. It turned out to be anything but.

I think they turned up on the day after Boxing day, were miffed that I wouldn't just give them the keys and complained that I would get in the way. I told them I had a responsibility to the school and besides I was a witness. Their attitudes changed immediately and I was bombarded for about half an hour with pointless questions. The School was closed for a further twelve days. Ms Coombs had allowed them nine to pursue whatever was shouting out people's names. There were two young men and one young woman all from Edinburgh University. They were lovely kids, smart, curious and once we'd established I had final say on what happened, industrious. They somehow managed to wire the school speaker system to act as microphones which were then plugged into some tape recorders. They had video cameras too and a half dozen other devices for various things like picking up rapid temperature shifts or infra-red images. Despite it all, and despite making some new friends half my age, the crew went away almost empty handed. One single word was caught on tape, it came echoing down the second floor corridor towards the Language labs. It was “Alice”, the name of the young woman. The voice was clear and the same deep male voice I had heard. It happened at five fifty two pm. on the Hogmanay. The following morning several of the tape recorders picked up a quiet singing, almost inaudible even at full volume. They seemed excited by this.

School started back for nineteen eighty six during a ferocious cold snap. Most of the local towns were snowed in and Haddow was subject to a small avalanche from the western hills. No one was hurt though. The atmosphere at the school was as frosty as the weather. Things were quiet though for a while. The kids from the University got back to us in March, telling us they'd found out that the song was an ancient Gaelic keening for a lost father. A funereal song. This didn't help since no solution could be found but thankfully the shout seemed to have stopped. By the time summer came round the whole thing seemed like a distant memory and the kids from the University kept pestering Ms Coombs to do more research. She was dead against it. I never told her, or anyone that I let them do more research during that time and I'm always amazed no one ever found out. Sadly for them it turned out to be a big waste of time.

Just before Christmas of '86 a young, bright English teacher Mrs Hangar had a miscarriage in the middle of her class. She was rushed to Edinburgh Royal and sadly died on the way there from blood loss. It was about then Goyrside made the papers.

The whole horrid history was painted out and exaggerated in Sunday Tabloids. It went back further than my career, all the way back to 1891 when the school was built. Twelve miscarriages, Forty seven fatalities, Twenty five children and twenty two adults, suicides, murders, deaths by natural causes. This did not include Morris Crowley. The shout was brought up, our little friends from the University were quoted in print, they even had pictures of several staff members, including Ms Coombs and me. All were taken by a black and white camera and picked to make us all look as suspicious as hell. Luckily the authorities dismissed it for the trash that it was.

Enrolment was down dramatically the following year. Ms Coombs used the whole thing to fire the Gaelic and Latin Departments claiming that dead languages were of little use in a modern society.

The teaching staff began to wonder who was next. As it happened it was the Home Economics, Classics, and Technical departments. The school was down to the basics. French, English, Maths, Modern Studies, History, Geography, Chemistry, Biology, Physics and P.E. Down to thirty teachers for fifteen hundred pupils, about half of whom would rather play truant any given day. Ms Coombs had been brutal at cutting anything she could but finally it was paying off in exam results. Those kids who did attend were doing quite well.

In fact the very next year Goyrside was one of the top secondary schools in the country and it's tragic past was conveniently forgotten as house prices rose in the area and a whole new flock of pupils came to the school. Kids from wealthier families pushed out the dole brats and the working class kids, just as their parents pushed out the natives. Goyrside changed. The Chippy became a Tapas bar, the White Bull pub became a wine bar called Fiasco's, seriously.

I didn't like these kids as much, they were too self-regarding to ever have fun, like little repressed mini-adults. Still that does not excuse a Physics teacher locking his class in an equipment shed and setting fire to it in order that the, as Mister Gordon told the police, “little bastards will finally get it through their thick fucking heads just how temperature affects the state that matter exists in.”

That was the next disaster, it happened in nineteen eighty nine. Two days before the fall of the Berlin wall. It was that historic occasion that saved the school from being closed entirely but Ms Coombs took the fall. She was allowed to work for the remainder of the school year but by August 1990 she was gone. Thatcher left in the November, but it's just coincidence right?

The school never really recovered after Mr Gordon's fireworks display despite a fresh Headmaster and several new keen members of staff. By 1993 we were down to 200 children. In September of that year I was walking through the Admin block when I heard my name being called. I turned to look round before I realised I'd heard that voice before. The Shout had returned. At first the new Headmaster thought it was a joke, until on the morning of February the sixth the following year, when in his office, he not only heard the shout call his name but, so he told me, it had given him instructions. I asked what those were but he was vague and said little beyond how correct it all was.

I did not know he had chained and padlocked all the entrances, nor did I know that he had brought with him an automatic rifle. Not until assembly was called.

“This is the headmaster, could all pupils and staff please come to the assembly hall immediately, for an important announcement.” That was what he said, I'll remember that until I die. He waited until the whole school was there before opening fire, first aiming at the staff on stage beside him I watched four human heads explode before the others were running away from him, they were riddled with bullets. The place was so loud with screaming that it was difficult to hear the gun-fire. Some part of me knew what I had to do and I started telling all the kids and teachers to follow me. It was then I realised he'd locked us in.

I also realised he did not know I had the key to the boiler room. I ran towards it as gunfire came down the hall, there was more screaming, I saw five maybe six people mown down, one of them was a teacher the others were kids, just children, torn apart by bullets. The Headmaster had gone insane.

I managed to unlock the boiler room door and let the kids pour in. It was a big space directly under the assembly hall. I watched Miss Brandon, a Biology teacher attempt to reason with the Headmaster and it looked like it was working, she saved a handful of lives by sacrificing herself.

I didn't save all of them. He killed so many people. The floor was littered with dead when I closed the door behind me. I reckoned I'd rescued perhaps forty children but we were stuck in the boiler room without any way out. We were doomed. It was then I remembered the fire axe kept at the back of the room. I heard a familiar shout, my name and then I knew exactly what I had to do. I took the axe from it's case and walked back through where all the terrified children were looking at me to save them and I knew how, it was so obvious, so correct. I was not about to let that madman gun them down. This was my school, not his, mine. The children were mine, not his, mine. He would not have them.

It was then that I raised the axe and began to kill them one by one.