The Drabbletails
Stephen Gresham

Steve Gresham has had a number of horror novels published by Zebra Books in the last few years, including Moon Lake, Half Moon Down, Dew Claws, Midnight Boy, and Skeleton Key. His short stories, very curiously, have appeared exclusively in the small magazines, though he's better than nine-tenths of the authors whose work is snapped up regularly by the major anthologists. "Ghost Fall," published by the short-lived Unknown Press, was a haunting piece of paranoia worthy of Ramsey Campbell. "Moonforms," in Fantasy Macabre, is a horrific piece of Southern gothicism with Lovecraftian underpinnings. Other tales of merit appeared in Potboiler, Bloodrake, Owlflight, Ghosts & Scholars, The Argonaut, and a few other places. It was difficult to decide which of these to reprint, but I finally settled on "Drabbletails" because of its powerful visual sense and perfectly realized characterization. It appeared first in Crispin Burnham's Eldritch Tales and was reprinted in the anthology Damnations from one of the finest small presses, R. Alain Evens' Strange Company in Madison, Wisconsin. The author lives in Alabama.

Every school has one: a boy like Albert Werner. Weird. That was the word that everyone used to describe him. Albert was a dark, sullen young man whose constant smirk seemed to signal that he knew some dreadful secret about nearly everyone at Longfellow High. Disheveled in appearance and thought, Albert would sit at the back of each class, daring to be taught, transfixed by the pages of pulp horror stories and slick-covered murder mysteries. He knew about murderers.
Nobody got through to Albert. Nobody penetrated his little shell, not even Mr. Carmody -- at least not at first. Albert was enrolled in Mr. Carmody's Art 1 class, a potpourri of misfits ranging from three sophomore girls (affectionately referred to as "dirty legs") who had been booted out of home ec and pep club, to long-haired, frail boys who hated shop and phys ed, to incorrigibles like Albert. The other class members were nondescript. It was a sheer delight to see Carmody transform this motley group into a motivated, even eager class of participators. All but Albert. He was very suspicious of Carmody, studied him carefully.
Longfellow High, together with all of Masonville, Kansas, was pleased with Carmody, the new art instructor. In two short months, his teaching had won praise from students and colleagues alike. In fact, Albert's was the only dissonant note.
"I just don't like the guy," he told Mr. Madden, the Principal, after Carmody had sent him to the office for carving four-letter words into an art lab tabletop with a stainless steel undertaker's knife that he usually kept hidden in his locker. Mr. Madden was quick to defend Carmody, seeing him as a sensitive motivator of young men and women.
Most of the time Albert simply avoided Carmody, like a three-legged dog's hesitation at the edge of the highway. Carmody, unmarried and in his late 40's (though he seemed much younger, almost ageless), was unshaken by his inability to coax Albert into class activities. Carmody was too enamoured of the pleasant refuge that Masonville provided for him. A change from the rush of Chicago. He had moved after a mixed bag of jobs including teaching, commercial art, and most recently, psychiatric counseling. Degrees in psychology, art, and education gave him an impressive set of credentials. He not only "looked good on paper," but he was also a splendid physical specimen, with charm and grace and a touch of British accent. Most people even overlooked his puzzling choice of lodging: the Santa Fe Boarding House near the Eastside tracks -- the low-life area of town.

* * *

The fall semester was passing quickly. November brought hard frosts and snow flurries. But nothing dampened the spirit of Art 1, for Mr. Carmody was introducing a new project and everyone, except Albert, was falling under the spell of Carmody's wizardry.
"Plaster of Paris," Carmody began, his arm raised, dripping an eggshell white substance that made it appear that he was wearing one long lady's glove, "is our next project. We are going to create life-sized figures out of Paris... and who knows, perhaps they will come to life," he joked, in mocking histrionics of a late show horror host. Everyone laughed, except Albert, of course. Warming to his subject, Carmody lectured on the origin of the substance.
"Gypsum, from which plaster of Paris is made, was first mined at Montmartre, near Paris." The history lesson continued for a few minutes before Carmody shifted into a rather philosophical discussion dealing with the nature of the flour-like powder.
"When this stuff is mixed with water it recrystallizes to form a solid. The mixture on my arm is not drying, it is setting. It is forming, or reforming to its original bonds. It's going back to its former self. I guess you could say it's immortal." Carmody's voice trailed off. The momentary high seriousness of the presentation had the class squirming on the lab stools, which surrounded the demonstration table. Carmody caught himself and turned his pedagogical voice back on.
With textbook precision, he mapped out the details of the project. A pencil sketch was the student's first step. And when something acceptable emerged from most of them, Carmody brought out the chicken wire, burlap, and complexes of steel pipe. The sketches were about to undergo a magical conversion. All except Albert's, whose sketchpad was blank.
In the next few days of class, the plaster of Paris assignment created a mysterious ambience in the art room. Everyone noticed it, especially Carmody. The students worked diligently but silently in the midst of an eerie gypsum fog, like an old movie of London by gaslight. Then the room itself began to change, pliant to the personality of its new inhabitants, for now the plaster was being smeared and spread upon the chicken wire, burlap, and steel pipe complexes. At first, the grotesque plaster skeletons made the room seem like a yawning graveyard, but as the emaciated figures were fleshed out into their final forms and clothing and color were added, the room became the haunted abode of supernatural forces. A sorcerer's workshop, with Carmody as the chief wizard and the students as his apprentices. And these apprentices, in awe of the spectres that rose menacingly out of their plaster covered hands, were subdued, as if some sacred ritual or prelude to horror were being performed.
The room also affected Albert. The spectres were catalysts to his inner sense of gloom. For a moment he cowered as he imagined that the figures were encircling him like a medieval woodcut of the Dance of Death. He sat in the back of the room, visibly nervous and yet perfectly still. It was as if he had been lowered into a glass cage of poisonous snakes at a reptile garden. Carmody eyed Albert knowingly, for he too shuddered, at least inwardly, at what was taking place.
But the role of teacher quickly reasserted itself and he heard himself chiding Albert for not having a figure, or even a sketch under way.
"I don't know what to make," Albert grumbled, forcing himself out of a trance. Snatching a murder mystery magazine from a stack of Albert's books, Carmody issued a challenge:
"Make one of your murderers, why don't you?"
His exclamation was coupled with an impatient shaking of the magazine in Albert's face. Albert's eyes brightened momentarily, and he carefully scanned Carmody's look of disgust.

Alicia, Elaine, and Terry Lynn, the three dirty legs, had been working together on a triangular arrangement of figures. After the fourth day of concentrated work, they were the first to finish their life-sized creations, replete with clothing, make-up and wigs. Proud as virgins offering a sacrifice to a sinister god, they unveiled their effort to Carmody.
"Drabbletails!" he exclaimed. "I thought you were making peasant women." But he smiled approvingly. "All right, what name for your creations do you want to put on the display mount?"
Almost in union the girls replied, "Ladies of the Night!" The class laughed loudly, except Albert, who, unnoticed by all but Mr. Carmody, was now working feverishly on his own figure.
Soon, other figures were completed, and the class beamed collectively with the show-off pride of children in their first Halloween costumes. They had created a veritable gallery of ghouls, or so it seemed to passersby in the hall who caught but a fleeting glimpse of the figures. The name that stuck, that came to be attached to these productions was "drabbletails." And it stuck despite protests from Carmody, and perhaps even because of his curious unwillingness to explain what the term meant. It was not looked up. There was simply too much excitement and eagerness among these sorcerer's apprentices to let all of Longfellow High see then- creations to bother with the details.
An all-school bulletin the next morning announced that Mr. Carmody's Art 1 class would be displaying "drabbletails" throughout the main building. By mid-morning the entire staff of janitors was wheeling the figures to strategic locations. It was a ghastly procession, these all too real figures rolling through the halls... speechless and motionless. They were an immediate hit! Pat Hillary's Ku Klux Klan figure stood ominously by the cafeteria door protecting an imaginary lily-white world from all potential threats. John Spivey's melancholy reclining boy smiled sheepishly at all who passed the principal's office. The gaunt figure of Leonard Peterson's Beethoven outside the music room, and a one-armed replica (the other arm had broken off in transit) of a worried-looking Joe Namath was propped outside Coach Skillen's office. But Alicia, Elaine, and Terri Lynn created the most popular drabbletails. Their painted ladies, now labeled and dressed more conservatively as "Peasant Women," patrolled the hall in front of the library, pensively surveying their area, as if still in their earlier role, for potential customers.
Every drabbletail shared one quality; each seemed incredibly real. The touch of the uncanny about them was attributed to Mr. Carmody's remarkable facility with young people.
The initial excitement over, Longfellow High and Mr. Carmody's Art 1 class settled down to the remaining business of the Fall semester. Thanksgiving break was only a week away now. But things did not run as smoothly in Art 1 as before. There was a natural letdown after the plaster of Paris project even though the drabbletails continued to delight, in their own way, Longfellow's students and faculty. Even Miss Thorndike, the massive librarian, who objected to the name drabbletails (she correctly identified it as a Victorian term for prostitute), admitted a certain affinity for the stunningly lifelike figures.
Carmody was the first to observe the change in the class attitude, a change that he traced with certainty back to a bleak Monday.
It was the day Albert finally completed his project.
It was a cold, rainy, drowned dog morning. Albert wheeled his stand forward, pulled the cover sheet from his creation, and smiled his inscrutable smile. Dead silence followed. Then little Jaynie Hamlin, a junior who made a figure of a small girl with tightly woven pigtails, began to pant hoarsely, and the panting gradually heightened to a squeaky scream, and then to an uncontrollable wail. And she screamed until she fell unconscious. The dirty legs screamed, too. Many of the boys uttered expletives of horror. Carmody was speechless and motionless as if hypnotized by the frisson of terror that rippled through his body. Albert stood proudly, arms folded against his chest. His life-size figure was slightly hunched forward, a loose outline with a gray trenchcoat, black shirt, and gray trousers. Yet at first glance, the hulking size of the figure was not that apparent, nor the physical strength that Albert had molded into its arms and legs. Nor the black, matted hair.
It was the face and the raised arm that drew attention and horrified the class and transfixed Carmody. Mummy-like, the figure's face was wrapped in strips of burlap so that no facial identity penetrated the hideous countenance. There were black holes for eyes and a small black rectangle for its mouth. And in the figure's raised arm was a newly polished, stainless steel undertaker's knife poised in a stabbing position. At the bottom of the figure's platform, scrawled in Albert's child-like printing on a sheet of white construction paper, were the words: JACK THE RIPPER.

It took several days for Carmody to calm the class and himself. Albert took advantage of the shocked silence of his classmates to point out smugly that the notorious Jack the Ripper was never caught. He detailed the gruesome Whitechapel murders of 1888 and closed his presentation with the outlandish theory that Jack the Ripper might still be alive in one form or the other. But no one listened.
Carmody's first inclination was to demand that Albert dismantle the figure immediately. Albert angrily pleaded that his creation deserved as long a life as the other drabbletails. Carmody relented but locked the unnerving figure in the art room closet after each school day and required that a sheet be kept over it during the day. Little Jaynie Hamlin transferred out of Art 1, and Mr. Madden tactfully reprimanded Carmody for letting things get out of hand.
Word of Albert's horrid drabbletail spread, bringing tittery thrill seekers into the art room for a nervous peek under the sheet. Many imagined that the threatening figure was slightly animated. And because several were deeply frightened by then- brush with Albert's "Jack," Carmody had to sentence the figure to an indefinite around-the-clock stay in the closet. Almost simultaneously the status of the other drabbletails changed, too. Students were now occasionally overheard expressing a bit of fear of the various figures, even the once much adored peasant women.
On the Friday before Thanksgiving, a freshman, Lottie Miller, screamed and began crying hysterically, claiming that one of the peasant women reached out for her as she walked past the figures. The scream could be heard all the way down to the art room. Mr. Carmody's class heard it and stopped their tie-dyeing project. Albert watched their frightened reactions closely.

The dark mood that had been gathering the previous week descended in full force on Monday. The weekend had brought a heavy snow to the flint hills protecting Masonville, and it had brought a visitor to Longfellow High. Scattered like huge bowling pins, the three drabbletails that had graced the entrance to the library were found sprawled on the floor, their clothing torn. Each had a deep gash semi-circling through their pale, chalky, lifeless throats from ear to ear. The work of schoolboy vandals? No one felt confident of that explanation. Miss Thorndike had discovered the figures early that morning and had fainted on the spot. Only later did she mention that she heard some rustling around the art room as she passed it on her way to unlock the library. But there was no vandalism in the art room. By mid-afternoon, Longfellow High was adrift in a sea of rumor. There even appeared to be some who were half-seriously suggesting that Albert's drabbletail was somehow involved. Everyone was uneasy. School was dismissed for the Thanksgiving holiday two days early. In the later afternoon, Mr. Carmody helped two very sober janitors carry the plaster corpses back to die art room. The slashing of the drabbletails served as a macabre opening to the next terror-filled weeks for Longfellow High and Masonville. On Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, the mutilated body of Alicia Forties was found in the corner of an abandoned train-checker's shack near the Eastside tracks. A week later, Elaine Brooks was discovered in a similar condition behind Fred's Cafe, about a mile from the first murder. The grotesque pattern of bodies literally ripped apart linked the two incidents. At school, the atmosphere was naturally somber. Everyone's mind was on the murders, yet few talked openly of them. Terry Lynn Caster, aware of the ominous sequence of events, walked around in a bubble of fear. Mr. Carmody and the Art 1 students, with the exception of Terri Lynn and Albert, began moving the remainder of the drabbletails back to the art room to be dismantled.
Suspects? A few names of unsavory characters and railroad tramps seen lately near the Eastside tracks were mentioned. No substantial leads came of any of them. The name that was most frequently mentioned at Longfellow High was Albert Werner, Weird Albert, the creator of that hideous drabbletail. Albert was taken into custody and questioned, questioned for three full days. Then Longfellow High and Masonville were freed from the bondage of fear.
Albert had confessed.
No, not actually confessed. He had stated rather enigmatically that he was responsible for the murders, and he agreed to undergo psychiatric counseling before the preliminary hearing was held. That was enough for the community. But the respite from terror was short-lived. Driven by a nebulous desire to complete his unfinished task, Albert managed to elude his counselor and the Masonville Sheriff shortly before Christmas. In the meantime, Mr. Carmody had taken each drabbletail, including Albert's, and rendered it to its former state of odorless dust.

On the evening of the day school closed for Christmas holidays, John Carmody returned to school and his art room after killing Terri Lynn Caster in the shadows beside the Transport Inn. He hesitated, finding the art room door pried open. He walked cautiously to the closet to put back the burlap strips, the dark clothing, and the undertaker's knife that had aided him twice before.
The closet door was also ajar.
As he pulled it fully open, his eye caught the image of a dark, crouched figure, still as a statue deep in the closet. He moved a few steps closer to it, peering as hard as he could into the darkness. In a split second the figure sprang and knocked him to the floor. Overpowered by the surprise of his attacker, Carmody felt the knife blade rip into his side with a grisly thud. His eyes rolled blankly before they could focus squarely on the face behind the knife.
"I know who you are, John Carmody," Albert whispered over the unmoving body.
Weak and shaken, Albert made his way to the Sheriff's office and announced he had killed the murderer of three high school girls. After several minutes of convincing, the sheriff and one deputy agreed to drive him back to the school and the art room. Still visibly shaken, Albert guided them to the room and to the closet where he had surprised John Carmody.
But Carmody was gone. No sign of him. No blood. No burlap strips. Nothing. Albert Werner walked slowly to the back of the room and dressed his ashen face into his pale, quivering hands.
"Oh, my God," he cried softly, "Jack the Ripper's still alive!"