Chapter 6 – High School
A few years ago the spider had had the misfortune of straying into a high school art class. He hadn’t meant to, but the lure of noise and young people who he could frighten had proved too much, and he had been unable to resist. Alas he had been more than a little surprised by what he saw, especially when he realised that he was not the scariest thing in the room!
Straight in front of him, so close to the window that the spider had nearly walked right into it, was a zombie. And not just any zombie, oh no that would have been far too easy, this one came complete with an eyebrow hanging out of its head, and a mean looking fork in his hand. It was the fork that had given the spider such a terrible surprise. Victor had been spiked before and wished never to experience such a thing again! Skirting around the fork the spider surveyed the zombie and cringed. Never before had he come across a school with its own creepy window guardian. He hoped it wasn’t the start of a trend designed to keep inquisitive arachnids at bay! That said, the presence of such a fearsome guardian did confirm to Victor that whatever was inside the room was going to be simply amazing.
‘So what is it?’ he heard a deep male voice ask. The spider turned in the direction of the noise and decided to investigate; sure his arachnid knowledge would allow him to discover the answer faster than any human brain possibly could.
‘It’s a phoenix,’ he heard a student voice reply, sullenly.
‘A phoenix?’ the teacher said again, squinting down at a papier mache creation on the table in front of him. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course,’ the student replied, glaring since his teacher clearly still didn’t appear to grasp his artistic concept. ‘Look see, here are the wings,’ he pointed to two small stubs of yellow stuck to the sides of a blob which currently had the misfortune of being described as the body. ‘And here is the ash it emerges from when it dies,’ the boy pointed to some very realistic looking ash which the teacher was regarding with far more interest than that which he had showed the phoenix earlier.
‘Well that explains the burning I smelt,’ he said, tutting and shaking his head. ‘I am afraid you will have to go the principal’s office for that. You know the rules, students are not allowed to burn things inside this building.’
But why?’ the student pouted, ‘they got to steal a fork so why can’t I st- borrow some paper and set it on fire?’ the boy crossed his arms as sniggering could be heard from two students who the spider guessed had created the formidable zombie window guardian.
‘They wouldn’t have set the school on fire with their careless actions,’ the teacher replied, sternly.
‘But I wouldn’t either,’ the boy protested again. ‘The phoenix would have saved us!’
‘Not if he looked like that he wouldn’t!’ the teacher muttered under his breath, before walking away and lamenting at the state of today’s youth.
Smiling at the oddness of children and phoenixes the spider headed back towards one of the windows, this time choosing a longer route past a different statue; one which appeared to be a strange duct tape concrete structure with the words ‘I love Ume’ written on it. The words had presumably been graffit’ed there by someone other than the statues creator because she was currently glaring at another student and moaning about graffiti besmirching a creation of artistic genius! The spider had no idea where the creative genius of the statue was hiding, but passing the concrete and duct tape lump was definitely preferable to walking past that zombie again since the fork was still giving him the creeps!
