Garden of Evil by Graham Masterton

was anybody nailed up there, with or without cats, he wasn’t going to go inside. All he could see, however, was a grubby plastered ceiling with cracks in it, and a small lizard, and two fluorescent tubes hanging down.
    He went in. Art Studio Four smelled strongly of oil paint and dried clay and damp dishrags, so he went across and opened the windows. From the second floor, he could see the windows of his own classroom, Special Class Two, and three figures in white protective suits moving around inside it. Outside Special Class Two, there was a grassy slope, which rose gradually up to a small grove of five or six eucalyptus trees, surrounded by a scattering of dry fallen leaves.
    To his surprise, Simon Silence was standing underneath these trees, his arms spread wide. He was wearing a white shirt and white linen pants and sandals, just like yesterday, and his white canvas sack was lying by his feet. It was difficult for Jim to see clearly at this distance, but he looked as if he had his eyes shut, and he was chanting, or singing.
    Whatever he was doing, Simon Silence too had missed Dr Ehrlichman’s assembly, but then Jim reckoned that
he
wasn’t in any position to complain about that. And Simon Silence was the son of a pastor, after all. Maybe this was the way he always started his day, by praying or singing hymns. Just because Jim thought that praying to God was futile, that didn’t mean that he disapproved of anybody else doing it. Jim thought that buying lottery tickets was equally futile, but that didn’t mean that some people didn’t occasionally get lucky.
    He laid his briefcase down on his desk, opened it up, and took out fifteen freshly printed copies of his grammar questionnaires. He thumbed through them, ready to hand them out, but then he had second thoughts and tucked them back into his briefcase again. After seeing at least some of his new class sitting outside the college grounds yesterday, listening to Simon Silence, he thought that he might start the morning differently, and read them a poem by Rachel X. Speed instead. He didn’t quite understand why, but he had a feeling that he might learn more about them by listening to their reactions to
A New Language of Love
than he would by watching them struggle to work out the difference between ‘pour’ and ‘pore’ – as in, ‘
DuWayne poured over his books all evening
.’
    He sat down at his own desk. It was antique, and made of pine – small and square and covered with almost as much ink and paint as the students’ four benches. Some bored art teacher had used felt-tip pens to draw a highly detailed doodle of a naked woman on it, with a large green snake entwined around her. The woman was blindfolded, so that she couldn’t see how the snake was triumphantly leering at her.
    Underneath, the doodler had written the lettersbut even though Jim knew a smattering of words in Greek, like(which meant kebab), he had no idea what this meant. Beware of blind bends?
    He tried to open the desk drawer. It was jammed at first, but he managed to wrench it from side to side and at last it came out. Inside was a roll of Scotch tape, a half-finished pack of fruit Life Savers, and a dog-eared copy of
Hustler
magazine for June, 2009.
    He was just leafing through the center-spread pictorial of a bosomy young woman named Alexis Ford when the studio door burst open and a diminutive girl with frizzy black hair and upswept eyeglasses came staggering in, carrying in her arms an oversized, grubby white teddy bear with the Star of David on its T-shirt. She was wearing a pond-green cardigan over a drab gray dress, and brown shoes that looked almost like hiking boots.
    She stopped and stared at Jim and his copy of
Hustler
and said, in a very nasal voice, ‘Oh,
zay moykhl
! I’m sorry. I guess I shoulda knocked.’
    Jim tossed the magazine back in the drawer but then he had to struggle for a few seconds to close it