S2/E9 | The Schoolhouse

What do you see? Large forms, whales and authors, many arms circling overhead, and smaller things too, fish and then and also they were waiting, it felt like. For What do you think? I don't know. Come, we should speak to missus. Marton, come in, mother, hello, hello, Miss Mayton, and who is this? This is a guest. Ah, welcome then, my friend has a question for you. Well, if I'm not here to educate, then what in fact, am I

here for? The schoolhouse? The playground? Mm Hmm, they are empty. Yes, well, where did they go? They're gone. They tried to warn us, but we didn't listen. Now it's too late and all the children and apologies, I didn't mean to startle you. It's been quite some time since anyone's visited and I seem to have forgotten my manners. Allow me to introduce myself, Miss Matchin. I was the teacher here for well over twenty years. I suppose nowadays, caretaker would be a more

apt description of my current position. And Yourself. I see you're new here in dybrook. It's in your eyes that delirious all were. Curiosity hasn't completely succumbed to dread yet. Curiosity is good. It means you pay attention. You also appear to have been on your feet all day. Please have a seat, catch your rings and perhaps indulge in old educator the opportunity to deliver a final history lesson before ah, but we don't want to get ahead of ourselves, now,

do we please? said. Yes, right, there is fine, comfortable. Let's see. Where was I? Ah, yes, at the beginning. This was many years ago, back when dybrook wasn't quite so m tire. It was a clear spring afternoon and towards the end of recess, while the older children supervised the younger ones, I stayed here grating papers. I remember hearing the usual laughter and shrieks against the ticking of

the clock. Then the shrieks became screams. As I rose to investigate, a flash sparked from the corner of my eyes. Then their scream stopped, as did the ticking of the clock on the wall, as did my very thoughts. All I could hear was the ocean. Yes, you can always hear the ocean here and I brook, but this was different. I could hear the waves, actually hear them as never before, their tides pulsing through my blood, their currency electric in each breath, until I didn't know where the sea ended

and I began. Eventually over the waves, I heard my name called. I awoke to the Gustav Twins Bursting into the class room with hysterical bleed. They urged me from the desk and led me towards the playground, their identical smiles radiant, yet their faces flushed and still wet with tears. They wouldn't explain themselves and I was still too discombobulated to protest. Once outside, I saw them, the other children all kneeling in a circle in the center of the

kickball field. My body swayed to the tempo of their chat, the exceeding, indeeding, and in the places little hand reach, the grags way out there with the stunts. The chill at my spine brought me back to my senses. I ordered the twins back inside then, with a shout only a teacher can give, demanded and enter the children's game. Stop running, come inside, sit down. That's what it must have been, after all, some sing song nonsense gone too far. That's what I thought then. Oh how I wish I

had been right. Silently, their swaying ceased and the children rose from the dirt is one, to file back into the classroom, each with a radiant smile and cheeks that glistened with fresh tears. Back inside, I resumed the lesson and the students gazed blankly at me. Finally I let them use the remainder of their time to read quietly until their parents arrived. When I was last alone in the classroom, I turned off all the lights and listened,

and I wasn't wrong. The Ocean was louder now. The next day, over half the class was absent, all of them, the ones who knelt in the field. The parents that bothered to call reported that their children had woken in the middle of the night with the fever and screaming in a language they had never heard before. The few remaining children that managed to show all looked as if they hadn't slept that night or any other. Possessed of an unrelenting curiosity, I abandoned the lesson plan to talk

to the children. I asked them what happened at recess yesterday. Silence. Then the twins spoke up in unison. They reported watching the boys play in the field when a golden ball of light appeared above them. It hovered there for a few moments and there was a sound like a wail song that they could only hear inside their heads. Then the light descended towards them and the sound grew louder. That's when everyone screamed. The ball of light burst to flash and in its place stood the crack an angel.

They all stopped screaming and formed a circle around it. It bide them to kneel, and that's what they did. It then told them a story. How long ago, their grandparents struck a deal when dyrebrook was on the verge of economic collapse. It was then the angel appeared to them with an offer of plump fishing nets and harbors, spared from the ravages of tempest. They asked what the

angel wanted from them in return. Okay, it replied. The dead could only be paid by the one child, and that child had not been offered because the dead had not been paid. The crack an angel has returned to collect the children of dyre brook to come live with it where the ocean meets the stars. I then asked the children to draw from me this crack an angel. What they produced was a picture of a towering man with peacock wings and a black smudge for a head,

from which radiated tendrils that reached outward. The next day, only five children arrived for school. They were all Pale with black rings around their eyes. The parents I managed to speak with reported their children had been up all night in fevered conversation with imaginary friends or or babbling incomprehensibly. Ultimately, though, they dismissed my concerns when I mentioned others had reported similar symptoms, by reminding me that everyone has bad dreams

and diyre brook. I tried to instill some much needed normalcy. I declared a pop quiz. I received none of the usual groans or gasps. The tests were passed out and at the end of twenty minutes returned to my desk, each page filled with hieroglyphs and are cane symbols. Outside I could hear the waves crashing as if they were at the front door. That night we all slept deeper than we ever had, all the adults that I brook, even those who worked night shifts, Sheriff Caine, as well

as Maggie and gusts at dotty's. All night diner dreamed of the children who entered our rooms and leaned down to our frozen bodies to whisper in an alien language, some forgotten promise or omen there. And when we woke the next morning they were gone, all of them. Don't ask how we knew, but something told us to go to the beach. There we found the footprints, child's eye, all leading across the sand towards the ocean, and none of them returning from it. The only thing left of

them was it? The Single Poo bear, the one little Jimmy Vander carried with him everywhere, found bobbing on the waves. Of course there were search parties, boats deployed, divers, the shores were searched thoroughly. There should have been bodies. None were found. There was a brief media frenzy that eventually died down once another random tragedy and another random town in America occurred. Diet Brooks mystery was abandoned and its residents were left to pick up the pieces as best

they could manage. What few children born over the years since that day are home schooled. No one comes here anymore, no one, that is, except me. You see, there's something I've never told anyone here before, none of the greeting parents or Stoic police officers, story hungry reporters. In my dream, it was the Gustav twins that visited me at night, and while all the other parents could only hear an indecipherable language from their sons and daughters, I alone understood

their words. Don't be sad, MS match, we're coming back one day soon, all of us, back from where the ocean meets the stars, and we'll bring the crack an angel with us. Then it will be our turn to teach you what we learned. Since that night. I come back to this classroom each and every day. I sit right here, patiently waiting behind my desk for the day the children will return and deliver to me, to all of us. The final lesson the crack an angel. Poor girl,

it was too much, wasn't it? There were so much. They were there. This one has the gift side. Mm Hmm, so it seems. Poor girl, can you stand, I think? All right. Well, we should be on our way, Miss Matson, father be with you. Everything returns to him. Come on, well, we should hurry along to the doctors. Surely He's back by now. And it looks like we have a storm brewing. The CROCK and Angel. What about him? Is He? Is he part of your religion? He is the whole of

our religion. The father in the sea has many names, good bleaks, but our clocking angel, the holy arms, all our forms of the same he who gives and he to whom everything returns. I think that I saw him. What my vision? Everything was circling around himmy was Nope, don't tell me. If he wanted for me to see him, he would show himself. Now, come on, before the rain washes that mind of yours clean again tomorrow. On thirteen days of Halloween, the doctor's office. It started with a

girl no more than thirteen. Her sight was dimming, save for a red smear that flashed each time she blinked. Languor listlessness, but sleeplessness as well. She was in some sort of infectious half life, the Fisher King's malady. It's like when you look at the Sun, you get that

red smear, she told me, retinal afterimage. I said she was a nice young girl whom I had seen around dating the son of a family friend, so it was natural that my radar was pinged when the family friend came in with the son in tow and described the same symptoms. Thirteen days of Halloween the schoolhouse, starring Kathen to, Jimmy, Bethany and Lynde and April Parker Jones. Written by Rob Mosca,

with additional material by Nicholas Takowski. Sound Design and mixing by Trevor Young, engineering by violent FERTZON, dubway studios New York, casting by Jessica Losa. Created by Matt Frederick and Alex Williams, with executive producer Aaron Manky, a production of I heart radio, grim and mild and blumhouse television.