Doctor Who_ Warchild - Andrew Cartmel [103]
Miss Marcroft ignored him and pretended to be busy on her computer. Let the old bastard wait.
But he wasn’t going to wait. He leant over the desk, his musky body odour and the sour smell of his coffee-breath wafted at her and thoroughly destroyed the delicate memory of this lunchtime’s fruit salad. Miss Marcroft hated people who drank coffee almost as much as she hated people who smoked. She frowned with concentration and began typing on her computer keyboard.
‘You’ve got a fellow teaching here says he’s a Buddhist monk?’
Miss Marcroft ignored him and kept on typing.
But Francis Leemark wasn’t going to be ignored.
‘I want to know what class he’s teaching in, right now.’
He was leaning across the desk, much too close to her.
‘Why do you want to know?’ She didn’t look up from her computer.
‘I just want to know. So just tell me.’
Miss Marcroft finally deigned to look at this rude intruder.
There was something strange about the way he was standing, one hand dug deep in the pocket of his old canvas work jacket. ‘I’m not sure I should give out that information,’
she said.
The old man began to shout. ‘I have a son at this school.
I have the right to know what goes on here.’
Miss Marcroft reached out for her telephone and pressed the button that activated the intercom in Mr Pangbourne’s office. ‘Mr Leemark is back,’ she said. ‘And he wants to know-’
She didn’t get any further because the old man reached out with one hand and slapped it down on the phone, breaking the connection. She looked up at him with fury in her eyes that died as soon as she saw his other hand.
It had come out of his jacket pocket.
It was holding a gun.
He was pointing the gun at her.
‘Mr Pangbourne ain’t going to be answering any questions. Now tell me which classroom that bald-headed freak is in.’
The Young Master was sitting cross-legged on his desk at the front of the room again. He was reading from a large book open on his lap. Occasionally he’d alter his position slightly and his baggy orange robe would shift around his knees and the girls in the front row would repress giggles.
‘“The crowd wants to wake the dreamer in their midst”,’
said the monk, reading aloud from the book. “For fear that otherwise they might prove to be figments of his dream”.’ He slapped the book shut and looked up at the class full of teenagers.
‘Who wrote that book?’ asked a pinched, studious-looking boy in the second row.
‘You might call it a Zen text,’ said the monk.
‘Well, I’ve read a lot of Zen,’ said the kid.
‘Me too, but only now and Zen,’ shouted Wally Saddler from the back of the class. And beside him Wolf Leemark grinned.
‘Quiet please,’ said the young monk and, oddly enough, Wally obeyed. The monk turned back to the kid in the second row. ‘Now what were you saying?’
‘Well, it just doesn’t sound like any Zen proverbs that I’ve ever encountered.’
The Young Master smiled. ‘That’s not surprising, because in fact it was written by a friend of mine. Written especially for the lessons here in this school. But the point is, like those who fear the dreamer, we too are drawn to certain ones among us, drawn by their strange composure. This is what, for lack of a more adequate term, we call charisma.
Some human beings possess this strange talent. For some it’s like a thousand-watt light they can’t switch off. When they walk through a crowd everyone notices them. The crowd doesn’t know it but on a deep unconscious level they look to these individuals for subliminal signals. Instructions on how the pack should behave. Hence the alpha male.’
Sitting in the front row Ricky McIlveen looked pale and tense, the very picture of someone hearing something he didn’t want to hear. All the kids sitting near him seemed to have picked up on his tension. But the mood had not quite communicated itself to the back of the room where Wolf Leemark held sway. As the other kids nearby watched with expressions ranging from hero-worship to disgust, Wolf suddenly slumped over in his chair, head limp and eyes