Miss Tyne’s Visitors
A chilling breeze whistled down the cobbled streets of Chesham that cold November evening. Anyone out walking those pavements would have spotted a light glowing through the winter mist from the far window of the Victorian school building.
Pulling her navy cardigan tightly around her shoulders and stifling a shiver, Miss Tyne sat at her desk inside, marking Year Six’s futile attempts at long multiplication. She expelled a heavy sigh and, with an aching hand, drew a regretful cross in red biro against yet another wrong answer. She took her role seriously, incredibly so. When the children’s exercise books showed as many mistakes as this, she glanced anxiously at her lesson plan beside her, meticulously colour-coded with expected durations for each segment, and wondered where she’d gone so utterly wrong. Running a hand through her dark bobbed hair in frustration, she turned in her swivel chair to observe the chalk sums on the blackboard behind her. The endless examples and explanations had amounted to nothing. Her feet were throbbing and she felt like a failure.
She clicked the side of her digital watch and the blue screen leaped to attention - three minutes past seven. Any second now, Mr Edwards, the school’s caretaker, would stroll calmly down the corridor, jangling his keys in a friendly gesture that let her know he was locking up. A sweet-natured, quiet man of at least seventy, he never enquired as to why Miss Tyne stayed so late every evening. She was relieved. It wasn’t that she’d have needed to confess to her partner’s heavy drinking, or his temper that sprung to life as soon as he heard her key slot in the front door. It was simply that lying about her homelife was just another exercise and, by the end of the long teaching day, she didn’t have the energy to pretend.
She swivelled in her chair to face the desk again and dropped her pen in shock. There was a face at the window on the far side of the classroom. It was a child - that much was apparent from the wide, innocent eyes that peered through the gloom. Her face was framed by little ringlets - the type that, though once in fashion, were now only sported by the pageant show darlings. Miss Tyne stood up slowly, so as not to startle the child. She knew the name of every student at the school. This was an easy accomplishment given how, in the small market town, siblings and cousins often overlapped in attendance and the older teachers even boasted educating multiple generations of the same families. And yet, the face at the window did not match any in the mental yearbook that Miss Tyne nervously flicked through.
It was possible that she’d missed a new arrival on the school’s register, she supposed. And perhaps the parents of this ‘newbie’ had not arrived to collect her at home time, and the child hadn’t thought to alert a teacher. Miss Tyne liked to rationalise everything, and the sequence of events she had devised for this strange situation was not totally improbable. Pulling on a thick black trench coat, Miss Tyne left her classroom and strode purposefully down the corridor.
Opening the door at the end of it, she was startled for a second time that evening. The little girl stood on the step, as if waiting for her. “Hello,” said Miss Tyne gently. She tried to smile, but was beginning to feel unsettled by the child’s hard stare. The blonde hair was indeed in shoulder-length ringlets that framed a pale, serious face, but the girl’s clothing had not been visible through the window. A white frock, just below her knees, with full-length puffed sleeves, was certainly not on the uniform list. Another thing confused Miss Tyne - though the school building was all on one ground-floor level, the windows were embedded in the red-brick walls at a fair distance above the ground. The girl’s face could only have been visible if she had been standing on something. Or had she somehow dangled herself from the window ledge?
“There’s danger.”
The girl’s voice was soft but firm in its conviction, and something about it stirred panic in Miss Tyne. She was unsettled by the situation, but nevertheless she took her role seriously. This was a child in need on the school grounds, and she reasoned that the girl’s wellbeing was now her responsibility as the only teacher on site. “Come inside, quickly,” asserted Miss Tyne, trying to remain authoritative despite her growing unease.
The girl followed her into the classroom and her dark eyes never left the teacher once. “Tell me your name,” said Miss Tyne, as she picked up her canvas tote bag and began to rummage for her phone. Certain that she was the only teacher left in school at this hour, and not wishing to bother Mr Edwards with matters of child welfare, she had decided to contact the parents herself.
“Clementine,” said the child, in barely more than a whisper that was still coupled with the same urgent stare.
Now, Miss Tyne knew something was amiss. She was certain she’d remember hearing such an unusual name shouted across the playground. Surely, the child did not go to this school. Now more serious questions had to be answered and all of this was becoming more difficult to rationalise.
“Why are you here?”
“The children aren’t safe,” came the reply, in a louder statement that was uttered with force and conviction.
“What, how -”
“The children aren’t safe.”
Miss Tyne was out of her depth and she knew it. The child was clearly disturbed. Social services must be called.
“The children aren’t safe.”
As the child’s steely voice repeated the incomprehensible warning, Miss Tyne turned back to her bag and searched for her phone with increasing panic.
“The children aren’t safe.”
It was in here somewhere. She’d definitely picked it up off the kitchen counter before she left that morning. Hadn’t she?
“The children aren’t safe.”
Miss Tyne froze. The warning had changed. This was the deepened voice of a grown woman. She looked up to meet the fierce stare of a lady in a long black Victorian dress, dark hair wrapped in a severe bun and an intense expression matching that of the little blonde girl.
“The children aren’t safe,” said the figure again, as fear flooded through Miss Tyne’s body. She turned to run, but a host of tiny, invisible hands grabbed her arms and ankles. Their fingernails pierced through the threads of her cardigan and she felt them claw frantically at her skin. Screams filled her ears, high-pitched and innocent. As shock overcame Miss Tyne and she dropped to the floor in a loss of consciousness, she could have sworn that she smelled smoke.
When she came to, Mr Edwards was standing over her. A warm smile radiated through his expression of concern. “Miss Tyne, good grief! Are you alright?” He held out a wrinkled hand and helped her to her feet. “What on earth happened?” he asked, like a kind grandfather. Miss Tyne couldn’t find the words to piece together the horrifying jigsaw of memories that was forming. Instead, she hesitated before asking, “Mr Edwards, is there a student in the school called Clementine?”
He paused and looked thoughtful. “There certainly was,” he said, “come with me.”
He led Miss Tyne out of the school. Her steps were unsteady and her hands still shaking, but she desperately needed answers. When they reached the window outside her classroom, where the face had first appeared, Mr Edwards pulled a torch out of his pocket and pushed aside a wall of ivy that clung to the bricks under the window. A rectangular copper plaque was revealed - ‘In Memory.’ Mr Edwards shone a light on the faded lettering and pointed to one name in a list below.
“Clementine Penn. Nine years old, poor thing. She was one of the victims of the fire in the 1800s. It broke out from a gas lamp and raged through the school. One class of fifteen children at the far end of the building couldn’t escape in time. They were killed, along with their teacher. A tragic accident.”
Abigail Tyne never went back to the school. She told no-one what she saw, citing a ‘funny turn’ and a random interest in local history as reasons for what happened that evening. Mr Edwards made her a sugary cup of tea in his office afterwards and drove her home. It was the kindest thing anyone had done for her in a long time, and when she silently packed a bag and left her snoring partner in the early hours of the next morning, she felt that her ghostly visitation had at least reassured her of some self-worth. It was one of those things that only a lesson called ‘life’ could teach, and it didn’t come with a colour-coded plan.
Miss Tyne’s sudden email resignation was met with disgruntlement by the headmaster, who ate his breakfast whilst phoning around local substitute teachers. One was thankfully sourced, and at half-past eight that morning, a young woman in a bright red dress wiped the blackboard clean of Miss Tyne’s sums, while the class babbled excitedly about the mysterious disappearance of their teacher.
In the ceiling above them, a circuit board crackled and sparked, in the desperate glee of history longing to repeat itself.
Written by Carla van der Sluijs
Carla's 9 to 5 day is based in technical PR, and in the evenings she likes to unwind from the semiconductors by scribbling in notebooks. Though initially focussed on theatre, she has since expanded her writing to encompass all of life's other dramas. She currently resides in a cottage in Buckinghamshire, but has previously lived abroad in Italy and Russia. She can be found on Twitter under @carlavds21 or at her personal blog 'The Carla Chronicles’.