The Niddry-Nake

By Sofia Ayres-Aronson

We weren’t supposed to let the children inside until seven AM, but the shouting and pounding of the door were so frenzied, so insistent, that I feared a wild dog had found its way onto the playground again. When I opened the door, a boy shoved himself through and barrelled down the steps to the cafeteria, hollering, “Breakfast!” A small crowd of about twelve students ran after him, filling the space with noise and then leaving it empty. I leaned out to make sure no stray hounds were prowling beneath the basketball hoops. Only a Subway wrapper swirled in the wind. Spoiled brats, I thought. 

I dragged the door shut and walked to my classroom. The hallway was long and stony, as if it had been carved from the petrified tongue of a dragon. A munificent investment had funded the construction of the primary school building at the heart of the city some one hundred years ago. But the building had been poorly maintained and was mostly unfurnished. My classroom, like all the others, contained only desks– thirty of them. 

I expected to see spelling books when I opened the classroom closet, not a coatrack I had never seen before. The coatrack’s rigid length leaned toward me, and its gnarled shape began to unbend and liquify into a body. The knobs I mistook for coat hooks unfurled into tendrils of blackness that resembled a head and many arms. The head swayed, the arms rippled, and the coils of roots it hovered on instead of legs dwindled to the floor like streaks of ink on paper held up to a light. The only part of its body not in fluid motion were two gold-encircled charcoal eyes that beheld me as I stumbled backward. 

“What is that!” I cried out, so shocked that my voice seemed to skitter from my body. “Oh, how rude,” said the thing. “Why don’t you ask me my name?”

Its voice came from inside my ears. It was a mechanical sound, like one that comes from a wind-up toy. But unlike a toy’s high-pitched chatter, the creature’s voice was throatier, more yawning. 

“Those are the first words you’ve spoken out loud today, aren’t they?” asked the thing as it glided through a row of desks. “‘What is that.’ No, instead of speaking you’ve been thinking, thinking. Feeling angry.” 

The thing paused at the end of the row. Its root-like filaments spilled across the floor and streamed under desks and chair legs. I got the sense that the thing was listening. “Yes, the children in the cafeteria are hitting, yelling, throwing, calling names. Some of them are just sitting. But many of them are angry.” 

It slid toward me. The steady eyes in the bobbing, ballooning head stared into mine. “Like you.” 

“What are you?” I breathed. 

“I’m a Niddry-nake,” it said, drumming fingers on six desks at once. 

The windows at the top of the wall blasted open with a frigid whistle. This was why I didn’t hang up pictures that the kids drew: the window latches didn’t work, and at any second, wind would blast them open and blow everything off the walls. Not a single thing works in this building, I thought. 

“No, indeed,” said the Niddry-nake, reading my mind. “But you work so hard.” “I don’t think you’re real,” I said. “I think I’m dreaming.” 

“If you were dreaming, would you imagine a thing like me?” 

It extended its ribbons of black and flicked the latches shut. 

“You’re right. I can’t be dreaming. I have too many things to do– real things like passing

out books, writing the message on the board, and filing detention slips. Now you’ve interrupted me, and I won’t have time to do it all. I think you’d better leave.” 

“On the contrary,” the Niddry-nake said, “I’d better help.” 

Anticipation of the children who would push through the door any minute restored my practicality and propelled me toward the board. I began writing. The Niddry-nake passed out spelling books. 

“Seven children will be absent,” said the Niddry-nake as it returned seven books to the shelf in the closet. 

I sighed. “I don’t know why these parents don’t send their kids to school.” “You do all this work, and the wicked things don’t even show up,” said the Niddry-nake, sliding detention slips into files. 

“They’ll be here in a minute, and they’ll scream when they see you. Get out.” “Oh, the wicked things don’t see me,” rippled the Niddry-nake. “They’re too busy daydreaming or fighting.” 

“Well, whatever. I don’t have time to think about one more thing.” 

The classroom was soon filled with students who came in at various stages of removing their coats, made feints of walking to their seats, and abandoned both purposes in favor of thronging around their friends’ desks. The noise mounted like a cloud of heat. “One, two, three, eyes on me!” I shouted. 

A feeble response of “one, two, eyes on you” was returned from half the class. From different parts of the room, cutting through the chatter, came cries from arguments stirring: “You stepped on my foot, and I know you did it on purpose!” 

“Hey, that’s my pencil! I’m telling!”

The Niddry-nake whirled tendrils that touched foreheads and encircled wrists. Kicking feet and chattering tongues stilled at once. Limp hands dropped erasers, sticks of gum, and all sorts of things that had been thumping against desks and making noise. Faces stared blankly. 

I started teaching the first lesson with a fiery satisfaction. We got through spelling and fact exercises with undisturbed order until a student interrupted: 

“Can I sharpen my pencil?” 

“Raise your hand,” I snapped with an irritation that scratched my insides. The Niddry-nake felt my anger, and the tips of its tendrils crackled with embers. As the hours passed, the Niddry-nake stood flickering in the corner like a lamp or 

patterned the ceiling with its roots and limbs. It quelled every budding disagreement with celerity. Meanwhile, the students were more focused than ever. As the class read a passage out loud together, I began to feel proud of them. They deserved a reward, I decided, so I announced that they could draw pictures while I read them a story. “Can we hang the pictures on the wall?” a student asked. 

“No,” I said, my generosity stopping short. “They’ll just blow away when the windows blast open. And it’s not my job to keep pictures on the walls. I’m a teacher, not an interior designer.” 

“I’m not sure about this,” said the Niddry-nake. “They don’t deserve a 

reward.” 

“Yes, they do,” I asseverated, turning my head up to where the Niddry-nake nested on the ceiling. 

“The wicked things will make noise and get angry again.” 

I wondered if that was what it wanted.

“They’re just excited for the book,” I insisted, opening a compilation of fairy tales. But after the fifth page, a murmur began. Then, two of the students’ voices erupted: “You better not talk like that!” 

“Don’t act all grown! You don’t even know how to tie your shoes!” 

“You think you can take me?” 

They jumped up and shoved each other. 

“Fight! Fight!” students chanted. 

The Niddry-nake hovered above the desks and whisked a grid of roots into the children’s ears. The chanting stopped at once. The students who had been fighting swayed on their feet with loose fists and slackened stares. Pure horror stunned my heart and I froze, unable to do anything but stare at the most grotesque, inhuman thing I’d ever seen. 

I stared at my students’ blank faces: their chubby, child faces that still had ketchup from lunch mingled with syrup from breakfast. How could these faces be worked up into such anger? They were just kids! Well, that’s it, I realised. They are just kids. They aren’t angels. None of us are angels. 

Then the two students collapsed on the floor. 

“What are you doing to the kids?” I cried. 

I bolted out of my seat and bent over their bodies, grabbing crazily at their wrists to check for pulses– beating. Their faces lolled between my cupped hands as I looked to see if their eyes were open or closed– closed. Gently resting them back on the floor, I scrambled to my feet. I was heading for the corded telephone when I stumbled back on my heels, finding myself face-to-face with the Niddry-nake. 

Flaming and dripping like a dying candle, the Niddry-nake answered me,

“I emptied their heads so they will be good.” 

“You keep calling the kids wicked things,” I gasped, “but you’re the wicked thing.” 

The Niddry-nake plunged to my level with its eyes smoking in front of mine. “It’s a shame you don’t want my help anymore,” it said. 

It vaulted into the air and snarled across the wall, trying to find something for kindling. I glanced around the room for something I could use to fight back, but all the room contained were the thirty metal desks, two stacks of books, and the kids’ drawings, now fluttering around the floor. The fire extinguisher in the hallway! I leapt toward the door, reached for the doorknob, and suddenly drew my hand back from the tendril that encircled it with pulsing heat. A ragged breath ripped from my chest as I forced myself to turn around. 

“Abandoning your class to save yourself?” said the Niddry-nake, swallowing spelling books crumbling with ash. 

Pictures and fallen pencils swirled around on the floor. I dared not touch the Niddry-nake’s fire myself. Could I use the pictures to defend us, somehow? I grabbed two: they were sketches of sports cars and dolls with anime eyes. It had been a long time since I cared to look at their drawings. I smiled, surprising myself. 

The Niddry-nake swelled so brightly that I was nearly blinded. I fell to my knees and began to see strange things: shadows colliding with each other in a phantasmagoria of ghoulish faces. I saw sobbing faces that peeled flesh from their jaws like soggy bread crusts; distended bellies bloated with straw that poked between buttons and rags; lacerated mouths opened so wide the lips disappeared. But I knew where I was, knew they were not real because I felt carpet under my knees, smelled the metallic coldness of desks, still felt the

stickiness of syrup that somehow made it from the students’ fingers to mine. So I crawled, feeling for papers and snatching them up. 

Clutching a stack of drawings, I broke eye contact with the translucent face looming in front of me and tried to focus on an outline of the Niddry-nake behind it. I whipped the stack at the Niddry nake. Its body sliced in half with a hiss. 

The ghastly grin wobbling in front of my eyes began to stretch. They’re going away! I thought. The ghost’s eyes began to sparkle, and its toothless grin sweetened into a cute smile. It was an anime girl’s face, and she was sitting in a sports car that was, like the drawings, slightly out of proportion. The kids’ pictures had simply turned the phantasmagoria into a cartoon parade. 

The Niddry-nake was weaker now, but it was not giving up. It coiled and launched itself at me. Somehow it was in my mind, spinning and blackening everything. I kicked my bare bleeding feet against hands that grabbed and wrapped them in fabric. The fabric slipped around my throat and tightened, my eyes protruding, my fingernails ripping at my neck. Beneath the tender area where fingernail meets skin, dirt was shoved so compactly and sharply that daggers could not have been more painful. But I kept peeling, tearing, until the wood splintered and dirt cascaded into my face, as welcome as fresh rain. I scrambled at the dirt until sunlight streaked my face. 

Distant flames lacerated a sky of purple and gold that I watched with calm eyes while leaning exhausted against a hillside. Brushing against my arms, the grass rustled with the breeze of a thousand wings. Feathered angels flew above my head in unison, every angel looking onward with pointed chins and resolute gazes. I observed with awe and wished I could feel as certain, as serene, as wholly intent as the tranquil vigor in their eyes showed they did.

Then, conscious of my envious yearning, how unlike an angel I felt! I reproached myself, yet I felt that if the angels’ eyes had turned upon me, their gazes would have enveloped me with more patience and benevolence than I had ever allowed myself or given toward others. 

The angels flew far from the hillside until at last their wings eclipsed the flames. Thunder grumbled and rain fell. The angels flew on, leaving wispy clouds that drifted in their wake. Lights flashed once more. I opened my eyes to find myself on a stretcher. “The kids! The fire!” I exclaimed. 

“How do you feel?” someone asked. 

“Are the kids safe?” 

“Yes, of course. You had some kind of episode.” 

I stared at the outline of my legs beneath a blanket. Suddenly, the wind lifted the blanket and blew it onto the asphalt. I thought of the student who asked if I could hang the kids’ pictures on the wall. Had I really answered that I wasn’t going to bother because the wind would just blow them away? I felt ashamed, but I reminded myself that since that moment of apathy, I had fought for the kids. I fought for them because I liked the kids, and I liked their drawings. I decided that when I got back to school, the first thing I’d do would be to get some sturdy bulletin pins and hang the pictures on the walls. 

People bustled around me and the emergency truck, everyone looking in different directions and holding onto their hats with their hands. How different from angels we are, I thought with a smile.