Over The Top: Chalk Dust

Then I heard the rustling sound. From the floor of the school room, beside the large desk, something white was rising up. It swirled and twisted like smoke in the wind until it formed a shape. Legs, body, arms, head... I stepped back in fright. A chalk man was there. He was looking at me and speaking. I saw his mouth moving, but there was no sound. He was trying to tell me something but I didn't understand the words.

I looked at his face. It was all there. The eyes, white and chalky, were moving in their sockets, the mouth was opening and closing, the cheek, all white, the jaw, the neck, the hair. He looked sadly at me, and a chalk tear ran down his cheek.

"Who are you?" I asked.

The chalk man tried to tell me. I shook my head.

"I don't understand."

The chalk man pointed at something behind me so I turned to look. There was a boy, kneeling. He was blurry, like a picture out of focus. There were dark areas where his eyes and nose and mouth were. He had something in his hands. He was tearing pages out of a book and crumpling them up. Making a pile of paper. Why? Walked through the chalks desks, and they swirled and reformed around my legs. I stood right beside the kneeling boy. He didn't see me. He kept ripping pages out and adding them to the pile.

"Hey!" I said, "What are you doing?"

The boy didn't hear me. He pulled a box from his back pocket, opened it, and pulled out a match. When he struck it I knew what he was doing. He was setting fire to the classroom. Burning it down!

"Stop!"

I blew at the pale flame but it didn't waver. It was like the boy, thin and ghostly. I tried to push the boy's hand away from the paper but he wasn't really there. I couldn't stop what had already happened. It was in the past. Unchangeable. The white, chalky flames began to leap upwards from the paper and the boy jumped to his feet. I stood there, helplessly, as the fire began to form a ball round the desk. The boy ran right through me and out the door.

The chalk man was still there. He was watching me sadly. He called silently to the boy.

Gradually, like drifting smoke, the classroom began to dissolve. The chalk man was dissolving too. He was crumbling away, filtering back into the ground at his feet. Returning to the soil that never forgot. There was already a gap between his shoes and the floor. I suddenly knew what I had to do.

"Wait!" I cried, jumping through the dust of the building. The wall swirled where I had gone and re-formed. I ran down the track, tripping and slipping in the darkness. The moonlight blotched the forest with patches of white. Black and