Scary story competition: “Karkusha”, Evgenia Ovchinnikova

– Kar-kar-kar! Be careful, do not touch children!

Karkusha, wearing a dirty gray dress with a black winged vest over it, led the high school students away from their precious babies.

– Trample him, kar-kar-kar!

The teacher Nina Ivanovna Karkushina led the first graders to the dining room. The children walked in pairs, holding hands. They pressed against the railing, dodging the older students who were rushing up and down.

Karkusha took the little one downstairs and disappeared around the bend.

– The old poker has received fresh blood!

-Who will be the next victim ?

— Girl with a bow or boy with a pincushion?

Friends surrounded me and shouted:

– Ooh!

– Stop that! “It’s not funny,” I said.

We also went to have breakfast. While waiting in line, the guys forgot about Karkush. I sat with my back to the exit so I could see her and the kids. The croaking was heard throughout the dining room – she told how to sit, how and in what order what to eat. The soundtrack was familiar – Nina Ivanovna and my friends were also our first teacher.

Most students couldn’t stand her – her mean voice, her thinning hair, her long nose – Karkusha lived up to her nickname in everything. I was afraid of her. In elementary school, I sat at the first desk and his words penetrated my brain. When she was young, she had an unsuccessful operation and damaged her ligaments. However, by making assumptions, we came up with the craziest stories. Sometimes, waking up in the morning, I heard echoes:

– Kholmogorov, if you don’t calm down, I’ll take you to the corridor!

“Car-ridor, car-ridor,” the echo remained in my ears.

At the beginning of eleventh grade, I began to notice strange things happening to his new children. I shared this with my friends, but they, knowing my dislike for Nina Ivanovna, only laughed.

– Look, look, Kholmogorov, stay away from the source of evil!

“She’s going to drag you into the nest, tear you to pieces and feed you to her chicks!”

We called the nest room in the primary classroom. Books, posters, boxes of cards and educational materials were stored there.

I was missing another child in the dining room. In September, there were 28 in Karkushina’s class, and by mid-October I noticed that the queue of her students had become shorter. In the dining room, they sat on four tables close together, then on three, and today they did not completely occupy three tables. Of course, children could get sick, transfer to another school, or be homeschooled, but my intuition told me that everything was not so simple here, because Karkusha had changed.

She lost weight, and although the gray dress hid her thinness, you could see how her face became sharper, her cheeks sank, the corners of her lips drooped, giving her a disgusted expression. The nose seemed to lengthen and two deep wrinkles extended to the chin. Bony beak with black dotted pores. The hair became thicker, shaggy like a crow’s nest.

But it wasn’t just about being thin. Nina Ivanovna’s eyes, previously wandering, light blue (how many hateful minutes I spent under their gaze in primary school, when she, disheveled at the teacher’s table, watched me suffer at the blackboard), became brown. Not light brown or streaked with green, but really black. When Karkusha noticed that I was looking at her and the children in the dining room, she looked at me without stopping, and her eyes seemed like black dots, and no matter what she said to her children at that At that time, I only heard one thing:

– Kar-kar-kar-kar!

And although I convinced myself that everything was explainable and that Karkusha could no longer throw me into the corridor because of bad behavior, I was still afraid of her. I was afraid she would dominate me like before. Which will be looked upon with contempt, like dirt on the road.

Her children were silent, they walked obediently holding hands, without looking up, as if they had done something wrong. Unlike the other classes of screaming and unruly first graders. In my dream I saw small fuzzy figures. They were always far away, shouting something I couldn’t understand, either warning or asking for help.

When the fourth dining room table was cleared, I was finally convinced that something was wrong. I started watching Karkusha and his class more closely. First, I counted the children and noted how many there were now and how many there were at the beginning of the year and how many times they disappeared. By my calculations, a child disappeared every two weeks. I began to count them every day, and this, of course, did not escape Karkusha’s stubborn glare. She looked at me and her chin was touching her tall shoulders, which were still tense and pulled towards her head, making her look even more like a crow. One day I decided to speak to him in public, but to no avail. I was waiting for her with the class on the stairs, and when she appeared with her charges, I approached, smiling impudently (everything inside was striking with horror).

– Hello, Nivananna…

Karkusha looked at me and my impudence instantly disappeared, replaced by melancholy and apathy. The body became limp, as if controlled from the outside.

“Let the children pass, Kholmogorov,” the old professor croaked, easily pushed me aside and passed on.

My friends shook me – they said I stood up and stared into space.

We didn’t manage to talk, but I decided to ask the secretary about Karkushina’s class. I knew the secretary well – cheerful Lyubov Ivanovna, we called her Lyubochka among ourselves, she was five years older than us. I showed up at Lyuba’s house the next day.

– Lyuba, tell me, where do the children go to Karkushina’s class?

And at the same moment I said the teacher’s name, Lyubochka’s eyes went blank and she muttered incoherently, looking through the papers on the table. She stood up from her chair, dropping her laptop and a stack of files. I turned the conversation to another topic and Lyuba immediately came to her senses and began to smile and ask where I was going to register.

One day after school I saw Nina Ivanovna leading a boy by the hand down the second floor corridor. She dragged him into her classroom, looked back – I managed to hide – and closed the door behind her.

I rushed after him. Low desks and chairs. Potted flowers and portraits of writers. There was noise coming from the back room. I entered it.

The old teacher stood in the middle of the room and looked at her palms, as if something was lying there, but had disappeared. The boy wasn’t there. She looked at me, and I, stunned, saw how her mouth slowly stretched, and a hoarse sound came out:

– Kar-kar-kar!

I backed away, tripped over the threshold, fell, and crawled into the hallway, where I jumped to my feet and fled.

Karkusha subjugated everyone to herself, Lyubochka and the director and, possibly, her parents. But where are the children?

In March, I took the plunge and stole his office key while the security guard was going to the bathroom. The school was empty – I agreed to come under the pretext of preparing for the concert. My footsteps echoed on the second floor.

There was nothing suspicious in the classroom. In the cabinets are ordinary books and posters. I was sure that Nina Ivanovna took the key to the laundry room with her and, hoping for nothing, I pushed the door. It creaked and opened. A cold wind blew through the door. I entered. On the sill of the wide-open window sat Karkusha, disheveled. Its nose extended into a beak and its arms were folded like wings. The legs were not yet completely transformed; they were a cross between human legs and bird legs.

The old teacher looked at me without blinking, and I again lost my own will, the ability to move and became ready to do whatever she said.

“Well, Kholmogorov, I was waiting for you,” croaked the giant bird, opening its arms.

I obediently walked over to her and felt the wings close behind me.