The Rook

Toler Mason didn’t look like a man who had, at one time or another, broken just about every bone in the human body. Of course, it wasn’t his own bones he had broken, but those of multiple people who lacked a sense of survival to stay out of his way. If Rottweilers were to give accolades for viciousness, Mr. Mason would be in their hall of fame. He certainly didn’t look like a sixth grade science teacher.

My name is Sam Conners, and I was about to discover the “truth” about Mr. Mason. It was the classic wrong place – wrong time situation I found myself in, as I discovered that in my haste to get to lunch, I had left my book behind in Mr. Mason’s classroom.

Thinking that Mr. Mason would be in the teachers’ lounge eating, I gave a cursory knock on the classroom door and slipped into the half lit room. I was not, however, prepared to be facing the business end of a black 45 caliber Desert Eagle. In one fluid motion Mr. Mason clasped me behind the neck and spun me down to the hard floor.

“Conners,” he rasped, “you are really in the wrong place at the wrong time.” (See, I told you, classic wrong place - wrong time.)

Looking up from my horizontal position, I started to take in the world around me. I could see a tiny hole splintering the glass window like a discordant spider web. Mr. Mason had torn away the left sleeve of his plaid button up shirt and a crease of blood trickled like a little bubbling brook down his arm from the top of his bicep. I could make out a tattoo on his upper arm that, until that moment, had never seen the fluorescent lights of the school. It was a picture of a black chess piece, the rook, and a script running below “Nemo me impure lacessit”.

“Mr. Mason,” I wheezed out, “I would like to please get my copy of Airman and please leave your room. Please.”

Mr. Mason actually broke his stoic demeanor and grinned. “I’ll bet you would Conners, but I am going to have to ask you to continue to please keep lying where you are. Please.”

I’m not sure, but amid all of the chaos my universe was descending into, I think Mr. Mason was making fun of me.

Mr. Mason looked at me and said “Don’t move from this position, I am going to lock you in the room.” With that, he slipped on his sport coat to cover his torn apparel, slid the pistol underneath it, and glided like a specter out the door.

After what seemed like an hour (actually only five minutes), Mr. Mason gave me another heart stopping moment as he surreptitiously slid back into his classroom.

“Well, Conners,” Mr. Mason remarked as he settled down into his black leather desk chair, “I believe we’ll have to blame you for the broken window.”

“Nice to see you’re still alive Mr. Mason,” I replied back, “did someone shoot at you and why did you have a gun and what does your tattoo mean and-”

Mr. Mason cut me off, “Nice to see you’re still alive Conners. And to answer your questions, yes someone just sent a .223 caliber round through my window and my gun is to ensure that it doesn’t happen a second time.”

At this point my brain was still trying to process that earlier moment when I was point blank with Mr. Mason’s gun. It quickly slammed into fast forward as I realized he probably had just left the room and shot, maybe even killed, someone.

“So there won’t be a second time?” I timidly whispered.

“Not for that guy. Let’s just leave it at that,” Mr. Mason smirked.

My thoughts jumped back now to what Mr. Mason had said when he returned from doing the thing we were just leaving it at. The part where he said I was going to take the blame for the broken window.

“Mr. Mason,” I spoke, “won’t I get expelled from school if I shot a school window.”

“Listen, we’re not going to be stupid enough to say you shot out the window. What you did was incorrectly mix baking soda, ammonia binitrate, and hydrochloric glysulfate into a test tube,” Mr. Mason replied back.

“Why did I do that?” I asked.

“Good question, Conners,” he said. “That dangerous combination when mixed in an enclosed space can cause a quick release of energy and send the cork shooting out of the test tube, possibly doing something like I don’t know….. breaking a window.”

Ahhhh. The light bulb flitted to life in my brain. So Mr. Mason was giving me a way out by saying that I broke the window but not by shooting it. That’s nice of him I thought. Wait, I was still going to be in trouble for breaking a window that I didn’t actually break.

“Relax,” Mr. Mason could read my concern, “I’ll tell Mr. Rooney that you will work off the window repair cost by doing lab work for me after school. Plus, that will give us a chance to talk about what is going to happen to you next.”

“Next?” Gulp.

“There are certain things you need to have made clear to you,” Mr. Mason said looking sternly at me, “and certain things you need to have made not so clear to you.”

“Okay, I think,” I answered as the lunch bell rang. “Will those three things really cause an explosion?

“Conners,” Mr. Mason said, “two of those three things don’t even exist.”

I was starting to admire this guy, “Mr. Mason, after what I just went through, do you think you could call me by my first name instead of calling me Conners?”

“Sure I can.” He was smirking again. “See you after school.”

I started to step out into the hall for my walk to Algebra.

“Oh, and Conners, the tattoo translates from Latin ‘No one attacks me with impunity’.”

“Impunity.” Gulp.

Ambling down the hall from Algebra, where I had just spent the entire period trying to decide if what happened at lunch had indeed happened at lunch, I felt relieved. I could tell Mr. Tucker was about to get on to me for not paying attention to his lesson. He had just called on me and by the way he was drawing out my name in extended syllables, I knew I was in trouble. Luckily for me, as the old saying goes, I was “saved by the bell” as the bell for seventh period cut him off and I made a dash for the door.

All that stood between me and my after school chat with Mr. Mason about things as he put it “being made clear and unclear” to me was gym class and a computer lab period. I put my books in my locker and jerked out the small backpack that held my gym clothes and proceeded down the hall toward the middle school gym.

“Hey Sam, wait up,” Core Millings called out as he came shuffling up beside me, “did you hear about Mr. Mason?”

Before I could stop myself I blurted out, “He didn’t kill anyone. I bet he doesn’t even carry a gun or have a tattoo.”

Luckily, Core was a good friend and took my rash outburst as an attempt at some sort of jovial bashing of Mr. Mason who had a reputation of being particularly stickler about discipline.

“No, dude,” he responded, “Ainsley said in science class after lunch he just let them watch Bill Nye the Science Guy videos all period and didn’t even ask them to ‘reflect on what they learned’.”

“Weird,” I commented, afraid to say anymore for fear of my mouth betraying the good sense my brain was trying to pump into it.

“Later bro,” Core said as he reached out to give me a fist bump before he turned down the hall to the library.

“And why would his tattoo be of a chess piece threatening you with impunity,” I called out before I could stop it.

Core laughed back over his shoulder, “You come up with some crazy stuff bro.”

If I didn’t get it pulled together, I was going to find myself doing a lot of explaining to Mr. Mason. I am not sure he would relish how I was quickly becoming the prosecuting witness to his deeds that day. I pushed open the door to the gym and thought absently to myself how strange it was that no one was on the court and how the main lights were not on.

The next feeling I had was of something small, round, and hard pushing into the back of my neck. Oh no! Mr. Mason had heard me in the hall selling him out and had come to make things “not so clear to me”.

“Look, Mr. Mason,” I stammered, “I was just…..”

But my sentence was left hanging as the pressure moved away from my neck and was brought down bluntly on the top of my head. The last thing my mind drew in was a scratchy voice saying, “Wrong little Tovarich.”

Blink. Blink. My eyes pop open. You know that feeling you sometimes get that tells you about trouble. Not, the hearing your mom call you out by your first, middle, and last name sense of audible trouble. No, this was that deep in your gut feeling that tells you however bad I thought my day was, it just got a thousand times worse.

I found myself tied to an old broken wooden student desk. I was held in place by about a dozen white jump ropes that smelled like they had been retired from duty because they had soaked up their capacity of middle school student sweat.

A single light bulb swung in a lazy arc between me and the scariest looking man I had ever seen. I would like to say I was most scared of the six inch serrated blade he was holding in his right hand and digging into his fingernails with, but that would be a lie. The penetrating stare and the stone cold smile was where my nightmares would be born from.

The school bell rang from a speaker somewhere behind me as the man taunted me with, “That makes it for the end of school; I guess you won’t be ‘saved by the bell’ as you Americans are fond of saying.”

What am I doing here? Where am I exactly? What are you going to do to me? Those are all the questions I should have asked after waking up to find myself tied to a desk. But, what came tumbling out of my mouth was…

“Why does your face look like it just went nine rounds with a saber-tooth tiger?”

A smile that could only be described as brutal spread slowly across the man’s face and a low chuckle tumbled from his mouth. The knife flashed around his hand as he flicked it and sent it flying into the top of the wood desk an inch from hand.

“Funny little tovarich,” the man’s words came out in a rasp, “my name is Viktov.”

“Well, Mr. Viktov, sir, if you would just go ahead and untie me, I think I had better get home. My mom told me if I didn’t get my room picked up there would be no Assassin’s Creed for me this weekend,” I babbled out.

He pulled himself directly under the light and all of the scars across his face flashed in the light like a roadmap of pain. His hand reached across and tugged the knife out of the desk. His voice was like a scrape across my skin..

“There is no need to play at an assassin’s game when you’re in an assassin’s game,” Viktov replied. “You see I am here to have a little conversation with your Mr. Mason.”

“Let me just run upstairs and get him for you,” I countered back.

“I have already made the arrangements to ensure that the Rook comes to me,” he said as he stared directly at me. “You are that arrangement. While we wait I can fill you in on some details about your Mr. Toler Mason that you may find interesting, and you can explain to me your connection to him.”

“Connection? The only connection I have to Mr. Mason is he is the guy who delivers my science lessons and a “not-so-surprising” pop quiz every Thursday,” I pointed out.

Viktov’s smile slithered off his face, “Then explain what you were doing in his room when he left it to go kill my partner.”

Gulp. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

“Never mind,” Viktov began speaking again, “I have made sure the Rook will come looking for you, but will only find retribution instead.”

I stammered out, “Why do you keep calling Mr. Mason the Rook?”

“Because that’s what he is, or at least was, before he entered the mundane life of being a school teacher.” Viktov’s voice had taken an even raspier tone. “Your Mr. Mason was once part of a little group called The Brotherhood of Solomon. Each member of the Brotherhood fills the role of a chess piece and he was their Black Rook.”

I wanted to say he had the wrong guy. That Mr. Mason was just a school teacher, but too many puzzle pieces seem to be coming together in my mind. As weird as it sounded, I was buying into Viktov’s tale.

He continued on, “As a Rook in the Brotherhood his job was the enforcer, the bone breaker, the veritable inflictor of pain. But as things go, the Brotherhood of Solomon took a fall years ago and the few surviving members were scattered to the wind. We have been hunting them down ever since.”

The more he talked, the more Viktov drifted down a straight and narrow path of fanatical that seemed to hold a great deal of contempt for Mr. Mason and this Brotherhood. Just as my worry started to go into its ninth round a small movement in the shadow behind Viktov made me pause.

“Why do you want me?” I asked already knowing the answer. A smile etched across my face that caused Viktov to suddenly tense up. “If it’s the Rook you want, I got two words for you: turn around.”

Now looking back, I probably shouldn’t have opened my mouth to give Viktov that little tip-off about Mr. Mason, because no sooner had it left my lips than he dropped into a roll off to his right. Viktov came out of the roll in a low crouch with a pistol capping off three rounds directly where Mr. Mason had been standing.

“Come out, come out Rook,” Viktov called out in his raspy voice, “time to pay or the boy and I shall play.”

I was beginning to realize that I had a strange reaction to stress because my mouth always seemed to engage itself in all the wrong ways. “Mr. Viktov, if it’s all the same to you, I have got an awesome Star Wars edition of Monopoly I could run home and grab for us to play. You can even have the Chewbacca token to use.”

Viktov was apparently not happy with my nervous chatter or he wasn’t a big fan of Wookies because the next thing I felt was his elbow colliding into my chest. All the air rushed out of me like a vacuum cleaner thrown into reverse.

Mr. Mason, who had remained unseen since my inadvertent tip-off, came back through the door into the room in specter mode. He was moving like he was gliding through the air and he made no sound. Viktov managed to fire off another round, but the bullet split the air where Mr. Mason had already glided out of.

With his left forearm Mr. Mason shoved Viktov’s arm back sending the gun flying back into a dark shadow while the palm of his right hand drove Viktov’s chin nearly back through his brain. Viktov crumpled hard to the ground.

Mr. Mason broke his silence, “Connors, you really do know how to show up in the wrong place at the wrong time, don’t you?”

Before I could answer him, he instinctively stepped back. As if it were a striking cobra, Viktov’s serrated knife arced towards Mr. Mason’s right leg. With Mr. Mason’s step backwards, Viktov used the brief moment to vault back to his feet, knife in hand.

“Rook,” Viktov bragged, “as your death arrives, so does the final death blow to the Brotherhood of Solomon.”

The disruption to my airflow had begun to clear up enough that I thought I should be the one to deliver the clever banter back to the bad guy like they do in the movies. “Well, Viktov, you’re going to be waiting for that arrival for a long time as Mr. Mason is about to school you. Get it, he’s a teacher, we’re in a school…”

My wittiness was cut short as Viktov had decided he could no longer stand the sound of my voice and swung his knife right for my face. Once again though, his plans for me were interrupted as Mr. Mason launched a devastating high kick that connected with a solid thunk on Viktov’s chest driving him back into the cinderblock wall.

The Rook, as I could tell that Mr. Mason had gone into his old role, followed up with a rock-hard right hook to Viktov’s head. Viktov tried to follow up with a return slash from the knife, but never came close to finishing his swing as the Rook’s left fist delivered a fight ending punch to the man’s throat.

Mr. Mason nudged Viktov’s limp body and bent to check him over. He straightened back up holding the serrated knife. After four quick slashes with the knife, Mr. Mason had freed me from my jump rope confines.

“Is he alive?” I asked Mr. Mason.

“Unfortunately,” Mr. Mason said back with a hint of a smile, “for now.”

We began up the stairs from where I had been held and I turned back to Mr. Mason, “Was all that stuff he told me true? Are you the last of the Brotherhood?”

The smile grew, “Oh, I think I may have found a new Pawn.”