Trusted Teacher

The best teacher anyone in the county ever had. The pupils read early, reckon brilliantly and remember everything, except, in time, their own families. Forty years on they come back and sit silently at the children's desks.

It is told of a small school, a tutor or a lecturer, and always with affection, which is the point. A schoolmistress, or an old master in academic robes, whose pupils outshine every other school in the county: they read at five, reckon like clerks at ten, win places at Cambridge and in the courts. The pupils love their teacher, and the parents are grateful. The lessons go deeper over the years, into memory and then into things no school teaches; and the old pupils, grown and placed, keep in touch, speak in each other's phrases and dream the same dreams.

Those who have seen it say the teacher's guise hides something tall and black as obsidian, armoured and written over with moving signs, four horns curving back like the nibs of pens, burning amber eyes along the face and throat, too many arms with too many fingers, black tentacles like spilt ink and a long dark tongue marked as if with letters. The Brethren hold that it feeds on curiosity and admiration, and most of all on the moment a pupil gives up judging for himself; its deepest pupils keep everything they learned and lose who they are.

It is found by its pupils. A former scholar who challenges a lesson learned forty years ago dies or disappears; a whole year of a school's pupils answer a question in the same sentence; grown men and women return to a little schoolroom and sit at the children's desks, waiting.

As witnesses describe it

A teacher in a classroom with a slate board behind, holding a book, sprouting curving black horns, many glowing eyes and dark tentacles. In one picture it is a bald, white-bearded old master in red academic robes in a shadowed lecture hall; in the other a smiling grey-haired schoolmistress in spectacles and a green dress in a sunlit schoolroom.