Morose Marvin

Morose Marvin

Marvin had started examining the strange embalming fluid in the jars on the shelves, when he heard something behind him. He startled and spun around. It was the school's headmaster.

"See anything interesting, boy?"

Marvin just gawped. The headmaster stood and appraised Marvin for a few minutes. He approached Marvin and guided him back upstairs to his office.

"All right, look. I'm sure you have questions. The other instructors and myself use the lab downstairs to develop a new embalming technique."

"Oh," said Marvin uncertainly.

"And we use the secret lab to conduct this research in peace, away from the hullabaloo of the school."

"Oh," said Marvin uncertainly.

"So that's what we're doing down there. Sate your curiosity?"

Marvin pondered for a moment, the nodded his head. "Ah."

The headmaster tapped his fingers on his desk and then offered, "Tell you what, son. How would you like to help out down there? It'd be your special project, and you'd get to skip one of your other classes, what say?"

Marvin brightened some.

"...But you have to keep it an absolute secret..."

Marvin felt honored. "Oh I swear, sir! I'll do a good job and mum's the word!"

Over the next few weeks Marvin spent more and more of his time working in the underground lab. He kept the storeroom straight and the floor swept. He actually started to enjoy the work, even when he was to embalm corpses with the odd glowing fluid, all by himself. Men would always arrive via a service elevator with a body, he would work on it, and then the men would take it away. Strangely, they always insisted that Marvin leave the complex for dinner, and not return until the morning.

His professors behaved differently to him, too; they never snapped at him in class anymore, and Marvin was pretty sure he got better food in the dining hall.

The other boys noticed; they teased him about being teacher's pet. Marvin always just blushed and said nothing, true to his word, even to his bunkmate Peter.