Better endings IV

"O Captain! My Captain!" Todd shouted.

"Sit down, Mr. Anderson!" Mr. Nolan bellowed. "Do you hear me? Sit down! Sit down! This is your final warning, Anderson. How dare you? Do you hear me?"

"O Captain! My Captain!" Knox yelled.

"Overstreet, I warn you! Sit down!" Mr. Nolan's fear was palpable now, an ugly, jittery thing eroding his authority and accentuating his already unsightly old-man wrinkles, Botox be damned. "Sit down! Sit down. All of you. I want you seated. Sit down. Leave, Mr. Keating. All of you, down. I want you seated. Do you hear me? Sit down!"

"Thank you, boys," said Mr. Keating, the words catching in his throat like a dolphin struggling in the nets. "Thank you."

And then, with a gleeful, wide-toothed grin, Mr. Keating turned to his students and displayed the dreaded -- though much anticipated by the boys -- thumbs-down.

"I think you know what to do gentlemen," he said.

It was at that point that the young members of Mr. Keating's Dead Poets Society turned on the school's headmaster, Mr. Nolan, and, like a pack of rabid hyenas, fell upon him, tearing him limb from limb and rending the flesh from his bones.

While the lads feasted zombie-like on the remains of the old school administrator, Mr. Keating prepared a batch of cool, cherry-flavoured Kool-Aid, which he laced with arsenic and Drano. After they had devoured Mr. Nolan, Keating and his boys went into the countryside, donned long, hooded white robes and drank their after-dinner refreshment under the gentle glow of the full moon.