“That’s the TV.”
“Really?”
“And if they cared they wouldn’t try to control my thoughts.”
“How could they do that?”
“The white pills. The red pills. The blue pills. Sit still, don’t fidget.”
“I’m cold. You give off no warmth.”
“Hmm. You know that movie, the one where the guy dies but doesn’t realize it, and just goes on same as before?”
“No.”
“Oh, well.”
“What will you do?”
“Tomorrow? Finish it, I guess. Tell Mr Vole. Tell them all. Bring the whole stinking, corrupt edifice crashing down.”
“Did you ever worry that the thing behind the edifice might be worse than the edifice?”
“Like a beauty spot over a smallpox pustule?”
“Yes, just like that.”
“That’s someone else’s problem. I’m only trying to get at the truth. What was it you said, about taking away the screen and showing the light behind?”
“You’re twisting my words. I was talking about the connectedness, but you’re talking about the truth, as if it were a simple, single thing, hiding underneath, or inside the world, like a pearl in an oyster. But that isn’t how truth works. All we have are signs. And each sign just points to another sign. There is no pearl, no secret inner truth, no reality behind the edifice. Just the endless play of signs.”
“Sounds deep.”
“That’s cats for you. Scratch me.”
“Where? There?”
“Yes, just there.”
DAY FOUR
FRIDAY
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE COUNSELLOR
I woke up on Friday morning knowing two things. The first was that this was the Big Day. The second was that I was late. I pulled my uniform on and ran through the streets, splashing through puddles of black water.
The deserted schoolyard felt vaguely post-apocalyptic. My plan was to go to see the Principal straight after morning registration, so that he could then make his move before the Friday Assembly at twelve. I couldn’t say that I had complete confidence in Vole’s ability to take the Shank down, but at least I’d have done my part and shucked off the responsibility onto somebody else’s shoulders. There was a sort of comfort in that.
I opened my form room door and synchronicity chimed: Mr Vass was reading out my name from the register. Every kid swivelled towards me. You’d have thought I’d come in wearing a pirate’s costume, complete with squawking parrot.
“Ah, John,” said Vass. “Good timing. Take a seat.”
Not a word about being late. I knew right away that the class had been talking about me. Before he went on with the register, Vass scribbled something on a piece of paper and gave it to a runty kid on the front row. Spellman was his name. Spellman scuttled out of the room. I sat down. There were over-the-shoulder glances, part nervous, part excited. Wilson gave me a full leer, wet and foul. He knew something. They all knew something.
Mr Vass had reached the end of the register when there was a quiet knock at the door. Spellman ducked in and ran back to his desk at the front, leaving the School Counsellor, Ms Cassandra, in the doorway.
Ms Cassandra was one of those ladies who had gone grey early, but had then stayed put, looking ageless. There was a sparsely haired mole, small but unignorable, in the disputed border territory between chin and jaw.
The Counsellor was the person you went to see if you were having “problems”, if you were addicted, aphasic or anxious; boring, bulimic, or bullied; cuckolded, cankered or crucified (I could go on…). Of course the only reason anyone actually went to see Ms Cassandra was if it meant they could use the good old excuse of being crazy to get out of games or avoid some punishment. Maybe a few kids feigned insanity to get attention. But you’d have to be mad to do that. Whatever your problem, anorexia or athlete’s foot, the gig was the same: Ms Cassandra would ask you how things were at home and try to get you to talk about your feelings. Then she’d hand you a leaflet on safe sex and you’d be on your way.
We’d had a couple of meetings back when my troubles started. It was pretty obvious that whatever I had was out of her league, and I’d sensed ever since that she resented me because of it.
Ms Cassandra (definitely a Ms, by the way – the two states of marriage and singleness seemed equally inconceivable) entered on her sensible heels and engaged in a brief, murmurous interchange with Mr Vass. They both trained their eyeballs on me, and I knew that my plans for the day were about to be rendered obsolete.
“John?” Mr Vass looked a little sorry, as if he’d been hoping for a ham sandwich and it had turned out to be cheese, without even the consolation of pickle.
“Sir?”
“Could you” – he paused, searching for the right verb – “go with Ms Cassandra.”
His choice seemed not to please him. It amused the class, however, and a long strangulated WooooOOOOoooooooo! resulted.
I gathered my gear and followed her out of there.
“What’s this all about?” I asked when we were in the corridor.
Ms Cassandra smiled at me. It was a warm, open, understanding smile, and I felt an almost overpowering urge to unfurl the fire hose attached to the wall and give her a blast of high-pressure icy water right in the face.
“It’s nothing to worry about. We’ve heard about some of your recent issues and thought that perhaps we’d, well, let things slip. And so I – we – thought it would be good to have a talk.”
I suppose I should have sniffed a rat, and I sort of did. But I felt a kind of inertia – you know, that feeling of powerlessness that comes over you, and makes you almost want to put yourself in the hands of the authorities.
By now we were at the Counsellor’s office. She opened the door. The room was the fanciest in the whole school. There were comfy chairs and a nice carpet and hi-tech blinds over the windows, and the place had that pleasant new-car smell of fresh plastic. There was even a decent computer – a flatscreen iMac as big as a shop window.
“Please sit down, John,” said Ms Cassandra in her soothing voice. “I just need to pop out for a few moments.”
She left the room and I flopped into one of the soft chairs. It really was extraordinarily comfy. As I sank into it I couldn’t help but let out one of those long sighs that people make when they sit down after some hard task. It was bright in the room, and I closed my eyes to shut out the glare. It was good to sit and let my mind drift.
I was half asleep when the door clicked open. Had I heard the sound of a key turning? Had the Counsellor locked me in? Why would she do that?
She gave me the smile again. She had lovely teeth, clean and white and even.
“Sorry about that, John. I had to make a couple of calls.” She sat next to me on a hard chair, pulling her skirt down over her knees. “Now, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”
“Fire away.”
“Have you ever had any pets? Of your own, I mean, not the school animals.”
“I don’t really see the point of this. But, yeah, we used to have a dog.”
“Used?”
“It died.”
“How did it die?”
“All dogs die, in the end.”
“You mean it died of old age?”
“Something like that, yeah. Cancer maybe. I was little.”
Ms Cassandra wrote something down on a pad.
“Any other pets?”
“Not really. Well, sorta. There’s a cat that lives on my roof.”
“Your roof?”
“Yeah. I feed her, but I don’t know if I could call her a pet. You know how it is with cats. You don’t own them. They stick around for a while, then they move on. But sometimes it’s nice to have someone to talk to.”
Ms Cassandra arched her eyebrows. She wrote something down on her pad.
“You talk to your cat?”
“She beats most people as a conversationalist.”
There was a slight pause, and then Ms Cassandra tittered, taking it as a joke.
She asked a few more questions, nothing too deep, and I made a couple of wisecracks and she laughed some more. But then I felt like I’d had enough. I had stuff to do. I struggled up out of the comfy chair.
“I have to go,” I said. “I’ve got to—” I stopped myself from saying get to the Principal. I didn’t want to give my plans away.
For the first time the Counsellor looked uncomfortable.
“We … we think it would be better if you stayed here for a while, John,” she replied, not looking at me.
“Who’s the ‘we’?”
“People who care about you.”
Click: I got it. This was all part of the plan to keep me away from Vole.
“Yeah, sure,” I said, coolly. “Real caring guy, the Shank.”
Ms Cassandra’s eyes widened a little. And her fingers moved involuntarily towards the mole on her chin. She took a breath.
“I want you to watch something with me.”
“What is it?”
“It’s something that I think you need to see.”
“Will it take long?”
“Not long.”
Ms Cassandra put her hand on my arm and led me over to the iMac in the corner. I won’t deny it, I was intrigued. And I reckoned I still had some time. I sat down and the Counsellor leant over to the mouse, giving me a noseful of perfume. In a couple of clicks she had a video running on the screen.
At first it was hard to make out what the hell was supposed to be going on. It was all shadows and murk, like something out of a low-budget horror film. And, just as with a nightmare, the most frightening part was that vague sense of familiarity. I knew this place: the clutter of boxes and unidentifiable objects. A digital clock glimmered in the corner of the computer screen, showing the time that the video was recorded, but I didn’t bother to check it. I was too busy peering through the static, trying to work out what I was looking at.
A shape lurched into view, staggering and crashing among the boxes. Whoever it was appeared to be performing a drunken dance. He cavorted to a soundtrack in his head made up of industrial cacophony mashed with death metal. He reached above his head with his hands, grabbing at something, scratching at it, fighting it. But there was nothing there to fight against.
“You know who that is, don’t you, John?”
I felt dizzy and nauseous. It was like coming round after a tooth extraction.
“It’s… I don’t know.”
“Do you know where it is?”
“It looks like the basement. Under the Interzone.”
“Interzone? Interesting… I’ve never heard of that. But it is the basement, yes. The storage area. There’s a CCTV camera down there. We’re looking at the film from the camera. But who is the boy, John? The boy in the film?”
“It’s fake,” I said.
“How can it be fake? Look at the time and the date, John. Yesterday morning. We know you went down there. People saw you. What are you doing, John? Why are you moving like that?”
“There was someone … someone on my head.”
“Who?”
“The Dwarf.”
“Dwarf…? John, I—”
“Is this the original?”
“I don’t know…”
“It can’t be. The surveillance cameras use tape. Someone had to digitize the video so they could put it on the Mac. Once it’s been digitized, it’s easy to manipulate. Anyone can do it. They’ve wiped the Dwarf off the movie. You can even see where he was – check out the area above my head, it looks weird. And look at the shadows.”
“John, I can’t see anything there.”
Then I happened to look at the clock on the wall. It was 11.45. How the hell had three hours passed by? The Shank was due to speak to the assembly at 12. I had to get to the Principal to tell him what I’d found out. I stood up, ready to go.
“Just sit down and take it easy,” said Ms Cassandra, the tension making her voice harsh.
“I’ve got a job to do,” I said. “There’s a boil here that has to be lanced. And I’ve got the scalpel.”
As I spoke I put my hand in my pocket. I don’t know why – I just did. But the thing is that Ms Cassandra, who was obviously on the brittle edge of an emotional crevasse, thought I was talking about an actual scalpel. A scalpel I was about to use for a bout of impromptu plastic surgery. She shrank back into the corner of the room, screeching out, “Don’t cut me! Don’t cut me!”
I wanted to explain that, of course, I wouldn’t cut her, that there was no scalpel outside the realms of metaphor, and that even if there was I’d never hurt anyone with it, because hurting wasn’t my thing. But all that took second place to bringing the truth to Mr Vole. And so I gave Ms Cassandra exactly the kind of sinister look that a scalpel-wielding serial killer might well unfurl the second before getting down to work on the old slice and dice.
She, naturally, moved further away, and I was out through the door before she had the chance to realize that I was bluffing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
SAFE
I reached Vole’s room, panting, thirty seconds later. I’d jinked up and down corridors, making sure that the Counsellor wouldn’t figure out where I was going. I knew they’d find me soon enough, but I didn’t need long. I slapped at the door, and entered the Principal’s office the way a fat kid belly flops into the pool.
Vole was sitting at his desk, gazing at the Venerable Bede, placed before him on his desktop blotter. The tortoise gazed right back. It was like one of those staring competitions: the first one to blink’s a sissy.
It was Vole who blinked first. He broke off whatever act of telepathy or mind control he’d been attempting and turned to me. He seemed entirely unsurprised by my sudden appearance.
“Ah, Middlebrow, excellent. I was just about to, er, send for you. Very important job I have for you here. Very important in–ah–deed.”
“Sir, I have to tell you—”
“Quite, quite, quite. Of course you do. And all in good, ah, time. But, for now, I need you to stay here as a – a – a Guardian. You know, of course, the role of the Guardians in Plato’s Republic? Yes, of course you do. Philosophers who lead by example. And beyond that, lead by, well, frankly any old way they like. Lying, killing, whatever. Because they have right on their side. The greater good. Yes. Made of gold, unlike the base metal of the mob. Or even the iron – or is it bronze? – of the warriors. Yes, anyway, there you are…”
“Sir, what I have to tell you concerns Mr Shankley and the deaths. I know who—”
“Which is precisely why I need you to stay here. You’ve done fine work, there, Midwitch. Fine, fine work. And now there is the final, ah, the last leg of the, ah, journey. Insofar as waiting here and not moving can be seen as engaging upon a journey, which I believe it can, if you don’t take a literal approach to things. Or rather, words.”
I should have forced my information on him, but there was something curiously reassuring about the old man. Or perhaps it was just something soporific. Either way, the idea that he had everything in hand had a definite appeal. It meant that the burden was no longer mine to bear alone. Yes, it would all be OK. Mr Vole would see to it. I imagined sinking again into the soft chair in the Counsellor’s office.
But, no, that wasn’t right. I felt like a prince in a fairy tale, battling an enchantment. I shook my head.
“Sir, it’s Hart, he’s the one who… I’ve got proof—”
“I know, my boy, I know. And now you can leave it to me. The important thing is that you stay here and guard our great totem, the symbol of all that the school has come to, ah, symbolize. And stand for. My old friend, the companion of my youth. And age. And we can’t take any risks. I’m going to put Bede where no one can reach him.”
Then Vole picked up the tortoise and carried him towards the butterflies mounted on the wall. He flicked a concealed latch on one side of the frame and pulled i
t back. Behind it was a safe. He took a key from his pocket and opened the door. He then placed the Venerable Bede on top of a pile of papers inside the dark womb. Or should that be tomb? Vole’s back was towards me and I didn’t quite catch what happened next, but I think Vole may have bent and kissed the tortoise’s scaly head. Or perhaps he was simply mumbling some words of encouragement or solace to the reptile. Then he shut the door, swung back the butterflies, and turned to me, smiling.
At that moment there came a firm tapping at the door. We both jumped. Miss Bickersniff, the school secretary, half entered.
“Principal, the assembly…” She was obviously used to his forgetful ways.
“Right with you, Miss Bickersniff,” Vole replied cheerfully. He turned to me again. “Give me your hand, my boy.”
I held out my hand. Vole pressed the safe key into my palm and closed my fingers around it.
“A great responsibility. Keep this safe. Keep him safe. Keep us all safe. I go now to battle against the forces of, ah, evil. We both know who it is that must be stopped. Cabined, cribbed, confined, to quote the, ah, immortal, er, Bard. Of Avon, that is. Where else, indeed? If anyone at all tries to gain entry, then resist them with all your might and main. I have your word?”
I nodded.
“Principal Vole…” nagged Miss Bickersniff, still waiting.
“Yes, yes, yes. Wonderful. Goodbye, and good luck.”
Then the old guy shook my hand, picked up a battered old briefcase, bulging no doubt with unread documents and papers and half-eaten pork pies, and left.
CHAPTER THIRTY
THE FINAL CLUE
THE silence after the thunk of the closing door was like the infinite stillness between the flash of a nuclear detonation and the arrival of the soundwave. There was nothing in the universe apart from that silence. And because even time was beyond the reach of the silence, it felt as if it would last for ever; that sound had been taken out of the world just as you could take an appendix or a spleen or a heart out of a patient.
And then the unnatural silence faded into the familiar quiet of ticking clocks and distant engines and muted birdcalls, and I was left feeling slightly silly. I hadn’t given Vole my evidence. But then he didn’t seem to need it. Had greater minds than my own grappled with the case and found the solution? Was I truly superfluous?
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