‘And Lucy didn’t listen to her parents and teachers, did she Mrs Perkins?’ Weirton rumbled.
‘Oh no, she didn’t Mr Weirton.’ Perkins shook her head, but her lips were pinched, her brow creased. Her face lacked the smug certainty with which she’d answered that question last time.
Other people were having doubts – some much more serious than my own. One day, Stubbs got it into his brain to go round telling everybody he no longer believed in God and Jesus. The idiot skipped in the playground, grin big, arms swinging, yelling out his crazy ideas. I trembled for the danger that buffoon was putting himself into. I glanced up at the sky. Masses of black and grey clouds floated, shifting over one another. I just hoped – for Stubbs’s sake – those clouds were thick enough to stop the Lord hearing Dennis’s high voice. The evidence of His great wrath was branded forever on Jonathon’s brow; the theft of just one item from His holy house had made Him almost drown Emberfield. What punishments could He flash down to smite Stubbs for his outrageous disbelief? The Lord seemed not to hear Stubbs that day, but Weirton’s ears were sharper. He’d been standing on his promontory, gazing out across the flatlands with the same blank-eyed stare with which he’d gawped at the pool. But, as Stubbs pranced below him singing out his cheerful blasphemies, the teacher’s body jolted. He twisted his face one way then the next, mouth hanging, eyes hunting the offender. Those eyes fastened on Stubbs. The teacher ran from his platform, jogged down the steps and paced across the playground to the boy, who was still skipping and flinging arms, oblivious to what was about to swoop upon him.
‘By God, Dennis Stubbs!’ Weirton thrust his finger at that lad. ‘I’ve never heard anything like it! I’ll beat those demons out of you that are making you blaspheme! I’ll pound the evil from you so the Lord does not send upon us more fire and flood!’
Stubbs froze in mid-prance. Like a comic statue, he remained in the same pose, his gormless face set between horror and triumph. The teacher’s hand flew out, grabbed Stubbs’s wrist, hauled him up.
‘By God!’ Weirton bellowed. ‘I’ll thrash those devils from you!’
The kids stared as Weirton stepped into his sideways stance, moved his right hand back and high. In the playground’s opposite corner, Perkins gawped, shook her head as if not quite able to take in Weirton’s words. Like the other kids, Helen Jacobs stood – open-mouthed, eyes swelling – yet there was more than fear and shock in her expression. A kind of distaste or disapproval I hadn’t seen before flickered over her features.
‘Daring to deny God!’ Weirton yelled. ‘The Devil is in you, boy!’
The hand plummeted. The impact echoed across the playground, over the field. Another whack whistled down, the strike resounded and soon the teacher had slipped into a pounding trance. Over and over again the palm swept; Dennis sailed up and swung back as that merciless hand beat. Soon Dennis was pale, choking, his lips spasming for breath. Sweat gushed down Weirton’s face, but this didn’t prevent the teacher yelling, ‘Don’t feel so clever now, do we? Well, I won’t stop till every demon’s walloped out of you! I won’t stop till the Lord’s work is done!’
And stop, he didn’t. The hand kept flying, bashing out its vengeance as impact after impact reverberated, as tears arced. Stubbs’s face sheet-white, he desperately gasped for air. Weirton’s cheeks glowed, but the teacher powered on. More whacks came; the teacher’s breath jerked in heavy pants; the holding arm trembled; exhaustion screwed his face, but still he went on thrashing as Stubbs gurgled and sobbed. The hand hammered on and on, slamming endless whacks into Dennis. Eventually, the holding arm juddered so much that – simply unable to keep Stubbs up – in jolts and jerks it lowered the boy. Even after Stubbs’s feet had touched the ground, the teacher got in a last couple of wallops. Weirton let go of Stubbs’s wrist; the boy collapsed. He banged onto his knees then sprawled on the playground – a strange jumble of flesh and bones. Sobs shuddered through him; hiccups lurched out. Weirton could hardly stand. He gripped the edge of his promontory as his scarlet face shone, as he sucked air in enormous gulps. Perkins crept up, began to pick Dennis from the asphalt. Between rasping breaths, Weirton stammered, ‘Mrs Perkins, please … supervise the children … I must go inside … I must go in to recover.’
The teacher staggered towards the steps – walking like a pupil after one of his hidings. He swayed and teetered up them then hobbled down the path at the school’s side. Both hands inched up to grasp his chest.
After school that day, Jonathon and I spotted Weirton fishing in the pond. Again he sat on his chair, gripping his rod. There was no rain so the kagool hood was down. We sneaked behind the pub’s fence then watched our teacher. There was little sign of his earlier exertions. The mouth pulled in steady breaths; the eyes rested on the brown waters. But I soon realised Weirton wasn’t calm. A tremble jerked through his hands, making his rod quiver. A twitch pulsed in one cheek. As for his gaze, it was a manic stare: as if the teacher were testing himself and the pool, daring himself to go on looking at it, daring that dread pond to try something. Apart from his shivers, Weirton sat without movement as the minutes dragged by.
‘He must be going mad!’ Jonathon whispered.
‘All the worse for us then!’ I hissed. ‘You saw what he did to Stubbsy! Never seen him give out such a huge whacking – and I’ve seen lots of tre-mend-ous ones! I really thought Stubbs might be joining Marcus in haunting Emberfield!’
‘Yeah, Perkins had to carry him back into the school!’
‘We’ve got to do something about Weirton before he kills someone! OK, he didn’t kill Lucy, but I’m sure he killed Marcus!’
‘Yeah,’ Jonathon said. ‘We have to get rid of Weirton! But how? How?’
Chapter Forty-eight
The whole town was discussing Weirton’s antics at the pool. At the dinner table in Jonathon’s house, I watched the brother fight his smirks as his parents talked about ‘the little eccentricities of our headmaster’. Though they let out long puffs of worried air, though concern crinkled their faces, they spoke of ‘sticking by Mr Weirton’.
‘It’s what he does in the school that matters,’ Mr Browning said. ‘And there are no problems there! If anything, the discipline’s getting stronger – it’s iron from what I gather!’
‘Yes,’ his wife replied. ‘Good old Mr Weirton – he’s one of the last of a dying breed. I really hope he’s OK.’
‘Course he is!’ Mr Browning said, though his eyes flicked in uneasy glances round the table. ‘Course he is! And long may he continue whipping our kids into shape!’
In the shop, all the chat I overheard was about Weirton’s fishing endeavours. Mrs Stubbs wondered if ‘Mr Weirton maybe just needs a little break’; Davis still had ‘no idea what he hopes to catch in there, but let’s hope he’s around for a good while to catch all the little scamps when they’re up to their misdemeanours’. In the playground, when the headmaster’s eyes were focused elsewhere, kids had fun ‘being Weirton’ – miming the fling of his rod, aping his stare into the pool, perhaps – in gormless triumph – hauling out an old boot or rusty can: jabbing their victorious fingers at that invisible prize. But such playacting was risky – it earned gargantuan thrashings for Stubbs, Darren Hill. Whatever might have been going on in Weirton’s head, there was little wrong with his right hand. As the parents rallied to Weirton, as the kids acted out their mockeries, the only person who puzzled me was Helen Jacobs. She talked of speaking to her father about the infamous walloping Stubbs had drawn upon himself after saying he didn’t believe in Christ, about the words Weirton had yelled out on that occasion, about him fishing in the pond, about what ‘had happened there before’. She said her dad ‘was making enquiries’. I wasn’t sure what Mr Jacobs could enquire into, unless he wanted to be able to tell Weirton whether fish really did skulk in Marcus’s pool.
Chill February slithered into rainy March. Weirton could now be seen sitting by the pond most afternoons, staring at its waters as the downpours thudded, gazing into that
pool even as thunder rolled, as the bellies of clouds were ripped open, as forked lightning flickered. Sometimes he didn’t pull up his hood. He just sat as the water streamed down his face, as the rain belted until it even flattened the iron hairstyle. He went on gazing as blond-grey locks flopped over his forehead.
But nothing had flattened Weirton’s performance in the school. As the first days of March edged past, Jonathon got two enormous hidings. I got three – massive wallopings that even my long experience of Weirton’s hand couldn’t have prepared me for: the force of the impacts, the way Weirton thrashed on until every gram of his strength had left him, the airless state in which I swung up and swooped down, even praying for death to save me from those lung-burning agonies. During the evenings after those whackings, my eyes did wander to the window, get hypnotised by the beckoning sheen of my bathwater. But that strange instinct would – against my will – jolt into action and rip my gaze from those shimmering portals I knew could lead me out of my painful world.
One day we passed Weirton. The teacher was sitting, staring into the pond as the rain pounded its wrath upon his bare head, crashed into the seething pool. Jonathon’s hand flew up, smacked his brow.
‘Of course!’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Why didn’t I think of it before?’
‘Think of what?’
‘It’s simple!’
‘What is?’
‘Who needs complicated robots? Who needs to wait for computers?’
Jonathon beckoned me down the road. We were on the pub’s stinking corner before he whispered, ‘All we need to do is shove Weirton into the pond!’
‘Yeah!’ I said. ‘So Marcus can get him! Maybe Marcus just needs a bit of help – then he can kill Weirton with his magic! Magic’s much better than science!’
‘I don’t know about Marcus.’ Jonathon surprised me by shrugging his shoulders. ‘Maybe he’s in that pond; maybe he’s not. But, anyway, Weirton might drown in there. It’s worth a try.’
‘Yeah, let’s hope Weirton can’t swim. And I’m sure Marcus will help pull him under! But …’
My smile dropped as the practicalities of enacting Jonathon’s plan struck me.
‘What if Weirton doesn’t drown? If we push him in and he sees us, imagine the whacking we’ll get! We’ll probably end up like Marcus ourselves!’
‘We’ll go back to our houses,’ Jonathon said. ‘Get old coats, different colours to our usual ones. We’ll have the hoods up, and tie scarves around our faces – like in gangster films! He’ll never know it’s us!’
My heart began to thud as I saw the parts of Jonathon’s wonderfully evil plot fitting into place.
‘But Weirton’s so huge,’ I said. ‘Are you sure we could shove him in there?’
‘Probably,’ said Jonathon, having to speak louder now as the rain battered our kagools even more strongly. ‘I reckon we each weigh about five stone; our clothes and shoes, maybe another stone each. We need to run up and throw ourselves at Weirton – twelve stone hitting him, fast!’
Jonathon slammed his fist into his palm.
‘Should be enough to knock him off his chair and, hopefully, into the pool!’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Then Marcus should do the rest!’
We ran to our homes. In my porch, I rummaged among the mouldy-smelling, damp jumble of hanging coats. I found my old kagool from a couple of springs ago, stuffed it in my satchel. I grabbed a scarf, a spare one of my dad’s. I sprinted from my house, met Jonathon on our main street.
‘Did you get what you were looking for?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Come on!’
I both prayed our headmaster would still be fishing and begged God he would have packed up and gone. Luckily, there was no one around to see us charging up the street. We pelted past the gap that had once held the witch’s hand, skidded to a halt opposite the pub. We peered down the school lane – Weirton’s dark bulk was there.
‘Let’s go!’ Jonathon whispered.
We sneaked across the road then crept towards the pool, staying close to the pub’s fence. My heart boomed at every step. How easily could that pub’s door swing open and an adult stride out! But the door stayed closed, and we were soon nearing the pond. We slipped into a mass of tall weeds, nettles and saplings that stood a little way back from the bank. The rain bashed as we crept through that tangled thicket. I begged God I wouldn’t step on a twig and startle Weirton, that some wicked creepers wouldn’t snag my foot, send me smashing down. But – from the way the vast body was hunched, from the way the neck thrust its now hooded head to stare over the pool – it seemed the teacher had all his senses fixed on that water. And the downpour was making so much noise I guessed it would mask the sounds of our movements. Jonathon and I stopped, squatted down a couple of metres behind Weirton.
‘Let’s get changed!’ Jonathon hissed.
The rain went on belting as we shuffled around, slipped our coats off, stuffed them in our satchels, pulled our old ones on. We yanked up our hoods, tied our scarves around our faces, dropped back into our squat. My heart banged. It would race for some seconds, faster than I ever thought it could. It would then slow as I hauled in a deep breath through my woolly mask before it rushed again. The teacher remained in his stooped posture. Just Weirton’s back was jerking wider then narrowing as his breath juddered.
‘Well,’ Jonathon whispered, ‘this is it!’
I glanced around – I could see no other people. There was just the teacher, the pond, the dark plains stretching off. I spotted a couple of birds – ravens or crows – wheeling far above. My mind now strangely calm, I thought it odd those creatures should be flying in such a downpour. Surely they’d be better off sheltering their sodden wings. I remembered a legend that such birds – ravens, crows and the like – were harbingers of death, black-winged messengers from the otherworld: messengers that would swoop down to bear souls away. Despite the deluge, those birds went on with their eager circles over the headmaster.
‘Ready?’ Jonathon hissed.
‘Yeah.’
‘Now!’
We charged from our hiding place. The teacher didn’t turn. As my arms jolted, as my legs powered, his back grew larger, until – like the flank of some elephant or whale – it swamped my vision. I launched myself at him. For two seconds – slow, slow seconds – I hurtled through the air. I floated in some state in which time’s rules were altered. I saw Jonathon drifting next to me. I saw the clouds, the trees, the drenched flatlands, the birds hovering. An impact – I sunk into wet plastic, spongy flesh; I bounced off and was lying on my back on the pond’s shore, watching those birds turn, dive towards the pool. I wriggled over onto my front. Weirton’s rod floated in the pond; he staggered – like a drunk man – at the water’s edge. He now tilted, trying to balance on one leg; his mouth hung; his eyes fixed me with their stare. His arms waved in big arcs. Those birds plunged, skimmed the teacher before gliding up. Weirton’s arms waved more frantically. He stumbled back, slipped, flew up, lay horizontal on the air before he crashed into the pool. Two massive waves jumped high then fell back over him. The water pitched; we could see nothing of the teacher. Bubbles burbled up near the pond’s middle.
‘Marcus!’ I gasped.
Something started to twist and thrash. It bucked and writhed – sometimes just above, sometimes just beneath the surface.
‘That’s Marcus killing Weirton!’ I blurted. ‘Gobbling him down!’
I stared as the struggle grew stronger. The protagonists vanished then the waters formed themselves into a rocking rain-lashed peak that rose in the pool’s centre. This summit thrust up and sloshed down a couple of times before the surface broke and a towering monster appeared. It reared up, brandishing its fists. Flaps of skin hung in dripping folds; a pointed caul crowned its head. The monster was coated in raw mud and green slime; its putrid stench wafted. Its huge mouth opened; it roared. I gripped the ground, as if the earth itself could somehow protect me.
/> ‘Boys!’ The creature was booming. ‘You … boys!’
‘It’s Marcus!’ I shouted.
‘Run!’ Jonathon yelled.
The monster lurched towards us, wading to the bank, gnashing its teeth. We scrambled up, stumbled into a sprint. I glanced back; the monster had reached the shallows and broken into an ungainly jog. My heart bashed; my arms pumped. Halfway down the school lane, I again looked back. The monster was charging up Marcus’s bank, but it slipped and for a second teetered, flinging mud-caked arms. It toppled backwards and crashed into the pool. Churning ovals of liquid leapt up, smashed down in vast explosions on the surface. I hurtled on then turned my head. The pond still pitched; rain still whipped it, but it had sealed itself. Of the monster, there was no sign. My heart vaulted as a hand thrust above the water. A giant, non-human hand smeared with brown and green. The hand shook; its fingers tightened as if they wanted to clench into a fist. But the hand grew limp, flopped below the waves. I dashed on to the lane’s corner where I risked another glimpse back. The rain still slashed at the pool, but its pitch and toss were subsiding. Weirton’s chair lay upended on the bank; the shallows lapped his rod. As for any life, I could see none.
Chapter Forty-nine
I hit the water – crash! It rains back over me like earth into a grave. I twist and writhe in dirty blackness, in piercing cold. I struggle with something, someone, grapple against his strength. I open my mouth to scream, call for help, filth pours down my throat, into my nostrils. My chest aches, something in it bulges, pain, pain sharper and sharper, now agony. I throw him off; my shoes slide on the sludgy bottom; with huge effort, I stand, break the surface. Back out of the water, into the old airy world. Still agony, squeezing, swelling in my chest. I see the pub, the fields, those two dark birds in the sky, two figures, boys, I think, on the pond’s bank. I call to them; they sprint off; I stumble from the water; hard to run as waves of agony pulse from my ribcage. I want to shout to them, ask for help, difficult to form speech. Tug on my ankle, I’m falling, I smash back into the water, into that biting chill. Flash in my mind of Marcus, last time I was in here. And again we’re fighting, thrashing, wriggling, struggling, but all is underwater, all is black, chest tight, full of pain. Marcus is winning, I’m getting weak. I stretch up my hand, feel the blessed air upon it, one last plea for help. And all is blackness and filth, and blackness and pain, and then just blackness. I sink and then no more.
The Standing Water Page 50
