The Red Road

by Stephen Sweeney

  One of the other boys? Were any boys in the school charged with keys or anything, as part of wider duties or security that I wasn’t aware of? Despite what Carson said, I couldn’t see it being anyone but one of the teachers.

  We sat there for a moment in silence, each trying to figure it out.

  “This is really weird,” Sam said. “I mean, how did they get the boys out of bed? It’s a dormitory, so I don’t see how they could have done it all without waking someone up?”

  “To be fair, at that age you sleep pretty soundly,” I said. “I barely even woke up during that hurricane we had in 1987.”

  “Really?” Carson asked. “It didn’t wake you up?”

  “No,” I said. “I was ten. They gave us lights out at nine p.m. at that age. I’d sleep through almost anything.”

  “Perhaps he’s drugging all of them?” Sam said. “Putting something in their hot chocolate, so they sleep through it?”

  “This is getting stupid now,” Rory said.

  “How would you do it? If you were the killer, I mean?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t take them out of the dorm directly,” Carson said, after considering it. “I’d entice them to meet me somewhere.”

  “That would work for the first one,” Rory admitted. “If it was someone they trusted, and it was the first time away from home, then they could have been lured out of their dorm for some reason.”

  “Which means, again, that it’s one of the staff. Or maybe one of the monks,” I said. “Not Ms Walker, though.”

  “I’d still finger her,” Sam said.

  We all snorted at that. Luckily we had finished our coffees or Carson’s desk would have been sprayed a light brown.

  “Your fingers stink after you’ve done that, apparently,” Rory said.

  “Really?” we all looked at him.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty gross I’ve heard.”

  “It depends on the girl,” Sam said. “Whether they smoke and what they eat can make a difference.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “I’ve heard Cody talking about it with some of his army friends when they were home one time. He didn’t want me listening to what they were saying, though, so I only caught a bit.”

  “Right, anyway,” Carson said, pulling out a pad of paper and a pen, “let’s get this written down. They would need to get access to the school, which means they would need keys—”

  “Ah, not true,” I said. “There are two teachers’ bedrooms in there, remember? So they could already have been inside.”

  “What about the matron?”

  “Too old,” I said. “She’d never be able to carry the body or ... oh crap, I forgot that the first one was all the way down the Red Road.”

  “How did you forget that?” Rory asked, a little incredulously. “You were the one who found them.”

  “Well, no, I remember finding them. But I just never really thought about it like that. The distance, I mean. They must have put the body in a car and driven them down there.”

  “But how?” Sam asked. “The school gates are locked.”

  “They weren’t back in September. They’ve only just started doing that after Craig Priest was killed. So, whoever did it could have driven around the school grounds without any problems.”

  “Risky, though. Someone could have seen them,” Rory said.

  “Unless you were one of the staff and were therefore above suspicion.”

  “Like Quasimodo, for example,” I said.

  “We’re going in circles here,” Carson said.

  “Maybe it was the Headless Highwayman?” I laughed.

  “The what?” both Carson and Sam looked at me.

  “The Headless Highwayman, from the junior school,” I reiterated, looking at both of them. “Oh, sorry, neither of you went to the junior school. It’s haunted.” I was trying, and failing, not to grin as I said it.

  “Haunted? By a ghost?” Carson scowled.

  “Yep. Part of the junior school used to be an inn or something like that back in the eighteen hundreds, and the landlord and landlady hanged a highwayman there after he kept robbing them. They got away with it due to something about him being wanted dead or alive, etc.”

  “But his ghost is still there?” Sam said.

  “Yep,” I nodded vigorously, still trying not to grin. Rory was smirking uncontrollably. “It floats about the corridors at night, looking for its head.”

  “Oh, fuck off, Crotty,” Carson said.

  “It does!” I repeated, laughing. “There have been loads of sightings. Rory saw it twice while we were there – once in the library and another time in the changing rooms. You’re too scared to go to the toilets in the middle of the night, in case you walk into it on the way there. Or it comes up behind you and grabs you while you’re peeing.”

  “He’s lying,” Rory said.

  “See,” Carson said to me. “Even Rory doesn’t believe you.”

  “No, I mean he’s not actually headless,” Rory said. “The rope broke his neck in such a way that his head isn’t upright any more, but hangs down over one of his shoulders.”

  Rory and I both started chuckling.

  “Whatever,” Carson said.

  “So, there is a ghost there?” Sam wanted to know.

  “No, there isn’t,” I said, admitting that the joke had already gone on long enough. “It scares the hell out of the first years telling them that, though. Some of them actually believe it, too. You should see the panic when you punish them with having to go to the library on their own at night. Well ... at least I don’t think the school is haunted. Quite a lot of old buildings actually are.”

  “So anyway, what have we got?” Rory said, looking at Carson and nodding to the paper he had been writing on.

  Carson looked at the paper, already with several ideas and proposals crossed out. “Ah, I don’t know,” he said, giving in, crushing up the paper and tossing it into the bin next to him. “As long as they don’t get me before I can get out of here and get to university, I don’t care.”

  “Where are you going to go?” I asked. “Any more ideas?”

  “Durham,” he said with the certainty of telling me that two plus two was four.

  “Isn’t that where you want to go, Sam?” I asked him.

  “No, I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Why?”

  “Probably because Durham’s bloody hard to get in to,” Rory said. “It’s where all the rejects from Oxford and Cambridge go, apparently.”

  “What about UCL?” Sam said to Carson.

  “UCL?” Carson asked.

  “University College London. That would probably be ideal. It’s near the City and Canary Wharf.”

  “Canary Wharf?” I asked, trying to place the name.

  “It’s now the tallest building in Britain,” Sam said. “You can see it from Hampstead Heath.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “Dave told me when I was staying at his. He thinks he’s going to go to UCL, and I think I might join him. It’s right in the middle of London, so it would get you loads of work contacts. Dave’s dad said that networking is really important to get ahead in your career.”

  I nodded. Sam raised a good point. It would be ideal for me, too. It would fit in well with my plans and give me a chance to get to know London before I embarked on a career there. I had found the city somewhat overwhelming when I had arrived there for the weekend, and knew that was an issue I would need to address as soon as possible.

  “I think I’ll stick to the City,” Carson said. “Canary Wharf’s not going anywhere just yet. No one’s really moving there from what I’ve read. Maybe in a few years, but not right now.”

  There came a rap at the door; it sounded like a teacher’s knock.

  “They always know where to find us, don’t they?” I commented.

  “Come in,” Carson said.

  The door opened, and in swept Father Thomas. Was the man stalking me? I wondered
. Did the monk stand outside Carson’s door looking at his watch and waiting for us to be late to evening prayers or something? The tall man looked around briefly and opened his mouth to speak, before his eyes settled on Sam.

  “Ah, I was about to ask if any of you had seen Sam, but here you are. Would you come with me, please? The headmaster would like to speak to you.”

  Sam glanced uneasily to the rest of us. “Is something wrong, Father?” he asked.

  “No, don’t worry, you’re not in trouble,” the monk said, raising a hand to calm everyone down. “But Father Benedict needs a word. It’s private, so he will tell you himself in his office.”

  Sam stole another glance at us, before getting up and making his way to the door in silence.

  “Boys, could you all please be back in your houses by nine thirty, for evening prayers? It’s nine twenty now, so you should think about getting there soon,” Father Thomas added, before departing with Sam, drifting out the door without any glimpse of shoes or feet beneath his cassock.

  “What was that all about?” I asked.

  “No idea,” Carson said.

  “I doubt he’s in trouble,” Rory said. “Sounds like something’s happened at home.”

  “Isn’t his brother in Iraq right now?” I said.

  “Shit, that’s true,” Carson said. “Christ, I hope not.”

  So did I. Sam was one of my best friends, and I would hate anything terrible to happen to him or his family.

  ~ ~ ~

  “Joe? Joe? Can you hear me?”

  Huh?

  “Hey, Joe?”

  Who said that?

  “Joe? Are you okay?”

  I opened my eyes. I was in Butcher’s third year dormitory. The lights were on. I looked around, seeing the others all staring at me. Simmons, Smith, the other Smith, and Silverman were still in their beds. Sam and Baz were standing not too far from me.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I think you were sleepwalking,” Simmons said. “I woke up and you were just standing there, over my bed, staring down at me. I woke Seb up, and he turned on the light, and you walked away. I thought you were mucking around, but you only just woke up now.” He sounded quite unsettled. The ribbing I had suffered from the last time I had been walking about at night was nowhere to be seen this time.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Twenty past one,” Baz said.

  I had barely been asleep for a couple of hours.

  “Are you okay, Joe?” Sam asked, sounding quite concerned.

  Why had I been sleepwalking again? What was wrong with me? How often did I do it? I couldn’t be sure that I actually woke up each time.

  “I think you should go back to bed, Joe,” Baz suggested when I didn’t answer.

  “Right, okay,” I said, turning around and lurching back to my own bed. I felt a little lightheaded. “Sorry,” I added to everyone as I lay down and pulled the duvet back over me.

  The others said nothing, and the lights soon clicked back off.

  “Are you okay, Joe? Baz whispered to me.

  I don’t know, I thought to myself. I didn’t answer him.

  Chapter Twenty

  The next day, I had a free afternoon and used the time to go and talk to the school nurse, to arrange a meeting with Steve Martin, the psychologist I had met when the headmaster and the police had wanted to talk to me about Scott Parker’s body.

  I didn’t expect him to be coming in any time soon and was prepared to have to talk to him in a week or two. As it turned out, Martin was coming in to talk to one of the other boys about a ‘delicate subject’, as the nurse said. I didn’t seek to find out what that might be and waited for the man to become available. I was hesitant to speak to him; I didn’t want anyone at the school to think that I was crazy. I hoped there would be a perfectly reasonable explanation for my behaviour.

  “So, what’s bothering you, Joe?” Martin said after we had exchanged some pleasantries and he had fetched me some water. “Is it to do with the murders at all?”

  “No, actually,” I said. “I was wondering if you knew anything about sleepwalking? The causes of it and that. I’ve been doing it a lot lately, as well as having some bad dreams, and so I thought I’d see if you knew anything about it.”

  “Hmm,” the man said, screwing up his face a bit. “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen,” I said.

  “Sleepwalking isn’t a common thing, but it’s not all that unusual around your age, either,” Martin said after considering things for a while. “It can often be related to puberty. As you will know, your body is going through a number of changes, and they can be psychological as well as physical. Have you been experiencing anything else at the same time?”

  “Nightmares,” I told him.

  “What do they involve? Is there any consistency between them?”

  “They usually involve ‘goblins’,” I said, finding myself laughing a little at the absurdity of the term. “They’re these small white creatures, with long bony fingers. They’re usually waving spears and things about. They chase me around the school and try to kill me. They succeed a lot of the time, too.”

  “Do you watch a lot of horror films or read anything of that nature?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ve actually been having the nightmares since I was about twelve, so this isn’t a new thing.”

  Martin nodded, thinking some more. “The ‘goblins’ are obviously a product of your imagination, but are likely representative of things in your life that are causing you distress. They could stand for your schoolwork or the older boys that might bully you. Nightmares are extremely common during adolescence, though most teenagers don’t like to talk about it. They’re afraid of admitting what has woken them up at night and that it might make them a subject of ridicule amongst their peers. Were you bullied a lot when you were younger?”

  “In the junior school, yes,” I admitted.

  Another understanding nod from Martin. “We don’t like to admit it happens, but bullying is a fact of school life. You can only stop the worst of it, unfortunately. Do you ever fight back against them?”

  “The bullies or the goblins?”

  “Sorry, I mean the goblins in your dreams?”

  “Sometimes. I remember having attacked them from time to time.”

  “But it doesn’t work? You still get the dreams?”

  “Yes,” I nodded.

  “Sometimes recurring dreams can be stopped by getting to the root cause of the problem, either in the dream itself or in real life. I used to have nightmares when I was your age. They slowly went away as I got older. When you suffer the nightmares, are you experiencing any stress from real life?”

  I thought about it carefully. Now that he mentioned it, I could see a correlation with what was happening in real life. The first nightmare I had suffered was when I had entered the senior school and been terrified of what might happen to me there. I had been overwhelmed by the scale of the new environment and the number of boys in my year and those above. The other times I had suffered them had been whenever I had been facing tests or exams, and, more recently, around the times of the murders. I told him so.

  “Stress and puberty,” Martin nodded. “I am confident that your dreams will go away in a few months, after you finish your GCSEs. If it’s something you’re very worried about, I can give you some sleeping aids to help deal with them.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I felt better knowing that. I suspected, as Martin said, that many of the other boys in my year suffered nightmares. Most would certainly not admit to them, especially if they were members of the Clique. That would almost certainly be seen as a sign of weakness.

  “The sleepwalking, on the other hand, is a little more troubling,” Martin then said. “You could harm yourself or one of the other students while doing it. When did it last happen?”

  “Last night,” I said. “I was just walking about my dorm. Apparently my eyes were open.”

 
“They usually are. It can be very unsettling for other people to see that.”

  I thought of how much it had bothered Anthony Simmons. He had looked quite afraid of me, as I expect anyone would with been, finding someone looming over them in the middle of the night, staring at them with a glassy look in their eyes. Baz and Sam had been attempting to wake me, though they had maintained a distance and looked equally bothered.

  “Is there an easy cure that you know of?” I asked.

  “Not as such. It can quite often be linked to other things, in this case your nightmares. Having thought about it, both could probably be avoided simply by maintaining a good sleep hygiene.”

  “Sleep hygiene?” I asked.

  “Getting the right amount of sleep, avoiding caffeine and sugar just before bed, not using the bed for anything other than sleeping – meaning don’t sit or lie on it when you’re not intending to sleep – eating properly, exercising regularly, changing your sheets often, and avoiding stress. I can see that last one being a little more difficult, given your upcoming GCSEs.

  “But try not to let the thought of that stress you out, either. Worrying about the nightmares and the sleepwalking could simply cause them to happen.

  “As I said, I can arrange with the clinic to bring in some sleep aids for you, for use when you’re feeling stressed. I’m very certain that this is just a temporary thing. Start with the sleep hygiene and try not to do any schoolwork just before going to sleep. Worrying about it will only stick in your mind. Read a book, something fun and interesting to settle your mind. Not horror. If after all that you’re still suffering from the nightmares, come and see me and I’ll arrange for you to receive some sleep aids.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks. Um ... this is just going to be kept between us, right? You’re not going to let the headmaster or anyone know, are you?” I asked just before leaving.

  “It’s just between us for now, Joe,” Martin said. “I would only advise the school nurse if I thought it was something that needed further investigation.”

  “Cool, thanks,” I said.

  “Have a good day,” Martin smiled.

  I felt relieved that it wasn’t something serious. I had wondered if I was going to sleepwalk for the rest of my life. To hear that it was something that generally only happened when you were younger (and wasn’t all that uncommon at that time) was a great weight off my mind. The fear that the thought of the nightmares caused me was almost worse than the things themselves, kind of like a negative feedback loop of sorts. I might well have broken the chain.