The Perils and Dangers of this Night

by Stephen Gregory

  My father took the pistol from me and we walked back to the house. I was sickened in my stomach that I'd spoilt the day and dreaded what he might say to my mother. But I remember my heart had swelled and my eyes prickled with tears of love and gratitude when, at the Christmas dinner table, she'd asked if I'd done well with the pistol and he'd smiled and said, 'Alan did very well – he learned a lot this morning.'

  Last Christmas: the pistol from my father, the radio from my mother. Now the vision faded and disappeared and I stared into the empty darkness of the dormitory. I pressed the hiss of the radio to my ear, and I wept, with great gulping sobs. As I swallowed, the tears scalded my throat.

  Sleep, and the burning in my throat, brought the dream to me again – the faces and the room I didn't know. The music that Kemp had snatched out of my ear suddenly blared again, the lurch and swoop of a familiar, unrecognisable sound, and a gloomy college room strewn with paper whirled around me. This time the faces of the man and woman blurred into view together, locked in a kiss which dissolved in a muddling of pain and tears as though the fusion of their lips had burned them. She was weeping, he was clawing at his throat and choking, and a voice said 'I disgust myself' in a weary monotone. When the lid of a piano slowly opened – and as it did so a pit of the deepest horror seemed to yawn inside my stomach – the reflection of the boy, me at first and then not me, beckoned me close and gestured for me to peer down into the hole. I leaned in. Something like a wire glimmered and snarled towards me and caught my throat and I recoiled with it scalding into my skin . . .

  I awoke with a jolt, as if I'd fled to the end of a leash around my neck and been yanked to a bone-breaking standstill.

  I lay still, in a quiver of relief that it was over. The radio was still hissing in my ear.

  FOUR

  Outside on the lawn, a cock pheasant scratched at the hard ground. It was a cold bright day, and the grass was white with frost. It had been a freezing night. Now the sky was silvery grey, the trees bare and black, and the world was a softly creaking, tinkling metallic place. The bird puffed out its feathers, red and gold and iridescent in the thin sunlight. It scratched again, and its little breath was a puff of vapour in the cold air.

  Inside the house, I was singing. I'd been singing throughout the morning, and now I was tired of it. It was early afternoon, and we'd only stopped briefly for a lunch of tinned tomato soup and slices of white bread that Mrs Kemp had brought from the kitchen. I sang – Three kings from Persian lands afar – while Dr Kemp, employing all his guile as a musician to avoid the few minutely out-of-tune notes which offended him so much, sketched an accompaniment on the grand piano.

  Mrs Kemp sat by the hearth. The hall was grey and dismal. There was no fire, so the room was probably not much warmer than it was outside. The lights on the Christmas tree had not been turned on. As I sang, my breath plumed around me. Dr Kemp, in his everyday tweedy jacket, didn't seem to feel the cold, and Mrs Kemp, a prisoner of her wheelchair, was swaddled in a red tartan blanket. She sat by the dead fire, and she brushed and brushed the big black dog, over and over, keeping a kind of rhythm with the music. From time to time she would stop brushing and pick all the hair from the brush and toss it onto the ashes, until there was quite a mat of it lying there.

  We reached the end of the carol. Mrs Kemp said, 'That was lovely, Alan,' and she leaned out of her chair to throw another ball of fur into the hearth. I waited for a moment, standing with my hands on the top of the piano, for a word from Dr Kemp.

  The word came. 'Again,' he said. 'Let's try to get it right.'

  Mrs Kemp was quick to say, 'Well, I thought it was lovely,' and there was a terseness in her voice which I hadn't heard before. 'That's my opinion, for what it's worth. I know we're all ''striving to shine'' at Foxwood, but sometimes a bit of praise where praise is due might be nice.'

  The headmaster looked at her as though she had used a word he had never heard before, a word from a language with which he was not familiar. 'Nice? We aren't striving to be nice.' He made a play of searching the ceiling for inspiration, and then added, with what he thought was withering sarcasm, 'Now there's a good idea for a school motto: 'strive to be nice'. Yes, let's change the motto for next year and see what a difference it makes to our exam results.'

  'You know what I mean, my dear,' she countered, and somehow the tiniest edge of exasperation on her sweet, soft voice was more cutting than his clumsy attempt at irony. 'I know it's a banal sentiment that only silly, mediocre people like me allow themselves, but at Christmas- time it is nice to be nice to one another, or at least to try to. That's what I think.'

  Dr Kemp weighed her words carefully. He instinctively felt for the crooked, paralysed fingers on his left hand, and massaged them as if he could bring them back to life again. And he said, with a great effort, 'You're right, my dear. The boy sings beautifully. With work and perseverance he might one day achieve some of the things which I did not. And so, for that reason, let's sing it again. Let's get it right.'

  So I sang it again, although my mouth was dry and my lips were chapped after the hot soup. This time Dr Kemp stood up from the piano, gesturing me to continue singing, and he caressed my knuckles with the ivory baton to keep me in time. I sang, and I could smell the man's jacket and his breath and his hair because he loomed so close, sometimes even placing a heavy hand on my stomach to whisper, 'From here, you breathe from here . . .' even as I sang without pause or hesitation. And I reached the end of the carol, unaccompanied, only to wait for the absolute verdict as Dr Kemp leaned to the piano and touched the chord which would signify that my voice was either perfectly in tune or minutely wrong.

  The chord hummed in the cold, still room, hung with the motes of dust from the dead fire and the dead tree. I knew I was good, because my ear was true and had always been true, long before Dr Kemp had singled me out. He listened to the notes until they faded to nothing and at last he said, 'Yes, that is good.'

  High praise. Mrs Kemp's eyes glistened as she smiled across at me, moved by the beauty of the carol and the unqualified approval of her husband. Only Wagner sounded an off-key note. He groaned long and loud, with a horrible rasping in his throat like a death rattle, so that Mrs Kemp laughed and even the headmaster chuckled at the sound of it.

  'Yes, Wagner, time to go out,' she said. 'At long last . . .'

  A minute later – the time it took for me to go swerving and skidding through the corridors and into the changing- room for my outdoor coat and shoes and back to the great hall – I followed Wagner as he burst from the front of the school and into the colder air of the outside world. The dog lumbered ahead of me, gathering speed into a lolloping gallop, charging across the lawn and towards the woodland. Another minute, and the two of us were crashing through the dry bracken of the forest, winding through the stands of smooth white birches, in and out of the tall columns of the beech trees.

  A grey and steely place, so that, if anyone else had been there to see it, my tuft of red hair would have been the brightest thing in the forest, flickering like a spark through the afternoon shadows. I yelled, my voice a little hoarse from the hours of singing and this sudden exertion – 'Go on, Wagner, go!' – as the heavy black bulk of the dog forced through the undergrowth ahead of me. With a glance over my shoulder I saw that the flinty façade of the school, with its rows of empty black windows, had fallen away and faded, that I'd escaped at last and was dodging and burrowing deeper and deeper into the woods. With another glance, I saw that the dog had startled a pheasant from the bracken, and the bird ran at first, keeping ahead of the dog, until it launched itself into the air and rocketed up, smashing through twigs until it broke clear, a brilliant-hot rocket of a bird which filled the trees with guttural croaks as it made its escape.

  'Go on, Wagner, get him, get him!' I shouted, as the dog pressed a hopeful, joyful, futile pursuit. We ran, until at last, as the woodland banked upwards where the lane wound through it, the dog flopped into a nettle bed and lay there heaving, his tongue flo
pping like an eel and flecked with foam. I threw myself onto the ground and lay by the dog, flat on my back, gathering my breath as I gazed through the tops of the trees to the darkening sky.

  A silence grew around us. At first the only sounds were our breathing, slowing and slowing to a steady rhythm, and the sounds of the forest on a late afternoon in midwinter that I knew so well: the cluck of the blackbird, the tick of the wren, the distant staccato of pheasant, and always the sway and creak of the branches. Dusk already. And never a silence, for the woodland was a whispering, living thing, as alive in the depths of winter as it had been in the sappy days of spring and bloom of summer.

  I lay there and listened. Stillness, a sense of waiting – waiting for the darkness to fall and the night to come.

  But then there was another sound. The dog heard it first. Wagner stopped panting, stopped breathing, and listened. I heard it too. It was the sound of an engine.

  It grew louder. A car was coming along the lane, winding through the forest towards us.

  I crawled on my belly to the top of the bank, so that I was overlooking the lane from a height of fifteen or twenty feet. The lane was a narrow cutting, barely wide enough for one car, with passing places here and there to allow a flow of traffic. On either side the banks were sheer, ancient hedgerows, much older than Foxwood Manor and the surrounding estate: probably this lane had been a cart track through the forest for hundreds of years. Now, as the dog bellied up beside me to have the same view, I peered into the distance and heard the sound of the engine grow louder. It was a snarling, intermittently roaring sound, the testy, impatient note of a car that was forced to slow and slow and nearly stop for the sharp bends before accelerating briefly along a short straight before slowing again. And I saw the lights: already, only four o'clock in the afternoon, it was dark in the deep tunnels of the lane, where the banks closed in and the trees lowered their bare branches over and across it; so I saw the headlamps cutting towards me, flashing their beams into the forest, now bright, now dimmed, as the car turned this way and that.

  The dog growled a deep, throaty, rattling growl. I put one arm around the animal's body and snuggled him close. The car burst into the cutting below us.

  An extraordinary sight, at such a time, in such an out of the way, forsaken corner of the English countryside. The car swerved round the bend too fast, headlamps blazing, the engine snarling, and as the rear wheels fishtailed out of control on a patch of frozen mud, it slithered to a standstill with its long nose rammed into the hedgerow, the front wheels mired in a ditch. Long nose, red flanks streaked with mud, the headlamps now blinkered in a tangle of hawthorn and blackthorn and nettles.

  I goggled from my vantage point. It was an E-type Jaguar, quite new, something so beautiful and wonderful, so unexpected, that I mouthed an involuntary wow and stared, aghast and agog. The car was stuck. The filthiest, loveliest car I'd ever seen, the wheels spun and the engine howled as the driver crunched it into reverse and tried to accelerate backwards. There were two people in the car, a man and a woman, bundled in coats and scarves. I could see them quite clearly – mouthing at each other, their faces white with anger – because, despite the bitter cold and the quickly smothering darkness, the hood was folded down. And now, the deep, narrow lane, which had been so quiet and still a few moments before, was swirling with fumes, loud with the noise of the engine, bright with white and orange light, as though a machine from another planet had suddenly landed.

  The driver got out. The engine settled to a rumbling growl as he stood up and slammed the door as hard as he could. He was tall and dark, young – hard to tell in the dusk and with a big black coat pulled up to his ears, a scarf wrapped around his mouth. Now he tugged the scarf from his face, said, 'Fuck,' and marched across the lane so that he was standing just below the spot where the dog and I were lying. He fumbled with his coat and trousers and started to urinate into the hedgerow. A cloud of steam rose into the air. The dog wrinkled his nose at the scent of it. Then the young man zipped himself up and strode back to the car.

  'You try,' he said. 'Come on, Sophie, you try, while I push. Just slide across, jam the fucking thing into reverse and let the clutch out.'

  The passenger, a girl as dark as the man and just as swaddled in coat and scarf, struggled to move across into the driver's seat, muttering impatiently as she snagged her coat on the gear-stick and hand-brake. 'What the hell are we d-d-doing here?' she stammered. 'I didn't even know you had a b-b-brother till last week.'

  'You didn't waste much time then, did you?' the man hissed back. 'Now, clutch down and find reverse – come on . . .'

  There was a horrible clang as the girl jerked the car into gear. Once more the air was filled with smoke and a terrible snarling, as she accelerated hard and the wheels spun in the mud. At the same time, the man forced himself into the hedge and heaved with all his weight under the nose of the car. Suddenly, throwing a splatter of mud and ice from its tyres and into the other side of the lane, it lurched sideways and was clear again. The girl just managed to stop before it rammed backwards into the opposite hedgerow.

  The man stood with his hands on his hips, his head thrown back, regaining his breath after the effort of pushing. When he crossed to the car, he paused and kicked at the off-side front tyre. 'It's going down, but it'll get us there. Move over.'

  With another struggle of big coat and gear-stick, the girl was back into the passenger seat and the man was behind the wheel. A moment later the car throttled forwards, the wheels spinning again as it tried to grip, and it seemed to leap through the cutting and along the lane like some kind of wild animal.

  Then it was gone, around the first corner. There was only one place it could have been going to: Foxwood Manor, the only place at the end of the lane. I jumped to my feet, tugging the dog with me. 'Come on, Wagner, let's go!'

  I was thrilled to have seen such a car appear in the lane: an E-type, so sleek and slim and smooth, so dirty. My head rang with the sound of it, and I could still smell the fumes of its engine as I hurried to follow the dog through the trees. I was strangely excited by the quick, sudden vision I'd had of the driver and the girl, and the language the man had used: words that I and the other boys at school knew and had even tried ourselves in a clumsy, experimental way, but which I'd never ever heard in real life, from the mouth of a real person. I tried now, as I ran. 'Fuck,' I said, and even in the emptiness and growing darkness of the woodland where no one could see me or hear me, the word felt awkward and ugly in my mouth.

  Boy and dog, we stalked the car. Because the lane was so tortuously twisting, winding like a snake around ancient tumuli and barrows of long-ago settlements, negotiating the stream beds and outcrops of rock over which the forest had grown, I knew I could get back to the school almost as quickly as the car would get there – or even quicker – by weaving my way along the tracks I knew so well. So we ran, this time with me going first and the dog huffing and snuffling behind me, and I could see the lights of the car over and away to my left as it spurted and slowed and spurted again through the maze of woodland. On foot the way was direct, and I bent low as I ran, like a hunter trailing a great, snarling wild beast. Sometimes the beast was close by, and I threw myself down or hugged the bole of a beech tree as it shone its eyes in my direction – and then, as the eyes flickered away and the beast moved through the shadows, the mud flecking its flanks and flying behind it, I ran harder, until I could see a light in the school ahead of me.

  'Come on, Wagner!' I hissed through my teeth. The daylight was fading fast. The forest was a dark and marvellous place of huge silver trees, frosty undergrowth and the crunch of dead dry leaves underfoot. I knew every step. 'We can get there first! Come on, boy . . .'

  At last there was a clear burst across the playing field, across the lawns. I skidded round the side of the school building and into the stable-yard. Just in time, because the lights of the car swept the open space where the dog and I had run just a few seconds before – and as I tumbled into the s
table, tugged Wagner inside behind me and pulled the door shut, the car rumbled into the yard and stopped.

  I peeped through a crack in the stable door. The noise was even louder, and the impression in the old cobbled yard even greater of an alien machine: because, as well as the roar of the engine, as the car revved so hard that it seemed to heave like an exhausted animal, there was a pounding beat of music which thrilled me even more – my generation, my generation baby – a thudding beat against the walls of the stables, which I could feel reverberating in the door itself.

  The noise, the lights, the smell and swirl of exhaust fumes – Wagner started to bark. And the jackdaw began to bate. I turned to see its beady black eyes bright in the reflected glare of the car's headlamps, and it was beating its wings so hard that the dust whirled in the air around its head. And as I moved towards it, to try and calm it somehow, I was too late – because the jackdaw flung itself along the perch and beat to the end of its tether. The tether snapped taut. The bird fell upside down and dangled, beating and screeching in a hysterical panic.

  Still the engine roared outside, and the beat of the music grew louder. Wagner bellowed from the depths of his barrelled chest. The jackdaw was a blur of wings and claws, a shrieking maddened thing. Just as I timed my grab at it, the engine and the music stopped. I caught hold of the bird's body, through the brittle, thrashing wings, but not before its scaly foot had gripped my hand with needle-sharp claws.

  I held the bird close and it fell calm. It heaved in my hands, panting so hard that I felt its little heart would burst. Wagner stopped barking. I put the jackdaw back onto the perch, where it bobbed and ducked like an owl, a manic imp, staring and hissing but settling again.