The Perils and Dangers of this Night

by Stephen Gregory

  'Well, here's wishing him a very happy Christmas,' Pryce said, draining his glass and replacing it expectantly on the table in front of Mrs Kemp.

  'In Alan's case,' she went on, ignoring the glass, 'there was a tragedy. It happened this summer. His father was an army officer serving in Northern Ireland. He came home on leave to England and . . .'

  At that point, I bolted. I turned and ran into the blackness of the corridor. I just wanted to be swallowed in the darkness, to blot out the words I was hearing, to hear nothing and see nothing and feel nothing. To remember nothing. To be nothing.

  But as I ran, I could feel the nightmare coming back to me, as it had so many times in the months of that summer and autumn. I tried to run from it, as though it were a terrifying black shadow pursuing me through the tunnel. I skidded and swerved down the corridor, so fast I seemed to fly, my fingertips brushing the familiar reference points of doors and door handles, my feet swift on the smooth lino and polished ramps. As I turned and saw the deeper darkness of a door in front of my face, I skidded to a halt and saw my own hand, a glimmer of white, reach out and push. I pushed the door open and went through.

  There, in the changing-room, my own coat was the only coat. It looked like the figure of a man in black, looming in the shadows and waiting for me.

  The room altered. For a dazzling moment the nightmare was real.

  My living-room at home. A man was standing in front of me, in black trousers, a black vest and black balaclava. His eyes were cold and hard as they swivelled towards me. He was holding a short, stubby, double-barrelled shotgun. My father was kneeling on the floor, and the muzzles of the gun were pressed to the back of his head.

  His face angled up and the words came out in hoarse, horrid slow-motion. 'Get away, Alan! Get away! Your mother . . .!'

  An explosion like the end of the world. Such a noise that I felt my head might have burst with it. But it wasn't my head that burst. When the man in black pulled the triggers, my father exploded. His head burst open, in a welter of blood and smoke.

  I ran. Past my coat, which had become a coat again. Through the room which had become a changing-room again. I stumbled out of the door at the back of the school and into the stable-yard.

  The air was delicious. Cold and clean, it woke me instantly from the nightmare and returned me to the present moment. So I pattered across the cobbles, hardly glancing at the long red car which was parked there, and I fumbled with the latch of the stable door where I'd left the dog.

  I fell inside. I could hear the stirring of the bird and feel the soft, warm nuzzling of the dog as I scrabbled for the matches on the shelf. I struck and struck a match and at last it flared into life. Applying it to the wick of a paraffin lamp, I saw how the flame threw a flickering light and fluttering shadows around the familiar room.

  The jackdaw blinked at me and stared. But this time it was the dog I'd come for. I sank to the floor and hugged him with all my strength. In all my lonely, empty world, the big old dog was everything I wanted.

  The nightmare had faded and gone, although I knew that the reality from which it had spawned would never change. Right now, in the safe, secret place I'd found for myself, with only a cranky crippled bird and a slobbery labrador for company, I buried my face into the animal's neck.

  'Wagner,' I remember whispering, overcome with relief, 'good boy, good boy . . .'

  I held tightly to the dog's collar and Wagner tugged me like a chuffing locomotive, back through the changing-room and along the corridors. At the further end I could see the light of the hall, and as we came closer I could hear the grown-ups' voices grow louder and louder. Reluctant to rejoin them, I paused at the entrance to the hall, peeked and listened.

  Pryce was by the Christmas tree, leaning towards the rows of old school photographs. Dr Kemp had settled at the fireside with his sherry and his wife. Pryce was saying, as though the conversation had continued seamlessly since I'd fled from the room, 'But usually the damage is done over a period of time, over months and years, rather than by a single traumatic incident. I mean, just look at these sad little faces. I wonder what's become of all of them . . .'

  He glanced back to the Kemps and shrugged when neither of them rose to his bait. He peered at another photograph, rubbing at the dust with his fingers, and said excitedly, 'This one, for example, take a look at this, Sophie.' And as she got up and joined him, he smudged at the photo and said, 'Do you recognise this darling little angel, Sophie? I must have been eight or nine years old at the time.'

  The girl peered so close she almost touched the glass with her nose. After a moment she said, 'I recognise him b-b-better than you do, Martin. It isn't you, it's Jeremy.'

  Wagner had been peering short-sightedly into the hall, leaning with all his weight on his collar, and when he spotted the tall figure of the young man against the lights of the Christmas tree, he lunged forwards with a horrid, strangulated growl. I tried to restrain him, but the dog gained a few yards with the suddenness of his movement and dragged me almost to the hearth before I could check him. Pryce and Sophie turned in alarm. Dr Kemp reached for the dog's head and grabbed the collar.

  'Well, you recognise me, don't you, Wagner?' Pryce said. 'Remember this?' And as the dog made another futile, gurgling lunge forwards, Pryce held his right hand towards the brightness of the fire, to show a neat white scar in the fleshy part of his palm. 'Yes, Wagner, that was you, remember? I'm scarred for life. If you aren't damaged when you come to Foxwood Manor, you are by the time you leave . . .'

  The words hung in the air. Mrs Kemp shifted in her wheelchair, flushed and lowered her head, so that her face was covered by the soft swing of her hair. Pryce had the grace, at least, to say, 'I'm sorry, Mrs Kemp, I didn't mean . . .' before she gestured at him with an odd flapping of her hands, as though his words were no more annoying than midges on a summer's evening. On impulse, Sophie sat down beside the woman and took one of her hands in her own.

  'It's all right, dear, thank you,' Mrs Kemp said to the girl. 'I came to Foxwood as the riding mistress, many years ago, when Dr Kemp was a young music teacher here. Not long after we were married, I had an accident, so that . . .'

  The headmaster tried to stop her with the lift of his eyebrow. But she continued, with a nod towards a photograph on the mantelpiece, a fading picture of a smiling, beautiful young woman on a big grey horse. 'My lovely Dapple, the love of my life, so handsome and fine. And a miracle, the shades, the subtlety of his marking. 'Glory be to God for dappled things . . .'

  Sophie took up the line – 'for skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow, for something-something on trout that swim . . .' so that Mrs Kemp laughed brightly, like the girl she'd been when the photograph was taken.

  'He was an ill-tempered brute,' the headmaster put in.

  'He didn't like you,' she said, 'because he could tell you were frightened of him. With me, he was sometimes a bit awkward, a challenge maybe, but marvellous . . .'

  'He was downright dangerous.' Dr Kemp made a tiny off-hand gesture at her wheelchair, like a lawyer resting his case.

  She pursed her lips, then said softly to the girl, 'We fell in the woods, me and Dapple. I gave him his head and he wouldn't stop. We fell and we were both hurt, me like this, and Dapple too – sadly, there was nothing to be done for him.'

  A gust of wood smoke blew down the chimney and roiled from the mouth of the fireplace. There was a long silence.

  At last the headmaster said to me, 'Well, Scott, it's your bedtime. Thank you for bringing the logs, and for taking care of Wagner. I know you're very fond of him. Go up now, and I'll be there in a few minutes.'

  Sophie seized the moment, or tried to. She let go of Mrs Kemp's hand and leaned towards Pryce, taking his hand instead. She made a cute play of finding the scar and kissing it better. 'Poor little b-b-boy. It's t-t-time for us to go, isn't it? Come on now . . .'

  He prised her fingers off him. He smiled too, but it was a cold smile he made with his fine white teeth. His eyes were not s
miling as he leaned to the fireside table, picked up Sophie's glass and drained the sherry in a single gulp.

  'I've been drinking,' he said. 'Better not drive.' He flashed a look at Dr Kemp. 'All right if we stay?'

  In the boys' bathroom at the top of the house, I was brushing my teeth. I stood at the sink, in just my stripy pyjama-bottoms, and I shivered, barefoot, reflected in the mirrors of a big cold room. When I heard the footsteps and voices along the corridor, I had a bewildering mixture of feelings which I tried, in a second or two, to sort out before the grown-ups came tromping past. Without turning, I watched in the mirror as the young man and his girlfriend went past the bathroom door, followed by Dr Kemp. Of the three of them, only Dr Kemp glanced in and saw me, and I caught a glimmer of hopelessness in the headmaster's eye which added another, even stranger ingredient to my stew of feelings. Because I, who'd been so resentful of my abandonment with the Kemps for the Christmas holiday, who'd been so thrilled and unnerved by the sudden, swaggering arrival of the strangers, now felt a twinge of resentment that they were marching along my corridor and peering into every empty dorm. More than that, I felt the tiniest creeping of fear in my neck and down my spine, and in the prickling of my palms.

  I spat into the sink. My mouthful of water and toothpaste swirled in the brown-stained enamel and slithered down the plug hole. I frowned at myself in the mirror. Confusing – I couldn't work out if I was glad or annoyed that the young people had come.

  I put my head out of the bathroom door and watched them. I heard Sophie protesting that she could drive, that she'd had only one glass of sherry and she could drive. I heard Pryce replying that there were dozens of empty beds and surely they could stay one night and they'd be gone first thing in the morning – and I heard Dr Kemp say, with all the civility he could muster at being steam-rollered so thoroughly in his own house, 'Of course, of course, there's plenty of room. It isn't a hotel, but there are clean sheets and plenty of blankets and . . .'

  Pryce paused at one of the dormitory doors, flicked on the light and looked inside.

  'No, I don't think so.' He flicked off the light and proceeded further. At the next door he stopped and flicked on the light and peered in. 'No, not this one.' With a resigned Sophie and an uncharacteristically browbeaten Dr Kemp trailing behind him, and me following like an eavesdropping shadow, he paused at the dormitory next to mine. 'Ah,' he said, 'let's see . . .'

  Pryce flicked on the light and looked in. He saw a row of fifteen iron beds, all stripped to their bare mattresses, a bare brown linoleum floor, bare white walls and two curtainless windows as black and cold as the night outside. Not a hotel. But he smiled strangely and drifted into the room, past bed after bed, touching each one as he went by as though it were a familiar pet. And at last, when he came to the one in the furthest corner, he stopped. There was a funny, altered twist of a smile on his mouth and a wistful gleam in his eye, as he stroked the icy-cold frame of the bed. He turned to the man and the girl who'd waited at the doorway for him to speak.

  'This one,' he said. 'Can I, Dr Kemp? My old bed . . .'

  At midnight the house was dark and silent.

  In the great hall Wagner slept by the hearth, snoring gently, as close as he could get to the glow of the dying embers. He'd slept there all the nights of his life, through sultry, airless summers and the aching cold of winter. It was his place. Now he sighed in his sleep and felt the last warmth of the fire in his old bones.

  It was silent along all the corridors of the house. No, not quite silent. From time to time the panelling creaked as the temperature dropped, and sometimes the wind which swayed in the forest and rustled the ivy on the walls outside made the windows rattle in the empty dormitories. So dark, so cold – the house seemed to groan and shift like a bear in deep hibernation, slowing its breathing, slowing its heart, sleeping a dead sleep.

  I was half-asleep, restive, alone in my dormitory, aware of the gleam of winter on my face. The hiss in my ear was not the hiss of the wind in the trees: it was the sound of my transistor radio, which I'd left switched on, on my pillow, for the last ounce of comfort it could provide me. No music, since the headmaster had banged it on the floor, but only a whisper, as though it were exhaling a long, last breath before it gave up completely.

  But then there was another sound from somewhere in the building. I rubbed my eyes and blinked, and I felt for the radio and turned it off. Suddenly alert, I lifted my head and listened as hard as I could, to try and catch the sound that had woken me.

  Voices? In and out of the silence, I thought I heard a muffled cry, or a shout, or a muttered exclamation. It came to me again, so that I slipped out of bed and padded barefoot to the door of the dormitory. I opened the door and peered into the corridor.

  Voices – and in the distance, the faintest flicker of light on the floor of the corridor, coming from beneath a closed door. Not a dormitory, but on the opposite side, perhaps from one of the lifts. I squinted into the darkness, thinking that Mrs Kemp was coming down in the lift for some reason, that perhaps she'd left something she needed in the hall and was going to fetch it. I stepped forwards and my feet were silent on the bare lino. As I continued on and on, I saw that the light was coming from inside the bathroom.

  The cries too. I stood outside the door and the light played on my feet, for it was moving, fluttering – not the glare of the overhead bulb, but the living light of a flame. I heard the high, suddenly muted cry of a woman, and the strangely rhythmic grunts of a man.

  I pushed the door open. A candle was burning, a stub of wax on one of the sinks, and the single flame was reflected again and again in the row of mirrors. Pryce and Sophie were standing naked, their bodies locked together. He was forcing her backwards against the wall and ramming himself deep inside her.

  I'd never seen such a thing before. Now I saw it in multiple, moving reflections, the whole length of the room, in mirror after mirror. The candle guttered, the room darkened, the flame recovered and stood up again, and still the man thrust himself into the girl. She cried out, although one of his hands was partly covering her mouth, 'You're hurting me – Martin, Martin . . .' and he squeezed his eyes shut and grunted and pushed so hard that her feet were lifted right off the floor.

  His back and buttocks were shining. Her face, wet with tears, twisted away from his and she opened her eyes wide. She saw me and cried out, 'Martin! The boy! Martin!'

  Pryce did not slow his steady, quickening movement. Perhaps he could not. He turned to look at me, the little boy who stood in the doorway. He leered, his tongue wet, his teeth silver in the light of the candle, and he thrust with exaggerated vigour at the girl. He silenced her by kissing her long and deeply – and at last, when they drew apart, her face was muddled with fear and pain as though the fusion of their lips had burned her.

  I spun out of the room, banging the door behind me. I ran back along the corridor, across my dorm, and buried myself deep in my bed.

  SIX

  In the morning, the world was quite altered.

  All night the snow had fallen, steadily, heavily, settling in deep silence. Now the woodland was muffled in snow and every sharp, cold edge of the house was softly blurred.

  Dr Kemp stood in the stable-yard with Pryce and Sophie. It was a miraculous day of bright sunshine and a clear blue sky. The three of them were staring at the car. I had thought it looked so marvellously cruel the evening before, like a bloody, muddy beast of prey, but now it was asleep under a thick white blanket. The snow had drifted deeply around the spoked wheels. And the inside of the car was full of snow, because it had been left all night without the hood.

  I'd gone out early, thrilled to see the world so wonderfully changed, and now I watched the grown-ups from inside the stable where I kept the bird: Pryce and Sophie, wrapped in the coats and scarves they'd arrived in; the headmaster, wearing his familiar brown anorak and a brown trilby. Dr Kemp bent to the car and scuffed away the snow with his foot. The off-side front tyre was completely flat.


  'You'll need to change the wheel,' he said.

  Pryce shrugged. 'There's no spare. Anyway, I don't think she'll start, even if we manage to dig her out.'

  Dr Kemp, his face reddening with the cold, did not add anything. His exasperation at the carelessness of the young man, who was travelling in mid-winter without a spare wheel, unprepared for even a puncture, who could have moved the car into one of the empty stables instead of leaving it outside all night, was apparent in every twitch of his mouth and stamp of his feet. His crooked fingers were aching, as he'd told me they always ached in winter, because I saw how he rubbed them hard to ease the throbbing pain: his war wound, as his wife called it, and now, as though to fuel the testiness he felt at the idiocy of these unexpected, unwanted visitors, he must have thought of the stupid accident which had so miserably disabled him.

  War wound. He'd told me the story, in the privacy of one of my singing lessons; he saved it, he'd said, for only the best of his pupils, and I'd been one of them. Soon after the outbreak of war he'd been conscripted and presented himself at Aldershot barracks, where by chance the recruiting officer had recognised him as a young musician who'd already made a mark as a concert cellist. Deliberately to protect him from harm, the officer had kept him as his personal driver, the safest of all wartime postings, snug and warm in a big black Humber. The following week, his fingers had been irreparably crushed as he struggled to change a wheel.

  Now I watched him from the stable doorway, as he stared at the flat tyre on Pryce's car, as he rubbed at his crippled hand. He flicked his eyes impatiently into the sky, where the rooks were clacking softly around their nests at the top of the beech trees, and higher still a buzzard was wheeling and mewing. It was a delicious day, the kind of day he must have looked forward to at the beginning of the Christmas holiday, which he and his wife could savour alone without boys or teachers or visitors. He sighed and chafed his hands together. He caught a movement at the other end of the yard and saw me, peering out of the stable.