'Dinner,' I said, and I draped the crow onto its perch. The jackdaw angled its head this way and that, from me to the odd prize I'd brought. I didn't know whether it would find my gift appealing or offensively inappropriate. But at last, after a moment's comical deliberation, it sprang to the crow, stood on it with all the weight of its one puny remaining leg, and mantled it with its wings. Like a hawk, it made a claim. It applied its beak to the bare flesh.
An owl hooted in the woodland.
The sound made me feel very lonely. I examined my hands, from which the stripes of the headmaster's cane were fading. With them, I'd saved the life of the jackdaw I'd found in the woods; with them, I'd blessed the crow, its cousin, with a quick death; and my fingers had been intimate with the workings of the owl's stomach. But now, as the jackdaw tore at the crow, as the owl quavered in the frozen forest, I knew that, for them, I did not exist. I'd never really touched them. Owl, jackdaw, crow: there was a kind of triangle, and I stood outside it.
I felt cold in the stable. There was no big black dog to warm me. I blew out the lamp, stood in the darkness for a few moments, and then I went outside and closed the door.
NINE
By ten o'clock the building was in darkness. No one had felt like sitting cosily around the fire. Indeed, the fire had burned down and gone out and no one had bothered to relight it. Its little residual warmth seeped out of the school and no one did anything to stop it.
No fire, no piano, no Christmas tree. No conversation. No appetite for the cheese sandwiches that Sophie had made in the school kitchen and offered to Dr and Mrs Kemp and me.
By nine o'clock the headmaster had sent me to my dormitory, and, for the first time in all my years at Foxwood, I undressed and washed and put myself to bed without a sign of Dr Kemp, without the prayer. I turned my own light out. I heard Pryce and Sophie go to their own dormitory soon after that, and heard the clanking of the lift as the Kemps went up to their apartment.
The house creaked. No footsteps, no voices. Not a groan or a whisper or even a flutter of snoring. A still night. A silent night. An unholy night.
Fast asleep, I dreamed that I was outside.
Barefoot, in my stripy pyjamas, I was crossing the snow-covered lawn. There was bright moonlight and I could see the dead dog beneath the copper beech, shining like a pool of oil. I called softly, 'Wagner, good boy', and the dog stood up and came to me. I bent to stroke him. He seemed bigger than usual, his body oddly stiff and swollen, and his tongue lolled so heavily that it almost brushed the snow. Together we went into the woodland, where the birches were gleaming, the beeches were silvery columns, where the moon threw marvellous shadows. We were walking and walking, and I was looking for something. In the dream I didn't know what I was looking for, not yet, not yet. But I felt no fear, no anxiety, nor did I feel the cold, because I knew that Wagner was there and he was helping me. 'Go on, boy, go on . . .' The dog moved stiffly ahead of me, now a big black shape in the moonlight, now a piece of the deepest shadow.
And then, in my dream, I found what I was searching for.
I saw Wagner nosing in the snowy leaves and nuzzling the dark soil of the forest, I knelt to the ground to gather the scattered scraps of blue air-mail paper – and I sensed that someone was moving towards me. Someone was in the woods with me, unseen, unheard, coming closer and closer, so that I froze and held my breath and stared around and listened as hard as I could for a footfall or a whispered breath – somebody coming, closer and closer . . .
I awoke. The door of my dormitory swung open.
Wide awake immediately, without moving at all, I flicked my eyes towards the blank space, where the corridor looked black and empty. I lay perfectly still, without even blinking.
At first there was nothing, nobody. Perhaps it had been the wind again, a shudder of cold air blowing from one end of the building to another.
Then the floorboards creaked, and a figure came into the room.
It tiptoed to the bed nearest to the door, and touched the frame. I stared, frozen still and holding my breath, and I heard the hiss of whispering. The figure moved to the next bed and touched it, leaned down as though peering for someone, and it whispered again. The figure came slowly closer and closer, from bed to bed, touching, looking, whispering.
Until I could stay silent no longer. I licked my lips and said, 'Dr Kemp?'
With an odd cast of its head, the figure seemed to glance in my direction. It moved another bed closer, leaned down and felt at the bare mattress. 'Jeremy?' it whispered. 'Are you there?'
And then the figure loomed at my bedside. This time it could sense there was really someone in the bed. 'Jeremy, are you awake?' it hissed, and as it bent so close that I could feel its breath on my face, I squirmed out and pressed myself, terrified, to the cold wall.
It was Pryce. He stared down at my bed. For a moment I thought he would lean down and feel at the dint on the pillow where my head had been, touch the warm outline where my body had been lying.
But there was no dint, no outline. There was a boy, lying where I'd been lying.
I saw him, and so did Pryce. The boy was asleep, his face white, his eyes closed, his black hair gleaming on my pillow.
And Pryce was hissing, 'Jeremy!' with a pleading, an urgency in his voice. 'Jeremy, wake up!'
The boy's eyes flicked open, from Pryce to me. And then he was gone.
I froze against the wall. Pryce touched the dint in my pillow, found it empty, straightened up and blinked around the dormitory. He was a man emerging from a strange dream.
At last he peered at me, as though he'd never seen me before in all his life, and he said, 'Where is everybody? Where is he?'
He turned and walked silently out of the room, leaving the door wide open behind him.
Pryce went deeper and deeper into the corridor, like a vole slipping into a damp, dark tunnel. He moved past the other dormitories and the lifts and as far as the bathroom, paused and opened the door and went inside. As he turned on the light, the bulb shining in the row of mirrors and all the sinks and baths threw an odd, fragmented gleam from the room and into the corridor.
I followed where he'd gone. I was afraid to get back into my bed, where the boy had been lying. Shaken out of the dream I'd shared with Pryce, I tiptoed after him and peered into the bathroom.
He'd torn open his shirt and flung himself to his knees beside one of the baths. After turning the taps on full he doused his head in the icy water, until his long hair was dripping and his shirt was wet through, and again and again he dunked his head, gagging and spitting, as if to lose himself in the noise and the drumming pressure.
He didn't hear what I heard: the clank of the lift, the opening of the lift door and the unmistakable hiss of the tyres of Mrs Kemp's wheelchair as she came along the corridor. I heard it all, and I had time to take one step backwards into the empty dormitory opposite the bathroom, to stand in the darkness as she wheeled right past me.
She looked into the bathroom, frowned and hesitated, and then rolled herself inside.
Pryce was groping for the tap, to turn it off while he still held his head under the gushing water, when he felt her gentle touch on his shoulder.
'Sophie,' I heard him say, without looking up. 'Jesus, Sophie . . .' and I saw him feeling for the hand that was touching him.
Straightaway he knew it wasn't the girl. He blinked through the water and his tousled hair and saw Mrs Kemp. She'd wheeled her chair right up to him: she was wearing a nightdress, her hair loose and soft, her eyes sleepy.
'I heard you,' she said. 'I heard the water. Are you ill?'
Still kneeling, he gripped her hand. 'A dream,' he said. 'I had a horrible dream.' With his other hand he swept back his hair and wiped the water from his face. Like a frightened child, he lowered his forehead onto her knee. 'I'm so sorry I woke you.'
'A bad dream,' she said. 'It's coming back here. Why did you come back? Upsetting yourself, upsetting us . . .'
She tried to extricate her h
and from his, but she couldn't. With the other she reached for the tap and turned it off, and then she put her hand on the top of his head. 'You're soaked. You're cold. Why did you come back?'
She couldn't see his face, which was pressed onto the soft material of her nightdress. But I could see it, from where I stood at the door of the bathroom. She didn't see how he squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath as he felt the heat of her leg against his cheek and the touch of her hand on his hair.
'To see you,' he whispered. 'And now that I'm here, I can't leave.'
'Silly,' she said. She held her breath too, acutely aware of the weight of his body as he leaned against her. 'After all this time, why would you want to see me?'
He lifted his head, still holding one hand, and he caught her other hand too, while her fingers were still entangled in his hair. Her nightdress was wet where his cheek had pressed on her knee. On his knees at her feet, gripping both her hands, he stared up at her. 'It's this place.'
'Of course,' she put in, 'after all the years you spent at Foxwood . . .'
'No, no, I don't mean Foxwood.' With a movement of his head he gestured around the bathroom. 'I mean here, in this place. Don't you remember? Look.'
He let go of one of her hands, long enough for him to reach for the plug and drop it into the plug hole. He turned on the tap again.
'What are you doing . . .?' she started, but her voice was drowned by the roar of the water.
He caught her hand again. 'You remember,' he said urgently. Up on his knees, his chest and belly bare right down to the belt of his trousers, he was suddenly a gleaming, powerful figure. The water was running hot now, hotter and louder, and as the bath was filling a cloud of steam came roiling out, fogging the entire room, misting the mirrors, hazing the light bulbs in silvery haloes. She licked her lips, and the glimpse of her tongue brought a quick, crooked smile to his face. 'Yes, you remember,' he said. 'I can see you remember.'
'Don't be silly, Martin,' she said, and I heard a quaver of panic in her voice. 'Childhood memories play tricks on all of us. Now, go back to bed and . . .'
Before she could try to resist, to try and match his strength with her puny arms, he pulled one of her hands forwards and pressed it, palm open and flat, against his chest. The other he pressed to the side of his neck.
'The first time!' he hissed. 'Here, in this bath!' He tugged her closer to him, her face towards his. 'You were washing my hair, and you touched me like this, and for the first time . . .' He rubbed the palm of her hand down his chest and the smooth hot skin of his belly and he closed his eyes in a kind of swoon. 'Here,' he said, and he held her hand to his groin. 'I was hard, like this, for the first time.' He snapped his eyes open again. 'Remember? Here, in this place . . .'
She snatched her hand away. 'I never touched you! Get away from me!'
He was on his feet. The room was a blur of steam and the bath seemed to thrum a deeper, rumbling note as the water rose higher. For the second time that day, I saw him pick her up, as though she weighed nothing. She cried feebly, 'No, no! Please, no!' and when she glimpsed through the fog that I was watching from the doorway she raised the pitch of her voice and called out, 'Alan, tell Dr Kemp! Tell him!'
Pryce swung her over the bath. 'In the water you'll be weightless,' he whispered, his mouth pressed to her throat.
I stepped into the room, as she moaned and writhed, as he lowered her to the surface. She twisted her head to the doorway again and cried, 'No Alan, don't tell him don't tell him please never please don't . . .'
Pryce smothered her words with his mouth, kissing her deeply. 'In the water you'll be free,' he murmured to the woman, and he laid her deep into the bath. 'In the water you are whole, you are perfect . . .'
Her nightdress swirled around her; she gasped at the sudden heat. He slipped out of his clothes and stepped into the bath. She stared up at him as he lowered his body to hers.
'You knew I'd come back,' he said. 'You wanted me to . . .'
He threw me a triumphant sidelong glance, and I spun away into the darkness of the corridor.
TEN
Pryce struck the ground with the spade, winced at the jarring in his wrists and struck again. He'd taken off his coat and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, and now he was working hard. Dr Kemp and Sophie and I watched.
It was a cold, grey morning. Unlike the previous mornings, the sun had not pierced the cloud and broken through, so the icy breath of night still hung in the woodland. The sky lowered on a strangely silent world. A silvery mist drifted and swirled in the treetops.
After a while, Pryce stood back and wiped his brow. He'd managed to make a considerable hole; having forced a way into the rock-hard earth at the surface, he'd hit a seam of softer soil and was cutting deeper with every blow. We were underneath the copper beech. The dog lay nearby. Kemp had draped the body with a sheet, for decorousness, to protect it from the crows, and to smother the smell.
Kemp stamped his feet and blew on his fingers. He looked older, I remember thinking as I glanced at the headmaster; in a matter of days he seemed to have bowed and shrunk, so that the brown jacket hung loosely on his frame and his trilby was almost ridiculous, a size too big. His eyes were watery. His nostrils were chapped and blue; his nose dripped and he did nothing to stop it. His skin was mottled grey, as though the blood had drained from it. Like the sunless, lifeless morning, the pallor of winter was on him.
Or maybe it was the contrast he made with Pryce. The young man was burning with energy. Hot, strong, plying the spade quite easily now that he'd broken through the crust and into the yielding mulch that lay beneath, he'd hit a steady swinging rhythm. His youth gleamed on him and around him, the aura of his maleness. He tossed back his hair, swept us three shivering spectators with a glittering smile, and attacked the ground again.
'It doesn't have to be too deep,' the headmaster said. 'I think you've done enough already.'
'We don't want anyone to find him,' Pryce said. His breath smoked. 'I mean, with a winter as hard as this, maybe a fox or a badger will get the scent and try to dig him out.'
He looked into the mist, and we all followed his eyes. In the forest, where the smooth whiteness of the lawn petered into tangled undergrowth, the crows were perched high up, watching. They made not a sound. They gripped and swayed with the creaking movement of the branches, but they themselves were motionless, like pieces of iron welded to the gantry of the trees.
'They're hungry,' he said. 'It's best if he goes good and deep.'
A shot rang out. The birds beat into the air and flapped away, over the roof of the school and into the distance. Pryce jumped and stared around. 'Who's that?' he blurted, unusually startled. 'Who's out there?'
'It's the gamekeeper,' Kemp said. 'He . . .'
'A gamekeeper?' Pryce said. 'There was never a gamekeeper!'
Kemp stared at him queerly. I looked at him sideways; still numb after the scene I'd witnessed the previous night, quite unable to meet Pryce's eyes, I was nevertheless surprised to see how discomfited he was. Pryce glared at me, and I ducked my head. Sophie, who'd stood frozen and mute ever since we'd all trooped onto the lawn, started to say, 'A gamek-k-keeper? Maybe he c-c-can . . .'
Pryce cut her off. 'No, Sophie . . .'
'There is a gamekeeper,' the headmaster said firmly. It was uncanny to see how quickly he asserted a shred of his authority the instant he saw that Pryce was rattled. 'His name's Roly, he works for one of the farmers.'
'Has he got a t-t-tractor or something?' the girl tried again. 'Maybe he c-c-can . . .'
'No, Sophie.' Pryce stared her out. Then, more gently, 'Sophie my love, we don't need anyone.'
Kemp shrugged. 'Whether we need anyone or not, it's no good asking Roly. He's a surly old fellow, just banging around the woods with a shotgun or festering in his caravan. He wouldn't put himself out for anybody.'
Another shot. The sound echoed in the icy forest and faded to nothing. 'He's further away this time,' Pryce said. 'Good.'
There was a longer silence. Pryce rubbed the palms of his hands together and turned to the hole he was making. The blade of the spade sliced deeply, keenly, into brown earth.
Kemp pulled the sheet off the dog's body. He tried to do it in a dignified and respectful way, but it snagged on one of the hind legs, which had stiffened at an odd, unlifelike angle. With his hand to his mouth, he bent close and freed the sheet and took it right off. He snapped the sheet open and laid it into the hole.
'Would you help me?'
Pryce nodded, and together they lifted the dog from the ground and lowered it onto the sheet. There was only a faint whiff of decay. The body was frozen hard, locked in rigor mortis. The dog stared obliquely at the sky, its mouth set into a twisted snarl; the tongue had stiffened into a long grey blade. Pryce stood back.
The headmaster knelt to the grave. He stroked the dog's head. He took hold of one of its paws and squeezed it hard, in the way that only a loving owner would do, who knew every ridge and whorl of the pads, every notch in the blunted claws, and could read in them all the miles and years of walking they'd done together. Still holding the foot, reluctant to let go, he gazed around the lawn and into the forest, into the branches of the copper beech.
At last he whispered, 'This is a good place for you, Wagner, it's your place.' He stood up with some difficulty, for the cold was in his knees and his hips. 'It's our place.'
He looked at Pryce and tried to lighten the moment. 'It's a mighty big hole you've made. Big enough for me as well, when the time comes.' He glanced back to the school, where his wife moved dimly in one of the upstairs windows. 'For both of us.'
The Perils and Dangers of this Night Page 12
