The Perils and Dangers of this Night

by Stephen Gregory

  Dr Kemp watched it too. When he turned back to Pryce, he found that the barrel of the gun was an inch from his nose.

  'Is the music going through your head?' Pryce whispered. 'A requiem for the souls of the dead? Is it for Jeremy Pryce? Or for yourself?' The man closed his eyes. Pryce murmured to him, 'Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine – Grant them O Lord eternal rest . . .'

  The man started gibbering. 'I never touched him, I swear to God I never . . .'

  Pryce jammed the gun into his throat. All of a sudden his voice was hard. No more whispering. There was a fleck of spittle on his mouth.

  'You made him disgust himself. You were killing him right from the start. And you're doing it now, you're doing it to Alan . . .'

  Without shifting his eyes from Kemp, he called across to me, 'Does he make you afraid? Alan, does he make you afraid?'

  I stood up. All of my schooldays I'd been trained to stand up when a grown-up spoke to me, and now a grown-up with a gun pressed into the headmaster's throat was asking me a question. 'I – I don't know. He . . .'

  'Tell me and tell him! Does he make you afraid?' Pryce started shouting at me. 'Afraid that he'll hurt you? Like he hurt you yesterday? Come here! Come here and show me, show him, show him your hands.'

  Unable to protest, I crossed to the fireside. Mrs Kemp still had her head on her lap, her hair falling about her face and hiding her completely. I manoeuvred past her wheelchair, caught the hopeless, terrified look in Sophie's eyes, and then Pryce's hand lashed out and caught my wrist in a grip like steel. I felt my fingers prised open, and Pryce shoved my palm into the headmaster's face, so close that the man could have stuck out his tongue and licked it.

  'Did he hurt you? He hurt you, didn't he? Look at your hands, look at them!'

  We all looked, where the blood was oozing from the scabs I'd been picking – lines of scabs, as thin as wires, more than the stripes that Kemp had given me.

  'Yes, yes – he . . .'

  'And you're afraid?'

  Pryce was louder now, tugging me close and squeezing the bones in my wrist, jamming the gun harder and harder into the headmaster's throat.

  'You're afraid he'll find out what you did to the piano? Yes, with these!'

  Pryce wrenched my hand deep into the side of the armchair where Kemp was sitting, forced me to feel by the headmaster's thighs, jammed my fingers between the cushions until I found the wallet of the piano's tuning keys.

  'With these!' He tugged out the wallet and held it aloft. 'I saw you hiding them, Alan, and now you're afraid he'll find out it was you and he'll hurt you again.'

  'It wasn't me . . .'

  'Does he make you afraid when he looks at you in the bath? Does he?'

  'Sometimes – yes, sometimes . . .'

  'Does he make you afraid when he sits on your bed? Does he touch you? Alan, tell me! Does he touch you?'

  'Yes, he . . .'

  'I never, I never!' the headmaster blurted. Pryce forced us together, me and Dr Kemp, jamming our faces together with all the force of one hand on my wrist and the thrust of the gun on the headmaster's throat.

  'Last night . . .' I heard myself breaking down. 'Last night, or the other night, I don't know when – he touched me, he . . .'

  'His hair was wet!' the headmaster was shouting. 'For God's sake, tell him, Scott! I touched his head because . . .'

  'My hair was wet! He touched me! He frightened me!'

  And we both broke down, speechless, heaving for breath.

  Pryce let go of us. I fell away from the armchair and, finding that I was holding the wallet of tuning keys, dropped them onto the floor as though they were burning my fingers. I instinctively shrank towards Mrs Kemp and Sophie, who were clutching each other's hands and weeping together, threw myself down by the pile of logs I'd made and blinked into the flames. Kemp was struggling for air, a man drowning.

  Pryce stood up, composed again. He sneered at Sophie and Mrs Kemp. 'Women,' he said, as though it were a dirty word he'd learned in the playground.

  He sneered at me and Dr Kemp. 'Perfect pitch, look what it does for you.'

  He leaned the gun against the headmaster's armchair, picked up the tuning keys and moved from the fireside. His footsteps were slow and deliberate as he crossed to the piano.

  No one dared to watch him. We could hear what he was doing. It filled my stomach with a terrible sickness. With his left hand he thumped a bass chord, sonorous, menacing, out of tune. With his right hand he leaned into the body of the piano and felt with one of the keys. And then the ugliest of sounds, as he loosened and loosened one of the strings, a horrible groaning, like something wounded and dying, as he thumped with one hand and loosened with the other.

  When it stopped, we all looked up. I saw him wrench a bass string out of the piano and hold it up, and it coiled and writhed in a gleam of firelight. He tugged it tight in front of his face.

  He moved towards Dr Kemp. 'I disgust myself . . .' he whispered.

  I noticed what happened next, saw how Mrs Kemp and Dr Kemp exchanged a secret, furtive look of understanding distilled by twenty years of marriage. She looked from the gun – leaning against his chair – and into her husband's eyes. He looked from her eyes to the gun.

  As Pryce advanced towards him, with the piano string taut in his hands, the headmaster started blustering. 'I never touched him, I never! Afraid of me? Afraid of work, more like it! I made them work, I made your brother work, without me he'd have gone nowhere, none of them would! I saw his talent and worked it! I made him what he was, I . . .'

  'Shut up!' It was Mrs Kemp. She rounded on him, on her own husband, suddenly swerving her wheelchair so close that her knees were touching his. 'You're a liar and a bully! I've seen it myself for years and years! I've endured your blustering and your bullying and . . .'

  He shouted back at her. His hand felt for the gun. 'I made them work! I worked them! Without me they'd be nothing!'

  'Your pig-headedness, your self-importance, your self-righteousness, your . . .'

  Pryce swaggered towards them. The string turned from silver to gold as he came close to the fire. He was bringing it to Kemp, delivering death.

  Solemn, priestlike, he intoned, 'I disgust myself, I would rather be dead . . .' and as I watched helplessly, I felt the involuntary movement of my hands to my own throat, as though anticipating the cutting of the wire and trying to prevent it.

  The woman whirled towards Pryce. 'And you! Your excuses, your bitterness, your stories about Jeremy – I don't believe any of it! You've made it all up, you've invented it all . . .'

  Pryce feinted at her with the string. It gave Kemp the chance they'd been angling for. He grabbed the gun and thrust himself out of the chair.

  Too slow. Pryce saw the glimmer of gunmetal, twisted towards him and seized the barrel. There was a moment of grappling and grunting, the two men chin to chin and bellowing and the gun jerking up and down . . .

  The woman lunged forwards. Her thin little hand closed on the barrel, so weak that it made only the tiniest difference to its angle. Enough difference.

  There was a bang. The headmaster squealed and collapsed onto the floor, pressing both hands to his groin. Blood welled between his fingers.

  Pryce hissed at the woman, 'You're fucking mad you fucking shot him!' and reloaded in an instant. Instinctively, hearing the chock of the chamber closing, Kemp lifted one of his blood-slippery hands, grabbed the barrel and yanked it hard.

  There was another bang. Mrs Kemp fell back in her chair. She flopped and gurgled, utterly spastic. Pryce tore the gun free. He was yelling, 'Jesus you fucking shot her!' Blood pumped from her throat.

  In the confusion, in a blur of smoke and blood and noise, I fled out of the hall.

  THIRTEEN

  I skidded along the corridor, navigating by radar as the darkness closed around me. The beat of the blood in my head, the pulse of fear in my veins, seemed to bounce back at me from the walls and the floor and the ceiling as I ran. I slid to a halt at the f
irst of the lifts, where the glow of light from inside illumined the sign on the door. Ignoring the sign, for the first time in all my years at Foxwood I pulled the door open and plunged inside. I shut the door, jabbed at the button and went up.

  It seemed horribly slow. The cables groaned, the cogs and wheels clanked, the feeble light flickered. I found myself dangling in a little cage, swaying inmid-air, and saw the grey, cobwebby walls of the shaft go crawling by. When it stopped at the first floor, I got out and padded along the corridor to the landing at the top of the grand staircase.

  From there, I leaned over the banister and peered down to the hall.

  Pryce and Sophie were engaged in a bitter row. Face to face, lunging at each other across the wheelchair in which the headmaster's wife was slumped, they spat and cursed and shouted. Their voices blurred into one clanging duet, impossible to make out the words, but their anger and panic rose up the staircase to where I was standing. I saw Sophie bend and then kneel at the side of Mrs Kemp's wheelchair, and then Pryce, with a ghastly shove, heaved the girl away.

  Hard to believe what happened next – I just goggled as Pryce took hold of one of the wheels, wrenched it upwards and dumped Mrs Kemp out of the chair and onto the floor.

  The woman just lay there, as though dead. Sophie knelt beside her and turned her onto her side. Pryce had taken hold of the headmaster by the collar of his tweed jacket and was dragging him towards the wheelchair.

  Too late, I recoiled from the banister. Pryce glanced up and saw me. Breathless from manoeuvring the lumpen weight of the wounded man, he crowed, 'I know you're up there, Alan – it's where I would've gone . . .'

  With a sudden tug, he hoisted the headmaster up and onto the chair.

  The wheels slithered and spun and he jammed them with one foot while he worked his hands under the man's armpits and adjusted him upright. All this time Kemp was grimacing horribly, his teeth clenched, pressing his hands into his groin where the blood was oozing through his trousers and between his fingers. He threw a despairing look at the body of his wife, whose place he'd taken; her face was dead white, as though already bled dry, her eyes and mouth half-open, unseeing, speechless.

  'I know where you'll go next, Alan!' Pryce called up to me, without turning his head to the dark space of the stairwell behind him. 'And after that, and after that!'

  He bent and addressed himself softly to the headmaster. 'I know every move he'll make, Dr Kemp. But I'm not so sure about you. Is it twenty years you've been here? You must know every crack and corner and hidey-hole – it's your place, that's what you said, and I bet you know every inch of it.'

  Sophie was kneeling as low as she could, pressing her ear to Mrs Kemp's mouth. 'She's breathing, just, but n-n-not for much longer . . .' Crouching on the floor, with a smear of the woman's blood on her cheek, she snickered at Pryce like a stoat in a trap. 'She was right, Martin! You know n-n-n-nothing, you are n-n-nothing – you make up all this shit to hide behind, to disguise your nothingness . . .'

  He slapped her mouth, a whipping back-hander. 'I didn't shoot her! Did I? And I didn't shoot him! Did I? They fucking shot each other!'

  He regained his breath, inhaling a big lungful and pushing his hair back from his face. Sophie fingered her lips to see if she was bleeding, saw blood, thought it was hers, and felt at her mouth again.

  'We'll play another game,' he said. 'We'll all play. You'd be at a disadvantage, Sophie, not knowing the place like the rest of us do, so you can be on my side, and we can even things up for Dr Kemp as well.'

  He reached for the piano string, which had fallen onto the carpet and coiled itself there in the confusion of shouting and shooting. He hauled Sophie to her feet and pulled her to him. She stammered an incoherent protest, she hammered her fists on his shoulders, but she was too feeble. With a series of brutal yanks and crudely twisted knots he wound one of her ankles to one of his. In less than half a minute, they were bound together as though for a three-legged race.

  They stood upright, the girl sobbing for breath, half-clinging to him for balance and half-thrusting him away from her, Pryce mugging and miming the fun of the game. Then he took hold of the handles of the wheelchair, spun Kemp around and propelled him very fast towards the corridor. With a mighty heave, he launched the headmaster into the darkness. He and Sophie watched and listened, as the wheelchair hissed on its thin smooth tyres and disappeared into the black tunnel.

  Pryce shouted after it. 'You've got a minute, Dr Kemp! Two minutes! Then we're coming for you!'

  I padded back along the first-floor corridor. There were no lights in the dormitories or the bathroom, only the glow from the lift; and just as I reached the lift I'd come up in I saw it jerk into motion and start to travel down again. I stood and watched as it vanished into the shaft.

  It was Dr Kemp who'd summoned it. As I leaned close to the shaft and peered down, I could just see him, moving in and out of my line of vision through the narrowest crack. Heaving for breath, utterly unaccustomed to sitting in the wheelchair and trying to handle it, he was struggling to manoeuvre it onto the ramp and brake it close to the lift. Now, having brought the lift down to him, he found it all but impossible to yank the door open while the chair tried to skid and spin this way and that, until he'd tightened the brake, opened the door, released the brake and heaved himself inside. I could see a darkening patch of sweat on the collar of his jacket, could see it spreading through the back of his thick, tweedy jacket; his hair flopped infuriatingly over his eyes. He was hot, steaming and bleeding, and he clutched at the glistening mess in his belly as though it would suddenly burst open.

  He held his breath and listened, to try and hear if Pryce had started to follow him. He pulled the door shut, thumbed the button and the lift started upwards.

  It loomed towards me. I heard it grinding and clanking, and I hurried back, as quickly and as quietly as I could, to my vantage point on the staircase.

  In the hall, Pryce reloaded the gun. He rattled the box of ammunition and dropped it into his trouser pocket. Sophie writhed against him, enraged to have found that it was less uncomfortable to hold onto him with her arm around his waist than to thrust him away. He stroked his little finger into the blood on her cheek and dabbed it onto the tip of her nose. 'Cute,' he whispered. 'Shall we go?'

  He lugged her out of the hall and into the gloom of the corridor.

  I stayed where I was and peered down to where Mrs Kemp lay beside the hearth. In the moments after the shooting, I'd seen her eyes flickering, as if she were slipping in and out of consciousness: winded by the impact as she'd hit the floor, in shock from the bullet wound to her throat, bewildered by all the yelling around her. Now, sensing from the growing silence that she was alone, she opened her eyes. She took tiny sips of breath and turned her face to the warmth of the fire. She was alive, although the life in her body was trickling away and there was nothing she, or I, could do to stop it.

  The waste . . . From where I was hiding, I could just see the photograph of herself and Dapple, and I thought of the little time she'd had with her husband before the accident had ruined her. It made me so sad and angry, to see how she sipped the air to keep herself alive, to know that she would die if she didn't keep on sipping, she would surely die before she would see her husband again. I watched her: every droplet of life was sweet and precious, every sip of air was a taste of her life. And I felt, in my understanding of the deadly game that had just begun, that simply by lying at the fireside, quite motionless, and by being alive, she was an essential player.

  I moved back to the lift as it came up towards me, meaning to help Dr Kemp. But then, from downstairs I heard the opening of the other lift door and knew that Pryce and Sophie must be getting inside it. Both the lifts were rising towards me.

  Stifling a bubble of panic that rose inside me, I instinctively ran back to the staircase and flew down it.

  Before I reached the bottom, I sensed another presence in the hall. I could feel it, in a breath of cold air which seemed to
fog around me.

  The boy was kneeling beside Mrs Kemp.

  A boy like me, dressed exactly like me, in a grey pullover and grey shorts.

  I froze, paused with my hand on the banister. I saw an image of myself bent over the stricken woman. But when the image turned and looked, it wasn't me. It was the boy I'd seen in my dreams.

  His face was flushed, his black hair shining in the firelight. He was holding Mrs Kemp's hands very softly in his. And she, looking up through half-open eyes as if through the haze of her own lashes, was smiling faintly, in recognition of his face and the comfort he was giving her.

  The boy let go of the woman's hands. He stood up, and with a curious beckoning motion of his head he crossed the hall and disappeared into the dark downstairs corridor. I followed him.

  And from then on, together, silent and unseen in the lightless corners of a building we both knew so well, the boy and I shadowed the movements of Kemp and Pryce and Sophie. I had the faintest inkling – something in the way he'd beckoned me – that he'd come back, enabled to return to Foxwood by the odd off-chance that I was still there, to play his part in the game.

  A dream-boy, a ghost-boy, a flutter of cold air through my dormitory window – whoever or whatever he was, and whatever fell purpose he had for me, I sensed that he needed me, he was powerless without me.

  I lost him in the darkness, although I knew he was close. I felt him nearby, in the prickle of the wire in my hands and the sting of the wire in my throat.

  Kemp, arriving at the first floor, had heard the other lift coming up too. He'd gone straight back down again. Desperate to get back to his wife, knowing that Pryce had left her immobilised in the hall as a bait to lure him back there, he negotiated his way gingerly closer and closer.

  I watched him, I was with him all the time, unknown to him, unseen by him. And I sensed horribly that Pryce was right behind us and would spring out at any moment.