The Perils and Dangers of this Night

by Stephen Gregory

  He couldn't move, either back into the lift or through the gap.

  I hurried back to the trapdoor and looked down into the hole. Sophie had moved swiftly along the corridor, seen the little staircase, heard the gasping breath from inside it and immediately climbed in to investigate. I could see her in the darkness, peering up at the bizarre tangle of headmaster and wheelchair.

  'Dr Kemp? Alan?'

  The man hissed back at her, 'Oh God, is he there? Pryce?'

  'He's stuck – he can't g-g . . .'

  'And I'm stuck! Push me, for heaven's sake! And Scott, are you up there? Help me, help me . . .'

  With a new, concerted effort, Sophie shoving with her shoulders from below and me reaching down from the top to pull at the chair with all my strength, we shifted the wounded man out of the wreckage and up towards the attic. He moaned, he stifled a yelp of pain; sometimes he pressed his fists into his groin where the wound had torn wider open. I leaned in and caught at his wrists, I heaved and heaved while the girl pushed from underneath. Until at last the headmaster crawled out and flopped on the floorboards, his whole body heaving, the breath rattling in his throat.

  Sophie wriggled past the wheelchair, which was easier to shift without the man jammed in it. As she got by, she kicked and kicked at it until at last it was freed, and it went bouncing down the staircase and landed with a crash in the corridor below.

  She scrambled up into the attic and knelt by the headmaster. He blinked at her, struggled to raise himself on one elbow and stared with horror at the black hole in the floor, the staircase from which he'd just emerged. 'Is he down there? Pryce? Is he coming up?' he gasped.

  'I told you! He's stuck! Halfway out of the lift! He'll g-g-g-get out unless . . .' She stood up and peered into the strange shadows of the attic. 'Did you t-t-turn off the power? Where is it? Where's the . . .?'

  There was a sudden rattle and roar from the lift shaft. No words, but the bellow of someone trapped, someone fighting with every nerve and sinew to force a way through the tiniest of spaces.

  'He's getting out!' the girl hissed. 'Where's the p-p-power? Show me!'

  She pushed through the boxes and books and clothes. As she passed under the skylight, for a second she glanced up at the pane of glass, and the moonlight fell on her face. Then she saw the fuse cupboard, open, and lunged towards it.

  'Halfway out?' Kemp was jolted into action. Somehow he lurched to his feet and stumbled after her. 'You'll kill him! For God's sake, don't . . .!'

  He fell headlong over the jumble of junk and crashed to the floor. Just as Sophie threw the switch.

  With a slurring groan, the music started – you really got me you got me so I can't sleep at night – louder and more raggedly menacing than it had seemed before, and the lights flickered on. The lift shuddered, the wheels groaned, the cables squealed, and the cage moved up and up the shaft.

  The three of us stared at the door of the lift. The music rose to a deafening climax – you really got me you really got me you really got me – and its four madding final chords, as the cage reached the attic.

  There was silence. The door didn't open. Kemp whispered, 'You've killed him.'

  Sophie moved forwards and pulled the door open. The lift was empty. Only a boot, and a scatter of cartridges.

  She stepped in, bent to the floor and picked up the boot. It was wet with blood. 'He's alive,' she said. 'He must've forced himself through.' She dropped the boot with a thud. In a moment, as Kemp just gaped at her, she was back in the attic and reaching for the fuse box. She turned off the power again.

  Darkness. Only the delicate moonlight and the yellowy glow of the emergency bulb inside the lift.

  Silence. Only the hoarse breathing of the stricken headmaster and a lovely lull of noiselessness.

  'He's alive,' Sophie said. 'And he's down there, waiting for us.'

  I hadn't spoken since Pryce's ranting tirade, the horror of the gunshot, the struggle to get out of the staircase. My mind had gone blank, paralysed by the awfulness of the headmaster's screaming and by Pryce's toxic words. I wanted nothing more than to hide in a dark corner of the attic, or crawl into an old trunk and pull down the lid until I thought it might be safe to come out again – but, as I glanced once more into the open stairwell, I saw the glimmer of a movement in the corridor below.

  Not Pryce. It was the boy.

  For a second, I saw his upturned face, pale, anxious. His eyes met mine, long enough for me to see the beckoning in them. And then he was gone.

  I heard my own voice say calmly and clearly, 'Stay here, Dr Kemp. I can get help. I think I know how.'

  I started down the stairs.

  FIFTEEN

  At the very bottom, I peered out, froze and held my breath.

  Pryce trod slowly along the corridor. He was a bent, lurching figure, oddly half-lit by the little bulbs in the ceiling.

  He stopped and leaned against the wall. He was so close I could smell the sweat in his hair. He seemed light-headed, confused. With a groan of pain, he peeled the sock from his left foot and dropped it onto the floor. He listened to the silence, cocked his head this way and that like a sparrow, and then he continued towards me. Every other footstep left a perfect bloody print on the lino.

  He came to the wheelchair, which lay on its side in front of him and blocked his way. For a long time he stared at it and frowned, as if it were the first time he'd seen it and he didn't understand what it was: a chair with wheels, capsized, one of the wheels askew, the spokes distorted, and the other turning and turning very slowly. He stood and stared until the wheel stopped, then he moved forwards and set it upright. Using the handles to support himself, he pushed it ahead of him. And it squeaked – a rhythmic, plaintive squeak squeak squeak – as he limped away, along the corridor.

  At last I took a breath. Kemp and Sophie had heard him too, had strained to catch the uneven footsteps and known that Pryce was at the bottom of the staircase. Now, as he took the chair away, the squeaks receded into the distance – tinier, fainter, like a mouse skittering through the wainscot. And then gone.

  'What's he doing?' Dr Kemp, slumped on the attic floor, was hissing down the stairwell to me. 'I have to come down, I can't leave my wife . . .'

  'No,' I hissed back at him. 'Stay up there. He . . .'

  'My wife! How can I just sit and do nothing?'

  'We need help,' I said firmly. 'We can't beat him on our own. Stay there.'

  Sophie was coming down. I saw her body against the attic skylight, as she manoeuvred into the hole. Just as she negotiated the first few steps, backwards into the darkness, the headmaster leaned to her and caught her wrist. For a split second, she stared up at him, horrified, because it was the same grip with which Pryce had manhandled and bullied her. I heard him say, 'Please, Sophie, just tell me, please tell me –' and she gasped as he squeezed her wrist tighter '– the note, the note he said that Jeremy had written . . . Is it true? Do you know?'

  'You're hurting me,' she said. He let go. She seemed to have difficulty composing her reply. There was a pause, long enough for me to see in my mind's eye, as though against the perfect blackness of the hole in which I was huddling, the slow arcing flight of a ball of paper and its sudden eruption into golden flame. I watched the flame blossom and die. When at last she spoke, her voice was flat and strong, without a trace of a stammer. 'It isn't true. There was no note. Jeremy didn't kill himself.'

  She ducked away from him, and as she felt her way down and down towards me, I heard the headmaster gasp to himself, 'Thank God, thank God.' Then he called after her, as loudly as he dared, 'I never touched him, I promise, I never . . .'

  Sophie and I trod softly away from the attic staircase and into the corridor. She felt for my hand, gripped it warmly and whispered, 'Where are we going? What are we doing?'

  I knew that Pryce was nearby, indeed I thought I could hear the squeak of the wheelchair somewhere ahead of me. And so I said to her, 'Where's he going? What's he doing?' She squeezed my hand ev
en harder, and I could sense in the fierce desperation of her touch that she knew, that she was too afraid or appalled to tell me.

  Pryce was there, only yards away, and yet, as we stole behind him, he seemed quite oblivious of the real world around him. We shadowed him, hiding and watching as he stopped the chair and peered about him. He was lost. In a building where he'd spent five of his childhood years, a house whose every room and cupboard and corridor he knew as intimately as I did, he'd lost himself. The wine, the pain in his foot, the darkness – for whatever reason, the reality of Foxwood Manor had slipped away and left him bewildered and frightened in a long black tunnel. He squinted ahead of him, where it narrowed and closed into nothing but blankness. He turned and looked behind him: the same. Overhead, high in a cave of shadows, a dim yellow light illumined a skein of cobwebs and not much else.

  Lost, fumbling through the dim, cobwebby tunnel of a half-remembered, half-forgotten childhood.

  There was a door open beside him, so he left the wheelchair and limped inside. I tugged Sophie closer, and we peered into a room whose coldness and emptiness seemed to yawn in front of us. We watched him shuffle forwards, heard him bang into something hard, and in the ghost-light from the dormitory window we made out a long row of beds – the skeletons of beds, stripped to nothing but their bare black frames.

  He moved slowly past them, one after the other, trailing his hand on the cold iron as he limped by. As I leaned in, the room swam around me. For me too, the reality of it was fading, replaced by a fractured dream vision of what it might have been. And as he bent to one of the beds and stared at the place where the pillow should have been, I heard him whisper, 'Jeremy? Jeremy, are you there?'

  There was no answer. There was nobody. But when he lifted his hands to his face and smelled the blood on them, I saw the boy appear beside him.

  Pryce knelt at the side of the bed, as he'd done every single night for all the years he'd been at Foxwood. And the little brother he was searching for stood dimly over him, as he mumbled the words which were ingrained in his head forever.

  'Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and by Thy great mercy . . .'

  It didn't sound like a prayer. He only sought comfort in the hiss of the words in the silent room, their familiar shape in his mouth. He struggled to his feet, whispering, repeating the phrases like a spell as he moved back towards the door, and I felt my own lips moving to the rhythm of the phrases I knew so well. The boy had disappeared, and this, together with the shuffling approach of Pryce, brought me once more to my senses. Just in time, I pulled Sophie away, and we withdrew into a pool of shadow.

  Pryce stepped into the corridor, blundering straight into the wheelchair. He clenched his teeth and hissed, and I saw how he shuddered with the pain in his wounded foot, how it flickered through his body and into the very dome of his skull. The present moment and a realisation of his surroundings came back to him with a jolt. He stared around, wild-eyed, then shoved the chair ahead of him and into the adjacent bathroom.

  He knew this place. It must have had many memories for him, from a distant long-ago boyhood to the vividness of the previous night. He stumbled past the baths, which looked like empty alabaster tombs in the darkness, and felt for one of the sinks. He turned on a tap and doused his face with water. Over and over, he plunged his head into the basin and splashed his face and his neck and hair. When at last he emerged, spluttering, gasping at the icy cold, he stared into the mirror: the eyes of a dead man, a dripping, bloodless face.

  As though he were afraid of himself, he smeared at the glass with the heel of his hand and left a smudge of watery blood. He stared again, disbelieving. 'Jeremy?' he whispered. 'Is it you?'

  He moved faster now, pushing the chair ahead of him along the corridor. When he reached the landing at the top of the staircase, he leaned over the banister and saw, far below, how a flutter of firelight played on the shabby rugs of the great hall. That was the only light, for there were no more emergency bulbs. He wheeled the chair to the brink of the staircase, held tightly to the handles and started to bump it down.

  Softly, softly, bump bump bump, he lowered the chair down the stairs. Sophie's hand was hot against mine as we both peered after him, saw how he paused for a breath at the first-floor landing and appraised the figure of Mrs Kemp lying by the hearth. She was not moving, she had not moved. Bump bump bump, he continued down.

  He wheeled the chair across the hall, past the Christmas table, to the fireside. He knelt and studied the motionless woman, who was sprawled exactly as she'd landed when he'd dumped her onto the floor. Even from our vantage point, high above the scene, her hair was very beautiful, for it had fallen away from her face in a spray of silken gold. Her skin was white, without a trace of colour in it; all the flush had faded, all the blood had drained. Indeed, from the wound in her throat a good deal of blood had run into her clothes and onto the carpet. It gleamed in the movement of light from the flames.

  He bent very close, so close that her hair stirred a little as he breathed. Not a sign of life. He said into her ear, 'It's me, Mrs Kemp, it's me,' and touched her cheek with his lips.

  Her eyes flicked open. She looked at him with such suddenness and clarity that he flinched from her. And then she closed her eyes again, as though he weren't worth the effort.

  'Good,' he said. 'You're still part of the game.' He stood up, wincing at the pain in his foot, and leaned on the wheelchair. He pushed it away from the fire and out of the hall, and it went squeak squeak squeak on the linoleum floor as he disappeared into the bottom corridor.

  I mouthed at the girl. 'Where's he going? What's he doing?' And when she bit her lip and shook her head dumbly, I mouthed again, 'You know! Tell me!'

  Quickly then, I led the girl by the hand, down the staircase to the hall. She veered towards the woman, but I pulled her with me, determined that we should try to keep Pryce in sight, that we should not lose him, that we should at least have some idea of where he was and his intentions. What I dreaded most was the nightmare of not knowing, just the sick feeling that he was somewhere in the building, somewhere close, a kind of murderous ogre who could strike from any shadow. We followed him into the corridor, ducking into the library as he stopped and turned. If I'd thought his purpose with the chair was to move Mrs Kemp, to relocate her elsewhere in the building as part of the gruesome game of hide and seek, I'd been wrong: because the chair was empty as he squeaked it rhythmically, steadily, along the bottom corridor and further away from the hall.

  Together we cringed in the darkness, sheltering between shelves of ill-assorted books: dusty tomes, never opened, never touched, blocks of musty paper stacked like bricks; a jumbled collection of comics and annuals, dog-eared and thumbed by generations of small boys who'd sought a haven there on rainy afternoons and long wintry evenings. For a moment I thought of Martin Pryce, a lost and lonely boy huddling in this very corner; and I thought of his brother Jeremy, who'd also hidden there, seeking a little respite from the torment of bullying and abuse.

  I held the breath, thick with dust, in my nostrils. Every mote was the misery of a boarding-school Sunday, the stink of homesickness, the hours and days I'd moped in the library: the longing for home that only a boarding-school boy can truly know.

  I felt for Sophie's hand. It was warm and soft, like my mother's. When her fingers entwined into mine and squeezed, I felt a rush of love for her. It flooded my body with warmth, like a transfusion of blood. It gave me strength as well, a sudden steely determination to survive. So that, when she whispered to me, 'The woman, we have to help the woman . . .' I was amazed how calmly I replied, 'No, she's dead.'

  I tugged her by the wrist, past slabby walls of encyclopaedias and atlases, to the further end of the room.

  We moved out of the library and into the adjoining classroom. I knew that wherever Pryce was heading, Sophie and I would be faster than him, nimbler through the obstacle course of the pitch-dark school. We were the only two, of the five players in this Christmas g
ame, as yet unscathed by gunshot, unhampered by loss of blood. We slipped swiftly and silently from room to room. I knew every desk in every class, every floorboard that might creak underfoot and give away our whereabouts, and so I led the girl through deep shadow, over splashes of snowlight and moonlight from high windows, further and further away from the great hall.

  'Where are we going?' she murmured.

  We were in the changing-room, so dark that even the ghostly figure of my coat on its peg was just a piece of the enveloping gloom. Her palm pressed against mine, and I guided her forwards.

  'What was that?' I stopped dead. She said again, 'What was that? Did you hear it?'

  We'd both heard it: a heavy thud from somewhere high in the house. It checked us for a moment, as we wondered what it could be, then I urged her on again. I unbolted the door at the back of the changing-room and together we burst into the stable-yard.

  I knew what had happened. As Sophie and I stepped from the stillness of the building into a blinding blizzard, it came to me with utter certainty that Dr Kemp had come down the attic staircase.

  He'd sat in the attic for as long as he could, ordered by a small boy to stay where he was. How long could he stay there? How long could he obey the instructions of a twelve-year-old? Not long, or not at all.

  Grinding his teeth at the pain in his groin, he must have thought of his wife, shot in the throat, tipped from her wheelchair, her life-blood pooling at the fireside. And I knew he could smell her, he could touch her: because, as he'd slumped and groaned among the jumbled boxes, as he'd stared at the skylight blotted with snow, he could have reached to the clothes which were hanging there and pulled them down to him – her riding outfits. I'd seen them and I knew what they were, and I knew he must have hung them there himself, with care and tenderness, soon after her accident, when she'd known she would never ride or walk again.