by W E. Mann
I reached down to pick it up and unfolded it delicately. It was the public announcement from years ago of a marriage: Colonel Alec Barrington, D.Phil. DSO, 3rd (Nigerian) Brigade, to Miss Angela Greymalkin. There was a photograph of their wedding day. Barrington’s face was a picture of pride and joy.
“Tom. Now! Get out of there right now. He’ll be with us in literally twenty seconds. I’m gonna hide.”
I hurriedly replaced the items I had not pocketed back in the box. But, as I did so, I noticed something in the newspaper cutting that I couldn’t believe I had not seen in the photo Freddie and I had found in Barrington’s wallet. It was the picture of his wife, Angela. I now realised why her face had previously seemed strangely familiar. The facial expressions were unfamiliar, but not the face; soft, porcelain, glamorous, even bewitching.
Head Matron.
twenty three
Reggie had not been wrong. Just as I closed Barrington’s door behind me, I saw the top of his lacquered, silver head rising step-by-step up the Spiral Staircase, my only means of escape. Looking around me frantically, I could see that there was nowhere to hide here. Not even any shadows. The Sun was blazing brightly though the glass roof, giving me the feeling of a fly trapped under the magnifying glass of a sadistic child. The Colonel could not see me just yet, but he would in ten, nine, eight... Where on Earth did Reggie get to? Six, five, four... I had to take a wild chance.
I threw myself headlong into the next room along, without time to read the name on the door. The room was mercifully empty, for now, and I waited by the door, struggling not to breathe too loudly, my pulse drumming my ears. I didn’t wish to step any further into the room because that would somehow feel more like trespass than waiting here with my head against the door. A quick glance around made it clear whose room this was: there was a large bottle of Gordon’s Gin and an ashtray brimming with cigarette butts on the table amid stacks of papers and history books. This was fortunate because, as I recalled, Mrs. Stowaway was on duty this breaktime. I might yet get away with this.
Then I heard the Colonel’s unmistakeable, clicking footsteps marching in my direction. Instinctively, I stepped back away from the door and put out my hand to steady myself. But, as I did so, I foolishly knocked the ashtray off the table.
It clink-clanked petrifyingly across the floor-boards, spraying fag-ends around the room and billowing up a plume of filthy ash. It then rolled around in increasingly loud circles until it eventually came to rest, leaving me standing in intensifying silence and a shower of noxious dust.
I froze still. Barrington’s footsteps had ceased. I even heard him clear his throat gently outside the door like he was about to say something. I waited, starting to choke on ash, trying desperately not to cough out loud. I cursed my malco-ordinated fumbling and wished that I could magically make myself the size of an ant and tuck myself underneath the rug.
The ash was tickling the back of my throat. I knew I was going to cough. I crouched down, my eyes were watering and I could feel my face going red with the effort to suppress it. I started to splutter, desperately trying to keep it silent. The tickling was driving me insane. I was doubled over now, practically gagging until the sensation passed.
I didn’t dare to move, still crouching. He was still out there, I knew it.
But finally, after what seemed like ages, Barrington clicked past and I heard his door close. I waited for a few more moments in case he was bluffing and was still standing outside. But I could hear nothing, not a shuffle or a scratch.
Then, holding my breath like I was about to be ducked in the deep end of the Pool, I plunged out into the Top Floor corridor and ran helter-skelter down the Spiral Staircase, across the Main Hall and out onto the Veranda, not looking back, praying that Barrington had not seen me.
twenty four
The first lesson after Break was Germanic Studies. Doctor Saracen’s classroom was at the back of the school. It was probably the biggest classroom and was decked out with Party banners and portraits of the Führer and his generals. About one desk in three was empty now. In fact, looking around, the only boys here were me, Pickering, Trout, Foxtrap, three of the boys from Marlborough dorm, Nigel Hardcastle, Emilio Menzies and Olivier Plumm, and two from Bedwyn, Ollie Philander and St. John Grüber. All of the other boys had been spirited away and each must by now be at some hideous stage in the grizzly process of zombification.
“Right, boys,” growled Doctor Saracen, strutting purposefully into the room with his gown billowing out behind him and the door slamming dramatically in its wake. It always surprised me how agilely he could move for a man who looked as if he was stooped by arthritis. “Bit of a sorry-looking shower, aren’t you, hmm?”
Saracen’s presence always cast an immediate spell over a roomful of boys. Everyone became deathly silent and still. His preferred mode of punishment was the use of the thick cane that hung by a leather strap from a hook by the blackboard, a looming threat against misbehaviour. The faintest flutter of activity or whisper of noise would soon result in a beating. You would think twice before brushing away a fly or blowing your nose. And if he was in a particularly foul mood, he would turn the weapon around and use the leather strap against you.
He went over to open one of the enormous windows. It was another oppressively clammy day. The window let in no breeze, just the buzzing of insects, the whisper of a distant motorcar and the tick-ticking of water-sprays, all of which seemed, if anything, to make the air in the classroom even heavier.
“Page one hundred and two.”
I opened my red and black book. There was a picture of the sort that appears on stained glass windows in churches of a middle-aged man with receding dark hair and a long, bedraggled beard. He looked gaunt, but not unhealthy, with bright, intelligent, kind eyes.
I started thinking about Head Matron and Pontevecchio’s story about how she was taken from Barrington in Africa. It occurred to me that she probably hadn’t been kidnapped at all. He probably zombified her, I thought grimly. Maybe she was his first. But what sort of twisted person would zombify his own wife? I tried to focus on the lesson. Saracen was unhooking his cane and flexing it with menace.
“This is an early depiction of Saint Nicholas,” began Doctor Saracen. He walked over to the window, stood there with the cane tucked under his arm like a drill sergeant, and started to ramble on about the superiority of the Old High German traditions and that the beliefs of the Volksdeutsche were too strong for many of the Christian ones when they were introduced to Europe. The only solution, he explained, was for the Christian beliefs to surrender to the existing beliefs and to be incorporated into them.
This was starting to sound familiar to me. It was like what Doctor Boateng had told us about the Voodoo beliefs that the slaves brought from Africa.
“The next picture is of the god Wotan, who goes back to a long time before Christianity existed,” he continued. “As you know from last week, he used to ride an eight-legged horse that could jump so far that it seemed like it was flying. Children would leave carrots, straw and other treats by their chimneys for the horse and Wotan would thank them by leaving them gifts. Does this sound familiar...” he rounded on us suddenly and pointed the cane at Nigel, “Hardcastle?”
“It sounds like Santa Claus and his reindeer, Sir.”
“Exactly. So what happened was that the Christian saints were associated with the superior deities with which they had the most in common. In this case, Wotan was connected with Saint Nicholas because both of them were givers of gifts. Thus both of these pictures are different depictions of Santa Claus. This process of identifying a Germanic god with a Christian saint is called syncretism.”
Doctor Saracen carried on talking and I looked closely at the page so that it looked like I was thinking about what he was saying, when a passage on page one hundred and three caught my eye:
“Syncretism in Inferior Cultures:
Christianity also succumbed to the beliefs of certain low cultures, such as V
oodoo, as a result of the inherent dishonesty of the believers. Catholic mass was used to disguise Voodoo rituals and the rudimentary Voodoo gods, called Loas, were syncretised with the Christian saints that were most similar to them. Grand Bois, the Loa of the forest became associated with Saint Sebastian; Dambala, the serpent Loa, with Saint Patrick; and Legba, the Loa of trickery, with Saint Peter.”
The lesson passed uneventfully and, aside from Peregrine Trout, who got a sharp whack across the back of his hand for asking an impertinent question, we all managed to get to Lunch unharmed.
***
Usually at lunchtimes, the Dining Room was a raucous place with boys and Masters alike wolfing down their food before the Kitchen Staff had an opportunity to remove the plates. Today, two of the ten long, ancient banqueting tables which stretched across the width of the room were empty and the room felt a good deal quieter. The scrapings of cutlery and crockery echoed around the high, ornately carved ceiling and distant, panelled walls, which were engraved with the names of the members of every Talltrees 1st XI cricket team going back to 1871 (excluding war years).
One of the boys in the 1927 team was named W.M. Turnpike, though I had no reason to think I was related to him. I often stared at his name and wondered whether his life before the Occupation would have been any different from mine. Maybe not: the cane, Detention, bullies, bad food and people shouting at him.
“Oy... Turnpike!” It was Reggie, whispering to me intently. I had so much on my mind that I had not even noticed that he was sitting next to me. “Come on, then. What did you find on your dekko of Barrington’s room?”
I looked around quickly to make sure that nobody was looking. It was never good to be seen speaking in hushed tones to someone else, especially when the likes of Saracen and Barrington were around.
I started to explain, whilst pretending to concentrate on my food. I recited as much as I could remember from the letters and, with Reggie’s eyes widening in surprise, I revealed to him the identity of Barrington’s wife.
“To be honest, Reg, I’m finding it all very hard to understand. There’s obviously so much we don’t know.” I looked around to where Doctor Saracen sat, two tables away. “And I’m just beginning to wonder whether anyone else is involved.”
Reggie was frowning and hacking at the meat on his plate. “But I thought,” he said, a forkful of gammon muffling his voice, “that Pontevecchio reckoned that Barrington’s missus died out in Africa, didn’t he?”
“Well I’m only telling you what I saw,” I whispered. “Honestly, it was definitely Head Matron. So either Pontevecchio’s story wasn’t right or he didn’t know the whole thing.”
“We’ve got to get into the Sick Bay,” said Reggie, “and see what’s happening to Milo, Freddie and the others. I don’t care how many Detentions we get. What do you reckon – after Lunch yeah? We’ll go the back way this time.”
***
He looked at his watch. We had managed to make it to our dorm without being seen, and waited there until the corridors fell silent.
“Okay. Lunchtime Surgery’s started. Let’s go!”
We scurried out of our dorm and around the gallery above the Main Hall to a door leading to the Sick Bay, the Sewing Room and a couple of other rooms which together formed Head Matron’s private fiefdom.
I had been in the Sick Bay only once before, so this was another part of the school building that was relatively unknown to me. It was a year or so ago, when I had croup, which is like a nasty cold, but with loads more mucus. I was sitting in English, feeling ghastly, when Mr. English said to me, “Turnpike, lad, I’m sure you are not usually that spearmint shade of green. Blackadder, be a good lad and take Turnpike up to Head Matron at once.”
Well, at first I thought, judging from what I had been told about the Sick Bay, that a brief stint there would represent a welcome holiday from the rigours of the term – glasses of Apfelschorle on demand, breakfast in bed, football on the wireless, visits from my mother and so forth. But, as it turned out, it is very difficult to enjoy any of these amenities when you are struggling for your next breath with a towel draped over your head and a bowl of steaming water under your chin.
I pushed the door slightly ajar to ensure that the hallway in front of me, which led down towards the Surgery at the other end, was empty before we stepped in. It was dimly lit by three antique lamps ensconced on the wall. The carpet and wallpaper were the technicolour of horror-films, red clotting to a thick black at the other end, the sort of colour scheme you would expect in Castle Dracula. The air was thick with the formaldehyde stench of languorous sickness. Just being here made me feel bile rising in my stomach.
“Which door is it?” I whispered. There were three along the same side of the passage, each covered in a sort of dark red carpet, followed at the other end of the passage by the door towards the Surgery and the Upper Corridor, where Reggie had been caught by Mr. Caratacus and Mr. English.
Reggie looked at me, astonished. “How the hell should I know? You’re the one who’s been here before, not me.”
“I really don’t remember,” I said. “We’ll have to try each of them.”
The first door led to what was obviously the Sewing Room. The lights were out and the shutters closed, but enough sunlight filtered through to illuminate a lonely rocking chair in front of which there was a large open chest containing various colours of wool and all the mysterious paraphernalia of the seamstress.
As I struggled to adjust my vision to the darkness, I had a terrible shock. But, as I started to discern the dark shapes of boys hanging from the ceiling all around the room, I quickly realised that these were items of careless boys’ clothing hanging wherever they would fit: moth-eaten socks draped over radiators, threadbare shorts spread out over the floor and torn blazers hooked over wardrobe doors.
I closed that door behind me and moved on to the next one.
Again, the shutters were closed, but in this room the lights were on, dimly displaying that the decorators had stuck to the same scheme of gory red in here as they thought fit for the passageway. A fly buzzed around my head and then out of the room in a mazy bid for freedom. The heady odour in the passageway was clearly emanating from this room. In here it was far more intense and sickening. The room contained a long table at the far end upon which was a row of bottles which I recognised from the shelves in the Physics and Chemistry Lab, bearing labels with long words and symbols denoting various hazards.
Reggie nudged me and whispered, “This must be where they make the zombie-poison. Look!” he pointed to a far corner of the room where there was a waste-paper bin. But instead of carrying paper, it was brimming with hypodermic syringes. I wondered, with horror, if one of the needles near the top had recently been stabbed into Freddie’s arm.
Suddenly there was the clunk of the doorknob at the end of the corridor. I bundled Reggie through the door and hurriedly pulled it shut behind me. We waited in silence as footsteps tapped along the corridor and through the door at the far end.
“Come on!” Reggie whispered.
We closed the door behind us and moved on to the next. It was the final door up here, the one that must lead to the Sick Bay.
I pushed it open carefully, terrified about what I might see in here – maybe some of my best friends jerking in electric agony, their sorry flesh putrefying on their bones and necromantic lunacy perverting their thoughts, hallucinations drifting callously in and out of their nightmares, open wounds drizzling and...?
But what I saw, though initially less disgusting, was more peculiar than that and, I realised, far more sinister.
“Christ, Tom. Oh god. Let’s get out of here now!”
twenty five
Samson stopped stacking the large cans of fruit onto the bottom shelves in the Pantry.
“What do you mean, “empty”?” he asked.
“You know. Empty. How many other ways are there of saying it?” said Reggie. This was the first time I’d seen him really worried. In fact,
he’d been biting his nails non-stop throughout Double Maths that afternoon and was now desperately tense.
“Look, we need think about this for a moment, calmly. If they aren’t in the Sick Bay, then where else could they be?” He paused to think about it. So did I.
I thought back through all of the new places I had seen in the school over the past few days. They could be anywhere. There were probably still a hundred rooms I had never seen and that was before I had even begun to think of all of the hiding places there might be in the Forest. There was the Round Room, where the old headmaster and his wife were entombed; there was the whole of the top floor, where the Masters’ Private Rooms were – I had only seen a small part of that; there was all of the Servants’ Quarters above the Kitchens; there were probably all sorts of rooms in the Basement I had never thought about.... But then I realised.
“Guys,” I said, looking up at Reggie and Samson. “I think I know where they are.”
“Where?” they asked urgently, at the same time.
“The Crypt.”
Reggie stared at me. “What on Earth’s the Crypt?” he asked.
I told them again about the mysterious bronze door in the Dungeon, the one which Colonel Barrington had been scrutinising when Freddie and I had made our ghost-hunting expedition just before he seemed to shine his torch directly at me.
“Well, you know I said that Freddie and I heard that horrible groaning noise coming out of the Dungeons just as we left. Well...”
“Oh!” said Samson, wide-eyed. “I thought Freddie was making that up for the story. So all of that was true?”
“Not a word of a lie. I must admit, we made one or two things up at first to tell the First Formers, but everything we told you guys was true.”
Samson looked at me open-mouthed for a moment, shaking his head slowly. “So what you’re saying is that all the boys who’ve apparently been ill for the past couple of weeks are actually trapped behind a metal door in the Dungeon?”
