The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 (Mammoth Books)

by Stephen Jones

  “Your private, or prep school.”

  “Ah, yes. Well, they were very odd institutions in my day. I generalise, of course, but mine certainly was. Abbey Grove, it was called. They went in for these rather grand Gothic nomenclatures: it added cachet, I suppose. But there was nothing of the abbey about this one. It was more of an overgrown country house: 1820s, I should say. Attractive, slightly nondescript white stucco buildings; extensive rather fine grounds, as I remember. It was in the Thames Valley, not too distant from London. It’s a housing estate now, of course. Every physical trace of it has been wiped out: it lives only in the memory of a dwindling few and when we who can still recollect it are gone it will have ceased to be altogether. Or possibly not.”

  “Your point being?”

  They had reached the top of a ridge and were looking down over the gentle downward curve of a ploughed field towards a church on the rise opposite. There, in the graveyard among the yews, was a simple headstone commemorating Edward’s wife Helena, who had died two years previously. Edward would walk there every day in all kinds of weather; and Peter was happy to go with him on his stays, especially on a day like this. It was mid-April, the sun was out, hawthorn was blossoming in all the hedges and the green on the trees was young.

  “We are bound by chains of memory to the past. Some if not all of the memories are inaccurate, but they still make us what we are. When you lose these things, as my darling Helena did in the last years from dementia, you begin to die. To all intents and purposes you cease to be while still remaining technically alive. That is why I hardly ever throw anything away. It is not self-indulgence. It is a means of preserving what I am and what she was.”

  When they reached the churchyard, Edward went straight to the stone inscribed simply with his wife’s name and dates and stayed there staring at it for several minutes, head bowed. Peter stood a few yards distant watching him. His uncle had brought no flowers to lay on the grave; there was not an ounce of sentimentality about his actions, but they were very deliberate. It seemed a passionless ritual, but was somehow all the more impressive for being so.

  They had closed the churchyard gate behind them before Edward spoke again.

  “I haven’t much to leave you physically, Peter. A great deal of what I had in financial terms was used up in caring for Helena at the end, but there are memories and these are of value. I may lose them myself soon, as she did, so I want to pass them on. You may believe them or not: that is irrelevant. You may not like them: that too is unimportant. What matters is that they don’t altogether die. Non omnis moriar, you know. Horace. Now that’s one thing I do regret passing. The classical education. At least they gave us that at Abbey Grove.”

  When they got back to the cottage his uncle put the kettle on for tea. While he was busy in the kitchen Peter surveyed his surroundings. Uncle Edward had been too modest about his material wealth: there were still one or two items of value for him to leave. In his career as a diplomat Edward had made some judicious acquisitions in the countries where he had served. He had had an eye for such things. Some of the books too were worth a good deal. Edward had collected first editions to read rather than for their value, but he had kept them well, dust jackets and all. Peter took his eyes away from the shelves and tried to dismiss materialistic thoughts.

  When Edward came in with the tea, he was also carrying an old-fashioned box file.

  “We were talking about Abbey Grove, weren’t we? So this may interest you.”

  Peter did not quite know why they had been talking about Abbey Grove, except that Uncle Edward had brought the matter up. It was true that Peter was a teacher, and so educational matters might be thought to be of interest to him, but he taught physics and chemistry at a Comprehensive and his view of fee-paying schools in general was dogmatic and dismissive. Naturally he kept these views to himself out of courtesy, but Edward, being no fool, must have been aware of them. Perhaps there was something on the old man’s mind that needed to be unburdened.

  While they were having tea Edward began to extract items from the box file. Here were some black and white snaps of Abbey Grove, taken by Edward with a Box Brownie. The angles were often askew, the focus less than exemplary, but Peter got the general idea. He took a mild interest in Uncle Edward’s memories of his “private”, as he insisted on calling it, but more in why Edward should be so preoccupied with them. It might have been a sign of approaching death.

  Edward had said the school buildings were attractive, but Peter did not think so from the photographs provided. The architecture was regular, but plain and undistinguished and, Peter thought, faintly menacing. The grounds, fringed with trees, looked pleasant enough. On them distant figures of boys in grey shorts and white shirts could be seen playing impromptu games of French cricket. Edward handed him another snap, this time a close up of two boys, one of whom Peter recognised as his uncle, not so much from the features as from his characteristic manner of smiling and the way he screwed up his eyes when he did so.

  “Photo of a young Edward,” said his uncle.

  “Who’s that next to you?”

  “Ah, that’s my friend Macpherson. Claimed descent from the fraudulent creator of Ossian. One of those rather fey Scotsmen. He was my great chum at Abbey Grove. Don’t quite know why. These youthful friendships are unfathomable, aren’t they? Not that he was a bad chap by any means. Became a Presbyterian minister, I believe. Died not so long ago, as it happens, and left me something. But that will come later.”

  “Later than what?”

  “That’s what I’m going to tell you.”

  “Then perhaps you’d better.”

  Uncle Edward leaned back and nodded in acknowledgement that he had been found out. It was clear that he had been needing to tell someone and that Peter was the chosen vessel.

  “I went to Abbey Grove in 1954 as a boarder. My parents’ choice of it was not entirely arbitrary. It had been recommended to them vaguely by a friend of a friend, and it was near London, so visits to see me could be made without undue expense. It was not in any way an academically distinguished establishment, but I suppose it was fairly competent in performing its primary task, which was to get boys through the Common Entrance Examination and into public schools. It had the usual rapid turnover of teaching staff backed by a few long term old lags. The headmaster, a Mr Waterfield, had two sons who also taught at the school. The elder son, like his father, was a competent teacher and destined to succeed to the headmastership; the younger was less able. He taught Geography, in those days the dreariest of dreary subjects. He had a feeble, etiolated sort of body and a long narrow face. He was known throughout the school as ‘Ratty’, an epithet so appropriate in every way that it was almost officially recognised.

  “Ratty had few designated powers and was not allowed to use the cane, the prerogative of Waterfield and his firstborn alone. In spite of this Ratty managed to exercise a good deal of petty tyranny over the boys in his charge. One of the miseries he was allowed to inflict was something called ‘punishment duty’: boys who had displeased him in some way were made, under his supervision, to perform a menial task of service to the school.

  “In the autumn term of my third year there Macpherson and I had been caught out by him in a minor infringement. It may have been only that we had been late for something or other. In any case we were put by Ratty on ‘punishment duty’, which was to sweep up the leaves on the hard tennis courts before evening prayers.

  “It was a pretty futile exercise – there would be more fallen leaves there by the following day – but it pleased the mind of Ratty. He spent almost ten minutes contemplating our labours before sauntering off, sucking at the briar pipe which he fondly imagined gave him a manly air.

  “As Macpherson and I continued with our task, which consisted of brushing the leaves into piles, putting them into a dustbin and then depositing its contents onto a nearby compost heap, dusk began to fall. The clear sky became a dull yellow colour and it turned very cold. The hard tenni
s courts were situated in a rather dingy part of the grounds which none of us really liked. Despite their displays of bravado young boys can be peculiarly susceptible to atmosphere. Uneasily we kept encouraging each other to ‘get this stupid thing done as quick as possible’.

  “I remember, we had almost scraped up the last pile of leaves when I happened to look up at Macpherson’s face. He was standing facing me and appeared to be staring at something behind me and a little to my right. I remember thinking dispassionately that his features seemed unusually white and blank.

  “‘Crikey, who’s that?’ he said.

  “I looked round and for a few seconds saw what he had been looking at. A face was peering at us through the wire mesh that bordered the tennis court, pressed so hard against the metal lattice work that parts of its pale, glistening flesh were bulging through the interstices.

  “It was the face of a man of about thirty-five, I suppose, with a black beard, parts of which were also sticking through the fence, the ends dripping wet and greenish in hue as if they had been turned somehow into pond weed. But the thing that to us seemed most strange and alarming was the position of the head. It was only a few inches above the ground. It looked as though whoever it was had crawled towards the tennis court fence on his belly and was trying to get in under the wire. The eyes had no whites to them, but were as black and shiny as snooker balls.

  “All this I took in in a few seconds. The next moment we had turned and were running towards the entrance to the court, mercifully at the end opposite to the dreadful face. After some frantic fumbling with the catch on the gate, we were through and racing up to the school buildings.

  “When Ratty discovered that we had not completed our punishment duty he ordered us back to finish it off the following evening, but we both stubbornly refused. This act of defiance, for which we offered no explanation, baffled him. He little knew that what appeared to be courage was in fact sheer funk. After some consideration he decided to assign another task to us: that of clearing up a lumber room at the top of one of the school buildings next to the sick bay.

  “This job suited Macpherson and me much better. We were both indoors sort of people and the idea of rummaging through ancient school detritus appealed to us. When Ratty turned up and found us almost enjoying ourselves he stayed for a very short while and walked off disconsolately.

  “At first it was the novelty of the job that we liked. Most of the lumber was not very interesting. Apart from some decaying sports equipment, destined to be thrown away, there were piles of old examination papers to be put into boxes and ragged copies of Kennedy’s Latin Primer and other textbooks to be sorted into neat piles. It was only when we managed to penetrate to the back parts of the storeroom that we began to discover items of real interest.

  “There was a large number of mounted and framed school photographs from before the Second and even the First World Wars. We pored over these with fascination. You see, every Remembrance Sunday in chapel old Waterfield, the headmaster, would read out the names of those from the school who had died in the two World Wars. It was always a solemn occasion. Macpherson and I could, by consulting the legends on the mounts, put faces to those names and wonder at the fact that these innocent, confident young boys, their arms folded, cricket caps set jauntily on their heads would, in a very few years’ time be dead, carried away in the maelstrom of war.

  “In the farthest corner of the room, we found a set of framed sepia photographs dating from the very earliest days of the school in the 1870s. These, interestingly enough, were much less formally posed than later photographs, and included masters. Boys had no uniform and some wore top hats while the masters sported gowns and mortar boards.

  “One of these pictures, dating from the year 1873, gave us a shock. A bearded man standing in the back row bore a striking resemblance to the face we had seen at the tennis court the previous evening. No names had been inscribed on the mount of the photograph, as with the later ones, but a few had been scrawled on the backing in pencil. From these inscriptions we could be fairly sure that the black bearded master was one G. W. Sampson. After a pause for reflection we continued with our tidying operation.

  “There was one more thing. At the very back of the lumber room we discovered an old black japanned tin box about eighteen inches high and two foot square. On the top of it someone had pasted a label which bore a legend written in ink and firm if faded capitals: EFFECTS BELONGING TO G. W. SAMPSON ESQ. TO BE RESTORED TO HIM ON HIS REAPPEARANCE OR SENT TO NEXT OF KIN IN THE EVENT OF HIS DEATH BEING REPORTED, and then a date, JULY 15TH 1874.

  “The box was locked but, conveniently enough, a key on a loop of string was tied to one of its handles. Macpherson was for opening the box; I was reluctant, but curiosity at length prevailed.

  “There were a number of interesting items, some of them valuable, in particular a gold half-hunter watch made by Wormold of London. There were some jade cufflinks and a signet ring with a crest on it. A Greek New Testament bound in Morocco leather had been heavily annotated in pencil. Besides these there were a number of small curios, obviously of some antiquity. There were several cameos which I am pretty sure were Imperial Roman rather than later Italian copies; there was an ancient Babylonian cylinder seal in amber depicting a lion hunt in exquisite detail and an Athenian red figure calyx decorated with a scene of Heracles wrestling Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog of the Underworld. Though I saw all these treasures for only a matter of minutes over fifty years ago, they are still clearly etched in my memory. Last of all there was a black leather bound notebook on the cover of which the letters G.W.S had been stamped in gold. Being the honest boys that we were we replaced all the treasures reverently in the box, but the notebook Macpherson insisted on taking. I pleaded with him not to, but he said he would study the contents and then return it to the tin box at a later date.

  “Over the next few days I was aware that Macpherson was in the process of reading the manuscript but I never saw him doing so. Whenever we met I would ask him to reveal to me something of what he had read, but he refused. I did not even know if, after reading the notebook, he had returned it to its rightful place, though I later found out that he could not have done so because Ratty had locked the lumber room after our tidying exercise.

  “On a clear moonlit night, about a week after our adventures, something odd happened. We – Macpherson and I – slept in a dormitory at right angles to the main school building. Ratty slept in the main building on the first floor, so we could see his window from ours. At some time between one and two, I was woken up by Macpherson shaking me. He appeared to be in one of his fey moods: excited, frightened, exultant and troubled all at once.

  “‘Come over to the window and have a look at this,’ he said. Dully, still half asleep, I obeyed. We looked out of the window and saw that on the drive below Ratty’s window two figures were standing, monochromatic but clearly etched by the moonlight. One was a tall man in what might have been a schoolmaster’s gown. His features were in shadow but you could tell that he had a beard. The other figure was smaller, slighter, thinner and appeared to be naked though it was impossible to determine the sex. Its skin seemed to glisten slightly as if it were wet. Then the bearded man turned his head to look full at us while he raised his right hand to point at Ratty’s window. I glanced at Macpherson, who seemed to be transfixed by the vision. Slowly and almost imperceptibly he nodded towards the figure in the drive.

  “‘Mac, what on earth are you doing?’ I asked.

  “Macpherson stared at me, shook his head several times and said: ‘Nothing. I didn’t do a thing. I never thought they’d come.’

  “‘Who are “they”?’

  “‘I don’t know. I don’t know! Look, let’s get back into bed and forget all about it.’

  “I was happy to do so. Macpherson seemed to be in a state of shock.

  “The following morning when I began to question him about the night before he gave me a blank look. I felt he was warning me not to broa
ch the subject if I valued his friendship.

  “Shortly after morning chapel we heard that Ratty would not, as usual, be taking us for Geography because he had become seriously ill during the night. Later in the day three of the boys told us they had seen an ambulance draw up in front of the main school house, and Ratty being put into the ambulance, not on a stretcher, but wrapped in a blanket and escorted by two tall men. The boys said that Ratty was struggling and the two men were having a job to get him into the vehicle.

  “The following term Macpherson’s parents took him away from Abbey Grove for reasons unspecified, but he and I did keep up a desultory correspondence. We never saw each other again as our paths diverged: I went to Eton and Oxford and thence into the Diplomatic, he from Fettes to St Andrew’s and then the Ministry. The letters we exchanged were friendly and informative but not intimate and it was Macpherson who always seemed to initiate the renewal of contact. I had the feeling that there was something between us that he wished to recall and preserve, but what?

  “The clue – if it is a clue – came when he died last year. Solicitors informed me that there was a sealed package which he had bequeathed to me. Inside the package there was no final letter from him. Simply this . . .”

  From the box file Edward took an ancient black leatherbound note book on the cover of which the letters G.W.S had been stamped in gold. He handed it to his nephew.

  “Read it tonight in bed, Peter,” said Edward. “Even a stern rationalist like yourself might find it of interest.”

  Uncle and nephew spoke no more that day about Abbey Grove. They watched the news on television and then Edward, who was an excellent cook, made dinner and they shared a fine bottle of Pouilly Fumé. As they were going to bed Edward said to him: “Sleep well!” – something he never normally did – and there was a gleam of amusement in his eye.