He nods and the hands fall away.
Bring them to me, says the voice.
‘How can I do that?’
You will find a way.
Billy opens his eyes to see the room he knows already from the pages of his magazine, the same vaulted ceiling and grey stone walls with rings attached to it at waist level and higher, as high as a man can reach. The hands have left his face, but he isn’t alone. Mitchell is leaning against the opposite wall, in rugby kit and a leather apron, his bare arms crossed on his chest. He smiles at Billy, as if to say, you took your time. The open pit is in the centre of the room and above it, attached by a chain to the roof, is a circular cage the size of a boy obliged to crouch. He knows this because Sharples is already in the cage. When he sees Billy he starts to whimper. Billy nods at Mitchell, who turns and takes hold of a wheel attached to the wall beside him. He looks a second time at Billy. Sharples is wriggling, trying to move in the cage, to free himself perhaps, hopeless though that is, but there is no room for movement, not any more. The room is filled with a pungent scent as Sharples shits himself. Billy nods a second time and Mitchell begins to turn the wheel. The noise they hear is less a rattle than a churning, of metal buried deep beneath the earth, of rough chains woken into life after decades, after centuries, of lethargy, waiting for their moment. It drowns out the tinny thread of Sharples’ pleading as the cage disappears inside the pit.
Horton comes up to him first thing, before assembly. ‘I bet you caught it,’ he says. ‘I saw your dad come to get you.’
‘Leave me alone,’ says Billy, looking around for the other three.
‘Ooh, “leave me alone”,’ says Horton in his squeaky voice. ‘You really made a mess of it in the shop, you know that. I don’t think Sharpie’s going to let you get away with it.’ He takes hold of Billy’s tie, pushes the knot up until Billy can hardly breathe. ‘Did you get his little note?’
‘You wrote that,’ says Billy. ‘I know you did.’
Horton shrugs. ‘You can’t prove it.’
Wolf grabs them both by the hair, tugs until Horton squeals. ‘Get into hall, you two,’ he says. ‘Hanging around here, gossiping like a pair of fishwives.’
During the first hour, Billy sees that Sharples isn’t there. His desk is by the window; he keeps glancing out, not concentrating on the lesson, expecting him to come in late, with some excuse, and be given detention. But he doesn’t appear. Between lessons, before the second hour starts, he notices the Lees twins standing together in the corridor, clustered with Horton and three other boys. When he approaches, because there is no other way, they stop talking to stare at him, but he walks past, suddenly not caring. Without Sharples, he realises, they’re nothing, nobody. Without their master, the Lees twins are mindless, will-less golems. Not even Horton frightens him any longer. In his mind, Billy’s still in the room with the cage and the pit, with Mitchell, brave and bold, in his leather apron and the whispering voice of his friend, telling him that everything will be fine. That he only has to be patient.
The next day, at assembly, the headmaster tells them to wait in their classrooms at morning break. As they file out, a boy in the third year whispers that he’s seen a police car parked outside and the news runs along the corridor like a trail of fire. There is still no sign of Sharples. Horton comes over to him as they go to the first lesson. ‘Hello,’ he says, his air suspicious, as though Billy might know something he doesn’t. Billy turns away as though he hasn’t heard.
At break they go back to their own class, sit there until Wolf arrives. He stalks into the room, his gown billowing behind him. ‘I expect you’re wondering why you’re here,’ he says. ‘Well, to be honest, so am I. It appears that one of your number has decided to abscond. You may have noticed that young Master Sharples hasn’t honoured us with his presence these past two days. I don’t suppose any of you wretched children have seen him?’ He pauses, sighs. ‘I thought not.’ He walks across to Horton. ‘You’re one of his little cronies, aren’t you?’ he says. Horton nods. ‘The police will be talking to you in a few moments, so you’d better put your thinking cap on.’ Wearily, he looks round the room. ‘Any other special friends of Sharples here?’ When no one answers, he tells Horton to stand up. ‘Well?’ he says. ‘Perhaps you can help me?’ Horton points at the twins, and then, with a smirk, at Billy.
‘I’m not his friend,’ says Billy. He’s about to say more when the voice whispers Hush.
The door opens and Mitchell walks in. ‘I’ve come from the police,’ he says. Wolf summons Horton, the Lees twins and Billy to the front of the class.
‘These are for you,’ he says. ‘Do with them as you will.’ He turns to the rest of the class as Mitchell leads the four boys from the room. ‘I shall now explain to the rest of you how many dangers lurk in the outside world,’ he begins, ‘and what can be done to avoid them.’
Mitchell leads them to a small room beside the headmaster’s study. When they pass the cupboard in the corridor, Billy feels a draught of air, warm air, that disappears almost immediately. He glances at the others, but no one else seems to have noticed. The Lees twins look scared. Horton is his usual cocky self. Why did you say we were friends? Billy wants to ask him, but not in front of Mitchell. Having Mitchell there gives him strength.
The four boys are taken into the room together and lined up in front of a table. Behind the table, a policewoman is playing with the cap of a pen. A policeman is leaning against the wall, cleaning his nails with a small file. They smile. ‘So you’re David’s friends?’ the policewoman says. For a moment, Billy wonders who she means. The other three nod silently, looking at each other. ‘I hope you’ll be able to help us,’ she continues. ‘His mum and dad are very worried.’ She pauses. ‘We’ll need to talk to you one by one but before we do, maybe you can tell us if anything was worrying David?’ At this, at the notion that Sharples might worry, Billy fights back an urge to laugh. ‘No,’ says Horton, his voice serious, and the Lees twins shake their heads. ‘OK,’ she says, then looks directly at Horton. ‘We’ll start with you, shall we?’ Mitchell leads the other three out of the room. ‘You wait here,’ he says, pointing to a row of chairs. And they do.
Billy is the last to enter. He’s been told by the voice what to say. Nothing. It only takes a minute and he’s out again. ‘That was quick,’ says Mitchell, as he takes them back to their classroom. In a lower voice, he adds, ‘I didn’t expect to see you there. You aren’t friends at all, are you?’’ Billy looks up and smiles.
‘No,’ he says. ‘I hated him.’
The following afternoon is cross-country. Billy’s still in the first stretch of the lane, lagging behind with the slow boys from the rest of the school, the smokers and the fatties, when Mitchell and two other prefects appear from the next field along the run and tell them to stop where they are. Nobody asks why. Ten minutes later, the sports master rides up on a bicycle and orders them all back to the school. Some of the faster boys come running back through the gate into the field, but stop when they see the stragglers. One of them waves his arms and shouts out, ‘They’ve found him,’ but, when stopped and questioned, doesn’t know where. Another boy says he was swinging from a tree, but Billy knows this can’t be true. Sharples would never do a thing like that.
They’re ordered into the assembly hall and told to stay with the rest of the boys in their year, but not even Wolf can stop them rushing to the windows when they hear cars driving across the playground and the siren of an ambulance. ‘They’re police cars,’ cries the first boy to arrive, clambering onto a pile of chairs to see better. It’s only when the headmaster gets onto the stage and shouts for order that the school settles down. Everyone shuffles to his place, except for Billy, who has edged his way to the door and, before anyone can stop him, or try to stop him, if anyone should care, he is running along the corridor towards the playground. He pauses for a second beside the niche, the time it takes to say, Thank you, then skirts the row of wooden buildings that house the lower-f
orm classrooms until he has reached the path leading down to the start of the cross-country route, a strip of land between the rugby pitches and the edges of the school grounds. In the lane outside the grounds, he can see a police car parked, so he stays on his side of the hedge, keeping his head low. He’d get down into the ditch but it’s thick with mud and rotting leaves. It rained all yesterday evening and through the night. He must have got soaked to the skin, thinks Billy, smiling to himself as he wriggles between shoulder-high clumps of cow parsley and straggling brambles. He’s out of breath by now, stumbling a little as he runs, but he can’t remember the last time he felt this happy. He doesn’t even mind the dirty water that splashes up his leg as his foot hits an unexpected puddle. He’s never done the cross-country route this fast; it’s lucky they weren’t made to change out of their running kit before being sent into the hall. He wonders if anyone did see him leave, if anyone cared. Mitchell, perhaps. He feels as though Mitchell’s eyes are always on him, even if they’re in different rooms. He picks up the scent of him in the air, on his clothes, the scent of fresh sweat and liniment, the space he fills in Billy, like a second heart.
It takes him no time at all to reach the ambulance and the other two police cars. Before anyone can spot him, he crouches behind the hedge on his side of the lane. He can see the gate that leads into the field opposite, where the hole in the ground is. He isn’t surprised to find them here. He knew this is where they’d all end up. He knew that all the holes would connect. Beyond the gate, men are shouting, but he can’t hear what they’re saying. All he can hear is a rising tone of alarm. Then two men climb down from the back of the ambulance with a rolled-up stretcher and carry it through the open gate. Half an hour later, maybe more, he watches them carry the stretcher back with the broken body of Sharples draped across it, stark naked and streaked with shit and mud and slime, like something that’s just been born.
No one is waiting for Billy when he gets back. He walks into an empty school. He looks in his classroom and thinks about taking his satchel, but decides to leave it where it is. He pops his head into other rooms. Some doors are open, as if the class has just this minute left. Others are closed. The science labs are locked; he wonders why. The assembly hall is deserted, the chairs lined up and ready for the following day. In the gym, the equipment – the horses and trampolines and mats – has been stacked in its usual place at the far end, beneath the high windows you can only see through if you climb a rope almost to the top. The changing room is silent, tidy, everything put away. Even the air smells of nothing. In the showers, the steam has entirely dispersed. Billy wants to call out, to see if anyone will answer, but is scared that no one might. He’s about to cross the drive and walk out of the school, to walk towards the bus stop, go home, still in his running kit because he no longer knows where his proper clothes are, his itchy shorts and blazer, his shirt and tie, although surely someone must have found them, and wondered who they belonged to, and thought of looking for him. Perhaps, if he leaves the school now, he might never be found. This is when he hears the voice. You can’t leave now, it tells him. We haven’t finished yet. Oh yes I have, he wants to say, I have finished, but to whom? I didn’t mean it to happen like this, he wants to say, although perhaps he did. But he knows that isn’t what the voice wants to hear, because the voice doesn’t listen to reason, or excuses or apology, and it is the voice that counts.
And then he hears a hissing noise and understands. There is only one place left that he can go to. He pauses for a final second by the door leading out to the drive, where he first saw Mitchell with the sunlight on his skin, the drive beyond which the road is visible, but it might be a hundred miles away for Billy, as he walks along the corridor and places both hands on the edge of the store cupboard to pull it away from the wall. As he squeezes into the space he has made, to stand beside the radiator, its hissing gets louder, higher pitched, but also less fixed, rising and falling, regular as the ratchets of a turning wheel. Not only the hissing; the heat it throws out is no longer constant, but an even, uninterrupted pulse. The radiator seems to be beating in time with Billy’s heart.
He watches the wall dissolve and steps into the darkness.
Some time later, he doesn’t know how much, he’s woken by the sound of people speaking. He can’t tell how far away they are. He’s sitting in the room with the vaulted ceiling and the grey stone walls but this time he’s alone. He gets up and crosses to the pit in the centre of the room, beneath the empty cage, to see if that’s where the noise is coming from, and some of it does seem to be coming from there, far down, a low insistent murmuring that might be children, or not even human. But then, above the endless pulse of the hiss, which has never ceased, which was with him while he slept, he hears other voices, voices he recognises, coming from where he came from, from where the wall dissolved. He hears Matron, and Wolf, and Mitchell. To start with, the words aren’t clear, but when he hears the word Lender he understands. They are talking about him. He’s about to run towards them, but some force holds him back, as though he were in the cage himself. The murmuring from the pit is getting louder, drowning out their words. He strains to hear. Then he catches Matron saying ‘He must be somewhere’ and Wolf is saying something about ‘Two in one day’ and he wants to tell them he’s safe, he isn’t like Sharples, but the voice of his friend tells him to hush. Don’t think you’re so special, the voice says in a tone it’s never used with Billy before, as though they aren’t friends at all. Billy’s skin is suddenly cold, his bare legs covered in goosebumps.
He edges away from the murmuring of the pit, less human than ever, a murmuring that has begun to sound like rodents feeding or the noise of the pit itself, to get back to where he came from, to reach his niche, his one safe place. He feels his way blindly through the darkness, his hands stretched out before him, ignoring the voice of his friend, ignoring the pit and what might come out of it.
He’s almost there when he hears the store cupboard being dragged away from the wall. ‘I caught him trying to hide behind here a few days ago’, says Mitchell, ‘after he’d been bullied,’ and Billy’s heart leaps. He tries to shout out, Yes, I’m here, but no sound comes. He can’t make himself heard above the hissing from the radiator. It can’t be far now, he thinks. He’s breathing hard. ‘I’ll look,’ says Mitchell.
And then, as if from nowhere, the niche is filled with light and everything it holds – the wall, the floor, the air itself – turns white-hot as Mitchell reaches both arms out towards him. ‘Come here,’ he says, reaching out to take him in, to make him safe, all gold, a niche of gold, and the radiator explodes.
Afterword
The first short story I ever wrote – I must have been thirteen or fourteen – described a half-hearted, mildly sceptical séance above a corner shop, interrupted, like the story itself, by the rat-a-tat-tat of cloven hooves on the stairs and the knowledge that there was no way out. A lack of faith was no defence against what had been summoned and was about to arrive, the story seemed to suggest. Which is another way of saying that people who play with fire deserve to get burnt, regardless of whether they actually believe in the fire or not.
One of the most compelling elements of most horror stories – the source of both dismay and, lurking beneath that, not always acknowledged, a sense of brutal gratification – is their aversion to moral relativism. There are no free lunches, no alibis, no excuses for protagonists of the uncanny. They have sown the wind, as the Book of Hosea has it, and they shall reap the whirlwind. Perhaps the core element of most horror fiction is the idea of retribution, and just how hard, how essentially inhuman, that is to accept. Which is why we need monsters and deities, descending from heaven or emerging from that cupboard under the stairs, to do the job for us. Pure retribution is the stuff of nightmare, we say, as the monkey’s paw fulfils its final promise and we hear the noise on the path outside of dragging feet.
As a pre-adolescent, my favourite bedtime reading, by which I mean the books I read by torch
light when I was supposed to be asleep, were the Pan Book of Horror Stories series. The first one came out in 1959, when I was six, and I can’t have been more than three or four years older than that when I read it, and its successors. I still remember many of those stories, and the terror of lying alone beneath the hump of blanket, waiting for my heart to slow down. I must have had nightmares to reinforce those memories, or why would certain images still haunt me? A surgically rearranged man. Eyeballs masquerading as grapes. A wall that was also a mouth. Still with me, more than half a century later. Which is also a sort of retribution, for having done something expressly forbidden me by my parents.
But I’d been making up stories long before I discovered the Pan anthologies. I shared a bedroom with my younger sister for a while and it soon became part of our night-time routine that I should tell her a story until she fell asleep. The story I told soon developed into an endless tale involving a host of human and non-human characters, and it didn’t take me long to learn the value of an artfully constructed cliff-hanger, although this had the opposite effect of that desired, and became a sophisticated form of older-brother teasing. The other technique I developed was the ability to create unease, and then downright fear, which was a crueller form of teasing. It won’t surprise anyone to discover that Stephen King – perhaps the most relentless of all modern masters of horror – is now one of my sister’s favourite authors. It’s an awful power to have, and I’ve always been drawn to those writers who possess it, from King to M. R. James, an early love, to Shirley Jackson and, in her wonderful The Demon Lover, Elizabeth Bowen. Drawn, and unsettled, and touched to the core by the intransigence of fate, as the ravens come home to roost. I hope the two tales in this book will unsettle their readers as much as these writers and their tales have unsettled me.
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