Return of the Emerald Skull

by Paul Stewart

  Too late, behind me, I heard the telltale whistling sound of a fives bat swinging through the air, and felt a heavy blow strike me hard on the back of the head. There was an instant of shock and pain.

  Then nothing …

  When I regained my senses, I was being dragged by my legs unceremoniously down the stairs by two prefects. My hands were roughly tied, my swordstick was gone and my head thudded painfully against each step as we descended. Down in the entrance hall I was bundled to my feet and led past poor Thompson, who still lay like a broken marionette in a pool of blood.

  Perhaps the most chilling thing about the gruesome scene was the casual indifference to his body shown by the boys milling around. Something was very wrong here in Grassington Hall, I told myself as the prefects dragged me down a wood-panelled corridor. There was an evil infecting the place, turning these boys into savage beasts, immune to suffering.

  But who was responsible?

  We came to a halt. I looked up at the plaque screwed into the dark wood panels of the door – a single word, spelled out in intricate gold letters.

  HEADMASTER

  The door opened slowly and the prefects pushed me roughly in the back, sending me stumbling inside. The door creaked closed behind me. I seemed to be alone in the gloom of the headmaster's study.

  The first thing that struck me was the smell. It was a curious heady odour, like a mixture of formaldehyde and snuffed candles, which caught in my throat and made me light-headed. It appeared to be emanating from the single source of light, a smoking oil lamp which stood in the centre of the headmaster's desk beside an inkpot and a tattered quill. The meagre glow it gave off was muted and orange, and seemed almost to cast more shadow than it did light.

  Behind the desk was a high leather wing-back chair, turned towards the wall, on which the headmaster's qualifications hung in gilt frames. The glass was cracked and the certificates were torn and defaced – but I could still make out the crest of one of the older universities, and the letters following the headmaster's name.

  Archimedes Barnett, BA (Hons), MA, MRSA.

  As I squinted at the certificates, the leather chair slowly turned to reveal the slumped shape of the headmaster himself, hideously transformed. His clothes were stained with blood and, in places, ripped to shreds, as if slashed by the claws of some vicious bird of prey. His cheeks were sunken, his hair matted and lank, while his skin was sallow, waxen and badly bruised.

  His eyes stared into mine, deep-set, dark-ringed and full of torment. His spectacles were twisted, the lenses shattered, and hung down from one ear like some barbaric ornament. Not that it mattered, for Archimedes Barnett was staring right through me with haunted, unseeing eyes.

  ‘What have I done? What have I done?’ he muttered over and over again to himself, drool dribbling down from the corners of his mouth.

  I don't believe he was even aware that I was in the room. Whatever caused the shudders and twitches that now racked his body, it was a horror that only he could see.

  ‘My children,’ he murmured, his voice now little more than a defeated rasp. ‘My children.’ He twitched. ‘My poor, poor children …’ Tears welled up in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks, leaving tracks like snail-trails down his grimy face. ‘What have I done?’

  ‘Here,’ came a hissing voice, seemingly whispering close by my ear.

  It was my turn to twitch, as I looked past the babbling headmaster towards the back of the study. There stood a second door.

  Slowly it opened, as if by an invisible hand, to reveal a small inner chamber on the other side. It was the headmaster's private library, the walls clad with shelves laden with leather-bound books. The smell I'd noticed when I first entered the study became stronger than ever.

  Despite myself, I stumbled towards the open door and entered. On the wall facing me, both the shelves and the books had been removed, and now their torn and shredded remains formed a crude flat-topped pyramid – a miniature version of the great pyramid that the boys had constructed outside in the quad.

  There were small candles flickering from each roughly hewn step of the pyramid's sides, and inkpots – now re-filled with some sour-smelling incense, whose smoke coiled up into the air and filled the study with an intoxicating fog. Around the base of the crude pyramid, the bones of what I took to be previous savage school dinners littered the floor: antlered skulls and jutting rib-cages.

  But that is not what caught my eye. No, what made me gasp and shrink back instinctively was the thing at the top of the pyramid … nestling upon a soft bed of exotic feathers …

  An emerald skull.

  It was covered in slivers of a translucent green stone – jade, perhaps, or malachite – each one expertly cut and fixed into place. Every part of the skull – the jutting jaw, the jagged nasal socket, the grotesque ridges across the domed top, even the long teeth, fixed in a wicked parody of a grin – had been covered in the dazzling green veneer.

  Extraordinary though the mosaic of the emerald skull was, it was nothing compared with its glittering eyes. Set deep into the skull's bony sockets were two huge blood-red rubies, cut into countless angled facets that twinkled and gleamed in the dancing candlelight as they stared back at me.

  I couldn't take my eyes off that hideous crimson stare. I was transfixed. It was as though my strength was ebbing away. My legs felt weak, my breathing became harsh and laboured, and my chest tightened, as if an invisible fist was closing around my heart.

  And, as I stared into them, the skull's ruby eyes began to glow with an inner fire, brighter and brighter, until they shone like two crimson rays directly into my eyes, filling my vision with a pulsating blood-red light. Then, whispering softly, came the voice.

  ‘Fall to your knees before me, miserable slave. For it is I,’ it hissed, ‘the head.’

  will never forget the visions that filled my mind as I stared, transfixed, into the glowing red eyes of the emerald skull.

  ‘It is I, Catincatapetl, Emerald Messenger of Darkness, Master of the Underworld and Lord of Chaos. You belong to me …’

  The voice hissed in my head, each word laden with a dark and ancient evil.

  I could see a verdant jungle, and a great stone pyramid rising out of it. I was surrounded by a vast crowd, murmuring, heads bowed, shuffling forward. I was being swept along with it towards the great pyramid and up its steps. The murmuring voices grew in intensity, rising to a crescendo as I approached the top.

  ‘Catincatapetl! Catincatapetl!’

  Overhead, the sky filled with dark, boiling clouds that spread across the horizon like a monstrous ink blot. I felt icy fingers tightening round my heart and a crushing weight bearing down on my chest so hard I could hardly breathe.

  ‘Catincatapetl! Catincatapetl!’

  The chant rose even higher to a deafening, screeching frenzy. Just as I felt that my head was about to explode, the chant stopped dead and, for an instant, the glowing eyes of the emerald skull flashed a dazzling brilliant white. There was a moment of intense, searing pain – as if my chest had been ripped open – and then a warm feathery darkness enveloped me, and all I could hear was the beat of a monstrous heart, drowning out all conscious thought.

  Thud! Thud! Thud!

  ‘Our hearts beat as one, child of Catincatapetl, servant of Darkness. Now, join the others.’

  From that moment on, I was only dimly aware of my surroundings, and no longer questioned what I did or saw. It was as if I was in a dream; the only reality, the voice above the steady beating of the heart.

  ‘Prepare the sacrifice, my children,’ the voice hissed. ‘The time draws near.’

  As I stumbled down the corridor in a trance – the walls close up one moment, then telescoping endlessly away the next – other boys joined me. Their faces were daubed with paint. Crude weapons were clutched in their white-knuckled fists. Studded cudgels. Jointed flails. Blazing torches …

  But none of this seemed strange to me now. It all made sense. We were one with Catincatapetl,
the Emerald Messenger of Darkness. We all shared the one beating heart. The sound of chanting echoed up from the quad. The whole school was gathering outside, everyone taking up the same rhythmic cry.

  ‘Catincatapetl! Catincatapetl …’

  The chanted name ebbed and flowed, like music on the wind.

  ‘This way,’ the voice hissed inside my head, and I stepped out of the crowded corridor and through an open door to my left.

  Abruptly the door slammed shut. I was in a cloakroom. Eleven prefects – dressed in feathered head-dresses of red, purple, yellow and black; feathered robes that rustled and hissed as they flapped, and grotesque beaked masks – turned towards me.

  ‘Robe yourself, my child,’ the voice commanded.

  A pair of rough hands placed a head-dress on my head and tied a cape around my shoulders – hands which, with no sense of surprise, I realized were my own. I pulled the beaked mask over my face, and felt a strange surge of power and excitement as I did so. The heartbeat quickened imperceptibly.

  ‘Come, my condors!‘ The voice sounded almost gleeful. ‘The time is close upon us …’

  I fell into step behind the others as we marched in time to the heartbeat, out of the cloakroom and down the corridor towards the quad.

  ‘Catincatapetl! Catincatapetl!’

  The chanting reached a mesmeric fever-pitch as we emerged. The swaying multitude of boys bowed and scraped and stepped aside to let us pass. We strode between them, towards the great towering pyramid of wrecked furniture before us.

  There was something strange about the air that we all seemed to sense, for a hush fell over the quad. Although the sun was high in the sky, there was an unnatural chill. I heard the distant sound of dogs barking, of sheep bleating and, although it was still mid-afternoon, great flocks of starlings and sparrows circled the sky as though looking for somewhere to roost for the night.

  ‘Approach, my condors,’ the voice commanded.

  We climbed the steps of the pyramid, over shattered cabinets and splintered desks. Flaming torches flickered. Pots of incense gave off coils of smoke, at once acrid and aromatic. At the top, eleven battered and bedraggled masters cowered on the platform, bewildered and stupefied.

  ‘The time has come at last,’ the voice hissed. ‘The time of darkness to be made eternal, my children …’

  The eleven feather-cloaked figures ahead of me fanned out across the platform.

  ‘For when twelve beating hearts are offered up to me by twelve innocents, my reign shall begin again. The sun will be extinguished and eternal darkness will cover the earth … Catincatapetl shall rule, my children!’

  The heartbeat thumping in all our heads now quickened with excitement.

  ‘Catincatapetl! Catincatapetl!’ the schoolboys chanted from the quad below.

  ‘Let he who was last among us be first to make the sacrifice!‘ the voice hissed.

  The sky seemed to tense and tremble. The air abruptly cooled.

  ‘Cut out his beating heart!‘ the ancient voice commanded, each syllable dripping with a dark evil that I was powerless to resist.

  Overhead, the moon slid slowly but inexorably across the face of the sun, casting the courtyard into a dreadful silent dusk. And as the light faded, so did the last vestiges of my free will. There was nothing I could do. This was the total eclipse that my friend, PB, had been so excited about. I'd looked forward to it too – yet from where I stood now, it seemed like the harbinger of an appalling bloodbath.

  A circle of shadowy figures clustered like a flock of hideous vultures around the great slab that lay before me. Their beaked faces and long rustling feathers quivered with awful anticipation as their dark eye-sockets turned, as one, towards me.

  On awkward, stumbling legs I approached the wooden altar like a sleepwalker, climbing one step after the other, powerless to fight it.

  The hideous figures parted as I drew closer. At the altar, I looked down. There, stripped to the waist, lying face up and spread-eagled, was the headmaster, roped into place. There were cuts and weals on his skin – some scabbed over, some fresh – and his ribs were sticking up, giving his chest the appearance of a damaged glockenspiel.

  His head lolled to one side, and from his parted lips there came a low, rasping moan.

  ‘Please,’ he pleaded, gazing up at me with the panic-stricken eyes of a ferret-cornered rabbit. ‘Don't do it, I'm begging you …’

  At that moment the final dazzling rays of the sun were extinguished by the dark orb of the moon. The eclipse was complete. With dazed eyes, I looked up into the sky. The whole disc had turned pitch-black, and from the circumference of the circle a spiky ring of light streamed out in all directions, like a black merciless eye staring down from the heavens.

  The tallest of the feathered figures stepped forward to face me. He wore a great crown of iridescent blue plumage. Behind him, nestling like a grotesque egg on the cushion of the headmaster's high-backed leather chair, was the hideous grinning skull. As I stared, the huge jewels in the skull's eye-sockets started to glow a bright and bloody crimson, which stained the eerie twilight of the eclipse.

  The feathered figure reached into his cape and withdrew a large stone knife,

  which he held out to me. Again the ancient voice rasped in my head.

  ‘Cut out his beating heart!’

  Despite myself, I reached out and gripped the haft of the stone knife in my hands. As I did so, I felt my arm being raised up into the air, as if it was attached to a string tugged upwards by some unseen puppeteer.

  I stared down at the headmaster, tied to the altar. A vivid cross of red paint marked the spot beneath which his heart lay, beating, I was sure, as violently as my own.

  My grip tightened on the cruel stone knife, the blade glinting, as the blood-red ruby eyes of the grinning skull bored into mine. Inside my head, the voice rose to a piercing scream.

  ‘Cut out his beating heart – and give it to me!’

  I stepped towards the headmaster's mahogany desk, now transformed into a barbaric altar, flickering torchlight glinting on the flint blade. Before me, the headmaster whimpered pitifully – but I was indifferent to his plight. The head had spoken. And I, his servant, had to obey.

  All around me, the wreaths of aromatic incense swirled and danced like silken veils, glinting in the torchlight as the darkness of the eclipse intensified. The smoke encircled my face, filling my eyes, my mouth and coiling up my nostrils.

  Sweet. Sour …

  As I stood there, the distinctive odour of the incense stirred something deep within me. I breathed in that smell – sweet, yet sour. It reminded me of … of …

  A Stover's pasty!

  The juicy smell of the pasty's thick gravy, coupled with the mouthwatering aroma of the syrupy spiced apples, came flooding back to me. And as it did so, a vision of Mei Ling's face floated before me, her forehead wrinkled in a frown and her beautiful eyes full of concern.

  ‘Cut out his beating heart, slave!‘ the skull's voice hissed in my head.

  The stone knife trembled in my hands.

  ‘Look into the spaces in the mist …’ I recalled Mei Ling's melodic voice, so different from that of the ancient skull.

  ‘The mist …’ I murmured as I stared at the dancing coils of smoke which drifted up from the pots of smouldering incense. As I had done so many times before – in the chamber above the Chinese laundry; in my attic rooms – I found my gaze focusing in on the spaces: those long tunnels which opened up and spiralled away into the distance. I entered the world of what isn't there; the world of silence and stillness and empty spaces—

  ‘Cut out his beating heart!‘ The emerald skull's voice rose to an agitated scream as the heartbeat quickened.

  Below me, the schoolboys banged their weapons to the same beat – pounding their clubs and cudgels against the stone pavement of the quad, chanting as they did so.

  ‘Catincatapetl! Catincatapetl!’

  I could feel the blood-red eyes of the emerald skull boring
into me, together with the black, masked stares of the eleven prefects and the wide, terrified eyes of the headmaster. But I kept my gaze on the coiling smoke, Mei Ling's gentle words replacing those of the hideous skull.

  ‘Step into the empty spaces, Barnaby.’

  Empty spaces …

  The art of absence.

  The Way of the Silver Mist.

  Yinchido.

  ‘Obey me, slave!‘ the head roared.

  Its power swirled about me, threatening at any moment to suck me down into a dark whirlpool of oblivion. Instead, with a mighty effort of will, I focused on the glowing light that was Mei Ling and …

  … let go of the stone knife.

  It clattered onto the mahogany surface of the desk, before tumbling over the edge and down into the quad below. There was a great collective gasp, followed by a ghastly rattle and chattering of teeth as the emerald skull shook on its cushion with impotent fury.

  ‘Sacrilege!‘ the ancient voice shrieked. ‘Destroy him!’

  The prefects turned, advancing towards me, their clubs and cudgels raised. The heartbeat pounded in the eerie darkness as if beating out a rhythm to their attack.

  Thud! Thud! Thud!

  The tall prefect in the crown of iridescent blue plumage attacked first, swinging a vicious-looking spiked cudgel which, before the nine-inch nails had been hammered in, had once been an innocent piano leg. I focused on the space between the prefect and his swinging arm and stepped into it.

  ‘Oof!’

  The prefect exhaled, his mask slipping, as the cudgel sliced through thin air, then lost his balance and toppled from the platform. As he disappeared from view, four more of the prefects took his place.

  ‘Destroy him!‘ the head screamed. ‘Destroy him!’

  Two of them swung heavy studded clubs at my head. I ducked down, then sprang immediately backward to avoid a third club. There was a crash as the three clubs struck one another and their owners toppled off the platform and down to the quad below. The fourth prefect – a hefty individual with curly black hair and a great hooked beak strapped to his face – came at me with a long pole, a dagger bound to its end to form a makeshift spear.