Skippy Dies: A Novel

by Paul Murray

  The ground sinks under Carl’s feet. They’re in a bog or something. He has to hurry not to lose the others, he can’t see his own hand in front of his face and something is there, something is moving, thudding towards them, Deano reaches into the sports bag –

  Horses. They come close enough so he can see the outlines of their pointy ears. Then they stop, and wait there, breath snuffing down their noses. They watch them go past, like they know something. They know who’s waiting for Carl.

  Suddenly it’s freezing cold. The others are under the trees, there is the sound of rushing water. Their faces appear as he gets closer like ghosts in a graveyard. Do they know too? A slimy log stretches across a stream. Deano is smiling. Ladies first, he says. Carl goes over the log on his hands and knees.

  Where is this cunt? he hears Knoxer say.

  He said he’d light a fire for us, Mark says.

  They’re talking about the Druid, Carl! They don’t know about Dead Boy, they’re not bringing you to him!

  Now they’re in a forest, branches keep springing back into Carl’s face.

  But what if Dead Boy is inside their heads too, pushing their thoughts with his see-through hands? What if none of this is even real? Maybe Carl is in a nightmare, maybe he smoked loads of hash and is sleeping. Wake up, Carl! Wake up wake up!

  But then, like a spark from a lighter, he sees a tiny orange flame somewhere in the dark. Look! he shouts. Not waiting for the others he stumbles towards it, ignoring the branches in his face and the brambles that drag at his ankles, until the woods open into a field, and the spark turns into a bonfire.

  Two men are standing in front of the fire. One has long hair and a beard that tangles down his chest. He’s wearing a cloak with suns and moons on it, and he’s leaning on the handle of a huge sword. The other man is short, cross-eyed, a bit mental-looking, he has one hand tucked inside his leather jacket.

  I went out to the hazel wood, the tall man with the beard says, because a fire was in my head…

  All right? Mark and the others arrive at the bonfire.

  Never better, the man says. I see you’ve brought some friends along? He tips his head at Carl and Barry.

  They’re just two young lads have been helping us out, Mark says. They wanted to come along.

  Why not, why not, the Druid nods along. The more the merrier. Do come warm yourselves. He waves his hand and they step towards the fire. And then there is a flash, a flash of air, not the kind you can see. Now the Druid’s sword is stretched out with the point pressed into Deano’s throat.

  For a moment nobody moves, like the whole world is balanced on the tip of the sword. Then the cross-eyed man leans in and whips the sports bag out of Deano’s hand.

  We’ll take care of this for now, the Druid says. The cross-eyed man pulls the shotgun out of the bag, splits it open over his knee and rattles out the shells. The Druid lowers the sword. Deano sags like he’s deflating. Now friends, the Druid says. Business before pleasure. Let us adjourn to my office.

  He turns and walks up the hill. They follow after him with the cross-eyed man behind. No one has said a word since the Druid swung his sword. Fear crackles in the clouds, in the long grass, the lights of the city rise up around like they have come to watch something happen. And now a shape appears at the top of the hill, a rocky black shape that stares out like a skull.

  Which of you scholars can tell me what this is? the Druid says cheerfully.

  None of them says anything and then Barry says in a voice like he’s hypnotized, A dolmen.

  Very good. The Druid is pleased. One of the oldest forms of burial chamber. Also known as a Portal Tomb, as it is a doorway to the land of death. Note the distinctive tripartite structure, for the three aspects of the Goddess. He looks from one face to the next. In ancient times it is here that offerings were left for the unseen ones, he says.

  Nothing happens for a moment. Then Mark jerks to life. He takes the package from under his belt and holds it out to the Druid. But the cross-eyed man grabs it instead. He rips open the paper and counts the money, muttering. The Druid leans on his sword and watches him with a little smile, like someone watching children playing. When he is finished the cross-eyed man lifts his head. He nods to the Druid. The Druid walks up to the dolmen and stretches his arm into the dark between the ground-rocks and the slab lying across them. His hand comes out holding a bag. He throws it to Mark. Mark opens it. Inside are smaller bags of white powder, other bags of pills, a brick of hash in clingfilm, it’s just like on TV. All to your satisfaction? the Druid says.

  Yeah, brilliant, Mark says. Thanks very much. He looks at Knoxer, at Ste. Ste jerks his head in the direction of the car. Well, Mark says.

  The Druid has his head tilted back, looking up at the sky. But you’re not leaving already? he says.

  Let’s go let’s go let’s go, Carl is thinking, they are all thinking, Mark too but he doesn’t know what to do.

  Come, the Druid says. It is so rare that we see our friends. Let us sit by the fire.

  At the bottom of the hill the bonfire has burned low. The cross-eyed man picks up a jerry-can and pours petrol on it. Flames jump out, the Druid laughs. Sit, sit, he says, laughing. They sit in a ring around it like children. Ste is trying to make Mark look at him but he won’t. The Druid takes a pipe from his cloak and lights it and passes it around. In the firelight you can see he is not that old, he is less old than Carl’s dad.

  Once this whole country was a stronghold of the Goddess, he says. Magical sites lie all around here. The modern jackals do not see it, of course, they’d concrete over this very hill if you gave them half a chance. But to anyone with ears… He pulls his shoulders in. The sword lies on the ground beside him, pointing into the fire like a gold tongue drinking. You can hear them, he hisses. The dead.

  Carl gets the pipe. The smoke tastes weird, maybe it’s because they’re out here in the fields and trees. He is trying not to hear the dead, he is trying not to think of the black space between the rocks of the dolmen where the Druid put his hand.

  Hence my little enterprise, the Druid says. I was chosen by the Goddess to protect this hill from the defilers.

  So how old would you say it is then? Mark says, because the Druid is staring at him. Like, the dolmen?

  The Druid goes quiet like he’s thinking back to when he built it. Perhaps… three thousand years?

  Beside Carl, Deano bursts into giggles. He tries to stop but they just get worse. He laughs and laughs, high hyena yelps, till he’s on his side. Then when he can speak he says, Sorry… just reminded me of this cunt… wantin to ride a fuckin skeleton… He explodes into giggles again.

  The Druid stares at Deano without smiling. It’s just a game we were playing on the way up here, Mark explains. If you could pick one woman, you know, to be with. Ste picked Helen of Troy.

  Helen of fuckin Troy… gasps Deano. The dozy prick.

  Ste looks even more pissed off, like he’s just about keeping himself from saying something.

  The Druid just stares. Helen of Troy, he says.

  Barry hands Carl the pipe again. His eyes are like the black skies of a lost place. But above his head the stars are like millions of eyes. Carl pretends he doesn’t feel them watching, he looks into the fire instead. Q. But in the fire there are hands reaching up trying to get out!!!! A. Don’t look in the fire either!!!! He sucks on the pipe, trying to build up the wall of fog that hides him from the dead! But this time the smoke instead of hiding him is leading him deeper in!

  Helen who was Helle, the Druid says, was none other than Persephone, the Goddess of Death and Resurrection. It is she this whole land belonged to, it is her Door atop this hill.

  Ste lets out a sigh, looks at his watch.

  In Erin of old she was Brigit, the exalted one, the fiery arrow. In Wales she was the Ninefold Muse Ceridwen. She is Ashtaroth, Venus, Hecate, and a thousand others. She is the Goddess who underlies all things, the supreme object of desire whom no man may resist and no man may posse
ss without being destroyed, who ruled us all before her throne was stolen from her.

  And suddenly Carl knows why Dead Boy brought him here. He is going to take Carl back with him, through the Door! He wants to scream, he wants to get up and run. But there is a spell on him making him weigh a million tons. It’s the hill, already pulling him into it, it’s the hands in the fire holding him down. Soon he will hear the Door open, then the shadows will come!

  Stolen by the Church, the Druid says, by little priests in cells, scribbling out their Bibles, loving only gold and power! Thieves and paedophiles, who presided over a perversion! But she will be avenged! She will burn them all in her holy fire!

  Ste jumps to his feet. I’m freezin me hole off listenin to this shite! he shouts. See youse in the car! He turns to go back down the hill – but now the little man gets up too, he puts his hand in his jacket –

  Then Barry slumps forward. After a moment, gently but swiftly, the tips of his hair catch on the bonfire and light into little flames, like birthday candles. He lets out a loud snore. Everybody starts laughing, even Ste, even the little cross-eyed man.

  ‘I think someone’s had his fill,’ the Druid says.

  ‘Can’t say I fuckin blame him,’ Deano says. ‘This weed is fuckin lethal.’

  ‘It’s not weed, lad.’ The Druid laughs a big chesty laugh. ‘It’s heroin.’ He laughs some more, and they all do too, laughing and laughing, everyone is laughing!

  But Carl feels so, so sad.

  And then the screaming starts.

  ‘I’m just wondering if it’s going to be entirely safe…’ Jeekers in the wings.

  ‘I don’t imagine anyone will get hurt,’ Ruprecht says. ‘Though there may be some structural damage.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Jeekers whimpers to himself. But it’s too late – Titch is already introducing them; and now they are walking out onto the stage. The lights are so bright, and so hot! Yet even through them it seems he can feel the icy gaze of his parents, the avid gleam of their eyes as they wait to grade him out of ten in this new field of endeavour; and although he cannot see them, and in spite of what he is about to do, he works up a watery smile and directs it into the great darkness.

  Two days ago, Jeekers was eating lunch in the yard on his own, just as he does every day, when Ruprecht sat down beside him and told him he wanted to get the Quartet back together. Jeekers was surprised to hear this, after everything that had happened. But then Ruprecht explained why. He wanted to use the Quartet to get a message to Skippy. I know it sounds unorthodox, he said, but the fact is that there’s a sound scientific principle behind it – here he reeled off a list of nineteenth-century names who had apparently tried a similar thing. Where they went wrong, he said, was in thinking of us, our four-dimensional spacetime, as here, and the other dimensions as there, which meant they needed some kind of magical substance to bridge the gap in between. But in fact, you don’t need any such substance – or rather, according to M-theory, ordinary matter is also itself the magical substance! He paused here, looking at Jeekers with eyes that blazed like Catherine wheels.

  Strings, he said. If they ripple one way they make stuff, and if they ripple another way they make light, or nuclear energy, or gravity. But in each case they perform these ripples in eleven dimensions. Each string is like a chorus line with a stage curtain falling down the middle of it, so that one part is in our world, and the other is in the higher dimensions. The same string that makes up one quark of one atom of the handle of your tennis racket could at the same moment be revolving in an entirely other universe. So if every string goes beyond the veil, might it not be possible to somehow pass a message along the string from our side so it reaches the other side?

  Like two tin cans tied together? Jeekers said.

  Exactly! Ruprecht said. Once you see it, the concept is quite simple. It merely becomes a question of how. That’s where the Quartet comes in.

  In Lodge’s book, he explained, the soldiers in Summerland, which was what they called the Otherworld, reported that they could hear certain musical performances from the Albert Hall. What they were hearing were radio broadcasts. Evidently certain combinations of sonic architecture and radio frequency have this ‘amphibious’ quality that enables them to travel over to the higher dimensions. My theory is that some kind of sympathetic resonance must be involved. The tricky thing then is to find these amphibious frequencies. In the past they used human mediums, who sniffed them out by a process of intuition. However, with a simple recalibration of the Van Doren Wave Oscillator, we can alleviate all need for a medium by translating our sonic ‘message’ into every possible frequency – one of which has, of necessity, to be the one audible to the dead…

  Listening to him elaborate on his plan, Jeekers recognized that Ruprecht had finally lost the plot. His experiments had always been a little zany for Jeekers’s taste; still, in the past he could appreciate that they did have some exhilarating, if fleeting, points of correspondence with reality. This, though – this was delusion, nothing more.

  So why – why, why, why! – had he said yes? It’s not that he hasn’t felt sorry for Ruprecht over these last few weeks, and of course he feels terrible about what happened to Skippy. But when he thinks of how much trouble they’re going to get into – and right in front of their parents! It’s all right for Dennis and Geoff, they don’t have academic records to protect. But Jeekers is putting his whole future in jeopardy! Why?

  Yet even as he asks it he knows the reasons why. He is doing it precisely because it is pointless and foolish and out of character. He is doing it because it is the kind of thing he would never, ever do, because the kind of thing he does do – following the rules, working hard, being Good like a boy ordered from a catalogue – has lately come to seem quite empty. It might have something to do too with Dad getting Mr Fallon fired, even when Jeekers begged him not to; or maybe the creeping realization that it was the Best Boy that Dad loved, not Jeekers, and that if he was kidnapped, and the Best Boy left in his place, Dad would not be sad.

  Anyway, here he is. And as he looks across the stage – at the other three primed over their instruments, Geoff’s triangle lilting ever so slightly back and forth, like a leaf in anticipation of a breeze; Dennis’s smirk just visible at the mouthpiece to his bassoon; Ruprecht breathing very slowly, focus fixed on the back of the auditorium, on his lap the mangled horn that Jeekers still can’t look at without setting off an interior pandemonium of alarm; and then at Father Laughton, poor unsuspecting Father Laughton, as he raises his baton – the weird thing is, even though he knows Ruprecht is wrong and there is no chance of this working, still, at this precise moment in time – beneath the bright lights, shaking with nerves, surrounded by parents and priests in the Sports Hall on a Saturday night – reality does feel distinctly unreal, and what seemed unreal, conversely, feels a lot closer than before…

  And the music, when it begins, sounds so beautiful. Pachelbel’s familiar melody, worn threadbare by endless TV commercials for cars, life assurance, luxury soap, by street-performers in black-tie, mugging for tourists in high summer, by any number of attempts to invoke Old-World Elegance, accompanied by haughty waiters bearing trayfuls of tiny cubes of cheese – tonight it seems to its audience entirely new, to the point of an almost painful fragility. What is it that makes it so imploring and so sweet, so disconcertingly (for the older members of the audience who have come tonight expecting merely to be pleasantly bored and now find themselves with lumps in their throats) personal? Something to do with the horn that large boy in the silver suit is playing, perhaps, a new-fangled instrument that looks like it must have been run over by a truck, but produces a sound that’s like nothing you’ve ever heard – a hoarse, forlorn sound that just makes you want to…

  And then the voice comes in, and you can actually see a shiver run through the decorous crowd. Because there is no singer on the stage, and given that Pachelbel’s Canon does not have a vocal part, listeners could be forgiven for mistaking it for a
ghost’s, some spirit of the hall roused by the music’s beauty and unable to resist joining in, especially as the voice – a girl’s – has an irresistibly haunting quality, spare, spectral, carved down to its bare bones… But then one by one the audience members spot beneath the mike stand over to the right, ah, an ordinary mobile phone. But who is she? And what’s she singing?

  You fizz me up like Diet PepsiYou make me shake like epilepsyYou held my hand all summer longBut summer’s over and you’re gone

  Holy smokes – it’s BETHani! A new murmur of excitement, as younger spectators crane their necks to hiss in the ears of parents, aunts, uncles – it’s ‘3Wishes’, the song she wrote after she broke up with Nick from Four to the Floor, when there were all those pictures of her at her mum’s wearing skanky clothes and actually looking quite fat – some people said that was all just part of the publicity, but how could you think that if you listened to the words?

  I miss the bus and the walk’s so longI got split ends and my homework’s wrongThere’s a hole in my sneaker and gum on my seatAnd the world don’t turn and my heart don’t beat

  – which the girl who’s singing now fills with such longing, such loneliness, only amplified by the crackling of the phone, that even parents who view BETHani with suspicion or disapproval (often coloured, in the case of the dads, by a shameful fascination) find themselves swept up by its sentiments – sentiments that, separated from their r’n’b arrangement and grafted onto this melancholy spiralling music three hundred years old, reveal themselves as both heart-rending and also somehow comforting – because their sadness is a sadness everyone can recognize, a sadness that is binding and homelike.