by Paul Murray
Dennis remains silent, then issues a long, slow tocking with his tongue. ‘Geoff, how long have you known me? Is that really the kind of thing you think I’d think? Because if it is I’m very disappointed.’
‘Mmm, yeah, I knew you’d say that too.’
‘I’m going to bed,’ Dennis says peremptorily. ‘I don’t have to sit here and listen to my character being assassinated.’
He gets up; then he stops, sniffing the air. ‘Did you just cut one?’ he says.
‘No.’
Dennis sniffs the air again. ‘That is rough. You need to stop eating those urinal cakes, Geoff.’
With that he’s gone, and now Geoff’s alone in the Rec Room. But he doesn’t feel alone, not nearly as alone as you can feel sometimes, when the room is full of people playing table tennis and copying homework and throwing wet tissues at each other: in the wake of Ruprecht’s song, everything seems unusually placid, contented, still; and you can sit, just another object, not so colourful as the pool table nor so lightful as the Coke machine, and think of what Skippy might say if he were here, and what you, Geoff, might say back to him; until a yawn comes over you, and you rise and pad back out to get your toothbrush and go to bed – so tired all of a sudden you don’t notice the evermore acrid tint to the air, nor the first wisps of malign black smoke as they creep up the stairs.
It sounded like when you set an animal on fire. Then all around him were black bodies rising out of the grass. They rose up, they were screaming, only Carl could hear them.
Then he was on the street outside his house. He didn’t know how he got there. The noise was gone, they were gone, but the night kept getting darker and darker. He blinked to push it back but then it came crashing in again. Lights did not make any difference. The rain in the pocks of the path joined up to make words he could not say, words made of secret letters. Every word was a shell that held an empty universe.
The key was in the door. There was mud on his trousers.
Carl’s life had become a series of scenes featuring Carl. They joined up for a second like words made of rain in the pocks of a path then came apart again. Everything was like an answer that was on the tip of your tongue. Coats. Tiny flowers of the wallpaper.
He could not remember how things join up!
The bodies, the shadows, a thousand, a million, going, WE ARE THE DEAD. So loud, the horrible sound! The Druid staring at Carl with his mouth open. Then in a glow Dead Boy at their front.
That’s when Carl ran, he ran all the way back home.
The living room smelled like chemicals. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Light shot at you from everywhere! Gleam gleam went the wood and glass, the TV, the rowing machine, the gin bottle. Through the dark. On the couch Mom lay. From the doorway it looked like a fairy-tale with a princess fallen asleep in an enchanted garden. The curtain was open, the streetlight shone on her bare legs. Carl reached down and very gently, like he was plucking a flower, took the burned-down cigarette from between her fingers. He carried it to the fireplace and put it there.
In the kitchen he poured water into a glass. He held up the glass and looked into it. In the glass the room: the cream walls, the grey refrigerator, the cookery books with famous TV chefs on the never-opened covers, all shivery and blurred. He drank and felt the room wobbling icy-cold in his stomach. Now when you open your eyes there will be nothing there.
Carl!
He opened his eyes. He was in the living room. Mom rose silver out of her sleeping body and floated above it. She watched Carl but did not speak. The moon was full, they had turned it into a streetlight. She looked down sad like something terrible was going to happen. But it was not she who said Carl’s name.
Standing right next to Carl was Dead Boy.
Oh fuck!
Now when you stared at him he did not disappear any more. That was what happened on the hill, that was why Carl was screaming. You screamed and screamed, FUCK OFF and I’M SORRY, he just hovered, he just smiled. Now he was here in Carl’s house, there was nowhere left to run.
He is dead. I’ve been wanting to talk to you, he said.
He can talk?!
First you had to smoke the poppies first, then I can talk to you.
???
The poppies are made of In the war they grew out of the bodies From the LAND OF DEATH People spat on them So They moved underground To give them ANTEROGRADE AMNESIA so When you smoke them Now you can see us
Do you live in the dolmen? Carl said.
Dead Boy nodded. It is very cold, he said.
Yes that is what THEY said, now he remembered We are cold We are sad.
I am cold too, he said.
I know, Carl, said Dead Boy.
Then he realized: Dead Boy is his friend! He wanted to help him! That was why he’d been appearing!
Carl’s eyes were full of tears. Lori won’t talk to me, he told
Dead Boy. It’s like I’m dead too.
Dead Boy nodded.
I love her, Carl said. How can I get her to talk to me again?
You have to show her that we’re friends now.
But how?
You have to help me finish the quest, Dead Boy whispered.
Everything went dark like the room was filled with [black paint] [millions of crows].
Carl was afraid. The quest?
You have to kill the final Demon. Now it was just Dead Boy’s eyes like two big moons.
It’s the priest, Carl. It’s the peterphile. He’s the one who killed me.
He is? Carl said.
Dead Boy nodded slowly.
Something was not right about this but Carl shook it away.
Everything glowed.
You have to show her.
The holy fire, Mom said above the couch. Her hand was a flame.
And Carl knew what he had to do.
Father Green had intended to attend tonight’s concert, if only out of a childish wish to irritate Greg. But at the very last minute he had been called out to administer the last rites to an ailing woman on the other side of the city. He drove for an hour only to find she had made a miraculous recovery. Father Green had no option but to concede the point to his rival. Well played, sir! When he returned everyone had gone. The halls are empty as he makes his way down to his basement office, where he will sit and watch the hands of the clock.
No work, Jerome? That’s not like you! Getting old at last?
It has been like this since the boy died. He does not work, he does not sleep. You know he sees him still, in his office, dutifully folding cardboard sheets into boxes, taping shut the flaps, oblivious to the silent battle raging only a few feet away, the carnal ravenings of an old man. Even now, approaching Our Lady’s Hall, Father Green thinks he hears footsteps behind him; and he cannot stop himself from a shiver of hope as he turns round. But of course there is nothing.
At the top of the hall, he stops by the crib – as yet only half-occupied: no Infant, no Kings, only the oxen and donkeys to keep watch over the Holy Parents as they kneel in the straw. Before it, the offerings for the hampers. He bends to examine the labels. Mascarpone cheese, semi-sundried tomatoes, lychees. Donations are down this year. The idea of giving food, of taking actual food from your larder and putting it in another’s, must seem tiresomely Victorian in this ethereal age of numbers flying through the air. Poverty far too literal for these abstracted people.
That is not the reason, Jerome. The reason is you.
Yes. Father Green is aware of the rumours surrounding him. He sees the graffiti on his door; he hears the whispers, detects the snubs in the corridor, the staffroom, the vestry even. All in all it has pained him surprisingly little: the blessing of being an unsociable man. Except that now it has taken away what power he had to do good. For how can a criminal tug at anyone’s conscience? Who will give to a monster? He himself becomes the excuse not to think of those wretched slums, those addled lives. Irony upon irony! One always underestimates the capacity of life to diminish one.
<
br /> So why do you stay?
He asks himself the same question as he descends the steps to the office. Why stay? He has given Greg his scapegoat. Scandal is averted, the swimming coach may make his escape unblemished, the school continue as a shining beacon of the bourgeoisie. What they need of him now is to go. Go, that they may curse his name and forget this ever happened. And he wants to go. He has done enough for Seabrook. Why stay, to be calumnied? To be painted with the sins of another?
It’s obvious, Jerome. You wish the sin had been yours. That’s why you will not tell the truth, that’s why you will not leave. Instead you must stay here and be punished. Yet you committed no crime.
Only because I was afraid.
Ah, Jerome. Come, it is over. The boy is in the ground, with nothing to touch his lips but the worms. You have done him no wrong. Why must you torture yourself?
Why?
For Africa? For what happened forty years ago? Who remembers, Jerome? Those little boys? Most likely they are dead too. So who then? God? But what God do you believe in any more?
The priest sits at his desk, leafs through the paperwork unseeingly.
You would rather punish yourself than accept the alternative, is that not so, Jerome.
That noise outside again. Footsteps?
None of this matters. That is what you will not accept. None of it has mattered, nothing you did, the good, the bad. And nothing matters now.
Definitely something out there. A smell too, acrid. He rises, crosses the floor.
But you, you would rather burn than think this. You would rather hellfire, than look at the world and see the truth. See nothing.
Tears, or the ache of tears that will not come. He opens the door. As the red flame leaps for him he staggers backwards. Shock at first, but then a glimmer of joy.
Hellfire!
Howard stumbles out into December. The night, once it has slipped its fingers beneath his insulation of alcohol, is exceptionally cold, with a sour, chemical note to the air. He walks back in the direction of the school car park, deferring until he gets there the knowledge that he is unfit to drive and has not enough money for a taxi. His conscience taunts him with memories of the many times Halley rescued him from comparable situations, driving across the whole city sometimes to pick him up, and he falls morosely into his fantasy of earlier on – calling at her door, attractively bloodied from his encounter with Tom Roche, to be swept up into her arms. Somehow he doesn’t think turning up unbruised, sacked and drunk will have quite the same effect.
The moon tonight is full, and bright enough that he notices it disappear when he turns in the gate. He looks up, and sees an enormous black cloud printed over the school. It is of an unusual solidity, and low enough to partially obscure the Tower. The very next moment, all the lights in the upper floors come on; and now – he finds himself braced for it – the frenetic shrilling of the alarm clamours into the sleeping yard. Breaking into a run, he hurries down the avenue, through the car park, the dense black cloud growing over his head all the while, until, passing the Sports Hall, he arrives in the Quad.
The never-opened doors at the top of Our Lady’s Hall have been flung open, and boys are pouring out like pyjama’d ants from a disturbed nest, coils of black smoke snaking out with them at ankle height and slithering opportunistically into the night. Already the heat is palpable, a tropical warmth on his cheek. Bright amorphous hands beat at the leaded glass of the windows, and from within comes a rapturous roar of destruction, mingled with crashes and breaking. Howard locates Brian Tomms by the doors, hollering at the exiting boys to line up in order of their dorms. ‘What’s going on?’ he yells over the alarm.
‘Fire.’ Tomms does not appear surprised to see Howard. ‘Seems to’ve started in the basement. We’ve put in a call to the fire brigade, but it’ll probably have eaten up the Tower by the time they get here.’ He speaks in calm, clipped tones, a general surveying his battlefield. ‘Looks deliberate to me.’
‘Can I do anything?’
‘We’ve got most of the boys out. These are just the last few.’
As he speaks the crocodile line begins to peter out and Tomms descends the steps to oversee the prefects as they do the head-count. The boys, dim-eyed, tuft-haired, wait in orderly two-by-two rows. A few are filming the event with their phones – the white shapes behind the glass like furious dancing ghosts – but most merely look on vacantly, as though attending a special midnight assembly, lending the scene a weird peace.
Then it is broken by a commotion at the doors. Two fifth-years struggle to contain a handful of smaller boys, who are apparently attempting to run back into the school. Tomms runs over to help the prefects, and as they are jostled out into the Quad, Howard identifies the breakaways as Geoff Sproke, Dennis Hoey and Mario Bianchi from his second-year History class. The tears on their cheeks, in the unearthly light, give their faces the appearance of melting wax. ‘He’s still in there!’ blurts Geoff Sproke from behind the chain of arms. ‘He’s not!’ Tomms shouts him down. ‘He’s not, we checked!’ As he speaks, a plume of fire shoots over the roof, bathing the onlookers in a freakish orange glow. ‘Ruprecht! Ruprecht!’ the boy’s friends cry, throwing themselves once more against their captors. The sound is pitiful and thin against the flames, like kittens crying for their mother. With a sinking heart, Howard reels around and stumbles towards the doors. Heat blasts his face; beneath its bandages, his hand sings ecstatically, as if recognizing its own.
Burning, Our Lady’s Hall has become something alive, something new and terrible. Flames race over the walls, seizing and devouring, and the dull matrix of the school beneath them – the chipped timber, the shabby plasterwork, the doorways, the desks, the statue of the Virgin – seems already to have retreated from the world, half-turned to shadow. Looking on, Howard feels like a dinosaur watching the first meteors fall; like he’s witnessing an evolutionary leap, the arrival of an insuperable future. He imagines Greg’s tropical fish boiling in their tank.
Tomms appears by his side at the threshold. Howard looks back at him in a daze. ‘We have to do something.’
‘There’s no one in there,’ Tomms says. ‘We checked all the dorms.’
‘Then where’s Van Doren?’
Tomms does not reply. ‘Could he be in the basement?’ Howard says, thinking aloud.
‘If he’s in the basement, it’s already too late. But why would he be down there?’
No reason, of course; and yet, looking into the phantasmagoria of clashing light, Howard has a terrible sense of something left undone. And then, ‘What was that?’
‘What?’
‘Didn’t you hear that? It sounded like… music.’
‘I didn’t hear anything,’ Tomms says. His nostrils twitch, detecting the alcohol on the other teacher’s breath. ‘Come on, Howard, we need to get everyone clear.’
‘I was sure I heard music,’ Howard repeats distractedly.
‘How would there be music?’ Tomms asks. ‘Come on, there’s nothing more we can do.’ He may not be an expert on history like Fallon, he may not have grand conversations about the First World War in the staffroom with Jim Slattery, but he knows plenty about fires – how they work, how hot they get, when you can be a hero and when you can’t. ‘Nothing,’ he repeats confidently.
But before he can stop him Howard’s disappeared into the burning school.
Desks are burning. Chairs are burning. Blackboards are burning. Crosses are burning. Maps of the world, set squares, rugby photographs. Everything you hate is on fire. So why are you crying?
Once upon a time Carl came in a window in the utility room. He had come to kill the Demon. The school was dark but after only a few moments the priest came walking down the hall. Carl followed him to his office. When the priest went in and closed the door, Carl poured petrol over it and up and down the basement. Then he set it on fire.
He waited in the fire just to be sure. The priest opened the door and stared around at the flames. Then he saw Carl, a
nd he nodded like he’d been expecting him. He came out his door, Carl dodged back, but the priest went the other direction, a little way down the hall, and broke the glass of the fire alarm. Then he went back into his office and sat down in his chair. The bell rang, boys came running everywhere and teachers and prefects. Carl went to hide.
That was a hundred years ago, they’ve all gone now. Ever since, Carl has been walking in the smoke. It burns his eyes, it’s dark as night, and every turn he makes just leads him further in. He thought when he killed the Demon something would happen! Lori would appear, Dead Boy would bring him to her! But there is nothing, only smoke. He walks, the flames make him think of the night he first met her, he was a dragon with flames coming from his mouth, burning Morgan Bellamy’s small girly feet –
He stops.
Because he has just realized.
Flames from his mouth.
He’s the one who killed me.
The Demon is not the priest.
The Demon is him.
He looks down at his hands. They are huge scaly claws. When he touches his face it’s like rock.
He is the Demon. He is the one that has to die for the game to be over.
Now he knows, that is why he is crying.
The smoke is everywhere black like the world’s been scribbled out. There’s no way out of here. He’s alone in the black fire. He feels so sad! But the smoke is so soft, it rolls around him like a blanket. So he lies down.
In the distance of his hand his phone rings. It is the World to tell him it’s time to die. But that’s okay, he is remembering other things. He is remembering that first night, when Lori rolled up to him and swept over him like a bright white wave. Even after everything he still has that night, and as the smoke piles up over him, becoming a Door that slowly opens, he holds it tight in his Demon’s hand.
