by Brian Lumley
The idea was this: that all the pupils employ Tuesday’s last period to walk a mile down leafy country lanes to the beach, there to collect up large, flat, rounded stones, of which there were plenty, and to carry them back one per pupil to the school. And as stated, along the way one male teacher (usually the gym-master, who was ex-Army Physical Training Corps) and two of the school’s younger, unattached female teachers would extol the glories of the hedgerows, the wonders of the wild flowers and the countryside in general. None of which was of any real interest to Harry Keogh; but he did like the beach, and anything was better than a classroom on a warm, droning afternoon.
“Here,” said Jimmy Collins to Harry as they strolled, two abreast, midway in a long line of kids, down through the paths of the dene winding to the sea, “you really ought to pay attention to old Hannant, you know. I mean, not about all that “needing qualifications” stuff—that’s up to you—but during lessons gen’rally. He’s not a bad’un, old George, but he could be if he decided you were just taking the mickey.”
Harry shrugged dejectedly. “I was daydreaming,” he said. “Actually, it’s sort of funny. See, when I daydream like that, it’s like I can’t stop. Only old Hannant shouting—and you giving me a jab—pulled me out of it.”
Pulled me out … the strong hands reaching down into the water … to pull me out, or push me under?
Jimmy nodded. “I’ve seen you like it before, lots of times. Your face goes sort of funny.…” He looked serious for a moment, then chuckled and gave Harry a playful thump on the shoulder. “Not that that’s a big deal—your face is funny all the time!”
Harry snorted. “Listen who’s talking! Me, funny-looking? I’d play Kirk to your Spock any time! Anyway, what do you mean? I mean, how do I look, you know, funny?”
“Well, you just sit very still, all stary-eyed, scared-looking. But not always. Sometimes you look a bit dreamy, like. Anyway, it’s like old George said: you just don’t seem to be here at all. Actually, you’re very weird! I mean, it’s true, isn’t it? How many friends have you got?”
“I’ve got you,” Harry feebly protested. He knew what Jimmy meant: he was too deep, too quiet. But not studious, not a swot. If he’d been good at lessons, that would perhaps explain it, but he wasn’t. Oh, he was clever enough (at least he felt he could be clever) if he wanted to concentrate on it. It was just that he found concentration very hard. It was as if sometimes the thoughts he thought weren’t really his at all. Complicated thoughts and daydreams, fancies and phantasms. His mind made up stories for him—whether he wanted it to or not—but stories so detailed they were like memories. The memories of other people. People who weren’t here any more. As if his head was an echo-chamber for minds which had … gone somewhere else?
“Yes, you’ve got me for a friend,” Jimmy interrupted his train of thought. “And who else?”
Harry shrugged, went on the defensive. “There’s Brenda,” he said. “And … and anyway, who needs a lot of friends? I don’t. If people want to be friendly they’ll be friendly. If they don’t, well, that’s up to them.”
Jimmy ignored the mention of Brenda Cowell, Harry’s grande passion who lived in the same street. He was into sport, not girls. He’d hang himself from a goal-post before he’d be caught with his arm round a girl in the cinema when the lights went up. “You’ve got me!” he said. “And that’s it. As for why I like you—I just dunno.”
“Because we don’t compete,” said Harry, shrewder than his years. “I don’t understand sport, so you enjoy explaining it to me—’cos you know I won’t argue. And you don’t understand me being so, well, quiet—”
“And weird,” Jimmy interrupted.
“—And so we get along.”
“But wouldn’t you like more friends?”
Harry sighed. “Well, see, it’s like I have friends. Up in my head.”
“Imaginary friends!” Jimmy scoffed, but not unkindly.
“No, they’re more than that,” Harry answered. “And they’re good friends, too. Of course they are … I’m the only friend they’ve got!”
“Huh!” Jimmy snorted. “Oh, you’re weird, all right!”
Way up at the head of the column, “Sergeant” Graham Lane came out of the woods into bright sunlight, pausing to hasten on the double rank of kids behind him. This was the narrow mouth of the dene, also the mouth of the stream which had cut its gulley through the sea cliffs. To north and south those cliffs now rose, mainly of sandstone but layered with belts of shale and shingle, and banded with rounded stones; and here the stream passed under an old, rickety wooden bridge. Beyond lay a reedy, weedy marsh or lake of brackish water, only ever replenished by high tides or storms. A path skirted the boggy area towards the sandy beach; and beyond that, there lay the grey North Sea, growing greyer every day with debris from the pits. But today it was blue in the bright sunlight, flecked white here and there by the spray of diving gulls where they fished.
“Right!” Lane called loudly, standing arms akimbo and very much The Man, in his track-suit bottoms and T-shirt on the nearside of the bridge. “Off you go, over the bridge, round the lake and on to the beach. Find your stones and bring ’em back to me—er, no, to Miss Gower—for grading. We’ve a good half hour, so anyone who fancies can have a quick dip as soon as he’s found his stone—if you’ve got your costumes with you. But no nude bathing if you please. Remember, there are other people on the beach. And stick to the pools left by the sea. You all know what the current’s like just here, you young buggers!”
They knew, all right: the current was treacherous, especially on an ebb tide. People were drowned up and down this coast every year, strong swimmers too.
Miss Gower—Religious Instruction and Geography—from her position roughly halfway back along the column, had heard Lane’s gravel-voiced, parade-ground instructions. She gave a little grimace. Oh, she understood well enough why she was to grade the stones: it was to allow Lane and Dorothy Hartley a bit of freedom, so they could have a little ‘ramble’ along the rocks and find themselves a spot for a quick hump! Purely physical, of course, for their minds were totally incompatible.
Miss Gower tilted her nose and sniffed loudly; and now, as the pace of the kids towards the front began to speed up, she called out: all right, boys—hurry along. And remember this week’s wild-life quest. We need some good razor-shells for the natural history room. Whole ones, still hinged together if you can find them. But please—empty ones! Let’s not carry any rotting molluscs back, shall we?”
Farther back, along the path under the trees, where the rear was brought up by Miss Hartley and the monitors of her English and History classes, Stanley Green trudged, hands in pockets, his clever but vicious mind dark with thoughts of violence. He had heard Miss Gower’s memo to the kids: no dead shellfish. No, but he’d like to fix it for a dead “Speccy” Keogh! Well, maybe not dead, but severely mauled. It was that dumb kid’s fault he had those maths problems to work out tonight. Dumb shit, sitting there like a zombie, fast asleep with his eyes wide open! Well, Big Stanley would open his eyes for him, sure enough—or close them!
“Hands out of your pockets, Stanley,” pretty Miss Hartley said from behind him. “It’s five months yet to Christmas, not quite cold enough for snow. And why the hunched shoulders? Is something bothering you?”
“No, Miss,” he mumbled in answer, his head down.
“Try to enjoy, Stanley,” she told him, a little archly. “You’re still very young, but if you keep on taking your spite out on the entire world you’ll get old very, very quickly.” And to herself she added, like that frustrated bitch, Gertrude Gower…!
* * *
Harry Keogh was not a natural born voyeur, just a curious boy. Last Tuesday down here on the beach he’d stumbled on something, and he hoped to do so again today. That was why, after he delivered up his stone to Miss Gower, he checked that no one was watching him and cut away across the dunes and round towards the other side of the reedy marsh. It was only a little
more than a hundred yards, but in half that distance he’d already picked up fresh footprints in the sand. A man’s and a woman’s; and of course he’d seen “Sergeant” and Miss Hartley heading this way, as he’d suspected they might.
Earlier, Harry had conveniently “forgotten” his bathing briefs; this had left him free to pursue his own interests, for Jimmy had subsequently gone off to swim with the rest of the boys. What Harry was looking for was simple: he wanted pointers. Sitting next to Brenda in the cinema and pressing his knee against hers (or, when she leaned close to him, squeezing her upper arm so that his knuckles touched her small breasts through her coat and jumper) was all very well and even sort of exciting, but it seemed pretty tame when compared with the games teachers Lane and Hartley got up to!
Finally, coming over a dune and crouching down he located them sitting on a patch of sand within a semicircle of tall reeds—the same spot where he’d seen them last week. Harry backtracked and quickly chose a place at the crest of another dune where he could lie down and peer through a clump of crabgrass. Last week she (Miss Hartley) had been playing with “Sergeant’s” thing, whose size Harry had found extraordinary. Her sweater had been up and “Sergeant” had had one hand up her skirt while the other fondled and tugged at her firm, large-nippled breasts. When he’d come, she had taken a handkerchief and delicately soaked up the glistening semen from his belly and chest. Then she’d kissed him on the tip of his thing—actually kissed him there—and started to put her clothes right while he just lay there like a dead man. Harry had tried hard to imagine Brenda Cowell doing that to him, but the picture just wouldn’t develop in his mind. It was too alien.
This time it was very different. This time it was going to be what Harry really wanted to see. By the time he got himself settled down on his stomach, “Sergeant” had his track-suit bottoms right off and Miss Hartley’s short white, pleated tennis skirt up around her waist. He was trying to get her knickers off, and his thing—even bigger than last week, if that was at all possible—was jerking about on its own like a puppet on some unseen string.
From beyond the dunes, far off down the beach, Harry could hear the kids shouting and laughing where they swam and splashed in one of the big tidal pools; the sun burned the back of his neck and ears where he lay perfectly still, his chin in the palms of his hands; sand fleas jumped only inches from his face. But he allowed nothing to distract him; his eyes remained riveted on the sexual activity of the lovers in their reed bower.
At first she seemed to be fighting “Sergeant,” trying to push his hands away. But at the same time she unbuttoned her blouse so that her breasts jutted up naked in the sunlight, their pointed tips unbelievably brown. Harry sensed a sort of panic in her, reflected in his own suddenly pounding blood. It was as if she were hypnotized, with “Sergeant’s” penis a snake where it swayed over her belly—mesmerized into lifting her bottom so that her lover could remove her panties, and into bending her knees and parting her legs. In there, she was dark as night—as if she wore a smaller pair of black knickers under her white ones. Black, yes, and then pink where she put her hands under her thighs to open herself for “Sergeant.”
Harry caught a glimpse of her: pink, white, curving, dark, brown, but that was all. Climbing between her legs, his incredible penis disappearing into her in a moment, “Sergeant” allowed no more. All that was left were feet and legs and the gym teacher’s tight buttocks starting to lunge, shutting off the view. The watching boy gasped, felt himself grown hard inside his pants, rolled on his side to relieve the throbbing of his genitals—and spotted Stanley Green coming over the dunes, scowling, his little pig eyes full of venom!
On the trail of the lovers, Harry had found a perfect razor-shell, both halves intact and hinged together. Now he studiously scraped away sand, “found” the shell, slid down the dune holding it carefully in one hand. Aware that his complexion must be bright red, he turned his face away from Green, pretending not to see him until the youth was almost on top of him. After that there was no avoiding it. No avoiding a showdown, either.
“Hello there, Speccy,” the bully growled, approaching in a half-crouch, his arms spread wide, defying Harry to run. “Fancy finding you here, ’stead of pissing about with your mate the big football star. What’re we doin’ here then, Speccy? Found a pretty shell for Miss Gower, have we?”
“What’s it to you?” Harry muttered, trying to sidestep the other, get round him and away.
Green moved closer, snatched the double shell out of Harry’s hand. It was a shiny olive colour, old, brittle as a wafer. As he deliberately closed his fist on it, so it crumbled into fragments. “There,” he said, his voice full of an unpleasant satisfaction. “You goin’ to tell on me, Speccy?”
“No,” Harry breathlessly answered, still trying to dodge past, seeing in his mind’s eye “Sergeant’s” backside going up and down, up and down, in the reed hollow not fifteen yards away on the other side of the dune. “I don’t tell on people. And I don’t bully, either.”
“Bully? You?” Green found it funny. “You couldn’t bully a fart out of a frog! All you’re good for’s falling asleep in class and acting like a big tart! That and getting people in trouble.”
“You got yourself in trouble!” Harry protested. “Giggling like that.”
“Giggling?” Big Stanley caught his arm, pulled him close. “Giggling? Girls giggle, Speccy. You callin’, me a girl, then?”
Harry shook himself loose, put his fists up. Trembling in every limb, he said, “Piss off!”
Green’s mouth fell open. “Rude, is it?” He said. Then he shrugged, half-turned as if to go, and when Harry dropped his guard turned back and caught him a punch at the side of his mouth.
“Ow!” said Harry, spitting blood from a split lip. Off balance, he stumbled and fell; and Green was just readying a kick when “Sergeant” Lane, tucking in his T-shirt, came storming over the top of the dune scarlet with rage and frustration.
“What the bloody hell—?” he roared. He caught the flabbergasted Green by the scruff of his neck, swung him round, aimed his instep accurately at the seat of the bully’s pants and let fly. Green yelped as he flew facedown in the sand.
“Up to your usual tricks, are you, Big Stanley?” “Sergeant” shouted. “And who’s your victim this time? What? Skinny Harry Keogh? By God, you’ll be strangling babies next!”
As Green scrambled to his feet, spitting sand, the PT master pushed him in the chest, sent him flying again. “See, it’s not so pleasant, Stanley, when you’re up against someone who’s bigger. And that’s how Harry feels about it. Right, Keogh?”
Still holding his mouth, Harry said: “I can look after myself.”
Big Stanley, for all that he was a year older than Harry and looked older still, was on the point of blubbering. “I’ll tell my dad,” he said, scrambling away.
“What?” “Sergeant” laughed, hands on his hips as the bully backed off. “Tell your dad? That fat beer-gut who arm-wrestles for pints with his mates in the Black Bull? Well when you do, ask him who beat him last night and nearly broke his arm!” But Stanley was off and running.
“You all right, Keogh?” Lane helped him to his feet.
“Yes, sir. Mouth’s bleeding a bit, that’s all.”
“Son, you stay away from that one,” said the master. “He’s a bad lot and he’s much too big for you. When I called you skinny, I didn’t mean it; it was just to point up the difference in your sizes. Big Stanley’s not likely to forget this in a hurry, so look out for him.”
“Yes, sir,” Harry said again.
“Right, then. Off you go.” Lane made as if to return across the dune, but just then Miss Hartley appeared, looking all prim and proper. “Shit!” Harry heard “Sergeant” say under his breath. He wanted to grin but was afraid it would split his lip even more. So turning his face away he made for where the rest of the boys were gathering around Miss Gower, ready for the return trek.
* * *
It was the seco
nd week in August, a Tuesday evening, and it was hot. It was funny, George Hannant thought as he mopped his brow with a handkerchief, just how hot it could get on an evening like this. You’d think it would cool down, but instead the heat seemed to close in on you. During the day there had been a breeze, not much of a breeze but a breeze; now there was none, it was still as a painting out there. All the heat of the day, soaked into the earth, was coming out now, coming at you from all sides. Hannant mopped again at his brow, his neck, sipped an iced lemonade, knew that that, too, would soon start to run out of him. It was that kind of weather.
He lived alone not far from the school, but on that side of it away from the mine. The other side would have been too depressing, too oppressive. Tonight he had papers and books to mark up, lessons to plan. He didn’t feel like doing either one of these things, or anything else for that matter. He could use a drink but … the pubs would be full of miners in their caps and shirt-sleeves, their voices coarse and guttural. There was a decent film on at the Ritz, but the sound system was deafening at the front and the courting couples in the back rows invariably annoyed him, their sweaty fumblings distracting his attention from the screen. And anyway, he had that marking to do.
Hannant’s home, a semi-detached bungalow on a tiny private estate overlooking the dene and its valley where they narrowed towards the sea, was cut off from the school by the broad swath of a cemetery with its old church, well-kept plots, high perimeter walls. He usually walked through the place to school each morning, back again in the evening. There were benches circling huge, gorgeously clad horse chestnut trees, their leaves already turning in places. He could always take his books and papers there.
