Hello Darkness

by Anthony McGowan

  “And they were gone?”

  “And they were gone.”

  “Was the door to the lab locked?”

  Mrs Maurice gave me a long look, one that I’d have had to be about a thousand years older to fully understand, and said, “Oh, Johnny, you know very well that I have an open-door policy.”

  Focus. I had to keep focused.

  “And you’ve no idea who might have, er, murdered the insects?”

  “You mean did anyone have a grudge against them?” She stretched her sleepy eyes wide, mimicking fright.

  I was getting nowhere. Time to try absolute honesty and seriousness.

  “Look, Mrs Maurice, I’ll level with you. I’m here because the Shank…”

  She raised an eyebrow. It was a neat trick. Not her only one.

  “I mean Mr Shankley. He thinks I’ve got something to do with all this. I was in the toilets when the sticks got dumped. He wants my head on a spike. And it’s not just me. The Shank wants the whole school to suffer for this – he’s gonna cancel the school play unless we get it sorted out. So, if you’ve any ideas…”

  That eyebrow headed north again. I don’t think she could stop it if she tried.

  “About these guys, I mean…” I pointed down at the dry, brown bodies.

  “Why don’t we ask one?” said Mrs Maurice. She picked one of the insects up and whispered to it. Then she held it up to her ear, and nodded and gasped a little.

  “What does he say,” I asked, resigned.

  “She.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a she. They’re all ladies. She says—” And then, all of a sudden, she stopped the play-acting. Maybe she took pity on me. Maybe she got bored. Or maybe I was suddenly seeing the world straight. Anyway, for a second she looked ten years older. “Look, John,” she said, sounding like any other teacher, “I haven’t a clue what happened. You’re a good kid and I’d like to help you, but I don’t see how I can. The stick insects were here, then they weren’t. Now they’re back again and dead. That’s all I know.”

  “Can you at least tell me how they died? I mean they don’t seem to have been squished or anything.”

  “What, you want me to do an autopsy?”

  I shrugged. She sighed.

  “Leave them with me,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said, and left.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A HISTORY LESSON

  I had to hurry to make it to my afternoon class. It was history, taught by Mr Hemp. Hemp was the right man for the job – he was a thousand years old and as arid as the Gobi Desert. There was no period in history that he couldn’t suck the life out of.

  The class was still getting settled, but Hemp was already speaking. It sounded like he’d been gargling chalk again. He pronounced every word quite separately, as if it were utterly alone and unconnected with any other. The effect of this was that, although the meaning of each word might be clear, it was impossible to keep a track of the general gist:

  “And. The. Athenians. Overreached. Themselves. When. In. The. Midst. Of. Their. War. With. The. Spartans. And. Goaded. Into. Action. By. Alcibiades. Whose. Desecration. Of. The. Sacred. Herms. Prevented. His. Own. Participation. They. Launched. An. Invasion. Of. Sicily …”

  As I sat down, I realized that the class was silent and staring.

  I felt a jab in my back. I resisted the urge to turn round.

  “Why did you do it, Middleton?”

  I recognized the voice of pretty-boy Steve Wilson.

  “What did you kill them for? You do it for fun? Cos you’re sick? Cos you’re a wacko? You shouldn’t be in a normal school. You should be with the other mental kids in the nut house.”

  I heard the scrape of a chair. I could see what was coming. Wilson was leaning forward to slap the back of my head. He was that kind of kid. Well, this time he’d chosen the wrong head to slap. I ducked, and felt the swish of a hand passing through my hair. And now that he was off balance, it was easy work to catch his wrist, pull him forwards over his desk and roll him onto the floor. Easy work, but slickly done, even if I say so myself.

  There was a guffaw from the class – the fickleness of the mob is the one thing you can always rely on – and Hemp looked round from the board, where he’d been writing down ten key facts about his friends, the Athenians.

  “What is the meaning of this?”

  “Wilson just overreached himself, sir,” I replied.

  Hemp blinked at me. I guessed that his mind was away on some remembered or imagined archaeological dig, back when he was young and still full of the excitement of discovery. There he was, trowel in hand, scraping away the soil from a bone or a pottery shard, and suddenly I’d dragged him back to this classroom full of kids who didn’t want to learn. And it turned out that his lonely life had slipped by, and now he was old and half dead with nothing achieved.

  “I–I…” said Hemp, his voice like the rustle of dry leaves in a hot breeze. And then he lost his way, and nothing followed.

  I suddenly felt sorry for the old fossil and wished I’d found a better way of humiliating that jerk Wilson than disrupting the class.

  But before Mr Hemp had the time to find the right word to come after “I”, the door opened. Only after he’d opened it did the kid bother to knock, and the knock was a kind of satire, a reminder of its own impertinent absence, like a pretty girl blowing you a kiss after she’d just told you to get lost.

  The class turned to the newcomer, like Wimbledon spectators following the ball.

  He was tall and willowy and wore his hair long. His face was as perfect and as blank as a Byzantine Madonna. His name was Hart, and he was a Drama Queen.

  The kid called Hart spoke to Hemp. Spoke to Hemp, but looked at me.

  “I’ve come for Middleton,” he said, sounding bored. “Drama business.” Hart wore a black feather boa threaded through the belt loops of his trousers.

  It was accepted throughout the school that in the couple of weeks leading up to a big production, “drama business” came first, and kids could get called out of lessons at any time.

  “Take him,” said Hemp, glad, I think, to be relieved of one more burden.

  “What’s this all about?” I asked Hart, although I had a pretty good idea.

  We were heading towards the drama studio. The shows took place in the main hall, but the studio was the Drama Queens’ Kremlin.

  “She’ll tell you when we get there.”

  No need to tell me who “she” was.

  “Because, you know, if it’s a Dorothy you want, I’d have learned the lines,” I said.

  Suddenly that perfect, expressionless face was contorted with something like rage.

  “There’s only one Dorothy in this school,” hissed Hart, “and it’s not you.”

  Again, there was no need to ask who the one, true Dorothy was.

  “OK, don’t get your boa in a twist. I was just making conversation.”

  “Sure,” said Hart, and once again his words sounded like they could hardly be bothered to crawl out of his lips. “Me too.”

  The drama studio was on the top floor. I was breathing heavily by the time we got there, but Hart looked like he’d done nothing more taxing than caressing his hair out of his face. Turns out that the combo of modern dance and high drama can keep you pretty fit.

  Hart pushed open the door and stood back as I entered.

  The studio was well sound-proofed, so the noise and bustle hit me with the surprise of a wet fish in the face. There were, maybe, twenty jabbering Year Seven kids in a straggling line. Year Sevens always look like they could ride to school on cats, but these were the smallest of the small. I suppose it’s because they were—

  “MUNCHKINS!”

  The scream came from a commanding figure, entering from stage left. “Scream” gets it wrong. Right for volume, wrong for tone. Scream is what you do when you lose control because of fear or fury. But this was controlled, directed and lethal. It came from a Dorothy, but a Dorothy un
like any you’ve ever seen.

  “MUNCHKINS!”

  Things had mellowed down from fog-horn level to mere holler.

  The milling Munchkins fell into a terrified silence.

  “You see I thought we were doing The Wizard of Oz. This is supposed to be the yellow brick road and you are meant to be Munchkins. But it looks to me as though you’ve decided that you don’t like The Wizard of Oz. It looks to me like you’ve decided on something different. It looks to me as if we’re doing The Pied Piper of Hamelin and you lot are nothing but a bunch of filthy, stinking, plague-ridden

  RATS!”

  The last word had the sudden shocking impact of a German 88 mm anti-tank round, and a couple of the Munchkins actually fell over.

  I couldn’t decide if the whole thing were grotesquely comic, or just plain grotesque. Either way, a grin licked at the corners of my mouth.

  And then things took a more sinister turn. Dorothy grabbed one of the Munchkins by the ear.

  “I don’t think you’re listening to me, are you?”

  The Munchkin writhed and emitted a pitiful keening noise, like some small rodent in the jaws of a weasel.

  “You know what happens to Munchkins who don’t listen?”

  The Munchkin squealed again, as Dorothy applied an extra twist.

  “No? Then I’ll tell you.”

  Then Dorothy whispered in the Munchkin’s ear, the one she was still twisting. The child’s legs buckled, and it was only that relentless ear-grip that kept him off the floor. The kid begged Dorothy for mercy, using inchoate sounds rather than actual words. She let go and he fell to his knees.

  It was sick and I wanted it to stop. But it was Hart who acted. He went over and spoke to Dorothy. Dorothy spun towards him, her eyes blazing fire. I thought she was going to strike or scratch, but then she controlled herself, glanced over towards me, and smiled a smile that could have blasted King Kong off the top of the Empire State Building.

  “Well,” she said in a voice like honey drizzled over rotting plums, “aren’t you a nice-looking boy, for a killer.”

  I smiled and acknowledged the compliment with a brief blush.

  “Let’s go and talk in my dressing room.”

  This wasn’t the first time I’d seen Emma West, better known as Dorothy, but it was the first time she’d spoken to me. She was at the top of the pile in our school, and she’d earned it the hard way. The Queens were what they were today because of her. She’d found them in complete disarray and forged them into the disciplined fightin’-and-dancin’ machine they had become.

  There was a disconcerting ambiguity to Emma West, almost as if she were a boy who looked like a girl playing at being a boy impersonating a girl. You wouldn’t call her beautiful, or even pretty – her features were too heavy for that – but she pulled at your eyes like a peacock, and she could sashay for England.

  The dressing room was through a door at the back of the studio. It was obviously designed to perform various technical functions, and it was still lined with assorted pieces of audio-visual equipment – the light-controller, a sound mixer, and other stuff I didn’t understand. However, the whole place had been transformed with cushions and drapes and random pieces of fabric, and the air was heavy with perfume and powder.

  It was also full of Drama Queens. Some were in costume – there were a couple of witches, one wicked, the other very wicked. There was a Tin Man and a Scarecrow. Other Queens were in their school uniforms. And they were staring at me with exactly the mixture of suspicion and hunger that the lions in the zoo reserved for the hunk of meat just tossed over the fence.

  The Queen Mother threw herself down on a long, backless couch, raised at one end. What was it – a chaise longue? An ottoman? I couldn’t remember, but it was a decadent thing to have in a school like ours. Anyway, she lay across the ottoman – we’ll settle on ottoman – like a python, a python with curves instead of coils, and I stood in front of her like Mowgli before Kaa.

  She stretched out a hand and a tall, thin glass appeared in it. It was full of bubbles.

  She looked at me again, and I couldn’t hold her gaze. Those eyes had seen too much.

  “You know why you’re here,” she said at last.

  Question or statement? I wasn’t sure.

  “I guess you’ve heard about the stick insects,” I ventured.

  “You guess right.”

  “And that I was mixed up in it.”

  “Go on.”

  “And that unless I find out who did the deed, the play – your play – gets cancelled.”

  I felt the room’s hostility level rise like the water when a fat man gets into the bath.

  “Get one thing straight, pretty boy,” said Emma. “Nothing’s going to stop this show.”

  “Then maybe you should help me find out what’s really going on here.”

  “And how do you propose I do that?”

  “I’m just a guy on his own. You’ve got the resources; you’ve got the reach. There’s not much that goes on in this school that the Queens don’t know or couldn’t find out about. If we work together, we can crack this.”

  “But the entire world seems to think that you’re the one behind it. In fact, there is a very easy way to sort this out right now. You run along to Mr Shankley, and you tell him that you killed those itty-bitty bugs for whatever crazy motive you had. Then you take your punishment and the play goes on. Simple.”

  “Not so simple. I didn’t do it.”

  Dorothy sighed. “I’m bored with this. I’ve got Munchkins to train. We tried playing nice, Middleton. We tried giving you a chance.”

  And suddenly I found, as she was speaking, that there were hands gripping me. No single hand was strong, but together they were overpowering. I was set down on the floor and held like a pirate about to have his leg sawn off.

  “Sophie!”

  I heard the door open and felt a heavy tread. Whatever it was that just came in was standing out of sight behind me. Suddenly I was freaked – and it takes quite a lot to freak me. Somehow I knew that behind me there lurked something truly terrible, something from the depths of the earth – or perhaps just from the darkest place of my subconscious.

  “Yes, Dorothy?” The voice squeaked like Minnie Mouse, but this was one of those occasions when you know the voice doesn’t go with the mouth.

  “Playtime.”

  Giggles. Girlish giggles.

  Sweat burst out on my forehead, and I strained to see whatever it was that moved behind me.

  But I couldn’t see. I would never see.

  “Look,” I said, panic giving my voice a metallic edge. “The Shank has given me four days. That’s all I need. I’ll find the real killer, and then everyone gets to go to the Emerald City.”

  “If I let Sophie loose on you, you’ll say whatever I tell you to say, do whatever I tell you to do.”

  “Then that makes you worse than the Shank. Even he was prepared to give me some time to get to the bottom of this.”

  Dorothy came so close I thought she was going to kiss me. But I saw something in her eyes. She was ruthless and she was powerful, but she wasn’t the Shank.

  “So, what if I trust you and you let me down, huh?”

  “I won’t let you down.”

  “That’s what you boys always say.”

  “If I don’t find the real killer in four days, then I’ll take the fall. I’ll be your patsy.”

  Again Emma West stared at me with those ageless, beautiful, fatal eyes. I could have been waiting for three seconds or three hours.

  “OK, you’ve got your chance.”

  I heard a stunted wail of disappointment from behind, and heavy steps moved away. The hands holding me released their grip, and I picked myself up from the floor.

  “I think Sophie liked you,” said Emma, conjuring up the image of a whale liking krill. “And if you don’t find out who did this, then I guarantee you’ll be getting better acquainted.”

  I shrugged. “If I get out of
this maybe you and I can give Sophie the opportunity to feel a little jealous.”

  Emma laughed. It was the first sound I’d heard coming out of her mouth that seemed spontaneous. Suddenly she looked like what she was: a drama-crazed schoolgirl who just wanted to put on a show.

  “Maybe, kid, maybe,” she said. She flickered close to me, like a flame, and kissed my cheek. “Don’t make me sorry. You won’t like it.”

  And then she spun away on her kitten heels, and I headed for the corridor.

  On the way, I felt a hand on my sleeve. It was Hart.

  “You want to know where to look?” he asked, in that careless way of his, as though nothing mattered.

  I wasn’t in the mood for him, or for cryptic questions.

  “Get screwed, Hart,” I said. “I don’t care by who or what so long as I don’t have to watch.”

  He sighed a little. “Some people you just can’t help.”

  I wanted to inflict a little pain on Hart, but the truth was I had nothing. “Say what you’ve got to say.”

  “The Lardies.”

  Then he was gone. And so was I.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A CAT, A DOG, A COLD WELCOME

  THERE was only half an hour of the school day left, so I slipped through the gates and began walking home. It was a mile. A long mile. I’d been slapped, punched, kicked and coshed. I was sad and sore and confused.

  And hungry: I’d had nothing to eat all day.

  The streets around the school were pretty scuzzy. In places, low-rise concrete blocks had replaced the old redbrick houses, but they in turn were now being demolished, leaving scruffy open spaces where people had once lived out their lives. Nothing lived there now, unless you counted the odd hunched rat. In one of these dead zones a gang of skeletal children stood around a burning mattress. You could see the stains on the mattress, like archaeological layers: the incontinence of childhood; the marks of love or lust; the returning incontinence of dotage. And now the smoke and stench of the pyre.

  One of the kids stooped to pick up a piece of broken brick. He hurled it at me, but it fell short, and he returned his gaze to the smoking mattress. I walked further, then turned back, but all I could see was the smoke and haze, and I wondered if I had imagined the skeletons and the brick.