Where Human Pathways End

by Shamus Frazer

  ‘Stand still,’ said Molly, as she dabbed the swelling with lint and lotion. ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Well, it sort of throbs—but it doesn’t hurt exactly.’

  ‘I’m putting a plaster on it, so that you won’t scratch it. Come and see me in the morning.’

  ‘All right, Matron. . . . Do you think,’ he added, struggling into his dressing-gown, ‘it’s a mosquito bite?’

  ‘It might be. You’ll be off games, and you’ll come up here for my morning and evening surgery.’

  ‘Custance,’ I asked, ‘what’s been happening on that ship? Do you know?’

  He looked at me wide-eyed.

  ‘You know about the ship, sir?’

  ‘Something. Something was going to happen, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, we took the ship you know,’ he said airily, ‘and some we killed in the fighting and the rest we tied up in our own chains. Then there was a storm—Felton dreamt that bit, sir—and the ship was wrecked and broke up. When it was my turn there wasn’t much. It was all thick forest, and fires burning in a clearing—and there was a huge thing we dragged through the trees. The drums were beating like mad, and once or twice this thing—a sort of idol I thought—stumbled and crashed, and when this happened everyone wailed.’

  ‘You know what it was, though . . . ?’

  ‘It was night-time in my dream. I couldn’t see much. I pulled with the others on the ropes.’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ asked Molly.

  ‘Oh, just a serial story,’ I said, ‘that the boys in Custance’s dormitory are telling one another.’

  ‘I’ll tell you this, sir,’ Custance went on, ‘I wouldn’t like to be them.’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘The men we tied up. We brought them into the forest too, and . . .’

  ‘James, please,’ said Molly, ‘it’s time this boy was in bed. . . . Now you go back to your dormitory, Custance, and try not to scratch.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not itchy or anything. It’s got a living feel, that’s all —a kind of soft drumming like a bird’s heart beat when you hold it in your fingers. . . . Goodnight, Matron. . . . Goodnight, sir.’

  When he was gone I said:

  ‘Dr Halliday’s baffled by those swellings, isn’t he? What’s he make of them?’

  ‘He thinks they might be an insect bite of some kind.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like them before.’

  ‘I think I have,’ I said. ‘That boil thing on Custance’s chest was like an eye—an eye with a cataract or semi-transparent lid over it. . . . Are they all like that?’

  ‘Yes, the same. Now you mention it I suppose they are roughly the shape of an eye.’

  ‘And has any boy had more than one of these swellings?’

  ‘Come to think of it—no.’

  ‘Funny the outbreak should be mostly in the senior dormitories.’

  ‘That’s what makes me think the doctor was wrong to stop swimming—but I suppose he knows what he’s about. . . . What by the way was that rather lurid tale Custance was trying to get out when I packed him off to bed?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It has something to do with Winterborn’s juju—that cyclops idol, you know.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Molly in exasperation, ‘they’ve been bringing the horrible thing into the dormitories. Once I actually found it in a boy’s bed. I’ve told them that if ever I see the beastly thing in a dormitory again I’ll confiscate it.’

  ‘How did they take that?’

  ‘Oh, the usual muttering. But they understood I meant it.’

  ‘Molly,’ I said, ‘shall we wait half an hour or so and then raid the senior dormitories? I’d like to know who’s got that juju in his bed tonight.’

  ‘They wouldn’t dare. . . . I left no doubt that I should confiscate it, and punish the boy responsible.’

  ‘Frankly, I think you’ll be able to confiscate it tonight.’

  Even halfway along the passage we could hear through the open doorway that the boys in Custance’s dormitory were not yet asleep. We tiptoed the last few yards down the unlit passage, and stopped to listen to the excited murmuring within.

  ‘I tell you it’s true. If one dreams we all dream.’

  ‘You mean,’ it was Custance’s voice, ‘that I’ll dream now even if it’s not with me.’

  ‘Yes, anyone who has the murrain mark: we seven and the others in the other dormitories.’

  ‘The same thing?’

  ‘Always the same thing.’

  ‘Who has him tonight? It was Bradbury’s turn.’

  ‘I’ve got him. Winterborn said it was all right.’

  ‘Gosh, Felton. I wonder what we’re really going to do with them.’

  ‘You know,’ someone giggled in the dark, ‘you know very well. Why have we been feeding them up for weeks, eh?’

  Molly Sabine switched on the lights. There was a quick scuffling, the squeak of bed springs, and a deep stertorous breathing: not a head moved on its pillow.

  ‘You were talking after Lights Out,’ Molly accused.

  Nobody spoke or stirred.

  ‘Bradbury,’ I said, ‘hand that Thing over to Matron.’

  He turned about blinking in the light, feigning the point of waking: ‘What . . . who . . . what’s that, sir?’

  ‘The Thing in your bed—hand it over.’

  ‘In my bed, sir? . . . What d’you mean, sir! I’ve got nothing.’

  Something heavy clattered the same instant on the dormitory floorboards. The other boys decided to be woken by the clatter, but the pretence they put up was a poor one.

  I picked up the juju from where it had fallen beside Bradbury’s bed and took it over to Molly.

  ‘Your prize,’ I said.

  But Molly seemed as much in a huff with me as with the boys. She gave me one of her looks before turning its full blue fire on to the dormitory at large.

  ‘Very well,’ she said, ‘you’ve all been talking after Lights Out and you are going to be punished. You know what I said about bringing this horrid dirty thing into the dormitory. Well, I shall ask Mr Herrick to confiscate it for the rest of term. And Bradbury, I shall have you punished both for disobedience and for lying. Now if I catch anybody talking again tonight the whole dormitory will be sent to the Headmaster.’

  She switched out the lights and made a queenly exit—leaving deepest silence behind her.

  ‘I do think, James,’ she said, when we reached her room, ‘that if you knew they were bringing that thing up here at night you should have told me.’

  ‘But I didn’t know you’d banned it. And until this evening I thought it rather harmless. Do you want to keep it?’

  ‘No, you look after it. And see that Winterborn doesn’t have it back until the end of term. And, James . . .’ she added with a smile that told me I was forgiven, the huff evaporated, and she her normal pretty self again, ‘you can take it to bed with you every night if you like.’

  I didn’t like. I put it in my wardrobe and shut the door on it and locked it; but even then I dreamed. It was beastly hot and I was shackled hand and foot. A great fire burnt somewhere and sent grotesque shadows leaping like demons about the hut: the mud walls were crimsoned with its light, and I watched a large coppery scorpion climb above my head and hide itself in the roof thatch. A wailing interminable chant trod with the beat of the tom-toms thudding in my head. Trickles of sweat, tormenting as flies, ran down my head and felt their way across my face and into the corners of my eyes. Suddenly the clanging and the drumming ceased, and in the long silence that followed I struggled insanely to be rid of my fetters. A shrill terrible scream stabbed into my heart like a knife and I fell back on the hard mud floor: it was followed by a vast shuddering sigh, utterly obscene as if it issued from the mouth of Hell itself, from all the mouths in Hell. The chanting and the beating of the hand-drums started up again on a wilder note: it was accompanied by the stamp and shuffle of innumerable feet.
Horror mounted with the tempo of the chant. Then a groaning body was thrust into the hut, tumbled over someone’s legs, and rolled against me on the floor. I glimpsed in the firelight the bloody mutilated face, and I awoke crying, ‘The eyes! They have eaten Captain Zebulon’s eyes.’

  When I slept again the shadows had taken delirious shape: they stamped and leered around me, huge heads nodded above tiny painted bodies, tattooed and feathered legs whirled above my head. A woman daubed all over with yellow paint fell on her hands and elbows and stayed there, her breasts shaking and her mouth dripping foam: she snarled at me like a jackal, and twisted herself nearer. Someone in hyena skins knocked her aside and bent down to feed me from a painted calabash: I heard a voice in my ear whisper hoarsely, ‘Don’t eat it. It’s Zebulon,’ and I woke to a red and breathless dawn and the familiar drooping masses of the beech trees beyond my window.

  I got up and dressed. I unlocked my wardrobe and took out the Cyclops juju, and for a while I stood by the window thinking what I should do with it. My room overlooked a part of the Beech Walk which here was at its closest approach to this wing of the house: the beech trees meandered away, and to the left one could see the paddock and the little temple they overhung. With the increasing light the horror of the night’s dream grew more remote. My fearful suspicions of so short a while ago began to seem absurd. All the same I had no wish to share my room another night with this piece of crudely daubed iron wood I held like a sceptre in the crook of my arm. The stucco summerhouse my eyes had fixed on over the lawn answered the problem for me. The Greek temple should be Pollywolly doodle’s shrine until the end of term.

  Before anyone was up I took the key from the board outside the school office, let myself out by the side door, and strode over the dewy and cobwebbed grass to the summerhouse. Here I hid Winterborn’s juju in a roll of old netting, and locked him in. I felt a great sense of relief as I sauntered back to the school. He was safe where he was: let the mice and the spiders dream with him if he willed it. I felt very pleased with myself, and at the same time wonderfully conscious of my own absurdity.

  It would have been better, as things turned out, if I had obeyed my waking impulse, which was to bring the Cyclops juju down to the boiler room and incinerate him in the furnace.

  Winterborn made a fuss about the confiscation of his god.

  ‘Sir, it’s not fair. I didn’t know Bradbury was bringing him up to the dorm—honestly, sir. Can’t I have him back if I promise he’ll never be brought upstairs again?’

  ‘Matron said you were to have him back at the end of term. Even if you persuade her to alter her mind about it my own’s made up. He stays locked up for the rest of term.’

  ‘It’s a rotten swiz, sir. It’s my god. I didn’t know Bradbury had borrowed it, the little tick. . . . If Bradbury comes and tells you I knew nothing about it, won’t you . . .’

  ‘He said you lent it to him and the others confirmed it.’

  ‘The dirty liars! But, sir, can’t I just look at him now and then and hold him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where are you keeping him, sir? He’s not in your room.’

  ‘How do you know that, Winterborn?’

  ‘Well, I . . . I didn’t, I kind of guessed. But where have you put him, sir?’

  ‘You can go on guessing.’

  Winterborn shut his eyes, and a look of infinite suffering came over him. He nudged close to me. There was a plaster bandage showing above the open V of his shirt, the lint slightly deranged so that I made out beneath it the black treacly glitter of the iodine ointment I supposed Molly Sabine had daubed on his sore.

  ‘It’s a rotten thing. It’s just like slavery, this school,’ he murmured, his eyes still closed: he was pressing against me heavily so that for a moment I thought he was going to faint.

  ‘What’s wrong, Winterborn?’ I asked, ‘are you ill?’

  He opened his eyes then, and said:

  ‘Sleepy. . . . It’s all right now, sir. He’ll be all right. You’ll let me have him on the last day?’

  ‘On the last day.’

  For the next several nights I went on dreaming, but this I attributed rather to the heat than to the juju. My nightmares now seemed to consist of sounds, strange cries, wailing, a distant drumming. These sounds brought me awake with all my senses alert and alarmed—my eyes strained into the darkness, my hearing racked by the deceptions of that heavy silence, my breathing thin as wires controlling the pendulum swing of my heart. Before long I discovered that others had heard the noises I had fancied in my dreams.

  ‘That bloody bird,’ Roger Edlington remarked over breakfast one morning, ‘did you hear it, James? It kept me awake half the night.’

  ‘Bird!’ I said, ‘I’ve heard odd noises for several nights—but I couldn’t identify them.’

  ‘I fancy one of Colonel Torkington’s birds must have escaped from its cage. It was crying about the house for hours. At first I thought it a peacock, but it was a shriller cry and more prolonged. Some ghastly parrot, I’d say, or kookaburra.’

  ‘Colonel Torkington’s aviaries are about five miles off,’ I said.

  ‘I know. It’s odd it should have flown here to roost. But it’s the only way I can account for that shocking row last night. I’ll telephone Torkington this morning and get him to send over one of his men to snare it.’

  Later in the morning I came across Roger in the library. He had two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the table before him, and several books on birds.

  ‘None of Torkington’s birds is missing, James,’ he said. ‘One thing I’m certain of—last night’s visitor was not an owl.’ He began turning over the pages of the encyclopaedia, thumbing for ‘kookaburra’. ‘The trouble with these bird experts is that they’re useless at describing intelligibly in print the cries they make. Either they’re vague and poetic, or they’re musical and talk about “limpid notes” and “descending scales”.’

  ‘I take it that last night’s bird was neither vague, nor poetic, nor musical?’

  ‘It certainly was not!’ said Roger, looking grim as he bent to his study of the habits and call of the Laughing Jackass.

  We sat up that night, and about one o’clock we heard it crying close to the house, a long harsh scream with a gobbling sound at the tail of it. Roger went out with a gun to stalk the creature by moonlight. He came back after twenty minutes to report failure.

  ‘It’s sly enough,’ he said, ‘for there wasn’t a sound from the moment I let myself out of the house. I had a feeling of being watched all the time, though: it was rather uncanny.’

  Roger’s excursion with the gun had succeeded at least in scaring the creature. Once or twice it called again, but remotely from some distant part of the playing fields or the woods.

  The following night I went to bed early, and woke repeatedly as was my recent custom into profoundest silence. It must have been long after midnight that I was aroused by a knocking on my door, and a shaking of the handle. I switched on my bedside lamp and called, ‘Yes . . . who is it?’

  It was Molly Sabine in her dressing-gown and looking scared.

  ‘James,’ she said, ‘there’s no one in Senior Blue Dormitory. Their beds are empty. I looked into Yellow next door and there are only two boys sleeping there: the others are gone.’

  I pulled on my dressing-gown, shuffled into slippers, and followed Molly’s torch along the corridor.

  The Blue dormitory was bright with the full moon, which shining through the tall, late eighteenth century windows cast oblongs of broken light on the floor and made alabaster tombslabs of the narrow beds.

  ‘They’ve sneaked back, Molly,’ I whispered, pointing to a bed by the door: for there was the little mound of a sleeping body under the quilt, the dark outline of a head on the pillow.

  ‘Oh, they’ve taken their precautions,’ she said, and she pulled back coverlet and sheet.

  A pillow punched into shape, a pair of stuffed stockings, a sponge bag for head and the
sponge for hair: there was my sleeping boy. Molly shone her torch on the other pillows.

  ‘The rest,’ she said, ‘are quite as ingenious. But where have they gone?’

  ‘Look, Molly,’ I said, ‘will you make a list of the missing boys? I’ll put on a few clothes and go and wake Roger. We must try and avoid waking the others.’

  The truants were all, with one exception, from the senior dormitories. Molly had found one bed dishevelled and empty in Junior Green dormitory. ‘It’s little Dickie Zuppinger,’ she reported, ‘and he’s the only one who hasn’t got it.’

  ‘Hasn’t got what?’ asked Roger, grumpy from interrupted sleep and the hasty assumption of responsibility.

  ‘What they call “the murrain”—those boils I’ve been treating.’

  ‘Do you mean all the other absentees have these boils?’

  ‘The list I made out was exactly the same as my last night’s surgery list—except for Zuppinger.’

  ‘Silly little asses!’ said Roger, ‘I’ve noticed they’re beastly proud of their blains. I suppose they’re off on a beanfeast somewhere to celebrate their Mark of Cain. There’ll be several more marks of cane of a very different sort to celebrate when I catch them.’

  We searched the place thoroughly, and the boys were not in the school buildings. Roger found the key that led to the side door was missing from the keyboard.

  ‘And the key to the summerhouse?’ I asked.

  ‘I didn’t notice. . . . We’d better beat different sectors. I’ll cut along past the swimming bath, look in the gym, and work across the playing fields to the park. You take the other side. Move along the Beech Walk: they may be holding a feast in the shrubberies. If they’re not there go on into the park, and up to the woods. If we both draw a blank we’ll meet by the Knoll where we build the Guy Fawkes bonfire. You have the torch. Got a whistle?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Here, take this one. I’ll pick up another from my study. Blow the whistle like mad if they run for it.’