Then something happened. Some instinct rose up in Edward and overwhelmed him. He heard the knight shouting something, but it was so faint he could not make out the words. And now all sorts of images were flashing across his eyes. Fragments of his subconscious were being worked out on the page in front of him–images that fitted together, that seemed to make sense, to connect–the raven morphed into a dog, which changed into a boy. He relaxed, and let the images flow.
Then he began to notice that with each passing vision, something was going wrong. Everything took on a distorted quality. If people spoke they spoke slowly, sinisterly, like a tape going backwards. Then people appeared with heads growing out of their stomachs, with teeth in the palms of their hands, and they were all crowding around, rushing, laughing, dancing and wailing, and among them was one who was taller than all the rest, and it saw Edward, and he felt its dark presence. It approached Edward and stood barely a foot away. It was shrouded in a long cloak so that he could not make out any features, and when it spoke Edward quailed at the sound.
The thing asked him what he desired, and Edward found that he was spilling forth everything that he had ever held in check, every nasty, mean thought that he had suppressed or forgotten about. The creature held him by the neck, Edward closed his eyes to try and shut it out but it pressed his eyelids open and Edward began to see things that he never thought could be, had never thought existed. Still the creature pushed at Edward, asking him what he wanted. The sight of Imp killing the raven passed across his mind, and the creature laughed. Edward fought, and hit, and shouted and roared, but still the creature held him to the images that burned and raced before him. He tried to stop them, with every straining, shivering sinew in his body, he tried, but there was nothing he could do. He began to weaken, and he felt cold, and broken.
Mrs Ferrers was on her rounds the next morning, at seven o’clock, patiently going round the dorms in the Manor waking everyone up. The day was bright and clear. She came to Edward’s dormitory, and burst in.
‘Wakey wakey, rise and shine!’ she said, and pulled open the nearest pair of curtains. Boys stirred and mumbled. Mrs Ferrers looked around. Edward was not in his bed. Sometimes he got up early to practise the piano in the music school, so she was not too bothered. She went over to the next set of windows, joshing the boys who were still in bed. She yanked the curtains open, and stepped back with a gasp. Edward was lying there on the window seat, pale as an Elizabethan nobleman powdered with arsenic. It took three boys shaking him before he woke up.
The first thing he saw was Mrs Ferrers’s kind face. ‘My dear boy,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’
Edward nodded slowly. Then he realised that he was missing something. He scrabbled around on the window seat. The book had vanished.
Four
‘Why did you do it?’ Mrs Ferrers asked Edward, with concern in her voice as she put a thermometer in his mouth. Edward had got dressed, and was sitting in the matron’s room, balanced on a little wooden stool.
‘I wanted to see how long I could stay awake,’ he said, screwing up his left eye slightly. It seemed a sensible answer, in the circumstances, and she accepted it, with much shaking of her head and tutting.
‘What a silly boy. You should think about what you’re doing before you do it. You’re off games for the day.’
Edward usually longed to be off games, so he was ecstatic, even if he was feeling a bit shaky and spooked. The loathsome things that he had seen in the book kept coming back to him, and the memory of the knight kept galloping into his thoughts, all mixed up with the boy in the Hall in his dream. On top of all this, he felt thinned, spread out, as if his body had somehow been stretched; the leathery taste of the book was constantly at the back of his throat. It seemed to him like the anxiety that you feel when you’re walking home at night in the dark and you know that there’s something behind you.
‘Go on now, off to breakfast,’ said Mrs Ferrers. ‘Make sure you eat enough.’
‘OK,’ said Edward, and slipped down the back stairs into Kakophagy, where breakfast had already started. He felt distanced from everyone else, and could not join in with the banter; he thought he noticed people looking at him differently, and wondered if he was getting paranoid. He looked at himself in the back of a spoon and noticed that he was still deathly pale. The book has disappeared, he thought. What has happened to it? It was troubling him, greatly.
After the meal, he sought out Will Strangore as they and the other scholars filed down to Eudoky. It was sluggish, and there was an overripe feeling in the air.
‘You’re goddamned quiet,’ said Strangore. (He had been reading Ernest Hemingway.) ‘Have you forgotten there’s a Latin test?’
‘Hm? On what?’
‘Gerunds.’
‘Score,’ said Edward, with an air of cavalier distraction.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Will.
Edward paused, wondering what he could possibly say to him. ‘Listen … I want to tell you something … I don’t know, this weird thing happened and I think it’s got something to do with Lady Anne.’
Lane Glover came past the other way, his hands hanging loosely, his school shorts worn as low as he dared. He heard Edward, and came closer.
‘Wassup, homeboys,’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Nothing,’ said Edward.
Lane Glover launched himself at Will, pushing him on to the ground.
‘Hey!’ said Edward. ‘Stop picking on him!’
‘Why? He’s such a weakling.’ Guy pushed Will as he was trying to get up again. Will’s hand scraped against the ground. Edward pulled him up.
‘I heard you say Lady Anne’s name. Don’t like her, do you? Think she’ll get rid of your favourite Fraser?’
‘Go away, Glover,’ said Edward.
‘Fine,’ said Glover. ‘I don’t care anyway.’ He went on up to lessons.
Edward would usually have let fly with a volley of considered insults, but this time his mind was elsewhere.
Will looked very calm. He tended to bottle up his feelings. Edward knew better than to say anything, but all the same he patted his cousin on the shoulder and smiled at him. He could feel Will’s hatred of Glover. But there were other, more pressing things to talk about.
This is useless, he thought. I’ll have to tell Will about the book or I’ll burst. He turned to his cousin as they entered Eudoky. There were about twenty minutes before lessons.
‘What would you say,’ said Edward, as he felt in his ink-blotted wooden desk for his tattered Latin books, ‘if something weird had happened to me? Like … you know, when I was younger and I thought I saw spirits in the forests.’
‘Oh yeah, when you went loony.’
The way he said it was hurtful to Edward, for the memory of it was still fresh and vivid. It had been when he’d first arrived at Oldstone Manor. He had tried to share it with Will, but he hadn’t believed him, and Edward had kept the sense of awe it had given him secret ever since. It was the only other–he didn’t want to say it, but it was the only word he could think of to describe it–supernatural experience which he could remember having, and he had felt it had connected him to the Manor in a way which other boys could not understand.
Edward remembered the time when the two of them had been playing camps. He had been standing guard over the entrance to the camp which Strangore and he had built together. They had called it, for reasons not clear to either of them, Temple.
It was at the north end of the woods, far away from the school, right at the edge of the mysterious zone known as Out-Of-Bounds. He had been holding a stick against his shoulder–except of course in his imagination it wasn’t a stick, it was a spear. He was by turns a Roman guard, marching up and down Hadrian’s Wall, or outside Caesar’s Palace, then a Persian guarding the tent of Alexander in the savage lands of Bactria. His arm had ached, but he hadn’t minded. Soldiers had to endure pain.
Edward had felt that here he was at the edge of the infini
te. Hardly anything moved except his heart, and the things that did move, moved in sympathy with it. A few twigs crackled in the wind. Beech trees nodded gracefully. A little bird walked upside down under a branch. He had emptied his mind of noise, and had allowed the forest to pour into it. He remembered that he had been able to see it in its exact details, even when his eyes were shut. He recalled that everything had felt porous, as if he could have merged with everything else, or crossed over into a place that was not this world.
It was then that he thought he had seen the spirits of the wood. The trees around him had seemed to grow and move, to become animated beings with old, cruel, sad thoughts. For a few moments he had felt linked into their minds, and it was profoundly different. He felt the whole earth beneath him swarming with life, he felt insignificant, he felt humble.
This feeling, that he was nothing but another growth in the forest of the world, was what brought the young Edward Pollock to the attention of the melancholy pair of eyes that had watched him ever since. It was then that he had been chosen.
Edward remembered how Strangore had come back from the mission he’d been on, had broken something, some connection–Edward was sure he heard something snap in his mind–and Edward was not part of the forest any more, and the sense of the wood spirits vanished. He told Strangore excitedly what he’d seen, but it sounded wrong, and Will had looked at Edward in his owlish way and shaken his head.
Since then Edward had often thought about what he’d seen. He’d even gone back into the woods on his own but, however hard he tried, he never saw the spirits again. He knew that the experience had brought him closer to Oldstone Manor. And he also felt as if he had been touched by something outlandish, and it was something secret, which from that moment onwards he had decided to keep to himself.
That was why he did not like Will’s tone, and why he hesitated now to tell him about the book. It made him feel exposed, vulnerable. But he needed help, and Will was the only person he could think of to whom he could turn. And now at least he had evidence, which might persuade his scientifically-minded cousin. The piece of paper with the poem on it.
‘Come on, you can tell me,’ said Will, not unkindly. He saw that there was an intensity in Edward’s face which meant that something was at stake.
Edward told Will, hesitantly at first, everything that had happened. He had carefully folded the piece of paper and put it in his pocket, and he pulled it out now.
Will took it from him.
‘Well, it looks genuine enough,’ he said.
‘You mean you’d think I’d make something like that?’ said Edward, outraged.
‘I wouldn’t put it past you, if you had a reason for it.’ Will held it out of Edward’s reach, and read it over. When he had finished it, he read it again.
‘So what d’you think?’ said Edward, at last.
‘Doesn’t mean anything to me,’ said Strangore. ‘Tell me more.’
‘We’ll have to go upstairs.’ Edward led him to the library, where he had left Idylls of the King, and showed him its green and gold bindings.
‘You found the poem in this?’ said Strangore.
‘Yes.’
‘I wonder why. Maybe it’s meant as a clue. What else is there?
‘Will,’ said Edward. He breathed in deeply. He didn’t want to sound strange. ‘I think …’ and for a moment he didn’t know how to start. ‘I think something dark’s going on. Last night, I heard voices on the drive. Lady Anne and her friend, talking. I heard her saying that all the signs were pointing here.’
‘She probably meant motorway signs,’ said Strangore, and slapped his thigh.
‘Will! Listen! Lady Anne is here to find something. I’m sure of it!’ He hesitated for a moment before adding, ‘And I found this … strange book … and when I opened it …’
‘But where is this book?’
Edward shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s … vanished.’ He didn’t want to say just yet that he suspected that somehow the book had been absorbed into his mind, that even now he felt it stirring within him, stretching and pressing against his skull. ‘But I think that this poem might have something to do with it.’
Strangore laughed. ‘Well, let’s look at it again.’
The two boys bent over the piece of paper, and Strangore shook his head. ‘Beats me. The blood of a maiden must surely be spilled. Well, that’s all right, it can’t be either of us. We’re not maidens.’
‘No,’ said Edward. But something he had read about Galahad flashed in the furrows of his mind, like a gold cup turned over by a plouging team of oxen. And then before the memory surfaced, it vanished again.
Will finished reading the poem and looked up. ‘Right. Anything else you need to tell me?’ he said.
‘Oh …’ Edward hesitated, and then he told Strangore about the grave and the raven.
‘Now that is interesting,’ said Will. ‘How long till lessons?’
Edward looked at his watch. ‘Ten minutes.’
‘Good. I’m just going to check it out. I’ll see you later.’
‘Later,’ said Edward.
When Will had left, Edward went to the other side of the library and looked out of the window into the courtyard. Mandy was there.
‘Skiving off school?’ he shouted at her.
‘No,’ said Mandy. ‘I’m ill.’ She coughed unconvincingly. ‘Edward, I’ve been looking all over for you. Come down. I need to tell you something!’
Edward set off excitedly through the library and down the back stairs. These stairs led into a no-man’s-land of clutter: discarded trunks, ancient wicker laundry baskets; past rooms whose use had been forgotten–sculleries, butteries, pantries and storehouses–through a twisty maze of tunnels and finally into Kakophagy. Edward pattered down the stairs, wondering what it was that Mandy could have found out.
The ancient smells of the kitchen hung around heavily, speaking of the lunches of centuries ago, when the boys could drink beer and subsisted almost entirely on bread and cheese. Edward came into a corridor by the kitchen, where the cold rooms were. He thought he saw Mandy just ahead of him.
‘Mandy!’ he said.
‘In here!’ she replied, darting into one of the rooms. There was an uncomfortable, grinding feeling in his mind, a sunken humming, which he couldn’t get rid of.
‘Come on, Edward,’ said Mandy.
He followed her into the cold room.
‘What’s up, Mandy?’ he said, looking at her back. The door to the cold room closed itself. It was hard to see. Vapours rose off from everywhere, and it was deadly silent. ‘Hang on,’ he said, and turned back to open it. But it was stuck. ‘What’s wrong with this thing? Hey, Mandy, come and help me.’ He turned round. Mandy was still standing with her back to him.
‘Mandy?’ She did not reply. He let go of the door handle. His body tensed. He noticed that all around him hung bloodied carcasses. They swung eerily. Crates of frozen fishfingers, burgers, peas were stacked around. Edward felt a freezing tingle seep up his body from the small of his back to his neck. ‘Mandy?’ He went up to her and touched her shoulder. It was very cold. She still did not turn round.
‘Mandy!’ He shook her, and she dissolved and in her place was a stack of ice cubes which began to tumble down to the ground.
‘What the hell!’ Edward, terrified, rushed back to the door. ‘Help! Let me out!’ The ice cubes were reassembling themselves, forming into something. He rattled the door handle. ‘Is anyone there?’
The ice cubes had taken shape now, becoming an indistinct creature, a faceless, humanoid thing, that slowly moved towards Edward, two arm-like extensions held out in front of it. A crushing sense of claustrophobia enveloped Edward. There was no way out. Frantic, frazzled, he backed up against the door. The carcasses around him shook and shimmered, and he noticed again how bloody they were, and how, in the half-light, they looked like human bodies.
‘Help!’ Edward’s breath made smoky shapes in the air. He was growing more desperate, an
d the chattering and squealing in his mind was getting louder. He shook the door, and the thing came closer. Edward saw his hands turning blue, and icicles growing on his clothes.
The fiend’s arctic outstretched arms touched him, and the cold spread from its fingertips, into Edward, and Edward could feel it entering into the pith and marrow of his body, freezing his sinews and his blood …
Something was fighting in him and he felt power surge from his mind; his body filled as if with liquid strength, and he turned to face the monstrous icy form which was now engulfing him in permafrost.
He grabbed hold of the thing by what could only be its neck, and he felt the warmth flow out of him and it was thrown backwards.
But whatever it was, it had strength too, and it gathered all the frozen air in the room to it and advanced once more on Edward. He felt the cold of deepest space pour into him, and he began to slump. He felt himself being picked up, being raised to one of the hooks that hung from the ceiling, and still he fought, but whatever strength of will was in him had faded … He felt his eyelids beginning to stick together, and his fingers curling up.
Yet, as his consciousness ebbed away, he thought he saw a face forming in the ice.
Five
Edward’s brain was slowing down. Thoughts were difficult. Even fear had disappeared as his heartbeat got slower and slower. So this is what death is like, he thought. No white lights, no feeling of peace, just emptiness.
The thing sniffed. But it didn’t close in on him. A sliver of hope began to form in Edward’s mind. Why wasn’t it finishing him off? He felt a scuttling in his mind again.
Once more, the fiendish creature sniffed all over him. But then it let out a wail of disappointment, and Edward was dropped on to the floor. As quickly as it had formed together, the thing dispersed back into hundreds of scattered ice cubes. Edward’s breaths came in tiny, ragged gasps. He was stiff, a dead weight. He couldn’t move.
The Other Book Page 6