The Other Book

by Philip Womack

  The door opened, and one of the cooks came in. He made towards a pile of boxes, and then noticed Edward lying on the floor.

  ‘Clear off!’ said the cook. ‘You’re not meant to be in here!’

  Edward just about managed to lift up an arm.

  ‘Hey … you all right, son?’ The cook bent down. ‘Bloody hell, you’re frozen! Here, hold on a second.’ The cook dragged him out into the corridor, stood for a moment looking at him, then turned abruptly. Shortly he came rushing back with another man. The two picked Edward up as if he were a hind that had just been shot, and carried him up the back stairs and into the library, laying him out on the sofa. The cook went to get Mrs Ferrers, and the other man stayed with Edward.

  ‘Where do you sleep, son?’ he said, but Edward could not answer.

  Downstairs, the handle of the cold-room door moved, and somebody slipped out, and walked unnoticed away.

  Mrs Ferrers came into the library and rushed up to Edward, who was purple with cold.

  ‘My dear boy! What have you been doing!’

  ‘N-n-nothing, Mrs Ferrers.’

  ‘I’ll have to take your temperature.’ She flitted out and was back again in an instant, forcing it between Edward’s teeth. ‘Way below normal. You should stay away from lessons. I’ll put a note on the noticeboard. You’d better go up to bed. Will you two carry him? He’s in the west dormitory.’

  The two men took Edward to his dorm, and laid him gently on his bed. Mrs Ferrers followed them.

  ‘You stay here, and don’t move for the rest of the day. OK?’ She pressed his forehead.

  Edward couldn’t quite believe what had happened. His mind was tumbling with fear. Mrs Ferrers left him curled up under his duvet, and then later brought a tray of food. He didn’t touch it, and she sat by him gently coercing him until he managed to eat half a shepherd’s pie. ‘Good boy,’ she said. By then Edward was feeling better. He started to read something, and after a while he found that he could move without worrying that his finger would break off because it was frozen. Soon he had relaxed entirely.

  After lunch Strangore came up to see him.

  ‘How you doing?’ he said. ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘I was attacked by an ice monster,’ said Edward in an undertone.

  ‘What?’ said Will.

  ‘I was attacked! By a monster! Made of ice!’ said Edward, more emphatically.

  ‘Oh come off it, Ed,’ said Will, affectionately. He was worried about his friend.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Edward. He could see that he wasn’t going to make Will believe him.

  ‘Now listen,’ said Will. ‘I went down to the churchyard and looked at the grave you put the raven on. There’s a pattern round the edge of it, of Ms and Vs. What d’you think it could mean?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Edward pulled the blanket round him tighter.

  ‘Look, I’ve got to go, it’s lessons. But work on it.’

  Edward picked up his copy of Idylls of the King and leafed through it, until he came to the story of Merlin and Vivien.

  Merlin and Vivien … he knew the story, that Vivien had locked Merlin in an oak tree, having taken all his power from him. He had always wondered what had happened to Merlin afterwards. To have had all the magic in the world at your command, and then to have it taken away, to become a shrunken, helpless shell … Merlin’s nightmares must have been terrifying, thought Edward.

  He found himself drifting into sleep. Ms and Vs … He slept, and he dreamed of the two people he had seen in the front of the book, and the power they had wielded over the ages: the balance they trod between good and evil, combining both in the creation and destruction of the universe.

  Later in the day, the sun, which was burning his left cheek pleasantly, woke Edward up. He lay on his back, and stared into space. The dormitory around him was, in its ordinariness and familiarity, a place of safety. The football posters and cartoon-character duvets were normal, reassuring presences. The things he had seen, in the black book and in the cold room, had crawled into the back of his consciousness. He felt a little better. But there was still the mysterious disappearance of the book to deal with. Where had it gone? he wondered. He had held it the night before, but now …

  It had dematerialised. There was absolutely no sign of it around his bed. He looked at the window seat where he had sat, and grubbed around on the floor. But there was nothing there. Things don’t just disappear into thin air, he thought. He knew that. Or at least he’d thought he’d known. Until he had seen the ice creature.

  He wondered whether the book had gone back to the library where the mysterious figure had put it. He got up and shuffled his way there through the corridors. It was deserted. The room was as it always had been. He went to the place where he had first found the black book–but there was nothing there. A sense of distress gripping him, he looked on all the shelves around it, and then further afield–but nothing came up.

  The thought that had been occupying him now came forward. He was desperately hoping that it wasn’t true; that the book had, by some strange osmosis, absorbed itself into his brain. Once more he checked under the shelves, behind the radiators. Frustrated, he sat down on the sofa.

  It must be true, he thought. Somehow … it is inside me. The frightful thought compelled him to look out of the window, to seek what was safe and commonplace. For the first time now he realised that what was clamouring inside him, shrieking in its unknowable, icy language, must be the black book. In order to try to suppress it, he focused his attention on what was going on below.

  The school was particularly busy today, getting ready for a drinks party to welcome the benefactors, and Edward was quite relieved to be out of it all. Tables had to be moved, chairs found, marquees put up and form rooms tidied, masters dusted off, boys cleaned, Norman loos unblocked and the special secret staff loo filled with flowers and smelly soaps.

  Edward watched masters, kitchen staff and boys all flapping about anxiously. He sensed nervous laughter bubbling under the surface. A drinks table was being set up in the courtyard, with bowls of enticing-looking liquids placed all along its white length, interspersed with piles of fruits and mini-sandwiches still fresh under clingfilmed bubbles. It was all carried off with clinical precision. The kitchen girls, Mandy among them, in their white gloves, hats and aprons, were like doctors as they laid out the cold meats on the white slab of the table.

  Looking down at them, Edward watched who he hoped was the real Mandy carry out her tasks, joking and laughing with her mother. She put down a plate of sandwiches and looked directly up at him. That has to be her, he thought.

  Then something curious happened. Edward shuddered as a ghost-light splashed over the scene. The walls of his brain seemed to be thinning. A darkness encroached, and he saw his own body, lying spread-eagled on a table, and a shadowy figure bent over him. He held his head and shook it, trying to force his sight back to normal, and when he looked up again the vision had gone.

  Edward was disturbed, frightened. All around him, what he had thought of as the safe boundaries of his world were being infiltrated by sinister presences. How could I ever have felt safe in Oldstone Manor? he thought. He considered the meaning of what he had just seen, but could reach for no explanation. Exasperated, he left the window. Perhaps the book is trying to tell me something, he thought. He felt hungry to have it back in its hands, away from his mind. A hunger that felt like it couldn’t ever be satisfied. He picked up a novel–one he’d read before–and was soon immersed in it.

  He didn’t notice the time passing, and it was almost five o’clock when he looked up–time for Bartlett to take roll call. Edward heard him stumbling up the stone stairs, muttering to himself. He reeled into the library. A mixture of the boot room, the staff smoking-room and alcohol came before him.

  ‘Evenin’, Eddy my boy,’ he said gruffly. Edward winced at the familiarity. Not even his parents called him Eddy. Bartlett clasped him by the shoulder. ‘You’d better run along to yo
ur dorm. Tell the chaps that Bartlett’ll be along in a minute. Cave and all that!’ He cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed, ‘CAAY-VEEY!’

  Edward shuffled back to the dorms. He was only too glad to be away from Bartlett, whose teeth looked as if a demented toddler had rearranged them. His nostril hair glared out angrily from his nasal cavity, merging into what Bartlett liked to think of as his military moustache.

  Bartlett rolled into the dorm like a sailor. ‘Ah, my boys,’ he said. His spittle arched through the air. He was breathing heavily, and leant against the washbasin. Edward hoped for a second that it would break under his weight. ‘Roll call, old chaps. Now, no shenan-in-ani … I mean peccadill-peccadilly … now behave yourselves, old boys. Especially you.’ He pointed. ‘Pollock,’ he said.

  Oh no, thought Edward.

  ‘Pollock,’ he said. ‘Come out here, Pollock. Out into the middle of the dorm. Come on.’

  He walked out, slowly. Everyone in the dorm was looking. He stood near to Bartlett and fixed his eyes on the ground.

  ‘Pollock, my dear boy. I have an important question to ask you.’

  ‘What is it, sir?’ asked Edward, hoping that it would be something about subjunctives or Tennyson.

  ‘Have you ever known what it is to love a woman?’ he said, with the air of a tutor in the arts of love. Edward felt fire in his cheeks. All the boys laughed.

  ‘Do you know, my dear, dear boy,’ he continued, ‘what the love of a woman can be? How it can …’ Here he staggered, and clutched at the washstand to save himself. ‘How it can make you feel like … well, like nothing Tennyson could ever talk about, with his mystical mumbo-jumbo. He didn’t know what it was like, eh, Pollock?’ He looked around at the dorm. ‘Pollock,’ he said, ‘Pollock is a man of the world. Aren’t you, Pollock?’

  Edward was squirming.

  ‘Well, Pollock?’

  He didn’t answer. Bartlett sighed in disappointment. ‘Well, Pollock. I gather from your silence … from your intransigence … from your intractability … that you’re not at all as worldly as I thought. I suppose you’ve never snatched a kiss from the delightful Mandy in the kitchens? That you’ve never walked, hand in hand, down to the river bank and gazed at the moon?’

  His red face was taking up all Edward’s vision. His scratchy tweed jacket, stained with a multitude of sins, was repulsive. He could smell everywhere Bartlett’d been, no doubt in the last few years.

  ‘Tell the dormitory, Pollock! Tell these assembled youths of your first love! Tell them of that first kiss, snatched behind the tree. Tell the world!’

  Edward’s eyes were burning. He pushed away from Bartlett as violently as he could. Every single boy in the dorm was giggling, guffawing, bellowing. He sensed inevitability, a ball rolling into its accustomed furrow, mechanisms falling into place. The world had slowed down. Why did it feel like he had seen this before? He sensed a balance tipping over.

  He tried to laugh, tried to pretend that he didn’t care. But he couldn’t hide the hatred, the fact that he despised Bartlett as a monster, a foul, slime-encrusted beast who had desecrated something. ‘Monster,’ he muttered, under his breath.

  Suddenly Bartlett looked ridiculous and Edward relaxed. But he felt the presence in his mind tighten itself. Mrs Ferrers came in. ‘Come on, then, everyone,’ she said, and Bartlett loped off like a toothless wolf.

  Six

  Edward threw himself on his bed and looked at the enormous pile of books on his chair. Milo was still balancing on top of them. At least, he thought, there was still something constant in his life. As he lay there, he considered what had happened that day. He didn’t think that the book was a hallucination, or a dream, or anything like that, feeling it as he did in his mind, in his very cells. It wasn’t just a distortion of reality created by his brain. It had come from something outside of him.

  Whatever it was, it was extremely powerful. What he’d felt in the cold room had wrenched his nerves, fired his adrenalin like nothing ever before. And last night when he had opened the book he felt as if he’d opened a gateway into all the mysteries of the universe. And then there was the face in the ice, which he was sure he’d seen somewhere before …

  There was the drinks party, he thought. It was a good opportunity to study Lady Anne–he might be able to glean some information if he watched her whilst she didn’t think she was being watched. She might let something slip to Mrs Phipps of her intentions. He was feeling better–the sleep and the novel had restored him–and he decided to take the initiative and go down to the courtyard. He could hide behind a screen of bushes and watch what was going on.

  Mrs Ferrers had bustled off, more elegant than usual in a grey dress, and the boys were all calm, lying on their beds, reading, or playing pencil cricket. Edward stretched casually, and for just a second too long. His neighbour Munro looked up at him.

  ‘Where are you going, Pollock?’

  ‘Loo,’ he said.

  The bathroom was full of echoes and dripping noises. He shut the door loudly, to make it seem as if he’d gone in, but stayed on the outside. He had to keep the fiction up in case anyone came in and asked where he was. He knew which floorboards creaked in the corridor, and tried to avoid the noisiest places. At one point he had to edge along the skirting board, clinging to the walls. He made it without making too much noise, and crept down the back stairs.

  Avoiding the flitting figures of the kitchen girls, he sneaked through the passageways and found a door that led on to the courtyard. It was right in the corner, and almost hidden by a group of shrubs–ideal for his purposes. The sense of being on a mission, of actively seeking out clues, swelled him with action. He nipped out of the door and ducked down. He could see, clearly, most of the courtyard.

  The jazz band had struck up. He could hear the murmur of the voices too–a small lake of wafflings, boastings and whisperings. The band darted knives through the chatter. He crept to his favourite corner and listened.

  In the sun the courtyard looked like the inside of a honey pot. Edward had a sudden image of the guests as delirious bees, eager to get at their share. He noticed Lady Anne and Mrs Phipps standing in one corner. Mrs Phipps did not say very much, only responding shortly to questions from the little group of people around Lady Anne. Mr Fraser and an old lady were standing nearer to Edward.

  He leant in closer, listening to the bubbles of conversation, allowing them to pop and burst pleasurably in his ears. Lady Anne had not engaged with anyone yet. Now was the time when she might let something slip to Phipps.

  ‘And how is the new music school coming along?’ said the old lady, impossibly refined, who was standing near him.

  ‘It’s a computer room, your Grace,’ said Mr Fraser.

  ‘I was once a cellist, you know.’ The Duchess made a movement with her hands, drawing a bow across her knees. ‘My cello playing made the king weep. But now my fingers are old. It is only I who weep.’

  ‘Well, at least you’ve made it to our beautiful school,’ said Mr Fraser.

  ‘This place is beautiful,’ said Lady Anne, who had marched over to stand behind the Duchess’s elbow. She pushed herself forward. ‘It’s like stumbling across a little hollow of perfection. It was my family’s, not so long ago. All of it.’ She threw back her arm, and took in everything, as if she wanted to pick up the valley and keep it for herself. Her gaze swept round the walls of the courtyard. Her eyes grazed the shrubs where Edward was hiding. He ducked, knowing she’d seen him. He could still hear their voices.

  ‘Do you know, when I was small, and used to live here, there were many ghost stories about this place. I really do think that it is haunted. It really ought to be, don’t you think?’ Edward remembered the ice creature. He knew that there was something extraordinary going on, and a small bird of fear began fluttering in his chest. Lady Anne began to shift round towards where Edward was.

  ‘Why do you think so?’ The Duchess shifted her head to the side, questioning.

  ‘The first
night that I came here, I could have sworn that I saw a little boy–quite timid, and white, in a bush, of all places! But when I asked Alex here,’ said Lady Anne, pointing to Fraser, ‘he said there couldn’t have been anyone. Can you imagine! I must have been dreaming. And over there, just now, I saw the most familiar face, peeping out.’

  The fear in Edward began to spread throughout his body, and yet he had to stay to hear Lady Anne. She started subtly shepherding the little group towards where he crouched. ‘Perhaps you can humour me, and we can check–otherwise I shall have terrible nightmares!’

  ‘It shouldn’t have been one of the boys,’ said Fraser. ‘It must have been a trick of the light.’

  ‘Perhaps it was a dream person,’ said the Duchess. ‘Or maybe one of your ancestors, come to tell you of buried treasure! I know all about that sort of thing.’

  ‘Perhaps it was,’ said Lady Anne. ‘I should be careful. There are things in this valley, trapped in the rustle of branches, in the cracks between books, which no one can understand.’

  They were silent for a moment. Edward wished he were back in the safety of the dormitory, where he was real, not a figment of Lady Anne’s imagination, a trick of the evening light and a cocktail glass.

  ‘Hey,’ said a voice. Edward jumped, thinking in horror it was Mrs Phipps. He turned round to face Mandy. ‘What’re you doing out here?’

  ‘Ssh!’ said Edward. This was definitely the real Mandy, her brown hair falling around her cheeks.

  ‘Why are you so jumpy?’

  ‘You’d be if you’d seen what I had …’ He quickly explained what happened in the cold room. ‘I don’t know what it was, but I know it wanted … something from me. What did you find out?’

  ‘That explains what I saw,’ she said. ‘Look, I haven’t got much time. I saw those two witches in the staff room. Mrs Phipps … she’s not real. She evaporated.’

  Edward saw the group, led by Lady Anne, approaching the bushes and was suddenly seized with a violent spasm.