First published by Lodestone Books, 2017
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Text copyright: James Hartley 2016
ISBN: 978 1 78535 498 4
978 1 78535 499 1 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016939767
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The rights of James Hartley as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Design: Stuart Davies
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This book is dedicated to my Mum and Dad.
“The only people who truly know your story are the ones who help you write it.”
Ritu Ghatourey
SHAKESPEARE’S MOON
ACT ONE
1
Something Wicked This Way Comes
Hello!
I’m sending you both the same letter, I hope you don’t mind.
Dad, I hope this gets to you and that you’re safe and not caught up in any trouble out there. Uncle Quentin says he knows someone who told him exactly where you are so I hope you are reading this safe and sound. And, Mum, I hope there is someone there that can read this letter to you. Are you feeling better? More like yourself, I hope. I miss you both a lot but I want you to know that I’m well and happy and I totally understand what you’ve done and why you sent me here.
Please write to me if you get the chance, or send me a number or address where I can reach you. It would be nice to talk to you both.
So I’ve been here at St Francis’s for almost a month now and I think I’m starting to get the hang of things. I’m in a boarding house called St Nicholas, which is built in the shape of a cross. Some of the boys say that’s because it’s on the site of an old graveyard but who knows? There are stories about everything here and I don’t know what to believe yet. The school is ancient – just like half the teachers and most of the people in the village.
There are five other boys in my dorm (that’s where I’m writing this, on my bed, bottom bunk, on the left as you walk in the door) and we all get on. Four have been here since the first year and the other one, Walter, started this year with me. He’s cool and we hang about together trying not to annoy the House Quaestors.
Every morning a bell rings at seven and we have to go outside and run around the block in a pair of shorts even when it’s freezing. I don’t mind it as it wakes you up but most of the others complain. After the run we shower up and breakfast is at eight. The day bugs start arriving for Assembly at half past and school starts at nine. The food’s OK. It’s normal school food – big silver trays and soggy veg and all that.
The actual schoolwork is fine too, not much different from Ras Al-Hambra to be honest. We have classes in a place called the Quad and during the boring lessons I read the graffiti on the desks. There’s loads of it. People use the desks as a kind of messaging service, which is dead interesting, especially as we’re not allowed phones during the week. (Joke, Mum.)
In science we’re studying the weather, which is great as the stations are dotted around the edges of the school grounds so it’s like exercise too. In English we’re reading Macbeth and in biology we’re doing plant reproduction. Do you think everyone, everywhere in the world, does plant-reproduction in biology? Is there anything else to it?
I play football or rugby twice a week and in the afternoons we have activities like Orientation, which basically means a teacher drops us in the middle of nowhere and we walk around in the woods until the minibus comes back and picks us up.
I want to write more but it’s impossible as it’s ‘lights out’ in five minutes. There’s so many weird things I want to tell you about. I’ve learnt loads of new words in these last few weeks, like Exeat, matron, eczema, The Eleusinian Room, Number One Uniform, The Magistrate, tuck, jiving and Prep – this place is like its own world with its own language.
I’m going to sign off now as I can hear the housemaster turning off the lights. He’s weird. The boys call him Cyclops because he has a staring eye. His real name’s Mr Dahl. He smells weird and looks nasty but he’s been fine with me so far.
I miss you both.
Lots of love,
Sam.
2
A Single Event Can Awaken Within Us A Stranger Totally Unknown To Us
It was icy, cold, dark and wet. People were shouting.
Sam thought he’d been carried outside as a joke. Or perhaps it was a fire alarm?
Lifting his head from the cold mud he saw shadows flickering against a pale grey sky. There were stars twinkling through billowing clouds of black smoke. A shadow was moving towards him: a stocky man in a helmet, carrying a sword. “Are ye hurt? Can ye move?”
“Aye, I’m hurt,” Sam replied, surprised to hear how deep his own voice sounded.
“Whereaboots?”
“The leg. Below the knee, there.”
A moment later Sam felt the pressure against his back and legs ease. “This wan was laying dead astride ye, Rab,” grunted the shadowy man, already moving off through the squelching mud. “Move ahn. Move ahn!”
Now that he was able to lift himself, Sam saw he was on a hillside and there were figures carrying scythes and axes moving over the dark ground. A dark, tattered flag was fluttering against the night sky not far ahead of him. He also saw what was pressing down on his legs: a fallen soldier.
It was the first dead body Sam had ever seen: a young man of about sixteen with bits of a beard, closed eyes and an open mouth. His body was dressed in battle armour and blood had dribbled from the corner of his mouth and dried black in his prickly chin hair. Sam stood up and moved off, his boots sinking and sticking in the mud.
This is some kind of battlefield, Sam thought. I’m dreaming. That’s all it is. I’m dreaming.
In the spells when the smoke cleared, Sam noticed the sky lightening, turning purple where it bowed to the earth. There was a twinkling stretch of dark water ahead of him upon which thirty warships floated in three rows, their masts and angry figureheads rocking to and fro on the waves.
“Help me!” came a voice from the darkness to Sam’s left. “Somebody, help me!”
“Where are ye?” Sam was too concerned with the search to wonder why he was speaking with a Scottish accent in someone else’s voice. Having accepted he was dreaming, nothing seemed strange.
“Here! Over here!”
Sam found the owner of the voice buried beneath two dead soldiers. The survivor was an old man with perfectly white hair, despite the mud and dirt. “Hold tight an’ I’ll have ye oot in no time,” Sam told him.
“This one on top’s got his pike jabbed right through mah leg,” the man replied, gritting his yellow teeth in pain.
Sam took the news coolly, pulling the first heavy body away before kneeling to examine how he could do the same with the other. As the man had said, the second soldier’s weapon had pierced the old man’s thigh and the long blade was pinning him fast to the hillside. Sam was about to try and yank out the pike when the old man waved his hands.
“Nay,
nay, nay, lad! Snap it, boy, snap it! Snap it and I’ll do the rest.”
Sam did as he was told, ignoring the man’s horrible cries as the wood splintered. After watching him pull the rest of the blade from his leg, Sam hauled the old man up onto his shoulders and started again down the hill. He looked up as the grass and mud turned orange and saw the flotilla of warships alight on the water. Timber cracked as the vessels broke up. Some exploded and one by one they slid beneath the fiery waves.
“Good riddance,” growled the old man on Sam’s back.
At the foot of the hill Sam was stopped by a captain and directed to a long line of carts roped to mules. Loud groans and cries emanated through the carts’ dirty canvass covers as Sam rounded the last in the line. Piled inside were wounded and dying soldiers, some looking sad and tired, others missing arms, legs, eyes or faces.
“Oh, dinnae put me in there,” groaned the old man sadly. “I beg ye.”
And so Sam limped along behind the carts as they moved off with the old man on his back. If this is a dream it’s a wee bit too realistic, he was thinking, feeling his twisted ankle and bruised legs throb with each step. The steady weight of the man pressing on his shoulders made his back ache and as the day rose grey and bright, Sam marched with his head bent down to the tyre ruts, thinking of nothing but putting one foot in front of the other.
When he did look up it was to barren countryside: grey-green hills covered with heather and thistle. From gravel slopes rose granite mountains bobble-hatted with mist.
Occasionally they passed through small villages where people in shawls with bad teeth and worse skin came out and offered food or drink or tried to barter. At a busy crossroads a one-eyed farmhand offered to carry the old man for Sam’s breastplate and Sam couldn’t resist the offer. He climbed up into the wagon of the dead and dying and collapsed on the wooden tailgate.
The path was bumpy, the smell horrendous and the groaning within nightmarish but Sam was so exhausted that within seconds he fell into a profound sleep.
3
Everything You Can Imagine Is Real
The House Quaestors gathered giggling in the shadowy corridor and at a signal from their leader burst into the silent dorms and screamed at the top of their lungs for everyone inside to get out of bed.
Sam didn’t know what day or time it was but he was up onto his bare feet on the cold floor and stripped out of his pyjamas in seconds. The buzzing strip light was blinding and it wasn’t until he was walking out into the chilly corridor with the others, hugging his bare sides to try and keep himself warm, that his eyes adjusted to daylight.
The seven-o’clock bell rang shrilly as they trudged down through the locker room to the boot room. Here, where their breath smoked and the floor was chilly stone, the boys changed into their running shoes before fumbling outside to where another House Quaestor, dressed and barking orders from behind a thick, green, woollen scarf, checked them off and sent them on their way.
As Sam jogged after the others, trying to ignore the cold gnawing at his ribs and flanks, he glanced across to where sleepy-faced girls were emerging from the Main Building. The junior girls’ boarding house was on the second floor and Sam noticed some of the girls had blankets or duvets draped over their shoulders. There was no fraternising or calling out: everyone was too cold or tired to do anything but put one foot in front of the other and keep moving. Each step forward, after all, was one step closer to getting back inside and into the warmth.
The boys’ route followed the perimetre of the main lawn and Sam looked up at the branches above hanging bare before the midwinter sky. The puddles he was splashing through were icy-black and frost sharpened the edges of the leaves scraping his numb, red legs. At the school gates he saw senior girls running up the lane opposite and knew they were at their own halfway point. He and his dorm-mates fell into a line and pressed on. They were almost home.
Arriving back, there was a crush at the boot-room door. Over-sleepers and their angry friends were trying to push their way outside as Sam and the rest of Dorm Four, arms wrapped around their shoulders, breath steaming, tried to barge past them and get into the warmth.
Sam joined the rush to yank his towel off the racks in the drying room and as quickly as they could they lined up as a dorm to be checked off and let into the showers. With a finite supply of hot water and the House Quaestors already washed, Sam was happy to find that for his thirty seconds under the spray the water was soothingly tepid.
Back in the dormitory, windows steaming up, the boys got changed. Orhan, who’d been at St Francis’s since he was eleven, put some music on and they listened as they buttoned their shirts, knotted their ties and finally warmed and woke up.
It wasn’t until he was in double maths that Sam remembered his dream. It came back to him like a shattered memory.
Sam and Walter were sitting at the back of the class. Before them were eight rows of bowed heads steadily taking down the quadrilateral equations which Ms Morris was relentlessly scribbling onto the electronic board.
“I had the weirdest dream last night, Walt, man,” Sam whispered.
“What about?” Walt pointed out some new graffiti on the desk and sniggered.
Looking up, Sam’s eyes caught those of the Welsh teacher and with a jolt of panic he turned back to his notebook. “Tell you later.”
“What? You can’t start a story and then leave it like that.”
“Tell you later, man! Morris’s looking!”
As he copied down numbers and pretended to make calculations, Sam tried to think of what might have inspired the dream and made it so vivid. He thought back to the classes the day before: perhaps the talk they’d had in history about Caractacus? What had they been doing in biology? He couldn’t remember properly but hadn’t it been something about plants? It couldn’t have been that, could it?
The day went on and double maths segued into break-time. Walter had to buy something from the school stationers so Sam spent thirty minutes in the locker room at St Nick’s watching a nerdy kid called Aldolous play brain games on a tablet. A dreary French class with the ever dour Monsieur Houellebecq, led to lunch and gradually Sam forgot about his dream and so, abandoned, the dream left him.
In double English Mr Firmin had a surprise: they would be going up to the junior girl’s common room to watch Polanski’s film of Macbeth. They could leave their bags in the classroom but they had to bring their copies of the play. As the class walked across the Quad they waved at friends in the other classrooms despite being warned not to. Mr Firmin strolled ahead with his strange, rolling gait causing Mark Smith, a snotty northerner from Dorm Five, to say the way the teacher walked made him seasick.
As they were entering the Main Building during class time everyone, Magistrate or not, was permitted to go in through the main entrance. This was something Sam and most of the others had only ever done with their parents the first time they’d come to the school. At all other times it was strictly forbidden.
Beyond the oak door with the school motto carved into it – Possunt Quia Posse Videntur – lay a panelled porch decorated with photographs of staff and students in years gone by. Further in was a large hall with a healthy log fire burning in an ornate grate. Down the corridor to the left was the Staff Room and the mysterious Eleusinian Room, where Quaestors, Praetors and Consuls were initiated into The Magistrate, while in gilded letters, spanning the panels running around the main hall, were the names of every Head Boy and Head Girl the school had ever had.
“Who’s got both oars in the water?” Firmin cried as the class grouped up at the foot of the staircase. The English teacher wore a light linen suit and pumps. He had small, birdlike eyes, high cheekbones and a dark, bristly moustache. “Shake a leg over there, chaps! Up we go, please. Lead the way, Mr Kempis!”
In the common room the girls, who were boarders and knew the place, took the good seats while some boys jumped on top of each other on the sofas, play-fighting. Mr Firmin got everyone to settle down and cr
ouched in front of the television dangling a remote control from his hand. “Now how do these blasted contraptions function?” He called Aldolous over and took himself to the window, tucked his fingers in his rope belt and puffed out his broad chest. “I say, what a cracking day!”
Sam glanced about the common room and thought it not much different from theirs at St Nick’s. It smelled different though: an odd combination of faraway stale cigarettes and fried breakfasts. There were books piled up along every available shelf and surface, arranged haphazardly, in piles and towers. Here and there were cacti leaning vertiginously in jars in the spaces between the spines.
Directly ahead of where Sam was sitting was a huge bay window. This provided a fantastic view of the back lawns: the fountain, the covered-over swimming pool, the Assembly Hall and, beyond a low fence, the playing fields. Dots of green and white floated about on the hockey pitch. The view disappeared and the room was thrown into darkness as Mr Firmin closed the shutters, yanked the curtains closed and called for everyone to “pipe down”.
Within ten minutes of the film starting half the class were asleep, Sam among them.
4
I Decided I Must Be Lots Of Different People Inside My Brain
Sam was shaken awake in the darkness and the first thing he noticed was a foul smell. It was something rotten; like the most rancid bin he’d ever smelled, mixed with the foulest breath, plus fingernail debris and gone-bad wounds.
“You there! Ootta there right this instant!”
Sam saw a warrior brandishing a flaming torch glaring back at him. “Me?”
“Aye, you, mon, you! Who else? Oot!”
Two other men stepped forwards and yanked Sam from the tailgate of the cart and forced him to stand. It was night. “That’s the death cart, I’ll have ye know. It’s nae place tae be sleepin’.”
Sam shrugged. “My apologies.”
The Invisible Hand Page 1