The Invisible Hand

by James Hartley

  The weather had turned too: out of the violent storms and impervious mists had come a dry, cold days lit up by empty, ultramarine skies and chilly nights pocked with starfields.

  Tuesday mornings first period were the best for Sam, walking out onto the crunchy fields in his football kit, studs fighting to grind their way into the frozen ground while wisps of nights dissipated over the distant hills and trees.

  Between his interview with Mrs Waters and the next full moon only one conversation of note occurred in Sam’s life and that was with Eddie Burroughs one Wednesday afternoon during Integrated Science.

  The two dorm-mates had devised an ingenious way of staying out of the classroom for as long as possible. Under the guise of checking a series of weather stations mounted around the perimetre of the school, Eddie and Sam had spent most of the double period walking from one to the other. While it might have been more time-efficient to have checked them individually, the boys had made the circuit together, chatting as they went.

  “What exactly do they do in The Eleusinian Room?” Sam asked that day, as they headed down the long, leafy path behind St Nicks to the second station.

  Burroughs laughed with shock. “I can’t tell you that, Sammo!”

  “Who’s gonna hear you here?” Sam had his hands balled in his pockets but they were still cold. It was a bitter November day. They moved on slowly, neither talking, until Eddie piped up.

  “Tell you what.” Burroughs stopped and turned. His eyes glanced nervously over Sam’s shoulder and he dropped his voice. From where they stood Sam could see Mr Dahl’s living room window, dark and still as a stagnant fishpond. “I’ll tell you what happens in The Eleusinian Room if you tell me what really happened that Exeat weekend with you and the girl.”

  “You know what happened!”

  “Yeah, right.” Burroughs spat on the ground. All the boys had started spitting. The fashion was for a strange kind of mannered spit, rolling the tongue and flobbing a small ball of whiteness from the tip, in an arc, to the floor. “They called two ambulances and the police because you fell off a wall.” Eddie shook his head. “Pull the other one, Sam. One of the SP’s told me you were covered in dirt when they found you. I’m not stupid. There’s a story there.”

  “Sure about that?”

  “What did she do, Sam? Bury you? That’s what I heard. It’s what’s giving you the nightmares and playing with your head.”

  “If I tell you, you tell me what happens in The Magistrate induction ceremony.”

  Burroughs took a deep breath. “If you promise to never, ever tell anyone.” He balled and raised his fist. “I’ll kill you if you say anything, man, I swear. I’ll deny and deny it but I’ll still kill you.”

  “Calm down.” Sam waved his empty palms. “What about you? Can I trust you to say nothing?”

  “Of course.” Burroughs kicked the soil. “You can trust me, Sammo. I’m a HQ.”

  “All right, then.”

  They shook hands.

  “You first,” said Eddie.

  “Me first,” nodded Sam. “Right.” There was a pause as, reaching the weather station, they checked the level of the rainwater in the marked tubes and Eddie jotted the results into a notebook. Later they’d transfer it electronically and add it to their file. They both fell silent a moment, nodding to a gardener cutting up a tree trunk with an axe before following the path which traced the perimetre wall and took them towards the fields. When they were both certain they were alone Eddie nudged Sam.

  “Come on then.”

  Sam, hands deep in his pockets, gave a sign. “Well, I was covered in dirt because we’d been in a tunnel.” Now it was his turn to feel strange and paranoid. He looked about at the trees nearby as if nervous they could hear him. They were passing through some rough ground at the foot of the tennis courts. The children that smoked came here, ducking down among the shrubs and sharing cigarettes they’d hidden up their sleeves.

  “What tunnel?”

  “A tunnel we’d found in the graveyard.” Sam took the lead as they walked single file through a line of dapple-trunked elms and walked out onto the frosty fields. Some of the ice had melted during the morning but it was hardening again as the temperatures dropped with the sun. “You see, we’d bumped into an old teacher who told us about them. There’s tunnels under the school.”

  Burroughs’s face turned serious. “I know about the tunnels.”

  “Well, we had tea with the teacher. I thought he lived over by Burmester, in the old cottage, but the other day I looked and it was completely different. Maybe I was wrong. It was dead foggy the day we met him. I might have made a mistake. I don’t think so but everything was strange, to be honest.”

  “Wait. Who was the teacher?”

  “An old master. Even dressed in the old style, you know. The flat hat and the cape. I’d seen him in the photos they have in the Main Building.” Sam stopped and wagged a finger. “That’s probably why I’m thinking of The Eleusinian Room, actually, because I was in the Main Building yesterday getting photocopies for Mr Maugham and I was looking at the pictures as I waited. He was in all the black and white ones.”

  “Name?” demanded Eddie.

  “Chipping? Chipper?”

  “Chipping.” Eddie nodded. “He was Headmaster for a bit.” Eddie suddenly frowned. “But I don’t think he lives around here, though. He’s ancient history. I’m not even sure if he’s not dead.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he was visiting. But we saw him. Leana and I. We were there, having tea with him, and I don’t know how it got started but he – this Chipping – was talking about the history of the school and he mentioned that there were tunnels – tunnels that connected the school and the church, things like that. Books. A weird story about an old woman and three books.”

  “That’s right.” Eddie had turned pale. Surprised.

  “So, that’s about it. We went up to the church. The priest showed us some things but we didn’t find any tunnels. But then when we went outside and found a part of the graveyard where there was a strange kind of tunnel opening, like a hobbit’s house, or something. And we climbed in there.”

  “You climbed into a grave?”

  “It wasn’t a grave. It was a tunnel. There was a door. It went down underground. It was a real tunnel, heading somewhere. Under the school, I think.” But now Sam remembered the skeletons and stopped. “Well. It went under the graves. That I know.” He was about to go on, about how he’d gone back to the graveyard to check after the Armistice Day service when Eddie began laughing. “What?” asked Sam.

  “You should write all that down, man!” Eddie cried. “What an imagination!”

  “Eh? It’s true!”

  “It’s true, he says,” said Eddie. There was something about his manner which was screamingly false. He’s scared, Sam thought. He knows I’m telling the truth. Or, he’s afraid I’m telling the truth.

  They were at the second station, at the top of the fields where a fence separated the school grounds from woodland. They took their measurements and began walking back. Their route took them across what in summer was the cricket square. From there they walked down to the pavilion and onwards to the Quad. The last station was near the school greenhouse on the open land by the gate to the village.

  “So,” Sam said as they walked under the trees. “Your turn.”

  Burroughs scoffed. “I’m not telling you anything if you think I’m going to believe that story!”

  “It’s not a story!”

  “Yeah, right.”

  In the end, desperate to keep up his end of the bargain, Sam made up a story about Leana pushing him over the church wall and attempting to bury him in a grave which had been dug but left open. This came out of nowhere – perhaps he did have a wonderful imagination after all – but it seemed to placate the other boy.

  “That’s just evil, man,” Burroughs laughed, spitting happily, convinced. “No wonder you didn’t want to tell anyone.”

  Sam allowed
Eddie to savour this scenario for a few more minutes until, aware that their time was running out, he again asked him to keep up his end of the bargain.

  Eddie was reluctant but he was honest, and when Sam applied some pressure, he came shoulder to shoulder with Sam and said, “I’m not going to tell you exactly what they do because if you repeat it people will know that you know.”

  “Right,” nodded Sam. Now it was his turn to be confused.

  “But I will tell you something I heard off my brother which turned out to be true. It’s something that for some reason people know, so if you repeat it the whole thing can’t be traced back to me – know what I mean?”

  “Just tell me.” Sam smiled, anxiously spotting the last weather station.

  “Have you ever been in there? The Eleusinian Room?”

  “Maybe. When we were shown around.”

  “What can you remember?”

  “Does it have a kind of high ceiling?”

  “It does. Anything else?”

  Sam was squinting, trying to recall the interior. But that day was almost impossible to remember clearly. They might have been shown around the school by Mrs Waters, Sam thought, but he could only remember cloudy images. They’d seen two or three schools in the same day, all of them jet-lagged, his mother and father hardly speaking. The Eleusinian Room might have been a dark, panelled room he remembered with a high ceiling filled with bookshelves and some faraway wine-green stained-glass windows. But that might just have well have been in another school altogether. “Tell me. I can’t really remember.”

  “Well, it’s a normal room on one side, with panels and stuff,” Eddie began, “but then you can go up some hanging stairs and get up to the old library bit. Surely you remember that, with loads and loads of bookshelves going up to a kind of turret? That’s the castle window you can see when you’re driving in the main gates. When you’re inside, you look up and you can see the turret with all the books going around and around. There’s a staircase in the middle, also going around, and they can pull up the ladder so you can’t get up to the books on the top shelves. It’s all in a kind of steel cage, don’t you remember?

  “There are green windows at the top, right?”

  “Yes, like church windows. That’s it.”

  “I remember the windows. I can’t remember the books.”

  “Well, that’s it really.” Eddie nodded, sniffed and trotted off. “Better get a move on.”

  Sam chased after him. “That’s it?”

  “What?”

  “You can’t just tell me that!”

  “But what else do you want to know?”

  “I don’t know. The ceremony, maybe?”

  Eddie pushed out his lip. “Nothing really. All The Magistrate are there. You have your name called and you have to write in The Book and that’s it.”

  “The Book? What book?”

  “The Book. The School Book. The famous one. It’s nothing.”

  “What famous one? What are you talking about?”

  “The one they tell all the stories about. The one Chips told you about, probably. Well, it’s not that one, the original. Nobody knows where the original is – but they have the book up there, on a kind of altar, I suppose. There are two little jars, little urns on each side. They hold the ashes of the other two books, the ones they burned. They’re supposedly the real ashes but who knows? They call the big one The Book but it’s just a big old ledger type thing, like a big rectangle, with blank pages. All the ones they’ve already filled out are on a shelf behind, and that’s it. You go up, you look for your name and you write something in the book. Like a promise, or a wish.”

  “What did you write?”

  “I’m not going to tell you!”

  “But, is it supposed to come true, or what?”

  Eddie looked to see if Sam was serious. “I don’t know.” He bit his fingernails. “That’s what they say, isn’t it? That some chosen ones can write in it and what they say comes true. That’s supposedly why we’re all here. But I can’t see how. I mean, I can’t see how anything like that can come true. It’s just magic, isn’t it? Or superstition, or whatever.” He sniffed. “They say they’re trying to find someone who the book listens to. You know what I mean? That what they write comes true. The sword in the stone or something like that, I don’t know. It’s a nice story.”

  “Where’s the original book, then?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “But do you think it’s in the room?”

  “Sam, man, you’re crazy! It’s just a ritual, you know. A ceremony. You’re reading too much into it.” Eddie spat again. “All the badges and stuff, all that ceremony, it just means I can go to the shop for you lot, that’s all. Go out at the weekends. Walk in the front door or wear shoes in the house or whatever. They keep it all secret and make it hard to get into but in the end it’s just a game, you know. You have to play the game.”

  Sam raised an eyebrow. “Sounds like they take it a bit more seriously than a game.”

  “I think it’s all like a copy of religion,” Eddie whispered. “They want to make you think of the bible or something, talking about books and words. It’s like when they make you swear on a bible in court, you know, to tell the truth. That type of thing.”

  “So you don’t believe in it all?”

  Eddie thought about it. “No. Not really.”

  “But you still wrote in The Book?”

  Eddie stopped and stared at Sam. “Did you like that packet of crisps you ate last night, Sammo? The ones I got for you?”

  Sam laughed. “Yep. Yummy.”

  “A-ha,” Eddie replied, nodding. The boys stopped to take their last measurements. “Just checking.”

  17

  The Queen And I

  “And this man is your husband, ye say?” the doctor asked, kneeling beside the prone body of Robbie Cauldhame.

  “That’s right, sir,” replied Leana. She was watching the broth she had cooking over the fire. She and the doctor had been on the road all night and both were exhausted. They would have a small meal, the soup and some bread they’d bought along the way, and they would sleep. The stone cottage was warming up with the flames. Leana poured them both small beer from a canteen and handed out the mugs. “How do you find him?”

  “He breathes. He’s alive all right. But he does not wake.” The doctor bent over, to listen to Robbie’s chest. “I’d say he is well. Sleeping. He looks well. What happened to him?”

  “The war.”

  “He must eat. And drink.”

  “He will.” Leana nodded, ladling out the broth. The doctor took his thankfully. “I have put this bowl for him. When it cools, you’ll see. He will eat and drink but he will not wake.” She mentioned one of the nurses from the army who’d been coming daily to give him food and drink.

  The doctor rubbed his eyes. “Well, lassie, I’ve lived too long to say this surprises me. Nothing surprises me anymore, in fact.” He sipped the soup and nodded his approval. “This is your home, is it, miss?”

  “It was. Once.” Leana stared around the dank walls. “I come here from time to time.”

  They ate and drank in a companionable silence. The dark eyeballs of hungry mice flickered in the corners as their twitching noses followed the trails of falling breadcrumbs.

  The doctor asked, “You say the King’s castle is near?”

  “Five miles as the crow flies.”

  “Then shall we leave at dawn?”

  “As you wish.”

  Leana watched the doctor settle himself for bed and cut her hair in the small glass she had hanging on the wall near the fireplace. She had decided it would be best to go to the King’s castle in disguise the next day. The last time she’d been was as part of the Thane of Ross’s entourage and although she doubted she’d been noticed, she didn’t want to risk being recognised. Within a few moments the doctor was snoring.

  What shall we do with our reward, Robbie? Leana thought, looking across at her ‘husband�
��. Where was he? Where was Sam? What would Sam say if he’d heard her calling him her husband? Oh, the idea made her cringe even though no one was watching – but then she smiled. Oh, but what shall we do with our reward? she thought again, walking over to feed the gently breathing body the cool broth. As usual he swallowed. He also took beer.

  Leana thought she wouldn’t sleep but had underestimated how tired she was.

  The last thing she heard were the bats.

  Macbeth’s castle struck Leana as gloomy and forlorn despite standing proudly before a backdrop of gorgeous, snow-drenched Bens. After riding through the dense confines of Birnam Wood, the wide-open heathland was uplifting. Hares sprung out of the path of the black stallion as the sun glittered off a diamond-flashing loch lying low to their right.

  There were the usual beggars and invalids gathered around the gatehouse, as well as revellers and peddlers carrying their wares on their backs jostling to be let inside to trade. A smiling sergeant was looking for recruits for the King’s Army, offering bed and board, shouting about the opportunities fighting might provide. Beer stalls and meat-roasters were doing a good trade and there was a small cattle market underway in a nearby field, the grass churned up by carts and hoofs.

  The aggressive soldiers at the main gate backed down as the doctor revealed his name and reason for their visit. He introduced Leana as one of his staff. As they waited in line to be let into the castle Leana remembered how Sam had said he was reading about Macbeth at school and thought it would be wonderful if he was somehow there, watching all that was happening, like God in the sky. Life is like a dream, she thought. Are you there, Sam? Can you hear me? Are you looking at me from one of those awful old classrooms in the Quad?

  When, almost at midday, she and the doctor were finally admitted to the castle, Leana’s attention focussed on the shabbiness and dreariness of the grim sights they found inside. Emaciated donkeys hee-hawed sadly from where they were tethered to iron loops in the walls: their teeth were enormous, their eyes dry, their ribs showing through their worn out hides. Passing by a small anteroom with a dirty rag for a door, Leana spied a group of men drinking and playing dice. They looked like demons gathered around a fire.