He stopped for a moment to regain his breath. He must work this out logically. How had it happened before? Why, of course, by walking away from the desired destination. Mr Sharsted turned back and set himself to walk steadily towards the lights. Though terrified, he did not despair, now that he knew what he was up against. He felt himself a match for Mr Gingold. If only he could find the door!
As he reached the warm circle cast by the glow of the street lamps, Mr Sharsted breathed a sigh of relief. For as he turned a corner there was the big square, with the soot-grimed chapel on the corner. He hurried on. He must remember exactly the turnings he had taken; he couldn’t afford to make a mistake.
So much depended on it. If only he could have another chance – he would let the Thwaites family keep their house, he would even be willing to forget Gingold’s debt. He couldn’t face the possibility of walking these endless streets – for how long? And with the creatures he had seen . . .
Mr Sharsted groaned as he remembered the face of one old woman he had seen earlier that evening – or what was left of that face, after years of wind and weather. He suddenly recalled that she had died before the 1914 war. The sweat burst out on his forehead and he tried not to think of it.
Once off the square, he plunged into the alley he remembered. Ah! there it was. Now all he had to do was to go to the left and there was the door. His heart beat higher and he began to hope, with a sick longing, for the security of his well-appointed house and his rows of friendly ledgers. Only one more corner. He ran on and turned up the road towards Mr Gingold’s door. Another thirty yards to the peace of the ordinary world.
The moonlight winked on a wide, well-paved square. Shone, too, on a legend painted in gold leaf on a large board: ninian’s revivalist brotherhood. The date was 1925.
Mr Sharsted gave a hideous yell of fear and despair and fell to the pavement.
Mr Gingold sighed heavily and yawned. He glanced at the clock. It was time for bed. He went over once again and stared into the camera obscura. It had been a not altogether unsuccessful day. He put a black velvet cloth over the image in the lens and went off slowly to bed.
Under the cloth, in pitiless detail, was reflected the narrow tangle of streets round Mr Gingold’s house, seen as through the eye of God; there went Mr Sharsted and his colleagues, the lost and the damned, trapped for eternity, stumbling, weeping, swearing, as they slipped and scrabbled along the alleys and squares of their own private hell, under the pale light of the stars.
THE BOYS WHO WOULDN’T WAKE UP by Stephen Gregory
This book opened with a tale set at Halloween, the holiday today most closely associated with horror stories, and it closes with one that takes place at Christmas, which in generations past was the time for telling spooky stories by firelight. Stephen Gregory is the author of seven novels, the first three of which, The Cormorant (1986; winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and adapted for a film starring Ralph Fiennes), The Woodwitch (1988), and The Blood of Angels (1992) have been republished by Valancourt. Author Mark Morris has written that Gregory is ‘one of the best and most underrated novelists in the world’ and has noted the ways in which nature and the natural world play a prominent role in his fiction, particularly birds, which appear in Gregory’s work as ‘malign, destructive spirits or harbingers of doom’. ‘The Boys Who Wouldn’t Wake Up’, published here for the first time, is a quiet ghost story that shows a different side to this fine horror author, who still awaits the broader recognition he deserves.
Ian sat on his bed and looked out of the dormitory window, down to the drive in front of the school. One by one, all the other boys were collected by their parents or picked up in taxis and taken off to Salisbury station. A succession of cars swept up to the door, crunching on the gravel, and parked beneath the branches of the cedar; and then there were kisses and cries of joy as mothers and fathers greeted their sons. Leather-bound trunks were loaded into the boots of the cars or the waiting taxis. He saw Mr Hoddesdon down there, the headmaster, shaking hands with the parents, ticking a name on his list as each boy left. Ian sat on his bed and watched. He was not going home. Soon there would be no one in the school except him and Mr Hoddesdon.
Ian Stott was seven years old. He was small and neat, like a vole, with glossy brown hair and wide, brown eyes. Although he was trying very hard not to cry, his cheeks shone with tears of unhappiness and fear. He wanted to be brave like his father, an army officer thousands of miles away in the Falkland Islands. But, when he thought of his mother, who had written to tell him she was skiing in Austria so he would have to stay in school over Christmas, the tears tingled and his heart seemed to rise into his throat.
Christmas . . . Ian shuddered at the awfulness of it. He looked around the bare, cold, empty dormitory, at the eleven other beds all neatly made. He sniffed and shivered and he watched out of the window as the last of the cars drove away. He listened as the school fell silent.
It was four o’clock on a December afternoon. Dusk became a misty, whispering twilight. Not a sound, except the wind in the cedar tree . . . Ian Stott was alone in Foxwood Manor with Mr Hoddesdon, the headmaster.
Foxwood Manor was in the Cranbourne Chase, an area of forest and downland in the triangle formed by Salisbury, Shaftesbury and Blandford Forum. A fine house with a single, high, square tower on the east wing, it stood in hundreds of acres of ancient oakwood and beechwood and bristling, black fir plantation. But the school was dwindling to the brink of closure. Years ago, it had had a reputation for academic excellence; but the numbers had shrunk and shrunk, so that Ian was one of only fifty pupils, supervised by five unqualified, uninspired teachers. There was a matron, a cook and a weary groundsman. The buildings were in cobwebby disrepair. The grass was long and untidy on the football pitches; the cobbled stable yard was a carpet of moss; jackdaws squabbled in the great, twiggy nests they had built in the crumbling chimneys. And the house itself was dark and dusty: the corridors and the oak-panelled halls were hung with yellowing photographs and gloomy paintings of long-dead headmasters.
Mr Hoddesdon was the headmaster. At last, when all the boys were ticked off and gone, he limped inside, shut and locked the front door and climbed stiffly up the spiral staircase to his room in the top of the tower. He stoked the smouldering fire, for he was aching and chilled from standing in the freezing dusk. He rumpled the heavy old head of Brutus, the black labrador, and he stared from his windows at the frosty twilight, at the dark, deep woods which stretched as far as the horizon.
Christmas . . . Mr Hoddesdon snarled at the dread of it. Probably his last Christmas at Foxwood Manor, if the school was bound to close. He sat and stared at the fire and thought of the years gone by.
He had spent his life at Foxwood Manor; first of all as a boy evacuated to the country during the blitz, staying on to take Winchester scholarship; later, with a double first from Oxford which could have made him a brilliant young don or at least a master at Eton, he chose to return to Foxwood, to teach Latin and Greek to the brightest boys; and eventually, to become the headmaster, presiding over the school’s dismal decline.
Alone . . . always had been. Never married . . . never would be. He never smiled . . . probably he could not. He was seventy, a gaunt and solitary figure who stalked the classrooms and dormitories like a grizzled, grey wolf – hobbling with a stick and growling at the pain in his hips. Brutus was his only companion. For years, for decades, for a lifetime, he had lived in the high tower. Now, he stared into the fire, prodding it irritably until a reluctant, trembling flame stood up.
Another Christmas . . . of waiting and hoping and inevitable disappointment. His last, probably. He glared around the books and photographs which lined his room, at the dust and cobwebs and useless clutter.
As evening became night, he suddenly remembered the boy, Stott, who was still in school. Cursing, he limped downstairs from his tower to the kitchen, rummaged for some milk and biscuits in the pantry and put them on a tray. The place was silent, deserted; only a f
ew optimistic mice skittered in the skirting. Leaving the ground-floor in darkness, he stomped up the stairs and along the corridor to the boy’s dormitory.
The little boy was sitting on his bed, staring from the window, although the world outside was black and still. He jumped when he heard the door open, when he saw the man come into the room.
‘Stott,’ the headmaster said.
‘Yes, sir,’ the boy said.
‘Supper,’ the headmaster said.
‘Thank you, sir,’ the boy said.
Shivering, Ian tried to eat and drink, but the biscuits and milk were a cold, thick paste in his throat. The man stood silently in the middle of the room and looked up and down the row of eleven empty beds. The walls were yellowed and bare and the floorboards were pocked with worm.
‘Grim,’ the headmaster said at last. ‘Hardly changed since I was a boy at Foxwood, sixty years ago. This is my old dormitory, you know. That’s my old bed you’ve got, right next to the window.’
The man snarled with regret and disappointment.
‘Hurry up and eat your supper, boy, now that I’ve gone all the way down to the kitchen and back upstairs again to get it for you. If you’re not going to eat it, get ready for bed.’
Then, seeing that Ian was shaking with cold and unhappiness, he added as gently as his growling voice could manage, ‘We’ll have to make the best of it this Christmas, the two of us. Perhaps we’ll go out tomorrow, if the weather allows, walking with Brutus or out in the car. Come along now, stir yourself . . .’
While the old man waited, the boy changed into his red and white striped pyjamas, splashed his face and brushed his teeth at the wash basin and then climbed into bed. The headmaster moved to the door. But, as he lifted his hand to turn off the light, there was a rasping at the dormitory window as though someone outside were scratching his fingernails on the pane, and the man whirled round, suddenly startled. He stomped across the room again, stood at Ian’s bedside and stared from the window, but all he could see was a glassy blackness.
‘What the devil’s that?’ he exclaimed.
Ian said nothing, huddled in bed with the blankets to his chin, although he knew what had made the noise. It was a noise he was used to, every night in the big, bare room, but he was too frightened to say anything as the headmaster struggled to throw open the window and then leaned over the sill. Freezing air rushed into the freezing dormitory.
‘By Jove,’ the man said, muttering to himself as though the boy were not there. ‘This old thing has grown a bit. I can reach it quite easily now. Here, let me just . . .’
And he stepped back into the room with a fistful of bristly needles from the cedar tree which stood on the lawn below, whose branches reached to the first floor and scratched the glass as they moved in the wind. He held the needles to his face, twitched his nostrils and inhaled the resinous scent.
‘That smell,’ he said to himself. ‘After all these years, it still reminds me.’
Mumbling, growling, snuffling his face in the needles he rubbed in his fingers, he limped to the door again, flicked off the light and went stumping along the corridor . . . too distracted to say goodnight or to close the window he’d left wide open.
Ian waited until the footsteps had faded, until the house was in silence. Then he got out of bed to shut the window. For a moment he leaned out, as the headmaster had done, and he stroked the nearest branch of the cedar. The world was black and empty: no light in any direction, only the deep, dark forest for miles and miles around. Aching with cold, he tugged the window down and jumped back into bed.
There he lay, as the house creaked and whispered, as the needles scratched at the glass. Very lonely, very sad, Ian sobbed until he thought his chest might burst with sobbing, and at last he fell asleep.
*
But the following day was less horrid than he’d thought it might be.
Mr Hoddesdon woke him and hurried him downstairs, where they sat together and ate the breakfast that the headmaster had cooked. The long refectory tables were empty and bare; the panelled hall was gloomy and chill. Mr Hoddesdon was gruff. Brutus sat beside him, lolling a huge, pink tongue, and was eventually rewarded with bacon rind and crusts of buttered toast.
‘Coat!’ the man said. ‘Football socks inside your boots! Gloves! Hurry up and get ready, Stott – five minutes and we’re off walking!’
They stepped into crisp, cold, glorious sunshine: Ian in gloves and scarf and Wellington boots; the headmaster with stick and pipe and binoculars and a curious little rucksack slung on his back; Brutus shambling beside him.
At the overgrown ha-ha, Mr Hoddesdon told Ian to leap down into the dilapidated bandstand and find owl-pellets in the dead nettles and the skeletons of willowherb; while the owl itself, blinking and bobbing like a demonic gnome, stared from the rafters at the man and the boy and the big, black dog. The headmaster broke the pellets in the palm of his hand and showed Ian the bones of mouse and shrew and the gleaming remains of beetles that the owl had eaten.
They walked slowly into the woodland. They saw a sparrow hawk, dashing between the trees with a thrush in its claws. They heard jays, shrieking like banshees. They saw deer and hare. The man smelled fox, and the boy sniffed it too, sharp and rank on the cold, dry leaves.
They pushed deep into the undergrowth, to the mounded earthworks of a Roman camp buried in brambles and bracken; and there, where the sunlight was warm, Mr Hoddesdon sat down and opened the mysterious rucksack: a picnic of pies and cakes and ginger beer – a pie for Brutus as well. Later, while the man smoked his pipe, Ian and the dog went burrowing in tunnels of thorn, exploring the ancient, long-lost site.
They walked back in the afternoon. The day grew quickly cold and dark. A grey mist drifted in the woods like smoke. Dusk fell. The forest was silent. Alarmed by the footfalls of man and boy, startled by the scent of dog, deer fled through the plantation and rabbits flashed their scuts. An owl hooted in the freezing twilight. As they broke from the trees, the headmaster and the boy saw the house in the distance, square and black like a huge gravestone.
‘Chin up, Stott,’ the old man said, seeing how despondent the boy had become. ‘We’ve had a good day out, haven’t we? We’ll soon get warmed up when we get in. Ever been to the tower? Of course you haven’t. No one has, except me and Brutus. Well, we’re on our own this Christmas, the two of us. Got to make the best of things. Come on, before we catch our death.’
They crunched across the lawn in front of the house, under the looming cedar, and Mr Hoddesdon unlocked the front door. The hall was dark and very cold. They climbed up to the tower, the man and the dog both limping on the spiral stairs, the boy following, to the secret, private place at the top where the headmaster had lived for so long.
It was a tall, square room, cobwebby and cluttered and chill, with leaded windows on all four sides; a desk strewn with papers and books and photographs, a rumpled bed, threadbare furniture arranged by a little fireplace. While the boy stood and stared, sniffing the smell of tobacco and old man’s clothes, Mr Hoddesdon knelt and lit the fire which was already laid in the grate. Soon, the windows gleamed with flamelight. The room was warmer. The man sat in his armchair and the boy sat on the rug, with hot toast and mugs of tea, with carols on the radio . . . scented wood-smoke, the headmaster’s pipe, the smell of dead leaves and bracken on a weary old dog . . .
Ian and Mr Hoddesdon were weary too. They nodded asleep in front of the fire. Much later that evening, waking suddenly to find that the fire had gone out, the man shook the boy and led him down the stairs, along the corridor to the dormitory at the other end of the house and put him to bed. Ian fell asleep again, straightaway.
*
He thought he had a dream.
He dreamed that he sat up in bed and saw Mr Hoddesdon in the moonlit dormitory. The headmaster was pacing from bed to bed, stopping at each one to shake at the pillow, tug at the sheets and rattle the bedstead. His face was contorted with panic and terror. He opened and closed his
mouth as though he were shouting, but no sound came out. The only bed the man did not shake was Ian’s. Again and again the headmaster shook the beds with terrible violence, although there was nobody in them. His face was more and more twisted, blanched by the moonlight, snarling with fear and despair. His throat bulged with silent screams. Until, with a shrug of utter hopelessness, he came to the window by Ian’s bed, struggled and struggled to throw it open and then leaned so far out that Ian thought he must surely fall to the ground below . . . only to pause, the panic on his face turning to surprise and bewilderment, to pluck a fistful of needles from the cedar and step back into the dormitory. Then, rubbing the needles between the palms of his hands, sniffing and sniffing them like a wolf, he walked slowly out of the room.
That was Ian’s dream.
In the morning, the dormitory was very cold because the window was wide open. The other eleven beds were dreadfully rumpled. Puzzled by his dream, afraid that Mr Hoddesdon would be cross if he saw the untidiness, Ian made his own bed and all the others and went downstairs.
The headmaster looked tired and drawn, as though he had hardly slept at all. He had not shaved, so that his face was prickly with grey stubble. He grunted at the boy and then said nothing as they sat in the silent dining-hall and chewed their toast. At last, pushing back his chair and standing stiffly upright, he said, ‘Wrap up warm, Stott, and wait for me in the stable yard. We’re going out in the car,’ before he shuffled upstairs. Brutus followed him. Ian took the dishes into the kitchen, washed them and put them away, and then he went through the corridors to the changing room, where all the rows and rows of hooks were empty except for his hook. He remembered the place in term-time, noisy and steamy, smelling of muddy boys and wet football boots; now it was bare and silent, swabbed with disinfectant. He put on his coat and scarf and gloves and went into the yard.
The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories, Volume Two Page 29