The Red Road
A Novel
12.12
Copyright 2012, Stephen J Sweeney
All Rights Reserved
Original cover photograph by Nick Bramhall. Copyright 2007, Nick Bramhall. Some Rights Reserved.
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0
http://www.flickr.com/photos/black_friction/1855160096/
http://www.flickr.com/people/black_friction/
The right of Stephen J Sweeney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
All characters in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
www.stephenjsweeney.com
Books by Stephen J Sweeney
THE BATTLE FOR THE SOLAR SYSTEM TRILOGY
The Honour of the Knights (First Edition)
The Honour of the Knights (Second Edition)
The Third Side
The Attribute of the Strong
Author's Note
While many of the dates of past events, such as the releases of music albums, films and sports fixtures, are largely accurate, some timings have been modified for the purposes of storytelling.
Michaelmas Term
September 1991 – December 1991
Chapter One
I had always known that at some point in my life I would see a dead body. Whether it be a grandmother, a grandfather, a life-long friend, or my own mother or father, it was a certainty of life. What I didn’t expect was for it to be the body of a ten-year-old boy, when I myself was only fifteen. I also never expected the corpse to have been dumped by a roadside as a result of a murder.
I was jogging along the so-called Red Road at the time, a woodland road that wound its way through the countryside close to St Christopher’s boys’ boarding school. I had always hated having to do the run. Word would spread around lunchtime that we wouldn’t be playing rugby or football that afternoon, but instead the teachers would be making us go on a three-mile jog. The Road was always such a torturous affair that I wouldn’t believe it until I went to the main notice board and saw a printed piece of A4 pinned up over the usual sports schedule, informing us of what time the run started (one forty-five, directly after lunch).
Some would say that the run was to help us build up our stamina and maintain a certain level of fitness, so we could sprint around for eighty minutes during rugby matches. But in my humble opinion, it was because the teachers were feeling lazy and/or sadistic that day.
I would have been a little more tolerant of the run today if I had been doing it along with one of my close friends — Sam, Baz, Rory, Marvin, Rob or Carson. I had set off early, however, changing into my sports kit straight after lunch. I just wanted to get it over and done with.
Two things were almost guaranteed to happen during these runs. The first, that even before I was halfway done, I would hear of how one of the incredibly athletic African boys at the school was already finished. Desperately out of breath and wishing I could be finished at that point, too, I would trudge on through the wind and the rain, climbing the hills and dodging the holes, imagining the guy reclining in his room with a magazine, having barely even broken a sweat.
The second thing that would happen is that one of the sixth formers would choose to vent whatever pent-up rage that was afflicting them (hormones, stress, general sexual frustration) on one of the unfortunate younger boys they met along the way. A swift and not so discreet punch in the guts would be the norm, the older boys knowing that there would be no repercussions from the assault. Not that this happened to me any more, thankfully. I was almost sixteen, tall and able to handle myself better than when I had been thirteen and simply forced to shut up and lump it. Not that even now I would still hit a sixth former back if they did choose to attack me; I wasn’t that stupid.
There was no getting out of the runs, either. One of the sports teachers (usually Mr Edmunds, well-known for his bad breath and poor sense of humour) would be sitting at the end of the road in his car, along with a clipboard and pen, to tick off the names of the boys as they arrived. If it was raining, which it often was in good old England, he would be sitting with a smug look on his face and pouring out some hot coffee from a Thermos flask, making a point of displaying his comfort to us as we arrived. Not having your name ticked off would usually result in detention, essay writing, or possibly something worse depending on how much the teacher in question disliked you.
Still, the runs had their upsides. Sometimes the less-fit teachers would come tramping along the Road with us. I was never sure whether that was for their own benefit, to keep an eye on us, or just to provide us with some extra motivation, but I always enjoyed watching them get a stitch and have to pull up and stop, taking some time out to ease their aching sides.
But at this moment, the person pulling over was me. I had caught sight of the dead boy’s hand as I had turned a bend. It was fairly well hidden, easy to miss if you gave it just a glance, as I suspect all the other boys running ahead of me had done. At first, I thought it was someone hiding. Then, after further investigation, I discovered otherwise. The boy’s dead, unblinking eyes stared out from the bushes at me as I came closer, his face, hands, arms, and body extremely pale. He was naked, whomever had left him here having stripped him before dumping the body.
My stomach lurched, and I felt as though I was going to vomit. I did so as soon as I saw a fly land on the boy’s face and casually walk around it, before disappearing up one of his nostrils. I cast frantically about as my half-digested lunch shot up my throat and splattered all over the ground, seeing Mr Rod, housemaster of Martin, jogging along the road towards me.
His expression was initially one of mild concern, laced with humour. I was sure he wouldn’t be laughing in a moment.
“Are you okay, Joe?” he asked, stopping alongside me and rubbing me on the back.
“Sir ...” I said, spitting particles of food and bile from my mouth and pointing to the bushes.
“What’s that ...?” Mr Rod began, before giving a start. He didn’t investigate for very long and immediately began instructing me to tell everyone coming our way to turn around and head back to the school, no questions asked. Just say there had been an incident, he told me.
“Make sure you get word to the prefects to ensure everyone goes back,” he added, “but send a couple of them this way.”
“Do you want me to tell the headmaster?” I asked, spitting the remainder of the vomit from my mouth and wishing I had some water to hand.
“No, just get back to the school and don’t say anything. Understood?” Mr Rod said.
“Okay,” I replied and started back the other way. It was the shortest run of the Road I had ever done. Likely, I had even beaten one of the African boys this time.
~ ~ ~
The assembly hall was packed, all five hundred boys crammed inside. I had rarely ever seen it this full, and there was barely enough room for all of us. We sat in our houses, a raft of black suits and multicoloured ties for the senior school covering the vast majority of the seats, while bright blue blazers filled what chairs were available to those in the junior school. There weren’t nearly enough seats for everyone, many of the juniors being made to stand. They lined the walls closer to the front, skinny white legs exposed in shorts. I recalled shivering during the winter months in those and was grateful that I was no longer forced to wear them, trousers being part of the uniform in the senior school.
“Crotty saw it.”
I heard my nickname mentioned and leaned forward to look down the line of boys seated on the same row as me. Anthony Simmons, Charlie Smith
and Daniel Rye were whispering together.
Although in the same house as me, they weren’t three people that I usually had a great deal to do with. They were part of the exclusive third-year “Clique” that numbered around twenty, made up of boys from the five different houses. In the main, those in the Clique would only ever speak to me if they wanted something or had heard some disparaging rumour either about me or one of my close friends. In those cases, it would either be to rile me about it or seek further information. The whispering continued for a time, before all three turned in my direction.
“Oi, Joe,” Simmons hissed.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Did you see the body?”
I nodded.
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged.
“What year?” Smith interjected as Simmons made to ask another question.
“I think he was from the junior school,” I said, glancing in the direction of the skinny white pins. “They looked like it.”
“How do you know?” Smith asked, somewhat incredulously.
What’s with the bloody interrogation? I wondered. “Because he looked about ten.”
“How cou—” Rye started.
“What uniform was he wearing?” Simmons interrupted.
“He wasn’t wearing one,” I admitted, catching the eyes of other boys who had turned in their seats to focus on me. “He wasn’t wearing anything.”
“He was naked? Gross!” Rye said, scowling. “Was he—”
“Oi, shut the fuck up, Ben,” Simmons glared at him. “Do you know what happened to him? Was he covered in blood?” he asked, looking back to me.
Good question. To be honest, I hadn’t actually noticed; I was too busy being sick. I couldn’t recall having seen any blood or anything like that on him, so he could well have been hit by a car for all I knew. The real question was what he was doing all the way out there.
I told the three inquisitive boys as much as I knew, and they mulled the information over.
“You don’t know anything else?” Simmons demanded, sounding a little annoyed that he wasn’t about to become privy to exclusive information ahead of time.
“No,” I said.
“Well, you’re no fucking use, are you?” The three turned back to discussing things between themselves.
“Joe, you saw it?” Sam, sitting next to me, asked.
I nodded. As per Mr Rod’s instruction, I hadn’t told anyone of what I had seen and was only now admitting it, having been outed by the Clique. I had denied all knowledge of it to those who shared my dormitory.
“What happened?” Sam asked.
I didn’t have time to answer, as the headmaster was coming in through the tall doors at the rear of the hall. We all fell silent and rose from our seats, as was expected of us whenever the headmaster entered a room. He said nothing as he proceeded down the central aisle and up to the podium at the front.
St Christopher’s, as with so many other boarding and prep schools of its ilk in the South East of England, had been founded on the grounds of a monastery. In the past, the school had been staffed almost exclusively by monks. These days, the monastery’s influenced had waned somewhat, and the teaching staff now came from a variety of different backgrounds.
There were still a number of hangovers from the past, however, with many of the more senior positions being held by monks or chaplains; the position of the headmaster always held by a member of the clergy, in this case a monk named Father Benedict. It had often surprised me that for all the authority and power the man held, he was very placid and easy to talk to. It was rumoured, however, that though he was a patient man, he had been the type to happily throw a school-wide blanket punishment, should he feel the need to. These usually only happened under extreme circumstances and usually involved no talking at meal times, in our houses or in the classroom block, an early lights out, and no privileges (meaning that the tuck shop, arcade machines, TVs and all else were off limits). Thankfully, this had not yet happened during my six years of attendance.
“Please be seated,” Father Benedict said. “I’ll keep this brief.”
And so he did. Following on from the discovery of the body on the Red Road, the school was to be closed for at least the next seven days, while the police conducted their investigation. The body was that of a first-year junior school boy named Scott Parker, who had actually disappeared the previous night.
I could tell that Father Benedict was loath to suggest that the boy had been snatched from his dorm and murdered, but it was obvious that that was what everyone was thinking. Having seen the body for myself, it was clear to me that that had been his fate. No blood, though. Perhaps he had been strangled.
Ever since my sighting, the school had been busying itself in calling all of our parents, to have us taken home as soon as possible. We were all, following this assembly, to go back to our dormitories and wait for our families to come and get us. The school should be completely vacated by the following evening, at the latest. For those boys that couldn’t easily get home because they either lived abroad or their parents were not immediately available, another of the boys’ families would be requested to look after them.
“Joe,” Sam whispered in my ear almost immediately, “can I stay with you?”
“Should be able to, so long as I can persuade my parents. They’re away on a business trip at the moment.”
“Oh. When are they back?”
“Tonight,” I said. “I expect they’ll come here straight from Gatwick. I’ll talk to Mr Somers and get him to explain things. He’s got the number of their offices in Geneva.”
“Cool, thanks,” Sam nodded.
We returned our attention to the headmaster who continued talking for a while, letting us know that letters would be posted out in the next couple of days giving our parents more information on what was going to happen.
I saw the matron of the junior school move from her place and pick one of the younger boys up out of his seat as the headmaster started to wrap things up. I thought that I had heard him sniffling earlier and saw as the two walked from the assembly hall that he was sobbing quite profusely.
Was he related to the victim? I wondered. Or was what had happened just very upsetting for him? If this was his first time away from home, then I could well understand. Many first-year junior boys cried a lot with homesickness. For them, today would have been even more traumatising. It wouldn’t have surprised me if, after today, some didn’t come back.
Father Benedict concluded the assembly a few minutes later, asking anyone who might have problems leaving the school that night to talk to their housemaster. I wondered how this might affect me if for some reason my parents were delayed or chose to stay out of a country for longer than originally planned.
I didn’t relish the thought of being left nearly alone in the school after everyone else had gone. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that tonight I would be treated to a long overdue visit from the goblins.
Chapter Two
In recent years, I had started to suffer the most horrific nightmares, in which I was tormented by a recurring image of being chased down a dark corridor by hoards of stunted, spear-wielding goblins. Or, at least, ‘goblins’ was what I called them. To tell the truth, I wasn’t really sure what they were. Whenever I encountered them in my dreams, they always appeared the same – glowing white faces, sharp, pointy, yellow teeth, sticky-out ears, and murderous black, pupilless eyes. They would laugh and lash their tongues when they saw me, howling in delight ...
... and, damn, could these things run.
I wasn’t sure what caused the nightmares. Maybe it was a hormone imbalance, puberty, stress, or something else. All I could be sure of was that the dreams always started out the same way. I would find myself standing in a narrow, white corridor, like those of Enfield and Cookson House. The lights would be on, but far dimmer than they should be, and I would be stood about halfway along, with several doors to my left-hand s
ide. Where the doors led depended on what the nightmare had in store for me that night. Most often, like the windows on the right, the doors would be locked. I had tried many times to open those windows, sometimes unable to even reach them, so high up they would be placed.
It would be silent, save for the soft splatting sound of the goblins’ feet as they approached from around the bend in the corridor ahead of me. The slapping would be followed by elongated shadows of hands and arms, clutching spears and other terrible implements. Heads, with hooked noses and long ears, came next until the first of the creatures rounded the corner. They would charge instantly towards me with bloodcurdling screams, wasting no time at all. It was as if they could smell me from miles away.
At that moment, I would always attempt to do one of two things – either try and find a place to hide, or run. Hiding never worked. Either the doors to the left would remain shut tight, and the goblins would immediately dive on me, biting, scratching, stabbing, eviscerating ... or the doors would open, only to offer no sanctuary.
The interior of the room the door opened into was inconsistent between dreams. Sometimes it was a dormitory, vacant, save for bare mattresses set upon metal beds, bedside lockers beside each. At other times the door led into one of the school’s classrooms. On one occasion it was a poky little library. Most of the time, I would run into a room already populated by the sharp-toothed stumpy creatures, who would be waiting for me within.
I would try to barricade the room whenever I could and hide under the beds, or even get inside the bedside lockers themselves. It made no difference; the goblins would always get in eventually. The door would burst open, dozens of the pale-white creatures pouring in and starting to stab me with their little spears and knives. I would crawl into the corner, begging them for mercy and pleading with them to stop, but they never did.
The Red Road Page 1