The Perils and Dangers of this Night

by Stephen Gregory

  Heaving for breath, Kemp ducked into the library and hid, futilely, between the tall bookcases. I hid with him. There was a curious shuffling footfall in the corridor overhead. For some reason, Pryce and the hapless girl were lurching in and out of the darkened dormitories. We heard a lift come down. When the headmaster snagged the wheelchair on a protruding shelf, I watched him stop and hold his breath as Pryce's crowing voice sounded just inches from where we were hiding – Are you there, Dr Kemp, are you there? – and a sinister cooing seemed to echo and hum through the house, up and down the lift shafts, along the corridors, everywhere – Alan, where are you? Upstairs, downstairs, where are you, Alan . . .?

  The house was full of Martin Pryce.

  My head pounded with the dread of turning a corner and confronting him, Pryce with the gun, Pryce with the piano string. And the house, which had become so familiar for all the years I'd been there, was suddenly a baffling and infuriating maze. I was filled with an insane anger at the house itself, as I moved in the wake of the terrified headmaster and saw it thwarting him with its maddening jumble, its angles and corners which caught him and jabbed him as he tried to steer past: the ramps which sapped his failing strength as he struggled up them and careered down; the lifts, one at each end of the building, with their clanking gates, their cables and cogs and wheels, going up and down from the bottom to the top of the house as Pryce toyed with them to confuse and exhaust his victims – so that the whole thing was a nonsensical game of snakes and ladders.

  Foxwood Manor was a maze: a dark, cold, unfriendly maze of shabby rooms and dusty corridors. It flooded me with hatred and bitterness. And, worse somehow, an overwhelming boredom for all the time I'd been a prisoner there.

  Dr Kemp leaned with all his strength on the wheels of the chair. His hands and the wheels gleamed with blood. He propelled himself closer to the hall. And as he came closer to his wife and sped towards the light at the end of the corridor, I felt my bitterness fall away – as I realised it was the chair I hated, not the house, and my heart ached with pity for Mrs Kemp, for all the years she'd endured it.

  The headmaster reached the hall, peered in and saw his wife lying beside the fire.

  Pryce and Sophie were at the top of the great staircase. They started to stumble down. Pryce was saying, 'Come on Sophie, this'll make it a bit more fun . . .' With a curse, as Pryce half-dragged and half-carried the girl down the last few steps, Dr Kemp could do nothing except spin the chair and accelerate as hard as he could, back into the corridor.

  I hid and watched as Pryce lugged Sophie across the hall.

  She was tight-lipped, her face white with anger and fear. She'd given up struggling against him, and just hobbled wherever he took her. Now he dragged her past the table and its wreckage of a Christmas feast, stepped over the body of the headmaster's wife as though she were no more than a heap of rubbish, and lifted the lid of the record player.

  'This'll do it,' he said.

  He took off the long-playing record that was on the turntable – Fauré's Requiem – and dropped it onto the nearest armchair, and I saw him tug out the little black disc of a 45 from under his shirt. He dropped it onto the turntable, changed the speed, stood back. And even from where I was watching, in the dusty black mouth of the corridor, I could hear the needle settle onto the vinyl, nestle into the groove. Pryce adjusted the volume to maximum, so that the crackle and hiss were loud in the expectant room.

  'Oh yeah, this should do the trick,' he murmured.

  Kemp had raced back to the lift and wheeled himself inside. I heard the lift go up and up, past the first floor corridor, past the second. Towards the attic.

  I ran. We ran. For the ghost-boy, the dream-boy was still with me, in a waft of cold air which made my scalp tingle and my palms itch. With my eyes closed, I flew up the stairs to the first floor, knowing every step, every creak in the floorboards, every chip in the paint, feeling with my fingers up and up and onwards to the second floor, in a house so dark and blank and yet so much a part of me that when I swerved to a halt on the corridor near my own dormitory I knew there'd be a little forbidden door in front of me, with a little forbidden handle on it, and a sign that said: forbidden to boys . . .

  The attic. I'd never been up there.

  I opened the door and flung myself inside, pulling the door shut behind me and scrambling blindly up and up a narrow staircase until my head banged onto a trapdoor. I flopped down, panting, heaving, lost in a pitchy darkness.

  Through the noise of my own breathing, I heard the hiss of the wheels of the wheelchair over my head.

  Kemp had taken the lift to the attic. He must have yanked open the door and thrust himself out, just as the music blared.

  Music? The jagged chords of 'You really got me . . .' were so loud in the great hall that they tore into the lift shafts and corridors and filled every space in the old house. And I could hear Pryce yelling at the top of his voice – Can you hear this, Dr Kemp? Music is the life of the school! It runs through the building!

  As the record turned, the noise built in and built a stealthy momentum, growing in volume and intensity. I could hear Kemp shouting too, as though he were grinding his teeth and shouting for the only means of help he could think of. 'Scott! Where the devil are you? Are you there, for God's sake?'

  Huddled in my safe, secret place, in the staircase only a few feet away from the headmaster, I was as astounded as Kemp to hear this music pounding through the building; astonished to hear something so appallingly, so marvellously raucous stirring the dust and cobwebs of Foxwood Manor.

  Pryce's shrilly manic voice came to me from somewhere far below. Kemp was calling me from up in the attic. I pushed with all my strength on the trapdoor above my head and felt the weight of something on top of it, until it opened just a little. I peered inside.

  It looked as though the headmaster had given up shouting for me. Galvanised into action by the savagery of the noise that was blasting through the building, he heaved himself out of the wheelchair. He'd seen from the movement of its cables that the other lift was coming up. I saw him stumbling along the attic, treading onto piled-up junk, ducking through a line of old clothes; I heard him gritting his teeth and growling to himself, 'Where is it? Where is the wretched thing?' – and then he was fumbling into the highest, darkest corner, reaching up to a fuse box and struggling to pull it open.

  The lift was clanking up and up. He knew that Pryce was in it.

  Pryce and Sophie were coming up to the attic. I could picture Pryce, with the gun in one hand, his other arm around Sophie's waist, as he yelled the lines of the song – you really got me now, you got me so I don't know what I'm doing, oh yeah you really got me now, you got me so I can't sleep at night . . .

  The lift was almost at the second floor when the lights went out. It jerked to a halt. The music slurred horribly and stopped.

  The entire house was in darkness. And silence. Only an eerie creaking as the lift dangled and swayed in the shaft. Then I heard Pryce say, 'What the fuck?'

  Kemp had thrown the mains switch, turning off all the power in the house.

  Now he felt his way back through the shadows of the attic, and he collapsed heavily into the wheelchair. Only the cloudiest of moonbeams fell through a snow-covered skylight in the roof, enough for me to see a gleam of tears in his eyes, tears of relief that the noise had stopped and even a twist of a smile on his lips, a moment of triumph, as he heard Pryce calling from inside the stranded lift, 'Hey, Kemp, what are you playing at? Are you up there, Kemp?'

  There was a tiny tremor of panic in the young man's voice. Kemp buried his face in his hands, careless that they were sticky with blood and cobwebs, and squeezed his eyes shut.

  I forced the trapdoor open further, shoving aside whatever had been weighing it down, and popped my head out of the staircase, like a marmot emerging from its burrow.

  I'd never seen the attic before. Watching the headmaster earlier had given me no sense of its size: a great tunnel of roof space a
lmost as long as the house, cluttered with papers and books and crates and trunks, the jumble that a country prep-school might accumulate and then discard over three or four decades. A long rack of clothes on hangers swayed in the darkness like a queue of faceless people.

  I blinked into the gloom, turning towards the headmaster hunched in the wheelchair. I was puzzled, then alarmed, to see that the chair was rolling towards me.

  'Dr Kemp? Sir?'

  The wheelchair gathered speed. The headmaster, rubbing at the tension in his forehead, hadn't felt the wheels turn beneath his weight as he'd flopped back into it. The chair swivelled, silent and smooth on the warp of the ancient floorboards. It moved faster towards the hole in the attic floor: the hole from which I'd just emerged.

  I cried out again, 'Sir! Dr Kemp!' and he opened his eyes and turned, too late, to see where he was heading.

  Above him, the snow-encrusted skylight whirled like a giddy moth. Disoriented, weak from loss of blood, he wrenched at the wheels but could do nothing to control himself. And I couldn't possibly have stopped it, couldn't have countered the force of a thirteen-stone man swooping towards me. I ducked away and threw myself back down the stairs, as far as I could go.

  Just in time. The man and the chair crashed into the stairwell, overturned, banged down and down and down with a series of sickening jolts and suddenly jammed.

  Kemp was stuck there, somehow wedged into the narrow space. He groaned, badly hurt by the fall, 'My God my God oh God help me . . .' The chair had capsized. He was hanging half out of it, upside down, both his arms somehow pinioned at his sides, his head and shoulders dangling into the stairwell.

  I cowered at the bottom of the stairs. Looking up, all I could see was blackness and the bulk of the man and the chair hopelessly plugged into the hole.

  'Scott, are you there? Help me, for God's sake, help me get out of here.'

  'I'm here, sir, I'm down here.' I felt my way up the steps until I was just below the wreckage. 'I can't . . .'

  'You'll have to get through, somehow! You'll have to get past me and pull me out!'

  For a split second, it was almost funny. There was a glimmer of farce. But then something happened, so awful that the whole house felt the horror of it.

  As the man hung upside down above my head, dangling with all his weight, we both heard the softest, gentlest whisper of a sound – like the tearing of silk. He said, 'Oh God,' because he must have felt it as well as hearing it. The weight of his body was opening the wound. He couldn't staunch it with his hands, because his arms were trapped – and suddenly, unstoppably, the blood welled into his trousers until it spattered and dripped onto the stairs and intomy face.

  He started to cry. He said, 'Oh God,' again, his face wrinkling and he started blubbing oh god oh god oh god in a little girl's voice, and his mouth and nose were full of uncontrollable tears.

  The blood from his trousers came faster and hotter. No longer a spatter but a steady trickle. He began to squeal.

  I gaped up at him, my headmaster, my Dr Kemp. A pig, hanging in an abattoir. Squealing. Bleeding. A piglet on a hook, ready for slaughter.

  I heard myself saying please Dr Kemp please sir don't sir . . . but the noise of it cut through my words and all the surrounding silence. It was a sick, shameful noise, and it grew louder and more dinning, quite unearthly, the cries of a dying animal from the mouth of a middle-aged man in a tweed jacket and a shirt and tie.

  Tie. I lunged up towards him, grabbed his tie and started to force it between his teeth.

  Unable to free his arms, he snarled and snapped at me, trying to fend me off. Please sir please stop sir please stop stop stop I was shouting into the horrid twisted piggy-face, and I stuffed in the tie, timing it as he snatched a breath to carry on squealing. He gargled and gagged and blubbered and I forced more and more of the tie into his mouth and silenced him.

  Until he just hung there, whimpering. He stopped wriggling, his breath calmed as he inhaled through his nose, and the trickle of blood from his groin slowed and stopped.

  A silence. I lay on the stairs and listened to it.

  FOURTEEN

  Ten o'clock on Christmas Eve. The whole place, and everybody and everything in it, had stopped dead, as though it were gripped and seized by the deadening cold.

  Foxwood Manor, cut off from the world by miles of woodland and deep snow; no telephone, no electricity.

  Pryce and Sophie, uninvited, unwanted guests, prisoners in a cage in a cobwebby shaft.

  Dr Kemp, hanging in a narrow staircase, half-in and half-out of a wheelchair, with his own tie stuffed into his mouth. Me, a blood-spattered twelve-year-old boy, huddling beneath him.

  Mrs Kemp, dying in front of the fire in the great hall.

  In one of the stables, a crash-landed, convalescent crow; in another, a splendid, useless car.

  Outside, an eighteen-year-old labrador, frazzled to death and already buried under the cold cold lawn.

  No one was going anywhere.

  'Kemp? Alan? What the fuck's happening up there? What are you doing?' Pryce shouted suddenly.

  His voice sounded very loud and close in the deadened building, although he and the girl were still encaged in the lift. It stirred me and the headmaster alive again. I clambered up to him and pushed with all my strength to force myself past the wreckage. I snaked one of my arms through and wriggled past the man's body, feeling the frame of the chair chafing the skin on my belly as my shirt rode up. At the same time, Kemp found one of his hands was free and, retching hoarsely, pulled the tie out of his mouth.

  The voice came again. 'Alan, are you with me and Sophie? You aren't afraid of Kemp any more, you can get us out of here!'

  Then Sophie, chiming clearly. 'Alan, you've got to help Mrs Kemp!'

  There was a gasp, as though Pryce had wrenched her into silence. He shouted, 'Your wife's dying, Kemp! You shot her, remember? Turn the power on and you can go down in the lift! It's the only way! Don't you want to see her again? Don't you want to say goodbye before she dies?'

  Kemp had managed to find some leverage and pushed at me with all his might. His bloody, sticky hand slid on my thigh, then found a place on my belly to shove and shove. I heard myself cry out, the chair cutting into me, but still I writhed upwards, inch by inch. Kemp was grunting, 'You can do it, Alan, you're there, you're there . . .' and he found a breath to shout, 'The boy's with me, Pryce! He'll get me out, you murderer!'

  Pryce yelled back. 'I didn't shoot her! You did!'

  The defiance in his voice faltered slightly. There was a tiny wobble of petulance. It was unmistakable, the sound of it, and the sense that his arrogant power was slipping. When he shouted again, there was a shriller note of desperation like the squalling of a spoilt child. 'Alan, leave the old man and do what I tell you to do! Didn't you hear what happened to my darling brother? Is that you, now? Are you Kemp's little darling? Has he got his dirty hands on you, like he did with Jeremy?'

  Kemp was still pushing me. I'd reached through and grabbed a banister, something to pull on, to squeeze myself through, and the man's fingers were rough on my bare skin. At last I wriggled past and up, through the trapdoor and into the attic.

  Pryce was ranting. 'Is he touching you now? Are you his little Dolly Boy? You're a tease, aren't you Alan, letting him touch you, making him do it – his darling Dolly Boy . . .'

  I crossed the attic to the lift shaft and peered down. There was a dim yellow glow, some kind of emergency light that had come on when the mains power had been switched off. And I could see obliquely into the lift itself, which had jammed to a halt just a few feet below me.

  Pryce was staring up the shaft. He was pasty-faced, his long hair damp with sweat. And he saw me. Before I could step back from the shaft, he caught the movement of my body and his eyes met mine.

  'Dolly Boy!' he hissed.

  All of his bitterness towards Kemp, the jealousy of his brother, all of the bile inside him he spat towards me. His voice was poisonous, and at the same time
I could just see Sophie's hand, her arm around his waist, stealing closer to the trigger of the gun.

  'A good name for Jeremy and a good name for you – and it was my idea, for Kemp's fucking angel with perfect fucking pitch – and I made sure it stuck. It was me. I hated him and I hate you Alan you fucking Dolly Boy you . . .'

  The gun went off.

  The report was sharp and very loud, amplified in the lift shaft. As the echo faded, Pryce said very softly, 'What've you done, Sophie?' He dropped the gun and the box of cartridges, and he slid to the floor.

  He clutched his left foot. There was a blackened, smouldering bullet hole in his boot and blood was welling out. He whispered, 'Why is everyone fucking shooting each other?'

  Sophie kicked the gun to the opposite corner of the lift. While he was stunned by the impact, still in shock, she knelt beside him and deftly unwound the piano string from their ankles. I heard her heaving as hard as she could on the lift door, until she wrenched it open. The lift had stopped just above the second floor: there was a nine-inch gap. Ignoring Pryce, who was wheedling at her, 'Help me, Sophie, hey help me!' she skidded the gun across the floor and through the gap and it fell with a clatter to the corridor below.

  And then she was out of my field of vision, out of the crack of light I could see down the shaft and into the lift. But the wires trembled, the cage swaying with the force of her little body as she struggled to push herself through the gap and out. I saw Pryce roll after her, the slick of blood he left behind, and he was begging, 'Hey Sophie Sophie . . .' as he tried to prevent her escape. But his hands were hot and slippery from the wound in his foot. The lift shuddered – and there was a thud as the girl, wriggling like a fish away from his grasp, squeezed out and landed with a thud on the second-floor corridor.

  Pryce was mad. I could just make out the writhing of his body and see him forcing his head into the gap she'd slipped through. It was too small, but he forced his head into it. And he roared, like a medieval madman with his head in the stocks, 'You'll never get out Sophie you'll never get out Jesus I'm fucking stuck help me Sophie help me you're no fucking angel Sophie for fuck's sake help me . . .'