The Perils and Dangers of this Night

by Stephen Gregory

  I looked long and hard at the dead headmaster's face. The features, which had seized so grotesquely as he'd struggled to breathe, had now softened. His eyes were closed, and there was a dribble of blood from his lips. In repose, he was just a shabby, middle-aged man, bundled awkwardly in his shirt and tie and tweed jacket, grey flannels and suede shoes. His hair needed cutting: it was greasy, and where it fell over his collar there were flecks of dandruff. There were tufts of bristle in his ears and nostrils, his nose was red, his cheeks were marbled with veins, and a fine white stubble covered his chin. In the left eyebrow, there was a scar almost an inch long, perhaps from a childhood accident or sporting injury, which I'd never noticed before.

  Staring at him, I realised I'd never looked so closely, through all the years I'd been a boy at Foxwood.

  I picked up his right hand; inexplicably, I wanted to touch him, to be touched by him. This was the hand that had held a little cane and swished it sharply onto my backside. It had wielded a wooden clothes-brush and smacked it on my buttocks. With these fingers, now tacky with blood, he'd rapped my knuckles with the ivory baton, as I'd tried my best to sing in tune or to master my scales on the piano. I picked up his left hand, where two of the fingers were curled hard into the palm, an injury which all the boys had noticed and never dared mention, a secret he'd only divulged to his most precious pupils – to me, who'd been precious to him. Somehow amazed, oddly moved, I examined the hands of this man I'd often feared, sometimes hated, but whom I'd never really seen before: Dr Kemp, headmaster of Foxwood Manor School, deceased.

  As the body sagged, as the last of the life drained from it, we knelt in the silence and knew that he was dead.

  Sophie appraised the figure in the wheelchair. She ran her eyes from the long dark hair which hid the face, over the lean body which was so twisted and still; the long legs, bent on either side of the dead headmaster; the bare left foot, mottled purple.

  She bent closer and touched the foot. Ice cold. No wound. The stink of death.

  She recoiled sharply. We both turned and stared across to the piano, as Martin Pryce stepped from behind it.

  'You as well, Sophie? Can't you tell us apart?'

  She turned back to the man she'd shot, whose hands were so black, whose face beneath the flopping hair was swollen and black. She saw the glint of the wire in his throat. She recoiled in horror and disgust. She looked from the dead, cold Jeremy to the living, bloodied Martin Pryce.

  'You wanted to kill me,' he whispered. 'Hard to believe.' With a couple of lurching hops, he covered the distance between himself and the girl. Before she could get to her feet, he grabbed her arm and yanked her to him. 'We're in this together, Sophie, we always have been . . .'

  She writhed away from him, but he was too strong. He lugged her to his chest and squeezed her to him, so hard that she could barely breathe. 'I love you, Sophie, and you love me, remember? That's what got us into all this . . .'

  She squirmed in his arms, flailing at his face with bloody fingers. 'No, I never loved you! Maybe I could've loved Jeremy! And so you killed him! I hate . . .'

  There was a horrible groan. The dead headmaster, who'd been propped against the legs of the dead Jeremy, now slid to the floor. The air in his lungs was forced out in a gurgling sigh, and, as he flopped onto his side and his head bumped hard on the floor, a bubble of bloody mucus the size of a golf-ball formed at his lips and then popped.

  We all stared. And Sophie stamped as hard as she could onto Pryce's left foot.

  She broke away from him. He raged at the pain and clutched the blackened wound. He yelled after us, me and Sophie, as we fled across the hall, 'You can't get away! There's nowhere to go!' But we slipped into the shadows of the corridor.

  Sophie disappeared ahead of me. I could hear her in the distance, as far away as she could get from the horrors in the great hall. An awful sound – not weeping, not retching, but the whimpering of a wretchedly wounded animal. The misery of someone destroyed by the mess of her life.

  Pryce hobbled to the dining-table. I watched, as I'd done before, indeed as I'd been watching him since he and Sophie had arrived at Foxwood Manor. He tried to muster a few drops of wine from the bottle and glasses. He licked out the dregs.

  He bent to Kemp and sat him upright, leaning him against the armchair on which Mrs Kemp was sitting. He took her left hand and the headmaster's right, and twined their fingers together. In this way, husband and wife were joined.

  The fire had almost gone out. He built a scaffold of holly twigs on the embers. They caught immediately, so dry from waiting their turn at the side of the hearth. Onto the new blaze he leaned some bigger pieces of wood and watched as yellow and blue flames licked around them.

  Click-click-click – the record was still spinning on the turntable, the needle riding an endless groove.

  He moved to it and picked up the needle. He was about to drop it again when he paused, with an expression of the greatest disgust on his face, snatched up the 45 and tossed it onto the fire. Immediately it folded into the flames.

  He picked up the long-playing record which had slipped off an armchair and onto the floor, blew off the dog hairs and placed it on the turntable. The needle hissed and crackled, and then the music started.

  Lovely beyond words, the first haunting melody of Fauré's Requiem filled the hall. Pryce fell to his knees on the hearth rug, and his face was twisted, tormented, as he looked at the crumpled figure of his dead brother, at the dead headmaster and his dead wife sitting hand in hand and strangely serene. The music swelled around him, so strong and sure, so human, so alive.

  He stared into the flames, where the molten black plastic fizzled and flared, and he wept. Hot, uncontrollable tears ran down his cheeks and into the corners of his mouth.

  SEVENTEEN

  I searched the house for Sophie and found her at last. Like a dying animal, fatally poisoned and wracked with pain, she'd crawled into a dark corner and huddled there.

  She was in my bed, in the furthest corner of the highest dormitory. When I tiptoed into the room and whispered for her, I made out the mound of her body under my blankets, with her face to the wall. I heard her laboured breathing and came closer, and she shuddered at my touch on her shoulder, thinking that at last Pryce had come for her. But when she knew it was me, her body eased. She didn't move, she didn't turn towards me, she just exhaled long and slowly and whispered something into the pillow. I bent to catch what she was saying. She was almost too exhausted to speak, enmeshed in the fear and horror of what had happened, of what might yet happen, but she whispered again, 'Hold onto me, please, just hold on . . .'

  I kicked off my shoes and slipped under the blankets. When I wrapped my arms around her, her body seemed to melt. She wept like a child.

  Slowly her sobbing subsided. She fell into a stupefied sleep, the only hiding place she could find.

  The music continued. As Pryce had said, it crept up the stairs from the great hall, crawled along the corridor and slithered under the door of the dormitory. I thought I could feel it coiling itself under my bed. And yet it was so familiar, so much the sound of an ordinary bedtime at Foxwood Manor, that somehow it smudged and blurred the reality of the nightmare that Pryce had brought with him. Or maybe it was the comfort of lying so close to the warm body of the girl. I felt myself drifting asleep . . .

  And the boy came to me.

  He stood in the doorway of the dormitory, dressed like me in grey pullover and grey corduroy shorts. And yet, framed in the darkness of the corridor, he had a kind of gleam on him. His face was pale, the glow of a mushroom pushing its head from the soil of a forest, and his black hair was shining. Spectral, he beckoned to me. I slipped out of bed, careful not to disturb the girl, and followed him.

  Along the corridor, down the stairs and into the hall. Without a glance to left or right, he crossed to the front door and paused for me to join him there. His hand was cool and dry in mine as he took me through the door and outside.

  The sn
ow had stopped. The woodland lay still and hushed, a pristine world. The trees swayed and groaned, and as they moved they shifted the weight of the snow and showered it onto the ground below. As the blizzard had died, the clouds had frayed and torn until the last tatters had blown away, and now the sky was perfectly clear. A gibbous moon had dipped to the horizon, leaving a swirl of stars.

  There was a movement in the pool of shadow beneath the copper beech, and Wagner padded across the lawn towards us. He was wagging his whole barrel-shaped body, so pleased to see us, and when he lifted his face to my hands and then to the boy's his teeth chattered with joy.

  I followed the boy and the dog into the woods. He meant me to see everything. So far I'd missed nothing: with my own eyes I'd witnessed every turn of the action, peeping and peering, pursuing, shadowing, recording every move of everybody on the screen of my mind. And now the boy had come for me, in my sleep – not to wake me, but to show me in a dream – so that I would see for myself the unfolding of the story.

  A mile from the school, a man was sleeping. He lay inside an old caravan, beneath the bare boughs of an oak tree. The caravan was covered with a deep layer of snow; all the angles and corners had been softly rounded so that it looked like a huge boulder, or a barrow that men had made hundreds of years ago, an ancient piece of the forest. There was a little window, minutely ajar, but no light from inside it.

  The boy gestured me to the window. I smudged at the frost on it and looked in.

  Roly stirred under a mound of blankets. He was completely covered, even his head buried. It looked, in the shadows of the jumbled little space, more like the den of a bear than the habitation of a human being, and through a crack in the window I caught the smell of stale bedding, unwashed clothes and an unwashed body.

  I willed him to wake up.

  Roly pushed his head up, twitching his nose like a ferret. He blinked, scratched his tousled grey hair and he listened.

  He knew the sounds of the forest. He'd lived in the woods for years, given the use of the caravan and a monthly pittance by a feckless landowner. Now, he could tell that the blizzard had stopped by the unearthly silence that surrounded him, an absence of sound made more profound by the secret whispering of the trees as they shivered the snow from their branches. And something else.

  He lay there and listened until, despite the effort it took to push the warm blankets aside and get out of bed, he stood up and pulled on his trousers. His breath was white in the freezing air. He put on his shirt and a thick pullover, stomped his feet into his boots, took his old waterproof coat from the peg on the back of the door and was ready to step outside.

  And something else, he needed something else. Again I pressed my will on him, so that, as he picked up a torch and shone it around him, the beam fell on the shotgun which leaned at the side of his bed. He picked up the gun and loaded two cartridges.

  Roly trudged through the forest. He inhaled the cold, clean air, to clear his head from the fug he'd been breathing under his bedding. And we followed him, two boys and a dog, silent and unseen, for we were not a real part of his waking world. Our feet made no sound, no imprint on the snow. The sound he'd heard was a tinkling, like the splintering of ice except for its odd insistence, again and again with a shake and rattle. He waded knee-deep where the snow had banked against fallen timber, he pushed through nettle beds and bracken, and he flashed the torch into the enveloping darkness. The light gleamed back at him from the silvery columns of birch and the blackened pillars of beech and ash.

  The sound grew louder. He was getting closer.

  I willed him on, I willed him to look upwards. And when the little bells rang over his head, and he saw in his torchlight a fluttering like a piece of rag caught high in the branches of a venerable holly, he leaned the gun against the tree, switched off the torch and slipped it into his coat pocket, blew on his fingers and started to climb.

  The bark of the tree was slippery, but the branches were gnarled and knobby and easy to grip. Roly moved steadily upwards. As he climbed higher, it was harder to find places to lodge his boots, and the clustered leaves prickled at his face. Near the top, he jammed himself against the trunk and felt for the torch in his pocket. He shone it through the highest branches, an icy, brittle place, and fixed the beam on the struggling jackdaw.

  The crippled crow I'd rescued from a tangle of thorns. An imp, delivered into my care by some mischievous spirit of the forest.

  The bird had tangled its jesses, and now it was dangling hopelessly upside down. Too weak to scream, it hung there, panting, hissing, wasting its strength in futile spasms of anger as it thrashed its wings against the sharp leaves. The bells tinkled through the snow-muffled forest.

  Roly reached up to the bird. Wrapping an arm around the trunk of the tree, he pointed the torch with one hand, stretched with the other and fumbled for the jesses. But they were snagged, entangled by the jackdaw's frantic movements, and as he tried to undo them it stabbed at his hand with its beak. He leaned out as far as he dared and tried to seize the stump of its missing leg. For a moment the bird was free from the tree and righted itself, and it gripped his forefinger with the last of its strength. He swore, dropped the torch, let go of the trunk and lunged for the bird with both hands. By chance, in the darkness and cold and the flailing of wings, he found its legs with one of his hands, pulled it towards him and folded its body against his.

  I was shouting, Wagner was barking, the boy was shouting too – we could see the breath in front of our faces. But Roly couldn't hear us. None of us could warn him or do anything to help him, as his foot slipped from its precarious perch. Just as he managed to bundle the bird inside his coat and hug it close, the branch on which he'd rested his weight snapped and gave way.

  He fell sideways, away from the trunk. With a breathtaking impact, his ribs struck a bigger branch, which arrested his fall and gave him a second to grab for a handhold. The branch cracked beneath him – and from there on, he banged and crashed and slithered down and down, through the limbs of the tree, his body and his boots smashing a way from the top to the bottom.

  He landed flat on his back in a deep drift of snow.

  He lay still, and I knelt over him, searching his eyes for a flicker of movement. He groaned and stared right past me, blinking at the stars through the splintered branches. Winded, he stayed where he was and tried to regain his breath. When he felt a sudden writhing inside his coat, he sat up, shook the snow out of his hair and struggled to his feet.

  The torch was still shining where it had fallen. He picked it up, turned it off and put it in his pocket. He didn't need it. The starlight and the gleam of the snow were enough for him, and he knew every inch of the woodland. Within the warm and pungent darkness of his jacket, the bird stopped squirming – my imp, released into the woods to summon the only help there was.

  Roly took his shotgun and started the long, slow walk towards the school.

  And in my dream, I was there before him.

  Wagner had gone. On the lawn in front of the house he'd licked my hands and the boy's hands and limped into the shadows of the copper beech. He disappeared, a big black dog absorbed into a deeper blackness. Returned to the reality of death.

  I was inside the house again. Pryce had left the great hall and gone to the chapel. The music followed him – and I was with him too, a kind of dream-shadow. He'd turned up the volume as high as it would go, so that every part of the building was filled with the swelling sound, and he knew it was clear and loud in the dormitories because he'd heard it a hundred or five hundred times, and he knew that it thrummed in the lift shafts and up to the big hollow space of the attic in the very roof of the house. The music moved with Martin Pryce, comforting and warm like a cloak around his shoulders, as he limped down the corridors and past the classrooms and library and staffroom, when he started in fear at the sight of a single coat looming like the figure of a man in the shadows of the changing-room.

  He reached the chapel. The dust and cobwebs stirred
as he crossed to the vestry.

  Starlight pierced the stained-glass windows. The bell rope dangled in front of him, and for a moment he felt the smoothness of it, the grip and the sweat of all the palms of all the boys who'd tugged it. But he didn't ring the bell – although he'd done so many times in those long-ago years – because the music was so full inside him: it was all the sound he needed, all the sound he would ever need. I watched the tears run down Pryce's face, as he reached for a surplice and cassock from the pegs in the vestry.

  He tried them all and they were all too small. His frustration grew as he took one after the other and pulled it over his head, tried to force it over his shoulders and chest. Too small. Time and again, he tore off a red surplice and threw it into the corner of the room, ripped off a white cassock and tossed it aside, until, in anger and bitterness, he forced his arms through and his head and wriggled his body until he stood there, mouthing to the music through the sobs that rose into his throat – an overgrown choirboy, weeping, stuffed into a surplice and cassock he'd grown out of eight years before, illumined in a beam of starlight.

  He limped up the aisle, between the rows of pews where generations of boys and teachers and parents had sat, and he left his sticky footprints on the cold floor. He found his place in the choir-stall: not the coveted place of the head chorister, where I had sat, where Jeremy had sat, because he'd never won such distinction. He sat in the darkness of his little corner, from where he used to sit and watch his exalted brother.

  And then the music drew him back to the great hall.

  It was a tumult, full blast, so loud that it was the only sound in my dream. Even for Pryce the sounds of the real world were blanked out. Indeed, when he stepped on some broken glass with his bare foot, when he cried out and leaned so clumsily on the dining-table that a wine bottle toppled over, it was all in a kind of silence. Grimacing at the newer, even fierier pain, he hobbled to the fireside, where he lifted Mrs Kemp from her armchair and into the wheelchair.