The Perils and Dangers of this Night

by Stephen Gregory

  An oblong of golden light fell from the front of the house and far across the lawn as Pryce pulled open the front door. He let the weight of the woman in the chair tug him down the ramp and then he leaned and crunched the wheels through the snow. It was deep, unmarked by the print of any bird or beast. He manoeuvred the chair to the mound which was the only sign of Wagner's grave, and he lifted the woman out and laid her there. She sank comfortably into the snow, as though she were asleep on a feather bed.

  He went back for Kemp. It was a struggle to lug him into the wheelchair, because the man was sitting on the floor and much heavier than his wife. Then he rolled him out of the door, so fast down the ramp that he fought to control the chair in case it might tip over, and he heaved with all his strength to push it across the lawn to the copper beech. He stood beneath the branches, leaning on the handles of the chair, gagging for breath, until he was ready to pull the man out and plump him down beside his wife.

  I watched him: a gangly choirboy trussed in a red surplice and white cassock shoving a wheelchair once and then a second time across the lawn, leaving a dead woman and a dead man in the snow. I heard the lovely music, and I saw, in the light which fell from the front door of the school, the glistening of tears on the choirboy's face.

  With the utmost tenderness, Pryce lifted the body of his brother onto the chair. The body was curled like a foetus, from being brutally buckled and bent into the boot of the car – only just possible when the spare wheel had been taken out and left behind. Completely stiff, it hunched in the chair, its head almost touching its knees. Pryce wheeled swiftly to the door and down the ramp, and this time, the third time, it was easy to follow the existing tracks and roll smoothly to the graveside.

  Jeremy's body was light. He levered it out of the chair and onto the snow, beside the bodies of Dr and Mrs Kemp. And then he knelt and kissed the purpled face, the blackened fingers.

  As he did so, I felt the cold, dry fingers of the boy squeezing mine. I turned, and I saw in his eyes that there was yet one thing I must do for him, that he couldn't do for himself. It was why he'd come back.

  The music built to a marvellous climax as Pryce wielded the spade, as he drove the blade at the ground. He swung it from over his shoulder, beating and beating with an increasingly desperate and futile rhythm. It was useless. The earth was frozen. The iron of the spade hit the iron of the ground with a terrible, jarring force, and made no impression at all.

  At last the music faded. The spade clanged a few more times, until the overgrown choirboy was exhausted. Sobbing, he flung the spade down and fell to his knees.

  EIGHTEEN

  Christmas morning. It was very dark in the great hall of Foxwood Manor. The fire had gone out. Bitter cold. The door was wide open to the wintry dawn.

  Still wearing the surplice and cassock, Martin Pryce was asleep in an armchair. He looked wretched, with his head thrown back and his mouth agape. There was a welt on his cheek where the bird had torn him, and his skin was deadly pale. His hands dangled and his fingers twitched, and they were mottled white, blenched by the snow. His bare foot was scoured: all the blood was gone from it, and the gunshot wound was raw meat.

  As Roly came closer to the school he could see the tall chimneys of the house through the woodland. He trudged through the snow, which had been treacherously deep on the uneven ground of the forest, and at last, as he approached the building from the back and crossed the playing fields, he found good footing.

  He paused there, and he surveyed the tops of the beech trees beside the school. Something was different, something was missing, and for a few moments he couldn't decide what it was. And then he had it. He was often up and moving through the woods at dawn, and in the darkest days of winter he would catch the crows still roosting in the high branches: this morning there were none.

  He came behind the school. He didn't want to meet anyone, to disturb anyone, and, in any case, his business was only in the stable-yard. The jackdaw stirred inside his coat as he turned the corner and felt the cobbles under his boots, and there he stopped dead at the extraordinary sight in front of him.

  A car full of snow. Long and low and smoothly rounded, it seemed to be abandoned there; having no roof, the inside was filled with snow. The boot, wide open, was also full of snow.

  Roly squinted at the car. Where a slab of snow had slipped from its flanks, he could see that it was red, and the wheels had silvery spokes and silvery hubs. He touched the rim of the steering wheel, then recoiled and swivelled around in case anyone had seen him do so. One of the stables was open, and he could see from the tracks that the car had been pushed out of it. The snow all around was a scribble and scrawl which made no sense at all; narrow tyre marks too, and a smudge where something had been dropped and dragged, even some bare footprints tinged the softest pink.

  Roly frowned, pushed back his cap and scratched his hair. He crossed to the corner stable, pushed the door open and went in.

  The jackdaw bated as he took it out of his coat, such a whirl of screaming and thrashing that all the dust in the stable clouded around him. Quite calm, he just held its jesses and held it at arm's length, his head turned away, as though it were a firework he'd lit in his hand, showering sparks all over him. 'Be good, be good,' he whispered, and he moved across to the perch and swung the bird gently in the right direction. With the momentum of one of the swings, the jackdaw beat itself upright in mid-air and clawed at the perch, scrabbled with its claws and gripped.

  At last it stood there, chest heaving, tattered and ruffled and very angry, glaring at Roly with mad black eyes.

  He tied the jesses to the perch and stepped away. There was a wry, weasly smile on his face. 'Don't look at me like that, all huffy,' he said softly. 'I didn't do it for you, I did it for the boy, all right?'

  He picked up the shotgun and came out into the yard. As he turned the corner of the house, a great cloud of crows rose from the lawn.

  There was an enormous commotion. The birds whirled into the air in such chaos that some of them snagged in the branches of the copper beech. And then, startled that the man with the gun had suddenly appeared, they went clacking and cawing into the tops of the woodland trees, where they clamoured and slowly settled. Roly stood there and watched them, puzzled to see so many and so early, when they might have been roosting still.

  He crunched through the snow to see what they'd been doing.

  He saw the overturned wheelchair, a spade, and the marks that a spade had made on the hard ground. Mrs Kemp was lying on her back. Her hair was lovely, but she had no eyes or nose or lips: only holes in her face, where her eyes and nose had been. Her teeth were long and yellow, like a horse's, and there was a gaping wound in her throat, which surely the crows had not made. Dr Kemp lay beside her. The birds had had his eyes as well, although they'd left his nose and attacked his cheeks instead. Their beaks had gone into the flesh, broken it open and worked into the gums, pulled his tongue out sideways, through the cheek, because his teeth were so tightly clenched: yellow teeth, exposed to the roots. It looked as though, curiously, the crows had ripped his trousers and pecked into his belly: a mess of blood. And there was a third person, curled oddly into a ball and lying on his side: a stranger, a young man with long dark hair. The birds had picked off his ear, and the flesh around it was black.

  Roly stared at the three dead bodies, so grotesquely disfigured. He glanced up at the birds in the high trees, and his first reaction, in shock and disgust, was to raise his gun and . . .

  He heard a noise from the house. He lowered the barrels of the gun and turned round slowly.

  * * *

  I woke from a strange dream.

  The commotion of the crows had woken me, and I found myself lying in my bed with all my clothes on, with my arms enfolded around a sleeping girl. I rolled out of bed and pressed my face to the window. Roly was on the lawn, pointing his gun up into the trees. I rapped on the glass, and he lowered the barrels of the gun and turned round slowly.

&n
bsp; When I beckoned to him, he lifted his hand in a kind of wave and trod across the lawn. He could see from there that the front door of the house was wide open.

  'Sophie, Sophie!' I shook the girl awake. Her befuddled face turned towards me. Her cheek was striped from the pillow, her eyes wild and frightened; I could smell her mouth. 'Roly's here!' I hissed at her. 'He's come to help us!'

  She had no idea what I was saying. She didn't know who Roly was. But when she stared at me, reached out and touched my neck, there was a tiny jewel of blood on her fingertip. 'Who? What?' she said. 'What is it?'

  I spun away from her. There was no time. But as I hurtled across the dorm and out of the door, I could feel the welt around my throat and the blood welling from it, the prickling of the stripes on my palms – the stigmata of my dreams.

  I skidded to a halt on the top landing. Far below me, the hall was very dark. I tasted the air rising from it, dank and stale like the air from a cellar.

  Swallowing hard, almost gagging, I moved down to the next landing. Roly came through the front door, stepped inside and stopped. He sniffed and shuddered and exhaled: the building was deathly cold, somehow colder than the world outside. He peered into the gloom, making out the empty chairs, the gape of the hearth, a dinner table with glasses and plates and an overturned bottle. Beyond that, it was as black as a cave.

  He said softly, 'Scott, are you there?' and took another few steps. I tried to answer, couldn't. His boots crunched on broken glass. With a quiver of fear in his voice, he called towards the staircase, which curved up and up to where I was standing, 'Scott, where are you?' He started to climb.

  Silent night. Holy night. A few muffled notes from the piano. No more than a whisper in the great hall, but a whisper that made Roly stop on the stairs and turn back.

  Silent night . . . holy night . . . The first two lines, only the melody, played on muted bass keys. And then silence.

  Roly stared back into the hall. He stepped from the staircase, towards the dimly echoing darkness from which the sounds had come. 'Is that you, Scott?' he said.

  It started again, the plangent melody of the carol. A bit louder, as though the fingers on the keyboard were drawing Roly closer and closer towards the piano. 'What's happening?' he said. Glass crackled under his feet. One of his boots caught a tin cup that was lying on the floor and it clanged against the hearth. 'Scott, are you all right? I saw them outside . . .'

  I trod down to the foot of the stairs. I couldn't speak. The playing got louder. Not so lovely, the melody skewed, distorted, an ugly sound – all is calm, all is bright – played on one finger, wrongly, and then stopping.

  'Stop it,' Roly said. 'Stop it, boy, and answer me.'

  I tried to call out, to warn him, but it felt as though the wire were tightening in my throat. I could hardly breathe, my hands were fighting it and the wire was cutting my palms. Roly banged into the corner of the piano, hardly seeing its angular bulk in the shadows. He fumbled around its edges, reaching to where he thought I must be. Nothing but empty, cold air. There was no one.

  His fingers blundered onto the keyboard, startling him so much that he jumped away as though the piano had bitten him. He whirled around, sensing someone very close.

  And then he heard footsteps. He turned and saw a dim figure coming down the stairs.

  'Who's that?' he said. 'Who are you?'

  Sophie moved past me. She said in a high, clear voice, 'Thank God you're here. Please help us.'

  'Help you? I don't know . . .'

  Roly's breath was cut off. A black shape rose behind him, sudden and misshapen like some ghastly spectre conjured from inside the piano itself. It whirled a gleaming wire around his throat and pulled it tight with a terrible strength.

  Sophie cried out – No Martin no! – and flew across the hall.

  Roly grappled with the wire, one of his hands scrabbling hopelessly as it cut and cut into his flesh. In his other hand, the gun came up.

  There was a crashing detonation.

  The blast lifted the girl from her feet and flung her backwards. She landed with a sickening thud in the fireplace.

  The explosion rocked the whole house. Outside too, the crows erupted from the treetops in a panic of raggedy wings and hoarse voices. And then there was a long beat, as the report echoed and faded and a kind of silence resumed.

  Roly was gurgling, spastic, flapping his arms and legs like a puppet. Pryce dropped him onto the floor.

  'Sophie – oh Jesus, Sophie . . .'

  He lurched to the hearth, a hunchbacked creature in the half-light, still bundled in the bloodstained surplice and cassock and dragging a swollen, purpling foot. He leaned into the fireplace and embraced her.

  'Sophie, I didn't mean – I didn't want to . . . Oh Jesus, Sophie, I love you I love you please . . .'

  He held her tightly, although she was utterly limp in his arms, and buried his face in her chest. The side of her head was a welter of blood, the ear and hair scorched off. For a full minute he shuddered and sobbed with the horror of it, and the words spilled out of him, as though he himself had been burst open and everything inside was broken. 'Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and . . .'

  A shaft of light fell across him. He turned his face into it and blinked, quite dazzled.

  He saw a boy silhouetted against the window. A gleaming boy with a halo of dust.

  'Jeremy? Is it you? Are you here?'

  I opened the shutters wider. I'd come into the hall in the aftershock of the blast. With a glance around the room I saw Roly lying beneath the piano, where he'd crawled in the final throes of his struggle with the wire. I saw Sophie, crumpled and bloody in the fireplace. Pryce, the choirboy, huddled against her, squinting into a gleam of snow.

  'Jeremy?' he said. 'Alan? Alan, it's Sophie – it's Sophie, look!'

  I bent to the floor and straightened up with the shotgun.

  'Help me, Alan, help me! She's . . .'

  I hefted the gun in my hands. The weight and the warmth and the smell of it were oddly satisfying. It eased my breathing, it soothed my hands. And I could feel the boy with me, in me, guiding me, using me.

  'Alan, I didn't mean this, you know I didn't – look, Alan, I . . .' Pryce moved from the fireplace, on his knees, dragging himself towards me. He wheedled, 'I never wanted this, I didn't come here for this – I never meant those things I said . . .'

  I stood perfectly still in the cold sunlight. Craven, toady, Pryce slithered closer. 'I'm on your side, Alan, I know what it's like to be here, in this place, with these people! I've been you, and you'll grow to be like me, to be me! Alan, you are me!'

  'No.' I levelled the gun, sighted, held my breath – as my father had taught me to do, as the boy wanted me to do.

  The voice changed. It was a sneer, full of loathing. 'No, you aren't me. You're Jeremy, you're Kemp – you're Kemp and Jeremy with your perfect fucking pitch. Do you know how imperfect you've made me feel?'

  He lunged forwards. I squeezed the trigger.

  At close range, the blast hit him full in the mouth. He spun away and crashed back into the fireplace. He lay there, obliterated, his arms and legs flung out, flopped against the girl; side by side, they looked like a couple of rag dolls that had been dropped down the chimney. For a few moments his fingers opened and closed, and then stopped.

  It was done.

  A silence grew. Slowly, all the dust in the air settled, and so did the ash that had been blown out of the hearth. The smoke from the barrels of the gun was a dim blue haze in the light that fell between the shutters of the tall window.

  I glanced to the open front door, thinking I'd seen a movement there. There was a flutter of cold air, as though someone or something had passed through the door and gone outside. And then a silence in the house that had not been heard since the game began.

  It was all over.

  I stood for a minute, for two or three minutes. It made no difference: the passing of time could make no difference to what had happened. Once
the din of the explosion had faded and even the ringing in my ears had gone, I just stared in front of me and my mind was blank.

  My breathing was easy. When I felt at my neck, there was no blood, no wound. The prickling on my hands was just an itch.

  I dropped the gun onto the floor. I heard the faint sound of a regular, rhythmic clicking, trod to the record player, picked up the needle from the spinning disc and put it gently on its cradle. I switched off the turntable and watched it slow down and stop. Then I closed the lid of the walnut cabinet.

  The world was a still, utterly silent place.

  NINETEEN

  The telephone rang.

  It was so loud, so unexpected, that I just blinked and stared. It was the sound of faraway, of somewhere beyond the miles and miles of snow-covered forest. I let it ring for a long time, before I picked up the receiver and lifted it to my ear.

  A woman's voice, bright and blithe. 'Hello, Foxwood Manor?' A pause, then, 'Dr Kemp? This is Jennifer Scott, Alan's mother . . .'

  I held the receiver away from my ear and examined it in my hand, as though it were a piece of technology I'd never dreamed of. The little voice tinkled into thin air. I said into the mouthpiece, 'Mummy?'

  'Oh Alan, you're there! I'm so sorry, darling, I haven't been able to make it, I'm still in Austria . . .'

  Somehow the stream of words was too quick for me. It was a language which had no meaning for me at that time, in that place. A warm trickle ran through my hair, down my forehead and into my eyebrow, from where it dripped onto the strange black object I was holding. I stared at the blood, and I studied the odd, crumpled dolls in the fireplace: the girl-doll was still quite pretty, but the choirboy-doll had no face at all. Under the piano, a figure in an old waterproof jacket and boots lay very still.