by W E. Mann
“Okay. Okay fine. Come on then,” he said and I felt a wave of relief and the urgency to be back into my warm bed.
But, just as we were heading back out into the Basement, we saw that, down the passage, the door to the Spiral Staircase was being pushed open. My eyes widened.
“Barrington must have seen us.” I whispered sharply, “Hide!”
I let the Dungeon door close as quietly as I could, with us still on the inside.
Freddie had run ahead of me and plunged himself into the first side-tunnel to the right. I followed, with no sense of where I was going, running headlong into utter blindness.
Suddenly, from somewhere in the darkness, something clutched my arm and dragged me off balance. I staggered to my right.
“Shh!” whispered Freddie, releasing my arm. “Don’t move a muscle.”
***
So, that was where I stood, frozen to the spot, not even daring to catch my breath, minutes away from being caught and sent to Behavioural School. I should never have listened to Freddie.
Sure enough, I heard the Dungeon door grunting open and could do nothing but listen as assured footsteps became louder and louder, closer and closer. From our hiding place we could see that torchlight was being flashed past us and I could see now that Freddie had managed to drag me in amongst what, I thought grimly, appeared to be stacks of coffins leaning up against the wall.
A shadowy figure moved slowly past, directly in front us. I was racked by terror, rooted to the spot and unable to catch a breath, my skin prickling with sweat in spite of the cold. But, in spite of my fear, I did notice something odd in the way that Barrington seemed to be walking down the tunnel, slow and hesitant, like he was looking for something, not following someone. Maybe, just maybe, I hoped, he hadn’t even followed us at all. But that was silly, surely. Why on Earth would he be down here otherwise?
The figure then paused directly in front of us as if he had noticed something. I was scrambling through my memory for anything I may have dropped. I couldn’t think of anything that I might have had in my dressing-gown pocket and I certainly hadn’t carried anything down here.
But soon it became obvious that it wasn’t us that had caught Barrington’s attention at all, but what looked like a metallic door set into the tunnel wall opposite where we hid. He passed the light of the torch around the edges of this door, pausing at the keyhole. He grabbed the doorhandle and pushed and tugged it, but to no avail. He then muttered something I couldn’t catch, turned to his right and began to beam the torch in a zig-zagging motion along the tunnel’s floor as if he was looking for something he had dropped.
He turned again so that he was facing directly towards me.
My heart thumped. This was bad, very bad indeed. Now I was totally exposed. Freddie had silently edged away to my left so that he was entirely hidden in the narrow gap behind one of these hefty boxes. But there was no more room for me. Even if there was, I was too petrified to move. All Barrington had to do was raise the torch to point it straight ahead of himself and I would be caught.
He moved the torch-beam slowly along the bottoms of the boxes. Then, to my horror, he paused with the light shining directly on my slippers. I looked down at my feet, glaring at them to tell them to keep still. But I couldn’t help it: something was digging painfully into my left foot through the soft sole of my slipper and my big toe twitched treacherously. He flashed the light straight up towards my eyes. I was blinded and terrified. I still didn’t move, somehow desperately hoping that if I didn’t, he wouldn’t see me. But that was stupid. He must have been able to see me.
I closed my eyes, wincing. But the orange light blazed through my eyelids. Footsteps grated across the floor. I braced myself to be hauled off my feet at any moment, resigned to my fate, almost willing it on just so that this night could be over with.
But then, after what was probably a second or two, but felt to me like an eternity, the light faded from my eyes and finally I heard Barrington turning sharply on his heels and clicking off into the darkness.
The Dungeon door creaked shut behind him.
Freddie breathed a heavy sigh of relief. He shuffled past me and began to tiptoe exaggeratedly, slowly inching out from among the boxes and towards the door.
Before I emerged after him, I crouched down to sweep the floor where I had been standing to find out what was underneath my foot. My hand was still shaking. I soon found what felt like a slender key, about the thickness of my little finger, but three times the length. Could this be what Barrington had been looking for? I decided not to tell Freddie, at least until tomorrow. If this was the key to the metal door, then he was bound to want to unlock it. After the fright I had just had, I certainly didn’t have the stomach for that.
So I pocketed the key and crept with Freddie towards the Dungeon door. He was holding it slightly ajar so that he could check that the passage to the Spiral Staircase was clear. He looked at me and nodded.
But, just as he caught my eye, his eyes widened and his face took on a haunting pallor. For at that moment, from the bowels of the Dungeon, came an aching, lingering groan.
I have never run so fast in my life.
two
I woke up the next morning in a panic, that horrendous, otherworldly noise still ringing in my ears. And I was convinced that at some point that day, I would be tapped on the shoulder and directed to Wilbraham’s office, where he would be brandishing his cane, a fearsome length of silver birch, and lying to me that he would take no enjoyment from my punishment.
“Look, Tom, I don’t know how Barrington didn’t see you. All I know is that it’s obvious that he didn’t see you. You can’t spend the rest of your life worrying about it. Maybe you were so still that he couldn’t see you. I heard that there are ninjas in Japan who can stay so still that they become invisible to the naked eye and you can only see them if you’ve got the new Vampir night-vision lenses. Maybe you did something like that without realising.”
Freddie was probably right. Not about the ninjas, but about that fact that I shouldn’t spend all the time worrying about how I wasn’t seen. He was just as dismissive of the noise we heard as we were leaving the Dungeon:
“It was obviously just Barrington opening a door in some other part of the building. Look, we were in such a state of fright last night, you see, that our minds were playing tricks on us, so we must have just imagined that the noise had come from inside the Dungeon. It’s obvious when you think about it!”
But this, of course, did not prevent Freddie from telling everyone he met on the way down the Spiral Staircase to Showers that we had both seen the Deathly Screamer and, as usual, the parts he invented overwhelmed those that were true:
“At first we couldn’t see anything,” he began, in a theatrical tone and with excessive hand gestures. “But then he materialised in front of us. He was dark green and there were empty holes where his eyes had been and his fingernails were as long as his forearms. I must admit,” he added casually, “I was a little bit scared when he drifted and pointed towards us and said, in the deepest voice you can possibly imagine,” and Freddie put on the deepest voice he could muster, ““now you must leave or you will surely die!”. He started to scream so loudly that his breath blasted through our hair. So we ran as fast as we could back to the dorm.”
He also talked about the mysterious metallic door which, he asserted, must lead to what he was now calling “the Crypt”. “Well it’s obvious why there is a thick bronze door,” he explained to anyone who would listen. “It’s where they stored the bits of all of the boys and Masters who were blown to pieces during the Resistance. Imagine the smell!”
But I was unsettled. Colonel Barrington must have been up to something and I was just beginning to wonder whether his strange antics and the noise we had heard were connected, when Peregrine Trout caught up with us, out of breath.
“Guyth.” Peregrine was one of our dorm-mates, tall and lanky, thin red hair and a brace that had given him a ridiculous
lisp.
“Guyth,” he repeated, catching his breath, having taken the steps three at a time, “hath either of you theen Blackadder thinthe you got up?”
“No,” I replied. Milo Blackadder had the bed opposite mine and was one of my best friends.
“Well I wath awake before the bell and hith bed wath empty then.” He paused to let the message sink in. So, another boy taken ill. What was happening to them all? It was starting to get weird – too many boys, too quickly.
“But he was absolutely fine before lights out last night,” I protested. “Was he still in bed when we got back from the Dungeon?”
“Dunno,” shrugged Freddie, seemingly not concerned by Milo’s sudden disappearance. But it seemed very odd to me that a boy could go from pillow-fighting at eight o’clock in the evening to being so ill by eight o’clock in the morning that he had to be quarantined. It just seemed far too unlikely. I couldn’t think of him saying anything he shouldn’t have. He just wasn’t the type.
“Hey, Grüber!” called Peregrine, setting off along the Lower Corridor after another of our classmates. “Grüber!”
“Fred,” I whispered urgently when I was sure that Peregrine was out of earshot. Freddie was one of three or four friends I knew with absolute certainty I could trust. “Come on! How can you not think...?”
“What?” he interrupted sharply, knowing exactly why I was whispering. “Do you really think they’re all being taken away by the Gestapo? Boys of our age and younger? What would be the point?” He paused for a couple of Fourth Formers to shuffle past us with towels round their waists. “Nobody younger than seventeen has ever been taken...”
“How can you possibly know that?” I said angrily. There’s nothing worse than talking about things you shouldn’t be talking about when the person listening doesn’t even agree.
We had reached the Junior Changing Room. It was crowded with boys in towels heading to and from the Showers, too crowded for us to continue our conversation.
He rubbed his chin and shook his head. “It’s a crazy idea,” he muttered to me. “It’s not as if the sick boys have been speaking out of turn, is it? And don’t one or two have fathers quite high up in the Ministries?”
That was true, I thought. One of the ill First Formers, Ambrose Milligan, claimed he had a step-uncle who was assistant to Hans Fritzsche in the Propaganda Ministry, meaning he was only two ranks removed from Doctor Goebbels himself.
But it still worried me and I shuddered as I thought again about Barrington’s strange behaviour and that terrible howl in the Dungeon.
***
I couldn’t concentrate in lessons at all that morning, not even Latin which I usually like because of Mr. Caratacus’ bustling eccentricity.
The summer sun blazed in through the window. Everything in the room, from the chirping blackboard at the front to the sagging bookcases at the back, seemed to swell and yawn in the warmth. All I could do was sit, stare out at the mirage floating like an enchantment over the 1st XI cricket pitch, and worry until the lesson ended.
“Tom,” called Mr. Caratacus, collaring me when the lesson ended. “Can you tell me anything I taught you during the lesson?”
Oh dear. I knew I wouldn’t be in trouble, but I hated to disappoint Caratacus because, under his scruffy, bright orange hair which bushed out from underneath his mortar board, he had a face of wide-eyed enthusiasm.
“Um... the passive, Sir? Amor, amaris, amatur...”
“Yes, yes, I know the passive voice, young man,” he chuckled. “But that was two weeks ago. Today we were working on the prepositions that take the ablative.”
I began to apologise, but he cut me off. “Look, it’s okay to be upset. I know that you’re worrying about Blackadder. But listen, he’s going to be just fine, just like the other boys. They’re only being quarantined as a precaution. So stop worrying that he’s on his deathbed. Right then,” he said, with a mock military tone. “Not only are you one of my star Latinists, but you are also the Swallows’ star cross-country runner and I’m relying upon you to do well for the House in the Flucht this afternoon. So, as your Housemaster, I order you to stop your worrying and stay focussed! So, run along.”
***
We were clustered together at the edge of the Colts’ cricket pitch at the back of the school, Swallows in white, Crusaders in blue. There were thirty-five of us who had failed to convince Head Matron that we had measles, or a broken leg, or the bubonic plague. Most years, ten to fifteen boys would be caught, beaten and brought back. They were always the weediest Third Formers and would be made to wear a red armband for the rest of the term. If that happened, you could guarantee that you would be bullied for the rest of your life.
I was anxious, but, looking around furtively, I could see that some of the others were shuddering. I tried to remain calm.
Freddie and I had a plan.
The Seniors were on the gravel between us and the Veranda, whose steps arced gracefully around its pillars and up to the French windows of the Main Hall. They were swaggering, pointing, nudging and joking.
Behind them, looking down upon all of us from the terrace above the Veranda, smoking tobacco rations and sipping acorn coffee, were the Masters. Professor Ludendorff, the Schulekommandant, was also there flanked by three other Party members, Doctor Saracen, our Germanic Studies and Ethnic Hygiene teacher, and two others I did not know. Doctor Saracen’s gown hung from his hunched shoulders like the wings of a vulture watching silently from the highest branch of a tree. His face was sunken like his flesh was too tired to stay on his bones, he had goggly eyes and jowls that dragged down his lower lip to reveal a jumbled menace of brown teeth.
I took a deep breath and tried to distract myself.
On a day like today, with the sun blazing down, the school building looked so grand and so regal that you would never suspect how tatty and run-down it was inside; threadbare carpets, peeling wallpaper, groaning furniture and rising damp. But out here it looked like a palace.
“Sieg heil!” shrieked Ludendorff, with his right hand skyward.
He liked to give his speeches from the terrace high above us all, probably because he thought it made him seem like the Führer. But really there was no similarity at all. The Schulekommandant had a silly, high-pitched voice. He was a strangely nervous and apologetic man most of the time and his right hand would usually be shakily clutching a hanky to mop his permanently sweaty brow. I secretly liked Ludendorff, though I would never admit that to anyone. He was short, fat, bald and bespectacled and had gentle, childlike eyes. He was also very kind to homesick First Formers, occasionally bringing them contraband fruit. Quite a few of the boys called him “Vater”, Father, which he took to be a term of affection, not realising that we were actually just poking fun at his startling flatulence.
As Ludendorff was squeaking on about something to do with the virtues of physical suffering, something peculiar caught my eye:
Movement in one of the windows. The fourth window to the left of the Veranda. I would normally have thought nothing of it, but the reason why it puzzled me was that I had absolutely no idea what or where this room even was. From the outside, it looked as if it must be next to the Maths rooms and behind the Library. But I hadn’t the faintest notion of how to get into this room or of what might be inside. I would have to ask Freddie. He was bound to have some explanation.
But suddenly, just as I was contemplating the location of this mysterious room, a ghoulish, black figure materialised in its window. My heart thumped. From here it was difficult to make out much detail. Maybe I was imagining it, maybe I was still shaken from the events of last night, but it seemed as if this shadowed being was pointing towards me. I shivered coldly and was about to turn away, but just then, for a brief sliver of a moment, I was certain that I saw the lank frame of Colonel Barrington, with his thickly lacquered white hair, approach the figure in the window and then disappear from view.
I shook my head, blinked and looked again, but they were gone.
Had my eyes played a trick on me? I was sure I had seen Barrington, but the other figure? It was like some kind of unearthly spectre, conjured by the Colonel with the potions he concocted in the Chemistry Lab.
There was an unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach. Too many strange things were happening, small things which made no sense when they were added together. Colonel Barrington was up to something. I was willing to bet it was something sinister.
“Blut und Ehre!” shrilled Ludendorff. “Blood und Honour, mein boyz!”
A hush descended as he raised his luger and fired it into the air.
We were off.
“Who?” I said.
“Doctor Boateng,” Freddie repeated. “Don’t you ever listen to anything Wilbraham says at Assembly? He’s African. He’s come from Europe for a week to sit in on our lessons and see how things are done.”
“But that’s impossible! How on Earth did he get a travel permit? An African?!”
“I dunno. Friends in high places, I suppose. Wilbraham said he’s an Ehrenarier.”
“A what?”
“Ehrenarier. An honorary Aryan. It means he must be personal friends with Göring.”
“You’re kidding! How can you have honorary Aryans? That makes no sense at all!”
It must have been at least an hour since the school bell had sent the Seniors after us, and we had heard and seen nobody from our vantage point in the limbs of an enormous, gnarled monkey-puzzle tree. The air was cool and quiet and we were at the furthest reach of the Forest, where the trees are thickest and the light struggles to penetrate the canopy. I was glad I wasn’t alone. Even the birds knew to keep away from this place because far, below us on the Forest floor, lay a smooth, flat slab of stone, half buried under the mud and bracken: The Black Dog’s Grave.