S.T.A.G.S.

by M A Bennett

  Henry scrambled up behind me and I turned to face him. The stag at bay, I thought, seeing him standing knee deep in the swirling water. Henry’s torch was long gone and it took my eyes a minute to adjust. He was soaked and breathing hard, his trademark hair silver-pale in the moonlight, his eyes mercury-bright. I wanted to lead him away from the noise of the fall, but he stood on its very lip. We’d have to shout at each other to be heard, but that could work out well for the plan.

  He spoke first. ‘I would have spared you, Greer,’ he called. ‘You were going to be the only one we left alone. I even talked to the others about it. I thought you understood. I thought you loved Longcross.’

  ‘I did,’ I said. I had to keep him talking. ‘I do.’

  ‘Then Perfect saw you in the library last night, with the game books –’

  ‘So he did see us,’ I exclaimed, before I could stop myself.

  ‘Of course,’ said Henry. ‘He’s a gamekeeper. Tracking animals is his job.’

  I didn’t rise to the insult, and he went on. ‘I knew you’d gone over to their side, the side of those who don’t belong, who think they can be like us but never will be. The side of the Savages.’ He shrugged. ‘No matter. The game books will be gone by tomorrow. We’ll just have to keep them somewhere else. Can’t leave evidence lying around now, can we?’

  ‘Why didn’t Perfect just use the gun on us then?’ I asked. ‘He could have taken out all three of us, problem solved.’ I knew the answer, but I wanted Henry to say it.

  ‘Oh, Greer, you still don’t understand, do you? Even you, my clever little scholarship girl. It has to look like an accident, don’t you see? How do you think we’ve managed to get away with it for so long? Because they always look like accidents. Even the deaths.’

  I was already shivering and didn’t think I could get any colder, but it turned out I could. His words gave me an extra chill. ‘So there have been deaths then?’

  ‘Of course there have been deaths.’ He sounded surprised I would even ask. ‘Quite a few over the years. Terrible “accidents”, all of them. All from families who wouldn’t be able to stand up to us. The son of some tin-pot African royal family. They wouldn’t dare to go up against the British establishment. We had a scholarship girl once before too; she was one of the deaths. Her family was too poor to pay for an enquiry. Dr Morand fills in the death certificates, and my father squares things with the police commissioner and the coroner. They all come for the shooting, you know.’

  ‘Of course they do,’ I said bitterly.

  ‘It was easier in the old days. My father, my grandfather, his grandfather.’

  I swallowed. All those blond boys in the silver frames on the piano. All of them grew up to be murderers. ‘Just how long has this been going on?’

  ‘Conrad de Warlencourt started it. When he came back from the Crusades. I guess he just missed killing the savages. So he found more savages to kill on his own doorstep. And then he found like-minded people to carry on the tradition. Tradition’s so important, isn’t it, Greer? You need continuity, and order. I think Conrad would like it that you will meet your end here, at Conrad’s Force. His own waterfall.’

  My body started to shudder uncontrollably. ‘So I am to die now?’

  ‘Oh yes, I think so,’ he answered, just as if I’d asked him whether he thought it would rain later. ‘I was even considering sparing you – this morning when I saw you kill that fish. I thought you could be a Medieval after all. But then I saw the wetsuit, and I knew you’d prepared yourself against me. Under the clothes you were a Savage all along, through and through.’

  ‘Are you going to make my death look like an accident too?’ I said, teeth chattering with cold and fear.

  ‘Naturally. It’s harder now, of course. In the feudal days no one would even challenge us. Much harder now. More agencies asking more questions. DNA, post mortems – all that technology you people love so much. But we’re still able to convince the police. A gentleman’s word still counts for something at Longcross. A terrible fall, and a drowning. Case closed.’

  He took a step towards me, away from the lip of the waterfall.

  What a Sherlock Holmesian time we’d had of it, my fear-crazed mind thought. The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Loch Ness film. Then this ending, a tussle between two mortal enemies on a waterfall.

  ‘Have you seen Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows?’ I asked, playing for time.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said, his predator’s eyes on me.

  ‘It’s not a great film,’ I said. ‘And it’s not super-faithful to the books. But there’s one bit that is. Sherlock and Moriarty are in Switzerland, and Robert Downey Jr – he’s Sherlock Holmes (bear with me, I was doubtful too – but he’s actually good) – he lures Moriarty to the head of the Reichenbach Falls. Well, they have this tussle and they both go over the edge together.’ I was babbling, and backing away, and Henry was creeping towards me like that game you play in primary school, when you try to move without anyone seeing you. ‘And Watson, who is played by Jude Law (again, you wouldn’t pick him for it, but he’s really OK too) goes back to London all sad, and they actually have Sherlock’s funeral, and then Watson is writing up Sherlock’s last adventure, and he types “THE END”. And then the doorbell goes and it’s the postman, so Watson leaves the room, and when he comes back, it turns out that someone has typed a question mark so that it says “THE END?” And Watson smiles. Because that one little bit of punctuation, that question mark, tells him that although the bad guy is dead, the good guy survived. And you, Henry, are the bad guy.’

  Henry just shook his head and kept on coming. ‘You’ve just demonstrated the problem with living your life through screens,’ he called over the sound of the rushing water. ‘Children nowadays spend four hours a night online. They live in headphones, cut off from the world. No one can eat a meal without taking a picture of it. No one can enjoy a concert without filming it or meet a so-called celebrity without taking a selfie. You don’t even have to retain your own memories any more; Facebook does it for you. Everything has to be recorded; people experience life through a screen the size of a playing card, instead of living it. And for what? Not everything is a movie, Greer.’

  ‘Not everything,’ I agreed. ‘But this is.’

  In a much louder shout, directed to the packhorse bridge where I could see the Saros 7S’s little red recording light, I yelled, ‘Did you get all that?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ shouted Nel from up on the bridge. ‘We got it.’

  Shafeen and Nel stood up and leaned over the parapet. Nel had the Saros in her hand and turned the torch beam full on Henry. The water swirling around our ankles turned to white milk.

  She tapped the phone and held it high. It began to speak, in Henry’s voice. ‘Of course there have been deaths. Quite a few over the years. Terrible “accidents”, all of them. All from families who wouldn’t be able to stand up to us.’

  Henry held his hand high, just as I’d done when I’d reached my hand out of the lake. But he wasn’t asking for help. He was commanding. ‘Give me that thing,’ he said, low and deadly, like a furious teacher confiscating something from an errant child. The force of his personality was such that I almost expected Nel to drop the gadget into his hand.

  But she just shook her head. ‘Wouldn’t do any good,’ she said. ‘You could take this phone from me, but the video’s already been uploaded to the Saros Orbit. It’s a satellite storage system, totally secure.’

  ‘Isn’t technology wonderful, when you find the right application for it?’ called Shafeen.

  Henry should have been beaten. He should have been deflated. He should have broken down, and sobbed, and begged us not to go public. But he did none of these things. He drew himself up, more powerful than ever, his eyes shining with this freaky, almost religious light. ‘You can’t win,’ he said. ‘You can’t upset the order.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ said Nel. That girl was a badass. ‘One touch of this screen and this video will be up
loaded to YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram. By morning your confession will have gone viral. You’ll be an Internet sensation. It’s over, Henry. Your world is over. We’re in my world now.’

  Henry backed away towards the lip of the falls, as if seeking to put some distance between himself and these terrible new words. But he was still defiant. ‘The order will go on, even without me,’ he cried.

  Shafeen called back, grim, mocking. ‘There’s a new order now,’ he said.

  I think I’ll remember the next few seconds for as long as I live. People say the end of a life slows down, as if it’s playing in slo-mo, and I’m here to tell you that’s perfectly true. I turned my head to Shafeen when he shouted from the bridge, and that took my eye off Henry long enough for him to back right up to the edge of the falls. Then, and only then, did I process what Henry had said.

  Even without me.

  I knew what he was going to do.

  I spun around, my wet hair stinging my face like a whip, and half waded, half stumbled to him as fast as I could, the water impeding my progress like quicksand, my own voice, loud in my head, screaming ‘NO!’

  I’ll swear on my life, forever afterwards, that my fingertips caught at Henry’s, linked, slipped and lost him. I saw him for a second, an hour, a lifetime, suspended in space: immensely strong, immensely powerful. For one split second our eyes met and locked, his gaze undefeated. Then, his arms flung out like a cross, he tipped back over the lip of the falls.

  Suddenly I was back in Paulinus quad, dropping a coin down the medieval well. The coin was falling down and down into the darkness, and I was waiting for it to hit the surface of the water. Henry and the coin falling together. At Conrad’s Force, too, time stretched out to infinity, and the roar of the waterfall was so loud that we couldn’t even hear when Henry hit the rocks below.

  chapter thirty

  To be honest, I don’t remember much about what happened after that.

  Nel told me that I collapsed in the water and Shafeen had to wade in and fish me out, only just catching me before I slipped over the lip of the falls myself. He’d picked me up and carried me to the Land Rover, which was parked on the packhorse bridge. I have a vague memory of being in his arms, but it was far from romantic. I was numb with cold and shock and actually thought I could still die.

  Apparently it was Nel who drove the Land Rover back to Longcross in the dark. I don’t remember that either. Nor do I remember Shafeen and Nel dressing me in enough of their clothes to conceal the wetsuit and carrying me shivering into the house, or the servants swarming around me and fetching me a dressing gown and blankets and wrapping me up in front of the roaring Great Hall fire, or the same ancient family doctor coming to check me over.

  I do remember, though, the Medievals trooping back in, much later, and the unmistakable flare of surprise in their eyes when they saw me alive. I remember the smooth lies they told, one for each of them:

  ‘Oh my God, we’ve been so worried about you …’

  ‘Don’t you remember falling in? We were all trying to fish you out …’

  ‘Then you just slipped under Henry’s boat and disappeared …’

  ‘We thought you’d drowned …’

  ‘We’ve been out looking for you ever since …’

  I could quite believe they’d been looking for me, but not to save me, that was for sure.

  Then, a little later, I remember Cookson being the first person to say, Where’s Henry? And Shafeen looking at me and very slightly shaking his head.

  And a couple of them going back out to find him, and Lara coming back and saying, Hen’s not home yet.

  Then Perfect going out to look for him.

  Then the police.

  Then the hours in front of the Great Hall fire, hours of sipping hot drinks in a white towelling bathrobe, hours of answering questions with lies, and hours of waiting for the results of a torch-lit police search with growing dread for the news we knew would come, before I was finally able to escape and go up to bed.

  When I crept into Lowther I didn’t switch on the lights. The police cars still crowding in the drive outside illuminated the room every other second with their eerie blue lights. I sat on the bed, exhausted, and Jeffrey looked down at me, his blue-lit expression oddly sympathetic. His eyes seemed softer, his nose rounder, his antlers less pointed. He looked downcast, defeated. ‘Yes, you understand,’ I said to him, wearily. ‘Aidan’s stag escaped because he was invisible, but you never quite got the trick of it, did you? And neither did I. All term I kept my head down, never tried to stand out. But I wasn’t quite invisible enough. I thought I was just being myself. But being myself was to be different, and that was enough to put me in Henry’s sights. Better to turn yourself into a mini-Medieval, be exactly like them or be separated from the herd and hunted down.’ But Nel had tried that approach and it didn’t work; she hadn’t quite got it right. And Shafeen was always different, by being another race; he might as well have been another species.

  Suddenly I couldn’t be in there, just me and Jeffrey. I needed them now: my friends, my new friends. I left Lowther and padded along the passageway to Raby, Shafeen’s room. I knocked softly and opened the door. Nel was already there, sitting on the window seat with Shafeen. She’d obviously felt the same way. We didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. Nothing to do but watch and wait. I joined them and we all looked down.

  They brought Henry’s body back at midnight. I saw the stretcher being transferred from the back of the shooting brake to the waiting ambulance. But you could see that it was too late for any medical attention. In films, you see, if someone’s still alive, whatever state they’re in, they leave the face uncovered – obvs – so the person can breathe. Henry’s body was covered from head to foot. We all watched as the stretcher slid into the ambulance. The doors were slammed, someone signed a form on a clipboard, and the ambulance drove away. We watched it till it was out of sight. A young man was dead, and however evil he undoubtedly was, and however much his death might have prevented countless injuries and even other deaths, he was still someone’s son.

  I was the first to speak. ‘We are murderers,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Shafeen gently, but firmly. ‘It was a suicide.’

  ‘We should have gone back for him,’ I said. ‘We should have gone to find him. What if he was still alive? What if we could have saved him?’ The fact that I’d been barely conscious after his fall didn’t blunt my guilt.

  Nel said, ‘How? We couldn’t have got back down the falls. You know. It was hard enough for you climbing up. And no one could have survived that fall, from that height.’

  I knew that to be true – I’d known when I was climbing that, if I’d fallen, I would have been finished.

  ‘Plus,’ said Shafeen, ‘we had to get you back. If I hadn’t fished you out, you’d have gone over the falls too. And if we hadn’t got you back to Longcross, you’d have died of hypothermia.’ He must have heard how it sounded. ‘I’m not calling myself a hero. I’m just stating a fact.’

  ‘And,’ said Nel, ‘Henry wanted to go. He jumped.’

  ‘Yes, but we made him do it,’ I persisted. ‘We put the noose around his neck. We threatened him with worldwide humiliation at the hands of the very technology he despised. Social media, the police, the press. He couldn’t handle that.’ I turned to Nel. ‘You aren’t really going to upload his confession, are you?’

  ‘Not now,’ said Nel. And I knew what she meant. Not now he’s dead.

  Shafeen closed the heavy curtains against the blue lights and we all collapsed onto his bed in our pyjamas. There was nothing weird – it was like we were all five years old. Nel got out the Saros 7S and we all looked at it where it sat on her palm. In its silver heart lived the technology that had saved me. It had been an integral part of our plan. That miraculous, powerful, friendly little device had turned a 2D Ordnance Survey map on the estate room wall into a 3D digital image of Longmere and its surrounding terrain. It
had taken a unique thermal image map of my body and tracked my position every minute of the day when I’d been fishing with Henry, so I was never alone, and Shafeen and Nel knew where I was at all times. It had night-sight capability so Nel was able to film Henry and me at the head of the waterfall even without the light of the torch. It had talked to its mother satellite, uploading to the Saros Orbit every shred of evidence we needed against Henry de Warlencourt, from the photos of the game books to the video of his confession. And now I just felt like I wanted to switch off; and it could help me do that too. I knew exactly what we all needed.

  We all crowded round the phone and watched YouTube into the early hours until we fell asleep right there in Shafeen’s room. We watched all the crap on the Internet, from piano-playing cats, to skater fails to bottle flips. We watched ‘try not to laugh’ challenges, mannequin challenges and 24-hour challenges. We watched Vines of people dabbing and animals sneezing, and tons of memes. The brash music and stupid electronic sounds bounced off the damask wallpaper, the garish lights and colours reflected off the heavy silk curtains of the bed that Elizabeth I had slept in. Strange though it might seem, since we were filling his ancient medieval house with Savage rubbish, it was our elegy for Henry.

  We let the world in.

  In the morning, before we went back to our own rooms, we had a decision to make.

  ‘What do we do?’ I didn’t need to explain. I meant, Do we show the video to the police?

  ‘We keep quiet,’ said Shafeen. ‘The huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ is over – it can’t continue without Henry at Longcross. No point heaping disgrace on the family just to make ourselves feel better. His dad’s obviously a shit, but his mum might be OK. She’s lost her son – we should let her have her dignity. Let’s keep quiet about the footage, unless someone tries to connect us with his death. At the moment, they don’t even know that we were with him when he died. If they work that out, then we’ve got the evidence to show that he took his own life.’