“Do I feel what, Tilly?”
Her face changes, the avid expression painted over by one of uncertainty, perhaps fear. What does the child mean?
“Tilly.” Thackeray’s voice is low but seems to affect the girl like the crack of a whip. She starts and looks guilty. I didn’t even hear the door open. “Tilly, don’t bother Doctor Croftmarsh. It’s late and time for you to be getting back to your room.”
Tilly drops my hands, and dips her head, blonde curls covering her blush-red face. She makes for the exit, then looks back over her shoulder before she leaves, smiling a sunburst at me and then throwing an odd glance at Thackeray, which I cannot interpret.
“Sleep well. Don’t forget to read the Roux,” I say after her as the door closes and Thackeray leans his back against it.
He grins, his thick lips smug, then he moves into the room without invitation and helps himself to the whisky waiting on the shelf, knocking one of the heavy crystal glasses against the other. He raises the bottle at me, and I nod. Beneath his black woollen academic robe he is still a rugby player, but slowly going soft and bloating in parts. His pale cheeks are shadowed with ebony stubble; the ruffian’s posture hides an acute, albeit lazy intelligence; sometimes I wonder how he came to teach at a place as exclusive as this.
“So, young Tilly Sanderson,” he begins, handing me one of the tumblers. His own measure is far more generous. He slumps into the chair I recently vacated, drapes himself across it, long legs stretched forward, one arm hanging down almost to the carpet, the other hand clutching his drink. His voice is low, trying for levity, but there’s a dark edge that tells me to tread carefully. “Not teaching her something new, are you?’
“Don’t be ridiculous.” I sip at the whisky, feel it burn down my throat then take up residence in my belly, heating me surely as a fire. From a chest at the foot of my writing desk, I pull an unopened bottle and hold it out to him.
“What? Can’t want me gone so soon, surely.” But he gets to his feet and reaches out. He wraps his large hand around not just the neck, but my hand as well, trapping me unless I want to sacrifice forty-year-old Scotch. His breath is hot and malt-rich on my face; I can feel the warmth radiating off his body, and my cheeks flame with a dim memory of drunken fumbling. I’m not sure how far it went. “Surely we could indulge ourselves once again… Who’s to know?”
I would know. And so would he. And it would give him something else to use against me in a school where fraternisation of any kind is reason for dismissal. I know how the world works; he would receive a slap on the wrist and I would be gone without references. “Good night, Thackeray.”
I pull away and he has to juggle to save his prize. He gives a slow smile, takes his defeat well, throws back the amber in his glass and returns the empty to the shelf.
He leaves and I feel as if I can breathe for the first time in an age. From the corridor, I hear the whisper and scuffle of boots. My heart clenches at the idea that any of the other teachers might have seen him coming out of my room. I creep over and crack the door, putting my eye to the sliver.
Thackeray and Tilly stand close, oh so close. His free hand is roaming up one thigh, over her hip, then cupping her backside roughly. Her face is hidden from me, pressed into his chest.
I step back. The headache that’s been with me all day worsens; I feel as if the bones of my skull are pushing against each other. I rub my palms across my face, hoping to hold the pieces in place, to press the pain back.
IV
FEBRUARY 15TH
I am hidden, but lovely, O ye daughters of darkness,
as the dreams of Great Old Ones,
as the drowned houses of R’lyeth.
The office door, with its frosted glass panel reading simply PRINCIPAL, is unlocked, and there is no sign of the watchdog, Mrs. Kilkivan. The Tilly–Thackeray situation gave me a restless night and I thought I might approach the Head before class.
Inside, the floor is covered with an enormous rug that stretches almost to the boundaries of the enormous office. The walls are covered by bookshelves, neatly stacked with hardbacks, decorative spines showing off silver lettering. Three display cases take up one corner, each with a series of ancient gold jewellery, marked with carefully hand-written labels and histories: this one found in ancient Babylon, this one from a well in Kish, yet another dug up from the depths of Nineveh, this from Ashur, these from Ur and Ebla. Artefacts excavated from the cradle of civilisation; I seem to recall the Head had been active in archaeological digs in early life, and that father and mother, uncles and aunts, had all spent time in the Middle East.
Beneath the broad tall window is a desk roughly the width of the office, with just enough space to walk around, if you’ve slim hips. The desk is neat and tidy, a notepad on the blotter which is perfectly aligned with the edge of the mahogany edifice, the bases of the two banker’s lamps also carefully placed, one on the left corner, the other one the right. The pens, fine things, are in individual cases on the polished surface; a sturdy pewter letter opener lies next to them, protected in a bronze enamelled sheath.
Some of the shelves are bereft of books, but stand instead as habitations for busts of Greek and Roman philosophers, statuettes of gods and demons, strange twisted things that would not be out of place in a museum.
Unable to resist the impulse, I step around the desk, plant myself in the ample leather seat and try one of the drawers. Locked. All of them. I rub at my forearms; the skin is dry, thickening, irritated. The grandfather clock strikes the hour and I will be late for class. I snatch a piece of paper from the notebook and scribble a message to the Principal that I need a word. I place it in the centre of the blotter, where it cannot be missed. I carefully put the pen back in its case, only after trying to wipe off any finger marks.
Here is my problem: Tilly seemed willing. She is almost eighteen—yes, we keep them here longer, if they wish. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Some stay on and become staff, studying, learning from the teachers here, which gives them a far better training than they would find elsewhere. Here is my other problem: the possibility of Thackeray revealing what may have happened between us, but which I am unsure even took place. And Tilly, she is a child, easily influenced.
Who do I protect? Myself or the child?
I don’t know what I will tell the Head. Candide will be useless; he will simply give me a slow blink and ask whatever do you mean? The Principal is the key. When we meet I will know what to say.
V
FEBRUARY 16TH
Look not upon me, because I am disguised,
because the sun hath burned me:
Earth’s children were angry with me;
they stole what was mine;
They kept him from me.
The west wing houses the library; it’s stacked with shelving and desks overrun by computer terminals and printers. A wooden set of card-index drawers stands lonely and lost in the middle of the room—the young librarian doesn’t know quite what to do with it and is too afraid of the ghosts of librarians past to throw it out. Curiosities abound: a giraffe’s skeleton, a giant cephalopod, spears and shields and helmets of disappeared empires, bronze horse statuettes, elephant tusks and rhinoceros horns, all take up space on walls, shelves, nooks and alcoves. There are portraits, too: long-dead educators staring down with what might be disapproval or hauteur or both.
The only wall unencumbered by shelves or display items is covered by a tapestry. A woman sits enthroned on a stone seat, a staff in one hand, a snake in the other. Her eyes are wide, almost too much so: icthyoid and protuberant; her lips pouting, her nose somewhat flat; hair a mess of black; yet there is a kind of beauty to her, a compelling strangeness that draws the observer in. She wears a simple green robe, something that seems almost armoured, perhaps scaled, and at her slippered feet, a field of blossoms: black, silver, red, yellow and richest chestnut petals on stalks of green. She sits most closely to the left of the tapestry—or rather, to the right—and to the right, or rather he
r left, nothing more than a verdant tangle of forest. Branches and trunks, undergrowth and vines, all twist together to form a dense curtain, seemingly without uniformity or plan, utterly wild and overgrown, curled around the stony ruins of a building crushed by the foliage.
In a quiet corner of the room sits Fenella, surrounded and almost concealed by a fortress of books built on the desk in front of her. At one of the tables are Tilly and Stephen and their various acolytes; I note the blonde curly head turn towards me, offering a smile, but I pretend not to see her, keep myself aimed directly at my friend.
“Have you seen the Head?” I ask, sotto voce, as I scratch at the sides of my throat, trying to get rid of the terrible itching there. She jumps, pulled from her concentration by my question, both hands thumping on the tabletop in fright.
“Don’t you knock?” One of the book towers wobbles and begins a slow slide. She tries to stop it, then gives up and lets the tomes fan out, domino-like, until the final one teeters on the edge and falls. It marks the end of its descent with a noise like a shot that stops the library for a few moments.
Fenella folds her arms and looks at me.
I ask again, “Have you seen the Head?”
“This morning,” she says. “What is wrong with you?”
And she’s right, I’m jumpy, sweating, twitching at the slightest noise, the tiniest hints of something moving in the corner of my eye. There’s still the headache: as if someone is trying to crack my skull open. And I cannot shake the accompanying sense that success will result in a dark river, a black tide flowing out of me. I blink, hard, eyes dry.
“I don’t feel well,” I say. “And…”
She puts a hand on my forehead—the cool flesh is a shock against my hot skin. “Go and lie down. You don’t have any classes this afternoon.”
“Thackeray,” I say, the words becoming harder to force out, the hurt pressing in on my head. “Thackeray and Tilly, were…”
She tilts; the whole room tilts and I can’t figure out why. I wonder that the books aren’t falling from the shelves; then I realise I’m the one who’s on an angle. I’m the one who’s falling. I hit the floor, head bouncing against the polished parquetry.
There’s a burble of noise around me; I see figures looming above, blurring. Beneath my head, I feel a beat. A thudding, ever so gentle, a mere echo of a vibration, a rhythm, a pulse, a song, but it will grow stronger, of that I have no doubt. It travels up me like a tremor, a whisper of motion. It moves me and shakes me and lulls me all at once. I close my eyes, for I have no choice, and everything is blocked out.
The last thing I hear is Fenella swearing at the crowd to stand back and let me have some air. I try to smile, but cannot feel my face.
VI
FEBRUARY 17TH
Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou waitest,
where thou sleepest:
for I shall not be as one turned aside
by the rise and fall of aeons.
Sound, unclear, as if heard through water. I swim up, slowly, ignoring the yearning pain in my bones. Voices. It’s voices: male and female.
All I can feel beneath me now are the soft crisp linens of my bed; no more subtle rhythm, no more gentle beat. Clear-headed at last, but I keep my eyes closed, for they still retain an echo of the ache. And I listen.
“How is she?” Thackeray, subdued.
“The same as she always is at this point.” Fenella, cool. They’ve been arguing.
“No. It seems different—she’s never struggled like this.”
Fenella is silent.
“What if she’s—?”
“You’re an idiot.” Fenella, angry. “She saw you. You can’t just fuck about for the better part of a year. You put us all in danger. We’re not completely invisible here.”
“We’ve been over this already. What does it matter? She’ll be gone soon.”
“We go to all the trouble of choosing, of making each one think they’re special.”
“So? I just made her feel a little bit extra special.”
“Everyone else here is careful. Goes out of their way to keep us all secret and safe.” Her voice drops. “I will tell her, when this one is gone and she’s back.”
“You worry too much, Burrows. Her time is short,” he sneers.
“She won’t need long.”
That shuts him up, then there is a shuffling, his heavy steps moving away, the door opening and closing. I crack an eyelid and see Fenella, hands over her face, shoulders slumped. I know my vision is still wrong because she seems to have only three fingers. She sighs, throws back her shoulders, takes a deep breath. I focus.
She leans over me without really looking at me, touches my face. Five digits, of course; stupidity. I do not react, keep my breathing steady, slow. She steps away and leaves the room.
I wait, counting down seconds, counting down until I feel safe. I sit up, throw back the covers, swing my legs out of bed. Through the window I can see the sky, blue-black, dotted with stars, buttoned-down with a full moon. 11:30 says the bedside clock. I have slept long.
My legs tremble, I straighten. My hands spasm, the base of my skull feels… stretched. I shake my head, leave the room, uncaring that my pink flannel pyjamas are not the best attire for sneaking through corridors.
The dust and darkness are heavy in the Principal’s office. The moonlight streams in and on the broad expanse of the desk I can see a piece of paper. My note. Untouched, unmoved, unread.
Once again, I pull at the drawers, knowing they’ll still be locked. I take the letter opener from its place and jam it into the keyhole, then into the thin space between the bottom of one drawer and the top of another, jiggle it, jemmy it and to my surprise the lower one grinds open with a protest. The fine dark wood splinters, exposing its pale naked inside. The drawer slides on reluctant runners.
There is a sewing-box, a padded embroidered thing, quite large, a silver toggle slid through the loop on the front to keep it closed. I unclasp it and flip it open. Inside, threads. So many threads, all twisted into figures of eight, their middles cinched in by the end of the very same thread. Tens, twenties, fifties, hundreds? So many: black, silver, red, yellow, richest chestnut. On the padded silk inside the lid, an array of needles, sentinels pinned through the fabric, all fine and golden, some thicker than others, fit for all manner of work, for varying thicknesses of material, canvas, skin, hide, what-have-you. I reach in, prick my index finger, watch the blood well and drip onto the pale blue silk, clotting bundles of thread.
I suck on the injured digit and notice, behind the casket, a creamy wad of pages. I draw them forth. Each one has a ragged edge as if torn from a journal. Each one is filled with scribbles, ancient cuneiforms of text, amateurish translations beside those obtuse scratchings:
I am hidden, but lovely, O ye daughters of darkness. They kept him from me. I remember thy love more than life. Let him kiss me with his mouths. Thy name is as fear poured forth. Lead me, I will wait for thee.
Each page dated; I can see a series of different years. How many? Oh, God, how many?
The grandfather clock interrupts me as I kneel there on the floor. It chimes the quarter-hour and I watch the hands move. The office door opens and Tilly’s soft voice, rich with anticipation, a little fear, calls “Doctor Croftmarsh? It’s time.”
“Tilly. Tilly, you have to get away from here.” I scramble up off my knees, try to move towards her at the same time, stumble twice before I stand and manage to get a hand on her arm. The touch is as much to steady me as to underline my point to her. “There’s something going on. We have to go—we’ll go out through the kitchens, no one will see us—”
“Doctor Croftmarsh, don’t be ridiculous,” she says, barely concealing disdain. I tighten my fingers around her wrist. She jerks her arm away.
“No, Tilly, I’m not being silly. Something is happening and you’re in danger.”
“No,” she says, smiling, but I can’t quite fathom the demeanour. “I’m
not in danger—He has called my name and I will heed him. He will know me and choose me for I am new.”
And all at once I know that inimitable combination of tone and expression: triumph and malice, jealousy and hope. The child thinks she is part of a greater mystery. She thinks Thackeray will—will what? Despair and desperation well up inside me as rhythmic pulses of pain.
We stare at each other, time seemingly marching in place until, at last, there is the sound of the final flick of the clock hands shifting into place. Mechanisms begin to sing midnight and all of my agonies fall away. I smile at the girl and offer my hand in conciliation.
VII
FEBRUARY 18TH
If thou know not, O thou greatest among beasts,
Send me dreams so I might guess,
and kill the flock by the shepherds’ tents.
With my free hand I hook the edge of the tapestry and pull. The right half of it hangs from a rail separate to that for the left, so, when drawn across, the picture changes, the forest folded back upon itself becomes a creature, muscular, tentacled, winged; the broken stones become a second throne and the lord’s limbs, now seen true, caress his bride in lewd love.
More importantly, this redecoration shows a door in the wall behind the arras, a door which leads down to the academy’s rarely used chapel; to the undercroft more precisely. I wrench it open and a whiff of dust puffs out. Dust and something else, like long-dead fish.
“Come, Tilly,” I say. There is no answer. I turn to look at her; she is staring at the hanging. I take her face in my hands, run my fingers through her hair, tender as a mother. I kiss her on the forehead, a chaste embrace, and say, “You were right: you have been called, Tilly, and you are needed. You are anointed, the coming one. And He will know your name and I shall see you covered in the throes of glory before this night is out.”
In the darkness, I can see with the unerring stare of a creature from the deep. In her gaze is my reflection, my features rewritten by my memories, my true memories: eyes set wide and angled up, icthyoid and protuberant, pouting lips, flattened nose. And the hair, a waving tangle of green-black tentacles, a-shiver with a life of their own. I stretch, my bones cracking. I am taller.
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