The Quickening of Tom Turnpike (The Talltrees Trilogy)

by Mann, W. E.

  “We won’t,” I promised.

  After Pontevecchio had left the room, Freddie turned round to look at me. “Whoa! You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he said.

  “Well don’t you think it’s a bit of a coincidence?”

  “What?”

  “Come on, Fred. Milo and the others! What was Barrington doing down in the Dungeon the other night? Don’t you think it might have something to do with the fact that so many boys have been falling ill lately? In fact,” something had just occurred to me, “come to think of it, has Barrington been on night-duty a lot recently?”

  Freddie stared at me wide-eyed, absorbing what I had just suggested. “God!” he said. “I think you might be right. But why would this be happening now, all of a sudden? We’ve got to work out what’s going on. Come on.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “To find Al de Sucksley.”

  five

  The Library was deserted and we had just over half an hour before Third Form Curfew.

  “Okay. Hughes, Hugo, Hume... Huxley,” muttered Freddie.

  Five shelves up and wedged between the end of the shelf and a book called Hume’s Enquiries was a tattered copy of a book entitled Brave New World by this Aldous Huxley.

  Freddie pulled it from the bookcase. He stepped back, with an expression of reverence as if he were waiting for something magical to occur. After a second or two of nothing happening in the way of hocus-pocus or divine intervention, he pushed his hand into the gap where the book had been. He felt around the inside the bookcase, but found nothing. He brought his hand back out, filthy with black dust, which he wiped on his shorts.

  He pulled more of the books from the shelf and peered into the space where they had been. But there was nothing. No switches, no latches, no levers or catches.

  I shook my head. “Come on, Fred. This is silly.”

  Freddie threw me a look of dejection and began to replace the books. “I was sure Mr. English was trying to give us a clue earlier.”

  I shrugged.

  “What now?” he asked. But before I could reply, I heard someone pacing in our direction.

  “Someone’s coming,” I whispered.

  Freddie hadn’t have time to squeeze Huxley back into the shelf. So he turned quickly, clutching the book behind his back with both hands, to face the footsteps.

  “Evening, soldiers!” sung Caratacus cheerfully. I felt Freddie release a sigh of relief next to me: It wasn’t Barrington! “So you didn’t fancy a dip in the pool then, I take it?”

  “That’s right, Sir,” I replied. “We finished our reading books today, so we decided to come to the Library instead to choose some new ones.”

  Freddie looked at me with an eyebrow raised quizzically. I realised that this was a ridiculous and wheedling fib. It might almost have been believable of me, but there is no way any teacher would ever believe that Freddie would take any voluntary steps to advance his education outside of the designated hours.

  But anyway, I thought, it’s only Caratacus. And besides, we have nothing to hide: why would anyone imagine that there was anything against the rules in browsing through books in the Library? After all, this is exactly the sort of thing the teachers want us doing, isn’t it?

  “Ah, well that’s marvellous,” said Caratacus. “Let’s see. So you’ve been looking under H, have you? Well I have two excellent recommendations for you, Strange: Homer and Herodotus. They share your passion for the propagation of elaborate stories.”

  He reached up to one of the higher shelves and Freddie looked at me with a bewildered shrug.

  “Here you go,” Caratacus continued. “Herodotus’ Histories. My favourite book. I think Book One will be just to your taste.” He presented this hardback slab to Freddie with mock reverence and a wink at me.

  “That’s very kind, Sir,” said Freddie, “but I have a book already. Perhaps I will move on to Hairytoss after I’ve finished this one”. He produced Huxley from behind his back.

  “Good heavens!” exclaimed Caratacus, looking around the Library as if he needed to check nobody was there. “Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I’m amazed this book is still here. I think you’d better get it back into the shelf before anyone sees you with it.”

  “Why, Sir?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said quietly, “it’s subversive literature. Totally illegal. You’re better off steering clear of that altogether unless you want the Gestapo rifling through your tuckbox!”

  “But, Sir,” began Freddie, “Mr. Eng...”

  “Sir,” I hurriedly interrupted, realising that Freddie might accidentally get Mr. English into trouble if he mentioned that Mr. English had recommended the book. “Um... so did Huxley write anything else?”

  “Difficult to say,” mused Caratacus. “As far as I know, he moved to the United States before the War and so obviously we haven’t heard anything of him since then. Ah,” he said, looking at his watch, “I’d better be off, chaps. I don’t suppose either of you has seen Pontevecchio, have you?”

  “Yes, Sir,” I replied. “He’s supervising First Form Curfew.”

  “Aha! Marvellous. Well I’ll see you both tomorrow morning. You’ll be pleased to know that you both scored handsomely in last week’s vocab test.”

  After Caratacus had left, Freddie turned to me and said, “So what was Mr. English doing, telling us to read a forbidden book? And what the devil was that all about; telling Caratacus we were choosing new reading books? Honestly! Do you think Caratacus has never met me before?”

  I chuckled. “Well we got away with it, didn’t we?”

  Freddie began to head off towards the door. But something had occurred to me.

  “Hang on a mo, Fred,” I called after him.

  Stupidly, it hadn’t previously occurred to me that, since Brave New World began with a B and was at the end of a shelf, it was perfectly possible that there might be more books by Aldous Huxley on the next shelf down.

  “That’s odd, Freddie, look!” He came dashing back over.

  The first book on the next shelf down, lodged between another book by Huxley called Crome Yellow and the end of the shelf was an unassuming and very slender green hardback in mint condition. If I had been glancing casually along this shelf, I probably would not have noticed it at all. It was entitled Moses, Man of the Mountain by Z. Neale-Hurston.

  “This one’s out of position,” I said. “It should be under N for Neale, not H for Hurston.” I managed to wrench the book from the shelf.

  Freddie slid his right hand into the narrow gap left by this book and spent a few moments exploring the inside of the bookcase. Turning his head away and with the grimace of effort of an alcoholic desperately seeking a ten pfennig coin down the back of an armchair, he pushed his hand as far in as he could without removing any other books.

  “Eureka!” he exclaimed.

  This time there was a gentle click and Freddie removed his hand and retreated. Again he waited for some magic to happen and, when it didn’t, he looked at me, shrugging.

  I stepped forward to replace the book. But then, as I was forcing it back into its space, the whole bookcase swung slowly and smoothly backwards. I looked around to ensure that nobody else had entered the Library.

  “Quickly,” snapped Freddie, bundling forwards and giving the bookcase-door an extra shove, “before anyone catches us.”

  Behind the bookcase, about four feet away, was a second door that looked just like any other door in the building. We both squeezed around the bookcase-door and pushed it shut from the other side. There was another satisfying click so that we knew that nobody who entered the Library now would have any inkling that we were there.

  We were now in what was effectively a very cramped and very dark chamber with the bookcase-door behind us and this second door, presumably leading to the secret room, in front of us.

  I felt around in front of me for the handle and pressed my left ear up against the door. There was no sound.

 
“Hurry up, will you?” said Freddie anxiously.

  “This handle’s really stiff.” I struggled and forced all of my weight down upon it.

  Eventually it gave way and I pushed the door open very gently. The elongating light of the evening slid into the tiny chamber. I poked my head into the room beyond and nodded to Freddie.

  We closed the second door behind us.

  Like the Library, this room was constructed almost entirely from wood and books. The room was quite small and square with a large window directly in front of us, the window in which I had spotted Colonel Barrington and Doctor Boateng earlier. There was a lectern standing proudly in the middle of the room with a large, ornate chandelier hanging over it like a clumsy booby-trap. Over to our right, surrounded, of course, by more bookcases, was another door like the one we had just come through. It had been left slightly ajar.

  The whole room was shrouded by a thin layer of dust which, in the reddening evening light, seemed to rise ghoulishly from where it rested.

  The books ensconced in the shelves all around us were, if it were possible, even more ancient than those looming in the higher shelves in the Library. They were colossal tomes which looked like roughly hewn logs, engraved on their spines with angular Latin abbreviations. I struggled to believe that these texts, if indeed they weren’t just blocks of wood, had ever been meant for reading.

  “Freddie,” I warned, “get away from the window!”

  Freddie had been gazing out in the direction of the Swimming Pool, apparently not realising that he might be seen by any of the Seniors who were now beginning to return from their swim. Freddie stepped aside and began to nose around the room with intent.

  He opened the door on the right hand side of the room.

  “Look,” he said, beckoning me over from where I had been admiring the immense hardbacks. The door led directly to a cast iron staircase which spiralled upwards into total darkness.

  “Where do you think it goes?” I asked.

  “Not sure,” he said, calculating which rooms might be above us on the Second Floor. “I guess it might end up in Mr. Wilbraham’s flat.”

  Well, I thought, that would certainly rule this out as an escape route. If we were to emerge unannounced into his dining room, interrupting dinner with his sparrow-like wife, from a room in which we were not meant to have been, there would be hell to pay. Probably the cane, expulsion, criminal records, and a one-way pass to the Eastern Front. It really didn’t bear thinking about.

  “Hey look!” said Freddie, walking towards the lectern.

  Upon it was a very tatty looking book which had been left hanging open listlessly like a gormless man’s jaw. In contrast to the stately volumes enthroned in the bookcases around the room, this book, if it could be called a book, clearly did not belong here. It was a ragged sheaf of papers of differing dimensions held loosely together with strips of tired leather.

  “Someone’s been reading this recently,” Freddie said. “See, there are fingerprints in the dust on this book-stand thing. But what does all this say? It’s not Latin, is it?” said Freddie.

  I looked over the two pages that were on display. I didn’t dare to turn the pages for fear of tearing them or dislodging them from their flimsy binding.

  “I don’t think so,” I replied. “Looks like a load of gobbledegook to me.”

  The text was written in scrawling manuscript. What Mr. English would say was neat, but not exemplary. The ink had faded with age and was further obscured by the dust that had ingrained itself into the paper.

  It was written in an unfamiliar language. Most of the letters were recognisable, but some of the words contained additional, strange-looking characters, like ɣ, ɔ, ɖ and ŋ, which gave the text a magical, hieroglyphic look.

  The middle of the right-hand page set out what looked like an extract from my mother’s ration-book with numbers at the ends of each line of words. The top of the left-hand page had a roughly drawn diagram, showing a number of circles, some outlined, some filled in, connected by arrows.

  “This looks like a picture of the solar system,” said Freddie, staring at the arrangement of arrows and circles. “Do you think that this language might just be English or German, but in some kind of code?”

  I was just about to tell Freddie that I had no idea, when we both heard a click. Someone had opened the bookcase-door.

  I froze, all of a sudden engulfed by panic. I could see the stiff doorhandle moving. Freddie grabbed my arm, wrenching me from my paralysis, and we tiptoed as quickly as we could through the door that led to the cast-iron staircase, leaving it as it had been, slightly ajar. We waited behind it, hearts racing. The slightest sound, I thought, and we would be learning a great deal more about human sacrifice.

  The door from the Library eventually opened and we heard hushed voices speaking sharply.

  “...I still find it hard to believe that you, of all people, would entertain such a dangerous plan.” This must have been Doctor Boateng: He had a deep, but soft, grainy voice and he seemed to place stress on all of the wrong syllables to give it the intonations of a record being played backwards. “In fact,” he continued, “what you propose is based on views that are insulting to my culture”.

  “Oh, honestly!” hissed Barrington. I saw him briefly as he moved across the room past the gap in the door behind which we hid. “Do not pretend that you have a special relationship with the Vodun.”

  Boateng replied angrily. “You know just as well as I do that this whole aspect of the religion was invented by your British Empire as a way of stamping it down and replacing it with Christianity, tainting the beliefs of your slaves with accusations of witchery and Satanism. That fact that it is now so popular with our new masters does not make it any more valid than it ever was.”

  “Yes, yes, yes!” interrupted Barrington impatiently, “I do know these arguments.”

  “Even so, ignoring these cultural arguments, what you have proposed to do is, as you well know, medically incredibly dangerous. Many of the boys could die. Or worse.”

  My heart jumped and Freddie looked at me with an expression of confusion and terror. What could it be that Barrington was proposing to do? Was Doctor Boateng referring to the boys who had already disappeared or was he talking about all of us? And how could Barrington be plotting something that was worse than death? What could that even be? You hear rumours of gruesome tortures performed by the Gestapo on Resistance activists...

  Freddie and I started to edge backwards towards the base of the staircase, trying to contain the panicked instinct to run. Being caught by Barrington now, well, I just didn’t know what it might mean. But what I was certain of was that being caught stumbling into the Headmaster’s flat would be a very welcome alternative.

  “Well,” replied Barrington, with a malevolent calm, “Miss Prenderghast and Head Matron are already under the spell. The time is coming, and it is a risk I am prepared to take.”

  “It is not your risk to take!” Boateng shouted furiously.

  Freddie and I were now halfway up the staircase and we could see a very thin sliver of light up above. Probably emanating from underneath the door to Wilbraham’s flat. It was becoming harder to hear the discussion continuing below and I did not know whether some of the words they were using were unfamiliar or whether I was just mishearing what they were saying:

  “Please listen to me for a moment,” said Barrington, his voice quietened in an effort to impose some reason upon the discussion. “Have you seen this text before?”

  Boateng paused. In spite of being quite far away by now, I could still hear Boateng breathing heavily, clearly still angered by Barrington’s determination. “What is it?” he asked, forcing himself to speak evenly.

  “I was given it by the Witchdoctor in Accra.”

  Freddie stared at me wide-eyed with disbelief.

  “After she...”

  “Yes. After she was taken. He told me to prepare myself for the Bokor. Look, it is all written down here. Most of
this admittedly is nonsense, but this portion here sets out the prescriptions, the timings and the methods of administration.”

  There were a couple of minutes when they spoke too quietly for us to hear them. Freddie and I did not dare to move a muscle. We were still well within earshot of Barrington and Boateng.

  “So the potion is to be prepared before.... But how do you propose to administer this to the boys?”

  “I’m planning to gas them!”

  Freddie’s eyes widened even further. At that moment, I leant too heavily on the banister and it let out a faint creak.

  Barrington and Boateng fell silent. I could then hear one of them stepping quickly towards the door just below us. I still had my hand on the banister, and loosening my grip just slightly let out another treacherous creak.

  “Who’s there?” shouted Barrington.

  Without hesitating, we scrambled up the stairs as fast as we could, heedless of the amount of noise we were making. This was a new kind of fear, one I had never felt before. I hadn’t realised before that every time I had previously thought I was afraid, I was, in fact, not. Even when we were down in the Dungeon and Barrington had shone the torch straight at me, my fear still had the element of playfulness and mischief that my current fear was lacking. Now I was afraid for my life and for whatever fate had befallen the others.

  We burst through the door at the top of the stairs.

  six

  “Where are we?”

  “Not sure,” panted Freddie. “But it’s definitely not the Beak’s flat!”

  We had emerged into a large, empty bathroom that smelt of wet gym socks. There were three baths in a row down the middle of the room, and a series of five sinks along the wall to our right. The dripping taps looked as if they hadn’t been used for centuries and there were rusty streaks running down the porcelain below them which, in the reddened light, made the taps look like sixteen bleeding noses.