by Mann, W. E.
She exhaled slowly. “Bring him here,” she said and pointed to the geriatric wooden chair in the middle of the room. It was, I thought, the sort of chair that people get tortured on by Russians.
Freddie hobbled and winced his way to the chair. Head Matron crouched down to examine him. But, just then, we heard a sudden commotion coming from the Upper Corridor. Oh dear. Phase Three was going wrong.
“Reginald Pickering! What the hell do you think you’re doing?!” It was Mr. English and he was in a terrible temper.
“Sir, I...” began Reggie.
“Detention!” shouted Mr. English. “In fact double Detention!”
“But Sir...”
“Do not answer me back, boy!” he fumed.
“Reggie, Reggie!” It was Caratacus’ calmer tone. “What on Earth were you doing going up there, eh?”
“Sir,” said Reggie, “I’ve lost my tuck-box key and I think Blackadder’s got it. I wanted to see him to ask if he could tell me where it is.”
“Well, look here, the thing to do is ask Head Matron. You know very well that she is the only person allowed up to the Sick Bay. She’ll pass on the message. It’s not worth the risk going up there yourself now, is it?”
“No, Sir. Sorry, Sir.”
“So does that hurt?” Freddie had been too distracted by the exchange outside to remember to maintain his groaning and wincing while Head Matron prodded his ankle.
“Hmm? Oh...er...ooh, ouch! Gosh, that’s sore!” he howled unconvincingly. I rolled my eyes at him.
“You’re fine,” she said, standing back up and, with a wave of her hand, added, “Off you go.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
I pretended to help Freddie out of the Surgery and, as soon as the door was shut behind us, we ran to catch up with Reggie.
fifteen
That night I slept very deeply, but was awoken at some unrecognisable hour by a freakish nightmare.
It was about Milo Blackadder. He was standing there in our dorm, by his bed, with the moon slicing through the shutters and casting a strip of white light down him. He was pale and dishevelled. His pyjamas were ragged and grubby and hung from his thin shoulders. His toenails and fingernails were thickly ingrained with grime. His hair matted greasily to his forehead. He seemed emaciated and his mouth hung open dryly, revealing teeth that looked as if they would soon drop from his gums. But the most startling aspect of his appearance was his eyes - glassy and lifeless, and the surrounding areas of his face were black, giving the impression that he had not slept for an age and that his eyes had receded into his head.
My body was frozen still. Well, not so much frozen as pinned down by an invisible block of cement. I wanted to run or scream, but I felt bound and gagged. I could not even close my eyes. Around me, the rest of the dorm was sleeping soundly. If only I could close my eyes, I could at least pretend to be asleep and this nightmare might go away.
Milo slowly raised his grubby hands towards me. Somehow I knew he wanted to explain, but he couldn’t speak. Strangely, though, I felt as if I understood him. It was like he was speaking directly to my mind, explaining that he needed to get away from something. And there was thirst. He was unquenchably thirsty. But most of all, it was sadness. He was consumed by a sadness that not even death could assuage, and he needed to escape. He was desperate for help.
But then something much more terrifying loomed into view behind him and placed a haggard, rotten hand on his shoulder. A tall figure in a shabby, brown cloak, the face completely shrouded in the shadow of a hood. Terror sheared like a frozen knife straight through me as I felt the eyes of this horrifying ghoul fall upon me.
Then they were gone. My nightmare echoed with the sound of hooves trotting off into the night.
Or were they paws?
sixteen
I awoke with a start and a dry mouth. I looked around at the familiar surroundings of my dorm. It was a creepy room at the best of times, but I was comforted to see that everything seemed to be as it should be. And as I wondered whether dreams really could contain messages from people in distress, I fell back to sleep.
Sunday was a good day. Other than Prayers in the Orangery, we could do whatever we wanted. A day set aside for everyone’s favourite activity: mucking about. There were always so many possibilities: climbing trees, doing dares, building huts, declaring wars; there was the Walled Garden, the Deer Park, the Swimming Pool, the Games Pitches; stinging-nettles to dodge, pheasants to bash, booby-traps to prime and a never-ending supply of hidden locations to discover, name, annex and render as part of the semi-mythical realm we occupied.
Sundays started in the best possible way. An extra hour in bed. So, at the sluggish hour of seven, I would wake up and have a few moments to face the depressing thought of heaving myself out of bed and traipsing downstairs to be herded through a tepid shower. But then, once that thought had fully awoken me, I would have that blissful realisation that I had the next hour in bed. And that hour was always the one hour of the week when my bed was more comfortable than it was during any of the other one hundred and sixty-seven.
So I closed my eyes and sunk back into my mattress and a flickering almost-sleep when my dreams masqueraded as reality. I saw Blackadder slithering out from the Burrow with Boateng and the Colonel standing above him in Polizei tunics, necromancing him from the soil, and Blackadder blinking in the light with the unfamiliarity of a newly-born baby. And then I was seeing myself, hidden behind the barricade which Pickering was still constructing. I knew I had been seen and I wanted to run. But I could not command my body because, of course, my body was over there and I was still here, watching. And then I was drinking water straight from the tap at the sinks by the Showers in the Basement. The water was cold and perfectly clear. It woke me up.
***
It was another fine day and Peregrine Trout had just opened up the shutters as the rest of us were dozing and struggling to wake up.
“Guyth,” said Peregrine suddenly. “Hath Blackadder been here?”
I propped myself up on an elbow and rubbed my eyes. The others ignored him.
“Why?” I asked.
“Oh nothing,” he said. “I jutht didn’t think thith photo of hith family wath lying on hith bed before lighth-out.” He picked the framed picture up from where it lay on Milo’s bed. “I thought it wath on hith chair latht night, that’th all.”
“I thought so too,” I said, pulling myself out of bed and into my slippers. “That’s where it always is.”
“Oh well,” he said dismissively. “Hmm, but that’th odd. It’th got a load of mud on it. Very thtrange.” He tossed it back onto the bed.
I went over to have a look. Peregrine was right. There was no reason why I would usually be bothered by this sort of detail – after all, things were always disappearing mysteriously or being found somewhere other than where they were left. But this time I felt a faint twitch of panic inside me: In my dream, Milo had been here, trying to tell me something, and his hands had been dirty. In fact, I thought to myself, either this was a bizarre coincidence, far too bizarre, or my dream had not been a dream at all, but a nightmare reality.
Could it be possible that when I thought I was dreaming, I was actually seeing one of my best friends in the form of a zombie, coming to me for help? And what was that petrifying ghoul that had loomed behind him to take him away? Milo had certainly looked zombie-like, but his behaviour was far from what I had been led by cartoons and films to expect of a zombie – no staggering about, attacking people or sucking out their brains.
It must have been a dream, I reassured myself. Of course it was a dream. But I realised that there was so much more that I had to find out: how zombies were made, how I could identify them and, most importantly, the cure. Sunday was the perfect day to do that. No distractions.
***
Mr. English’s English classroom, which was also the Second Form prep-room, was empty after breakfast. Though the room was not strictly out-of-bounds like Wilbraham’s fl
at or the Dungeons or the Science Labs, I shouldn’t really have been in here and if Mr. English happened upon me, he would hit the roof like he had with Reggie yesterday. Last year there had been a spate of stationery thefts from people’s desks, so anyone found poking around in another form’s prep-room outside lesson-time would have his honesty subject to discussion in the teachers’ common-room over ersatz coffee and Eccles cakes.
Mr. English’s room had a crusty smell of nicotine, just like his breath, only not quite so obnoxious. Maybe he had spent so many years here that his breath had imbued the walls, the floor and the pale yellow ceiling with the sickly stench of cheroot-smoke, like a pub with a despondent landlord.
On Mr. English’s desk was an open box containing copies of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. I guessed that he would soon be imposing this upon the Fourth Form as their summer holiday reading project. In the far corner of the room were two bookcases containing novels for boys in the lower part of the school and a brand new set of the English version of the Encyclopædia Germanica. I heaved the last of these (Typewriter – Zygote) from the shelf and slammed it onto the mantelpiece behind Mr. English’s desk, puffing up a plume of dust as I did so. I flicked towards the back. I knew that I was unlikely to find a full account of the attributes and weaknesses of zombies, but what I did find was shockingly enlightening:
“Zombi, also spelled “zombie”: In Voodoo folklore, a corpse reanimated after burial by a Necromancer (a Bokor) and compelled to do his bidding. Scholars believe that actual zombies exist as living persons under the influence of powerful drugs, including nitrous oxide, poisons from berries of the Deadly Nightshade and tetrodotoxins derived from the livers of poisonous puffer fish.”
I took a sharp breath. I could hardly believe it. It was set out here in black and white, and it was so matter-of-fact. The poison from the livers of puffer fish is used to make zombies. That’s what it said. And it was the livers that Miss Prenderghast wanted us to remove from the fish we dissected in Biology the other day. Surely there was no way that could be an innocent coincidence. So this must be Miss Prenderghast’s role in all of this: She is helping Barrington by producing the potion to turn boys into zombies. And what was worse was that we had all unknowingly helped her. I read on.
“In certain versions of Voodoo, the Bokor reanimates the corpses during a ritual, known as the Quickening. The Bokor enters into an often violent trance during which he is possessed by a Loa (which is a Voodoo deity similar to an angel or a demon). Once the ritual is complete, it is said the souls of the reanimated corpses enter Fetishes (dolls commonly made from wood) where they will remain until the Bokor dies.”
The door opened sharply and I quickly, guiltily rifled through to another entry. I had to be able to pretend that my reason for being here was innocent. Oh dear, “Wendy House”. How am I going to justify that?
“Hullo, Tom!”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “Blimey, Freddie! Open the door like a normal person!”
“I’ve been looking high and low for you. Reggie’s off to check out the Hidden Library before the Morning Service. You know, look for clues.”
“Quick, Freddie, close the door! You’ve got to have a look at this!” I showed him the encyclopædia entry and waited for him to finish reading it.
“Whoa! No way!” He looked at me, open-mouthed. “Miss Prenderghast... she...”
“Exactly! We already knew that Miss Prenderghast was under the zombie spell. But now it’s obvious that she’s helping Barrington.”
“I can’t believe it!” he said, shaking his head. “So when we were doing the dissection, we were actually helping to make the poison that they plan to use on us!”
“Grim, isn’t it? So Prenderghast produces the poison, or perhaps she produces part of it and Barrington produces the other part, and then Head Matron injects it into the boys. Hey, do you know what either of these other ingredients is? Nitrous oxide or Deadly Nightshade berries?”
“I don’t know anything about Deadly Nightshade, but I know about nitrous oxide,” he said. “It’s laughing gas. They gave it to my brother Charlie. What happened was he was playing rugby a couple of years ago and got smashed by these two ginormous blokes so badly that his kneecap went all the way round to the other side!”
“Urgh!” I felt ill thinking about it. “Hey, could he bend his leg in the opposite direction?”
Freddie paused, perhaps toying with including that idea into his next rendition of the story. “Dunno. He didn’t try coz he passed out from the pain. When he woke up, he was in the front seat of his housemaster’s car outside the hospital. The doctors couldn’t figure out a way of getting him out of the car without making it hurt really badly. So they made him inhale loads of nitrous oxide.”
“Really? Did it work?”
“Yeah! He was laughing his head off!” Freddie grinned. “It’s used in whipped cream too. It’s the stuff that makes the cream come out of the can all foamy. Anyway,” he said, “You look up Deadly Nightshade and I’ll look for tetro... tet... that puffer fish poison.”
I pulled volume three of the encyclopædia off the shelf and found the entry for “Deadly Nightshade”. Freddie was already nosing through volume eighteen.
“Deadly nightshade. Here it is. Blah, blah, blah... Aha! The berries of the Deadly Nightshade are extremely toxic. Consumption can be lethal. Symptoms of poisoning include: hypersensitivity to light, loss of balance, staggering, dry mouth and throat, confusion, loss of memory, impaired speech, blurred vision... and constipation!”
Though I couldn’t really comment on constipation, it seemed to me that all of these other symptoms were classic hallmarks of zombiness in the comics.
“The Deadly Nightshade plant grows bell-shaped flowers that are dull purple with a green tinge. The berries are half an inch in diameter...” I turned the page to see a coloured diagram showing a specimen of the plant. It looked very familiar... Of course! It was the plant which Miss Prenderghast was picking berries from when we saw her on our way to the Burrow. So that meant that she was working on two ingredients of the zombie-poison.
I then flicked to the entry for “Bokor”:
“Bokor: In the Voodoo religion, necromancers who practise evil magic. According to folklore, there is at any time one Grand Bokor and a number of Lesser Bokors. Each has a relationship with a particular Loa (a lesser deity) which he summons to perform rituals.”
“Hey, Tom. Listen to this. It’s awful! Tetrodotoxin: A very strong poison found notably in the livers of the puffer fish. When swallowed, the victim’s body becomes paralysed, but he is left fully conscious. Tetrodotoxin has no known antidote.”
What a horrible situation, I thought. Like those horror stories you hear of people in comas who can hear everything that’s going on around them, but can’t tell the doctor not to turn off the life-support. Freddie continued:
“The first symptom of tetrodotoxic poisoning is a slight tingling of the lips and tongue. Next there is an increasing numbness in the limbs before total paralysis takes hold, with the brain still working. At high doses, it can leave its victim in a state of near-death for long periods. For this reason, tetrodotoxin is thought to be used in the Voodoo practice of creating zombies.”
“Wow!” exclaimed Freddie, looking up. “So your brain works, but your body goes dead. Imagine spending all that time knowing what’s going to happen, but not being able to do anything about it.”
The door banged open and I jumped.
“Here you are!” panted Reggie. “Guys, look!” He excitedly brandished what looked like a torn scrap of paper.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Well I found it on those stairs that go up to Wolfhall from the back of the Hidden Library.” He paused for breath. “That book you said you saw in there wasn’t in there today. I looked all around the shelves, but there was nothing other than all those ancient books. But then, when I was just getting to the door to that dirty old bathroom, this was just there lying on the top step.
I reckon it’s a clue.”
“It must have fallen out of that book when Barrington and Boateng were chasing us up the stairs,” said Freddie, peering at it. “It’s the one that we saw before. Look, it’s that strange picture of the circles and lines. The writing here must be in that Eewoo language Samson was talking about.”
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s find him.”
seventeen
“Well these words won’t mean much to you,” said Samson, studying the scrap of paper closely. “But it is E’we.”
The three of us had found him in the Basement, lugging hefty sacks of flour from the Storeroom to the Pantry located downstairs from the Kitchen. The Cook wasn’t around and nor were any of the Masters, and now the four of us were in the Pantry, sitting on the flour-bags.
I looked around at the store-cupboards and their heavy padlocks, imagining what kinds of delicious food might be in them. My stomach rumbled.
“But I can work out what most of it means,” he continued. “It’s a bit strange, but the language is very simple, like it’s been written by a five year old or something.”
“Go on,” I said.
“Well,” began Samson, putting his finger on the page to trace the words as he read them, “it seems like the caption to this diagram and I think what this says is: “And the time when they wake up is the time when the night is darkest and with Lisa on one side and Mawu on the other...”, and that’s where the page ends.”
He sat quietly for a moment, thinking.
I shrugged. “So what are Lisa and Mawu?” I asked. “Are they people or something?”
“I think Lisa and Mawu are like gods,” he said. “They’re Voodoo Loas. In the stories, they are the children of the god who created the world. I think one is the first man and the other is the first woman, but I can hardly remember.”