The Quickening of Tom Turnpike (The Talltrees Trilogy)

by Mann, W. E.

  “Well, that must be it. And Barrington’s logbook said that it was best to keep them in a damp and cool environment. That would certainly describe the Dungeon. But I don’t... Oh!” Something else had just occurred to me. “I’d totally forgotten. How stupid of me!”

  “What is it?” asked Reggie.

  “A key! I found a key lying on the floor down there. I’d forgotten about it all this time. How could I forget? I wonder... well I suppose it might just be a key to the bronze door...”

  “Where is it now?”

  “I would have pocketed it, I guess. I suppose it must still be in my dressing gown.”

  ***

  “Look!” said Reggie, pointing shakily at the floor just outside the door to the Dungeon.

  There was nobody in the Basement. It was another hot evening and almost everyone in the school, at least everyone who had not yet been spirited away by Barrington, was passing the time between Prep and bed outside in the Forest, the Pool or the Cricket Nets. So there would be nobody near this part of the building. Anyway, most of the rooms around here were just for storage.

  I had the long, slender key clutched firmly in my hand like a robber’s knife in a dark alley, and Reggie brandished his torch nervously, flashing the beam unnecessarily at the marks in the dust in front of his feet.

  “It looks like something has been dragged in through the door,” said Samson.

  “Or someone,” added Reggie dramatically, but without jest.

  I pushed the ancient, heaving door, holding it ajar to usher past Reggie and Samson before I let it close behind me. The door’s werewolf growl as it shut seemed somehow to have a quality of finality about it, like it was warning us that it would not let us back out again, that we would be down here in the Dungeon forever. And Freddie’s adage that “it’s never daytime in the Dungeon” certainly seemed to hold true. Nothing in here gave any hint that outside it was a glorious, balmy midsummer’s evening. In fact, nothing in here gave any hint that there was, or had ever been, an outside at all.

  “I hate this place,” muttered Samson, reminding me that I was not alone.

  Reggie was flashing his torch frantically into every nook and corner. “Let’s not hang around,” he said with a shiver. “Where are we going?”

  I could feel the fear crawling all over me, making my arms and legs twitch with the urge to run away. It was different to the last time I was down here when I was just trying to prove a point to Freddie. A pretty stupid point, now I thought about it. But that was before I believed in ghost-stories – and if we hadn’t come down here that night, maybe I never would. I certainly wouldn’t have been standing here now, shuddering with terror. This time was far worse because I knew that something was lurking here in the swallowing darkness and I could not turn back and make up a story to tell the First Formers the next day. This time it was real. And I needed to suppress the tension and my instincts to flee. In fact, I would need to be totally robotic and emotionless. Like a zombie, I thought with a grimace.

  “Right,” I whispered, swallowing. “That way. Let’s do this!”

  We crept slowly down the first passageway on the right, the one where I had found the key lying in the dirt. Reggie swung his torch-beam around, painting the walls and the floor with nervous cones of orange light which seemed to yield in submission to the unknown depths of blackness. Perhaps it was a failure in my memory or a trick played by fear on my mind, but the passage seemed a good deal broader than it had been last time I was here. But then I noticed why that was.

  “Guys,” I whispered as quietly as I could. “There were loads of big wooden cases along this wall before. Ah, look, like those down there, but loads more.”

  “Hey,” said Samson, his whisper slightly too loud for my liking. “They look a bit like coffins, don’t they? I mean, they look a lot like coffins, don’t they? God... I don’t like this one bit.”

  “And look,” said Reggie, dragging the lights across the cold, dank floor. “It looks like people have been dragged up to about here,” he indicated the area around where the row of boxes had begun when Freddie and I had hidden behind them. “And then look...”

  After that point, the dust – well it was more like damp grime and mud here – had clear tracks through it, about two feet wide, and ending at the base of the bronze door. “So the boys have been dragged down here,” I said, “then loaded into these coffin-boxes and then the boxes have been dragged into the Crypt.” I looked up at the bronze door. “Guys,” I added, with the tempo of my heartbeat rising, “I’m a bit scared!”

  “Me too,” whispered Samson and Reggie at the same time.

  I opened my right hand. I had been clutching the key so tightly that my skin peeled away from it to leave a deep indentation in my palm.

  “We’ve got to do this,” I said, hoping that, by sounding defiant, I could trick myself out of the terror. “I don’t exactly know what we’ll find, but Barrington’s logbook said that they shouldn’t be zombies yet, not until the eclipse of the Moon. Anyway, as I see it, if we don’t do something now, we’ll all either get turned into zombies or we’ll end up getting killed by them. Right?”

  “Well then, stop dithering and let’s get on with this!” said Reggie boldly, shining a light on the keyhole.

  The key slid in neatly. I turned it slowly and the lock yielded smoothly with the faintest click. I looked up at Samson and Reggie and then, deciding that I ought to make the escape route as accessible as possible, I pushed the bronze door open as far as it would go.

  It scraped grittily across the stone floor, like fingernails down a blackboard, with an agonised banshee-shriek that rang and echoed down into the unseen depths of the Crypt and then it boomed against whatever was behind it, which rattled and reverberated into the darkness, causing a flutter of scratchings and scurryings of what I could only hope were unsettled rodents.

  I was petrified, rooted to the spot, prone, exposed and utterly betrayed by Reggie’s torchlight. If anything was going to hurtle out of the bowels of the Crypt and skewer me with its talons, it would be able to do so right now without resistance and I would be pinned to the wall behind me. And then a horde of shambling zombies could simply take their time devouring my brains and sucking out my bone-marrow and innards in whichever order they saw fit. Maybe polish off my fingers and toes for dessert.

  After an eternity, the shrieking, booming, rattling, scratching and scurrying ceased and was replaced by a dead silence. It felt like the eye of the storm. I was still frozen. I was willing my legs to spring me out of harm’s way, but they would not obey me until finally Samson broke the spell:

  “Jesus!” he said out loud – I suppose there was no point in whispering after that. “Well, seeing as we’re still alive, I suppose we ought to find out what’s in there.”

  Reggie shone the light over my shoulder and down into the Crypt. It was a long, arched tunnel of brick, like a sewer, opening up to a broader area towards the back, with thick leaden pipes running along its ceiling, dripping with mould. The end of the Crypt was only just visible in the gloom, a crumbling brick wall probably thirty yards away. There were patches of sludge and puddles on the floor, and, in the middle, a large pile of black mud with a shovel leaning up against it.

  Reggie passed the light down each wall. Along both sides of the tunnel were metallic racks made of what looked like heavy-duty Meccano. It was obviously one of these that had produced the rattling as the door slammed into it. Upon these racks, in two rows like bunk-beds, were more of the wooden boxes, laid flat.

  Reggie approached one of them tentatively and shone his torch into it.

  “That’s odd,” he muttered. Samson and I peered in. The box had no lid and appeared to be about three quarters full of mud.

  “A box of mud,” said Reggie.

  “I doubt it,” said Samson grimly.

  He began to brush away some of the dirt with his hand, layer by layer. At first I couldn’t see anything, but Reggie suddenly stepped back with fright.<
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  “Oh dear!” he said. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  “Look, just give me the torch,” said Samson. He snatched it from Reggie and shone the light into the soil. And then I saw what had startled Reggie. It was a nose. Someone’s nose was poking out of the mud, soft, pink and shiny.

  “Lend us a hand,” said Samson. “Come on, Reggie. It won’t hurt you.”

  We dragged away more and more of the dirt until the form of a face gradually began to sculpt itself out of the grime.

  “Either of you recognise him?” asked Reggie, brushing away the last of the mud to reveal curly blond hair and tired, flaccid cheeks, marble-pale but for patches of ingrained dirt and darkly reddened areas around his calmly closed eyes.

  “It’s Ambrose Milligan,” I said.

  “Who?” said Reggie.

  “Milligan. You know, played Siegfried in the First Form Play. I think he’s been ill for about a week,” I said and then suddenly gagged because, in the torchlight, I just caught sight of a thin worm slipping from his nose and into the mud. Reggie and Samson had not noticed.

  Samson flashed the light towards some of the other coffin-boxes around us. None of them had lids, some of them were empty and, in fact, most of them did not even contain enough soil to cover the sorry occupant. We walked along the row of boxes with Samson muttering the names of the boys inside as he recognised them, though some had been bundled in carelessly, face-down. “Ingram-Edge... Bunting... Rainwater... Spitalfields... Ah, here’s Milo. Oh my God!”

  Samson hovered the light over Milo’s face. It was horrific; his eyes were wide open in an expression of abject terror and his cheeks were drastically gaunt and sunken, far worse than when I had last seen him. His skin was crusty and tinged with green and yellow like it was beginning to rot on his bones, particularly at the edges of his mouth, his nostrils and ears. Reggie yelped sharply.

  “L-look at his hand.”

  One of Milo’s hands was visible above the soil in his coffin and, as I looked, wondering what had startled Reggie, Milo’s index finger suddenly jerked. Samson and I jumped backwards like we had been electrocuted.

  “Do you think he can see us?” panicked Samson.

  I remembered what Barrington’s log had said about the boys’ bodies being dead, but that they would still have the power of thought. Did that mean they could see and hear as well though? “I don’t know,” I gulped. “God, I really hope not. That would be too... weird!”

  Samson moved further down into the Crypt. “Whoa!” he exclaimed, holding the light over another box.

  There was no mud in this one at all. But it contained a skeleton wearing a rotting dressing gown and slippers. Its bones were a brilliant white, like it had been meticulously cleaned, almost seeming to emit its own light. Its hollowed eyes and fleshless mouth grinned maniacally, mocking us.

  “This boy’s been here for a very long time!” said Samson.

  “Hang on!” I said. “It can’t be... I know who this boy is. Look, the spine is smashed and, here, all of his finger bones are crushed up. Some of them have broken off altogether.” I looked at Samson and Reggie, waiting for a reaction. “You know the story of the boy who fell from the top of the Spiral Staircase on his birthday. These are his injuries.”

  “The Deathly Screamer!” said Reggie in amazement. “And I thought all those injuries were made up to scare First Formers. Urgh, and look! If you look through the eye-hole, you can see his brains are still there.”

  “But... why wouldn’t his brain rot away?” frowned Samson. “Hey, you know about this one?” he said shining the light on the next box along. It was another skeleton, this one wearing a decaying boiler suit, face down to display a great cavity in the back of its skull like a large piece missing from the middle of an old lady’s jigsaw puzzle. But again its brains appeared to be intact.

  “I don’t believe it!” I said. “It’s the boy who fell out of the Watchtower tree and smashed his head on the Red Rock. The Fallen Boy!”

  “Exactly. And look at these two,” said Samson. “The Wondering Monk and the Black Dog!” He was right. The monk’s cowl was thickly layered with mould and slimy fungus.

  We had reached the end of the row of boxes by now and had not yet seen Freddie. I supposed that he must have been in one of the coffins that were full to the brim with mud, or maybe he was one of the boys lying face down. After the racks of boxes, the Crypt opened up into a wider circular area with straw strewn around.

  “What’s this?” said Samson. Around the outside of the area of straw were numerous twisted lumps of what looked like large clods of soil positioned at regular intervals. But on closer inspection, I realised what these were. They were small, roughly chiselled wooden dolls, like the ones that Doctor Boateng had shown us during his talk in the Orangery. They were Fetishes.

  “Guys, I know what this set-up is,” I said. “This is where the Bokor summons the Loa. It’s where he goes into a trance so he can cast the Quickening spell to turn people into zombies. And these are the Fetishes, look. They’re voodoo dolls that are used to contain the souls of the boys who become zombies. This is where it’s all going to happen.”

  “This place is evil,” said Samson, horrified. “Come on, guys. We’ve seen enough. Time to get out of here.”

  “What are we going to do then?” asked Reggie with a note of relief in his quavering voice.

  “This is all the evidence we’ll need. We’ve got to bring Caratacus or Wilbraham down to see...” I began.

  Suddenly we heard the unmistakeable growl of the Dungeon door echoing down the passageway and into the Crypt. Oh God. We were stuck. There was no way we would be able to make it to the Crypt door in time to avoid being seen and there was certainly no way we could close the Crypt door without being heard.

  “Oh no!” panicked Reggie. “Oh Jesus! What do we do?”

  “There’s only one thing for it,” whispered Samson, switching off the torch. “Find an empty one and get in face down. Don’t move a muscle.”

  “What?!” exclaimed Reggie. “You’ve got to be kidding. I’m not getting in one of those!”

  “Reggie,” I said, trying to pretend I wasn’t also horrified by Samson’s grim suggestion, “we’ve got no choice. It is either that or get turned into a zombie.”

  “No way!” he insisted.

  The footsteps were getting closer.

  “Reggie, you’ve got to do it,” ordered Samson. “Or you’ll get Tom and me turned into zombies too!”

  Reggie took a deep, hesitant breath. “Okay, okay. Alright. I’ll do it.”

  We scurried around in various directions and clambered up into vacant boxes. We waited, struggling not to twitch or breathe. My box, as one would expect, was hard and uncomfortable. It also had a damp, foetid smell seeping out of the wood, like rubbish which has been left in a bin for too long. I couldn’t help wondering why this box was empty and whether it had had any previous occupants.

  I strained to hear. I expected whoever it was to be in the Crypt by now. But then I realised why they were not; I could faintly hear a dragging sound, getting louder and louder. This must have been the sound of another boy being brought to his coffin. Maybe it was Freddie. And then I heard a voice whispering hoarsely and tersely.

  “You’ve left the door open, woman. Look at it!”

  There was no reply.

  “Right. Bring him in. Find an empty box. Put him in it and pile on some earth. There. Clear enough?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a light being flashed around. And I heard the footsteps getting louder and louder.

  “Right, my little beauties,” the voice whispered faintly. “Tonight is your night! And some of you have been waiting a long, long time for this. It’s just the beginning. Just the first small step in our grand scheme, eh? One tiny little corner of the world which will be our very own!”

  I could hardly believe what I was hearing. This was like something from a scary film - a deranged lunatic with a ghastly
plan for the destruction of humanity! The footsteps got louder and louder still until they ceased right next to my head. I lay dead still, my nose pressed up uncomfortably against the base of the coffin, holding my breath for dear life. And then, horrifyingly, light blazed orange through my closed eyelids. Oh God! I had been discovered. If I tried to climb out and run, Barrington or Head Matron would surely catch me.

  “This is odd... and no soil!”

  In my desperation not to move a muscle, I felt my whole body tense up. I couldn’t help it, but my knee jerked impulsively. Oh no! That was surely it; my treacherous right leg had sold me to the zombie-makers.

  “Ooh!” he whispered excitedly and clapped his hands. “We’ve got a twitcher. Marvellous, marvellous! Don’t you get impatient, my little zomboy! We’ll have you up and out tonight and you will have your fun.”

  To my relief, he removed the light from me. But, as I took the opportunity to draw breath, I felt something pattering onto my back and in into my hair. I opened my eyes briefly and, just then, a large clump of mud landed right by my head and a long, swollen worm oozed out of it towards my face. I wondered whether worms and maggots could tell whether boys were dead or alive and prayed that this one could and would decide not to squirm into my nose or ear.

  After a few more minutes of mud heaping onto my back and piling up around my face and as I was beginning to weigh up whether I would rather suffocate in a coffin or be turned into a zombie which lived in a coffin, the shower of soil ceased. I heard the shovel being tossed clangourously onto the floor and footsteps retreating from the Crypt.

  “Jolly good!” whispered the voice and then, with a certain amount of shuffling and grunting, the Crypt door squealed shut.

  After a few moments, I crawled spluttering from my coffin. Samson switched on the torch and shone it up and down me.

  “Blimey!” he snorted. “You look like a coal-miner!”