Skippy Dies: A Novel

by Paul Murray

  ‘Here comes William Bunnington,’ sings Geoff anxiously, ‘with his friend Owl – he’s the Mayor…’

  ‘Dog biscuits! You draw up this big complicated plan, with the bells and the whistles, and then before we even leave you eat the dog biscuits!’

  ‘I couldn’t help it,’ Ruprecht replies miserably. ‘When I’m nervous I get hungry.’

  ‘They were dog biscuits!’

  ‘Well, we can’t stay up here for ever,’ Odysseas says.

  ‘I’m not going down there to get my family jewels chewed off,’ Mario states, then scratches his ear. ‘This damn rayon, it’s making me itchy!’

  ‘Bunnington Village,’ Geoff, with mounting urgency, ‘where the squirrels make Nut Soup…’

  ‘Lad, why in God’s name do you keep making that infernal racket?’ comes the rough voice of Brody the janitor.

  ‘It helps me concentrate,’ they hear Geoff reply. ‘When I’m looking for things?’

  ‘Are you sure your ball even came in here?’

  ‘I think so,’ Geoff says.

  Below, the dog flexes itself in a settling-in sort of way.

  ‘Maybe we should just abort the mission,’ Mario says.

  ‘Never!’ comes the defiant reply from his left.

  ‘Well, what are we going to do, just stay up here all night?’

  Ruprecht does not answer.

  ‘Isn’t that a football right there?’ they hear the guard say.

  ‘Where?’ Geoff’s voice says.

  ‘There, right there, you’re looking right at it.’

  ‘Oh yes – hmm, I’m not sure that’s my football…’

  ‘Well, it’ll do ye –’

  ‘A bunny place, a funny place…’ desperately –

  ‘Ah for Jesus’ sake –’

  ‘… an always bright and sunny place, Bunnington will keep a space for you…’

  ‘Stop it! Go home now! I don’t want to see you in here again!’ the guard starts clapping his hands and calling the dog. The dog, without taking its eye off the top of the wall, barks. ‘Hold on, sounds like Nipper’s found something…’

  ‘Wait!’ Geoff implores. ‘I have to tell you something! Something of the utmost importance!’

  ‘Well, commandante?’ Mario inquires acidly. ‘May we please go home now?’

  But before Ruprecht can reply, Odysseas has peeled off his black sweater, leapt off the wall into the yard and thrown it over the dog. ‘Quickly!’ he urges the other two, as the sweater charges blindly left and right, emitting muffled barks of ever-growing anger. Mario and Ruprecht land painfully on the wet asphalt, just as the dog’s vengeful snout pokes into view. ‘Go!’ Odysseas exhorts, stepping protectively before them; and they take to their heels and run to the shadow of the school. Snarls and the sound of tearing fabric echo across the empty yard. But there is no time to wonder or grieve, nor is there any way back. The guard’s feet thump over the ground, his torch-beam flashing in every direction. Without stopping to think, they scurry around to the back of the school and up the rickety metal staircase, wrestling open the window sash and hurling themselves through it –

  It’s only as they pick themselves up from the moth-eaten carpet that they realize where they are. Inside St Brigid’s: inside the grey walls that have stared back at them for so long, teasing them with the mysteries they conceal. Not yet ready to speak or move, every breath seeming like a thousand-decibel explosion, the boys roll their eyes at each other in mute incredulity.

  One aspect of the plan has panned out – there doesn’t seem to be anybody around. Silently, warily, Ruprecht and Mario tread away from the window, leaving the dark crenellations of Seabrook behind. The deserted hallway is both alien and familiar, like the landscape of a dream. There is a chipped dado rail and a picture of Jesus, dewy-eyed and rosy-cheeked as a boy-band singer; passing into the girls’ dorms, they see through the open doors rumpled bedcovers, balled-up foolscap, posters of footballers and pop stars, homework timetables, bottles of spot cream – uncannily like the dorms in Seabrook, except in some unplaceable but totally fundamental way completely different.

  As they descend the stairs to negotiate the ground floor, this creepy schizoid feeling only grows. Everywhere they look, there are analogues of their own school – classrooms with cramped benches and scrawled blackboards, printouts on the noticeboards, trophy cabinets and art-room posters – almost identical, but at the same time, somehow, not, the discrepancy too subtle for the naked eye and yet omnipresent, as though they’ve entered a parallel universe before the portal has been opened at all, where instead of atoms everything is composed of some mysterious other entity, quarks of hitherto unseen colours… It is quite different from how Mario imagined breaking into a girls’ school would be, and the idea that this place has been here, existing, the whole time he’s been around is one that he finds deeply unsettling.

  If Ruprecht is struck by this he shows no sign; he treks on wordlessly, five or six steps in front of Mario, the pod clinking gently in the bag slung over his shoulder. Then, up ahead, they hear footsteps, and Ruprecht yanks Mario into an unoccupied classroom just as two grey-frocked nuns round the corner. In the very back row they crouch beneath the desks, bathed with sweat, Mario’s breathing heavy and rushed –

  ‘You’re making too much noise!’ Ruprecht hisses at him.

  ‘I can’t help it!’ Mario gesticulates. ‘These nuns, they give me the willies…’

  The nuns have stopped right outside the door. They are talking about a Brazilian priest who is visiting in spring. One nun suggests they take him to Knock. The other says Ballinspittle. A polite argument ensues over the competing merits of the materializations of Our Lady in these two places, one being more accredited, the other more recent, and then – ‘Did you hear something?’

  Under his desk, Mario gazes in horror at his phone, which has just released two loud, self-satisfied bleeps, and now emits two more. Hysterically, Mario fusses over the buttons, trying to shut it up –

  ‘Could it be mice?’ one nun wonders from the corridor.

  ‘Funny sort of mice,’ the other says, her tone hardening.

  ‘Coronation Street’s starting.’

  ‘I’ll just have a peep –’

  The light comes on: the nun’s eyes scan the bare surfaces of the desks. The boys hold their breath, clench every muscle, painfully aware of the fug of sweat and hormones and odours that pump from every pore, waiting for a nostril to twitch in recognition –

  ‘Hmmph.’ The light goes off again, and the door closes. ‘That didn’t sound like a mouse to me, you know.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Sounded more like a rat.’

  ‘Oh goodness, no…’

  The voices recede: Mario whips off his balaclava and sucks in lungfuls of air. ‘These nuns,’ he pants, ‘in Italy they are everywhere, everywhere!’

  By the time he has calmed down sufficiently to carry on, their window of opportunity is starting to look decidedly narrow. Dinner hour is over at eight, and although the students will be continuing from there to Study Hall, the nuns, of whom it seems Mario has a pathological fear, which Ruprecht thinks is the kind of thing that ought really to have been mentioned prior to entering the convent, will be at liberty and on the loose.

  They exit the classroom and hurry along as directed by the map. Nerves are strained now, and the uncanny familiarity of their surroundings paradoxically disorientates them, leading them repeatedly down false paths – ‘That was the chemistry lab back there, so the gym must be this way!’ ‘No, because the lab was on the right, by the AV Room.’ ‘No, it wasn’t.’ ‘Yes, it was – just trust me, it’s this way – oh.’ ‘Oh, this is the gym, is it? This is the gym, that they have disguised as a second, identical AV Room? And they play badminton with the televisions, and hockey with the VCRs? Wow, they must be strong, these girls, to use heavy AV equipment instead of balls –’ It starts to seem like the school itself is misdirecting them, reacting hostilely to their presence h
ere – either that, or the corridors simply don’t link up in a linear way, don’t actually correspond to the map, but instead are obeying some circuitous, rhizomatic feminine principle, the influence of the Mound, maybe…

  And then, quite by accident, they find themselves in a recognizably older part of the school. Here there are holes in the wainscoting and crumbling walls; even the light seems dimmer, greyer. They hasten along by dilapidated rooms stacked full of chairs, till they arrive at a pair of wooden doors. Very softly, Ruprecht twists the doorknob and peeks inside. Inside there are climbing frames and mini-soccer nets: the gym. ‘Meaning that this,’ turning one hundred and eighty degrees to the door across the corridor, ‘must be the Locked Room.’ He can’t keep the quaver out of his voice.

  The door, of course, is locked when they try it. Ruprecht sets down his equipment on the floor, produces the OpenSesame!™ Skeleton Key and inserts it in the keyhole. After jiggling it around a moment, he tries the door again. It is still locked. ‘Hmm,’ Ruprecht says, stroking his chin.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Mario asks him. He does not like this corridor. Mechanical noises are emanating from somewhere, and a draught that seems unnaturally cold circles his ankles. Without replying, Ruprecht examines the teeth of the key and replaces it in the keyhole.

  ‘What is it?’ Mario repeats, hopping from one foot to the other.

  ‘This is supposed to be able to open any conventional lock,’ Ruprecht says, twisting it about.

  ‘It’s not working?’

  ‘I can’t quite seem to get it to connect…’

  ‘We don’t have time for this! Try something else!’

  ‘It has a guarantee,’ Ruprecht points out.

  ‘Just use the drill and get it over with.’

  ‘The drill will make noise.’

  ‘It’ll take two seconds with the drill.’

  ‘All right, all right –’ He looks at Mario expectantly.

  ‘What?’ Mario says.

  ‘Well, give it to me then.’

  ‘I thought you had it.’

  ‘Why would I have it?’

  ‘Because I don’t have it…’ The realization hits them simultaneously; Mario’s shoulders slump. ‘I thought you said you planned this.’

  ‘I did,’ Ruprecht says humbly. ‘It’s just that I made the plan before I knew what was going to happen.’

  It is then that they hear the voice. By its pitch it is clearly a woman’s, but any feminine softness has long desiccated away, replaced by an eldritch darkness and attended by what sounds an awful lot like the snipping of spectral shears… For a moment they remain frozen to the spot, and then – ‘Run,’ gurgles Ruprecht. Mario doesn’t need telling twice. Scrambling his bag from the ground, he is set to scarper down the corridor when a hand fastens about his arm –

  ‘What are you doing?’ hisses Ruprecht.

  Mario stares at him, nearly apoplectic with terror. ‘I’m running.’

  ‘It’s coming from down there,’ Ruprecht blinks back at him.

  ‘It’s not, it’s coming from up there…’

  They pause, almost but not quite clutching each other, with their ears cocked. The hideous dried-out croak is drawing inevitably closer – apparently, whether by some quirk of the architecture, the type of stone in the masonry perhaps or the curious way the corridor bends, from both directions at once. The boys gibber at each other helplessly. With every passing instant now the temperature drops precipitously, the grey light wanes; the ghastly voice chants its message, necrotic and Latin, over and again, as though doomed to repeat it, doomed for eternity, a doom that any second now they will be sharing, when the voice’s owner comes around that corner, or the other corner, or possibly even both corners, to find them quaking before her –

  And then a hand – whose hand neither of them can remember afterwards, but a hand in desperation – reaches for the door, and this time, miraculously, it gives. Without a second thought they hurry through it to crouch on its far side, ears pressed to the wood, as the voice outside, now accompanied by an ugly dragging noise, passes right by them, no more than a couple of inches away (they can’t suppress a shudder)… and then recedes, or rather ebbs, or rather, actually, dissipates…

  As soon as it’s gone they feel warmer, braver; straightening up, they dust themselves off, scoffing at the idea that either of them thought for a second that whatever was outside was the Ghost Nun: ‘I don’t even believe in the stupid Ghost Nun.’ ‘No, me neither.’

  It is the smell that returns them to their surroundings, like a finger tapping them on the shoulder. Potent and alien and deep, it suffuses the air to the point, it almost seems, of replacing it; as they inhale, they realize that it has been present in the atmosphere all along, too rarefied to notice until now. Whatever the mysterious feeling of difference is, this is the source, the omphalos.

  ‘We, ah, seem to be in the Locked Room…’ Ruprecht says at last.

  ‘Yes,’ says Mario.

  There is silence, silence and darkness. The dead walk… futurity becomes a womb…

  ‘Okay then,’ Ruprecht says, with false bravado, ‘let’s get this show on the road.’ He stumps with his pod into the shadows; Mario hastens after, following the clinking from Ruprecht’s bag, trying not to think about the legends Niall’s sister spoke of – and then he sees it, the blue corpse of a girl suspended from the rafters, dangling there right in front of him!

  Luckily he is too shocked to scream. And when he has steadied himself, he realizes that it is not a girl at all, only a school blouse, hanging there weightlessly in space.

  Ducking beneath it, he presses on. Even in the darkness the room appears considerably larger than they expected. As their eyes adjust, they make several other unexpected discoveries. It is not, for instance, bare.

  ‘Show me that map again,’ Ruprecht says. Bringing it right up to his face, he studies it carefully. ‘Hmm,’ he says.

  This is unquestionably the place. And yet, instead of cobwebs and cracked floorboards, there are clothes horses, washing machines, jumbo-sized boxes of detergent. ‘More of a laundry than a classroom,’ Ruprecht muses to himself. Perhaps an abandoned laundry? And yet the tracksuit tops with the St Brigid’s crest, the skirts and jumpers, some damp, some dry, heaped in baskets or strung on criss-cross lines, none of these looks especially old –

  He studies the map again. ‘You don’t hear any music, do you?’ he asks Mario. ‘Like supernatural music?’

  Mario doesn’t reply. With another Hmm, a kind of verbalized frown, Ruprecht forges on through the thick foliage of wet fabric. No evidence of a looming Otherworld presents itself; reaching the back of the room, his only new discovery is three huge sacks filled to the brim with girls’ unmentionables, waiting to be washed. This puts the tin hat on it, as far as Ruprecht is concerned –

  ‘There’s no Mound in here!’ he exclaims. ‘Just piles and piles of schoolgirls’ underwear!’

  A sound from outside. Someone’s coming! These voices are unambiguously modern, vital, somewhat raucous, the kind that might shout matily to one another over the judder of laundry –

  ‘We have to get out of here!’ Ruprecht says. ‘Quick, the window!’

  He pries open the bolt and shoves up the sash, and is on the point of wriggling through when he realizes he is on his own.

  ‘Mario!’

  Team Condor’s cinematographer and navigator is rooted to the spot, slack-mouthed and staring, as if in a trance.

  ‘Mario!’ Ruprecht cries. ‘What’s wrong with you! Mario!’

  The voices outside stop abruptly. But still Mario does not respond. A huge, happy smile spreads slowly across his face, like the man who has found the back door to the Promised Land; then, uttering a single, incomprehensible noise, like bleer or meep, he breaks loose of Ruprecht and dives headlong into the pile of knickers –

  Skippy’s back in his room. The others are still out on their operation; he makes it in here without talking to anyone. He knows what he has t
o do now, he doesn’t want to waste any more time. He closes the door and switches off all the lights except for the lamp on his desk. He takes a blank sheet of paper from the stack in Ruprecht’s printer, and sits down.

  The goggles stare down from the door. The swimming trophy gleams with little fragments of remembering. Driving through Thurles on the creaky old bus. The day like elastic, stretched tighter and tighter till the moment of the race when all of time snaps. In the bleachers the blank space where Mum and Dad aren’t. The green underwater hotel, the room where you can’t sleep, the numbers that count down in gold to the door –

  Hurry, Skippy, hurry! You have to do it now!

  It’s like he can see the door opening again.

  Come on, come on!

  Slowly opening, the streams of future wrapping around him and pulling him forward into it –

  No! He picks up his pen. He writes, Dear Coach.

  Ruprecht has not returned by lights-out. The next morning, however, when Skippy opens his eyes, he is there – lying on the duvet in his underpants, staring at the ceiling as if it has done him some grievous wrong.

  ‘How did your mission go?’ Skippy asks.

  ‘Not well.’ Bits of what appears to be foliage litter his hair.

  ‘Did you visit any higher dimensions?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you find the Mound?’

  ‘No.’

  Skippy gets the feeling he isn’t that eager to talk about it, and drops the subject. At breakfast, however, Dennis is less forbearing.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he says with an expression of concern. ‘Didn’t you follow the map?’

  Ruprecht, gazing blackly into his breakfast, says nothing.

  ‘Hmm, maybe you should have asked one of the nuns,’ Dennis remarks contemplatively. ‘Did you ask them, Ruprecht? Did you ask the nuns to show you their mound?’

  Ruprecht’s eyes narrow, but he remains silent; then the door opens and Mario enters the Ref. Seeing Ruprecht at the table, he halts. ‘Oh,’ he says, and hovers there, as if uncertain how to proceed. Still without speaking, Ruprecht gives him a long hostile stare. Then he rises, leaving his meal half-eaten, and departs the room.