The Blood of Angels

by Stephen Gregory

  Exhausted, bloated, dizzy with drink, they rested like this until they were calm. There was hardly a sound from outside, nothing but a whisper of wind and the cry of a gull in the enveloping mist. Gog and Magog snored, temporarily satisfied by the carcase they’d demolished. The fire burned very hot, smelling of seaweed, and the candle flames were straight and tall now that the room was still again. Christy, rousing himself suddenly, got up, reached for one of the candles and carried it to the door. He staggered a little when he stumbled on the dogs, which were sprawled in their corner like huge, black, matted rugs, but he caught himself by grabbing the door handle with his free hand.

  ‘Going for a wee . . .’ he mumbled. ‘Bursting . . .’ He stepped from the room and onto the landing.

  Harry remained at the table until he heard the beachcomber fumbling for the bathroom door and then shutting it. He heard footsteps on the dank linoleum, the creak of the floorboards, and then there was silence. Very quickly, agile and limber despite the wine he’d drunk, he crossed the room, sprang over the dogs and onto the pitch-dark landing. His feet were silent in the supple brogues. He reached the bathroom door just in time to hear the rustle of jeans and pants, to hear the trickle and hiss of piss in the bowl. He closed his eyes. He conjured a picture to go with the sounds, a picture so vivid that he could see how the candlelight played on the beachcomber’s thin, white, shivery thighs. The trickling stopped. He listened a bit longer, to the readjustment of clothing and the clank and rattle of the chain. Then, his heart thudding, his breath short, he tiptoed from the landing and back to his seat at the dinner table before Christy had crossed the bathroom and opened the door.

  ‘No, it doesn’t flush!’ Harry said without looking up.

  Christy came into the room, put the candle back on the mantelpiece and resumed his seat at the table.

  ‘It’s no good yanking on the chain like that,’ Harry went on. ‘It hasn’t flushed for weeks. The floods must have busted the pipes, busted the plumbing, busted the drains or something.’

  He glanced up and grinned, seeing how shy the beachcomber was after the visit to the dark, cold bathroom. Christy flicked his hair behind his ears and stared into the fire, abashed that the man had heard his futile efforts to flush the toilet.

  ‘Who needs plumbing, anyway?’ Harry said, as he himself stood up and carried a candle to the door. ‘Who needs plumbing when the whole bloody house is flushed out by the sea every day? Of course, I appreciate it’s a bit different for a female, but as far as I’m concerned the bathroom’s completely redundant now. Who needs it? You stay where you are! No peeping! It’s my turn now! I’m bloody bursting, too!’

  He went onto the landing and stood there for a few moments to let his eyes become accustomed to the darkness. The shadows were huge on the high ceiling and along the corridor as he waved the candle this way and that. The flamelight gleamed on the bath­room door handle and the door handle of the bedroom which had been locked for so many years. It gleamed on the barrel of the shot­gun, leaned in its usual place by the landing window. It gleamed on the water which had flooded the hallway.

  Yes, the sea was in the house. A glistening, sinewy, muscular thing, it slapped at the foot of the stairs. The swell was driving through the front door, a steady, relentless current which had crossed the foreshore and the fields to nose itself past the piano and into the hall. Harry stepped from the landing. Running his hook along the banister, he felt his way carefully downstairs until he was two or three steps above the rising tide. Then he set the candle on the staircase. Tugging at the unfamiliar buttons of his cavalry-twill trousers, pissing powerfully into the water, he shivered so hard that he almost lost his balance and staggered backwards, but he righted himself and sprayed a foam of bubbles onto the silken surface. The jet of urine, steaming in the candlelight, stuttered and stopped. He shook out the final drops; they were warm on the back of his hand. But it was very cold in the hallway. Although the night was so still, the mist had blown into the house, through all the shattered windows, through the broken door, and the air was ghastly chill. One-handed, he struggled with the fly buttons; his fingers were stiff and clumsy. He bent for the candle, trudged up the stairs again, and he didn’t realise that his visitor had been watching all the time from the landing, watching and sniggering to see how the man fumbled and stumbled and splashed his shoes as he pissed into the flooded hallway . . .

  Christy skipped back to the fireside before Harry had reached the top of the stairs. He slopped more wine into the glasses, ready for the man’s return to the room. He’d seen the sea in the hallway. So what? He didn’t care that he couldn’t get back to the home. There would be trouble with Mrs Bottomley. So what? It was Christ­mas, the best Christmas he’d ever had! He guzzled his glass of wine and refilled it by the time the man stepped into the room and resumed his place at the table.

  ‘For this relief much thanks,’ Harry said. ‘That’s Shakespeare, by the way. I don’t suppose you know any Shakespeare, do you? You don’t do bloody Shakespeare at school these days. Spend all your time tinkering about with computers instead of learning to read and write . . . Well, have a look at this.’

  The boy was going to say that they did a good deal of Shakes­peare at school. He recognised the quotation. But the man was holding out a tattered tome he’d rummaged from a pile of books under the bed, thrusting it into Christy’s hands. The boy took it from him.

  ‘The complete works,’ Harry said. ‘I got it as a form prize at Wrekin, my public school, when I was about thirteen. It’s prac­tic­ally a bloody antique by now. I’ve got lots of books, scattered around the house . . . poetry books, bird books, books about the stars. I never look at them nowadays. Might as well let the sea drag them all outside and feed them to the fish!’

  Christy flipped the book open, ran a finger through the index and found the very line in a matter of seconds. ‘ “For this relief much thanks,” ’ he said, smiling smugly. ‘It’s from Hamlet, Mr Clewe. Act One, Scene One. We acted it at school. I was in it! I was – ’ He stopped short. Despite the quantity of wine he’d drunk, or because if it, he had the wit to embroider the truth he was about to tell. In fact, chosen for his fine hair, his willowy figure and his unbroken voice, he’d had a small part as Osric, a foppish courtier in an extravagant bonnet; but he hesitated, racking his bleary brain for another name.

  ‘I was Ophelia!’ he said. ‘That’s who I was, Mr Clewe! The fair Ophelia, Hamlet’s sweetheart! I ended up drowned! That’s why they picked me for the part, I think, because of what happened to my mum and dad when I was little!’

  Then, seeing that the man was surprised, even shocked, by the silliness of his prattling, the boy slammed the book shut. His head was whirling, his mouth was veering out of control. He took an enormous breath and ducked his head, because the man was staring at him in an owlish, pop-eyed way. Balancing the book on his knees, he reopened it at the flyleaf. He blinked hard and read the inscription: Wrekin School, a coat of arms and a motto he couldn’t understand, ‘Aut vincere aut mori.’ Below that, the ink was faded, the handwriting was loopy, but at last he could make it out. He read it again. Snorting with laughter, he slapped his hand to his mouth.

  ‘Harold Vivian Clewe!’ he spluttered. ‘Is that you? Vivian? But Vivian’s a girl’s name, isn’t it? I’ve never heard of that before! A boy called Vivian!’

  Struggling to control himself, he smeared the tears of disbelief from his face. He thrust the book at the man, who slid it back under the bed.

  ‘It can be a girl’s name and a boy’s name, you ignorant child,’ Harry said, with a sniff and a shrug. ‘It can be both, or either. Anyway, names don’t matter. It’s what we are that really counts.’ He grinned. ‘There we are! That was my profound thought for Christmas! Now it’s over and done with, let’s have another drink!’

  They toasted one another, for the umpteenth time since the feast had begun.

  ‘To you, the fair Ophelia!’ Harry said, raising his glass. ‘Or rather, the fai
r Christine!’

  ‘To you, Mr Clewe!’ the boy said, raising his glass. ‘Or rather, Harold Vivian!’

  They fell silent. They drank. It was eight o’clock. The firelight caught the colour of the wine and cast a flicker of red on their faces, like smudges of blood on their cheeks and foreheads. All of a sudden, Harry leaned forward and brushed at Christy’s hair with his hand, and the pine needles that had caught there during the struggle with the tree dropped onto the table. Christy giggled, recoiling from the hand by throwing his head back and tossing his hair from side to side to get all the needles out. In his turn, still giggling, he reached out to Harry, where the needles were caught in the baggy white cricket pullover, and he picked them out with minute care.

  Then the giggling stopped. Strangely serious, breathlessly hushed, as though there was some kind of ancient significance in the ritual they were performing, they gathered all the needles they’d collected from one another’s hair and clothing, and they leaned very close to the hearth to scatter them into the fire. There was a sizzle and a spit as the sappy green stuff burst into flames, a fume of resin, and the two of them stared so hard that their eyes watered and their brows were all but singed; so that, when they straight­ened up again, although the exchange had been nothing but tomfoolery and it was only the proximity of the fire that had reddened their cheeks and stung their eyes, a curious awkwardness fell on Harry and Christy, leaving them tongue-tied and bashful . . . like a couple whose flirting had shifted from playfulness to the brink of something more serious.

  To fill the uncomfortable silence, to find something to do with their hands and faces, they reached for their glasses and swilled them empty. There was a flurry of business with bottle and corkscrew as Harry brought more wine to the table, and the boy crossed the room to his coat, which he’d hung on the back of the door, to fetch the fruit from the pocket. In doing so, he stepped heavily on the sleeping dogs, and Gog or Magog – impossible to tell which, because they’d snuggled together into a single, hairy, black monster – let out a roar and reared up, snapping its teeth on thin air with a clang like the jaws of a trap.

  Christy squealed. He sprang away, dropping the fruit on the floor. An orange bounced across the room until Harry, appropriately dressed in the cricket pullover, fielded it with his outstretched hand. The dogs subsided, grunting like a pair of sows.

  So the silence was broken, the awkwardness was over. Harry and Christy shifted the dining table away from the hearth. Sunk into armchairs on either side of the fire, they settled to another bottle of wine and a box of liqueur chocolates.

  The night deepened and darkened. The mist grew thicker. The tide was filling the house. It shifted the piano in the hallway, it sucked at the trap door in the living room, and the weight of the water in the cellar made the floorboards bulge. Something was knocking down there, as though it was trying to get out. But Harry and Christy didn’t hear, although the night was so still. They heaped up the fire. Their faces were reddened by the heat and the wine. For the time being, all the world they wanted was in that little room.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  For the time being.

  Gorged with meat and swilled with wine, stunned by the blaze, they fell into a kind of stupor. Gog and Magog snored by the door. Harry started to snore as well; his head fell forward onto his chest and a dribble of chocolate dripped from his mouth onto his white pullover. Christy watched him and continued to sip at the wine in his glass, but his eyes grew heavy. Whenever he closed them for a while and then snapped them open again, his head swam; the flickering candles were blurred, and so were the enormous shadows they cast on the ceiling. So he gave up trying to stay awake. He dropped his glass onto the floor, let his head loll back and he was soon asleep too.

  Nine o’clock. Ten o’clock. The man and the boy and the dogs dozed in the hot, airless room.

  They all woke at the same time. Christy jerked into consciousness, so fast and so violently that he suddenly found himself perched on the edge of his armchair. Blinking, rubbing his face and staring around him, he tried to bring the room into focus, to try and establish where he was and how he’d got there. His head was buzzing. His mouth was dry. He was cold. When he’d smeared the sleep from his eyes, he looked across the hearth to see that Harry Clewe was awake too and staring at him in a vacant, stupefied way. By the door, Gog and Magog pricked their ears and held their breath, listening very hard.

  Eleven o’clock. The fire had burned down to a pile of embers; the candles were no more than stubs guttering in puddles of molten wax. So the room was quite dark. Harry and Christy sat still and they listened. Something in the night was different, some­thing had changed since they’d fallen asleep. The wind had picked up: so that, instead of the silence which had fallen since the hilarious feast was over, broken only by the skittering of rats on the stairs and the flutter of flames in the grate, now the house was full of moaning. Something banged, something creaked, something groaned as the wind drove the sea into the hallway and slapped the waves on the staircase.

  And yet, through all this noise, the boy could hear a very faint tinkling, like icicles breaking on a pavement or the chiming of cut glass. He’d heard it before and wondered what it was. Like the dogs, he pricked his ears and held his breath . . . and Harry, tousled and bleary from a drunken sleep, saw that his visitor was listening. Too befuddled to distinguish the tinkling from the dull droning of the wind, he guessed what the sound must be from the beach­comber’s angled head and frown of puzzlement.

  So he smiled. He bent to the hearth, put some more wood on the embers and leaned back again in his armchair.

  ‘A storm’s blowing up,’ he said very quietly. ‘There’ll be a big tide, almost to the top of the stairs, I should think. You’re here for the night, my girl, that’s for sure.’

  Christy smiled, a thin smile because his cheek ached from sleeping with the side of his face pressed into the armchair. Instinctively, he ran his fingers through his hair and licked his lips; it was all coming back to him, not just where he was and what he’d been doing, but the realisation of what the man thought he was: that he was Christine, a teenage girl with long, soft, blonde hair and a trickle of perfume on her throat. The idea still excited him. The roar of the wind and the boom of the waves excited him too, and so did the prospect of being marooned all night in the derelict house. The buzz in his head had gone, now that he was properly awake. He reached to the floor for his wine glass and raised it to his lips to drain the last few drops.

  ‘Is there any more of this, please, Mr Clewe?’ he asked sweetly, knowing that the answer would be yes. ‘I’m terribly thirsty. And cold, too. Let’s get the fire going.’

  He poked at the embers until they erupted in flames around the driftwood that the man had put there, and soon the room was warmly lit again. Christy added more wood, some of it entangled with dried, black seaweed which crackled and flared like gunpowder. He threw on the empty chocolate box; it exploded in a golden blaze and swarmed up the chimney like a live thing. All the time, despite the noise of the storm, he could hear the tinkling, and he knew where it was coming from, but he didn’t know what it was. He thought he might screw up the courage to ask, although he remembered how furious Mr Clewe had been to find him trying the door handle of the locked bedroom down the corridor. But just then Harry stretched out to the mantelpiece, felt behind the clock and brandished a key.

  ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ he said. ‘I’ll bend the rules, since it’s Christmas and you’re here to share it with me, and I’ll take you to a bit of the house you haven’t seen yet . . . although it’s not for want of trying on your part!’ Baring his teeth in a wolfish smile, he added, ‘Come on! Grab the brandy! That’ll keep us warm! Bring a candle and I’ll bring the torch and we’ll satisfy your curi­osity once and for all.’

  They left the dogs inside and shut the door tightly. It was very cold and very dark on the landing. The wind howled up the stairs, flinging spray in their faces. Somewhere down th
ere, the sea was churning in the hallway, dragging boulders and weed from room to room, but the only light was the gleam of foam. Harry went first, along the tunnel of the corridor. He waved the torch in his hand, throwing a feeble yellow beam at the walls and the ceiling, catching the gleaming eyes of the rats which ran over his shoes and nipped at his trouser legs. Christy followed him, with the brandy bottle under his arm, with his glass in his right hand, trying to shield the flame of the candle which he held in his left hand. He kicked at the rats, whose bodies were heavy and soft as they thumped on the skirting. He shuddered with cold and apprehension as Harry set down the torch, fumbled in his trouser pocket for the key and inserted it into the lock of the forbidden bedroom.

  The key turned, the door opened. Harry picked up the torch again and stepped into the room. Christy followed him.

  Harry closed the door. The wind was shut outside, where it moaned in the hallway, up the stairs and on the landing. But it was very still in the room. The torch beam flicked here and there and the candle flame was tall and straight. Neither the man nor the boy spoke. They held their breath and stared at the shadows.

  It was a big room, much bigger and higher than the spare room that Harry had been using. As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, the boy made out the shape of an enormous four-poster bed, whose pillars of carved black wood rose to a great black canopy draped with curtains. In a distant corner there was a wardrobe so tall that it almost reached the ceiling, and a dressing table whose mirrors glowed when the torchlight hit them. The air was thick with dust. The boy could taste it in his mouth and smell it in his nostrils; when he moved his face he felt the caress of cobwebs on his cheeks and lashes. An icy draught blew through the room, and the tinkling was suddenly loud again. Harry aimed the torch at the ceiling, where the beam was reflected by the dangling glass jewels of a huge chandelier. Christy shivered, almost dropping the candle he was holding and the bottle wedged under his arm. It was a dead room, like a tomb. A deep dust lay on everything, in the carpet and the drapes and the curtains. The ceiling billowed with cobwebs. It was a room of dust and deadness: dead cold.