The White Devil

by Justin Evans

  The detective ambled over to Andrew, still seated in the back of the detectives’ car, his legs resting on the pavement. The detective squatted and faced him.

  “I’m Detective Bryant. I think you just met my partner.”

  “Hi,” Andrew murmured.

  “Rather a bad shock,” Detective Bryant offered, with a grimace of sympathy.

  Andrew did not react.

  Bryant decided to take a random shot. “You saw what happened, didn’t you?”

  Andrew raised his eyes quickly.

  Bryant felt a thrill. He took another shot. “Not what. Who. You saw who killed him. Am I right?”

  Now the boy’s eyes went wide. Terrified.

  “Who was it?” Bryant kept bluffing. “One of the locals? Someone from school?”

  Andrew searched the detective’s face. For an instant Andrew thought the policeman knew something; knew, somehow, what he had seen; but no one familiar with the gaunt, white-haired figure could have assumed the detective’s flat, factual expression. The detective was groping in the dark. Andrew went back to staring at his hands.

  “The other detective told me he died this morning,” said Andrew. “So how could I have seen it happen? I didn’t find him until noon.”

  The detective silently cursed his partner.

  “Then what?” Bryant demanded, a little too urgently, sensing his moment was passing. “You’re frightened, I can tell. What of? I won’t tell anyone,” he added in a flourish of disingenuousness.

  But the boy’s eyes had focused on something else. The detective turned to follow his gaze. A heavyset woman in a black raincoat had arrived at the crime scene perimeter. She was breathlessly asking for help from the policeman standing guard there, then bickering with him as the answers he gave were evidently unsatisfactory. Eventually the policeman looked over at Andrew and pointed. Matron fastened her eyes on the boy and advanced.

  “Last chance,” said Bryant.

  “I didn’t see anybody,” said Andrew.

  “Don’t lie to me,” snarled the detective.

  Their eyes met in a standoff.

  Moments later, Matron reached them. “There you are!” she panted. “No one would give me any information,” she scolded Detective Bryant. “Can someone tell me what is going on here?”

  “Now you’re in trouble,” mumbled Andrew.

  Bryant rose from his haunches, obliged to answer the woman’s many questions and to listen to her moans of sorrow. He was forced to watch in silence—cowed by her busy, blowsy manner—as she wrapped an arm around Andrew and marched him down the hill.

  “I’m still interviewing him,” he called after them, helplessly.

  “He’s underage and the school’s responsibility,” Matron snapped over her shoulder.

  The road stretched empty and slick for thirty yards. Andrew and Matron descended together, leaving the bustle of police activity behind them. Ahead they faced a throng that had gathered below, in silence, blockaded behind another police car: countless bluers growing dark in the rain. A sea of Harrow hats. The black robes of beaks. The police let Andrew and Matron pass. They were immediately pressed by the boys’ damp bodies and awed faces.

  What happened?

  Is it true someone died?

  Is it someone from school?

  Did you see anything?

  Andrew pushed past them. They crowded him, asking, demanding, some grabbing. The rain intensified, pelted his face, trickled down his cheeks. A beak took his elbow, Let him through, please, boys. Come now, please, and ushered him, with Matron, through the crowd. The beak asked him if he was all right, what house was he in, and Andrew lied, Yes, and Matron answered The Lot. But Andrew did not see his fellow students or recognize any of their features; he perceived only the ashen face, the sunken eyes; the flaps of the frock coat and the echo of that horror-filled cough.

  “NEVER BEFORE,” MATRON muttered, half grief, half grumble.

  She removed his wet things with all the care of a farmer shucking an ear of corn. She told him to lie quiet. She put a blanket over him. She did all this while maintaining a stream of talk, mainly to herself.

  “In fifteen years.” She shook her head. “And, oh, what will the poor parents say? Imagine getting that phone call. You’d wish you were dead. I hope they have other children. Oh, but they do—Theo had brothers and a sister. Won’t break their hearts any less but it’s good to have others.” Then, almost angry, already converting the fresh news to gossip and rumor: “God knows what happened to him. He was too young for a heart attack, or an aneurysm. Healthy boys just don’t up and die.”

  Andrew sat up in bed. He wanted to explain to her, help her understand. “Matron, I saw . . .”

  She met his gaze and waited for him to finish.

  I saw a murder! He wanted to shout. I saw someone dressed in an outsize, costumelike overcoat suffocating Theo.

  Yes . . . and then what?

  This is the question he had been asking himself since he scrambled down the hill, shouting for help, and then returned to wait with the body. He had been alone there some five minutes before he realized that the attacker had disappeared. Not run away, with a fading footfall or a scramble down the path. He had simply vanished. With the high fence on either side, there would have been no means of escape. Andrew would have seen the gaunt figure run off. But Andrew had been so shocked—shocked? or was it something else: a kind of swoon, a surrender to an oppression that lingered on that spot?—that he had not even noticed the attacker’s disappearance. In such a gloom, it was almost natural that the snarling, uncanny figure had snapped out of existence so suddenly.

  And then he disappeared, Matron.

  Andrew’s mouth hung open.

  If you say those words, he assured himself, she will think you are crazy. She will tell others. Then every kind of attention you don’t want, you will get. Think what St. John Tooley and Vaz would do with information like that. They’d rip you to shreds. Brand you a psycho, a freak.

  Fortunately for Andrew, Matron took that moment to indulge a rare moment of sympathy, and leapt in to finish his thought.

  “I know. Your friend, like that. Poor Theo. Of all people.” Then Matron’s eyes screwed down on Andrew—it was the nasty American she was talking to, she seemed to remember—and he understood quite clearly in that moment that Matron would have rather seen him a cadaver on the Church Hill path than sunny, charming Theo. “You’re in shock,” she announced, standing. “Lie back and rest. I can’t sit here with you all day. The housemaster and the head of house need to be told. And the head man. And the parents. But that’s not my job, thank goodness.”

  Then, without a glance back, she rushed off to get Mr. Fawkes, leaving Andrew alone.

  HE LEANED ON one elbow and peered out the window. The rain, ignorant of the tragedy now beginning to stir the school, patiently tapped each leaf of the plane tree outside his window as it fell.

  Andrew flopped back onto the bed. He was at last warm, dry, and alone, but as though suffering a delayed reaction, he felt a shudder rack him from shoulders to toes. He pulled the blanket tighter. He began a kind of wandering debate with himself.

  You’re sleep-deprived, he reasoned. You’re wigging because you’re starting a new school.

  But the body had been real. He had felt it, cold and stiff and heavy. It had rolled a little when he had touched it.

  It. Him.

  Theo is really dead.

  Andrew’s mind recalled the few images it had gathered of Theo over twenty-four hours. He felt sick to his stomach.

  He thought of the gaunt figure. If it killed Theo, could it kill others? Andrew had locked eyes with it. Something had passed between them, a kind of recognition. Could the figure find him somehow? Would Andrew be the next victim?

  He sat up. He must tell the police, let them know that the pale figure had strangled Theo. Whatever it was, it was dangerous.

  No. They will think you’re insane. They will call your parents.

&nbs
p; And his parents would pull him out of school. Then he really would be fucked.

  With trembling hands he sought his cell phone in his desk drawer. Out of power. There was a charger somewhere. He found it and plugged it in. Pressed D. Saw names appear.

  DAD

  DANIEL

  He let the cursor land on DAD. The 203 area code popped up. His thumb went to the green button. He ached to hear a familiar voice. Even his father’s. An American accent. He wanted to tell his father the whole story. Not pieces of it, not the parts he thought his father could handle, but everything, just to hear him out, just to hear somebody nod their heads, say Yeah, that’s pretty weird.

  The thumb rose off the button. He knew his father could not do that.

  Even if the thousand miles had not been separating them (he knew this put his father on edge, made him his most controlling), Andrew could never draw out the kind of reaction he wanted now from his father. He might have once. At the dawn of Andrew’s puberty, his father had bought a canoe and had begun taking Andrew out on the Housatonic. He pointed out birds in the marshes and told stories—of his days at Penn, or his generally paranoid theories about surviving the corporate life-struggle, and asked Andrew about the soap operas unfolding among his school friends. Sometimes they even forgot to paddle and just drifted, talking and listening to each other’s voices and watching the ospreys carry off their prey; not forced to face each other; pointed in the same direction. But the arguments waited for them, a year later, back at the house. At first about ordinary things like grades and curfews. Then they grew bitter. His father’s frustrations mounted (Andrew’s choice of friends, his haircuts, his getting caught smoking cigarettes at fourteen; with a bag of pot in his sock drawer at fifteen). His father’s own ingrained rage seeped into all their dealings (the unfairness of his treatment at American Express; his inferiority complex about his lineage—all those Taylors in daguerreotypes, and he, a middle manager in suburbia, still wanting but failing to live like a southern aristocrat, heaping debt upon himself to keep up the vacations in Aspen or Biarritz, then suffering brutally with the burden, the humiliating day a fat man with a lip full of tobacco arrived to repossess the Audi). And after the first nine or ten screaming fights—recriminations, slammed doors, false accusations, top-of-his-lungs frustrated screamed red-faced fuck-yous—all that remained between them was a sprawling lake of bile. One vacation Andrew came home and noticed that the canoe was gone from the garage. His mother told him casually that his father had sold it.

  I’m pulling you out of there

  He could hear his father’s voice say it.

  Controlling. Angry. Taking away from him. Grabbing. His son made passive, brutalized by the storm of temper if he moved or rebelled.

  Pulling you out? said a voice inside him. Isn’t that what you want? You’ll be safe from

  The hands pressing on Theo’s face.

  We’re through with you, his father had told him. You make this right or we’re through with you.

  DAD

  DANIEL

  He lifted his thumb from the phone.

  No, he could never tell his father. Because of the incident at FW. It had destroyed what little was left of their trust.

  This was not Andrew’s first time in the acrid presence of death. It had brushed him once. He had peered into its fog and shuddered. That time it had been a disaster. That time it had ruined everything.

  You cannot tell about the white-haired boy.

  He drew up onto the bed. He curled into a ball. He stared at the blue wallpaper striped with brown.

  HE IS IN another dormitory room in country Connecticut, where the roads spin and dip and each village boasts its own whitewashed Puritan church. Where Frederick Williams Academy keeps you safe with its black iron gates and attenuated brick dormitories and groomed grounds and acres of trees and playing fields. Andrew is sitting on the floor, his legs splayed. There is a small glassine bag beside him with a ridged top. The word FLATLINE is stenciled on it, a kind of perverse brand name. Across from him is Daniel Schwartz. Daniel sags. Andrew struggles with himself, trying to stir, wait, he is saying, wait, then shaking his friend, because this doesn’t look right, but his friend is no longer there, his friend is turning blue, his mind has been kidnapped, carried off on a gypsy adventure on sunlit hills while Andrew is fighting struggles of his own against the drug fuck how much did I do this must be lots more potent than the last bag we tried because Daniel seems to be left alone there on the ground while he, Andrew, rises aloft, he is standing in the giant wicker sun-warmed basket of a hot air balloon, and up here, God is talking to him in great silent lightning flashes, showing him he has wasted everything, showing him his life is an empty lunchbox. Andrew vomits, vomits from the self-disgust and the loss, from the dead serious fear Daniel looks really fucking BLUE and he takes his cell phone from his jeans pocket. Andrew punches the three numbers and then SEND and lies back gazing at Daniel and idly wondering what the paramedics will think when they see him with an overdosed teenager at his feet and vomit on his legs.

  WHEN HE HEARD months later, he was comparatively calm. He was in his room, at home, in Killingworth. There was a lawn mower buzzing nearby. And it was just a phone call. No one implicated him. He was just . . . informed. He was able to hang up the phone quite calmly, roll over in bed, and begin, in private, the long, slow process of feeling his own guts corrode.

  “ARE YOU ALL right, man?”

  Andrew turned his head. Roddy recoiled. He was standing in the doorway, holding a long black umbrella.

  “You gave me the shivers. You look like a dead thing lying there. You coming?”

  “Coming where?”

  “To dinner! God, you don’t look well.” Roddy shook his head. “Come on. I’ll wait for you.”

  ANDREW RECOVERED SUFFICIENTLY to pad behind Roddy to the dining hall and he stood in a half stupor in line. As he made his way through the tables, he caught the first wave of sidelong glances, the whispers behind hands. Boys’ faces lifted and stared. The younger ones openly curious; the middle forms furtive; the Sixth Formers awkward, as if Andrew were the bereaved. Andrew attached himself, with Roddy, to the least objectionable group, the house squares, Henry and Oliver and Rhys. Conversation stopped when he sat down at the table. Henry defensively admitted, “We were talking about Theo.” When dinner was over Andrew trailed behind them to the house, passive, listening with detachment as they tried, alternately, to process the death and distract themselves with their ordinary chatter.

  FOR THE DAYS following, the rain continued, dull, pounding, remorseless as a headache. The Hill came to resemble not so much a proud crest, the highest point south of the Urals, but a set of shoulders hunched against the downpour and the winds. Black umbrellas appeared in profusion; skinny-legged boys clutched them earnestly while balancing books and trying to keep hats on their heads; laughter vanished from the High Street, replaced by coughing. Temperatures dropped; chills invaded. As if in sympathy with their dead friend, boys became sick, dry-coughed or wet-coughed through the night, sprouted fevers. Older boys grumbled as rugger practices were canceled. It’s like there’s nothing to do but sit and think of Theo, griped Roddy, voicing the sentiments of many: forced bloody mourning. On the day of the memorial service for Theo—presided over by Father Peter in the chapel, and thronged with Lottites—it was the blackest day of all, cloud cover like a steel ceiling and gushing, pouring rain, an absurdly tragic scene; alleviated, momentarily, by the bright rhetoric and charm of the many speakers, but ruined again by the wet sobs of the smaller boys, the vindictive downpour awaiting them outside, their need to puddle-hop, without dignity, to dining hall after. And in the Lot, even the boy with the plummiest accent, a Fifth Former named Clegg-Bowra (who, it was known, personally owned a share in a Formula One team and took nothing, not lessons, not sport, seriously), began holding court in the snooker room and gossiping like a charwoman. There’s a curse on the school, he drawled nasally. It’s never rained like this in the h
istory of Harrow. At this rate it will still be raining by Speech Day, and we’ll all be here with our parents, sneezing. People are getting sick. Theo Ryder was just the first victim. I think they should close the school, personally, he continued. And where’s the communication? No one’s saying what killed Theo. For all we know it was a murder and some psychopath up in the church graveyard is lying in wait to throttle more Harrovians. They hate us, you know, the Kevins, he said, using the school lingo—an Irish slur—for local, townie. Due to the chill, the heat was turned on, unseasonally; the pipes clanked and hissed. No one could get the damp out of their shoes. The felt in the snooker tables buckled.

  No explanations were forthcoming about Theo’s death. Only a terse note, posted on the bulletin board in the Lot and signed by the assistant master, Macrae, requesting that everyone soldier on with their work while the coroner did his, and that anyone who desired to speak to a counselor should avail themselves of Mr. Macrae or Matron or Father Peter. Piers Fawkes was conspicuously missing from the list, and from sight; Matron suggested to some that he was busy with arrangements with the family, who were in South Africa, and with the police and coroner. Macrae seemed to be enjoying the spotlight, and Andrew suspected that the assistant master was using Fawkes’s absence as an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the boys, especially the older, more influential ones—St. John and Vaz and their fawning crew, with teas and bull sessions, visible through the window in Macrae’s kitchen, just to the side of the Lot in the assistant housemaster’s residence. Once Andrew passed under this window on his way to Mr. Montague’s lesson, and all the faces turned to him. Vaz, St. John, and Macrae in a tall-backed chair, with a smug but guilty look, like a duke caught trying out the king’s throne. There was a moment of mutual apprehension. Andrew suspected they were talking about him. He moved on, ducking his head against the rain.

  Andrew avoided these gatherings; he avoided the common room, the dining hall; any place the whispers might arise, there’s the American, the one who found Theo, or the questions might resume did you see what killed him? was there any blood? He went straight to his room after lessons, even skipping meals, getting by on a handful of the biscuits Matron left for the boys in a wicker basket in the snooker room. He would sit cross-legged on his bed, spilling crumbs on the scratchy wool blanket. He knew that he should tell someone what he had seen, crazy as it was. Maybe information about a vanishing, skeletal, strangling figure could help the detectives. Or the family. Or someone. But he also knew the most likely outcome was that he would be branded mentally ill, or fatally damaged by the shock. So rather than speak out and add to the chaos and fear, he isolated himself. He did not call his parents. He did not check his email. He plunged into his lessons, abandoning TV and hallway chatter. His class on Roman Britain became, for him, an addictive serial; he wrote a five-sided essay on Camulodunum, Fortress of the War God. He read Chaucer for Mr. Montague and whiled away hours training himself to read the lilting, alliterative-inflected Middle English. From his window he watched the rain beat down on the Hill.