The Revenants

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The Revenants Page 5

by Alec Dunn


  Tristan was on his feet and started to prepare: play the part, let him get close, get ready to spring the attack.

  The tall year eleven girl had advanced so she was level with Tristan, facing Sankey and she said, very softly, “You’re very rude, aren’t you? I don’t like rude people.”

  Sankey’s attention was diverted, “Shut the…”

  “Gentlemen,” the ancient man had stopped on the other side of Tristan and was starting to address them all in a warm, friendly voice, “how nice of you to come. I was afraid that our reading group had not attracted so many people this year. I’m so glad for some new blood.” His voice tremored with age but had a depth that also seemed rich and strong.

  The boy, wearing the ragged and ripped clothes, had continued walking and was walking round and round Ryan and his sidekick, glaring at them. It seemed that he could barely suppress his rage and his face twitched and danced his hatred.

  Ryan was turning his head, looking behind him to find the boy and then turning again to talk to the very old man, “Reading group? I’m not here to read you stupid old fart. I’m here to put this arsewipe out of his misery.”

  “Nonsense, of course you’re here to read. Fate has led your steps to my door and now you find yourself in the library, the tabernacle of knowledge and, what is more, greeted by the librarian himself,” a dry chuckle, “if I may presume to say, the custodian of knowledge.” A theatrical gesture to the rest of the library, “Allow me to direct your steps just a little further into our sacred temple and find you a seat of learning.” The old man’s voice quickened in excitement and a dark purple tongue flicked across his pale thin lips. “We are reading ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’, a most resplendent volume that I am sure will tease your palette, leave you refreshed and invigorated with the knowledge you will imbibe there.”

  While the ancient librarian was rambling, Sankey’s face was showing confusion. His under-bite dropped open in a stupid, fly catching pose.

  The angry boy had paused in his circling and was standing very closely to Ryan’s weasel sidekick and sniffing him. The sidekick was looking worried.

  “Come, please, take a seat,” the elderly man beckoned with what seemed to be genuine enthusiasm and eagerness. “We’ve only started chapter one and we can happily read over the chapter again for you.”

  Sankey’s mouth closed, opened again, told the man where to go in two short words and he turned and left, quickly followed by the nervous sidekick.

  The girl at Tristan’s shoulder said quietly, sounding bored, “What a prick.” She drew out each word for emphasis. Tristan liked her more and more.

  “Oh dear,” said the librarian with sorrow. “What a shame, what a shame.” He turned his eager gaze to Tristan, “Mr Sankey is not known for his love of literature I am sorry to say, but I haven’t seen you before, I think. You must be the new boy. Yes, yes, but you’re very naughty to have not come to the library. How can I add you to the system otherwise?”

  Tristan didn’t know what to say, “Sorry. I didn’t know I was meant to.”

  The old man smiled warmly, “Well, no harm done, eh? Not to worry. You’re here now and that’s what matters. We can get you sorted in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

  And you are going to stay for our little reading group aren’t you? I just know you’ll fit in perfectly. Like a glove, eh? You will stay, won’t you?” and the librarian looked at him enthusiastically, his smile expectant and welcoming and his tongue snaked quickly across his thin lips.

  Tristan looked at the solid wooden door and thought of Ryan Sankey on the other side. He looked at the smiling old man and then at the beautiful girl standing next to him.

  There was no contest.

  “A reading group sounds like fun. ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Hound’ was it? I don’t think I’ve read that one. I did use to watch it on TV though… Do you read it out loud because to be honest I’ve got a bit of a sore throat and can’t talk too much.” He coughed to prove his lie.

  Five : Reading

  Another dream broke into Tristan’s consciousness, disturbing his sleep, another nightmare surfacing.

  He knows the boy from somewhere. The boy walks down an isolated narrow path, head down in the night. The face is grim. Nobody else is around.

  A figure emerges from the shadows of the trees. It trails him momentarily before moving swiftly to grab the boy. He seems to sense it and turns, but is engulfed in a whirlwind flurry of blows.

  Bloody cuts lace his face.

  He is struggling with the tall, dark thin figure. The figure is strong. It is violent. It lashes out and the boy’s head snatches to the right, his nose splays at a sharp angle. It is a moment before the blood rushes out.

  The figure is tall and powerful. It steps in to its victim, expecting to overpower him. It grapples with its victim, attempting to force him down, to beat him.

  But the face, the boy’s face, doesn’t flinch. There is no fear. There is a suppressed rage, anger or hatred, and the boy reacts, strike for strike, violence for violence. He does not fall. He fights. And the fight is brutal. And his face is like granite.

  Heart hammering, Tristan lay on his bed, sweating. It had seemed so real. The dream was fading now, the boy’s face disappearing, but it had seemed so real.

  He pushed the button on his phone and with relief found he had another three hours before he had to get up. He rolled over, diving to the depths of his duvet and submerged into sleep once more.

  There were now four members of the Hillcrest Library Reading Club, including himself, and Tristan wasn’t sure what to make of any of them: Gregor Masterton, the very old, slightly smelly librarian; Lucretia Beaumont, a curved and confident year eleven who looked like an escapee from a manga comic; Max O’Connell, the permanently scratched, tuft haired, graffitied, and angry fourteen year old who appeared to dress himself from lost property; and himself, Tristan Diggory Venn, the only member of any reading group in the world, as far as he knew, unable to read.

  The first reading group: Tristan hadn’t even meant to attend it. He had been chased there by Ryan Sankey, an accident pure and simple that he crashed through the doors of the library. Then a choice, leave and face Sankey, or stay and read.

  Tristan had sat there, worried; the exquisitely poised face of Lucretia opposite drawing his attention. She sat straight backed and silent, arms elegantly extended in front of her, holding her book in one hand, flicking the pages with her other. She caught him staring at her and flashed him a smile. Max, the angry boy had sat next to him, stared at him for a moment, before springing out of his seat and prowling around the library. Gregor, the old man had sat next to Lucretia, smiling warmly at him, showing teeth which were either yellow or brown and strangely mottled, while a dark tongue rolling out occasionally to moisten thin purplish lips. The old librarian was withered and dried out, his skin as thin the yellowed paper in the unread books of the library. He had ignored the boy roaming around them and gazed at Tristan through rheumy, filmed eyes. Gregor’s speech was friendly, but his eyes, his eyes were… uncomfortable, invasive. Tristan could not keep eye contact. He had perused Tristan like he was reading a book, taking his time.

  Gregor was like a character from the pages of one of the old books in the library. It was like he was in the wrong time, or the wrong place. He didn’t seem to be a part of the twenty-first century, or even the twentieth. He was an escapee from the imagination of some old, dead writer like Charles Dickens or Jane Austen, who had shuffled out of the brittle, stale pages and into the musty empty library.

  Tristan found it difficult to remember much of that first reading group.

  He recalled the three aged, dusty paperbacks with faded covers and tattered corners sat on the desk in front of them, unopened. The drawing of a barefooted boy in a straw hat painting a fence didn’t look anything like Huckleberry Hound.

  And he recalled that for too long, in uncomfortable silence, he had sat there under the searchlight of Gregor’s e
yes. He felt himself being somehow judged by Gregor’s examining stare, weighed up and measured.

  Then the old man introduced the three of them by name and started asking questions. And that had been it.

  The books with the faded drawing had lain there, untouched. Only Lucretia flicked casually through a book and Tristan noticed that it didn’t even have the same cover as the others.

  She read.

  Max paced.

  Meanwhile, Tristan had answered one question, then another, then another and so on, talking to the elderly librarian, Gregor Masterton. Just talking.

  He had started by telling him enough to be polite without deliberately lying, but then more questions followed and his answers had to become fuller, more detailed as the librarian warmly asked about names and dates, people and places. Gregor leaned forward, nodded in appreciation, hanging on his every word, drinking them in and then, Tristan thought he could remember, Gregor had confided details of his own life.

  And that was when Tristan noticed that Gregor smelt. Tristan wasn’t sure if it was the jacket, the slippers, something he ate or something he drank, and he couldn’t say what the smell was, but part way through the conversation he noticed it.

  He thought the smell was the smell of old age.

  Once Tristan had noticed the smell, the musty stench of the library took on a subtly different odour: the pervasive, indefinable smell of old man that caught in the back of his throat and made him gag, even as he answered the strangely personal questions.

  But they were like old friends, sharing everything. They had talked and talked, recounting stories and secrets.

  And the strange thing was, when Tristan tried to think back to those details, he couldn’t remember them, none of them. Not a single thing could Tristan remember now about the old man’s life, but he knew Gregor had told him.

  Gregor trusted him.

  And that had been enough to draw further confidences from Tristan. The memory of it was warm and fuzzy. He remembered being happy and relaxed there, in the library. So he couldn’t remember it clearly, so what? When he tried to think of details his mind slipped away. The memory was like a frozen lake on a winter’s day, unmoving, locked. And if he had told the librarian more than he had meant to, it didn’t matter. He was his friend. They were all his friends.

  In the fresh air of the next day, Tristan tried to think about what had happened. He hadn’t been beaten up. That was good.

  He had agreed to join a reading group. That was not so good. He couldn’t read.

  He had spent an hour in a library, not reading, doing… what?

  His memory was still vague, frozen.

  He remembered some talking, but not what had been said.

  He remembered the librarian, Gregor Masterton, his friend.

  Friend? The word struck him with surprise. Why did he think that?

  But the library was warm and welcoming, fuzzy and friendly. He could remember the attractive Lucretia and the idea of having friends, or even just people to sit with and a place to go, was a highlight of his time at Hillcrest Community School.

  The second reading group, Tristan wasn’t sure why he had gone back, or that he had made the right decision.

  He was welcomed through the dark stained doors of the library by the grinning yellow teeth of Gregor Masterton whose shuffling slippers guided him to a table in the empty room. The familiar, yet strange smell, enveloped him, catching at the back of his throat.

  An aged, shaking hand patted the lonely book sitting on the table sending up a small, but noticeable cloud of dust. The rich musical tones and reedy rasping of Gregor’s voice eagerly announced, “Short stories.” He coughed in the dust cloud and gasped greedily for air. “They are like precious gemstones, like diamonds, compacted under pressure into tiny fragments of completely self contained wonder, until they are almost perfect.

  You can see them all in a moment, take them all in at a single glance or you can stare into their depths for an age and still see new sparkling abstractions and beauty.”

  The librarian rattled on, “They have different faces and many different facets that will sparkle and shine for your delight.” And on, “Although for some, they can find the same simple pleasure in staring at cut glass, believing they have found a diamond, child like in their innocence.” He wheezed, coughed and seemed to rattle from somewhere in his chest, a shaking hand fell onto Tristan’s shoulder to support him and then, even barely able to breath, he went on. “So the question is, what will you find in their pages? A perfect gemstone or a worthless bauble?

  Read, my boy, read. Select a story you like and we will share our choice and why we liked it at the end.”

  Gregor shuffled away, hunched over and coughing and Tristan’s heart sank.

  Read! If only he could.

  He was getting better. The work at the base was paying off. The alphabet was no longer a mystery, but stringing letters together was a slow and difficult process.

  What the librarian described as a ‘short’ story would take Tristan all day. And to read more than one and decide which he liked was about as realistic as giving him two feathers and asking him to fly. That’s right Tristan, just flap those arms a little faster and you might just get your lardy backside off the ground.

  It wasn’t possible. Not today anyway.

  He looked longingly at the doors.

  But he opened the book and sat staring at it, feeling embarrassed and stupid. They might say ‘well done’ and that he was doing ‘really well’ in the base, but this was the real world now where people laughed at you, where Ryan Sankey picked on people and he still couldn’t read properly. Tristan could feel the frustration rising, feel himself turning red.

  What a stupid idea, an uneducated fifteen year old who couldn’t read, joining a reading group. It was ridiculous. He was ridiculous.

  He lowered his head, letting his hair fall across his face like a curtain. He let his emotions play out, trying to control his face, make it a mask, a calm surface to cover his bubbling fear and resentment. He flicked casually through the book, looking for any pictures that might help explain the story and to find which of the so-called short stories was, in fact, the shortest.

  It was while he was trying to sound out the letters in the title of the short story he had selected as the winner without speaking them aloud and without moving his lips that he noticed with a shock that the chair next to him was occupied.

  The black boots and hair of Lucretia had at some point sat silently down.

  He looked at her for a moment without speaking.

  She looked back at him. Her Egyptian styled, heavy eyeliner drew attention to her eyes. They sparkled with mischief and seemed to communicate more than words. They were dark, too dark for brown eyes. Could eyes be black? And was that a hint of purple around them? Contacts, must be those special contact lenses.

  Tristan realised he was staring at her and looked back at his book, pretending to read.

  She sat there, still. She didn’t say a word.

  His eyes flicked across just to check. She was still there.

  She smiled politely at him, and raised a fine eyebrow slightly in expectation.

  He made embarrassed eye contact again, gave a, “Hey,” and waited for her to speak. She was beautiful.

  What did she want?

  She did not reply, but sat there, her eyebrows now dropped and lips pursed in disappointment. There was a slight shake of her head. Not good enough she seemed to indicate. Was she waiting for a further invitation?

  Tristan was becoming unnerved, slightly disturbed by her. Her silence was almost imposing. He looked down, gathered himself and tried again. Looking directly into her eyes, he said, “How’s it going?”

  Was it his imagination or did her smile become fractionally wider, fractionally sweeter, victorious in some undefined battle. “Much better,” she said playfully and he frowned a little in confusion. Then she continued, “Your name is Tristan, I believe.” It was a statement, not
a question. “My name is Lucretia. No jokes please. I’ve already killed my parents.” A smile, both sweet and wicked flashed – joking.

  “Do you mind if I interrupt your reading a moment?” Her hand touched lightly onto his arm and he felt a small pulse run through him like the shock given by static electricity, “I have to say I have read this book about a hundred times or more when it was first published. I do believe I could recite every story without having the book in front of me,” her voice dropped to an intimate whisper, “and I have a confession to make. I don’t think I could read one word more without killing someone. So you’re going to be my little distraction.” Again the wickedly inviting smile. “How are you enjoying the book?” Her eyes sparkled, their black depths shining like a doll’s and her smile was as sweet as honey.

  Tristan’s mouth opened. Then it closed. Then for some reason that he couldn’t understand or explain he decided to tell her the truth. “I don’t really know. I can’t read.”

  Lucretia’s mouth formed a perfect ‘O’ and her eyebrows raised in surprise.

  Tristan felt the need to explain, “I am learning to read, now, but I never used to go to school. I only really started here in September.”

  She looked at him with interest, perhaps with concern, but not with that embarrassing sympathy that he hated when he told some people, “Don’t worry. That makes two of us.

  I never used to go to school when I was younger either and learning to read isn’t so hard. You’ll get there.”

  She paused and looked seriously at him, “Unless you’re stupid. You’re not stupid, are you?”

  The bluntness of her question threw him. This certainly wasn’t the dripping, oozing sympathy that he hated.

  In confusion his answer stumbled, “No. No, I’m not. Least, I don’t think so.” Then he noticed her smiling and laughing like she had been caught doing something naughty. He smiled too and gave a short laugh, realising she was teasing him.

 

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