Pilcrow (68 page)

Abadi Mukherjee got it into his head that his great friend Paul Dandridge should see India. He wanted to show him a different world. The practical difficulties were enormous, but Abadi wasn’t deterred by them, and neither was Paul.

Marion did everything she could to discourage them. She didn’t quite have the nerve to say that there was such a word as ‘can’t’ after all, but she made it pretty clear that there was such a word as ‘
s
houldn’t
’ and such a phrase as ‘would be mad to’.

She told Abadi that Paul would die in his care, but this argument didn’t even begin to work on him. If it hadn’t been for Abadi Paul would be dead already, wasn’t that so? That historic reprieve made him invulnerable. Neither Abadi nor Paul responded to her threats. On their side strings were pulled, appeals made, until Air India offered them free plane tickets. Abadi’s parents were very wealthy, so I suppose the fact that free tickets were so welcome must mean they weren’t helping.

Marion’s heart must have sunk when she discovered that the mad trip seemed to be going ahead despite her objections. Then it got worse, much worse. Abadi turned down the airline tickets and decided to go overland. He would feed, bathe and change Paul. At night he would run the respirator off the car battery.

Abadi’s passion had always been driving, which he claimed he’d been doing in India since he was eight. We’d heard that his
grandfather
was an enthusiastic driver who had once run over eighteen
beggars
in a single day (he didn’t say if they were all in a clump, or if they had been picked off individually), so it was in his blood. He would get his licence, and then he would make it happen.

It took him a long time to get sponsorship for the trip. In fact it took years. He managed it in the end and off the pair of them went on their mad adventure. When they reached Delhi, Mrs Gandhi came out to welcome them. I’m not sure she was Prime Minister at this point, but certainly a figure on the world stage.

I had mixed feelings about the overland-to-India saga. Sometimes it seemed to me that Abadi and Paul were making things too easy for their chronicler James Delaney/Kettle, by throwing in Acts Two and Three free of charge.

The infestation of fantasy which was such a distinctive feature of Vulcan School did us no harm, when it was a matter of James Bond paraphrase or even rip-roaring buckaroo porn. It was only when Miss Willis’s damaged emotional state was stirred into the mixture that mischief was done. The last manifestation of fantasy that I witnessed in my time at Vulcan was decidedly Gothic, and it did real harm to at least one vulnerable person.

Miss Willis set the rumour mill going well ahead of time. More than one person asked me, ‘Is it really true there’s a visitor coming to give a talk who’s got a real ghost in a box?’ I had to say that I didn’t know, but it didn’t seem very likely. I was still regarded as an
authority
on the supernatural. One little fuse-poltergeist and you’re an expert for life!

I was intrigued enough to ask Luke who our visitor was, but all he said was, ‘Nobody special – just some old duck,’ which made me wonder if he enjoyed Miss Willis’s confidence as much as he once had.

On the appointed afternoon we assembled in the main hall. Marion’s voice rang out in plump authority. ‘Boys of Vulcan School! It is a great pleasure to introduce our guest – and my personal friend – Miss Anna Mitchell-Hedges. Anna was living in the Castle before most of you boys were even thought of. It was her father the Colonel who placed the advertisement in the paper which Mr Raeburn and I answered all those years ago. Of course Anna knew the Castle as it was before we made our recent modifications, but I hope she gives her approval!’ To which Anna Mitchell-Hedges returned a twisted smile. ‘Anna and her father spent their lives travelling the world, surviving many dangers and discovering many things. In her time she has given a pedicure to the Duke of Windsor, and she has also landed the
heaviest
hammerhead shark ever caught by a woman – weighing fifteen hundred pounds!

‘She has brought one of her treasures to show to you today, a
treasure
which is much older than even the oldest part of the Castle. Please make her welcome, boys!’

We made her welcome, this strange, rather sunken creature with grey hair and a cold and grating voice.

‘Thank you, Miss Willis. It is a joy to me to see that what was once my home is giving hospitality to so many fine boys.’ It was odd to hear her speaking so coldly of joy. Her smile was like a winter night. ‘Now I must have darkness, total darkness.’ Presumably Marion had been briefed about this requirement beforehand. She went over to the windows and tugged the curtains scrupulously across. Then she went over to the door and turned the lights off.

In the darkness we could hear a succession of thrilling, slightly
sinister
noises. Miss Mitchell-Hedges’ voice came again in the darkness: ‘And now, dear friends, some music.’ There was a heavy click, and a tape-recorder started to play some music. I recognised it. It was the frightening music from
Fantasia
, from the bit with the spooks. ‘Night on the Bare Mountain’. It didn’t frighten me. If there was
anything
that did give me a moment of goose-flesh, it was Anna Mitchell-Hedges saying the words ‘dear friends’. She didn’t sound as if she’d ever had a friend in her life.

She made the music quieter, so that she could speak properly over it. ‘And now for some light …’ But she didn’t ask Miss Willis to turn the lights in the room back on. Instead she clicked on a powerful torch which she was holding just beneath an object on the desk in front of her. The light shone through the object. The light was red. There was a red lens on the torch. The only light in the room came from that torch, and reached us by passing through what was sitting on the desk before her, facing us with its grin. Miss Mitchell-Hedges made small passes with the torch, so that the red light wavered and cast changing shadows.

This was the moment, after the clunks and the click and the spooky music, when I started to hear another sound. A low continuous
banging
, with a moan inside it.

It was also the moment when Anna’s voice took on an oddly
crooning
quality. ‘What you are looking at, dear boys,’ she said, ‘and what is looking back at you, is an object full of value and danger. It is
valuable
because it is one of a very few in the world. The British Museum has another such object, but that has not been authenticated. And it is dangerous because of what it can do to those who under-estimate it. What it has done, indeed, to those who have shown it disrespect.

‘The Skull maintains an unvarying temperature of seventy degrees, no matter what its surroundings. It changes colour, even against a neutral background. Sometimes it goes a cloudy white, sometimes a dark spot expands until the whole Skull goes black.

‘This terrible, beautiful artefact was made from a huge piece of rock quartz, worn down into its shape by efforts that must have taken hundreds of years. The Mayans had no chisels, boys, they did not have so much as sand-paper. What they had was sand. The crystal was worn down by hand. Think of that! The sand wearing down both the crystal and the hands that rubbed it, year after year. They must have been slaves, I think, who did the rubbing, knowing that if they did their work well and finished the task that had been set their ancestors, then the blood of their descendants might moisten the stone and
satisfy
its thirst …

‘This is the Skull of Doom, made by the Maya people of South America. I was led to discover it in 1924. It has knowledge beyond our own. In ancient sacrifice it was used to bring about the death of tribal enemies. The Mayans would spill blood on it to make it work. Human blood.

‘Once you have been cursed by this Skull, there is nowhere for you to run to in this world. Or the next.

‘One man who spoke out against the power of the Skull developed a fever in three days and died. Another fell down a mine-shaft, a third went insane. One man in Africa was struck by lightning – out of a clear blue sky. Even to think bad thoughts about the Skull can bring sickness and death.’

The banging with the moaning inside it was getting louder, making a strong contribution to the oppressive atmosphere. I was sure I hadn’t secretly thought anything wrong about the skull, but I can’t say I felt very relaxed about it. While Miss Mitchell-Hedges was talking she let two fingers of one hand, the index and the little, slide down the front of the Skull onto its eye-sockets, interrupting the red light from the torch. The effect was eerie – all right, it was downright
frightening
. She was covering up the empty eyes of the Skull, but she seemed rather to be producing two searching beams of darkness. The gesture had something in it that was unlike a person touching an object. There was a sensual element, as if flesh was touching flesh, gloating at the contact. She was really milking the mood. If you like a captive
audience
, the disabled are always going to be at the top of your list.

‘As you know, boys, Farley Castle used to be my home. The Skull lived here with me for many years. It knows the building well. It would be wise for each of you to remember that something of the Skull has always been here. Something of the Skull will remain here, even after it returns to its case and travels home with me to Reading.’

At this point in her spook show she nodded to Miss Willis, who was waiting by the light switch and restored the room to its normal state. Anna Mitchell-Hedges turned off the torch and pressed the Stop button on the tape-recorder. She had a little colour in her face now, as if she had had a transfusion under cover of darkness. She seemed a little drunk, even, on the fear she had summoned up.

‘In a moment the brave ones among you may inspect the Skull at close quarters. Do you have any questions?’ This formula always
creates
a silence. Miss Willis raised her hand.

The sound in the room which had been bothering me for some time was still going on, but now I knew what it was. Little ‘
Half-Pint
’ Stevie Templeton, athetoid spastic, who could be jumpy and twitchy at the best of times, was jumping up and down very violently in his wheelchair. Sometimes on Sunday afternoons Mr Wooffindin the English teacher would read to us from
The Lord of the Ring
s
, and Stevie would become very agitated when he heard about the Dark Riders, but this was something else again. Poor Stevie! She was
pouring
fully a quart of anguish into that half-pint pot.

Little cries and moans of pain and bits of words he couldn’t
articulate
came stammering out of his mouth. He was sobbing and
dribbling
with terror. He was knocking his head hard against the metal sides of the wheelchair. There was blood.

Roger Stott called out from his seat, ‘Miss Willis?’ The look she gave him wasn’t one of her warmest. ‘Roger, you must have the
courtesy
to wait your turn before you ask our guest a question. What must she think of our manners?’

‘But Miss Willis, Stevie is shaking. Really shaking.’

She didn’t even look over to his wheelchair. ‘I’m familiar with Stevie’s condition, thank you, Roger. To resume: Miss
Mitchell-Hedges
– Anna, if I may – what is the most useful thing to take with you on expeditions to the wild parts of the world?’

Stevie Templeton was beside himself, and no wonder. If he was too frightened to stay in a dorm with me after a blown fuse had made a ghost story seem a little too real, then what chance did he have of
coping
with Anna Mitchell-Hedges’ carefully orchestrated spook show?

Even at that age, I could smell a prepared question, a put-up job. To her credit, Marion must have glanced over to Stevie and seen that something was wrong, just as Anna was getting into the stride of her answer. Anna raised her voice to cover the noise he was making.

‘Yours is a good question, Miss Willis, and one to which I have given much thought over the years. My answer is the same as my father’s: Eno’s liver salts. It is useful in two ways. It settles the
stomach
and is a tonic to the system. But it can also serve in an emergency to impress savages. Nothing makes a greater impact on the primitive mind than the white man’s ability to make water boil without using fire. That is how they understand the effervescence of the salts. If any of your audience remains unconvinced, your ability to drink the
boiling
water you have made without being scalded will certainly do the trick. If you decide to administer the salts to a native for their
original
purpose of soothing an upset stomach, you would do well to intone a spell beforehand, to account for the coldness of the liquid. Anything sonorous will do for a spell. On such occasions my father would recite the Twenty-third Psalm, not for sense but for rhythm.’

A handy tip in its way, but by this time few of us were resonating on Anna’s wave-length. Even while Anna Mitchell-Hedges was answering her question Marion started to sober up. At last she saw that Stevie Templeton was doing more than shaking in the ordinary way and she whisked him from the room. She didn’t appear again, but I can’t say that Miss Anna Mitchell-Hedges seemed to miss her. She had thoroughly enjoyed herself.

I wasn’t sure about taking up the offer to inspect the Skull at close quarters, but I certainly felt the artefact’s fascination. Everyone else seemed to be giving it a wide berth. At last I Wrigleyed up to the desk which Miss Mitchell-Hedges had used for her nasty
son et lumière
. She smiled at me. ‘Young man,’ she said, ‘have you come to consult the Skull of Doom? You may touch it. You may speak to it.’ I found I wasn’t afraid. I came right up to the desk and gazed at the object. There were still people in the hall, but they melted away and then it was just Mitchell-Hedges, the Artefact and Me. She whispered, ‘In fact there is no need to speak. The Skull is fully telepathic. If you merely think towards it and listen carefully, you will hear what it has to say. Simply gaze on eternity.’

The Skull was very deep and beautiful. I looked at it, touched it, caressed it and felt very honoured. The witch from Reading
murmured
in my ear, but I wasn’t really listening. As I gazed at the Skull, I felt the pain of Stevie Templeton, now dying away, and I knew
without
having to ask that the Skull would never have an interest in frightening a nervous little boy who had a huge task simply getting from one end of a day to the other. The Skull wasn’t baleful in itself, though it served Miss Mitchell-Hedges well in that respect. There was any amount of knowledge hidden away in that crystal chamber. Things seen and unseen swirled within its depths. As the Skull’s aura resolved more clearly in my mind, I began to have the surprising thought that it was actually female rather than male. In some strange way the Skull was a lady.

For a moment I thought of owning the Skull, but only to be able to spend time with it alone, and to give it a less ominous name. At the same time I realised the emptiness of treating it as a possession. I communed so deeply with the artefact that I began to think Miss Mitchell-Hedges knew nothing about it, apart from its ability to amplify her fantasies of control through fear. She was really just another Judy Brisby, a Miss Krüger too fastidious to touch her
victims
, and I had grown beyond the reach of such people.

From my vantage-point I could also see that the Skull was not in fact made from one piece of crystal. The lower jaw was detachable, held on with a piece of wire. At some stage an upper tooth had been chipped, one next to a canine. I wondered whether a clever dentist might not be able to make a little quartz crown for it.

Anna Mitchell-Hedges wrapped the Skull in cloths before putting it back in its case. ‘I wonder where Marion has got to?’ she asked, but she didn’t really seem concerned. She seemed pleased with her
afternoon’s
work. Her act was essentially ventriloquism, with the element of misdirection being crucial. Archie Andrews would have been shocked, though, by what was really going on. The crystal jaws of the Skull didn’t move, but everyone was looking at it, and meanwhile Anna Mitchell-Hedges had bitten into a schoolboy’s bone marrow, while Miss Willis looked foolishly on, pleased to have a friend who had cut the toe-nails of the Duke of Windsor, until the damage got out of hand. It was clear that she got a kick out of the fear and pain she caused Stevie Templeton. It couldn’t have been more obvious if she had gone over to him and licked the blood from his wheelchair.

She packed the Skull away and drove it back to Reading. With no real idea of where or how she lived, I visualised a gingerbread maisonette with a garden whose herbaceous borders were decorated with arrangements of children’s bones, and a basket in the hall for the Skull like a dog’s, except when it was allowed up on Anna’s lap while she watched Bruce Forsyth presenting
Sunday Night at the London
Palladium
.