The Perils and Dangers of this Night (13 page)

I watched the stricken crow. It had slowed down and
stopped, but it was still alive. I crunched across the lawn
towards it. The bird lay on its breast, its eyes wild, its
breath hissing through whiskery nostrils. Both wings
were outstretched, spread-eagled, and as I came close it
tried with all its failing strength to row away from me. It
pulled at the ground with its beak and claws, crawling
like a grotesque clockwork toy.

So I bent to the bird. It flopped against my foot, quite
submissive, as though it knew what I was going to do and
wanted it done quickly. It allowed my hands on its head
and neck, a kind of blessing. I pulled very suddenly and
the bird went limp.

Disinterested, the other crows watched from the woodland.
Even before I'd walked off the lawn and around the
side of the house, they dropped from the trees, in silence,
to the body of the dog.

It was evening. In the stable, in the lamplight, I held the
dead crow close to the flame and plucked the feathers
from its breast. I'd nearly finished. The bird had been so
brazen a few hours before, gleaming on the sunlit snow;
now it was little, skinny, nude. It still had a head, but the
weight and heft of the beak were out of proportion to the
naked body. The legs and claws, strong and black, almost
saurian, were quite incongruous. I swung the bird by its
feet, and it weighed nothing. I took it across the room to
my living, impish jackdaw.

'Dinner,' I said, and I draped the crow onto its perch.
The jackdaw angled its head this way and that, from me
to the odd prize I'd brought. I didn't know whether it
would find my gift appealing or offensively inappropriate.
But at last, after a moment's comical deliberation, it
sprang to the crow, stood on it with all the weight of its
one puny remaining leg, and mantled it with its wings.
Like a hawk, it made a claim. It applied its beak to the
bare flesh.

An owl hooted in the woodland.

The sound made me feel very lonely. I examined my
hands, from which the stripes of the headmaster's cane
were fading. With them, I'd saved the life of the jackdaw
I'd found in the woods; with them, I'd blessed the crow,
its cousin, with a quick death; and my fingers had been
intimate with the workings of the owl's stomach. But
now, as the jackdaw tore at the crow, as the owl
quavered in the frozen forest, I knew that, for them, I did
not exist. I'd never really touched them. Owl, jackdaw,
crow: there was a kind of triangle, and I stood outside it.

I felt cold in the stable. There was no big black dog to
warm me. I blew out the lamp, stood in the darkness for
a few moments, and then I went outside and closed the
door.

By ten o'clock the building was in darkness. No one
had felt like sitting cosily around the fire. Indeed, the
fire had burned down and gone out and no one had
bothered to relight it. Its little residual warmth seeped out
of the school and no one did anything to stop it.

No fire, no piano, no Christmas tree. No conversation.
No appetite for the cheese sandwiches that Sophie had
made in the school kitchen and offered to Dr and Mrs
Kemp and me.

By nine o'clock the headmaster had sent me to my
dormitory, and, for the first time in all my years at
Foxwood, I undressed and washed and put myself to bed
without a sign of Dr Kemp, without the prayer. I turned
my own light out. I heard Pryce and Sophie go to their
own dormitory soon after that, and heard the clanking of
the lift as the Kemps went up to their apartment.

The house creaked. No footsteps, no voices. Not a
groan or a whisper or even a flutter of snoring. A still
night. A silent night. An unholy night.

Fast asleep, I dreamed that I was outside.

Barefoot, in my stripy pyjamas, I was crossing the
snow-covered lawn. There was bright moonlight and I
could see the dead dog beneath the copper beech, shining
like a pool of oil. I called softly, 'Wagner, good boy', and
the dog stood up and came to me. I bent to stroke him.
He seemed bigger than usual, his body oddly stiff and
swollen, and his tongue lolled so heavily that it almost
brushed the snow. Together we went into the woodland,
where the birches were gleaming, the beeches were silvery
columns, where the moon threw marvellous shadows. We
were walking and walking, and I was looking for
something. In the dream I didn't know what I was
looking for, not yet, not yet. But I felt no fear, no anxiety,
nor did I feel the cold, because I knew that Wagner was
there and he was helping me. 'Go on, boy, go on . . .' The
dog moved stiffly ahead of me, now a big black shape in
the moonlight, now a piece of the deepest shadow.

And then, in my dream, I found what I was searching
for.

I saw Wagner nosing in the snowy leaves and nuzzling
the dark soil of the forest, I knelt to the ground to gather
the scattered scraps of blue air-mail paper – and I sensed
that someone was moving towards me. Someone was in
the woods with me, unseen, unheard, coming closer and
closer, so that I froze and held my breath and stared
around and listened as hard as I could for a footfall or a
whispered breath – somebody coming, closer and closer
. . .

I awoke. The door of my dormitory swung open.

Wide awake immediately, without moving at all, I
flicked my eyes towards the blank space, where the
corridor looked black and empty. I lay perfectly still,
without even blinking.

At first there was nothing, nobody. Perhaps it had been
the wind again, a shudder of cold air blowing from one
end of the building to another.

Then the floorboards creaked, and a figure came into
the room.

It tiptoed to the bed nearest to the door, and touched
the frame. I stared, frozen still and holding my breath,
and I heard the hiss of whispering. The figure moved to
the next bed and touched it, leaned down as though
peering for someone, and it whispered again. The figure
came slowly closer and closer, from bed to bed, touching,
looking, whispering.

Until I could stay silent no longer. I licked my lips and
said, 'Dr Kemp?'

With an odd cast of its head, the figure seemed to
glance in my direction. It moved another bed closer,
leaned down and felt at the bare mattress. 'Jeremy?' it
whispered. 'Are you there?'

And then the figure loomed at my bedside. This time it
could sense there was really someone in the bed. 'Jeremy,
are you awake?' it hissed, and as it bent so close that I
could feel its breath on my face, I squirmed out and
pressed myself, terrified, to the cold wall.

It was Pryce. He stared down at my bed. For a moment
I thought he would lean down and feel at the dint on the
pillow where my head had been, touch the warm outline
where my body had been lying.

But there was no dint, no outline. There was a boy,
lying where I'd been lying.

I saw him, and so did Pryce. The boy was asleep, his
face white, his eyes closed, his black hair gleaming on my
pillow.

And Pryce was hissing, 'Jeremy!' with a pleading, an
urgency in his voice. 'Jeremy, wake up!'

The boy's eyes flicked open, from Pryce to me. And
then he was gone.

I froze against the wall. Pryce touched the dint in my
pillow, found it empty, straightened up and blinked
around the dormitory. He was a man emerging from a
strange dream.

At last he peered at me, as though he'd never seen me
before in all his life, and he said, 'Where
is
everybody?
Where
is
he?'

He turned and walked silently out of the room, leaving the
door wide open behind him.

Pryce went deeper and deeper into the corridor, like a
vole slipping into a damp, dark tunnel. He moved past
the other dormitories and the lifts and as far as the
bathroom, paused and opened the door and went inside.
As he turned on the light, the bulb shining in the row of
mirrors and all the sinks and baths threw an odd,
fragmented gleam from the room and into the corridor.

I followed where he'd gone. I was afraid to get back
into my bed, where the boy had been lying. Shaken out
of the dream I'd shared with Pryce, I tiptoed after him
and peered into the bathroom.

He'd torn open his shirt and flung himself to his knees
beside one of the baths. After turning the taps on full he
doused his head in the icy water, until his long hair was
dripping and his shirt was wet through, and again and
again he dunked his head, gagging and spitting, as if to
lose himself in the noise and the drumming pressure.

He didn't hear what I heard: the clank of the lift, the
opening of the lift door and the unmistakable hiss of the
tyres of Mrs Kemp's wheelchair as she came along the
corridor. I heard it all, and I had time to take one step
backwards into the empty dormitory opposite the bathroom,
to stand in the darkness as she wheeled right past
me.

She looked into the bathroom, frowned and hesitated,
and then rolled herself inside.

Pryce was groping for the tap, to turn it off while he
still held his head under the gushing water, when he felt
her gentle touch on his shoulder.

'Sophie,' I heard him say, without looking up. 'Jesus,
Sophie . . .' and I saw him feeling for the hand that was
touching him.

Straightaway he knew it wasn't the girl. He blinked
through the water and his tousled hair and saw Mrs
Kemp. She'd wheeled her chair right up to him: she was
wearing a nightdress, her hair loose and soft, her eyes
sleepy.

'I heard you,' she said. 'I heard the water. Are you ill?'

Still kneeling, he gripped her hand. 'A dream,' he said.
'I had a horrible dream.' With his other hand he swept
back his hair and wiped the water from his face. Like a
frightened child, he lowered his forehead onto her knee.
'I'm so sorry I woke you.'

'A bad dream,' she said. 'It's coming back here. Why
did you come back? Upsetting yourself, upsetting us . . .'

She tried to extricate her hand from his, but she
couldn't. With the other she reached for the tap and
turned it off, and then she put her hand on the top of his
head. 'You're soaked. You're cold. Why did you come
back?'

She couldn't see his face, which was pressed onto the
soft material of her nightdress. But I could see it, from
where I stood at the door of the bathroom. She didn't see
how he squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath as he
felt the heat of her leg against his cheek and the touch of
her hand on his hair.

'To see you,' he whispered. 'And now that I'm here, I
can't leave.'

'Silly,' she said. She held her breath too, acutely aware
of the weight of his body as he leaned against her. 'After
all this time, why would you want to see me?'

He lifted his head, still holding one hand, and he
caught her other hand too, while her fingers were still
entangled in his hair. Her nightdress was wet where his
cheek had pressed on her knee. On his knees at her feet,
gripping both her hands, he stared up at her. 'It's this
place.'

'Of course,' she put in, 'after all the years you spent at
Foxwood . . .'

'No, no, I don't mean Foxwood.' With a movement of
his head he gestured around the bathroom. 'I mean
here
,
in
this
place. Don't you remember? Look.'

He let go of one of her hands, long enough for him to
reach for the plug and drop it into the plug hole. He
turned on the tap again.

'What are you doing . . .?' she started, but her voice
was drowned by the roar of the water.

He caught her hand again. 'You remember,' he said
urgently. Up on his knees, his chest and belly bare right
down to the belt of his trousers, he was suddenly a
gleaming, powerful figure. The water was running hot
now, hotter and louder, and as the bath was filling a
cloud of steam came roiling out, fogging the entire room,
misting the mirrors, hazing the light bulbs in silvery
haloes. She licked her lips, and the glimpse of her tongue
brought a quick, crooked smile to his face. 'Yes, you
remember,' he said. 'I can see you remember.'

'Don't be silly, Martin,' she said, and I heard a quaver
of panic in her voice. 'Childhood memories play tricks on
all of us. Now, go back to bed and . . .'

Before she could try to resist, to try and match his
strength with her puny arms, he pulled one of her hands
forwards and pressed it, palm open and flat, against his
chest. The other he pressed to the side of his neck.

'The first time!' he hissed. 'Here, in this bath!' He
tugged her closer to him, her face towards his. 'You were
washing my hair, and you touched me like this, and for
the first time . . .' He rubbed the palm of her hand down
his chest and the smooth hot skin of his belly and he
closed his eyes in a kind of swoon. 'Here,' he said, and
he held her hand to his groin. 'I was hard, like this, for
the first time.' He snapped his eyes open again. 'Remember?
Here, in this place . . .'

She snatched her hand away. 'I never touched you! Get
away from me!'

He was on his feet. The room was a blur of steam and
the bath seemed to thrum a deeper, rumbling note as the
water rose higher. For the second time that day, I saw
him pick her up, as though she weighed nothing. She
cried feebly, 'No, no! Please, no!' and when she glimpsed
through the fog that I was watching from the doorway
she raised the pitch of her voice and called out, 'Alan, tell
Dr Kemp! Tell him!'

Pryce swung her over the bath. 'In the water you'll be
weightless,' he whispered, his mouth pressed to her throat.

I stepped into the room, as she moaned and writhed,
as he lowered her to the surface. She twisted her head to
the doorway again and cried, 'No Alan, don't tell him
don't tell him please never please don't . . .'

Pryce smothered her words with his mouth, kissing her
deeply. 'In the water you'll be free,' he murmured to the
woman, and he laid her deep into the bath. 'In the water
you are whole, you are perfect . . .'

Her nightdress swirled around her; she gasped at the
sudden heat. He slipped out of his clothes and stepped
into the bath. She stared up at him as he lowered his body
to hers.

'You knew I'd come back,' he said. 'You wanted me to
. . .'

He threw me a triumphant sidelong glance, and I spun
away into the darkness of the corridor.