The Perils and Dangers of this Night (19 page)

At the very bottom, I peered out, froze and held my
breath.

Pryce trod slowly along the corridor. He was a bent,
lurching figure, oddly half-lit by the little bulbs in the
ceiling.

He stopped and leaned against the wall. He was so
close I could smell the sweat in his hair. He seemed
light-headed, confused. With a groan of pain, he peeled
the sock from his left foot and dropped it onto the floor.
He listened to the silence, cocked his head this way and
that like a sparrow, and then he continued towards me.
Every other footstep left a perfect bloody print on the
lino.

He came to the wheelchair, which lay on its side in
front of him and blocked his way. For a long time he
stared at it and frowned, as if it were the first time he'd
seen it and he didn't understand what it was: a chair with
wheels, capsized, one of the wheels askew, the spokes
distorted, and the other turning and turning very slowly.
He stood and stared until the wheel stopped, then he
moved forwards and set it upright. Using the handles to
support himself, he pushed it ahead of him. And it
squeaked – a rhythmic, plaintive
squeak squeak squeak
–
as he limped away, along the corridor.

At last I took a breath. Kemp and Sophie had heard
him too, had strained to catch the uneven footsteps and
known that Pryce was at the bottom of the staircase.
Now, as he took the chair away, the squeaks receded into
the distance – tinier, fainter, like a mouse skittering
through the wainscot. And then gone.

'What's he doing?' Dr Kemp, slumped on the attic
floor, was hissing down the stairwell to me. 'I have to
come down, I can't leave my wife . . .'

'No,' I hissed back at him. 'Stay up there. He . . .'

'My wife! How can I just sit and do nothing?'

'We need help,' I said firmly. 'We can't beat him on our
own. Stay there.'

Sophie was coming down. I saw her body against the
attic skylight, as she manoeuvred into the hole. Just as
she negotiated the first few steps, backwards into the
darkness, the headmaster leaned to her and caught her
wrist. For a split second, she stared up at him, horrified,
because it was the same grip with which Pryce had
manhandled and bullied her. I heard him say, 'Please,
Sophie, just tell me, please tell me –' and she gasped as
he squeezed her wrist tighter '– the note, the note he said
that Jeremy had written . . . Is it true? Do you know?'

'You're hurting me,' she said. He let go. She seemed to
have difficulty composing her reply. There was a pause,
long enough for me to see in my mind's eye, as though
against the perfect blackness of the hole in which I was
huddling, the slow arcing flight of a ball of paper and its
sudden eruption into golden flame. I watched the flame
blossom and die. When at last she spoke, her voice was
flat and strong, without a trace of a stammer. 'It isn't
true. There was no note. Jeremy didn't kill himself.'

She ducked away from him, and as she felt her way down and
down towards me, I heard the headmaster gasp to himself, 'Thank God, thank
God.' Then he called after her, as loudly as he dared, 'I never touched him,
I promise, I never . . .'

Sophie and I trod softly away from the attic staircase and
into the corridor. She felt for my hand, gripped it warmly
and whispered, 'Where are we going? What are we
doing?'

I knew that Pryce was nearby, indeed I thought I could
hear the squeak of the wheelchair somewhere ahead of
me. And so I said to her, 'Where's he going? What's he
doing?' She squeezed my hand even harder, and I could
sense in the fierce desperation of her touch that she knew,
that she was too afraid or appalled to tell me.

Pryce was there, only yards away, and yet, as we stole
behind him, he seemed quite oblivious of the real world
around him. We shadowed him, hiding and watching as
he stopped the chair and peered about him. He was lost.
In a building where he'd spent five of his childhood years,
a house whose every room and cupboard and corridor he
knew as intimately as I did, he'd lost himself. The wine,
the pain in his foot, the darkness – for whatever reason,
the reality of Foxwood Manor had slipped away and left
him bewildered and frightened in a long black tunnel. He
squinted ahead of him, where it narrowed and closed into
nothing but blankness. He turned and looked behind
him: the same. Overhead, high in a cave of shadows, a
dim yellow light illumined a skein of cobwebs and not
much else.

Lost, fumbling through the dim, cobwebby tunnel of a
half-remembered, half-forgotten childhood.

There was a door open beside him, so he left the
wheelchair and limped inside. I tugged Sophie closer, and
we peered into a room whose coldness and emptiness
seemed to yawn in front of us. We watched him shuffle
forwards, heard him bang into something hard, and in
the ghost-light from the dormitory window we made out
a long row of beds – the skeletons of beds, stripped to
nothing but their bare black frames.

He moved slowly past them, one after the other,
trailing his hand on the cold iron as he limped by. As I
leaned in, the room swam around me. For me too, the
reality of it was fading, replaced by a fractured dream
vision of what it might have been. And as he bent to one
of the beds and stared at the place where the pillow
should have been, I heard him whisper, 'Jeremy? Jeremy,
are you there?'

There was no answer. There was nobody. But when he
lifted his hands to his face and smelled the blood on
them, I saw the boy appear beside him.

Pryce knelt at the side of the bed, as he'd done every
single night for all the years he'd been at Foxwood. And
the little brother he was searching for stood dimly over
him, as he mumbled the words which were ingrained in
his head forever.

'
Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and
by Thy great mercy . . .
'

It didn't sound like a prayer. He only sought comfort
in the hiss of the words in the silent room, their familiar
shape in his mouth. He struggled to his feet, whispering,
repeating the phrases like a spell as he moved back
towards the door, and I felt my own lips moving to the
rhythm of the phrases I knew so well. The boy had
disappeared, and this, together with the shuffling approach
of Pryce, brought me once more to my senses. Just
in time, I pulled Sophie away, and we withdrew into a
pool of shadow.

Pryce stepped into the corridor, blundering straight
into the wheelchair. He clenched his teeth and hissed, and
I saw how he shuddered with the pain in his wounded
foot, how it flickered through his body and into the very
dome of his skull. The present moment and a realisation
of his surroundings came back to him with a jolt. He
stared around, wild-eyed, then shoved the chair ahead of
him and into the adjacent bathroom.

He knew this place. It must have had many memories
for him, from a distant long-ago boyhood to the vividness
of the previous night. He stumbled past the baths, which
looked like empty alabaster tombs in the darkness, and
felt for one of the sinks. He turned on a tap and doused
his face with water. Over and over, he plunged his head
into the basin and splashed his face and his neck and hair.
When at last he emerged, spluttering, gasping at the icy
cold, he stared into the mirror: the eyes of a dead man, a
dripping, bloodless face.

As though he were afraid of himself, he smeared at the
glass with the heel of his hand and left a smudge of
watery blood. He stared again, disbelieving. 'Jeremy?' he
whispered. 'Is it you?'

He moved faster now, pushing the chair ahead of him
along the corridor. When he reached the landing at the
top of the staircase, he leaned over the banister and saw,
far below, how a flutter of firelight played on the shabby
rugs of the great hall. That was the only light, for there
were no more emergency bulbs. He wheeled the chair to
the brink of the staircase, held tightly to the handles and
started to bump it down.

Softly, softly,
bump bump bump
, he lowered the chair
down the stairs. Sophie's hand was hot against mine as
we both peered after him, saw how he paused for a
breath at the first-floor landing and appraised the figure
of Mrs Kemp lying by the hearth. She was not moving,
she had not moved.
Bump bump bump
, he continued
down.

He wheeled the chair across the hall, past the Christmas
table, to the fireside. He knelt and studied the
motionless woman, who was sprawled exactly as she'd
landed when he'd dumped her onto the floor. Even from
our vantage point, high above the scene, her hair was
very beautiful, for it had fallen away from her face in a
spray of silken gold. Her skin was white, without a trace
of colour in it; all the flush had faded, all the blood had
drained. Indeed, from the wound in her throat a good
deal of blood had run into her clothes and onto the
carpet. It gleamed in the movement of light from the
flames.

He bent very close, so close that her hair stirred a little
as he breathed. Not a sign of life. He said into her ear,
'It's me, Mrs Kemp, it's me,' and touched her cheek with
his lips.

Her eyes flicked open. She looked at him with such
suddenness and clarity that he flinched from her. And
then she closed her eyes again, as though he weren't
worth the effort.

'Good,' he said. 'You're still part of the game.' He
stood up, wincing at the pain in his foot, and leaned on
the wheelchair. He pushed it away from the fire and out
of the hall, and it went
squeak squeak squeak
on the
linoleum floor as he disappeared into the bottom corridor.

I mouthed at the girl. 'Where's he going? What's he
doing?' And when she bit her lip and shook her head
dumbly, I mouthed again, 'You know! Tell me!'

Quickly then, I led the girl by the hand, down the
staircase to the hall. She veered towards the woman, but
I pulled her with me, determined that we should try to
keep Pryce in sight, that we should not lose him, that we
should at least have some idea of where he was and his
intentions. What I dreaded most was the nightmare of
not knowing, just the sick feeling that he was somewhere
in the building, somewhere close, a kind of murderous
ogre who could strike from any shadow. We followed
him into the corridor, ducking into the library as he
stopped and turned. If I'd thought his purpose with the
chair was to move Mrs Kemp, to relocate her elsewhere
in the building as part of the gruesome game of hide and
seek, I'd been wrong: because the chair was empty as he
squeaked it rhythmically, steadily, along the bottom
corridor and further away from the hall.

Together we cringed in the darkness, sheltering between
shelves of ill-assorted books: dusty tomes, never
opened, never touched, blocks of musty paper stacked
like bricks; a jumbled collection of comics and annuals,
dog-eared and thumbed by generations of small boys
who'd sought a haven there on rainy afternoons and long
wintry evenings. For a moment I thought of Martin
Pryce, a lost and lonely boy huddling in this very corner;
and I thought of his brother Jeremy, who'd also hidden
there, seeking a little respite from the torment of bullying
and abuse.

I held the breath, thick with dust, in my nostrils. Every
mote was the misery of a boarding-school Sunday, the
stink of homesickness, the hours and days I'd moped in
the library: the longing for home that only a boarding-school
boy can truly know.

I felt for Sophie's hand. It was warm and soft, like my
mother's. When her fingers entwined into mine and
squeezed, I felt a rush of love for her. It flooded my body
with warmth, like a transfusion of blood. It gave me
strength as well, a sudden steely determination to survive.
So that, when she whispered to me, 'The woman, we
have to help the woman . . .' I was amazed how calmly I
replied, 'No, she's dead.'

I tugged her by the wrist, past slabby walls of
encyclopaedias and atlases, to the further end of the room.

We moved out of the library and into the adjoining
classroom. I knew that wherever Pryce was heading,
Sophie and I would be faster than him, nimbler through
the obstacle course of the pitch-dark school. We were the
only two, of the five players in this Christmas game, as
yet unscathed by gunshot, unhampered by loss of blood.
We slipped swiftly and silently from room to room. I
knew every desk in every class, every floorboard that
might creak underfoot and give away our whereabouts,
and so I led the girl through deep shadow, over splashes
of snowlight and moonlight from high windows, further
and further away from the great hall.

'Where are we going?' she murmured.

We were in the changing-room, so dark that even the
ghostly figure of my coat on its peg was just a piece of
the enveloping gloom. Her palm pressed against mine,
and I guided her forwards.

'What was that?' I stopped dead. She said again, 'What
was that? Did you hear it?'

We'd both heard it: a heavy thud from somewhere high
in the house. It checked us for a moment, as we wondered
what it could be, then I urged her on again. I unbolted
the door at the back of the changing-room and together
we burst into the stable-yard.

I knew what had happened. As Sophie and I stepped
from the stillness of the building into a blinding blizzard,
it came to me with utter certainty that Dr Kemp had
come down the attic staircase.

He'd sat in the attic for as long as he could, ordered by
a small boy to stay where he was. How long could he stay
there? How long could he obey the instructions of a
twelve-year-old? Not long, or not at all.

Grinding his teeth at the pain in his groin, he must have
thought of his wife, shot in the throat, tipped from her
wheelchair, her life-blood pooling at the fireside. And I
knew he could smell her, he could touch her: because, as
he'd slumped and groaned among the jumbled boxes, as
he'd stared at the skylight blotted with snow, he could
have reached to the clothes which were hanging there and
pulled them down to him – her riding outfits. I'd seen
them and I knew what they were, and I knew he must
have hung them there himself, with care and tenderness,
soon after her accident, when she'd known she would
never ride or walk again.