The White Devil (15 page)
“Now what?” Dick challenged Fawkes.
Fawkes hesitated. “Now . . . smash through.”
“Smash through? Are you joking?” The workman rubbed his meaty palm lovingly on the creamy-yellow surface. “This is new plaster. We just fixed this up last year.”
“Dick . . .” reminded Fawkes.
“All right,” grumbled Dick. “New paint, have to redo everyfing . . .”
Now that they had their orders—though not without some final, skeptical head shaking—Dick and Reg got to business. They paced out the area, measured how much room they had to swing. They produced plastic goggles. They spread their legs for leverage, gripped the base and neck of their hammers—and began pounding. The noise was terrific. Dents appeared. Paint and plaster cracked and flew in white chips, chunks, and finally whole honeycombed slabs. Metal rods were exposed. The men’s clothes grew dusty. More students appeared, hovering in the stairwell, whispering, asking for explanation, receiving uncertain replies. From the original three, there were now more than seven boys watching. They kept coming, gathering in a queue up the stairwell. Fawkes ignored them, his big eyes never wavering from the action. Until Matron arrived.
“What the devil is happening?” she said, pushing down the stairs. The boys parted for her. “My apartment’s shaking like an earthquake!”
“We’re doing a bit of exploring,” said Fawkes.
“Exploring?” She took in the mess. “You’re destroying the house!”
“We’re not destroying it, Matron . . .”
“This fella says there’s somefing behind this wall,” said Dick, pointing at Andrew, and puffing from his efforts. “An old cistern, he says.”
“How would he know?” Matron scowled at Andrew. Andrew wished he could crawl into his collar. Then her eyes squinted at him suspiciously. “I hope this isn’t any silly business with the Lot ghost.”
For an instant, Fawkes’s nervous glance skittered across the faces of the gathered boys. They in turn stared back at him, eyes wide.
Dick grinned:
Now he’s in trouble
.
“It’s of historical interest,” Fawkes declared, summoning his peremptory English arrogance. “Nothing to do with ghosts, Matron. Now please, let us get on with the work.”
“Work!” she scoffed. She retreated up the stairs, grumbling. Fawkes gestured for Dick and Reg to resume.
Despite Dick’s shuffling manner, he was hell with a hammer. He and Reg moved like pistons, swaying, smashing, in orchestrated rhythm. On their tenth stroke, Reg’s hammerhead vanished halfway into the wall. Dick stopped swinging. For a moment they just stared. Fawkes lit up.
Is that it? Is that it, Dick?
he called out.
Now the hammers reared and slammed quickly. They beat a large, rhomboidal crack in the plaster. Reg gave it a terrific kick with his thick-soled yellow boot. The wall curled in. A hole stood about four feet high and two wide. Dick pulled his goggles onto the top of his forehead. He got down on one knee before the dark gap and peered through. His head disappeared. When it reappeared, his expression was begrudging.
“Looks like you got yourself a new basement, Mr. Fawkes.”
A LADDER APPEARED,
and a large flashlight with an orange grip. The ladder was shoved through the gap and secured. Andrew stripped off his jacket and tie.
Why is he going down?
the gathered boys asked. Reg descended with the flashlight. He called up that the ladder was secure.
Andrew stepped backward, through the hole. Eager boys, peering after him, crowded the opening. The last face he saw as he descended was Dick’s, scowling and dubious.
Inside the temperature dropped. All went black. The bobbing wisp of the flashlight below him illuminated the rungs.
“I got yer,” came Reg’s voice, echoing.
“You holding the ladder?”
“Yeh.”
“Is it secure, with the water?” Andrew asked nervously. He clung to the braces and made deliberate steps until he felt Reg’s strong grip on his triceps easing him to the floor.
“How did you know it was wet?” Reg asked.
Andrew followed the light. The floor had been littered with distinctly twentieth-century evidence of their demolition: plaster, dust, nails, wire.
“How did you know it was wet?” repeated Reg.
“Wet?”
Andrew followed the beam of the flashlight. He saw the sloping floor. The holes punched in the stone wall. The slick of dribbling water. And the cistern mouth, some seven feet wide, with its jagged stone lips.
“Look there,” grunted Reg, casting the light into the gloom of the hole. “Fall righ’ in there. Break your neck. Eh! Careful!”
Andrew circled the hole, staring into its depths, mesmerized. On the far side he stopped. Reg was saying something. Telling the group assembled above what they’d found. Fawkes’s face appeared in the opening. He was calling Andrew.
What is it?
Curious and anxious.
What’s down there, Andrew?
But Andrew was not listening. There, on the floor, straight and stiff, as if someone had been tugging hard on both ends, lay a clean white handkerchief.
Suffocation
DR. JUDITH KAHN
entered her home. It was a modest two-bedroom on Covey Lane, a ten-minute walk from school. It had been her father’s home (her mother had died when Judith was young), and she had redecorated it completely in a desire to make the place her own, to avoid that feeling that she was still living in her parents’ house. New paint, new furnishings. But that had been thirty years ago. Now the place looked battered in its own right. Scuffing on the walls, papers on the desk, too many picture frames on bookshelves and windowsills, her old comfortable caftan flung over the back of her favorite chair. She was proud she had avoided becoming old-lady-cozy; she could live with being bohemian-shabby. Her father had taught her how to manage money. She owned the houses on either side and rented them, as well as one of the nearby storefronts at the corner of Dudley Gardens and Lower Road. If the swaggering aristos of Harrow knew how much their school archivist had put by, they would have a shock.
The message light blinked on her phone. She saw its winking orange from where she stood by the front door. She punched the code into the burglar alarm (a concession to living alone), then crossed the room in the dark, illuminating a lamp along the way, to hear the message. It was Fawkes. He sounded both drunk and excited. She smiled. Everyone needed a Fawkes. A fountain spilling over with ideas. Or was that an overbrimming bathtub, threatening to flood the house: lately she had sensed, in addition to his usual narcissism, a careening, out-of-control quality, and it worried her. His message tonight was more garbled than usual.
Could you help us once again?
Fawkes asked. They had found a hidden room in the Lot; did she know anything about it? He thought it all linked back to Byron’s time, and suspected an element of the bizarre. Those were his words:
element of the bizarre
. Dr. Kahn frowned. Fawkes’s voice cracked when he said the words. Like he was trying to be comical, to cover up for something that upset him, and the strain was too much for his voice. Dr. Kahn picked up the phone to return his call.
Her finger never touched the buttons. Her senses tingled and she became aware of another person in the house. Whether it was through some small, scarcely detectible sound or true instinct she could not say, but she knew it instantly. She went to the hearth, attempting to remain calm, not to startle anyone. She wrapped her fingers around the heavy poker, then turned, and carried it in front of her like a bayonet. Her strategy lacked finesse—what would she do when she’d cornered the intruder?—but she was scared, and curious, and outraged. How did they get past the alarm? And what on earth would anyone want to steal? Books? Dr. Kahn edged into the corridor.
“Hello?” she called. Her voice was weak.
You can do better than that
, she told herself.
But she didn’t. Her senses more than tingled now. Something had changed in the house: she felt an oppressive cloud on her, a thickness in the atmosphere. It made breathing difficult. Her movements dragged, as if a weight lay upon her limbs. Even her thoughts came sluggishly.
She stepped forward into the first-floor corridor. She had only turned on one lamp in the living room, so the far end of the hall was bathed in shadows. The door to her bedroom stood halfway open. She had not left it that way, she was certain. It was as if someone had pulled the door closed, just enough to conceal themselves as they stood behind it.
Dr. Kahn felt a presence.
A body,
some
body, waited there behind that door. Then she heard it. An irregular wheezing; a gurgle. Gooseflesh rose on her arms and neck. She stood frozen, unnerved at last. Was it an animal? Had she cornered some beast? She heard a sharp intake of breath—human breath, shaped by lips, but ghastly, ragged, popping—that struck a note she knew. The deep inhalation before somebody started a nasty task, say, beating to death the old lady they were robbing. She saw four white orbs appear on the rim of the door. What were they? Her heart thrummed a beat before she realized. Fingertips. She felt something at her feet. She looked down. Now she screamed.
Rats had gathered at her feet, greasy, swarming. Dozens of them, there in the corridor, her corridor. One stood up on its hind legs, staring at her with eyes glowing orange in the reflected light. Then she felt a rush of motion behind her. She realized her mistake.
She had turned her back on the bedroom door.
SHE DID NOT
know how long she lay there, but she came to, to the sound of the telephone ringing. It rang and rang. She took stock. Felt her head—no injuries. The hall was free of rats. Free of anyone. Her bedroom door was open wide, the way she’d left it that morning. The poker stood by the hearth. But the greatest shock came in the words she heard, projected from her answering machine:
Judy, it’s Piers. Listen, we’ve made something of a discovery in the Lot. A room, like a cistern, that had been blocked up. Could you help us once again? To learn more? It’s all related. Tied up with Byron, I think. There is an element . . . of the bizarre about it. More when we speak.
It was Piers Fawkes,
leaving
the same voicemail she had heard when she first came into the house.
She struggled to her feet. She felt like someone over whom a wave has crashed: battered, but with all evidence of that violence dissolving into sand and sea.
She flipped lights on in the kitchen and with shaking hands made herself tea to calm down. She thought of Fawkes’s message.
Could you help us once again?
The
us
tripped her up. But the first hot sip of tea brought the answer. The American boy.
The one who had told her he had seen a ghost.
IT TOOK ONLY
twenty-four hours after the expedition into the basement.
Fawkes received a note, shoved through the mail slot. No postage, hand-delivered; even
he
could not miss it. (Clearly this was the intent.)
See me after lessons tomorrow
, it said, in Colin Jute’s angular script.
And here he sat, in Jute’s long, polygonal, well-windowed headmaster’s office, like the captain’s quarters on an old ship. Sofa and chairs on one end; vast desk on the other; view of the Harrow park beyond. It lay at the center of the school: at the crest of the High Street; Headmaster’s House built all around it.
Nervous about this meeting, Fawkes had drunk too much the night before. Gin before dinner, wine during, gin again after. A horrible idea in retrospect, but he had kept pouring it down, as if his nerves were a blocked pipe he could flush out. He’d been fighting nausea all day.
Jute stood at his desk, shuffling papers, his jowls bobbing under a dangerous-looking scowl. He spoke without raising his eyes to Fawkes. “Word has reached me about your incident in the basement.” He spat out this last word as if a basement were the moral equivalent of a strip club.
Fawkes suddenly knew exactly where this was going, and how it had happened.
The boys. It would have been the boys, the Shells, standing in the stairwell while the workers with sledgehammers bashed through the walls of their own dormitory. Not enough happened in the school in the average day—the average week—that such an incident would pass unremarked. Those boys would have emerged with reports, and distorted explanations, and spread these around—passed them from boy to boy in dining hall and classroom and High Street and tuck-shop like flu germs. And, of course, there was Matron, who would have complained to the assistant housemaster, Macrae, within the half hour.
“You seem to have lost your way, Piers,” said Jute. “Your house needs you more than ever. And you literally go about destroying it.”
His tone was not even angry, Fawkes observed ruefully, but calm and cutting. Fawkes, it seemed, no longer merited anger, or even bluster.
“The reason I wished to see you was the story I heard. That the American had seen a ghost down there. That true, Piers?
The Lot ghost?
” Jute’s nose wrinkled. “Wives’ tales?”
Fawkes’s face went red. “The boy suspected,” he stammered, “there was a . . . a bit of the old house . . .”
“So you took the archeology upon yourself? With sledgehammers?”
“I didn’t know what I would find. I didn’t know . . .”
“Were you drinking?”
Fawkes nearly choked. “I beg your pardon?”
“My question was clear enough.”
“The . . . it was four-thirty.”
Jute stared balefully.
“
No
,” Fawkes responded. An instinctive, self-protective lie. “May I inquire
why
you asked me that?”
“You drink, Piers. Don’t act so bloody shocked. The school, once upon a time, tolerated such behavior. And I suppose, as a writer you think it’s part of your mystique. But those days are gone. We hold everyone to professional standards.” He sighed. “It’s written on your
face
, Piers,” he said. “Your eyes. Nose. Blood vessels and cobwebs. People notice. I notice.
Boys
notice. In lessons, I’m told,” he added, with a note of outrage.
“Never.”
“Other times, then?” Jute asked, his voice now reclining into certitude. Fawkes realized his grave mistake in answering that last charge—to deny one instance was to acknowledge others. “House meeting? Check-in? You missed all your lessons on the day in question,” he said, referring to his notes.
Fawkes opened his mouth, but waited a second too long to speak.
“I’ve heard enough,” Jute concluded firmly, disgusted. “You’re on probation. Those boys had one of their fellows
die
, man. A Sixth Former, a popular one. They need reassurance, not excavations. Or bloody . . .
ghost stories
. I don’t want any more disruption to them or to the school. And I won’t have a drunk in charge of eighty boys. I have asked Sir Alan Vine, as one of the more senior housemasters, to monitor your performance. In four weeks’ time he will make a recommendation to me about your continued employment. That is all.”
The secretary poked her head into the office. The headmaster’s scowl broke into a sunny smile.
What is it Margaret?
Fawkes got the message—loyal servants treated kindly; bad ones punished. He did not need to be dismissed. He shouldered out past the spindly Margaret, who, sensing the headmaster’s mood, sniffed at him as if he were a dog that had rolled in something.
Fawkes burned as he left Headmaster’s House. He had been expecting the worst. He had been expecting consequences. But not this humiliation. Who had talked to Jute about the ghost? And that shit about drinking? Every master drank at school. Look at Blakey, soused at every holiday dinner. The beer allowances, the Sixth Form pub, the leavers’ parties . . . the place flowed with booze.
He shuffled down the High Street, letting the drops pelt his face. More rain. It never stopped, not since Theo died. Drowned in his own lung fluid, and then the school goes soggy for a month. No wonder Jute was edgy. The place
did
feel doomed, cursed. Fawkes would be lucky to leave. And given all his daydreaming about life after Harrow, Fawkes should have been elated. His employment agreement ran for a full academic year. He would be paid through July if he were sacked. Ten months. He could write a magnum opus in that time. Getting fired from a job he loathed, and which he performed poorly? Getting paid for not working? Getting time to write? This was his lucky day.
A wave of self-pity crashed over him. The play. He could take all the time in the world on it, and no one would want it. It wasn’t publishable without his association with the school. He felt a grasping sense of panic. And what about Andrew Taylor? What about John Harness; the cistern in his basement? Fawkes would lose his source material. For a few days, Byron’s life had come into focus for him, from this weak, two-dimensional prison (diaries, letters, who gave a shit; it was like listening to recordings of people’s phone calls; who cared about the everyday minutiae; give me the friction; take me inside the hour you became miserable, lost your soul, changed your life) into stark, three-dimensional reality; it rose before him like a fleshy pop-up book, in the form of the staring, sorrowful eyes of this American kid. Fawkes had been given
access
. As if—mopey as he was—Andrew Taylor were a member of an exclusive club that Fawkes, a born nonjoiner, was now desperate to enter. He wanted to spend time with this boy. And not just because of the play, he reluctantly admitted to himself. He actually
liked
Andrew. Their mutual discoveries had been the most . . .
fun
. . . he had had in a long time. Between teaching, and emailing parents, and administrative duties, and writing, Fawkes had had very little fun of late.
Probation
.
Four weeks
. He didn’t know how long he wanted or needed to complete his unfinished business at Harrow. But he knew it would take longer than four weeks.
He reached the Lot and found the front door of his apartment standing open.
Fawkes stood in the rain staring at it. Not because he was afraid—of burglars, or of someone breaking in. But because he had forgotten to close his own damned door.
He’d forgotten an umbrella, too. The rain dripped down his nose.
Small things. They made him suddenly furious.
Forgotten to close his own door! If Jute needed more evidence of a man not fit to care for others . . . well, here it was.
Get it together
, Fawkes fumed at himself. He kicked the door wide, beheld the miserable heap of cigarette butts and mess inside. All other thoughts were crowded out by immediate, visceral, disgust. Fawkes gritted his teeth in anger. At Jute. At the school. At himself.
“
Get it together,” he growled, this time aloud, stamping inside and slamming the door behind him.
“Get it together!”
DOWN IN THE
cistern room, it had been worse than Andrew feared. When he first saw the handkerchief, Andrew merely felt dizzy. He did not want to show it, with Reg there, in his work boots and paint-spattered trousers. But then Andrew nearly toppled over. He caught himself against the ladder. A strange sensation flooded him, as if some narcotic had been squeezed into his veins. He tried to shake it off. He ascribed it to the descent down the ladder. To the disorientation brought on by pitch blackness.
Pretty . . . pretty weird down here
, he muttered nonsensically to Reg, hoping to conjure cold reality back, through conversation. Reg merely grunted. When Andrew ascended a few minutes later to the light and the conviviality of his curious housemates in the basement corridor, the feeling, instead of dissipating, grew stronger.
