The White Devil (9 page)

Tells me tales of the Levant and the crimes of Lord Elgin.

Drinks late, till poetic madness takes him (and then quotes himself at some length),

Warns against donne Italiane and even here, watches his weight.

Or did. Now he’s sick. And a poor place to be so this is:

Bound in a bunker, surrounded by bogs, mosquitoes, Turks;

I mop his brow for him. We wait upon a surgeon.

We wait for everything. Powder. Bullets. Dry food, clean water.

To while the time—when he’s conscious—he’s taken to confessing.

Heaving over his living secrets, to make a lighter deathly crossing.

My mother writes me not to listen, or I may myself learn lore

Unsuited to my station: how to love like a baron,

Prowl palace and gutter for conquests; how to cuckold at scale.

Yet even the corrupt and very rich deserve friends, at death’s brink.

I will hear for myself, in this tiny theater—

A rectangle of cold plaster, with dampness creeping in the corners—

The deeds of a hero, of sorts, from his own lips.

Why should he spare me any humiliating truth?

His looks grow waxy. His time is short. He speaks!

And suddenly Fawkes—with his sad, popping eyes—rounded on Andrew and pointed. All faces turned to him. He went hot. He gripped the pages of the script until they buckled, damp in his sweating fingers, and began to read.

THE GROUP TUMBLED
out through the narrow Speech Room corridor together, excited. The play was rollicking, more fun than they’d expected. The actors liked their roles, each secretly believing his or hers was best, from the nervous, thin, and zitty Lady Caroline Lamb to the tall, very sincere athlete who’d been recruited to play Hobhouse, Byron’s best friend. Andrew had fared pretty well. Though James Honey had embarrassed him by informing him, in front of everyone,
twice
, that he would need to work on both elocution
and
accent training—
Lord Byron can’t be from Connecticut
, he had said—Hugh had stopped Andrew afterward and told him he’d been
not bad at all, really
. After the read-through, he felt himself jostling right along with the others. But then he stopped in the Speech Room passage, waiting there in the dark. He heard the wind roaring outside; he saw yellow leaves dancing on the spindly boughs and heard the rain patter against the brick. At last Persephone emerged. She stopped short in the entranceway when she saw him. She stood in the light, he in the dark. She pushed past him into the rain.

He followed her. Drops smacked his face. He caught up with her on the stairs that led down to the street.

“Why are you upset?” he called after her.

She turned, looking up at him, her face grim and set. She was clutching her books, shielding them from the rain. But she was growing wet herself, the white Harrow shirt staining grey.

“I thought we could be friends, that’s all,” she said. “But I see you’d rather be with them.”

“Who’s . . .”

“I heard you and
Rebecca
in there. I’m not deaf, you know.”

“Rebecca?” Andrew sputtered, blushing.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

She set off again, across the road, buffeted by wind and rain and chill. She cut between two buildings on the High Street to a steep stairwell that led down to the rolling park behind the school.

Andrew followed her. The high walls of the chapel and library on either side protected them from the wind, but raindrops smacked the roofs and walls and managed to spatter them. Andrew shivered.

“I didn’t say anything to Rebecca,” he called to her back.

“Stop pretending,” Persephone said, still clutching her books to her chest. “I went to school with those witches for four years. I know what they think of me. I just thought that by coming here, I’d have a clean slate. Which was totally stupid.” She stopped and turned to him. “You’re new. Be their friend. They’ll make you popular. They’ll be your personal PR agency. They seem to be mine.” She started moving again and Andrew saw that they had come to the verge of Harrow Park.

“I don’t want Rebecca as a friend,” he said while trying to keep up. “I want us to be friends.”

“That seems unlikely.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Then he hesitated. He had only a moment or two to keep her attention. He would tell her, then, even though he had promised himself he would tell no one. Persephone surely was different. He took a deep breath and blurted: “Something weird has been happening since Theo died.”

Her nose wrinkled. “Theo? Don’t use that as an excuse.”

He almost choked the next words out. “I haven’t told anyone about this. I’ve been scared to.”

“Then why tell me?”

“I want you to see I’m not like the others. And I trust you because . . . you’re not, either. You just said so.”

She searched his face. “All right, then. Come on,” she finally said, testily. “I’m freezing to death.”

SHE LED HIM
around the foundations of the chapel to the Classics Schools and opened a door on the first floor. It was a rectangular classroom, and in the near dark Andrew made out a long oval table in the center and a corduroy-upholstered armchair in the corner. A line of Latin was scribbled on the blackboard, pock-marked with scansion.

CONUBIIS SUMMOQUE ULULARUNT UERTICE NYMPHAE

“It’s never locked,” explained Persephone. “Mr. Toombs’s classroom. One of my refuges from Sir Alan.”

Since night was falling on the rain-soaked park outside, the overhead lights would have set the room aglow and made them visible for a mile. So, in tacit agreement, they stood in the patchwork glimmer filtering from the lanterns in the nearby headmaster’s garden. Persephone squeezed the rain out of her hair and shuddered. Andrew lunged for her bluer, which she had been carrying, and started to wrap it around her shoulders. She jerked it away from him.

“I’ve got it.” She moved a few paces away. “So what’s your story?”

“I . . .”

“Better hurry,” she snapped. “I swore to myself I would never speak to you again.”

“Yeah, okay . . . so something has been happening. Only . . . I was wrong, just now. It hasn’t been
since
Theo died. It was
when
he died.” He crossed his arms, shivering himself. “I saw something.”

“You found him. I know. I am sorry.”

“I saw him.” He held her eyes. He wished he could tell her without being forced to put it in words. “I saw him being killed,” Andrew said, whispering now, even though there was no one to overhear them. “He was suffocated to death.”

“What?”
Her eyes searched him fiercely. But she saw sincerity there. “By whom?”

“This . . . guy.”

“Did you tell the police?”

“No.”

“Why ever not, Andrew?”

“Because.” He rolled his eyes at himself, laughing a nervous and despairing laugh. “Because the killer disappeared.”

“Disappeared.”

“He was there one minute, and then he wasn’t.”

They both hesitated.

“Are you having me on, Andrew?”

“I wish.”

“So you’re seeing things.” Her voice was crisp, distant. “Have you seen Dr. Rogers about this?”

He snorted. “Why? Because I must be sick?”

“I only . . .”

“Well, what if there
are
things to see?” he went on hotly. “Am I still crazy? Never mind. I thought you would understand. I was obviously wrong.”

Persephone became conscious of the fact that just moments ago she had been flinging accusations at
him
for being conventional, for believing what others told him. This was supposed to be her turf. She drew a deep, preparatory breath.

“I’m trying to be helpful,” she countered. “I won’t judge. Go on.”

“You mean it?”

“I swear.”

Andrew crossed to the corduroy chair. He needed to sit.

“I saw the guy again,” he said.

“Again? Here at school? Who is he?”

“In the Lot,” he said. He raised his eyes to her. “He was being picked on. He was a student here. A long time ago, maybe.”

“How many years ago?”

“A long, long time ago.”

Persephone’s eyes opened a little wider as she started to understand what he was getting at.

“Hang on . . . you think he’s a ghost?”

“Something happened to him,” Andrew went on. “He was normal. Or looked normal, when I saw him in the Lot. But before, with Theo . . .” Andrew scowled. “He was emaciated, like a . . . cadaver.”

Andrew’s eyes glowed at her: grey, arctic, pleading for help. Insane or not, this boy is completely alone, she realized. He has no one, he is miles away from anyone he knows,
and you were browbeating him
, she scolded herself. She took two steps and knelt beside him. She placed a tentative hand on his shoulder to comfort him. The rainwater, gathered in the fibers of his wool jacket, was cold.

7

The Wolf May Prey the Better

THAT NIGHT ANDREW
shivered under his covers. The rain seemed to have leached through his clothes and onto his skin and clung there. From the moment he’d confessed to Persephone, he’d felt a cold grip on him. As if this chill were some kind of punishment, a warning. He dismissed this thought. It was paranoid, unhealthy. But his dreams, when he was able to fall asleep, were feverish. And when he woke up later, to a black and silent dormitory, he was full of a dull dread.

The dormitory was silent. It was not yet dawn.

Andrew listened. He heard nothing. But at once—had it been there the whole time?—he noticed the glow. A peach-colored line underneath his door. He stared at that glow for a long time. His pulse beat. He could not interpret what he was seeing. The glow was the wrong color—too warm—to be the corridor light. Could it be a fire? At last he rationalized: the sooner he found out what it was, the sooner he could go back to sleep. Despite the warning sounding in his head, he rose. The cold linoleum stung his feet and he opened his door.

In front of his room had been placed a candle, burning in a holder. Soft, orange, the source of the peachy light.
Like an offering. An invitation
.

He looked both ways in the corridor. No scampering footsteps. No giggling prankster. He bent down to lift the candle and in doing so stepped through the doorway.

Andrew reeled.

Outside his threshold sprawled a wide dormitory, packed with cots. Beds with rumpled bedclothes, dozens of them, in cockeyed rows. The beds contained bodies. The beds and bodies splayed over a large room, some thirty feet long. Andrew feared he had stumbled into some dreadful death scene, but then the sounds came to him. The intake of breath, the stirring cries, the snores of dozens of people.

He turned quickly. The door to his room was no longer there. A row of windows with ragged curtains replaced it.

He turned back. At the far end of the room he saw a flicker.

Another candle, disappearing through a doorway at the far end of the room.

The odors hit him now. He flinched. God, what a stench. Urine in abundance, soiled clothes, mildewing mattresses, the stink of ash and smoke. Another odor topped off them all. It was hard to place: savory, haylike, and acrid all at once. What was it? A now-familiar
cheeping
from the corners gave him his answer.
Rat shit
. He spotted their shadows. Dozens of rats, sniffing, shuffling along the walls in hairy clumps, their claws making tiny
tick tick tick
s on the floorboards.

He had no way back. He did not wish to stand in this chilly, rat-infested place in his underwear. He gripped the candle holder, put his hand around the flame to shield it, and began making his way across the room, in pursuit of the other candle glow. Whoever it was—and he could guess—he was no doubt intended to follow him.

Andrew hurried to the opening at the other end of the dormitory. This led to a staircase constructed of thick walnut banisters and shallow steps that creaked. The other figure must have descended here. He followed. After several plunging flights he came to a door. Inauspicious, with a brass knob battered with dents. He swung the door open. Stone-carved steps, slick with damp, descended before him. He took a step forward. The temperature plummeted.

He took the stairs carefully and found himself in a round chamber that had been carved from solid rock. The walls stood rough and jagged. Water oozed over them from a dozen holes that had been punched in the wall. The water then collected in a slanting floor that tilted toward the center. There lay a kind of deep basin or reservoir. Its black mouth gaped, jagged at the rim like chapped, cracked lips, sucking in all the water: a cistern. Andrew stared at it.
You could fall right in
. It was some ten feet deep. A tin pail on a string sat nearby to haul up fresh water. He was so transfixed by the sight of the cistern that he did not at once notice the glow of the other candle.

“Terrify babes, my lord, with painted devils,” a voice rang out. “I am past such needless palsy.”

Andrew saw him, standing on the far right side of the cistern mouth. The small-framed boy of the showers, his white-blond hair (now dry and recognizable) tucked behind his ears. He wore a nightshirt. He spoke in a voice that was unnatural, tremulous, and irresistible, a boy’s masquerading as a woman’s, charged with crystalline ferocity and with a towering regal contempt.

“For your names of whore and murderess, they proceed from you—as if a man should spit against the wind: the filth returns in his face.”

Then a deeper, scratchier, less certain voice emerged.

“Did you forget your bit again?” he whispered. “
Your champion’s gone
. That’s the cue. Then I say,
The wolf may prey the better
. I love that. I have no idea what it means. But it sounds
wicked
.”

The what?
Andrew asked himself.
The wolf may prey the better?
Was even language garbled and confusing in this place? Bewildered, and without thinking, he took the last step down into the cold chamber.

The boy picked his way around the treacherous cistern. He came to Andrew and placed his hands on Andrew’s chest—a grown-up gesture; more playacting, only this time the white-haired boy was playing at being a mistress, or a wife collapsing on the chest of a beloved husband, long separated. Andrew stood still, helpless in the face of these shifting personas.

“Do you always forget?” the white-haired boy continued. “
The wolf may prey the better
. Her champion’s Bracchiano. I suppose the cardinals are meant to be the wolves. But I fancy she’s the wolf. A
she
-wolf.”

Cardinals? Wolves?
Confused and alarmed, Andrew pulled away.

“You,” he managed. “You killed Theo.”

Now the eyes flickered fiercely—the mask was torn away. The boy’s face contorted and snarled.

“
Who was it?
” the boy screamed. “
Tell me!
”

Andrew recoiled. Fell back; tripped against the staircase. The boy followed and flung himself on Andrew. But not in attack. Something else. Another shape-shift. Back to the cringing mistress.

“You came, you came,” he gushed, and pressed his cheek to Andrew’s chest. Andrew, to his own surprise, felt himself momentarily surrender to the gesture; he realized how little he had been touched at school. No one
hugged
him; there was barely any handshaking; nothing. His body, without consulting him, responded to the white-haired boy; devoured the press of another body against it. He felt languorous, tended to, connected.

Now the boy hovered over Andrew and gazed into his face, intoxicated by their closeness. The boy’s mouth fell open. His breathing came heavy. Andrew struggled to move. His legs were paralyzed, his arms pinned down. His eyes bulged.
Let me up!
he wanted to yell, but found he could not. The boy closed his eyes and let his two thin, open lips descend onto Andrew’s. Then he moved his hands out of sight and squirmed, and Andrew felt his zipper tugged and a wriggling at their joined hips. The boy pulled out a handkerchief. Excitement and fear and revulsion jolted through Andrew. With a grimace of both concentration and lithe effort, the boy straddled Andrew and squeezed. Andrew’s eyes popped open
whoa what was happening
and the boy’s hands wrapped the handkerchief around Andrew’s neck and tightened it. Andrew lay pinned against the stone stair while the boy, still with his determined grimace, rapidly rubbed up and down, and Andrew’s eyes and face and skull felt tight with the pressure of blood and trapped air in his neck, and then despite himself the pleasure built and Andrew almost felt he was falling. The boy was watching Andrew now, hovering over him with those black eyes blazing, delighted, curious, and observing, the hand still gripping the handkerchief, and Andrew thought he would lose control—and he did, with a groan. An astounding gratitude spilled over, with shame less than a second behind. Then the handkerchief tightened and his world went black.

HE AWOKE IN
a narrow corridor with a thin red carpet.

It was daytime.

He needed to be somewhere urgently. He heaved, breathing hard. He had been running. He was still running.
He had to catch up with him
.

Around him crashed a booming sound so loud he thought he would lose his mind. It pounded like a surf.

He staggered forward. He reached a stairwell. He took the stairs—spindly, painted, wooden—and nearly broke the railing off in his hand, ascending like a mountaineer.

Through monumental effort, despite pain, he reached the top stair. He stood in another corridor. Andrew leaned against the wall to catch his breath, but was assaulted again by the horrible noise, which beat his brains like hammers.

And there he was, standing ahead of Andrew.

His quarry.

Grey, bent over in the shadows, unlocking a door with a key from around his neck.

The moment had arrived.

Andrew stepped toward the figure. The noise thrummed. It rose. Grinding, unbearable.

ANDREW AWOKE SCREAMING
in his room. He could feel it, a monstrous apprehension of what was about to happen. An understanding that he wanted to push away but could not.

He knew the violence would be ghastly.

Rhys appeared in a pair of pale green boxer shorts.
What’s going on?
He flicked on the lights. Then Roddy charged in, gripping Andrew’s shoulders and pressing him to his bed, telling him to
Calm down, for fuck’s sake, you’ll wake the whole house
. But Andrew couldn’t calm down, because it had arrived, the moment something horrible was going to happen. He had not seen it, but he had felt it coming, and the only way to get it out of him—his body knew, even if he didn’t—was to scream, scream over and over, as loud as his lungs allowed. Roddy backed off and laughed nervously, putting his fingers in his ears, grinning helplessly at Rhys.
Screaming bloody murder!