MASQUES OF SATAN (44 page)

I know what he is trying to do, but I have an answer for him. It just comes to me. It is something that our English master Mr Capstick (a bit of a show-off) is always saying to us. I say:

‘I am older than the rocks upon which I sit: like the vampire I have been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave.’

‘You’re bonkers, Sternfield,’ is all Sarson can say. ‘You’re completely off your rocker.’ Roxanne is already becoming a distant memory with him.

We watch the first half of the show from the front. We stand at the back of the circle because the theatre is full. The minute’s silence is restful, and it makes me happy. When it is over Sarson asks me why I was smiling during the silence, and I say that I was remembering Roxanne.

‘What do you know about Roxanne?’ he says aggressively.

I say, ‘A lot more than you do.’ It is a stupid thing to say, because then I can’t help talking about Mort and all the things I do know. He listens to me, but I don’t think he is taking it all in, so maybe it doesn’t matter. When he has heard me out he says nothing more, and we watch the show, which is going well.

I notice he has gone in the interval. I look for him for a while in the bars and foyer before I go back stage just as the interval is ending.

I have gone, not through the pass door from the theatre, but through the stage door, because I want to take a stroll outside. It is a hot night. It bears down on me and threatens thunder. I walk through the stage door, and as soon as I am in I know something is wrong. Pegley, the old stage door man, is looking at me in a funny way.

‘Mr. Rex, he wants to see you.’ Pegley always calls Rex Raymond ‘Mr Rex’ for some stupid reason. I do not like the way he says this but I go in. As it happens Rex can’t see me just at the moment. He is doing his opening spot of the second half. I can hear the orchestra strike up the opening bars of ‘I’ll Send My Love’. I stop at the dancers’ dressing room. The door is open and I look in. They are putting on fishnet tights for their next number, and chattering in whispers. One of them sees me, then another. They all fall silent. I cannot tell why they are looking at me, but it is the cold fishy stare of dead eyes, like eyes that I have seen before through a drizzle of wet silver hair.

Now I know that everyone is looking at me, even the stage hands, and I want to escape. I go into Rex’s dressing room. I must wait for him there. Sarson is sitting at the dressing room table smoking one of Rex’s cigarettes, trying to be grown up. He looks at me, and his eyes are bright with malice.

‘So you decided to come round, did you?’ I am bewildered. ‘Don’t look so innocent. We’ve all seen through you now. You were too clever, that’s your trouble. All that stuff you told the police about Mort. You thought it would throw everyone off the scent, but it was such rubbish. And Mort hasn’t vanished or anything. He’s here.’

Mort comes through the door of Rex’s private washroom and lavatory. He is in his uniform but for once he is without his cap. The dome of his bald head is as leprously naked as a skull. A blue vein snakes its way under the parchment skin at the top of his cranium. I step back in terror. Still I have no idea what everyone is doing.

‘Stay where you are,’ says Mort in a faint, scratchy voice. I turn and bolt through the door. As I do so, Rex, on stage, is coming to the end of his number, and the girls in their fishnets are pouring out of their dressing room to make their entrance. Wide-eyed, they split as I pass through them. In my rush I bump into Joey King. He grins.

‘What you doing here, boy? Come to give yourself up, eh? Eh?’ He grabs my arm but I shake him off because he is old and fat and unhealthy and a failure at everything. But then I must find somewhere to go.

I reckon the safest thing to do is to get back through the pass door into the main body of the auditorium. To get there I have to climb some metal steps against the back wall onto a gantry, one of several which surround the stage one above the other.

I climb the steps and look down. Rex has finished his number and is coming off stage to great applause. The dancers have formed a line and are entering from the wings, high kicking in time with the music. I see Joey King — a bald patch on the greasy top of his head I have not seen before — go up to Rex. After a swift, urgent conversation, they look around, then upwards, and see me at the top of the steps. Joey points. I run along the gantry on the prompt side to reach the pass door to the theatre. Just then it opens and Mort appears. My way is barred. I must now double back and go up the next flight to the second level, and thereby reach a door which will take me to the top floor of theatre dressing rooms. I reach the top of these steps, breathing hard, only to see Billy Wilshire coming towards me. He is followed by Sarson. I have nowhere to go and need a moment to catch my breath.

Billy comes towards me. He is wearing his schoolboy’s uniform, the little red schoolboy cap perched on top of his chestnut toupée, his round horn-rimmed spectacles gleaming, and, under this idiotic youthful façade, his face is old and evil. Wanting to look anywhere but where he is, I glance down towards the stage underneath me. Below, the dancers, dazzlingly lit, are turning in a perfect line. All I can see of them from the dark above are the plumed tops of their heads and their long, kicking, fishnetted legs: bodyless heads on wagging limbs, like those monstrosities of Bosch. Do I know about him? I turn back to the problem of Billy Wilshire. He has the look of a wizened, sexless dwarf, but he is a man for all that. He has opened his shorts and I can see that now, the horror of it. I need to cry for help. I look for it up, up to the gods, and see only a tangle of ropes and old scene drops hovering just below the roofed darkness. I look down the metal steps and see two faces staring up at me from the gantry below: Joey King’s, red and bloated, bursting from his tight, white collar like an eruption, and the pale, smooth face of Rex Raymond. They do not move; they appear to be there to see, nothing more, and their eyes have the strange emptiness of intense curiosity. I am backing away from Billy, watching his eyes as they watch mine, dead eyes, they seem to me, or longing for a kind of death, as I do. My hands grip and slip along the metal rail of the gantry as I retreat. Then suddenly my hand feels emptiness, I sway and begin to fall. I am tumbling down the metal staircase away from my persecutors Billy and Sarson — the Judas of the plot — and towards Rex and Joey below. My mind slows to a crawl as I watch the world spin. I am the fallen and betrayed Christ, the tumbling Titan. A glimpse of all those faces again catches them between horror and rage. I see the tawdry spectrum of the rows of batten lights: straws, pinks, ambers, and midnight blues, then my head strikes something, and then there is the long silence. I wake up here: I am fifty years older, and I do not know why.

I do not know why. I am the victim and not the perpetrator. I am certain of that; but, if that is the case, why am I locked in a white room every night? Why do the others shun me and call me names? Why did they come for me the other night in the showers and hurl my head against the tiles and leave me for dead? Rotten luck, I call it. Hard cheese! I wake up here and find that my childhood has been restored and my adulthood taken away. Now I am the child who was wounded, not the adult who did — what? I do not know. No! Don’t tell me! I have no part in it. I am not he. I am not myself.

But then, what do I know. Eh? Eh? Not much for my age.

The End of History

THE VICE-CHANCELLOR did not know why he was there, but he knew it must be for a very important reason, because University Vice-Chancellors are not invited down to the basement of the Physics Building for nothing. Besides, he was being accompanied by three other members of the University who were almost as important as himself.

Dr Semple, Chaplain of Blair College, and Senior Lecturer in Theology to the University, was an old friend, though the Vice-Chancellor had never been quite sure what precisely he believed in. He had a shaven head, as round and smooth as a billiard ball, and his features looked as if they had been scribbled onto its surface as a casual afterthought. Simone Quoist, by contrast, was dark and slender with the face of a handsome lizard. Only last year she had come from Berkeley, California with little in her luggage except a formidable reputation, to be the new Ayer Professor of Logical Positivism. Representing the arts, and perhaps from his frequent television appearances the most recognisable of the four of them, was Jack Angleton, holder of the Sylvia Plath Chair in Anglo-American Literature, whose latest book,
Shakespeare, the Urban Terrorist
, had recently caused an extremely acrimonious, but financially rewarding, controversy in the media.

In the foyer of the Physics Building, which resembled the inside of a giant glacier and was almost as chilly, they were met by a white-coated minion who escorted them to the lift. In this they were carried down several floors into a deep basement. The Vice-Chancellor, whose academic expertise was in Ancient History, did not know that the bowels of the Physics Building went so far into the earth. For a moment it crossed his mind that he and the others might be the victims of some bizarre terrorist plot to kidnap the academic elite of the world. Perhaps the Science Department was planning to take over the whole University. Then he dismissed the thought, because it had, after all, been his own nephew Dr Loring who had issued the invitation.

The minion let them out of the lift at the lowest floor and led them along a white, featureless corridor to a reception area. Here some effort had been made to contrive something hospitable, even festive, out of the naked neon-lit, windowless space. Plasma screens on the walls showed glowing representations of impressionist paintings; there were Turkish rugs on the floor, and brightly coloured cushions were scattered over the leather sofas and armchairs. More significantly, a table at the end of the room was loaded with food and wine of the most sumptuous kind. The Reverend Dr Semple was the first to it.

‘My word, will you look at that,’ he said, picking up a bottle. ‘Chateau Merleau-Ponty 2052! Where in hell did they find it? My College Wine Committee would sell their collective souls for a case of this.’ 2052 had been one of the last of the great vintages of the Merleau-Ponty vineyards before global warming turned that particular
terroir
into a wrinkled desert.

‘I had some trouble finding those, I must admit,’ said a voice only the Vice-Chancellor recognised. His nephew Dr Loring had just entered the room. ‘But we are celebrating something pretty momentous here today.’

Dr Loring, like his minion, also wore a white coat which accentuated his extraordinary tallness and thinness. He was an inch over seven feet tall, and his black hair brushed the ceiling of the room. He looked like a normally tall, slender man as seen through a distorting fairground mirror, but his features had none of the coarse clownishness that often goes with excessive height. The Vice-Chancellor, secretly of course, liked to think of his nephew as part of a new breed of supermen.

‘Please “partake of the charming viands”, as Daisy Ashford would say,’ said Loring. A physicist who has read
The Young Visiters
! thought the Vice-Chancellor; that just proves the man is exceptional.

Loring came over to him while the others crowded round the buffet. ‘Uncle Allan, how are you?’ The Physicist and the Ancient Historian shook hands warmly.

‘Robert, what is all this? Is the cloak and dagger stuff strictly necessary?’

‘Yes, as far as cloaks are concerned. You may think the daggers will come later. Your colleagues have been sworn to secrecy?’

‘I have their signed undertakings, but why has it been necessary to involve them?’

‘They are the world leaders in their respective disciplines?’

‘They are. Of course. This is Oxford.’

‘Precisely. What I am about to show you affects them all.’

‘And what about me? Apart from being Vice-Chancellor and your affectionate uncle, am I here in my humble capacity as Ancient Historian?’

‘I would say this especially affects your discipline, Uncle Allan.’

‘I wonder how. What is it you’ve been working on? Crystal Oscillation? I have no idea what that is: I only know that it has absorbed millions of pounds in research grants. And how does Crystal Oscillation affect Ancient History?’

‘You are about to find out.’

The theologian, the philosopher, and the literary scholar had already done full justice to the feast by the time the Vice-Chancellor arrived at the table, but he was not a greedy man. He sipped a glass of Merleau-Ponty and swallowed a quail’s egg or two. (
Quails
’ eggs? Weren’t quails supposed to be extinct?) His mind was too impatient to be bothered by sensual appetites.