Return of the Emerald Skull (14 page)

The heartbeat thumping in all our heads now quickened with excitement.

‘Catincatapetl! Catincatapetl!’ the schoolboys chanted from the quad below.

‘
Let he who was last among us be first to make the sacrifice!
‘ the voice hissed.

The sky seemed to tense and tremble. The air abruptly cooled.

‘
Cut out his beating heart!
‘ the ancient voice commanded, each syllable dripping with a dark evil that I was powerless to resist.

Overhead, the moon slid slowly but inexorably across the face of the sun, casting the courtyard into a dreadful silent dusk. And as the light faded, so did the last vestiges of my free will. There was nothing I could do. This was the total eclipse that my friend, PB, had been so excited about. I'd looked forward to it too – yet from where I stood now, it seemed like the harbinger of an appalling bloodbath.

A circle of shadowy figures clustered like a flock of hideous vultures around the great slab that lay before me. Their beaked faces and long rustling feathers quivered with awful anticipation as their dark eye-sockets turned, as one, towards me.

On awkward, stumbling legs I approached the wooden altar like a sleepwalker, climbing one step after the other, powerless to fight it.

The hideous figures parted as I drew closer. At the altar, I looked down. There, stripped to the waist, lying face up and spread-eagled, was the headmaster, roped into place. There were cuts and weals on his skin – some scabbed over, some fresh – and his ribs were sticking up, giving his chest the appearance of a damaged glockenspiel.

His head lolled to one side, and from his parted lips there came a low, rasping moan.

‘Please,’ he pleaded, gazing up at me with the panic-stricken eyes of a ferret-cornered
rabbit. ‘Don't do it, I'm begging you …’

At that moment the final dazzling rays of the sun were extinguished by the dark orb of the moon. The eclipse was complete. With dazed eyes, I looked up into the sky. The whole disc had turned pitch-black, and from the circumference of the circle a spiky ring of light streamed out in all directions, like a black merciless eye staring down from the heavens.

The tallest of the feathered figures stepped forward to face me. He wore a great crown of iridescent blue plumage. Behind him, nestling like a grotesque egg on the cushion of the headmaster's high-backed leather chair, was the hideous grinning skull. As I stared, the huge jewels in the skull's eye-sockets started to glow a bright and bloody crimson, which stained the eerie twilight of the eclipse.

The feathered figure reached into his cape and withdrew a large stone knife,

which he held out to me. Again the ancient voice rasped in my head.

‘
Cut out his beating heart!
’

Despite myself, I reached out and gripped the haft of the stone knife in my hands. As I did so, I felt my arm being raised up into the air, as if it was attached to a string tugged upwards by some unseen puppeteer.

I stared down at the headmaster, tied to the altar. A vivid cross of red paint marked the spot beneath which his heart lay, beating, I was sure, as violently as my own.

My grip tightened on the cruel stone knife, the blade glinting, as the blood-red ruby eyes of the grinning skull bored into mine. Inside my head, the voice rose to a piercing scream.

‘
Cut out his beating heart – and give it to me!
’

I stepped towards the headmaster's mahogany desk, now transformed into a barbaric altar, flickering torchlight glinting
on the flint blade. Before me, the headmaster whimpered pitifully – but I was indifferent to his plight. The head had spoken. And I, his servant, had to obey.

All around me, the wreaths of aromatic incense swirled and danced like silken veils, glinting in the torchlight as the darkness of the eclipse intensified. The smoke encircled my face, filling my eyes, my mouth and coiling up my nostrils.

Sweet. Sour …

As I stood there, the distinctive odour of the incense stirred something deep within me. I breathed in that smell – sweet, yet sour. It reminded me of … of …

A Stover's pasty!

The juicy smell of the pasty's thick gravy, coupled with the mouthwatering aroma of the syrupy spiced apples, came flooding back to me. And as it did so, a vision of Mei Ling's face floated before me, her forehead wrinkled in a frown and her beautiful eyes full of concern.

‘
Cut out his beating heart, slave!
‘ the skull's voice hissed in my head.

The stone knife trembled in my hands.

‘Look into the spaces in the mist …’ I recalled Mei Ling's melodic voice, so different from that of the ancient skull.

‘The mist …’ I murmured as I stared at the dancing coils of smoke which drifted up from the pots of smouldering incense. As I had done so many times before – in the chamber above the Chinese laundry; in my attic rooms – I found my gaze focusing in on the spaces: those long tunnels which opened up and spiralled away into the distance. I entered the world of what isn't there; the world of silence and stillness and empty spaces—

‘
Cut out his beating heart!
‘ The emerald skull's voice rose to an agitated scream as the heartbeat quickened.

Below me, the schoolboys banged their weapons to the same beat – pounding their
clubs and cudgels against the stone pavement of the quad, chanting as they did so.

‘Catincatapetl! Catincatapetl!’

I could feel the blood-red eyes of the emerald skull boring into me, together with the black, masked stares of the eleven prefects and the wide, terrified eyes of the headmaster. But I kept my gaze on the coiling smoke, Mei Ling's gentle words replacing those of the hideous skull.

‘Step into the empty spaces, Barnaby.’

Empty spaces …

The art of absence.

The Way of the Silver Mist.

Yinchido.

‘
Obey me, slave!
‘ the head roared.

Its power swirled about me, threatening at any moment to suck me down into a dark whirlpool of oblivion. Instead, with a mighty effort of will, I focused on the glowing light that was Mei Ling and …

… let go of the stone knife.

It clattered onto the mahogany surface of the desk, before tumbling over the edge and down into the quad below. There was a great collective gasp, followed by a ghastly rattle and chattering of teeth as the emerald skull shook on its cushion with impotent fury.

‘
Sacrilege!
‘ the ancient voice shrieked. ‘
Destroy him!
’

The prefects turned, advancing towards me, their clubs and cudgels raised. The heartbeat pounded in the eerie darkness as if beating out a rhythm to their attack.

Thud! Thud! Thud!

The tall prefect in the crown of iridescent blue plumage attacked first, swinging a vicious-looking spiked cudgel which, before the nine-inch nails had been hammered in, had once been an innocent piano leg. I focused on the space between the prefect and his swinging arm and stepped into it.

‘
Oof!
’

The prefect exhaled, his mask slipping, as
the cudgel sliced through thin air, then lost his balance and toppled from the platform. As he disappeared from view, four more of the prefects took his place.

‘
Destroy him!
‘ the head screamed. ‘
Destroy him!
’

Two of them swung heavy studded clubs at my head. I ducked down, then sprang immediately backward to avoid a third club. There was a crash as the three clubs struck one another and their owners toppled off the platform and down to the quad below. The fourth prefect – a hefty individual with curly black hair and a great hooked beak strapped to his face – came at me with a long pole, a dagger bound to its end to form a makeshift spear.

As the blade whistled past my left ear, I feinted a movement to the right, before leaping high up into the air to avoid another swinging thrust. The prefect groaned as he too lost his balance. One moment he hovered
at the edge of the platform, arms wheeling frantically; the next, with a loud cry of despair, he tumbled back and clattered down the side of the pyramid, to the groans of the schoolboys below.

I turned to face the other prefects. There were six of them remaining, the blood-red light streaming from the skull's ruby eyes throwing them into sinister silhouette. With howls of rage, they charged at me, cudgels, fives bats, mallets and spears swinging.

I stepped into the writhing, weaving spaces between the flurry of blows that rained down, with the slipperiness of a canal otter in a crowded lock. The prefects scattered and fell as their blows caught each other and left me unscathed. With a final nudge in the back, I sent the last of my feather-caped attackers hurtling from the top of the pyramid.

Ignoring the howls of the mob below, I knelt down and picked up a discarded fives
bat. I turned and approached the high-backed leather chair. Behind me, I could hear the headmaster's whimpering voice.

‘My poor, poor children … All my fault … All my fault …’

In front of me, on its cushion, the emerald skull's eyes flared a brilliant, dazzling white.

‘
It is not too late, my child
,’ its voice, almost pleading, hissed in my head. ‘
Not too late, my child. Look into my eyes …
’

Face buried in the musty emerald-feathered softness of my cape, I reached forward and grasped the skull in one hand.

‘
No! No! No!
‘ it shrieked, as if sensing what was to come.

Bracing myself, legs wide apart and firmly planted on the platform, I tossed the emerald skull high into the air and brought my bat back behind my shoulders. The skull reached the highest point of its trajectory. Then, as it began to descend – the voice screaming and the heartbeat thumping more feverishly
than ever – I focused on the water butt in the far corner of the quad and, with all my might …

The skull … shot off into the darkness.

Thwack!

The skull made hard contact with the centre of the fives bat and shot off into the darkness.

‘
Sacrilege!
‘ it screamed. ‘
Sacril—
’

From the far side of the quad there came a loud splash and a steamy hiss as the skull landed in the water butt.

The thud of the heartbeat stopped and, for a moment, nobody breathed in the now silent quad. At that instant the moon completed its passage across the face of the sun and dazzling shafts of light bore down from the sky above. As the eclipse passed, the grounds were once again bathed in warm sunlight. Birds sang. Dogs barked. And in the quad of Grassington Hall the large crowd of boys took in a huge gulp of breath and fell, coughing and spluttering, to their knees.

A moment later, the quad was buzzing with bewildered voices.

‘What happened?’

‘What's this?’

‘What are you wearing?’

From my vantage point at the top of the great pyramid, I looked around. One boy picked up the discarded stone knife and turned it over in his hand. Another pulled off a feathered head-dress and inspected it. A group of three or four helped a dazed prefect to his feet. Some others untied the line of shaken masters. Some wept and clung to one another, fatigue and relief overwhelming them in equal measure …

The Grassington Hall school rebellion was over.

I turned to the mahogany desk, where the headmaster still lay, bound hand and foot, with the grotesque red cross on his chest.

‘It was all my fault, Barnaby,’ he whispered tremulously, clutching my hands.

‘It wasn't their fault, poor children.’

‘It's over, Headmaster,’ I said gently, untying him and helping him to his feet. ‘The madness is over. No harm done …’

I stopped, a painful lump rising in my throat as I suddenly thought of poor Thompson lying in the entrance hall in a pool of his own blood. A watery film over my eyes made the bustling quad blur, and I swallowed hard. Archimedes Barnett must have mistaken my emotion for relief, for he grasped my hands.

‘Thanks to you, Barnaby Grimes,’ he murmured, squeezing my hands gratefully. ‘All thanks to you.’

‘One lump or two, Barnaby?’

‘Two, please, Headmaster,’ I replied.