The Perils and Dangers of this Night

• Praise For The Author
  
• About the Author
  
• Title Page
  
• Copyright Page
  
• Dedication
  
• Foreword
  
• Chapter ONE
  
• Chapter TWO
  
• Chapter THREE
  
• Chapter FOUR
  
• Chapter FIVE
  
• Chapter SIX
  
• Chapter SEVEN
  
• Chapter EIGHT
  
• Chapter NINE
  
• Chapter TEN
  
• Chapter ELEVEN
  
• Chapter TWELVE
  
• Chapter THIRTEEN
  
• Chapter FOURTEEN
  
• Chapter FIFTEEN
  
• Chapter SIXTEEN
  
• Chapter SEVENTEEN
  
• Chapter EIGHTEEN
  
• Chapter NINETEEN
  

Praise for Stephen Gregory

THE CORMORANT

'A promising and bizarre first novel, with excellent set pieces . . .'

The Times

'A considerable delight . . . the quality of the prose and economy of
expression are particularly impressive.'

Time Out

'A work of tremendous self-assurance that leaves the reader with a
lingering sense of unease and announces the arrival of a considerable new
talent.'

British Book News

'A sensuous, elegantly written debut that bears comparison with Graham
Swift.'

Publishing News

'No summary can do justice to the subtlety of Gregory's first novel, with
its fresh, vivid, sensual prose and its superb descriptive and evocative
power. An extraordinary novel . . . original, compelling, brilliant.'

Library Journal

'An artful first novel, reminiscent of the tales of Poe. Gregory uses a
low-key style and a subtle lyricism to build an atmosphere of nightmarish
horror in a tale that could become a classic.'

Publishers Weekly

'
The Cormorant
has a relentless focus that would have made Edgar Allan
Poe proud. A first-class terror story that does for cormorants what
Cujo
did for Saint Bernards. What sets the book apart, however, is the
psychological ambiguity Mr Gregory has woven into his sensual tale of
inexorable dread.'

The New York Times Book Review

THE WOODWITCH

'In fairy tales, perhaps the most frightening place of all is the forest at
night; the darkened woods hold wolves and witches, ogres and owls, and
even time itself can be bent in sinister and unnatural ways. For Stephen
Gregory the forest is an equally forbidding place . . . but the story he
chooses to set there is distinctly and disturbingly for adults only.'

Newsday

'Not for gossamer sensitivities . . . Gregory writes with the hypnotic
power of Poe, and this second novel has chilling implications.'

Publishers Weekly

'A powerful novel of psychological terror and a thorough reinvention of
the Gothic landscape: superbly written, unashamedly dark, Gregory's
voice and vision are wholly original.'

Ramsay Campbell

'A chilling portrayal of a man whose fear of ridicule is transformed into
mindless violence.'

The Oxford Times

'An atmospheric story of obsession and breakdown.'

Kirkus Reviews

After training as a lawyer and then working as a teacher for 10 years,
Stephen Gregory moved to the mountains of Snowdonia to write his first
novel.
The Cormorant
was greeted by the
New York Times
as 'a
first-class terror story with a relentless focus that would have made Edgar
Allan Poe proud'.
Publishers Weekly
recognised its 'nightmarish horror
reminiscent of the tales of Poe, in a tale that could become a classic'. Iain
Banks called the book 'intelligent and well-written, with a natural feeling
for the avian vandal of the title which brings to mind the poetry of Ted
Hughes'.

The Cormorant
won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1987 and was
made into a critically-acclaimed feature film for the BBC's Screen Two
series starring Oscar-nominated actor Ralph Fiennes.

A second novel followed, set again in the brooding atmosphere of a
Snowdonian winter.
The Woodwitch
provoked similar reactions:
Publishers
Weekly
commented that 'Gregory writes with the hypnotic power
of Poe', while the
Washington Post
called the book 'an ambitious attempt
to use the conventions of the contemporary horror novel to say
something compelling about the irrational side of human nature'.
The
Woodwitch
was the subject of a television documentary for the BBC's
Statements series.

The Blood of Angels
completed a trilogy of novels in which an English
incomer confronts the mysteries and vagaries of winter in Wales. It was
recognised by Oscar-winning director William Friedkin (
The Exorcist
,
The French Connection
) as the work of an unusually original horror
writer, and the author was flown to Hollywood where he spent an
exhilarating, often gruelling year writing stories and script for Friedkin at
Paramount Pictures.

Stephen Gregory

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

ISBN 9780753518472

Version 1.0

www.randomhouse.co.uk

Published by Virgin Books 2008

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Copyright © Stephen Gregory 2008

Stephen Gregory has asserted his right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the Author
of this work.

This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by
Virgin Books Ltd
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Rainville Road
London, W6 9HA

www.rbooks.co.uk

Addresses for companies within
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The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.

ISBN: 9780753518472

Version 1.0

For Chris, with all my love

Strange: for over forty years, no one ever asked me to tell
a fuller story of what happened at Foxwood Manor in the
week before Christmas 1966.

I was questioned very gently at the time, and over the
following weeks, but once I had explained in the simplest
terms how things had ended so tragically, they left me
alone. The police had been able to see for themselves,
from evidence at the scene they discovered that Christmas
Day, and by piecing together a story of the events that
preceded it. And I was a boy, just thirteen years old: they
must have thought I was so disturbed, so traumatised by
what had happened, that it was inappropriate to press me
further.

Until recently, no one asked me about the killings at
Foxwood Manor. More than forty years passed by, and
I often sat and thought, I lay awake at night, and I
recalled that long-ago week in such vivid detail that every
whisper and creak of the old house, the whiff of the dust,
the lingering touch of the cobwebs, the very reek of fear
and blood, became real again.

Now I have been asked to write it down. At first I did
not put my real self into the story. Somehow I could not.
I wrote and wrote, the words came slowly as the story
began and faster and faster as it hurried towards a horrid
end, but the boy was not me: he was always 'the boy', he
was 'Alan', he was 'Alan Scott', he was a third person
separate from the boy I had been, the I who had really
been there at the time. And so the reader of my bundled
manuscript, leafing through page after page in search of
the truth, straining for the voice of someone who had not
only witnessed the sensational events but been a part of
them, asked me with a note of professional exasperation
if I had been at Foxwood Manor or not, in the week
before Christmas 1966? And if I had been there, and seen
everything, why was I not in the story?

I have rewritten my account in the first person. If the
style is mannered, it is the voice and vocabulary of a
middle-aged man recalling a week of his life as a child.

It all began with a dream. And then there was a boy,
a choirboy, running through the woods on a wintry afternoon
. . .

Alone. Angry. Afraid.

It was me. I was there. I saw everything.

I woke very suddenly and sat up in bed. I was trembling
and breathing hard. I felt a keen pain on the palms of
both my hands and a scalding sensation on my neck.

I got out of bed. The nine other boys in the dormitory
were sleeping. I stood in the moonlight from the tall
window and looked at my hands, blew on them, rubbed
them: they prickled and itched, like a nettle rash. There
were rows of narrow stripes like cuts across my palms
and fingers. I leaned to the glass to catch my own
reflection, and saw a reddening on my neck, like a deep
wound all the way round and across the bump of my
Adam's apple, which mottled and blurred as I touched it
with my fingertips.

I didn't know what the marks were. I think I was
afraid. I shivered, barefoot, in my striped pyjamas,
looked up and saw that the top of the window was ajar.
A flutter of cold air came through it. Dr Kemp must have
left it open, after the prayer, before he turned off the
dormitory light. I stretched up and pushed the window
closed, then I sat on my bed and pulled a blanket around
me.

I placed my hands open on my lap and examined the
marks. And it was as though I could read from them the
dream I'd had . . . I saw a place I'd never seen before and
yet so real that I wondered how I could have conjured it:
a gloomy study, with shabby furniture and a huge
gleaming black piano, curtains half-closed on leaded
windows; every inch of every surface of tables and
armchair and sofa, the piano and the floor, strewn with
papers and books and sheet music; bottles and glasses
and pieces of clothing, the dishevelled aftermath of a
party. I heard music, lurching and swooping haphazardly,
maddeningly familiar and yet barely recognisable. As
I sat on my bed and looked from one of my palms to the
other, the face of a young man swam into view. He said
'
I disgust myself
' in a perfectly matter-of-fact voice, and
moved away again. A girl appeared, blew a kiss and ran
her tongue around her lips and tried to smile; but the
smile was a fake, it quivered and disintegrated; she burst
into tears and disappeared. '
I disgust myself
', a voice said
again, although I couldn't find the man who'd spoken as
the room turned slowly around me . . .

And then the room was different. A small difference,
but something so terrible that it filled me with an
unexplainable fear.

The top of the piano was wide open. Someone had
opened it. I moved towards it and I saw in its glassy shine
a reflection of myself: a schoolboy in striped pyjamas,
moving closer towards me, closer and closer, as though I
and the reflection would meet and fuse into one if we
kept on walking. Until, at the last moment, when I held
out my hand to the mirrored boy and our fingers nearly
touched, I saw that the boy was not me, but a boy I didn't
know and had never seen before in all my life.

He handed me a piece of paper, rolled tightly into a
ball. It burned my hand so much I dropped it, and it fell
in flames into the black hole of the piano. I leaned into
the hole, and my stomach and throat were suffused with
a horror of what I might see if I looked inside. Worse
than that, there was a pain in my throat so keen and
sudden that my hands flew to my neck to try and prevent
it. A gagging, suffocating dream . . . I recoiled from the
piano with a wrenching jolt.

I sat on my bed, trembling again, and I rubbed at my
hands. The stripes had gone, as suddenly as the dream
had disappeared. The pain in my neck had gone. I
breathed deeply, exhaling long and hard to calm myself,
and my breath was a plume of silver in the cold air.

I wondered if I'd cried out. I thought I'd heard a cry.
Instinctively I looked around me. One of the sleeping
boys was muttering and turning over, and then once
more the dormitory was silent. I slipped into bed with
a feeling of great exhaustion and was quickly asleep
again.

It was the first time I'd had this dream. I would have it again
and I would learn to understand it over the following few days.

'I hate you I hate you I hate you . . .'

I was running through the woods, so hard and so fast
that the words I was hissing kept time with my footsteps.

I crashed through the bare undergrowth, splintering
branches with my arms as I forced my way through. I
struggled through dead bracken and dry nettles as tall as
myself. As I ran I glanced over my shoulder and saw the
chimneys of the school behind me. Still I ran, until my
breathing was hoarse. Once I fell, launched headlong
when my foot snagged and then slipped on a root, and I
landed so hard, flat on my chest with my face in the dead
wet leaves, that I lay for a few seconds, winded and
breathless. Then, when my breath came back at last, my
words were more like sobbing – 'I hate you I hate you I
hate you' – and there were tears on my face, smudged
with dirt and sweat.

I got up and ran further, slower now that I was far
away from the school. When I turned to look, the
chimneys and roofs of the old house and its scattered
outbuildings were hidden by the deep woods. A bramble,
as vicious as barbed wire, reached out for me as I
blundered past: it caught at my neck, the thorns cut into
my skin, snagging and tearing, and I clutched at it with
both hands as though I were being strangled. The wire
tightened round my throat, and I cried out in panic until
I wrenched it away . . .

And then I stood there panting. My white cassock was
smeared with the black soil of the forest. The red surplice
I wore under it was torn, and there was blood on the
white ruff from a long, raw scratch on my neck. Still I
hurried further, and when at last I stopped, hardly able
to breathe, I fumbled in the pocket of my surplice and
pulled out a letter.

I smeared my face with the back of one hand and
stared at the letter through a blur of tears. It was a blue
air-mail envelope. I tugged a single sheet of air-mail
paper out of it, crumpled the envelope in my fist and then
threw it as far as I could into the undergrowth. So angry
that every part of the real world was blurred and grey
and all I could see was the flimsy piece of blue paper in
my hand, I tore it once, twice, three times. Then, as I
threw the bits up into the air and they whirled like
confetti around me, I wheeled round and round, giddy
with rage, and I yelled with all my strength, 'I hate you!
I hate you! I hate you!'

A gunshot rang out.

The woodland erupted with the cries of the rooks
which wheeled from the high bare branches. I stared into
the surrounding trees, and for a second I saw a figure
moving there, a dark figure which seemed to melt and
disappear into the shadows. Suddenly afraid, brought
back to my senses by the shot as though it were a slap on
my smeary face, I looked down at my dirty hands. I
frowned as I saw my dirty cassock and surplice, and I felt
at the crumpled ruff and suddenly knew how strange it
was for a choirboy to be standing deep in the woods on
a winter's afternoon – and when a second shot rang out
and the trees seemed to echo with the violence of the
sound, I turned and started to run, back the way I'd
come.

It was getting dark. Cold woodland. Late afternoon in
December. Dusk and an early twilight. The trees swayed
and shook the last of their leaves to the forest floor. A
flock of rooks clacked and croaked, blown into the air
like cinders from a wintry bonfire. Then, when silence
settled and the birds returned to their roost on the highest
branches, it was as though I'd never been there, shouting
and hissing, as though the explosions of the gun had
never happened.

Only, among the wet black leaves where I'd been
standing, there was a crumpled blue envelope and a few
scattered pieces of thin blue paper . . .

I ran back to the school. As I got closer, as I crossed the
football fields and then the lawns in front of the house,
the building was warmly lit with the glow from upstairs
dormitories, with streaks of soft golden light through the
wooden shutters of the library downstairs and the great
hall. I caught the movement of boys, up and down the
long corridors, and the thought that they were excitedly
packing for the end of term filled me with dismay. I
moved past the house itself and hurried around it to the
stable-yard, where I skidded to a standstill on the cobbles
and leaned on one of the stable doors.

It was dark in the yard. I pressed my forehead on the
door, trying to control my breathing. The anger felt like
a bubble inside my chest. Then I fumbled with the latch
and flung myself inside.

I closed the door quietly behind me. Still careless of my
cassock and surplice which were already so dirty from the
wet woodland, I felt my way through pitch blackness
until I found a shelf on the opposite wall.

There was a rustling movement in the darkness. A
shuffling, a flutter, a scratching, and the shivering tinkle
of a little bell. 'Ssshhh,' I said very softly. I felt along the
shelf until my fingers fell on a box of matches, and,
fumbling a little because my hands were slippery and
cold, I took out a match and scraped it three times until
it flared alight. 'Ssshhh,' I said again, because the sound
of the match and the suddenness of the light brought
another scratching and fluttering and tinkle from the far
corner of the stable.

I applied the match to an oil lamp, and the room was
bathed in a yellow light which threw great black moving
shadows everywhere: to the rafters of the roof, to the
empty stalls where horses had stood and stomped years
and years ago, over a dusty jumble of old school trunks,
broken desks and abandoned cricket bats. I blew softly
on the match until it plumed a little feather of smoke,
then I carried the lamp across the room.

My bird was in the furthest stall, tethered to the iron
framework of a horse's manger.

It ducked and bobbed and stared, as I approached with
the lamp. It hopped as far as the leather jesses would
allow, and a little bell tinkled as it hopped. I shaded the
light with my other hand and crossed the stall very
slowly, with hardly a sound of my feet on the cobbled
floor.

'Ssshhh,' I whispered, 'my little imp.'

When I set the lamp down on a long wooden bench,
the bird stared at the flame as though transfixed. And its
eyes were bright and black, like pinpricks of darkness. It
shuffled its feathers, shivering and bristling. It hissed like
an owl. Like an owl, it angled its head from side to side,
the black eyes unblinking.

Not an owl. A jackdaw, with a head too big for its poor,
scrawny body, its feathers dull and dishevelled. A cripple,
a cringing hunchback, it sprang along its perch on one
black scaly leg. It snorted through bristly nostrils, so that a
tiny bubble of mucus stood up for a second and then burst.

'My imp,' I whispered again.

The bird peered at me, askance. Its eyes fixed on the
lamp and then swivelled to watch me as I bent to the
floor and straightened up again.

I'd picked up a feather, one of the jackdaw's own tail
feathers. So gently that at first the bird could not have felt
the slightest touch, I caressed its breast with the tip of the
feather. Then, with a soft insistent rhythm, I stroked from
the tip of the beak to the softest spot on the belly, down
and down the one leg to the sharpest tip of each claw. I
stroked and stroked, and the bird just stared at me. It felt
the movement and pressures of its own feather through
the movements of my hand, and it heard the gentle
hypnotic rhythms of my voice.

It felt the warmth of my breath on its face as I
whispered, 'I love you I love you . . .'