The Perils and Dangers of this Night (17 page)

'Shut up!' It was Mrs Kemp. She rounded on him, on
her own husband, suddenly swerving her wheelchair so
close that her knees were touching his. 'You're a liar and
a bully! I've seen it myself for years and years! I've
endured your blustering and your bullying and . . .'

He shouted back at her. His hand felt for the gun. 'I
made them work! I worked them! Without me they'd be
nothing!'

'Your pig-headedness, your self-importance, your self-righteousness,
your . . .'

Pryce swaggered towards them. The string turned from
silver to gold as he came close to the fire. He was bringing
it to Kemp, delivering death.

Solemn, priestlike, he intoned, '
I disgust myself, I
would rather be dead
. . .' and as I watched helplessly, I
felt the involuntary movement of my hands to my own
throat, as though anticipating the cutting of the wire and
trying to prevent it.

The woman whirled towards Pryce. 'And you! Your
excuses, your bitterness, your stories about Jeremy –
I don't believe any of it! You've made it all up, you've
invented it all . . .'

Pryce feinted at her with the string. It gave Kemp the
chance they'd been angling for. He grabbed the gun and
thrust himself out of the chair.

Too slow. Pryce saw the glimmer of gunmetal, twisted
towards him and seized the barrel. There was a moment
of grappling and grunting, the two men chin to chin and
bellowing and the gun jerking up and down . . .

The woman lunged forwards. Her thin little hand
closed on the barrel, so weak that it made only the tiniest
difference to its angle. Enough difference.

There was a bang. The headmaster squealed and collapsed
onto the floor, pressing both hands to his groin.
Blood welled between his fingers.

Pryce hissed at the woman, 'You're fucking mad you
fucking shot him!' and reloaded in an instant. Instinctively,
hearing the chock of the chamber closing, Kemp lifted
one of his blood-slippery hands, grabbed the barrel and
yanked it hard.

There was another bang. Mrs Kemp fell back in her
chair. She flopped and gurgled, utterly spastic. Pryce tore
the gun free. He was yelling, 'Jesus you fucking shot her!'
Blood pumped from her throat.

In the confusion, in a blur of smoke and blood and
noise, I fled out of the hall.

I skidded along the corridor, navigating by radar as the
darkness closed around me. The beat of the blood in
my head, the pulse of fear in my veins, seemed to bounce
back at me from the walls and the floor and the ceiling
as I ran. I slid to a halt at the first of the lifts, where the
glow of light from inside illumined the sign on the door.
Ignoring the sign, for the first time in all my years at
Foxwood I pulled the door open and plunged inside. I
shut the door, jabbed at the button and went up.

It seemed horribly slow. The cables groaned, the cogs
and wheels clanked, the feeble light flickered. I found
myself dangling in a little cage, swaying inmid-air, and saw
the grey, cobwebby walls of the shaft go crawling by. When
it stopped at the first floor, I got out and padded along the
corridor to the landing at the top of the grand staircase.

From there, I leaned over the banister and peered down
to the hall.

Pryce and Sophie were engaged in a bitter row. Face to
face, lunging at each other across the wheelchair in which
the headmaster's wife was slumped, they spat and cursed
and shouted. Their voices blurred into one clanging duet,
impossible to make out the words, but their anger and
panic rose up the staircase to where I was standing. I saw
Sophie bend and then kneel at the side of Mrs Kemp's
wheelchair, and then Pryce, with a ghastly shove, heaved
the girl away.

Hard to believe what happened next – I just goggled as
Pryce took hold of one of the wheels, wrenched it
upwards and dumped Mrs Kemp out of the chair and
onto the floor.

The woman just lay there, as though dead. Sophie knelt
beside her and turned her onto her side. Pryce had taken
hold of the headmaster by the collar of his tweed jacket
and was dragging him towards the wheelchair.

Too late, I recoiled from the banister. Pryce glanced up
and saw me. Breathless from manoeuvring the lumpen
weight of the wounded man, he crowed, 'I know you're
up there, Alan – it's where I would've gone . . .'

With a sudden tug, he hoisted the headmaster up and
onto the chair.

The wheels slithered and spun and he jammed them
with one foot while he worked his hands under the man's
armpits and adjusted him upright. All this time Kemp
was grimacing horribly, his teeth clenched, pressing his
hands into his groin where the blood was oozing through
his trousers and between his fingers. He threw a despairing
look at the body of his wife, whose place he'd taken;
her face was dead white, as though already bled dry, her
eyes and mouth half-open, unseeing, speechless.

'I know where you'll go next, Alan!' Pryce called up to
me, without turning his head to the dark space of the
stairwell behind him. 'And after that, and after that!'

He bent and addressed himself softly to the headmaster.
'I know every move he'll make, Dr Kemp. But I'm
not so sure about you. Is it twenty years you've been
here? You must know every crack and corner and
hidey-hole – it's your place, that's what you said, and I
bet you know every inch of it.'

Sophie was kneeling as low as she could, pressing her
ear to Mrs Kemp's mouth. 'She's breathing, just, but
n-n-not for much longer . . .' Crouching on the floor, with
a smear of the woman's blood on her cheek, she
snickered at Pryce like a stoat in a trap. 'She was right,
Martin! You know n-n-n-nothing, you are n-n-nothing –
you make up all this shit to hide behind, to disguise your
nothingness . . .'

He slapped her mouth, a whipping back-hander. 'I
didn't shoot her! Did I? And I didn't shoot him! Did I?
They fucking shot each other!'

He regained his breath, inhaling a big lungful and
pushing his hair back from his face. Sophie fingered her
lips to see if she was bleeding, saw blood, thought it was
hers, and felt at her mouth again.

'We'll play another game,' he said. 'We'll all play.
You'd be at a disadvantage, Sophie, not knowing the
place like the rest of us do, so you can be on my side, and
we can even things up for Dr Kemp as well.'

He reached for the piano string, which had fallen onto
the carpet and coiled itself there in the confusion of
shouting and shooting. He hauled Sophie to her feet and
pulled her to him. She stammered an incoherent protest,
she hammered her fists on his shoulders, but she was too
feeble. With a series of brutal yanks and crudely twisted
knots he wound one of her ankles to one of his. In less
than half a minute, they were bound together as though
for a three-legged race.

They stood upright, the girl sobbing for breath, half-clinging
to him for balance and half-thrusting him away
from her, Pryce mugging and miming the fun of the
game. Then he took hold of the handles of the wheelchair,
spun Kemp around and propelled him very fast
towards the corridor. With a mighty heave, he launched
the headmaster into the darkness. He and Sophie
watched and listened, as the wheelchair hissed on its thin
smooth tyres and disappeared into the black tunnel.

Pryce shouted after it. 'You've got a minute, Dr Kemp! Two
minutes! Then we're coming for you!'

I padded back along the first-floor corridor. There were
no lights in the dormitories or the bathroom, only the
glow from the lift; and just as I reached the lift I'd come
up in I saw it jerk into motion and start to travel down
again. I stood and watched as it vanished into the shaft.

It was Dr Kemp who'd summoned it. As I leaned close
to the shaft and peered down, I could just see him,
moving in and out of my line of vision through the
narrowest crack. Heaving for breath, utterly unaccustomed
to sitting in the wheelchair and trying to handle it,
he was struggling to manoeuvre it onto the ramp and
brake it close to the lift. Now, having brought the lift
down to him, he found it all but impossible to yank the
door open while the chair tried to skid and spin this way
and that, until he'd tightened the brake, opened the door,
released the brake and heaved himself inside. I could see
a darkening patch of sweat on the collar of his jacket,
could see it spreading through the back of his thick,
tweedy jacket; his hair flopped infuriatingly over his eyes.
He was hot, steaming and bleeding, and he clutched at
the glistening mess in his belly as though it would
suddenly burst open.

He held his breath and listened, to try and hear if Pryce
had started to follow him. He pulled the door shut,
thumbed the button and the lift started upwards.

It loomed towards me. I heard it grinding and clanking,
and I hurried back, as quickly and as quietly as I could,
to my vantage point on the staircase.

In the hall, Pryce reloaded the gun. He rattled the box
of ammunition and dropped it into his trouser pocket.
Sophie writhed against him, enraged to have found that it
was less uncomfortable to hold onto him with her arm
around his waist than to thrust him away. He stroked his
little finger into the blood on her cheek and dabbed it onto
the tip of her nose. 'Cute,' he whispered. 'Shall we go?'

He lugged her out of the hall and into the gloom of the
corridor.

I stayed where I was and peered down to where Mrs
Kemp lay beside the hearth. In the moments after the
shooting, I'd seen her eyes flickering, as if she were
slipping in and out of consciousness: winded by the
impact as she'd hit the floor, in shock from the bullet
wound to her throat, bewildered by all the yelling around
her. Now, sensing from the growing silence that she was
alone, she opened her eyes. She took tiny sips of breath
and turned her face to the warmth of the fire. She was
alive, although the life in her body was trickling away
and there was nothing she, or I, could do to stop it.

The waste . . . From where I was hiding, I could just
see the photograph of herself and Dapple, and I thought
of the little time she'd had with her husband before the
accident had ruined her. It made me so sad and angry, to
see how she sipped the air to keep herself alive, to know
that she would die if she didn't keep on sipping, she
would surely die before she would see her husband again.
I watched her: every droplet of life was sweet and
precious, every sip of air was a taste of her life. And I felt,
in my understanding of the deadly game that had just
begun, that simply by lying at the fireside, quite motionless,
and by being alive, she was an essential player.

I moved back to the lift as it came up towards me,
meaning to help Dr Kemp. But then, from downstairs I
heard the opening of the other lift door and knew that
Pryce and Sophie must be getting inside it. Both the lifts
were rising towards me.

Stifling a bubble of panic that rose inside me, I
instinctively ran back to the staircase and flew down it.

Before I reached the bottom, I sensed another presence
in the hall. I could feel it, in a breath of cold air which
seemed to fog around me.

The boy was kneeling beside Mrs Kemp.

A boy like me, dressed exactly like me, in a grey
pullover and grey shorts.

I froze, paused with my hand on the banister. I saw an
image of myself bent over the stricken woman. But when
the image turned and looked, it wasn't me. It was the boy
I'd seen in my dreams.

His face was flushed, his black hair shining in the
firelight. He was holding Mrs Kemp's hands very softly in
his. And she, looking up through half-open eyes as if
through the haze of her own lashes, was smiling faintly, in
recognition of his face and the comfort he was giving her.

The boy let go of the woman's hands. He stood up, and
with a curious beckoning motion of his head he crossed
the hall and disappeared into the dark downstairs corridor.
I followed him.

And from then on, together, silent and unseen in the
lightless corners of a building we both knew so well, the
boy and I shadowed the movements of Kemp and Pryce
and Sophie. I had the faintest inkling – something in the
way he'd beckoned me – that he'd come back, enabled to
return to Foxwood by the odd off-chance that I was still
there, to play his part in the game.

A dream-boy, a ghost-boy, a flutter of cold air through
my dormitory window – whoever or whatever he was,
and whatever fell purpose he had for me, I sensed that he
needed me, he was powerless without me.

I lost him in the darkness, although I knew he was close. I
felt him nearby, in the prickle of the wire in my hands and the sting of the
wire in my throat.

Kemp, arriving at the first floor, had heard the other lift
coming up too. He'd gone straight back down again.
Desperate to get back to his wife, knowing that Pryce had
left her immobilised in the hall as a bait to lure him back
there, he negotiated his way gingerly closer and closer.

I watched him, I was with him all the time, unknown
to him, unseen by him. And I sensed horribly that Pryce
was right behind us and would spring out at any moment.

Heaving for breath, Kemp ducked into the library and
hid, futilely, between the tall bookcases. I hid with him.
There was a curious shuffling footfall in the corridor
overhead. For some reason, Pryce and the hapless girl
were lurching in and out of the darkened dormitories. We
heard a lift come down. When the headmaster snagged
the wheelchair on a protruding shelf, I watched him stop
and hold his breath as Pryce's crowing voice sounded just
inches from where we were hiding –
Are you there, Dr
Kemp, are you there?
– and a sinister cooing seemed to
echo and hum through the house, up and down the lift
shafts, along the corridors, everywhere –
Alan, where are
you? Upstairs, downstairs, where are you, Alan
. . .?

The house was full of Martin Pryce.

My head pounded with the dread of turning a corner
and confronting him, Pryce with the gun, Pryce with the
piano string. And the house, which had become so
familiar for all the years I'd been there, was suddenly a
baffling and infuriating maze. I was filled with an insane
anger at the house itself, as I moved in the wake of the
terrified headmaster and saw it thwarting him with its
maddening jumble, its angles and corners which caught
him and jabbed him as he tried to steer past: the ramps
which sapped his failing strength as he struggled up them
and careered down; the lifts, one at each end of the
building, with their clanking gates, their cables and cogs
and wheels, going up and down from the bottom to the
top of the house as Pryce toyed with them to confuse and
exhaust his victims – so that the whole thing was a
nonsensical game of snakes and ladders.

Foxwood Manor was a maze: a dark, cold, unfriendly
maze of shabby rooms and dusty corridors. It flooded me
with hatred and bitterness. And, worse somehow, an
overwhelming boredom for all the time I'd been a
prisoner there.

Dr Kemp leaned with all his strength on the wheels of
the chair. His hands and the wheels gleamed with blood.
He propelled himself closer to the hall. And as he came
closer to his wife and sped towards the light at the end of
the corridor, I felt my bitterness fall away – as I realised
it was the chair I hated, not the house, and my heart
ached with pity for Mrs Kemp, for all the years she'd
endured it.

The headmaster reached the hall, peered in and saw his
wife lying beside the fire.

Pryce and Sophie were at the top of the great staircase.
They started to stumble down. Pryce was saying, 'Come
on Sophie, this'll make it a bit more fun . . .' With a curse,
as Pryce half-dragged and half-carried the girl down the
last few steps, Dr Kemp could do nothing except spin the
chair and accelerate as hard as he could, back into the
corridor.

I hid and watched as Pryce lugged Sophie across the
hall.

She was tight-lipped, her face white with anger and
fear. She'd given up struggling against him, and just
hobbled wherever he took her. Now he dragged her past
the table and its wreckage of a Christmas feast, stepped
over the body of the headmaster's wife as though she
were no more than a heap of rubbish, and lifted the lid
of the record player.