The Perils and Dangers of this Night (18 page)

'This'll do it,' he said.

He took off the long-playing record that was on the
turntable – Fauré's Requiem – and dropped it onto the
nearest armchair, and I saw him tug out the little black
disc of a 45 from under his shirt. He dropped it onto the
turntable, changed the speed, stood back. And even from
where I was watching, in the dusty black mouth of the
corridor, I could hear the needle settle onto the vinyl,
nestle into the groove. Pryce adjusted the volume to
maximum, so that the crackle and hiss were loud in the
expectant room.

'Oh yeah, this should do the trick,' he murmured.

Kemp had raced back to the lift and wheeled himself
inside. I heard the lift go up and up, past the first floor
corridor, past the second. Towards the attic.

I ran. We ran. For the ghost-boy, the dream-boy was
still with me, in a waft of cold air which made my
scalp tingle and my palms itch. With my eyes closed,
I flew up the stairs to the first floor, knowing every
step, every creak in the floorboards, every chip in the
paint, feeling with my fingers up and up and onwards
to the second floor, in a house so dark and blank and yet
so much a part of me that when I swerved to a halt on
the corridor near my own dormitory I knew there'd be a
little forbidden door in front of me, with a little
forbidden handle on it, and a sign that said: forbidden
to boys . . .

The attic. I'd never been up there.

I opened the door and flung myself inside, pulling the
door shut behind me and scrambling blindly up and up a
narrow staircase until my head banged onto a trapdoor.
I flopped down, panting, heaving, lost in a pitchy
darkness.

Through the noise of my own breathing, I heard the
hiss of the wheels of the wheelchair over my head.

Kemp had taken the lift to the attic. He must have
yanked open the door and thrust himself out, just as the
music blared.

Music? The jagged chords of 'You really got me . . .'
were so loud in the great hall that they tore into the lift
shafts and corridors and filled every space in the old
house. And I could hear Pryce yelling at the top of his
voice –
Can you hear this, Dr Kemp? Music is the life of
the school! It runs through the building!

As the record turned, the noise built in and built a
stealthy momentum, growing in volume and intensity. I
could hear Kemp shouting too, as though he were
grinding his teeth and shouting for the only means of help
he could think of. '
Scott!
Where the devil are you? Are
you there, for God's sake?'

Huddled in my safe, secret place, in the staircase only
a few feet away from the headmaster, I was as astounded
as Kemp to hear this music pounding through the
building; astonished to hear something so appallingly, so
marvellously raucous stirring the dust and cobwebs of
Foxwood Manor.

Pryce's shrilly manic voice came to me from somewhere
far below. Kemp was calling me from up in the
attic. I pushed with all my strength on the trapdoor above
my head and felt the weight of something on top of it,
until it opened just a little. I peered inside.

It looked as though the headmaster had given up
shouting for me. Galvanised into action by the savagery
of the noise that was blasting through the building, he
heaved himself out of the wheelchair. He'd seen from the
movement of its cables that the other lift was coming up.
I saw him stumbling along the attic, treading onto
piled-up junk, ducking through a line of old clothes; I
heard him gritting his teeth and growling to himself,
'
Where is it? Where is the wretched thing?
' – and then he
was fumbling into the highest, darkest corner, reaching
up to a fuse box and struggling to pull it open.

The lift was clanking up and up. He knew that Pryce
was in it.

Pryce and Sophie were coming up to the attic. I could
picture Pryce, with the gun in one hand, his other arm
around Sophie's waist, as he yelled the lines of the song
–
you really got me now, you got me so I don't know
what I'm doing, oh yeah you really got me now, you got
me so I can't sleep at night
. . .

The lift was almost at the second floor when the lights
went out. It jerked to a halt. The music slurred horribly
and stopped.

The entire house was in darkness. And silence. Only an
eerie creaking as the lift dangled and swayed in the shaft.
Then I heard Pryce say, 'What the fuck?'

Kemp had thrown the mains switch, turning off all the
power in the house.

Now he felt his way back through the shadows of the
attic, and he collapsed heavily into the wheelchair. Only
the cloudiest of moonbeams fell through a snow-covered
skylight in the roof, enough for me to see a gleam of tears
in his eyes, tears of relief that the noise had stopped and
even a twist of a smile on his lips, a moment of triumph,
as he heard Pryce calling from inside the stranded lift,
'Hey, Kemp, what are you playing at? Are you up there,
Kemp?'

There was a tiny tremor of panic in the young man's voice.
Kemp buried his face in his hands, careless that they were sticky with blood
and cobwebs, and squeezed his eyes shut.

I forced the trapdoor open further, shoving aside whatever
had been weighing it down, and popped my head
out of the staircase, like a marmot emerging from its
burrow.

I'd never seen the attic before. Watching the headmaster
earlier had given me no sense of its size: a great
tunnel of roof space almost as long as the house, cluttered
with papers and books and crates and trunks, the jumble
that a country prep-school might accumulate and then
discard over three or four decades. A long rack of clothes
on hangers swayed in the darkness like a queue of
faceless people.

I blinked into the gloom, turning towards the headmaster
hunched in the wheelchair. I was puzzled, then
alarmed, to see that the chair was rolling towards me.

'Dr Kemp? Sir?'

The wheelchair gathered speed. The headmaster, rubbing
at the tension in his forehead, hadn't felt the wheels
turn beneath his weight as he'd flopped back into it. The
chair swivelled, silent and smooth on the warp of the
ancient floorboards. It moved faster towards the hole in
the attic floor: the hole from which I'd just emerged.

I cried out again, 'Sir! Dr Kemp!' and he opened his
eyes and turned, too late, to see where he was heading.

Above him, the snow-encrusted skylight whirled like a
giddy moth. Disoriented, weak from loss of blood, he
wrenched at the wheels but could do nothing to control
himself. And I couldn't possibly have stopped it, couldn't
have countered the force of a thirteen-stone man swooping
towards me. I ducked away and threw myself back
down the stairs, as far as I could go.

Just in time. The man and the chair crashed into the
stairwell, overturned, banged down and down and down
with a series of sickening jolts and suddenly jammed.

Kemp was stuck there, somehow wedged into the
narrow space. He groaned, badly hurt by the fall, 'My
God my God oh God help me . . .' The chair had
capsized. He was hanging half out of it, upside down,
both his arms somehow pinioned at his sides, his head
and shoulders dangling into the stairwell.

I cowered at the bottom of the stairs. Looking up, all
I could see was blackness and the bulk of the man and
the chair hopelessly plugged into the hole.

'Scott, are you there? Help me, for God's sake, help me
get out of here.'

'I'm here, sir, I'm down here.' I felt my way up the
steps until I was just below the wreckage. 'I can't . . .'

'You'll have to get through, somehow! You'll have to
get past me and pull me out!'

For a split second, it was almost funny. There was a
glimmer of farce. But then something happened, so awful
that the whole house felt the horror of it.

As the man hung upside down above my head, dangling
with all his weight, we both heard the softest, gentlest
whisper of a sound – like the tearing of silk. He said, 'Oh
God,' because he must have felt it as well as hearing it. The
weight of his body was opening the wound. He couldn't
staunch it with his hands, because his arms were trapped –
and suddenly, unstoppably, the blood welled into his trousers
until it spattered and dripped onto the stairs and intomy face.

He started to cry. He said, 'Oh God,' again, his face
wrinkling and he started blubbing
oh god oh god oh god
in a little girl's voice, and his mouth and nose were full
of uncontrollable tears.

The blood from his trousers came faster and hotter. No
longer a spatter but a steady trickle. He began to squeal.

I gaped up at him, my headmaster, my Dr Kemp. A pig,
hanging in an abattoir. Squealing. Bleeding. A piglet on
a hook, ready for slaughter.

I heard myself saying
please Dr Kemp please sir don't
sir
. . . but the noise of it cut through my words and all
the surrounding silence. It was a sick, shameful noise, and
it grew louder and more dinning, quite unearthly, the
cries of a dying animal from the mouth of a middle-aged
man in a tweed jacket and a shirt and tie.

Tie. I lunged up towards him, grabbed his tie and
started to force it between his teeth.

Unable to free his arms, he snarled and snapped at me,
trying to fend me off.
Please sir please stop sir please stop
stop stop
I was shouting into the horrid twisted piggy-face,
and I stuffed in the tie, timing it as he snatched a
breath to carry on squealing. He gargled and gagged and
blubbered and I forced more and more of the tie into his
mouth and silenced him.

Until he just hung there, whimpering. He stopped
wriggling, his breath calmed as he inhaled through his
nose, and the trickle of blood from his groin slowed and
stopped.

A silence. I lay on the stairs and listened to it.

Ten o'clock on Christmas Eve. The whole place, and
everybody and everything in it, had stopped dead, as
though it were gripped and seized by the deadening cold.

Foxwood Manor, cut off from the world by miles of
woodland and deep snow; no telephone, no electricity.

Pryce and Sophie, uninvited, unwanted guests,
prisoners in a cage in a cobwebby shaft.

Dr Kemp, hanging in a narrow staircase, half-in and
half-out of a wheelchair, with his own tie stuffed into his
mouth. Me, a blood-spattered twelve-year-old boy, huddling
beneath him.

Mrs Kemp, dying in front of the fire in the great hall.

In one of the stables, a crash-landed, convalescent
crow; in another, a splendid, useless car.

Outside, an eighteen-year-old labrador, frazzled to
death and already buried under the cold cold lawn.

No one was going anywhere.

'Kemp? Alan? What the fuck's happening up there?
What are you doing?' Pryce shouted suddenly.

His voice sounded very loud and close in the deadened
building, although he and the girl were still encaged in
the lift. It stirred me and the headmaster alive again. I
clambered up to him and pushed with all my strength to
force myself past the wreckage. I snaked one of my arms
through and wriggled past the man's body, feeling the
frame of the chair chafing the skin on my belly as my
shirt rode up. At the same time, Kemp found one of his
hands was free and, retching hoarsely, pulled the tie out
of his mouth.

The voice came again. 'Alan, are you with me and
Sophie? You aren't afraid of Kemp any more, you can get
us out of here!'

Then Sophie, chiming clearly. 'Alan, you've got to help
Mrs Kemp!'

There was a gasp, as though Pryce had wrenched her
into silence. He shouted, 'Your wife's dying, Kemp! You
shot her, remember? Turn the power on and you can go
down in the lift! It's the only way! Don't you want to see
her again? Don't you want to say goodbye before she
dies?'

Kemp had managed to find some leverage and pushed
at me with all his might. His bloody, sticky hand slid on
my thigh, then found a place on my belly to shove and
shove. I heard myself cry out, the chair cutting into me,
but still I writhed upwards, inch by inch. Kemp was
grunting, 'You can do it, Alan, you're there, you're there
. . .' and he found a breath to shout, 'The boy's with me,
Pryce! He'll get me out, you murderer!'

Pryce yelled back. 'I didn't shoot her! You did!'

The defiance in his voice faltered slightly. There was a
tiny wobble of petulance. It was unmistakable, the sound
of it, and the sense that his arrogant power was slipping.
When he shouted again, there was a shriller note of
desperation like the squalling of a spoilt child. 'Alan,
leave the old man and do what I tell you to do! Didn't
you hear what happened to my darling brother? Is that
you, now? Are you Kemp's little darling? Has he got his
dirty hands on you, like he did with Jeremy?'

Kemp was still pushing me. I'd reached through and
grabbed a banister, something to pull on, to squeeze
myself through, and the man's fingers were rough on my
bare skin. At last I wriggled past and up, through the
trapdoor and into the attic.

Pryce was ranting. 'Is he touching you now? Are you
his little Dolly Boy? You're a tease, aren't you Alan,
letting him touch you, making him do it – his darling
Dolly Boy . . .'

I crossed the attic to the lift shaft and peered down.
There was a dim yellow glow, some kind of emergency
light that had come on when the mains power had been
switched off. And I could see obliquely into the lift itself,
which had jammed to a halt just a few feet below me.

Pryce was staring up the shaft. He was pasty-faced, his
long hair damp with sweat. And he saw me. Before I
could step back from the shaft, he caught the movement
of my body and his eyes met mine.

'
Dolly Boy!
' he hissed.

All of his bitterness towards Kemp, the jealousy of his
brother, all of the bile inside him he spat towards me. His
voice was poisonous, and at the same time I could just
see Sophie's hand, her arm around his waist, stealing
closer to the trigger of the gun.

'
A good name for Jeremy and a good name for you –
and it was my idea, for Kemp's fucking angel with perfect
fucking pitch – and I made sure it stuck. It was me. I hated
him and I hate you Alan you fucking Dolly Boy you . . .
'

The gun went off.

The report was sharp and very loud, amplified in the
lift shaft. As the echo faded, Pryce said very softly,
'What've you done, Sophie?' He dropped the gun and the
box of cartridges, and he slid to the floor.

He clutched his left foot. There was a blackened, smouldering
bullet hole in his boot and blood was welling out. He whispered, 'Why is everyone
fucking shooting each other?'

Sophie kicked the gun to the opposite corner of the lift.
While he was stunned by the impact, still in shock, she
knelt beside him and deftly unwound the piano string
from their ankles. I heard her heaving as hard as she
could on the lift door, until she wrenched it open. The lift
had stopped just above the second floor: there was a
nine-inch gap. Ignoring Pryce, who was wheedling at her,
'Help me, Sophie, hey help me!' she skidded the gun
across the floor and through the gap and it fell with a
clatter to the corridor below.

And then she was out of my field of vision, out of the
crack of light I could see down the shaft and into the lift.
But the wires trembled, the cage swaying with the force
of her little body as she struggled to push herself through
the gap and out. I saw Pryce roll after her, the slick of
blood he left behind, and he was begging, 'Hey Sophie
Sophie . . .' as he tried to prevent her escape. But his
hands were hot and slippery from the wound in his foot.
The lift shuddered – and there was a thud as the girl,
wriggling like a fish away from his grasp, squeezed out
and landed with a thud on the second-floor corridor.

Pryce was mad. I could just make out the writhing of
his body and see him forcing his head into the gap she'd
slipped through. It was too small, but he forced his head
into it. And he roared, like a medieval madman with his
head in the stocks, '
You'll never get out Sophie you'll
never get out Jesus I'm fucking stuck help me Sophie help
me you're no fucking angel Sophie for fuck's sake help
me . . .
'

He couldn't move, either back into the lift or through
the gap.

I hurried back to the trapdoor and looked down into
the hole. Sophie had moved swiftly along the corridor,
seen the little staircase, heard the gasping breath from
inside it and immediately climbed in to investigate. I
could see her in the darkness, peering up at the bizarre
tangle of headmaster and wheelchair.

'Dr Kemp? Alan?'

The man hissed back at her, 'Oh God, is he there?
Pryce?'

'He's stuck – he can't g-g . . .'

'And I'm stuck! Push me, for heaven's sake! And Scott,
are you up there? Help me, help me . . .'

With a new, concerted effort, Sophie shoving with her
shoulders from below and me reaching down from the
top to pull at the chair with all my strength, we shifted
the wounded man out of the wreckage and up towards
the attic. He moaned, he stifled a yelp of pain; sometimes
he pressed his fists into his groin where the wound had
torn wider open. I leaned in and caught at his wrists, I
heaved and heaved while the girl pushed from underneath.
Until at last the headmaster crawled out and
flopped on the floorboards, his whole body heaving, the
breath rattling in his throat.

Sophie wriggled past the wheelchair, which was easier
to shift without the man jammed in it. As she got by, she
kicked and kicked at it until at last it was freed, and it
went bouncing down the staircase and landed with a
crash in the corridor below.

She scrambled up into the attic and knelt by the
headmaster. He blinked at her, struggled to raise himself
on one elbow and stared with horror at the black hole in
the floor, the staircase from which he'd just emerged. 'Is
he down there? Pryce? Is he coming up?' he gasped.

'I told you! He's stuck! Halfway out of the lift! He'll
g-g-g-get out unless . . .' She stood up and peered into the
strange shadows of the attic. 'Did you t-t-turn off the
power? Where is it? Where's the . . .?'

There was a sudden rattle and roar from the lift shaft.
No words, but the bellow of someone trapped, someone
fighting with every nerve and sinew to force a way
through the tiniest of spaces.

'He's getting out!' the girl hissed. 'Where's the p-p-power?
Show me!'

She pushed through the boxes and books and clothes.
As she passed under the skylight, for a second she glanced
up at the pane of glass, and the moonlight fell on her
face. Then she saw the fuse cupboard, open, and lunged
towards it.

'Halfway out?' Kemp was jolted into action. Somehow
he lurched to his feet and stumbled after her. 'You'll kill
him! For God's sake, don't . . .!'

He fell headlong over the jumble of junk and crashed
to the floor. Just as Sophie threw the switch.

With a slurring groan, the music started –
you really
got me you got me so I can't sleep at night
– louder and
more raggedly menacing than it had seemed before, and
the lights flickered on. The lift shuddered, the wheels
groaned, the cables squealed, and the cage moved up and
up the shaft.

The three of us stared at the door of the lift. The music
rose to a deafening climax –
you really got me you really
got me you really got me
– and its four madding final
chords, as the cage reached the attic.

There was silence. The door didn't open. Kemp whispered,
'You've killed him.'

Sophie moved forwards and pulled the door open. The
lift was empty. Only a boot, and a scatter of cartridges.

She stepped in, bent to the floor and picked up the boot. It
was wet with blood. 'He's alive,' she said. 'He must've forced himself through.'
She dropped the boot with a thud. In a moment, as Kemp just gaped at her,
she was back in the attic and reaching for the fuse box. She turned off the
power again.

Darkness. Only the delicate moonlight and the yellowy
glow of the emergency bulb inside the lift.

Silence. Only the hoarse breathing of the stricken
headmaster and a lovely lull of noiselessness.

'He's alive,' Sophie said. 'And he's down there, waiting
for us.'

I hadn't spoken since Pryce's ranting tirade, the horror
of the gunshot, the struggle to get out of the staircase. My
mind had gone blank, paralysed by the awfulness of the
headmaster's screaming and by Pryce's toxic words. I
wanted nothing more than to hide in a dark corner of the
attic, or crawl into an old trunk and pull down the lid
until I thought it might be safe to come out again – but,
as I glanced once more into the open stairwell, I saw the
glimmer of a movement in the corridor below.

Not Pryce. It was the boy.

For a second, I saw his upturned face, pale, anxious.
His eyes met mine, long enough for me to see the
beckoning in them. And then he was gone.

I heard my own voice say calmly and clearly, 'Stay
here, Dr Kemp. I can get help. I think I know how.'

I started down the stairs.