The Perils and Dangers of this Night (20 page)

I imagined him, a frightened, stubborn, middle-aged
man, lying in a dusty moonbeam. He'd stretched up and
tugged down a jacket and a pair of jodhpurs and pressed
them to his face. The scent of her, the warmth of her, the
lingering energy of the horses she'd ridden, the sense of
the shortness of the time they'd had together before she
. . . I thought of him inhaling deeply, intoxicated by the
love of his wife and the need to hold her again, and then
crawling to the top of the stairs and starting to bump
himself down, feet first.

Agony in his belly. The grease of sweat and blood on
his hands. A swirl of giddiness in his head.

When I heard that thud, I knew in my heart – because
I knew Dr Kemp – that he'd pitched into the hole,
banging and crashing head over heels, and landed at the
bottom of the stairs.

Sophie and I seemed to swim through the snowstorm.
The pale moonlight through the blur of the blizzard made
our shadows flicker like old newsreel. I pulled her across
the yard, where the snow was deep on the cobbles, and
in seconds I was struggling with the latch of the far
stable. Ignoring her questions, the sound of her voice
somehow muffled and woody in the snowfall, I pushed
the door open and we fell into the darkness.

She leaned on me, hopelessly lost and confused by
what I was doing. The stillness in the stable was a
comfort, however. It simply felt better and safer to be out
of the school building, blanketed by the snow outside and
the silence inside. The girl didn't know where she was;
she had no choice but to trust me as I lugged her
unceremoniously through strange and secret places to a
temporary refuge. She listened, holding her breath, as I
scratched and scratched a match, saw it flare and smoke,
and she watched as I held it close to the wick of the
lantern. The flame licked and fluttered, steadying into a
warm golden light.

She stared around the dusty interior of the stable. It felt
warm, although there were no animals, and the floor was
bare, uneven cobbles. No straw, no feed, nothing alive to
breathe and steam and stamp and keep the air from
freezing – until she caught a tiny tinkling, fidgeting
movement in the far corner and saw the bird staring at her.

'Take this.' I handed her the lantern. No time to
explain. She followed me on tiptoe, and when we were
close to the bird I bent to the floor and picked up a
feather. I whispered over my shoulder, 'Just hold up the
light, that's all you have to do, as still as you can.'

Fascinated, she did what I said. As though hypnotised
by the flame and the gleam of the jackdaw's eyes, she
obeyed me without questioning the connection between
the horror of the game and this calm, oddly irrelevant
business with a bird in a stable. If there was a connection,
for the moment she gave up trying to understand it and
just stood with the lantern.

I stroked the jackdaw's belly. With the tip of the
feather I caressed its throat. I whispered, 'Are you ready
for this, my little imp?' and with my other hand I untied
the leather thong that attached its leg to the perch. With
a tinkle of bells, the bird sprang to my wrist.

'My imp, my imp . . .'

And then the sweet, blissful moment was over. There
was a crash outside, the sound of the changing-room
door being banged open, and the slam of it falling shut.
We heard the crunch of footsteps in the stable-yard.

'The lantern! Blow it out! Quick!'

Sophie blew and blew. The flame died, then fluttered
alive again, obstinately tall and strong. She blew harder
and it went out in a plume of smoke.

The three of us, boy and girl and bird, peered through
a crack in the stable door. Pryce was shoving the chair
through the snow. It slewed and stopped, the buckled
wheel stubborn and hard to control.

Cursing, he bent all his strength against the handles,
too much, so that the chair slid sideways and fell over.
He cried out, in anger and frustration, and kicked at it
with his right foot, so that the good wheel spun fast and
threw a spray of snow across the yard. His left foot, still
bare, was a mess of blood and blackened skin. He righted
the chair and forced it on and on, until it was close to the
opposite stable door.

He unlatched the door and pulled on it with all his
weight. It refused to move: the snow had drifted deep
against it. Oblivious of the cold, his wound numbed by
it, he scuffed and scuffed at the snow with his bare foot
then pulled on the door again. This time he dragged it
wide open. He manoeuvred the chair close to the boot of
the red Jaguar.

Sophie said, 'Oh Jesus,' and clapped her hands to her
mouth as though she were going to vomit.

And the jackdaw, reacting to the terror in her voice,
erupted from my wrist. It beat and beat in the air, it
screeched, and then, as I tried to control it by drawing in
the jesses, it dangled upside down and thrashed its wings
in a blind, hysterical panic. The bells were loud in the still
air of the stable.

Pryce heard them. He turned from the car and stared
through the falling snow towards the door from which
the sounds were coming. He limped across the yard.

The bird gripped my wrist so hard that its claws drove
into my flesh. Stifling a yelp of pain, I folded its wings
under my arm, grabbed its leg, silenced the bells. I
grabbed Sophie in turn, and we scrambled as far as we
could go into the furthest corner of the stable and ducked
behind the empty stall. We could do nothing more but
crouch there, stare at the door and wait for it to open.

The footsteps came closer. The door opened. Pryce was
a looming silhouette.

'Who's there?' he said. He took a step inside, caught
his wounded foot on the cobbles and hissed like a cat. He
stared into the darkness. He sniffed the air, as though to
distil and distinguish the whiff of the lantern from the
other unfamiliar smells in the stable. He heard a rustling,
fidgety movement.

'Who's that? Alan, is it you?' He came on. Step by step
he moved deeper into the shadows. When he reached the
stall, he bent around it and felt the air with his fingers, so
close to my face that I could smell the blood on them.

I let go of the bird. It seemed to explode, a nightmarish
screaming creature, a raggedy black piece of the night
with wings and a tearing beak and raking claws. As Pryce
staggered away, it scrabbled and clung at his face so that
he covered his head with his arms and fell back to the
door. At last it whirled past him and out of the stable,
trailing the jesses and the bells attached to its foot.

With a yell, Pryce disappeared into the snow. I tugged
Sophie to the door, and we saw him stumbling across the
yard. He was a hunched, wretched figure, shaking his
head to flick the blood from the fresh wound on his face,
still leaving a bloodied print from the wound in his foot.
The blizzard whirled around his shoulders.

'We've done it,' I mouthed at Sophie. She blinked at
me, uncomprehending. While Pryce huddled in the shelter
of the other stable and wondered what it was that had
cut him, I took the girl firmly by the hand and we padded
across the yard to the door of the changing-room.

We slipped inside. Sophie groped in the darkness and threw
the bolt, and then she bent and dry-retched into a corner. Anxious to see
what Pryce was doing, I peered out of a window.

He was leaning wearily on the bonnet of the car. Then,
with his back to the stable wall, he put his right foot onto
the long red snout and pushed. The flat tyre squelched,
the rear wheels crunching into the snow, and then he bent
and shoved with both hands under the front bumper. The
car slid out of the stable and stopped in the yard.

The snow was still falling steadily, although the whirl
of the blizzard had slowed. He limped outside and moved
the wheelchair close to the back of the car. In just a few
moments, his hair was whitened with big soft flakes.

He took a deep breath, opened the boot, peered into it
and then stretched in with both his arms. There was
something heavy and awkward inside and he struggled to
lift it out.

Sophie pulled me away from the window.

Still intact, we moved silently through the house.

I remember a strange feeling, the tiniest inkling of
triumph, at the thought that for a short while we'd
regained the territory. I knew that Pryce would come
back, the bolt on the door would not stop him; but just
then, as we padded through the changing-room and past
the chapel, into the main building and along the bottom
corridor with staffroom, library, music practice rooms
and classrooms, Pryce was out and we were in. And I was
determined to maintain the initiative, earned by my local
knowledge and the way I'd led the mission to release the
jackdaw from the stable, so I immediately made for the
boys' staircase and started up it. Sophie followed me. She
only muttered, 'What about the woman?' as we saw the
glow of firelight from the great hall, far ahead along the
corridor, and then demurred when I said firmly, 'No, let's
find Dr Kemp.' She was right behind me as I climbed the
stairs, unerring even in the deepest darkness, up and up,
past the first floor and onto the second, to the little door
at the foot of the narrow staircase to the attic.

I expected to find Kemp lying unconscious, or dying,
or even dead. He wasn't there.

We paused together and listened to the silence in the
house. We could see, in the feeble glow of the overhead
bulb, that the lino was smudged with footprints and
tyre-prints, all smeared in a mess of blood: a lot of blood,
from Pryce's foot when he'd dropped out of the lift and
pulled off his sock; and then a long, wide swirl of it, as
if something had been dragged along the floor. The sock
was there, black and sodden.

I put my head into the staircase. 'Dr Kemp, are you
there?' I called, hoping I'd been wrong and he was still
sitting meekly in the attic. No answer. I clambered up
and looked. Nobody.

I came down. The steps were sticky with blood. From
where Sophie was waiting for me, from where she stood
in the swash of blood and urged me to follow her, the trail
of it glistened into the darkness – a gruesome brush stroke
painted onto the lino by the slither of the headmaster's
stomach as he'd dragged himself along the corridor.

We reached the landing and craned over it, in time to
see him bump and bump on his backside down the last
few steps into the great hall. From the top to the bottom
of the staircase, he'd left the round, fat print of his
blood-soaked trousers.

'Dr Kemp!' I hissed down to him. 'Sir!'

I didn't know why I called out to him, or what I would
have said next if he'd looked up and seen me: it was an
instinct, to make contact with him, either to reassure him
that we were there or to lessen my own fear. In any case,
he didn't hear, he didn't look up. Having reached the
hall, he sat in the mess of his own blood and slowly rolled
onto his back, groaning as though the effort of every
movement were killing him. He dug his fists into his
wound; he coughed and coughed and spat a gobbet of
blood onto the carpet. From the way he clutched at his
chest, I thought he'd bruised or broken his ribs, and I
imagined again how he'd cartwheeled down the stairs
from the attic and thudded into the corridor.

'Where is she?' Sophie hissed into my ear. 'Where's the
woman?' From the top landing we could see the flicker
of a dying fire, but no sign of Mrs Kemp.

I gazed down, and my head swam. I squinted at a dark
pool by the hearth – it could have been shadow or blood
– the place where she'd been lying. She wasn't there.

I trod down to the first-floor landing. Saw what Kemp
had already seen.

His wife was sitting in an armchair beside the fire. Her
head was propped against a cushion and her eyes were
closed. She might have been sleeping. Indeed, if the old
dog had been snoring at her feet, it mightn't have
looked so different from any other wintry night in the
great hall at Foxwood Manor: Mrs Kemp relaxing before
bedtime, the glow of the embers on her face and in her
hair.

But there was no dog. There was a Christmas tree
draped with shattered bulbs; a lot of broken glass from
the photographs and trophy cabinets; an abandoned
dining-table; plates and bowls of congealing fat and
greasy gravy; spattered pools of candle wax. There was a
slick of blood on the rug.

'Sarah,' the headmaster called softly. He heaved himself
to his feet and groped his way across the hall.

'No, sir! Please sir!' Those were the words I wanted to
call out, as he blundered forwards and I knew he was
enmeshed at last in the trap that Pryce had laid for him.
But no words came. Pryce must be there – only
he
could
have moved the woman into the chair – and now he was
waiting, watching and waiting. My lips moved, but I just
gaped and stared, dumbstruck with fear, and I felt for the
warmth and strength of Sophie's hand.

I felt into empty air. She'd gone.

The headmaster knelt at his wife's feet. 'Sarah, Sarah!'
he whispered, and he took them in his hands – her icy
feet, his hands like fire – willing all the life and heat of
his body into hers.

And suddenly the lights flickered on. The music started.

There was a deafening blast from the record player. It
was inches from the headmaster's ear. The sound had
been rude and ugly enough when he'd heard it from high
in the attic; now it was a physical assault. Jagged chords,
a primitive beat, an uncouth, snidely insinuating voice –
you really got me you got me so I can't sleep at night . . .
Thrown off balance, Kemp let go of his wife's feet, fell
away and rolled backwards onto the blood-soaked rug.

Sophie must have thrown the switch. In the time it had
taken me to realise she wasn't there beside me, in the
short, holy moment which Kemp had been allowed with
his wife, she'd flown up to the attic, reached for the fuse
box and turned on the power.

Kemp had forced himself upright. In the gloom of the
Christmas tree at the further end of the hall, he saw a
figure sitting at the piano – motionless, so bizarrely
hunched in the wheelchair that its forehead was resting
on the keyboard, the face hidden by a fall of dark hair.

The woman's eyes flickered open. Kemp reached for
her hands, and, despite the hellish cacophony, for a
second they gripped each other's fingers – her lips moved,
she tried to smile at her husband, but only a trickle of
blood oozed from the corner of her mouth. He lifted her
hands to his face and kissed them.

The last glimmer of life faded in her eyes. Then it was
gone.

He had no more time with her. There was a rush of
movement from the piano, and when he turned to see
what it was, the dark figure in the wheelchair was
careering straight at him.

Kemp couldn't move out of the way. The chair
rammed into him, two bony knees catching him full in
the chest and smashing him back into the record player.
The speed jolted down to 33 rpm. But still the record
turned, ear-splittingly loud but horridly slow, the words
just a ghoulish groaning.

Kemp lunged at the wheelchair. All of his anger and
hatred erupted inside him. The pain, that had been salved
in the few moments he'd had with his wife, now flared
through him, dazzling hot. It was the pain he needed to
mobilise every last ounce of his strength.

'Damn you! Damn you!' His hands grabbed at the
flopping hair, twisted and yanked, clawed at the face and
throat. He shoved and bellowed so that the chair spun
away from him. 'Damn you, Pryce!'

The music stopped.

I'd seen it happen, unable to believe what I was seeing.
Martin Pryce, appearing from behind the piano, stepping
forwards, lifting the needle from the disc.

He loomed over Kemp, who'd collapsed onto the floor,
heaving with rage and exhaustion. Kemp stared up at
him. Then he looked at the figure in the wheelchair. He
did a double-take, from the one to the other and back
again.

Martin Pryce leaned over, put his hand under the chin
of the body in the wheelchair and tried to lift it. But it
was too stiff to move. He pulled the curtain of hair to one
side.

A swollen, purpling face. Bruised lips. Eyes staring,
glazed. Blackened skin. A dead face. The gleam of a
piano string, embedded in the flesh of the throat.

'Don't you recognise him?' Pryce said.

With a terrible wrench of one hand, he grabbed Kemp
by the hair. With the other hand, as if by magic, he
dangled a piano string. He looped it around the headmaster's
throat.

'It's Jeremy, your little Dolly Boy – I've brought him
back for you.'

He tightened the string. Kemp squirmed and flopped,
like an animal caught in a trap. He clawed with both
hands to try and stop the wire from cutting. But it cut
deep. And it was easy for Pryce, who was tall and strong
and on his feet, while the headmaster crumpled to the
floor, gurgling, gagging, tongue out, eyes popping – so
easy for Pryce that he could reach with a free hand, drop
the needle randomly onto the record and restart the
slowly grinding blast of sound.

He dropped the headmaster onto the floor, jamming
him against the wheelchair. Kneeling suddenly, he tore
off his dead brother's left shoe and sock. A second later,
he'd melted back into the shadows behind the piano.

I'd seen it all. Sophie hadn't. She'd left me and gone
upstairs to turn on the power – and for something else, a
thing forgotten and lost while the house had been in
darkness. When I blinked over my shoulder and up to the
top landing, she was standing there with the gun.

She came down the stairs and flew right past me. I was
on my feet, grabbing at her arm and trying to stop her,
but she was too strong, too quick.

She reached the bottom of the stairs before me. She
saw Mrs Kemp slumped in an armchair. She saw the
figure hunched in the wheelchair, its left foot bare and
swollen-black – hunched over the body of Dr Kemp, who
was gurgling, twitching, flapping pathetically at a piano
string tight around his throat.

She strode forwards. At close range, she raised the gun
and fired just over the headmaster's head. The bullet
slammed into its target.

'Help me! Alan, help me!' she yelled. 'Quickly!' She
threw down the gun. As I hurried forwards, as I tried to
drag my horrified eyes from the figure in the wheelchair,
she knelt to the headmaster and struggled with the piano
string.

Too late, too late. She couldn't do it. The string was
too tight and deep in his flesh. As she fought with the
wire, Kemp rolled his bloodshot, bulging eyes at the
ceiling. His blood-filled mouth opened and closed, and
his final breath was a long bubbling cry. At the end of it,
his head rolled slowly forwards onto his chest.

The music stopped. Silence, at last.

We knelt for a long, lovely minute. The sense of peace
was almost overwhelming. I knew that Martin Pryce was
looming nearby, I knew Sophie would soon realise that
her bullet had found the wrong target. But I didn't care.
A great weariness settled on me. The whole building
breathed an exhausted sigh at the passing of Dr and Mrs
Kemp, its guardians for the past twenty years. The only
sounds were the flutter of the fire and the click-click-click
of the disc turning on the record player.

I looked long and hard at the dead headmaster's face.
The features, which had seized so grotesquely as he'd
struggled to breathe, had now softened. His eyes were
closed, and there was a dribble of blood from his lips. In
repose, he was just a shabby, middle-aged man, bundled
awkwardly in his shirt and tie and tweed jacket, grey
flannels and suede shoes. His hair needed cutting: it was
greasy, and where it fell over his collar there were flecks
of dandruff. There were tufts of bristle in his ears and
nostrils, his nose was red, his cheeks were marbled with
veins, and a fine white stubble covered his chin. In the left
eyebrow, there was a scar almost an inch long, perhaps
from a childhood accident or sporting injury, which I'd
never noticed before.

Staring at him, I realised I'd never looked so closely,
through all the years I'd been a boy at Foxwood.

I picked up his right hand; inexplicably, I wanted to
touch him, to be touched by him. This was the hand that
had held a little cane and swished it sharply onto my
backside. It had wielded a wooden clothes-brush and
smacked it on my buttocks. With these fingers, now tacky
with blood, he'd rapped my knuckles with the ivory
baton, as I'd tried my best to sing in tune or to master
my scales on the piano. I picked up his left hand, where
two of the fingers were curled hard into the palm, an
injury which all the boys had noticed and never dared
mention, a secret he'd only divulged to his most precious
pupils – to
me
, who'd been precious to him. Somehow
amazed, oddly moved, I examined the hands of this man
I'd often feared, sometimes hated, but whom I'd never
really seen before: Dr Kemp, headmaster of Foxwood
Manor School, deceased.

As the body sagged, as the last of the life drained from
it, we knelt in the silence and knew that he was dead.

Sophie appraised the figure in the wheelchair. She ran
her eyes from the long dark hair which hid the face, over
the lean body which was so twisted and still; the long
legs, bent on either side of the dead headmaster; the bare
left foot, mottled purple.

She bent closer and touched the foot. Ice cold. No
wound. The stink of death.

She recoiled sharply. We both turned and stared across
to the piano, as Martin Pryce stepped from behind it.

'You as well, Sophie? Can't you tell us apart?'

She turned back to the man she'd shot, whose hands
were so black, whose face beneath the flopping hair was
swollen and black. She saw the glint of the wire in his
throat. She recoiled in horror and disgust. She looked
from the dead, cold Jeremy to the living, bloodied Martin
Pryce.