The Perils and Dangers of this Night (22 page)

I watched him: a gangly choirboy trussed in a red
surplice and white cassock shoving a wheelchair once and
then a second time across the lawn, leaving a dead
woman and a dead man in the snow. I heard the lovely
music, and I saw, in the light which fell from the front
door of the school, the glistening of tears on the
choirboy's face.

With the utmost tenderness, Pryce lifted the body of his
brother onto the chair. The body was curled like a foetus,
from being brutally buckled and bent into the boot of the
car – only just possible when the spare wheel had been
taken out and left behind. Completely stiff, it hunched in
the chair, its head almost touching its knees. Pryce
wheeled swiftly to the door and down the ramp, and this
time, the third time, it was easy to follow the existing
tracks and roll smoothly to the graveside.

Jeremy's body was light. He levered it out of the chair
and onto the snow, beside the bodies of Dr and Mrs
Kemp. And then he knelt and kissed the purpled face, the
blackened fingers.

As he did so, I felt the cold, dry fingers of the boy
squeezing mine. I turned, and I saw in his eyes that there
was yet one thing I must do for him, that he couldn't do
for himself. It was why he'd come back.

The music built to a marvellous climax as Pryce
wielded the spade, as he drove the blade at the ground.
He swung it from over his shoulder, beating and beating
with an increasingly desperate and futile rhythm. It was
useless. The earth was frozen. The iron of the spade hit
the iron of the ground with a terrible, jarring force, and
made no impression at all.

At last the music faded. The spade clanged a few more
times, until the overgrown choirboy was exhausted.
Sobbing, he flung the spade down and fell to his knees.

Christmas morning. It was very dark in the great hall
of Foxwood Manor. The fire had gone out. Bitter
cold. The door was wide open to the wintry dawn.

Still wearing the surplice and cassock, Martin Pryce
was asleep in an armchair. He looked wretched, with his
head thrown back and his mouth agape. There was a welt
on his cheek where the bird had torn him, and his skin
was deadly pale. His hands dangled and his fingers
twitched, and they were mottled white, blenched by the
snow. His bare foot was scoured: all the blood was gone
from it, and the gunshot wound was raw meat.

As Roly came closer to the school he could see the tall
chimneys of the house through the woodland. He trudged
through the snow, which had been treacherously deep on
the uneven ground of the forest, and at last, as he
approached the building from the back and crossed the
playing fields, he found good footing.

He paused there, and he surveyed the tops of the beech
trees beside the school. Something was different, something
was missing, and for a few moments he couldn't
decide what it was. And then he had it. He was often up
and moving through the woods at dawn, and in the darkest
days of winter he would catch the crows still roosting in
the high branches: this morning there were none.

He came behind the school. He didn't want to meet
anyone, to disturb anyone, and, in any case, his business
was only in the stable-yard. The jackdaw stirred inside
his coat as he turned the corner and felt the cobbles under
his boots, and there he stopped dead at the extraordinary
sight in front of him.

A car full of snow. Long and low and smoothly
rounded, it seemed to be abandoned there; having no
roof, the inside was filled with snow. The boot, wide
open, was also full of snow.

Roly squinted at the car. Where a slab of snow had
slipped from its flanks, he could see that it was red, and
the wheels had silvery spokes and silvery hubs. He
touched the rim of the steering wheel, then recoiled and
swivelled around in case anyone had seen him do so. One
of the stables was open, and he could see from the tracks
that the car had been pushed out of it. The snow all
around was a scribble and scrawl which made no sense
at all; narrow tyre marks too, and a smudge where
something had been dropped and dragged, even some
bare footprints tinged the softest pink.

Roly frowned, pushed back his cap and scratched his
hair. He crossed to the corner stable, pushed the door
open and went in.

The jackdaw bated as he took it out of his coat, such
a whirl of screaming and thrashing that all the dust in the
stable clouded around him. Quite calm, he just held its
jesses and held it at arm's length, his head turned away,
as though it were a firework he'd lit in his hand,
showering sparks all over him. 'Be good, be good,' he
whispered, and he moved across to the perch and swung
the bird gently in the right direction. With the momentum
of one of the swings, the jackdaw beat itself upright in
mid-air and clawed at the perch, scrabbled with its claws
and gripped.

At last it stood there, chest heaving, tattered and
ruffled and very angry, glaring at Roly with mad black
eyes.

He tied the jesses to the perch and stepped away. There
was a wry, weasly smile on his face. 'Don't look at me
like that, all huffy,' he said softly. 'I didn't do it for you,
I did it for the boy, all right?'

He picked up the shotgun and came out into the yard.
As he turned the corner of the house, a great cloud of
crows rose from the lawn.

There was an enormous commotion. The birds whirled
into the air in such chaos that some of them snagged in
the branches of the copper beech. And then, startled that
the man with the gun had suddenly appeared, they went
clacking and cawing into the tops of the woodland trees,
where they clamoured and slowly settled. Roly stood
there and watched them, puzzled to see so many and so
early, when they might have been roosting still.

He crunched through the snow to see what they'd been
doing.

He saw the overturned wheelchair, a spade, and the
marks that a spade had made on the hard ground. Mrs
Kemp was lying on her back. Her hair was lovely, but she
had no eyes or nose or lips: only holes in her face, where
her eyes and nose had been. Her teeth were long and
yellow, like a horse's, and there was a gaping wound in
her throat, which surely the crows had not made. Dr
Kemp lay beside her. The birds had had his eyes as well,
although they'd left his nose and attacked his cheeks
instead. Their beaks had gone into the flesh, broken it
open and worked into the gums, pulled his tongue out
sideways, through the cheek, because his teeth were so
tightly clenched: yellow teeth, exposed to the roots. It
looked as though, curiously, the crows had ripped his
trousers and pecked into his belly: a mess of blood. And
there was a third person, curled oddly into a ball and
lying on his side: a stranger, a young man with long dark
hair. The birds had picked off his ear, and the flesh
around it was black.

Roly stared at the three dead bodies, so grotesquely
disfigured. He glanced up at the birds in the high trees,
and his first reaction, in shock and disgust, was to raise
his gun and . . .

He heard a noise from the house. He lowered the
barrels of the gun and turned round slowly.

* * *

I woke from a strange dream.

The commotion of the crows had woken me, and I
found myself lying in my bed with all my clothes on, with
my arms enfolded around a sleeping girl. I rolled out of
bed and pressed my face to the window. Roly was on the
lawn, pointing his gun up into the trees. I rapped on the
glass, and he lowered the barrels of the gun and turned
round slowly.

When I beckoned to him, he lifted his hand in a kind
of wave and trod across the lawn. He could see from
there that the front door of the house was wide open.

'Sophie, Sophie!' I shook the girl awake. Her befuddled
face turned towards me. Her cheek was striped from the
pillow, her eyes wild and frightened; I could smell her
mouth. 'Roly's here!' I hissed at her. 'He's come to help us!'

She had no idea what I was saying. She didn't know
who Roly was. But when she stared at me, reached out
and touched my neck, there was a tiny jewel of blood on
her fingertip. 'Who? What?' she said. 'What is it?'

I spun away from her. There was no time. But as I
hurtled across the dorm and out of the door, I could feel
the welt around my throat and the blood welling from it,
the prickling of the stripes on my palms – the stigmata of
my dreams.

I skidded to a halt on the top landing. Far below me,
the hall was very dark. I tasted the air rising from it, dank
and stale like the air from a cellar.

Swallowing hard, almost gagging, I moved down to the
next landing. Roly came through the front door, stepped
inside and stopped. He sniffed and shuddered and
exhaled: the building was deathly cold, somehow colder
than the world outside. He peered into the gloom,
making out the empty chairs, the gape of the hearth, a
dinner table with glasses and plates and an overturned
bottle. Beyond that, it was as black as a cave.

He said softly, 'Scott, are you there?' and took another
few steps. I tried to answer, couldn't. His boots crunched
on broken glass. With a quiver of fear in his voice, he
called towards the staircase, which curved up and up to
where I was standing, 'Scott, where are you?' He started
to climb.

Silent night. Holy night
. A few muffled notes from the
piano. No more than a whisper in the great hall, but a
whisper that made Roly stop on the stairs and turn back.

Silent night . . . holy night
. . . The first two lines, only
the melody, played on muted bass keys. And then silence.

Roly stared back into the hall. He stepped from the
staircase, towards the dimly echoing darkness from
which the sounds had come. 'Is that you, Scott?' he said.

It started again, the plangent melody of the carol. A bit
louder, as though the fingers on the keyboard were
drawing Roly closer and closer towards the piano.
'What's happening?' he said. Glass crackled under his
feet. One of his boots caught a tin cup that was lying on
the floor and it clanged against the hearth. 'Scott, are you
all right? I saw them outside . . .'

I trod down to the foot of the stairs. I couldn't speak.
The playing got louder. Not so lovely, the melody
skewed, distorted, an ugly sound –
all is calm, all is bright
– played on one finger, wrongly, and then stopping.

'Stop it,' Roly said. 'Stop it, boy, and answer me.'

I tried to call out, to warn him, but it felt as though the
wire were tightening in my throat. I could hardly breathe,
my hands were fighting it and the wire was cutting my
palms. Roly banged into the corner of the piano, hardly
seeing its angular bulk in the shadows. He fumbled
around its edges, reaching to where he thought I must be.
Nothing but empty, cold air. There was no one.

His fingers blundered onto the keyboard, startling him
so much that he jumped away as though the piano had
bitten him. He whirled around, sensing someone very
close.

And then he heard footsteps. He turned and saw a dim
figure coming down the stairs.

'Who's that?' he said. 'Who are you?'

Sophie moved past me. She said in a high, clear voice,
'Thank God you're here. Please help us.'

'Help you? I don't know . . .'

Roly's breath was cut off. A black shape rose behind
him, sudden and misshapen like some ghastly spectre
conjured from inside the piano itself. It whirled a
gleaming wire around his throat and pulled it tight with
a terrible strength.

Sophie cried out –
No Martin no!
– and flew across the
hall.

Roly grappled with the wire, one of his hands scrabbling
hopelessly as it cut and cut into his flesh. In his other
hand, the gun came up.

There was a crashing detonation.

The blast lifted the girl from her feet and flung her
backwards. She landed with a sickening thud in the
fireplace.

The explosion rocked the whole house. Outside too,
the crows erupted from the treetops in a panic of raggedy
wings and hoarse voices. And then there was a long beat,
as the report echoed and faded and a kind of silence
resumed.

Roly was gurgling, spastic, flapping his arms and legs
like a puppet. Pryce dropped him onto the floor.

'Sophie – oh Jesus, Sophie . . .'

He lurched to the hearth, a hunchbacked creature in
the half-light, still bundled in the bloodstained surplice
and cassock and dragging a swollen, purpling foot. He
leaned into the fireplace and embraced her.

'Sophie, I didn't mean – I didn't want to . . . Oh Jesus,
Sophie, I love you I love you please . . .'

He held her tightly, although she was utterly limp in his
arms, and buried his face in her chest. The side of her head
was a welter of blood, the ear and hair scorched off. For a
full minute he shuddered and sobbed with the horror of it,
and the words spilled out of him, as though he himself had
been burst open and everything inside was broken.
'
Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and . . .
'

A shaft of light fell across him. He turned his face into
it and blinked, quite dazzled.

He saw a boy silhouetted against the window. A
gleaming boy with a halo of dust.

'Jeremy? Is it you? Are you here?'

I opened the shutters wider. I'd come into the hall in
the aftershock of the blast. With a glance around the
room I saw Roly lying beneath the piano, where he'd
crawled in the final throes of his struggle with the wire. I
saw Sophie, crumpled and bloody in the fireplace. Pryce,
the choirboy, huddled against her, squinting into a gleam
of snow.

'Jeremy?' he said. 'Alan? Alan, it's Sophie – it's Sophie,
look!'

I bent to the floor and straightened up with the
shotgun.

'Help me, Alan, help me! She's . . .'

I hefted the gun in my hands. The weight and the
warmth and the smell of it were oddly satisfying. It eased
my breathing, it soothed my hands. And I could feel the
boy with me, in me, guiding me, using me.

'Alan, I didn't mean this, you know I didn't – look,
Alan, I . . .' Pryce moved from the fireplace, on his knees,
dragging himself towards me. He wheedled, 'I never
wanted this, I didn't come here for this – I never meant
those things I said . . .'

I stood perfectly still in the cold sunlight. Craven,
toady, Pryce slithered closer. 'I'm on your side, Alan, I
know what it's like to be here, in this place, with these
people! I've been you, and you'll grow to be like me, to
be
me! Alan, you
are
me!'

'No.' I levelled the gun, sighted, held my breath – as my
father had taught me to do, as the boy wanted me to do.

The voice changed. It was a sneer, full of loathing. 'No,
you aren't me. You're Jeremy, you're Kemp – you're
Kemp and Jeremy with your perfect fucking pitch. Do
you know how
im
perfect you've made me feel?'

He lunged forwards. I squeezed the trigger.

At close range, the blast hit him full in the mouth. He
spun away and crashed back into the fireplace. He lay
there, obliterated, his arms and legs flung out, flopped
against the girl; side by side, they looked like a couple of
rag dolls that had been dropped down the chimney. For
a few moments his fingers opened and closed, and then
stopped.

It was done.

A silence grew. Slowly, all the dust in the air settled,
and so did the ash that had been blown out of the hearth.
The smoke from the barrels of the gun was a dim blue
haze in the light that fell between the shutters of the tall
window.

I glanced to the open front door, thinking I'd seen a
movement there. There was a flutter of cold air, as
though someone or something had passed through the
door and gone outside. And then a silence in the house
that had not been heard since the game began.