The White Devil (32 page)

“
But that boy who died . . . it was TB, not that other problem?
”

“Sarcoidosis? No, it was TB.”

He heard his parents conferring, digesting this unwelcome news.

(
What did he say? Is it true?

Yes—the one who died had TB.

Oh my God! Let me talk to him!

Just give me a minute.
)

“Where are you, Andrew?”

He told his father: he was staying with the school librarian, who had become a friend, because the school was trying to dump him in a hotel to keep him away from the other kids.

“
Well, stay there. I’m coming to get you out of that place.
”

“Dad, no, wait . . .”

But his father’s voice overlapped his; with its spotty connection, his cell phone didn’t capture the subtleties. And for that matter, neither did his father. “
I don’t know what the hell we’ve got ourselves into, with that school,
” he fumed. “
This was supposed to be a place for you to buckle down. Instead it’s a disaster area. I might as well have sent you to Iraq. Are you feeling sick?”

“I’m not going to get sick.”

“
Are you sure?
” His father’s voice was anxiously hopeful.

“No,” he admitted. “It all depends on this essay I’m writing.”

“
What? You’re not making sense. Are you feverish?
”

The conversation lurched forward in this manner for a few minutes. Finally Andrew gave his father Dr. Kahn’s address, which he found on a magazine label on the coffee table. By the time his father landed at Heathrow, the séance, Father Peter’s prayers, would all be over. His father’s presence would make little difference. Andrew promised to meet him at Dr. Kahn’s house at about eight in the morning on Wednesday, in thirty hours’ time—the soonest Mr. Taylor could arrive. Then they would fly to New York together. At last Andrew pressed the red button on his phone with a trembling hand.

It was 2:17
A.M.
The silent house hummed.

He was leaving Harrow.

He was going home.

Would he see Persephone again? A wash of images overcame him: late-night phone calls. Thousand-word emails. Photos sent and pored over (
who’s that guy in the picture and why does he have his arm around you?
). He had seen this: the long-distance relationship. The
international
long-distance relationship.
Expensive and unsatisfying
, one of his more cosmopolitan female classmates had called it. And all this depended, of course, on Persephone surviving. One way or another he was going to lose her.

He wanted to cry, to sleep.

But he couldn’t. He had work to do.

Arms numb from fatigue, eyes drooping, he reached again for the Mary Cameron folder and began writing again—one letter at a time, at first, but slowly resuming his former clatter—to peck out the remainder of his essay.

PIERS FAWKES AWAKENED
with a start. Phantoms and wolves fell away, back into his dreams. Crucifixes, and dark canyons, and danger.

And a sprig of evergreen.

That image had stuck with him. Its needle-leaves moistened with dew drops.
Too much Father Peter
, he decided.

He raised himself from the sofa where he had fallen asleep. He felt hungover.
Just exhausted
, he told himself.
But sober, thank goodness
.

His phone was ringing. It was still dark out. He squinted at the clock: 5:10
A.M.

“Hello?” he slurred. He listened. He asked the female voice to repeat what she had said. “No, not me,” he replied to her question. “But I’ll call the parents. What’s happening?” He listened. His stomach plunged. He became sardonic, for lack of a better alternative. “That should give them time to get to the hospital, anyway. All right. Thank you.” He hung up.

He walked to the kitchen window. Pulled open the curtain. Just a shiny square of onyx. He would have given a lot of money to see sunshine or hear birds singing, just then. He found a crumpled pack of cigarettes on the kitchen counter. He was wearing a white T-shirt and his trousers from the day before. His back hurt. He lit the last smoke from the pack and leaned against his kitchen counter.

“Damn,” he said aloud.

It was 5:19. He would wait until at least six before calling Roddy Slough’s parents. They were divorced. Who would he call first? The mother was a drunk, he remembered; a voluble Liz Taylor type, in furs; she would get hysterical. He would call the father first, he decided—tall, unsmiling Peter Slough—and let him manage the mother. Then he would hand all this over to Macrae.

He went to his computer and opened his email. Eighty-four messages since the previous night, with increasingly alarmed subject lines.

Is this true what I’m hearing

Epidemic in School

CLOSING HARROW???

He opened only one marked high priority:

Last-minute but Urgent Meeting of Essay Club, Tues 7pm.

It was from Dr. Kahn, of course, inviting all the eleven members of Essay Club to a last-minute meeting for that night; with no explanation, but a subject, and a speaker:

Andrew Taylor, Upper Sixth, The Lot (Fawkes)
, it read.
The Truth About the Lot Ghost
.

Fawkes’s eyes widened at this title. But he realized why they’d chosen it: there was nothing more to lose by being coy; they did not need to duck the headmaster anymore. Fawkes had already been fired. Andrew had already been removed from school. It
was
inviting trouble to announce Andrew’s plan to be at school. But, perhaps, no one on this email would notice: Ronnie Pickles and the headmaster were not advisors for Essay Club, he observed wryly. He noted, further, that Dr. Kahn had not changed parentheses-Fawkes to parentheses-Macrae. By rights, now, Macrae should be the one to attend the meeting; to listen to, and to support, a resident of the Lot in the prestigious act of reading his essay at Essay Club. But when Fawkes scanned the
TO
list, there was no Macrae.

Good. Macrae might have made trouble for Andrew, and who knows, might have sought to bar Fawkes from attending the meeting.

But there was another contact on the list that caught his eye.

Alan Vine

Damn
again
. Dr. Kahn had merely sent the note to the standard Essay Club list. She should have pulled Sir Alan’s address. With this note she would be announcing Andrew’s whereabouts to the last person they wanted to know.

Fawkes started a pot of coffee. He felt a growing sense of misgiving.

Of course you feel that—you’ve just received a phone call that one of your students—former students—is terminal.

Fawkes stared at the black square of window. He felt . . . nothing. Worse than nothing. Yet he could not turn off that ongoing, ever-present channel of observation and rhetoric that ran in his head like a ticker tape:

Death, real death, doesn’t inspire. It doesn’t move you to elegies; not right away. First it drags you down, into inaction and despair
.

Poor Roddy.

He tried to rehearse in his mind what he would say to Roddy’s parents. But he felt a gnawing sensation, a nastiness that would not go away. It grew, as if the apartment were filling with a bad smell.

Wait

He had had this sensation before.

Adrenaline surged in Fawkes’s exhausted body. He felt that same
presence
that had terrified him and Andrew days before in his study, upstairs. He scanned his living room, looking for something; some sign of it. But he saw nothing to threaten him. He instructed his rational mind to take control, override what he was so clearly feeling with his senses, when it caught his eye. He almost overlooked it. A few weeks before, it would have been the most natural thing in the world to see, sitting next to his television, on the console.

A blue bottle of gin.

Two-thirds full. The same bottle of gin he had so willfully thrown away a week prior. He had enclosed that bottle in a double-layered black plastic garbage bag, with many other bottles, and taken it to the rubbish on the landing. The maintenance man had almost certainly collected it and carted it away long since.

In other words, it had no business being in his living room.

Yet there it was, sitting there, stubby and expressionless, like a little dwarf of infinite patience, waiting for him. Fawkes’s heart throbbed. He was left alone with it. He could do whatever he wanted. There was no one here to see. It was 5
A.M
. He would have plenty of time to sober up, for later. Plus, he’d been sacked! No more obligations! He could sleep it off and still have time to make it to Essay Club. Piers Fawkes felt a presence. It was poised, leaning forward, watching in devilish delight.

Fawkes crossed the room and seized the bottle by the throat.

25

Essay Club, Part II

THE HILL BUZZED
at nightfall.

THE DAY HAD
been almost entirely useless. Classes were held, true. But it seemed like a repetition of the day after Theo Ryder died, weeks prior; the boys full of rumors and unanswered questions. Only this time it was worse. The beaks merely went through the motions. Any wild rumor or false bit of gossip, introduced however arbitrarily, became cause to stop class and discuss what everyone wanted to discuss, which was the rumor of a TB outbreak in the Lot; the rumor that school was closing; the rumor that four students had gone to hospital and would soon be dead like Theo Ryder. In the small classroom spaces, sneezes brought severe glances; coughs could cause ejection from class.
(You’d better go back to the house and see Matron, Seabrook. You don’t sound well.)
The queue in Dr. Rogers’s infirmary filled the waiting room chairs and strung halfway down the stairs. Most distressingly,
no one was even bothering to deny the rumors
. Which could only mean, of course, that the worst and wildest of them were true. Harrow School—as the school gossips were happy to repeat—was shutting down.

In the headmaster’s office, the telephone call Colin Jute had been waiting for came a little before three in the afternoon. It was from a doctor at Royal Tredway Hospital. The news was good—at first.
The boys’ tests are negative.
Rhys Davies and Andrew Taylor were free of the mycobacterium tuberculosis. The headmaster rose, elated, standing at his desk, ready to hang up and take action: to send word around that the crisis had been averted; there was no danger; no risk to the other boys; no need to close the school for the first time in its history. He felt a flush of victory.

But the doctor seemed to be reading from notes, and he was not done. He informed the headmaster that the condition of the two Harrow students in treatment—Slough and Vine—was deteriorating. Jute sat back down. The parents had already been informed, the doctor said; but he assumed that the school would be interested.
Of course
, Jute replied.
Yes, quite
. To his credit, the headmaster felt several moments of pure sympathy before hanging up the phone and wondering what the hell he was going to do.

If those two went, that would make three dead students.

God, it would be national news.

He went to his calendar, and felt a pang of dread. He had dinner in London,
that evening
, with the governors. It began at six (his car would be there shortly); their quarterly review of the finances with the accountants, followed by a meal. What horrible timing. He reached for the plastic binder with the financial statements. They seemed remote, meaningless.
Then again
, he thought to himself,
perhaps this was a good thing, an opportunity.
Yes, it could be a lucky stroke, in fact . . . if things got ugly, which they very well might, he would need the governors’ support. He would need to appear to manage the situation—
not of his making
—with clarity and strength. Right. He would call the key governors now—his “core four,” Hovey, Gorensen, Brothers, and Jeffery—and prime them; then use the occasion of the dinner to put things in context, to prepare the governors,
proactively
. . . Jute began scribbling notes for himself. He called for Margaret and asked for the mobile numbers of the core four. Then he would shower; change; get battle-ready. He had just enough time.

HOURS LATER, AS
Colin Jute’s town car swerved through Piccadilly traffic to the columned portal of the Cavalry and Guards Club, throngs of Harrovians began returning to their houses.

They climbed the slope from the dining hall in clusters, buzzing with excited chatter. Anyone watching might have assumed that these were students returning from a long holiday, energized to be back together, to tell the jokes and anecdotes they’d been saving that they knew would amuse their friends. Yet this show of camaraderie came not from long separation, but from nerves. From gratitude that they had survived, that the school had not been shut down; and while more disaster and bad news might arrive tomorrow, it was unlikely anything more would happen today. Time to spend several unsupervised hours in the houses doing absolutely no work and burning off their copious nervous energy. Sixth Formers mentally calculated their beer allowances. Shells took inventory of celebratory candy supplies. A kind of fin de siècle giddiness overtook them. They would have fun tonight, as if it were their last together.

There were exceptions. Four boys checked their watches, ducked the curious glances of their peers, and headed to their rooms to change their clothes. These boys, all Sixth Formers, were not missed in the common rooms; they weren’t the hell-raisers anyway. They hurriedly slipped off their greyers and pulled on the thicker striped trousers. They strapped the black silk waistcoats over their white shirts and black ties. They slid on tailcoats, adjusted the flaps behind them, and gave their hair an extra combing. Then, from the various directions and houses across the Hill—from far-flung Rendalls, coming up the ivy-covered Grange Road; or clattering down the stairs from Headmasters—they made their ways to the Classics Schools, for Essay Club.

Father Peter walked with Fawkes. The priest carried a briefcase, which held a small booklet bearing the seal of the Diocese of Worcester; a Church of England prayer book; a bottle of water; and the soft green twig of a fir tree, snapped off and pocketed that morning during his 6
A.M.
run.

Fawkes walked upright, with an aspect that very nearly resembled self-esteem. When he had found a bottle of gin mysteriously at hand that morning, he had struggled—his heart thrumming with desire as if some naked and very available woman had just minced into the room—but he had defeated the urge and poured its contents down the drain, his nose wrinkled half in disgust, half regret.

The two men—Father Peter in his clerical collar, Fawkes in a tie—arrived at the Classics Schools, the lights of far-off London at their back, and opened the broad door to Mr. Toombs’s Latin classroom, lit by candles, with only a few faces around its oval table. Out of eight boys they saw four—Antoniades, Askew, Wallace, and Christelow—and out of three faculty advisors, they saw two. Dr. Kahn igniting the last of the candles. Mr. Toombs laying out the silver goblets. Wallace, with his slouch, peeled the plastic wrapper off a new bottle of Madeira and prepared to pour.

Fawkes hung there in the lintel. “No Andrew?” he guessed.

Dr. Kahn shook her head.

“Isn’t Andrew one of the chaps who was sick?” noted the lanky, forelocked Rupert Askew in his sleepy Sloane drawl, from his seat at the oval table. “Maybe he
can’t
come.”

“He’s coming,” Fawkes replied.

“Is that a good thing?” persisted Askew, looking from face to face. “There are a lot of rumors. About him in particular, I mean.”

“What sort of rumors?” asked Mr. Toombs.

“Well, that he brought the disease with him from America. Basically, he killed Theo Ryder. And now these others too. . . .”

“That’s quite irresponsible!” Mr. Toombs interrupted. “Nothing but gossip.”

“Sir, you asked me what the rumors were!” Askew defended himself. “And it’s not just me. That’s why Harris stayed away from tonight’s meeting.”

“And Turnbull, and the others,” added Christelow. “They were talking about it at supper.”

“It can’t be true, can it?” said Mr. Toombs. “Piers?”

“It’s not true,” said Fawkes. “Andrew is not sick. He was tested.”

“Andrew is leaving,” announced Scroop Wallace as he leaned over the first goblet and filled it with Madeira.

“Leaving?” said Mr. Toombs. “Leaving school?”

“I emailed him earlier, about a lesson, and he said he wasn’t doing it. When I asked him why, he said it’s because he’s being removed from school.”

“Do we have to stay, then?” asked Askew.

“Essay Club is a voluntary activity,” Mr. Toombs replied tartly. “Removed by whom?” he demanded.

“His parents,” Wallace replied. Wallace had a slight hunch and pasty skin, and when he spoke people had the shivery feeling he was manipulating words the way sadistic children toy with bugs. He seemed to take cold delight in this news.

“They’re frightened, I suppose,” offered Askew, knowingly. “With all the disease and death in the Lot. It’s only natural.”

“Are you leaving, too, Mr. Fawkes?” asked Nick Antoniades.

Nick was head of Headland House, Fawkes recalled.
Sir Alan must have let something drop
. “I am, yes.”

“Really, Piers?” gasped Mr. Toombs.

Askew leapt on this. “What—the school?”

“That’s right.”

“This is all mad!” he laughed. “Honestly, Mr. Toombs—
why are we here
? The speaker’s not coming, and even if he were, he’s leaving Harrow. The masters in the club are leaving. No one here’s even part of the school!”

“You’re being extremely rude, Rupert. I’m seriously considering asking you to leave the club altogether,” lashed out Mr. Toombs. Askew assumed a hurt expression. The other boys grinned. “Our chairwoman has called a meeting. Until she says otherwise, Essay Club is on. Andrew wrote his essay on short notice, I’m told. In all—and especially given what I’ve heard here tonight, he deserves a few extra minutes. . . .”

At that moment the door opened. The candles fluttered. Andrew Taylor stood in the doorway with a bleary expression, hair flattened on one side, holding a sheaf of papers.

HE FELT IT
at once. Almost as soon as he walked into the room. That full-of-water feeling. That living pressure, that surface tension, so strong it almost ejected him forcibly from the room. He felt them on him: eyes. Even though he was not in position yet, he felt those eyes staring across the table, drilling into the spot—at the head—where he would soon be sitting, in a high-backed chair, with its fan of blond-wood spokes. It was as if those eyes were ahead of time: already fixed: an inevitability. He felt them as he gripped his pages, as he turned sideways to slip past Christelow, as he greeted Fawkes with a nod and noticed Father Peter with a raised eyebrow, as he heard Mr. Toombs say
and here we are very good of you to come Andrew I was just saying what short notice you received for your preparation
as if they were words spoken from a boat deck high above, and he was sinking into dark water . . . but not yet. Somewhere in the murk stood Dr. Kahn, watching him—aware and empathic, here among the jostling boys.

He edged to his seat but did not raise his eyes. The boys settled down. Mr. Toombs made more polite remarks, something about a
swan song very sad to hear about your departure it feels as if we had just got to know you and were very glad to have you among our number
. Andrew was surprised that at least one voice—okay, two—let loose a modest but a clear
Hear, hear
. (Wallace and Antoniades. Unexpected.)
But at least we are able to partake in your essay . . . very fortunate . . .

Mr. Toombs’s voice trailed off in order to yield the floor to the speaker. And that was Andrew. He shuffled his papers, then arranged them to catch the maximum of the candles’ peachy glow.

he could not raise his eyes or he would see Harness

Harness was here

His pulse raced. What would happen if he did look? If he did greet those eyes? And whose chair was Harness sitting in? That empty one there, at eleven o’clock?

you know whose

He was glad he had written out the essay, instead of merely typing out notes—Dr. Kahn had been correct—because without his script he would have been lost. His mind sloshed and spilled, like someone running with a bucket. Sleep deprivation had unbalanced him.

and that presence

He felt as if he were on a slope, tipping forward

into the figure; crouched, pounce-ready

Harness—he knew—glared at him. Harness no longer felt any resemblance of love, lust, or desire. Just hate. Harness knew that Andrew, Fawkes, and Father Peter had come here to do battle. The room stank of it. The musk of a fight. And Harness was swelling his chest and limbering for combat.

I dare you even to extend yourself I dare you even to show yourself because if you do I will smash you

I know you are here to extinguish me but I have reserves you cannot underestimate ferocity and fierceness of life you know me too well to think you can

Didn’t you see what I did to the girl to your friend

How could Andrew continue his pretense of normalcy, in the face of this hostility? Yet there was Mr. Toombs, looking at him expectantly, with his pink cheeks and spectacles. Couldn’t Mr. Toombs, and the others, feel it as well? How could Andrew do something as refined as read aloud in such an environment? Like playing a violin recital on the prow of a rushing train. He felt nauseated, gripping the sides of the paper with his fingertips. He just wanted to crawl away, to sleep.

Andrew had watched the dawn come and had ended his essay abruptly. He had returned to his room in the Lot and packed his large suitcase. He lay there and thought of Persephone, tried to think about what the next day would bring for her—for them—but he could not project his exhausted mind into past or future anymore. This tortured mental cycling lasted until midafternoon, when a fit of last-minute stage nerves attacked, and he frantically retyped the final pages of the essay. Printed, stapled, and then, at last, napped . . . then an
oh-shit
wake-up . . . followed by a frantic run across the Hill, at 7:04
P.M.

Ahem.

The Truth About the Lot Ghost.

Lord Byron
, he read,
fell in love with John Harness when the latter was what we would call a Remove

The presence swelled. The others
must
feel it now, he was sure of it. He thought he saw Fawkes shuffle, suddenly uncomfortable, and Dr. Kahn pull her shawl around her as if a chill had descended.