Skippy Dies (80 page)

Helen who was Helle, the Druid says, was none other than Persephone, the Goddess of Death and Resurrection. It is she this
whole land belonged to, it is her Door atop this hill.

Ste lets out a sigh, looks at his watch.

In Erin of old she was Brigit, the exalted one, the fiery arrow. In Wales she was the Ninefold Muse Ceridwen. She is Ashtaroth,
Venus, Hecate, and a thousand others. She is the Goddess who underlies all things, the supreme object of desire whom no man
may resist and no man may possess without being destroyed, who ruled us all before her throne was stolen from her.

And suddenly Carl knows why Dead Boy brought him here. He is going to take Carl back with him, through the Door! He wants
to scream, he wants to get up and run. But there is a spell on him making him weigh a million tons. It’s the hill, already
pulling him into it, it’s the hands in the fire holding him down. Soon he will hear the Door open, then the shadows will come!

Stolen by the Church, the Druid says, by little priests in cells, scribbling out their Bibles, loving only gold and power!
Thieves and paedophiles, who presided over a perversion! But she will be avenged! She will burn them all in her holy fire!

Ste jumps to his feet. I’m freezin me hole off listenin to this shite! he shouts. See youse in the car! He turns to go back
down the hill – but now the little man gets up too, he puts his hand in his jacket –

Then Barry slumps forward. After a moment, gently but swiftly, the tips of his hair catch on the bonfire and light into little
flames, like birthday candles. He lets out a loud snore. Everybody starts laughing, even Ste, even the little cross-eyed man.

‘I think someone’s had his fill,’ the Druid says.

‘Can’t say I fuckin blame him,’ Deano says. ‘This weed is fuckin lethal.’

‘It’s not weed, lad.’ The Druid laughs a big chesty laugh. ‘It’s heroin.’ He laughs some more, and they all do too, laughing
and laughing, everyone is laughing!

But Carl feels so, so sad.

And then the screaming starts.

‘I’m just wondering if it’s going to be entirely safe…’ Jeekers in the wings.

‘I don’t imagine anyone will get
hurt
,’ Ruprecht says. ‘Though there may be some structural damage.’

‘Oh my God,’ Jeekers whimpers to himself. But it’s too late – Titch is already introducing them; and now they are walking
out onto the stage. The lights are so bright, and so hot! Yet even through them it seems he can feel the icy gaze of his parents,
the avid gleam of their eyes as they wait to grade him out of ten in this new field of endeavour; and although he cannot see
them, and in spite of what he is about to do, he works up a watery smile and directs it into the great darkness.

Two days ago, Jeekers was eating lunch in the yard on his own, just as he does every day, when Ruprecht sat down beside him
and told him he wanted to get the Quartet back together. Jeekers was surprised to hear this, after everything that had happened.
But then Ruprecht explained
why
. He wanted to use the Quartet to get a message to Skippy. I know it sounds unorthodox, he said, but the fact is that there’s
a sound scientific principle behind it – here he reeled off a list of nineteenth-century names who had apparently tried a
similar thing. Where they went wrong, he said, was in thinking of us, our four-dimensional spacetime, as
here
, and the other dimensions as
there
, which meant they needed some kind of magical substance to bridge the gap in between. But in fact, you don’t need any such
substance – or rather, according to M-theory, ordinary matter is
also itself the magical substance
! He paused here, looking at Jeekers with eyes that blazed like Catherine wheels.

Strings, he said. If they ripple one way they make stuff, and if they ripple another way they make light, or nuclear energy,
or gravity.
But in each case they perform these ripples in
eleven dimensions
. Each string is like a chorus line with a stage curtain falling down the middle of it, so that one part is in our world,
and the other is in the higher dimensions. The same string that makes up one quark of one atom of the handle of your tennis
racket could at the same moment be revolving in an entirely other universe. So if
every
string goes beyond the veil, might it not be possible to somehow pass a message along the string from our side so it reaches
the other side?

Like two tin cans tied together? Jeekers said.

Exactly! Ruprecht said. Once you see it, the concept is quite simple. It merely becomes a question of
how
. That’s where the Quartet comes in.

In Lodge’s book, he explained, the soldiers in Summerland, which was what they called the Otherworld, reported that they could
hear certain musical performances from the Albert Hall. What they were hearing were radio broadcasts. Evidently certain combinations
of sonic architecture and radio frequency have this ‘amphibious’ quality that enables them to travel over to the higher dimensions.
My theory is that some kind of sympathetic resonance must be involved. The tricky thing then is to find these amphibious frequencies.
In the past they used human mediums, who sniffed them out by a process of intuition. However, with a simple recalibration
of the Van Doren Wave Oscillator, we can alleviate all need for a medium by translating our sonic ‘message’ into
every possible frequency
– one of which has, of necessity, to be the one audible to the dead…

Listening to him elaborate on his plan, Jeekers recognized that Ruprecht had finally lost the plot. His experiments had always
been a little zany for Jeekers’s taste; still, in the past he could appreciate that they did have some exhilarating, if fleeting,
points of correspondence with reality. This, though – this was delusion, nothing more.

So why – why, why, why! – had he said yes? It’s not that he hasn’t felt sorry for Ruprecht over these last few weeks, and
of course he feels terrible about what happened to Skippy. But when
he thinks of how much trouble they’re going to get into – and right in front of their parents! It’s all right for Dennis and
Geoff, they don’t have academic records to protect. But Jeekers is putting his whole future in jeopardy! Why?

Yet even as he asks it he knows the reasons why. He is doing it precisely because it is pointless and foolish and out of character.
He is doing it because it is the kind of thing he would never, ever do, because the kind of thing he
does
do – following the rules, working hard, being Good like a boy ordered from a catalogue – has lately come to seem quite empty.
It might have something to do too with Dad getting Mr Fallon fired, even when Jeekers begged him not to; or maybe the creeping
realization that it was the Best Boy that Dad loved, not Jeekers, and that if he was kidnapped, and the Best Boy left in his
place, Dad would not be sad.

Anyway, here he is. And as he looks across the stage – at the other three primed over their instruments, Geoff’s triangle
lilting ever so slightly back and forth, like a leaf in anticipation of a breeze; Dennis’s smirk just visible at the mouthpiece
to his bassoon; Ruprecht breathing very slowly, focus fixed on the back of the auditorium, on his lap the mangled horn that
Jeekers still can’t look at without setting off an interior pandemonium of alarm; and then at Father Laughton, poor unsuspecting
Father Laughton, as he raises his baton – the weird thing is, even though he knows Ruprecht is wrong and there is no chance
of this working, still, at this precise moment in time – beneath the bright lights, shaking with nerves, surrounded by parents
and priests in the Sports Hall on a Saturday night – reality
does feel distinctly unreal
, and what seemed unreal, conversely, feels a lot closer than before…

And the music, when it begins, sounds so beautiful. Pachelbel’s familiar melody, worn threadbare by endless TV commercials
for cars, life assurance, luxury soap, by street-performers in black-tie, mugging for tourists in high summer, by any number
of attempts to invoke Old-World Elegance, accompanied by haughty waiters bearing trayfuls of tiny cubes of cheese – tonight
it seems to its audience entirely new, to the point of an almost painful fragility.
What is it that makes it so imploring and so sweet, so disconcertingly (for the older members of the audience who have come
tonight expecting merely to be pleasantly bored and now find themselves with lumps in their throats)
personal
? Something to do with the horn that large boy in the silver suit is playing, perhaps, a new-fangled instrument that looks
like it must have been run over by a truck, but produces a sound that’s like nothing you’ve ever heard – a hoarse, forlorn
sound that just makes you want to…

And then the voice comes in, and you can actually see a shiver run through the decorous crowd. Because there is no singer
on the stage, and given that Pachelbel’s Canon does not have a vocal part, listeners could be forgiven for mistaking it for
a ghost’s, some spirit of the hall roused by the music’s beauty and unable to resist joining in, especially as the voice –
a girl’s – has an irresistibly haunting quality, spare, spectral, carved down to its bare bones… But then one by one the audience
members spot beneath the mike stand over to the right, ah, an ordinary mobile phone. But who is she? And what’s she singing?

Holy smokes – it’s
BETHani
! A new murmur of excitement, as younger spectators crane their necks to hiss in the ears of parents, aunts, uncles – it’s
‘3Wishes’, the song she wrote after she broke up with Nick from Four to the Floor, when there were all those pictures of her
at her mum’s wearing skanky clothes and actually looking quite fat – some people said that was all just part of the publicity,
but how could you think that if you listened to the words?

– which the girl who’s singing now fills with such longing, such loneliness, only amplified by the crackling of the phone,
that even parents who view
BETHani
with suspicion or disapproval (often coloured, in the case of the dads, by a shameful fascination) find themselves swept
up by its sentiments – sentiments that, separated from their r’n’b arrangement and grafted onto this melancholy spiralling
music three hundred years old, reveal themselves as both heart-rending and also somehow comforting – because their sadness
is a sadness everyone can recognize, a sadness that is binding and homelike.

So that as the chorus comes around once more, you can hear young voices emerge from the darkness, singing along:

– so that for these few moments it actually seems that Ruprecht could be right, that everything, or at least the small corner
of everything that is the Seabrook Sports Hall, is resonating to the same chord, the same feeling, the one that over a lifetime
you learn a million ways to camouflage but never quite to banish – the feeling of living in a world of apartness, of distances
you cannot overcome; it’s almost as if the strange out-of-nowhere voice is the universe itself, some hidden aspect of it that
rises
momentarily over the motorway-roar of space and time to console you, to remind you that although you can’t overcome the distances,
you can still sing the song – out into the darkness, over the separating voids, towards a fleeting moment of harmony…

And then – just as manly hands throughout the Hall move clandestinely to brush away rogue tears – something happens. At first
it’s hard to detect what it is, other than that it’s
wrong
, very wrong. Heads recoil involuntarily; a spasm of distress flickers across Father Laughton’s cheek, as at some transcendental
tooth-ache.

It’s the song – it appears to have somehow
bifurcated
; that is to say, it continues on as it was, but also and at the same time in a different key. The result is viscerally, nails-across-a-blackboard
ugly, but the musicians do not seem to have noticed, and continue not to notice as the song does it again, so that there are
now
three
versions playing at once, in different keys – and then another, and another, like parallel-universe Canons somehow gathered
into the same auditorium, getting louder all the while. Wildly you look to either side of you, wondering if you’re going mad,
because this surely is what madness must sound like. Everywhere you see hands pressed to ears, faces shrivelled up like snails
retreating into their shells. Now as the layers mount on top of one another, some supra-song begins to loom above them, a
song of all possible songs, something not so much heard as felt, like the awful oppressive atmospheric weight preceding a
storm or other impending catastrophe. The volume soars; still Ruprecht et al. play on impassively. The engineer at the sound-desk
regards his levels in horror; and now the Automator staggers out from the wings and into the waves of ineluctable noise, which
has now achieved the status of
unthinkable
,
impossible
, no longer remotely discernible as a song; he lurches over the stage, like a man in a hurricane, only to be assailed, just
as he reaches Ruprecht, by a peal of sonic energy that is like nothing on Earth –

Howard had driven to Seabrook at full tilt – his hand, bound clumsily in a huge swollen mitten of linen bandage, screaming
every time he had to change gears or apply the brake, making him scream along with it – without knowing quite what he would
do when he got there. The vague plan he had in his mind, of unmasking the coach in front of a gasping audience, followed by
a Hollywood-style punch-up, Howard and Tom
mano a mano
, had, he knew, some serious holes (how could he fight with an injured hand? How could he fight a
disabled man
?); still, for the moment he preferred to leave these to one side, instead racing ahead to the aftermath, in which he arrived
at Halley’s door, bruised and bloody from his encounter, but – as she would recognize instantly – inwardly restored. She would
quieten his burbled apologies with a finger to the lips; she would smile that smile he had missed so much – so bright and
strong, like a kinder, warmer cousin of light – and take him by his good hand inside to her bed.