The Quickening of Tom Turnpike (The Talltrees Trilogy) (2 page)

He
was right.  Barrington should not have been near the Sick Bay.  For about two
weeks, more and more boys had been coming down with illness.  Wilbraham had explained
to us at Assembly that there was a ‘flu epidemic and that Head Matron had
received a Directive to quarantine any boys who displayed symptoms.  The word
“quarantine” put me in mind of rabid dogs.  I didn’t like it.  You always hear
of people disappearing suddenly under suspicious circumstances and never being
seen again, like the fathers of some of my classmates.  Like my own father.  But
I knew I shouldn’t think like that.   Schoolboys are surely too young for
labour camps, aren’t we?

Suddenly
we heard footsteps.  Freddie looked at me and I nodded urgently.  And we ran,
slippers slapping stone stairs, echoing all around.  And just as we reached the
bottom to sneak through the Basement door, we heard another door opening two
floors above us.

The
temperature dropped sharply as we entered the Basement and, aside from the dank
dripping of a pipe somewhere, there was silence.  I became acutely aware that I
was wearing a threadbare dressing-gown.  But my unbidden shiver had nothing to
do with the cold.  The Basement was the sort of place where daylight
certainties abandon you.  If ghosts really do exist, then this must be their
habitat.

 “He
can’t have heard us,” said Freddie.  “Come on, down there.”

The
Basement was the dark bowels of the school building.  Down here was none of the
tired grandeur of the three floors above us.  It was a complex of huddled tunnels
and exposed pipes and wiring.  The storage rooms were down here, as well as the
Changing Rooms, the Woodwork Room and the Gym. 

And,
of course, the Dungeon.

And
down there to the left, looming heavy and ancient at the end of the passage,
was the Dungeon door.  It was a great, wooden door engraved with what had once
been geometric designs or perhaps forgotten runic symbols, but had over the
years been worn down to indistinct bumps and grooves.  More importantly, as far
as we were concerned, it had no lock, presumably because nobody of sound mind
would ever want to enter. 

But
we did. 

And
during the next few days, when the whole world would turn inside-out, there
would be many times when I would wish that we hadn’t.

I
had never been in the Dungeon before and had no idea what it contained or why
it even existed if not in order to give boys something of which to be afraid in
the dead of night.  Freddie had told the First Formers that the inside of the
Dungeon was unique to each boy because each had different terrors in differing
measures.  For some, the place would be crawling with giant spiders or scorpions;
for others, it was a dark labyrinth whose walls and ceilings were closing in,
suffocating them or burying them alive.

The
door’s growling set my heart pounding at a dramatic rate.  Freddie opened it
just enough for us to squeeze through and, as it snarled shut behind us, we
were immersed in cloying, impenetrable darkness.  I gripped Freddie’s forearm
instinctively to ensure that he had not been swallowed alive by the gloom.  But
neither of us spoke.

Gradually
my eyes adjusted slightly to the darkness, but enough for me see that we were
in a cavernous tunnel with two further tunnels branching to the right, one just
ahead of us and the other in the black distance. 

Suddenly
something brushed against my ankle.  I jumped with fright as whatever it was
scurried away and disappeared.  I finally mustered a quavering whisper. “Okay. 
So... we’re here now.  Let’s go back.  Even if his ghost
is
here, I
don’t think we want to meet it.  Look, you’re going to make up what we saw
anyway, so we might just as well go to bed, get a good night’s sleep and you
can tell people what you like in the morning.”

Freddie
gulped.  “You’re not...
scared
, are you?”  The atmosphere down here was bone-chilling.

“Of
course
not,” I lied unconvincingly, knowing that he was just as scared
as I was, and knowing that he was as unlikely as I was to admit it.  “It’s just
that, um... well we’ve got the Flucht tomorrow and... it’s getting very late.”

Perhaps
now I had given him an excuse to agree with me.  That was what I hoped.  The
Flucht was the beginning of our military education.  Every Third Former would
be given a three minute headstart to dash out into the Forest before the Seniors
came after us to bring us back to the school by whatever means necessary.  It
was the perfect opportunity for a Senior to settle any score he had with a
Junior.  By Tea, the corridors would be resonant with boys comparing grazes and
bruises, and the Duty Matron would be busy with the less fortunate boys; those
with broken ribs and noses.

“Okay. 
Okay fine.  Come on then,” he said and I felt a wave of relief and the urgency
to be back into my warm bed.

But,
just as we were heading back out into the Basement, we saw that, down the
passage, the door to the Spiral Staircase was being pushed open.  My eyes widened.

“Barrington
must have seen us.”  I whispered sharply, “Hide!”  

I
let the Dungeon door close as quietly as I could, with us still on the inside.

Freddie
had run ahead of me and plunged himself into the first side-tunnel to the
right.  I followed, with no sense of where I was going, running headlong into
utter blindness. 

Suddenly,
from somewhere in the darkness, something clutched my arm and dragged me off
balance.  I staggered to my right.

“Shh!”
whispered Freddie, releasing my arm.  “Don’t move a muscle.”

***

So,
that was where I stood, frozen to the spot, not even daring to catch my breath,
minutes away from being caught and sent to Behavioural School.  I should never
have listened to Freddie. 

Sure
enough, I heard the Dungeon door grunting open and could do nothing but listen
as assured footsteps became louder and louder, closer and closer.  From our
hiding place we could see that torchlight was being flashed past us and I could
see now that Freddie had managed to drag me in amongst what, I thought grimly,
appeared to be stacks of coffins leaning up against the wall.

A shadowy
figure moved slowly past, directly in front us.  I was racked by terror, rooted
to the spot and unable to catch a breath, my skin prickling with sweat in spite
of the cold.  But, in spite of my fear, I did notice something odd in the way
that Barrington seemed to be walking down the tunnel, slow and hesitant, like
he was looking for something, not following someone.  Maybe, just maybe, I
hoped, he hadn’t even followed us at all.  But that was silly, surely.  Why on
Earth would he be down here otherwise?

The
figure then paused directly in front of us as if he had noticed something.  I
was scrambling through my memory for anything I may have dropped.  I couldn’t
think of anything that I might have had in my dressing-gown pocket and I
certainly hadn’t carried anything down here. 

But
soon it became obvious that it wasn’t us that had caught Barrington’s attention
at all, but what looked like a metallic door set into the tunnel wall opposite
where we hid.  He passed the light of the torch around the edges of this door,
pausing at the keyhole.  He grabbed the doorhandle and pushed and tugged it,
but to no avail.  He then muttered something I couldn’t catch, turned to his
right and began to beam the torch in a zig-zagging motion along the tunnel’s
floor as if he was looking for something he had dropped.

He
turned again so that he was facing directly towards me.

My
heart thumped.  This was bad, very bad indeed.  Now I was totally exposed. 
Freddie had silently edged away to my left so that he was entirely hidden in
the narrow gap behind one of these hefty boxes.  But there was no more room for
me.  Even if there was, I was too petrified to move.  All Barrington had to do
was raise the torch to point it straight ahead of himself and I would be
caught.

He
moved the torch-beam slowly along the bottoms of the boxes.  Then, to my
horror, he paused with the light shining directly on my slippers.  I looked
down at my feet, glaring at them to tell them to keep still.  But I couldn’t
help it: something was digging painfully into my left foot through the soft
sole of my slipper and my big toe twitched treacherously.  He flashed the light
straight up towards my eyes.  I was blinded and terrified.  I still didn’t
move, somehow desperately hoping that if I didn’t, he wouldn’t see me.  But
that was stupid.  He must have been able to see me.

I
closed my eyes, wincing.  But the orange light blazed through my eyelids. 
Footsteps grated across the floor.  I braced myself to be hauled off my feet at
any moment, resigned to my fate, almost willing it on just so that this night
could be over with.

But
then, after what was probably a second or two, but felt to me like an eternity,
the light faded from my eyes and finally I heard Barrington turning sharply on
his heels and clicking off into the darkness. 

The
Dungeon door creaked shut behind him.

Freddie
breathed a heavy sigh of relief.  He shuffled past me and began to tiptoe
exaggeratedly, slowly inching out from among the boxes and towards the door. 

Before
I emerged after him, I crouched down to sweep the floor where I had been
standing to find out what was underneath my foot.  My hand was still shaking.  I
soon found what felt like a slender key, about the thickness of my little
finger, but three times the length.  Could this be what Barrington had been
looking for?  I decided not to tell Freddie, at least until tomorrow.  If this
was the key to the metal door, then he was bound to want to unlock it.  After the
fright I had just had, I certainly didn’t have the stomach for that.

So
I pocketed the key and crept with Freddie towards the Dungeon door.  He was
holding it slightly ajar so that he could check that the passage to the Spiral
Staircase was clear.  He looked at me and nodded.

But,
just as he caught my eye, his eyes widened and his face took on a haunting
pallor.  For at that moment, from the bowels of the Dungeon, came an aching,
lingering groan.

I
have never run so fast in my life.

two

I
woke up the next morning in a panic, that horrendous, otherworldly noise still
ringing in my ears.  And I was convinced that at some point that day, I would
be tapped on the shoulder and directed to Wilbraham’s office, where he would be
brandishing his cane, a fearsome length of silver birch, and lying to me that
he would take no enjoyment from my punishment.

 “Look,
Tom, I don’t know
how
Barrington didn’t see you.  All I know is that
it’s obvious that he
didn’t
see you.  You can’t spend the rest of your
life worrying about it.  Maybe you were so still that he
couldn’t
see
you.  I heard that there are ninjas in Japan who can stay so still that they
become invisible to the naked eye and you can only see them if you’ve got the
new Vampir night-vision lenses.  Maybe you did something like that without
realising.” 

Freddie
was probably right.  Not about the ninjas, but about that fact that I shouldn’t
spend all the time worrying about
how
I wasn’t seen.  He was just as
dismissive of the noise we heard as we were leaving the Dungeon:

“It
was obviously just Barrington opening a door in some other part of the
building.  Look, we were in such a state of fright last night, you see, that
our minds were playing tricks on us, so we must have just
imagined
that
the noise had come from inside the Dungeon.  It’s obvious when you think about
it!” 

But
this, of course, did not prevent Freddie from telling everyone he met on the
way down the Spiral Staircase to Showers that we had both seen the Deathly
Screamer and, as usual, the parts he invented overwhelmed those that were
true: 

“At
first we couldn’t see
anything
,” he began, in a theatrical tone and with
excessive hand gestures.  “But then he
materialised
in front of us.  He
was dark green and there were empty holes where his eyes had been and his
fingernails were as long as his forearms.  I must admit,” he added casually, “I
was a little bit scared when he drifted and pointed towards us and said, in the
deepest voice you can possibly imagine,” and Freddie put on the deepest voice
he could muster, “
“now you must leave or you will surely die!”
.  He
started to scream so loudly that his breath blasted through our hair.  So we
ran as fast as we could back to the dorm.”

He
also talked about the mysterious metallic door which, he asserted, must lead to
what he was now calling “the Crypt”.  “Well it’s obvious why there is a thick
bronze door,” he explained to anyone who would listen.  “It’s where they stored
the bits of all of the boys and Masters who were blown to pieces during the
Resistance.  Imagine the smell!”

But
I was unsettled.  Colonel Barrington must have been up to something and I was
just beginning to wonder whether his strange antics and the noise we had heard
were connected, when Peregrine Trout caught up with us, out of breath.

“Guyth.” 
Peregrine was one of our dorm-mates, tall and lanky, thin red hair and a brace
that had given him a ridiculous lisp.

“Guyth,”
he repeated, catching his breath, having taken the steps three at a time, “hath
either of you theen Blackadder thinthe you got up?”

“No,”
I replied.  Milo Blackadder had the bed opposite mine and was one of my best
friends.

“Well
I wath awake before the bell and hith bed wath empty then.”  He paused to let
the message sink in.  So, another boy taken ill.  What was happening to them
all?  It was starting to get weird – too many boys, too quickly.

 “But
he was absolutely fine before lights out last night,” I protested.  “Was he still
in bed when we got back from the Dungeon?”

“Dunno,”
shrugged Freddie, seemingly not concerned by Milo’s sudden disappearance.  But
it seemed very odd to me that a boy could go from pillow-fighting at eight
o’clock in the evening to being so ill by eight o’clock in the morning that he
had to be quarantined.  It just seemed far too unlikely.  I couldn’t think of
him saying anything he shouldn’t have.  He just wasn’t the type.

“Hey,
Grüber!” called Peregrine, setting off along the Lower Corridor after another
of our classmates.  “Grüber!”

“Fred,”
I whispered urgently when I was sure that Peregrine was out of earshot. 
Freddie was one of three or four friends I knew with absolute certainty I could
trust.  “Come on!  How can you not think...?”

“What?”
he interrupted sharply, knowing exactly why I was whispering.  “Do you really
think they’re all being taken away by the Gestapo?  Boys of our age and
younger?  What would be the point?”  He paused for a couple of Fourth Formers
to shuffle past us with towels round their waists.  “Nobody younger than
seventeen has ever been taken...”

“How
can you
possibly
know that?” I said angrily.  There’s nothing worse than
talking about things you shouldn’t be talking about when the person listening
doesn’t even agree.

We
had reached the Junior Changing Room.  It was crowded with boys in towels
heading to and from the Showers, too crowded for us to continue our
conversation.

He
rubbed his chin and shook his head.  “It’s a crazy idea,” he muttered to me.  “It’s
not as if the sick boys have been speaking out of turn, is it?  And don’t one
or two have fathers quite high up in the Ministries?”

That
was true, I thought.  One of the ill First Formers, Ambrose Milligan, claimed
he had a step-uncle who was assistant to Hans Fritzsche in the Propaganda
Ministry, meaning he was only two ranks removed from Doctor Goebbels himself. 

But
it still worried me and I shuddered as I thought again about Barrington’s
strange behaviour and that terrible howl in the Dungeon.

***

I
couldn’t concentrate in lessons at all that morning, not even Latin which I
usually like because of Mr. Caratacus’ bustling eccentricity.

The
summer sun blazed in through the window.  Everything in the room, from the
chirping blackboard at the front to the sagging bookcases at the back, seemed
to swell and yawn in the warmth.  All I could do was sit, stare out at the
mirage floating like an enchantment over the 1
^st
XI cricket pitch,
and worry until the lesson ended.

“Tom,”
called Mr. Caratacus, collaring me when the lesson ended.  “Can you tell me
anything I taught you during the lesson?”

Oh
dear.  I knew I wouldn’t be in trouble, but I hated to disappoint Caratacus
because, under his scruffy, bright orange hair which bushed out from underneath
his mortar board, he had a face of wide-eyed enthusiasm.

“Um...
the passive, Sir?  Amor, amaris, amatur...”

“Yes,
yes, I know the passive voice, young man,” he chuckled.  “But that was two
weeks ago.  Today we were working on the prepositions that take the ablative.”

I
began to apologise, but he cut me off.  “Look, it’s okay to be upset.  I know
that you’re worrying about Blackadder.  But listen, he’s going to be just fine,
just like the other boys.  They’re only being quarantined as a precaution.  So
stop worrying that he’s on his deathbed.  Right then,” he said, with a mock
military tone.  “Not only are you one of my star Latinists, but you are also
the Swallows’ star cross-country runner and I’m relying upon you to do well for
the House in the Flucht this afternoon.  So, as your Housemaster, I
order
you to stop your worrying and stay focussed!  So, run along.”

***

We
were clustered together at the edge of the Colts’ cricket pitch at the back of
the school, Swallows in white, Crusaders in blue.  There were thirty-five of us
who had failed to convince Head Matron that we had measles, or a broken leg, or
the bubonic plague.  Most years, ten to fifteen boys would be caught, beaten
and brought back.  They were always the weediest Third Formers and would be
made to wear a red armband for the rest of the term.  If that happened, you
could guarantee that you would be bullied for the rest of your life.

I
was anxious, but, looking around furtively, I could see that some of the others
were shuddering.  I tried to remain calm. 

Freddie
and I had a plan.

The
Seniors were on the gravel between us and the Veranda, whose steps arced
gracefully around its pillars and up to the French windows of the Main Hall. 
They were swaggering, pointing, nudging and joking. 

Behind
them, looking down upon all of us from the terrace above the Veranda, smoking
tobacco rations and sipping acorn coffee, were the Masters.  Professor
Ludendorff, the Schulekommandant, was also there flanked by three other Party
members, Doctor Saracen, our Germanic Studies and Ethnic Hygiene teacher, and
two others I did not know.  Doctor Saracen’s gown hung from his hunched
shoulders like the wings of a vulture watching silently from the highest branch
of a tree.  His face was sunken like his flesh was too tired to stay on his
bones, he had goggly eyes and jowls that dragged down his lower lip to reveal a
jumbled menace of brown teeth.

I took
a deep breath and tried to distract myself.

On
a day like today, with the sun blazing down, the school building looked so
grand and so regal that you would never suspect how tatty and run-down it was
inside; threadbare carpets, peeling wallpaper, groaning furniture and rising
damp.  But out here it looked like a palace.

“Sieg
heil!” shrieked Ludendorff, with his right hand skyward. 

He
liked to give his speeches from the terrace high above us all, probably because
he thought it made him seem like the
Führer.  But really
there was no similarity at all.  The Schulekommandant had a
silly,
high-pitched voice.  He was a strangely nervous and apologetic man most of the
time and his right hand would usually be shakily clutching a hanky to mop his
permanently sweaty brow.  I secretly liked Ludendorff, though I would never
admit that to anyone.  He was short, fat, bald and bespectacled and had gentle,
childlike eyes.  He was also very kind to homesick First Formers, occasionally
bringing them contraband fruit.  Quite a few of the boys called him “Vater”,
Father, which he took to be a term of affection, not realising that we were
actually just poking fun at his startling flatulence.

As
Ludendorff was squeaking on about something to do with the virtues of physical suffering,
something peculiar caught my eye:

Movement
in one of the windows.  The fourth window to the left of the Veranda.  I would normally
have thought nothing of it, but the reason why it puzzled me was that I had
absolutely no idea what or where this room even was.  From the outside, it
looked as if it must be next to the Maths rooms and behind the Library.  But I
hadn’t the faintest notion of how to get into this room or of what might be
inside.  I would have to ask Freddie.  He was bound to have some explanation.

But
suddenly, just as I was contemplating the location of this mysterious room, a ghoulish,
black figure materialised in its window.  My heart thumped.  From here it was
difficult to make out much detail.  Maybe I was imagining it, maybe I was still
shaken from the events of last night, but it seemed as if this shadowed being
was pointing towards me.  I shivered coldly and was about to turn away, but just
then, for a brief sliver of a moment, I was certain that I saw the lank frame
of Colonel Barrington, with his thickly lacquered white hair, approach the
figure in the window and then disappear from view. 

I shook
my head, blinked and looked again, but they were gone.  Had my eyes played a
trick on me?  I was sure I had seen Barrington, but the other figure?  It was
like some kind of unearthly spectre, conjured by the Colonel with the potions
he concocted in the Chemistry Lab.

There
was an unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach.  Too many strange things
were happening, small things which made no sense when they were added
together.  Colonel Barrington was up to something.  I was willing to bet it was
something sinister.

“Blut
und Ehre!” shrilled Ludendorff.  “Blood und Honour, mein boyz!” 

A
hush descended as he raised his luger and fired it into the air. 

We
were off.

“Who?”
I said.

“Doctor
Boateng,” Freddie repeated.  “Don’t you ever listen to anything Wilbraham says
at Assembly?  He’s
African
.  He’s come from Europe for a week to sit in
on our lessons and see how things are done.”

“But
that’s impossible!  How on Earth did he get a travel permit?  An
African
?!”

“I
dunno.  Friends in high places, I suppose.  Wilbraham said he’s an
Ehrenarier
.”

“A
what?”

“Ehrenarier. 
An honorary Aryan.  It means he must be
personal
friends with Göring.”

“You’re
kidding!  How can you have honorary Aryans?  That makes no sense at all!” 

It
must have been at least an hour since the school bell had sent the Seniors
after us, and we had heard and seen nobody from our vantage point in the limbs
of an enormous, gnarled monkey-puzzle tree.  The air was cool and quiet and we
were at the furthest reach of the Forest, where the trees are thickest and the
light struggles to penetrate the canopy.  I was glad I wasn’t alone.  Even the
birds knew to keep away from this place because far, below us on the Forest
floor, lay a smooth, flat slab of stone, half buried under the mud and
bracken:  The Black Dog’s Grave.