The Red Road (2 page)

Ever since my sighting, the school
had been busying itself in calling all of our parents, to have us
taken home as soon as possible. We were all, following this assembly,
to go back to our dormitories and wait for our families to come and
get us. The school should be completely vacated by the following
evening, at the latest. For those boys that couldn’t easily get home
because they either lived abroad or their parents were not
immediately available, another of the boys’ families would be
requested to look after them.

“Joe,” Sam whispered in my ear
almost immediately, “can I stay with you?”

“Should be able to, so long as I
can persuade my parents. They’re away on a business trip at the moment.”

“Oh. When are they back?”

“Tonight,” I said. “I expect
they’ll come here straight from Gatwick. I’ll talk to Mr Somers
and get him to explain things. He’s got the number of their
offices in Geneva.”

“Cool, thanks,” Sam nodded.

We returned our attention to the headmaster who
continued talking for a while, letting us know that letters would be posted
out in the next couple of days giving our parents more information on
what was going to happen.

I saw the matron of the junior
school move from her place and pick one of the younger boys up out of
his seat as the headmaster started to wrap things up. I thought that
I had heard him sniffling earlier and saw as the two walked from the
assembly hall that he was sobbing quite profusely.

Was he related to
the victim? I wondered. Or was what had happened just very upsetting
for him? If this was his first time away from home, then I could well
understand. Many first-year junior boys cried a lot with
homesickness. For them, today would have been even more traumatising.
It wouldn’t have surprised me if, after today, some didn’t come
back.

Father Benedict concluded the
assembly a few minutes later, asking anyone who might have problems
leaving the school that night to talk to their housemaster. I wondered
how this might affect me if for some reason my parents were delayed
or chose to stay out of a country for longer than originally planned.

I didn’t relish the thought of
being left nearly alone in the school after everyone else had gone. And I couldn’t
shake the feeling that tonight I would be treated to a long overdue visit
from the goblins.

Chapter Two

I
n
recent years, I had started to suffer the most horrific nightmares,
in which I was tormented by a recurring image of being chased down a
dark corridor by hoards of stunted, spear-wielding goblins. Or, at
least, ‘goblins’ was what I called them. To tell the truth, I
wasn’t really sure what they were. Whenever I encountered them in
my dreams, they always appeared the same – glowing white faces,
sharp, pointy, yellow teeth, sticky-out ears, and murderous black,
pupilless eyes. They would laugh and lash their tongues when they saw
me, howling in delight ...

... and, damn, could these things
run.

I wasn’t sure what caused the
nightmares. Maybe it was a hormone imbalance, puberty, stress, or
something else. All I could be sure of was that the dreams always
started out the same way. I would find myself standing in a narrow,
white corridor, like those of Enfield and Cookson House. The lights
would be on, but far dimmer than they should be, and I would be stood
about halfway along, with several doors to my left-hand side. Where
the doors led depended on what the nightmare had in store for me that
night. Most often, like the windows on the right, the doors would be
locked. I had tried many times to open those windows, sometimes
unable to even reach them, so high up they would be placed.

It would be silent, save for the
soft splatting sound of the goblins’ feet as they approached from
around the bend in the corridor ahead of me. The slapping would be
followed by elongated shadows of hands and arms, clutching spears and
other terrible implements. Heads, with hooked noses and long ears,
came next until the first of the creatures rounded the corner. They
would charge instantly towards me with bloodcurdling screams, wasting
no time at all. It was as if they could smell me from miles away.

At that moment, I would always
attempt to do one of two things – either try and find a place to
hide, or run. Hiding never worked. Either the doors to the left would
remain shut tight, and the goblins would immediately dive on me, biting,
scratching, stabbing, eviscerating ... or the doors would open, only to
offer no sanctuary.

The interior of the room the door
opened into was inconsistent between dreams. Sometimes it was a
dormitory, vacant, save for bare mattresses set upon metal beds,
bedside lockers beside each. At other times the door led into one of
the school’s classrooms. On one occasion it was a poky little
library. Most of the time, I would run into a room already populated
by the sharp-toothed stumpy creatures, who would be waiting for me within.

I would try to barricade the room
whenever I could and hide under the beds, or even get inside the
bedside lockers themselves. It made no difference; the goblins would
always get in eventually. The door would burst open, dozens of the
pale-white creatures pouring in and starting to stab me with their
little spears and knives. I would crawl into the corner, begging them
for mercy and pleading with them to stop, but they never did.

Whenever I chose to run from them,
it was always atypical of a dream. Either I would never be able to
run fast enough, my legs moving as if through treacle, or I would fly
like the wind. When I was able to run properly, I would thunder the
opposite way down the corridor to the door at the other end, smashing
it open and rushing out into the clear light of day. I would always
emerge somewhere on the school grounds, though the exact location
varied every time. The grounds were always deserted and deathly
quiet, as if I were the last person left alive in the world. I would
sprint past the houses, the classrooms, the main school, sometimes
even the church, and down towards the sports fields. The goblins
would always be just behind me, never willing to give up. Even when I
was able to outstrip them, they would magically appear somewhere in
front of me, teeth gnashing and steel flashing.

And no matter what I did, the dream
would always end the same way – with my death.

The first time I experienced the
nightmare, I woke to find myself standing in the darkness of one of
the lavatories of the main school. One of the other boys was standing
by the door, holding it open and speaking very calmly.

“Joe?” he said.

“Hmm?” I replied.

“You’ve had a bad dream.”

“Huh?”

Despite everything, he didn’t turn
on the lights; perhaps he was concerned about how I might react. I
was standing directly in front of the long trough of the urinal.
Thankfully, it didn’t appear as though I had actually wet myself.

“Come on,” the boy said. “It’s
okay. Come with me and go back to bed.”

He stretched out a hand towards me,
and I went with him, leaving the lavatory and returning to my bed.
That was all I remembered about the incident. The next day,
however, my bed was surrounded by every other boy in the dormitory,
no less than fourteen faces staring into mine, all firing questions
at me and wanting to know if I was okay.

“Do you remember what happened
last night?”

“What were you shouting about?”

“Did you shit yourself?”

“How do you feel?”

“You
did
shit yourself,
didn’t you?”

Apparently, I had been screaming the
place down, wailing about how Freddy Krueger was going to get me, or
something like that. Though I had never seen any of the
Nightmare
on Elm Street
films, I’m not sure whether I would have really
preferred Kruger to the goblins in all honesty. A number of the other
boys had seen the films and told me about the vengeful spirit’s
murderous transcendence of the dream world and the real one. At least
my
tormentors were confined to my sleeping hours.

Though Butcher House provided a
bedroom for the housemaster or duty master, neither had heard me, as
none had been sleeping in the house that night. In the main, the duty
of ensuring a tightly run ship fell to the head of house, the house
prefects, and my own dormitory prefect (a boy by the name of Julian
Patrick, who left St Christopher’s after completing his GCSEs). It
was the first time he had been in charge of a dormitory, as well as my own
first month in the senior school itself. Wonderful introductions,
both of them.

I felt like death that morning and
was advised by Patrick to stay in bed until the school nurse became
available. I did so, and after all the other boys had showered,
dressed and made their way down to the refectory for breakfast, I
slouched on down to the clinic, still in my PJs, dressing gown and
slippers.

With my head spinning and my bowels threatening to fill my
pyjama bottoms with gallons of diarrhoea, I was admitted to the
infirmary immediately, where I stayed for seven days while I sweated
out a terrible fever. Only a handful of the boys came to see me,
mostly to bring me work I had missed, as well as letters from home
and penpals. Even so, they would stay as long as they could to keep
me company. They became my best friends from then on – Samuel
Gilmore, David Nurse, Robert Walker, and Barry Green. It was Sam that
had come to walk me from the lavatories back to my bed the night of
my sleepwalking episode.

The doctor came by twice during my
weeklong stay in the infirmary and discharged me on his second visit.
At the time, I thought the goblins were simply connected to the
fever. Sadly, they reappeared only a few weeks later. Quite what they
stood for I had no idea; maybe at some point in the future I would
find out.

Chapter Three

T
he
parents began to arrive at the school a little over an hour after the
assembly had finished. They came as a trickle to begin with, some of
the more local families putting in an appearance with such speed as
to make me think they did nothing except wait by the phone all day,
in case their little darlings were to fall down and graze their knee
and be in need of some TLC from Mummy.

By around six that evening, the
school grounds had been transformed into a scene that lent itself
more to the last day of term than a normal weekday. The roads outside
the houses and the main school were populated by all manner of
four-by-four vehicles; it looked like many of the parents had been
practical and just jumped into the family car, so as to arrive as
promptly as possible.

Others had to be different.

I had no idea whether they had been
told the true nature of events (I very much doubted it), but even if
they had, it clearly would have done nothing to dissuade some from
turning up at the school in sports cars. Some families at St
Christopher’s would leap at the chance to rub their wealth in the
faces of others, seeming to trade their cars in regularly for a more
up-to-date model in a bid to one-up one another.

I actually hoped
that none of the parents knew what had happened here today, and that it had simply been reported
as ‘an incident’. If not, I couldn’t believe that someone could
be as callous as to still feel the need to show off at such a time as this.

“Oh look, there’s Timpson’s
mum,” Baz said, as we stood together outside the entrance to
Butcher House. “Never wastes an opportunity to show off.”

We watched as the Ferrari drew
gracefully to a halt outside, looking as though it had just received
a thorough wash before leaving home; I couldn’t see a spot of dirt
or grime anywhere on its perfect red paintwork.

“I swear that’s a different car
to the one she arrived in at the start of term,” Baz muttered.

Baz (or Barry, to give him his proper
name) was one of the few boys in the school I really saw eye to eye
with. He had only been at the school for two years, much shorter than
my own tenure of six, but I already got the impression that he didn’t
intend on staying much longer. He had his head screwed on right,
though he was picked on by many of the other boys for no reason other
than his cockney accent. The Clique loved to rip into him for that,
repeating everything he said with emphasis on the missing letters in
his pronunciation.

Mrs Timpson stepped out of the car,
power dressed in a figure-hugging suit that I was fairly certain had
never seen the inside of an office, even on a visit to see her
husband. From what I understood, work was a four-letter word to the
woman. She was a lady of leisure, one that had found herself a rich,
older man; a successful but lonely man, of course, to live an easy
life. Now out of the car, she closed the door behind her and then
remained not three feet from the vehicle, clutching an
expensive-looking purse as she waited for her son to turn up.

“Why is she wearing sunglasses?”
I asked incredulously. “It’s cloudy.”

“Stuck up bitch,” Baz said.

The entrance to Butcher House was a
good place for people watching. Standing just outside the entrance
with the main door open, we could see most of what was going on in
the parking area, as well as into the downstairs hall and who was
coming down the flight of stairs.

We watched as other boys came down
from the dormitories and rooms above, some giving us a nod and a wave
(the younger ones), others sticking a finger up (the sixth formers).
They all carried an overnight bag filled with personal possessions
that they didn’t want to leave on the school grounds in their
absence. Ordinarily, when leaving at the end of term, we would have
our suitcases fetched and fill those with all our clothes, picking up
duvets, pillows, and all kind of other miscellaneous bits and pieces
along the way. The nature of the afternoon and the urgency to clear
the school completely within the next twenty-four hours meant there
was no time for any such thing.