The White Devil (4 page)

As Persephone reached the door, a head heaved into one of the window frames and peered up the drive suspiciously. It scowled at him. Bald crown. Wire-frame glasses worn on the nose tip. Ferocious, flared nostrils.
That must be Mr. Vine
. Andrew backed away as instinctively as if he’d heard a dog’s warning bark.

NOT ONE OF
his
, was Sir Alan Vine’s assessment of Andrew as the housemaster watched the boy from his living room. No meat on the shoulders or back. Long hair. Arts type. An extreme specimen, even. No, not one of his, but hanging about nonetheless. Sir Alan understood why, when he spotted his daughter three-quarters of the way down the drive.
Yes, she had been speaking with the long-haired character at the top of the drive.
He grew alarmed and came in for a closer look. The boy’s appearance—that hair, that slouch—affected a countercultural pose. Just the kind he knew his daughter would sniff out. Sir Alan’s shoulders tightened in annoyance.

The front door banged shut and her greeting rang in the hall.

“Who
is
that boy up there?” he called out.

He walked into the hall to pursue her but she had clattered upstairs too quickly. A second door slam; her bedroom. Was she ignoring the question? Or had she just not heard it?

He returned to the window to stare at the top of the drive where the shaggy Harrovian had stood. The spot was empty now; just hedges and trees.

He frowned.
He would have to keep an eye out for that one
.

ANDREW TURNED AND
trudged uphill. He found himself exhausted and excited by Persephone’s many-angled verbal attacks, and he groaned inwardly at all the ways he had acted like a dork. He became so preoccupied with revisiting every word of the conversation that he did not immediately realize he was lost. One of his fellow newboys that morning had told him emphatically that, when heading back to the house on the High Street,
not
to take the fork that goes down the hill
.
That leads away from the school. You’re sure to get lost
. But now, trudging
up
—ostensibly the right direction—the road looked distinctly wrong. There were no houses or shops. He found himself on a steep slope, with the school buildings he’d toured that morning below him, on his right. To his left was a brick wall. Ahead stood a gazebo-like wooden gateway leading to an old stone church and a graveyard. Carved into the wood on the left side of the gateway arch were the words B
LESSED
A
RE
THE
D
EAD
. On the right, as if it were a condition in fine print, was added W
HICH
D
IE
IN THE
L
ORD
.

Andrew hesitated. Someone had told him that Harrow-on-the-Hill was the highest point between London and the Ural Mountains. Here, at the crest of the hill, he believed it. The sky, which had grown white with low-hanging clouds, felt close enough to touch. No one stirred in the churchyard. After traveling in a pack all morning, he found himself drawn in by the isolation of the place. He followed its twisting stone path. Weather-worn headstones thrust out of the grassy churchyard like fingers. Thick trees, vines, and bracken encircled the place. Soon he had passed behind the church and saw a footpath down the far side of the hill. Again he paused. The path, also shadowed by heavy boughs and vines, had the silent, airless quality of a nook for bad behavior. But he did not smell the urine or see the garbage or the broken crack pipes he expected, and the path seemed to lead down and to the left, where he needed to go; so he pushed forward.

A sound cut the air. A growling, a barking. Andrew froze and searched around him for the origin of that noise.

Then he found it. Twenty paces down the path, a man straddled another man. The one on the bottom lay almost flat. The man on top was the source of the noise. He was wearing a long black frock coat with tails, which hung on him baggily and bunched at the shoulders. With both hands he thrust his weight upon the other man, smothering him. He snarled from the effort. The attacker’s face horrified Andrew. The eye sockets were sunken; the eyes protruded, a vivid blue; his flesh was a morbid gray. Long blond hair—almost white, albino-looking—hung over his eyes. Once he was forced to break from his labor to cough—and Andrew recognized the noise that had drawn him. The cough combined the bark of a sick animal with a wet, slapping sound. The skeletal man drew his hand across his mouth. Then he looked up. He locked eyes with Andrew.

Those eyes seemed to stab him across the space separating them. They belonged to a young man. His figure was scrawny, diseased: he reeked of death.

Andrew felt sick to his stomach. He staggered back a step, turned, and began to run, escape. But something stopped him after a few paces.

The victim. The figure on the ground.

There was something familiar in the grey trousers and black shoes that he could see protruding from under the attacker.

They looked like Harrow clothes.

Andrew stopped and forced himself to turn back.

He advanced. The scene came back into view. The victim lay there, supine, in silence. No attacker. Nothing moved. Just heavy tree branches enclosing the space. Vines entwining the fence rings. Andrew moved forward, taking in more information with every step.

Black wingtips.

Grey trousers.

White shirt.

Arms crooked, one flung over the body, protectively.

A smear of blood stained the right cheek.

Then another kind of alarm came over Andrew, and he ran toward the reclining figure.

Even before he saw the cracked Harrow hat, he knew it was a student. But he stared at the face in shock. It had lost all dignity: gravel and sandy grit stuck to the eyebrows and mouth. The eyes were turned upward. The mouth hung open, a swimmer gulping for air. With the skin a translucent white—all of that sunshine leached away, already—Andrew could scarcely recognize his friend. He knelt, he grasped the hand—then quickly let it go. It was cold. The nails had gone purply grey. Not knowing what else to do, he placed his hands all over the corpse and searched him—neck, wrist, chest—feeling for pulse, or breath, or any sign, as if Theo Ryder’s life were a set of keys he could find by patting him down.

3

The Death of a Boy at School

A STEADY, LAZY
rain fell. An ambulance backed up to the spot. Its reverse-gear warning beeped several times; its lights twirled. Two white police BMWs, with sirens and orange stripes, blocked the entrance to Church Hill Road. The area had been taped off, and the coroner’s team was doing its job. One detective, a man, stood waiting: for the coroner’s team to finish, for his partner to get the statement from the witness. The witness was a teenager, so his partner, a woman, was doing the interview. He was one of these schoolkids, the ones in the straw hats who looked like they belonged in a different century. This one had long, shaggy black hair, and he was tall, too adult to be wearing those school clothes. He looked like he should be playing in AC/DC, the detective smiled to himself. The kid sat in the backseat of their car, his legs turned out the open door, facing the female detective, who stood on the pavement; the kid’s body language indicated shock. He fingered the hat he held in his hands, never raised his eyes, mumbled, shook his head. The detective saw his partner gesture back to where the body was found—she was trying to get a reaction, prodding the kid to give up more. The detective watched closely. The boy raised his eyes. They flicked back to the spot where the body was being zippered up, and the face recoiled, as if the boy were afraid the body might heave upright and begin walking like a zombie. Soon the partner gave it up and ambled back.

“Anything?” the detective asked his partner.

“Not really. The patrolman found him here, shouting for help.” She checked her notes. “Andrew Taylor. They were mates. Next-door neighbors in the little dormitories here. Houses, whatever they call them. Mr. Taylor came walking up here and found the body.”

“Anything about the victim? What was he doing back here? Drugs?”

“There was nothing on the body. This one’s American.” She nodded back at Andrew. “Arrived yesterday. First day at school.”

“Bad luck. Did he notice anything?”

“He said the body already seemed stiff. Saw the blood on the face.”

“Did he move him?”

“Checked for a pulse.” She hesitated, then turned back to look at Andrew.

“What?”

“He’s awfully jittery,” she said. “Like he saw something. Seems afraid.”

“He didn’t look too responsive from where I stood.”

“No,” she agreed. “Want to have a go?”

“Not really.”

“What else have you got to do? Get rained on?”

The detective ambled over to Andrew, still seated in the back of the detectives’ car, his legs resting on the pavement. The detective squatted and faced him.

“I’m Detective Bryant. I think you just met my partner.”

“Hi,” Andrew murmured.

“Rather a bad shock,” Detective Bryant offered, with a grimace of sympathy.

Andrew did not react.

Bryant decided to take a random shot. “You saw what happened, didn’t you?”

Andrew raised his eyes quickly.

Bryant felt a thrill. He took another shot. “Not what. Who. You saw who killed him. Am I right?”

Now the boy’s eyes went wide. Terrified.

“Who was it?” Bryant kept bluffing. “One of the locals? Someone from school?”

Andrew searched the detective’s face. For an instant Andrew thought the policeman knew something; knew, somehow, what he had seen; but no one familiar with the gaunt, white-haired figure could have assumed the detective’s flat, factual expression. The detective was groping in the dark. Andrew went back to staring at his hands.

“The other detective told me he died this morning,” said Andrew. “So how could I have seen it happen? I didn’t find him until noon.”

The detective silently cursed his partner.

“Then what?” Bryant demanded, a little too urgently, sensing his moment was passing. “You’re frightened, I can tell. What of? I won’t tell anyone,” he added in a flourish of disingenuousness.

But the boy’s eyes had focused on something else. The detective turned to follow his gaze. A heavyset woman in a black raincoat had arrived at the crime scene perimeter. She was breathlessly asking for help from the policeman standing guard there, then bickering with him as the answers he gave were evidently unsatisfactory. Eventually the policeman looked over at Andrew and pointed. Matron fastened her eyes on the boy and advanced.

“Last chance,” said Bryant.

“I didn’t see anybody,” said Andrew.

“Don’t lie to me,” snarled the detective.

Their eyes met in a standoff.

Moments later, Matron reached them. “There you are!” she panted. “No one would give me any information,” she scolded Detective Bryant. “Can someone tell me what is going on here?”

“Now you’re in trouble,” mumbled Andrew.

Bryant rose from his haunches, obliged to answer the woman’s many questions and to listen to her moans of sorrow. He was forced to watch in silence—cowed by her busy, blowsy manner—as she wrapped an arm around Andrew and marched him down the hill.

“I’m still interviewing him,” he called after them, helplessly.

“He’s underage and the school’s responsibility,” Matron snapped over her shoulder.

The road stretched empty and slick for thirty yards. Andrew and Matron descended together, leaving the bustle of police activity behind them. Ahead they faced a throng that had gathered below, in silence, blockaded behind another police car: countless bluers growing dark in the rain. A sea of Harrow hats. The black robes of beaks. The police let Andrew and Matron pass. They were immediately pressed by the boys’ damp bodies and awed faces.

What happened?

Is it true someone died?

Is it someone from school?

Did you see anything?

Andrew pushed past them. They crowded him, asking, demanding, some grabbing. The rain intensified, pelted his face, trickled down his cheeks. A beak took his elbow,
Let him through, please, boys. Come now, please
, and ushered him, with Matron, through the crowd. The beak asked him if he was all right, what house was he in, and Andrew lied,
Yes
, and Matron answered
The Lot
. But Andrew did not see his fellow students or recognize any of their features; he perceived only the ashen face, the sunken eyes; the flaps of the frock coat and the echo of that horror-filled cough.

“NEVER BEFORE,” MATRON
muttered, half grief, half grumble.

She removed his wet things with all the care of a farmer shucking an ear of corn. She told him to lie quiet. She put a blanket over him. She did all this while maintaining a stream of talk, mainly to herself.

“In fifteen years.” She shook her head. “And, oh, what will the poor parents say? Imagine getting that phone call. You’d wish you were dead. I hope they have other children. Oh, but they do—Theo had brothers and a sister. Won’t break their hearts any less but it’s good to have others.” Then, almost angry, already converting the fresh news to gossip and rumor: “God knows what happened to him. He was too young for a heart attack, or an aneurysm. Healthy boys just don’t up and die.”

Andrew sat up in bed. He wanted to explain to her, help her understand. “Matron, I saw . . .”

She met his gaze and waited for him to finish.

I saw a murder!
He wanted to shout.
I saw someone dressed in an outsize, costumelike overcoat suffocating Theo.

Yes . . . and then what?

This is the question he had been asking himself since he scrambled down the hill, shouting for help, and then returned to wait with the body. He had been alone there some five minutes before he realized that the attacker had disappeared. Not run away, with a fading footfall or a scramble down the path. He had simply vanished. With the high fence on either side, there would have been no means of escape. Andrew would have seen the gaunt figure run off. But Andrew had been so shocked—shocked? or was it something else: a kind of swoon, a surrender to an oppression that lingered on that spot?—that he had not even noticed the attacker’s disappearance. In such a gloom, it was almost
natural
that the snarling, uncanny figure had snapped out of existence so suddenly.

And then he disappeared, Matron.

Andrew’s mouth hung open.

If you say those words
, he assured himself,
she will think you are crazy. She will tell others. Then every kind of attention you don’t want, you will get. Think what St. John Tooley and Vaz would do with information like that. They’d rip you to shreds. Brand you a psycho, a freak.

Fortunately for Andrew, Matron took that moment to indulge a rare moment of sympathy, and leapt in to finish his thought.

“I know. Your friend, like that. Poor Theo. Of all people.” Then Matron’s eyes screwed down on Andrew—it was the nasty American she was talking to, she seemed to remember—and he understood quite clearly in that moment that Matron would have rather seen
him
a cadaver on the Church Hill path than sunny, charming Theo. “You’re in shock,” she announced, standing. “Lie back and rest. I can’t sit here with you all day. The housemaster and the head of house need to be told. And the head man. And the parents. But that’s not my job, thank goodness.”

Then, without a glance back, she rushed off to get Mr. Fawkes, leaving Andrew alone.

HE LEANED ON
one elbow and peered out the window. The rain, ignorant of the tragedy now beginning to stir the school, patiently tapped each leaf of the plane tree outside his window as it fell.

Andrew flopped back onto the bed. He was at last warm, dry, and alone, but as though suffering a delayed reaction, he felt a shudder rack him from shoulders to toes. He pulled the blanket tighter. He began a kind of wandering debate with himself.

You’re sleep-deprived
, he reasoned.
You’re wigging because you’re starting a new school
.

But the body had been real
. He had felt it, cold and stiff and heavy. It had rolled a little when he had touched it.

It. Him.

Theo is really dead.

Andrew’s mind recalled the few images it had gathered of Theo over twenty-four hours. He felt sick to his stomach.

He thought of the gaunt figure. If it killed Theo, could it kill others? Andrew had locked eyes with it. Something had passed between them, a kind of recognition.
Could the figure find him somehow? Would Andrew be the next victim?

He sat up. He must tell the police, let them know that the pale figure had strangled Theo. Whatever it was, it was dangerous.

No. They will think you’re insane
.
They will call your parents.

And his parents would pull him out of school. Then he really would be fucked.

With trembling hands he sought his cell phone in his desk drawer. Out of power. There was a charger somewhere. He found it and plugged it in. Pressed D. Saw names appear.

DAD

DANIEL

He let the cursor land on
DAD
. The 203 area code popped up. His thumb went to the green button. He ached to hear a familiar voice. Even his father’s. An American accent. He wanted to tell his father the whole story. Not pieces of it, not the parts he thought his father could handle, but everything, just to hear him out, just to hear somebody nod their heads, say
Yeah, that’s pretty weird
.

The thumb rose off the button. He knew his father could not do that.

Even if the thousand miles had not been separating them (he knew this put his father on edge, made him his most controlling), Andrew could never draw out the kind of reaction he wanted now from his father. He might have once. At the dawn of Andrew’s puberty, his father had bought a canoe and had begun taking Andrew out on the Housatonic. He pointed out birds in the marshes and told stories—of his days at Penn, or his generally paranoid theories about surviving the corporate life-struggle, and asked Andrew about the soap operas unfolding among his school friends. Sometimes they even forgot to paddle and just drifted, talking and listening to each other’s voices and watching the ospreys carry off their prey; not forced to face each other; pointed in the same direction. But the arguments waited for them, a year later, back at the house. At first about ordinary things like grades and curfews. Then they grew bitter. His father’s frustrations mounted (Andrew’s choice of friends, his haircuts, his getting caught smoking cigarettes at fourteen; with a bag of pot in his sock drawer at fifteen). His father’s own ingrained rage seeped into all their dealings (the unfairness of his treatment at American Express; his inferiority complex about his lineage—all those Taylors in daguerreotypes, and he, a middle manager in suburbia, still wanting but failing to live like a southern aristocrat, heaping debt upon himself to keep up the vacations in Aspen or Biarritz, then suffering brutally with the burden, the humiliating day a fat man with a lip full of tobacco arrived to repossess the Audi). And after the first nine or ten screaming fights—recriminations, slammed doors, false accusations, top-of-his-lungs frustrated screamed red-faced
fuck-you
s—all that remained between them was a sprawling lake of bile. One vacation Andrew came home and noticed that the canoe was gone from the garage. His mother told him casually that his father had sold it.

I’m pulling you out of there

He could hear his father’s voice say it.

Controlling. Angry. Taking away from him. Grabbing. His son made passive, brutalized by the storm of temper if he moved or rebelled.

Pulling you out?
said a voice inside him.
Isn’t that what you want? You’ll be safe from

The hands pressing on Theo’s face.

We’re through with you
, his father had told him.
You make this right or we’re through with you.

DAD

DANIEL

He lifted his thumb from the phone.

No, he could never tell his father. Because of
the incident
at FW. It had destroyed what little was left of their trust.