All-Nighter
SIR ALAN VINE stood at the doorway of the hospital room. And for a moment, he turned his attention away from his daughter.
He looked at his wife.
His guts melted in gratitude. Thank God he would not have to bear this alone. Formidable: her spine, erect as always, even there in a battered hospital armchair; her gold jewelry shining, as if she were a Byzantine noblewoman, against skin toasted by mornings swimming with her friends on Ydra or one of the islands near Athens in the last warm months of the year; her profile, classically Greek, with that high bridge; her hair, only speckled with grey (while his was thinned to vanishing); and of course, wearing a knee-length skirt and perfectly pressed sweater, even here, so that she managed to bring order and floral scents to the gloom and chaos of the hospital wing. He wanted to rush across the room to her; to embrace her, kiss her full on the mouth; and then weep with her. But he knew what would happen if he did that. She would treat him like a salesman ringing the doorbell: unwelcome, impertinent. Resentments would squeeze between them and push them apart like they were the wrong end of two magnets.
Alan had always desired her. Married her for her exoticism, her style. How could he have known that Greek women of her generation were so goddamned chaste; lived like continual thirteen-year-olds, with their clucking girlfriends, their family gatherings; thrived on tea and shopping; and treated husbands like boys on a playground—occasionally entertaining interlopers. But the Vines were never the kind to pursue counseling. He almost chuckled at the idea of his wife on the Couch. She didn’t have the Electra complex. She was Electra. Tall, busty, prone to outbursts. Very little of self-examination among these Greeks, he observed snidely. The two of them had merely pulled apart, and away, over time. Now, when they met, they sniped like old enemies.
“You’re supposed to be wearing a mask,” he reminded her from the doorway, through his own mask.
Lady Alcina Fidias Vine turned to him defiantly. “I’m not wearing a mask.” Her accent had grown thicker after a few months in Greece, as it always did. “These doctors don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Sir Alan could only admire her. The way she cut through the puffery of authority. But he had a role to play here. The rational male responsible for making sense of it all.
“No? So what’s the matter with her, then?”
“I don’t know,” Alcina replied, unhappily.
Sir Alan lifted a chair and carried it across the room to sit next to his wife.
“Be careful,” she scolded.
They sat next to each other, aligned toward their daughter, watching.
“She won’t drink or eat,” Alcina said.
Now Alan sat close enough to Persephone that he could not ignore the degradation that had occurred in her, just in the past few hours. His daughter’s eyes were closed. Her skin had gone putty-white. Her mouth hung open, like that of a fish in a dirty tank, dumbly hoping more sustaining air would find its way in. Her chest heaved, slowly; her limbs and head remained still as her frame’s energy ebbed away to nothing.
“The oxygen tubes,” said Sir Alan, standing. “Weren’t they feeding her oxygen before?” He went to Persephone’s bedside and began to untangle the tubes from around a thin tank that had been propped there.
The door swung open and Dr. Minos entered, with shaved head and blazing eyes.
“What are you doing?” Dr. Minos demanded.
“Look at her,” Sir Alan blustered, embarrassed to be caught tampering with hospital equipment. “She’s struggling for breath. They had her on oxygen before.”
“Oxygen won’t help.”
“She has fever,” barked Lady Vine. “Those antibiotics you’re giving her are not working.”
Dr. Minos eyed her coolly. “We’re not using antibiotics; we’re using antimycobacterial medications.”
“Hang on,” Sir Alan said. “Why won’t oxygen help? Aren’t the drugs working?”
Dr. Minos pulled Persephone’s chart from the slot at the bed’s footboard. He scanned it. The couple waited in silence. He replaced the chart. He turned to them and spoke in a clear, emphatic manner that left no doubt what he was really saying.
“Your daughter’s case is very advanced.”
Alcina asked some questions and received short, firm replies. And eventually the doctor left. The pair sat in despondent silence. Sir Alan suppressed the desire to touch his girl, feel her pulse, feel for breath, embrace her so that he could somehow pump his own healthy blood into her veins. But he could only stand by, helpless. He found himself counting her breaths, unconsciously measuring them to make sure the time between them remained the same, not longer; and forcing himself to imagine she was breathing more briskly, even when she was not.
ANDREW SAT AT Dr. Kahn’s dining room table. Papers were spread out around him. He stared at the computer’s blinking cursor in front of him.
“What are you doing?” asked Dr. Kahn.
“I’m writing this paper.” His tone was stressed, irritated.
“Like that?”
“Like what? I’m sitting and writing.”
“How are you going to start, if you have not organized your thoughts?” she fired back.
“I don’t have time to organize my thoughts,” he snapped. “We have one night. I have to just get this done. Or Persephone’s going to . . .” He did not finish the thought.
Dr. Kahn took a seat next to him and folded her hands in her lap. “So what are you going to write?” she asked, imposing calmness on the situation.
He gave an angry, rambling response. He didn’t know. Everything. What was he supposed to write? A forensic report about the murder of Mary Cameron? Dr. Kahn asked him another question. Who is your audience? He merely scowled and slumped. So she asked him another. What do you want them to understand when you have finished? Andrew struggled to respond. She seized her chance; made a suggestion, which he accepted; and within a few minutes, Dr. Kahn and Andrew were busying themselves about the table with the source material—books, papers, notes about Harness’s letters—and placing them in piles; creating a chronology, and from that an outline. Then they stood back, satisfied, as Andrew sized it all up.
“This is a lot of work,” he said. “What time is it?”
“Ten thirty-six.” They exchanged a glance. “I’ll make coffee,” she said with a smile.
“Can I stay here?”
“You may,” she said. “Of course.”
Andrew turned back to the computer, staring again at the cursor until 10:41 P.M. Then he attacked the keyboard.
Lord Byron, he tapped, fell in love with John Harness when the latter was what we would call a Remove, at Harrow School, in 1801. It is almost certain that neither of them, at that time, could have foreseen that their friendship would end in murder.
Dr. Kahn placed a hot mug of coffee at his elbow. She paused, reading.
“Very good,” she said.
“Thanks,” he drawled. “Only twenty pages to go. This is an all-nighter.”
“Good luck.”
He turned to her, desperately. “You’re going to bed?”
“Staying up all night is for young people.”
“I can’t do this by myself !”
“You have everything you need.”
He turned balefully back at the screen. “I can’t,” he repeated.
Dr. Kahn stood over him. She felt his wild teenage energy, which came flinging off him in waves. Gamma rays—isn’t that what they called the energy Tibetan monks emit when they meditate? Then what she felt coming from Andrew must be—what? Zeta rays? She smiled to herself. Teenagers. Squirting glands; anger, frustration, confusion. He was a mouse furiously bashing its head against the confines of a maze, when the way out was so close at hand. Yet he cannot see it, she reflected.
Dr. Kahn wondered: What if she could siphon off that energy? Ground him, as it were? She rarely touched her students. Oh, she had patted the heads and backs of some of the Shells, she supposed, in their more irresistible moments; but she was not the huggy type. She was conscious that the teenage male body, in a school environment, was a volatile thing, not to be played with. Volatile. Yes. And now—that was the point. To drain away that frenetic excess energy. Dr. Kahn reached out a hand. Held it, uncertain, over Andrew’s shoulder. She had a moment of doubt—look at this freckled, wrinkly thing, those stubby fingers, with their unfeminine, unpainted nails; she had never liked her hands much—and then dropped it on Andrew’s shoulder. He stiffened. She held the hand there. He did not turn. He was still staring at the screen. In her mind, she recited a little spell: You may work, it went. It may seem a small, unextravagant blessing. But it is a sustaining one. You may work, Andrew. She held her hand there. It felt warmer. Pulsed. With Zeta energy.
She detected a shift in his body. He frowned at the screen, leaned into it. He typed. A few words. He deleted, backtracked. He started to ask her a question, then didn’t. What? she asked. No, nothing, he muttered. He typed again: a long trail this time, a sentence. More; a paragraph.
Yes, she decided. She gingerly removed her hand from his shoulder; he did not notice. It had worked. To her surprise, she felt a pang. Had she decided to like Andrew Taylor? Yes, she had, long since. Their consultations had ceased to be merely academic. They had become friends. Selfishly, she wished to remain; to add, shape, drive the task at hand. This was work she knew. But her best act of friendship now was to recede; let him do this on his own. She smiled, a little sadly—the typing flowed in torrents now—and crept from the room.
ANDREW TYPED. HIS hand cramped. He rubbed it. He would check the page count every now and then. But this was not something just to hand in, to a teacher. This was something that needed to make sense, to an audience. His real audience, as Dr. Kahn had pointed out: John Harness. He stopped once—stuck!—and panicked. He had lost the trail! But he reread, and in doing so remembered his logic. It was sound. Andrew felt a moment of pride. He had met himself, in the mouse maze; the self from an hour before, when he had made the decision to include this particular set of ideas; and he . . . liked himself: liked the decision made by a sensible mind. But he did not have time to dwell on it. Andrew raced through the pages, pursuing the idea that hovered, always, just a paragraph ahead of him.
At one point, late, a knock came. Andrew raised his eyes, bleary. He trotted to the door. Fawkes stood there. Andrew merely grunted and turned back to the dining room.
Fawkes followed, emitting a stream of excited talk. “I’ve found him, at last. Father Peter,” he said, as Andrew crawled back into his chair in front of the computer. “Do you know where he’s been? Newcastle. In training, no less. There’s a whole ministry, a team, that addresses the paranormal. The C of E is getting a bit hippie! Not that I’m complaining. He’s just been talking me through it—what we’re going to do tomorrow. It’s quite elaborate. Are you listening?”
“That’s good,” Andrew said, distantly. He yanked one of the books out of the stack in front of him, referred to an old map; traced a boundary line with his finger.
“Where’s Judy?”
“Asleep.”
“Oh, right.” Fawkes consulted his watch. “It is one A.M. Can I help?” He paced around the table, taking stock of all the paper piled around.
Andrew did not answer.
“I can see I’m disturbing you. I’ll just leave this here. See you in the morning?”
“Okay.”
Andrew’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. Rappity-tap. Another page came, quickly. Then Andrew stopped. He needed the Mary Cameron material now. He looked around. Shit—Piers had it. At the Lot. It would cost time, but he needed to get to it. Would Piers still be awake?
Then he spotted the manila folder sitting on the coffee table. MARY CAMERON written in block letters in blue pen.
Oh wait. Piers was here. He brought it.
Belatedly grateful, Andrew retrieved the manila folder. It was identical to the John Harness folder, only fuller; full of poems, and letters, and a few stapled, photocopied academic pieces about the life of a Regency-era prostitute. He flipped through one of these.
Abortions, it was thought, could be induced through several folk remedies. One was the ingestion of sulfur, which the unfortunate young woman would be forced to perform through the chewing of many hundreds of match heads.
Andrew flung himself onto the sofa and flipped through the pages, retracing the steps of the girl he had seen die on that spring night, two hundred years before. What would Harrow-on-the-Hill have looked like then? Without paving? Without streetlights? All woods and grass, in the full flush of June? Andrew read, absorbed, and almost did not notice when his mobile phone rang. Piers? It’s pretty late, even for him. Then, in a flash, he thought: Persephone! She’s calling! She must be better! He leapt for the phone. Punched the green button so quickly, in his eagerness, that the name and number of the incoming call, displayed on the screen, only registered in his mind after he had answered.
“Hi Dad,” he said. His voice came out in a murmur.
His whole being sank as he listened to the voice. He tapped the keyboard listlessly. L . . . L . . . L appeared on the screen.
“Your mother is standing with me. Where are you? The school called and said you’d left campus!”
“I’m at a friend’s house.”
“Where?”
“A few blocks from school.”
“Is it true that you might have tuberculosis?” His father’s voice rose into almost hysterical incredulity.
“Apparently we’re exposed to it all the time. In the subway . . . you know. Lots of places.”
“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.