Death Rattle
IN THE DARK they heard coughing. It was prolonged; it made your throat itch to listen to it. There was a shuffling. The bang of a chair moving. Fragments of voices: Can anyone . . . ? Should we light the candles or just . . . ? Finally came a decisive scrape as Mr. Toombs’s chair pulled back. After a few seconds, a snap brought on the harsh classroom lights. The students blinked at one another, still in their seats. Dr. Kahn had kept to her post. Fawkes had moved to the head of the table, to defend Andrew. Sir Alan had crawled across the table in his fury, but now he sat with his bottom resting on the table end, his feet dangling into the speaker’s chair, leaning back onto the table, on one arm; an exhausted warrior. He stared at the shallow space between him and the chalkboard. Andrew was gone.
“Good, he managed to get away. What were you going to do? Throttle him?” Dr. Kahn accused, from her chair.
Sir Alan did not respond. He sat in a daze. Fawkes searched the space for Andrew and satisfied himself that the boy had escaped. He turned, ready to reprove Sir Alan, but he no longer saw rage in the puffy face, only collapse. The man’s anger at Andrew had been, in a way, his last expression of hope, that there would be someone to blame, some action still to take. Now, deflated, it was clear this illusion had been stripped from him. Fawkes felt a stab of sympathy.
“I’m sorry,” Fawkes said.
“Sorry?” Dr. Kahn sputtered indignantly.
Fawkes continued. “Persephone is a wonderful girl, and a friend. I wish there were something I could do.”
Sir Alan flinched, as if these kindnesses stung him. He spoke softly, almost to himself, and with bitterness. “You don’t know anything.”
But Fawkes had already spun around. Of course there was something he could do; what was he doing, standing there?
He searched for Father Peter at the table, among the other dazed members of the Essay Club.
“It’s time,” he said. “Come on!”
THE TWO MEN clambered back up the Hill to the High Street. Father Peter spoke excitedly. “Piers,” he said. “Piers, I don’t know if you shared those sensations?”
“What?”
“It distinctly seemed as if there were something in the room with us.”
Fawkes winced. “I know.”
“Have you experienced that before?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“I don’t know how to describe it. It was negative, wasn’t it? Clammy. All over you, as it were.” The priest shuddered. “Not a happy feeling.”
“No, not happy. You heard Andrew. Harness is a murderer.”
“And you think this person, John Harness, is responsible for the others being sick? Sir Alan’s daughter, and the boys?”
“I do. Or I’ve gone mad. Which at this point seems a distinct possibility. But that would mean you’re mad, too.”
“Yes. But it is the role of the clergy to join parishioners in their suffering.”
Fawkes glanced at Father Peter sidelong. Sarcasm under pressure. Indeed, he liked the priest. They hurried around the bend in the High Street, past Headmaster’s House and the Old Schools. “It’s all up to you now, Father Peter. Are you ready?”
“I hope so.”
“Don’t hope. Be.”
“Jesus Christ is the arbiter of such conflicts. I am only his representative. But His power is absolute.”
“That’s encouraging,” said Fawkes.
A voice called behind them. Father Peter came to a halt.
Fawkes went ahead a few paces before stopping. “Come on,” he ordered, crossly.
“But it’s Judy.”
They turned. Behind them, on the High Street, Dr. Kahn bustled, waving something in the air. They waited for her. She seemed to move in slow motion. Urgency tugged at Fawkes. Come on, come on. He felt that something terrible was imminent, and that every second he let pass might be ruinous.
“I’m coming with you,” she called, out of breath. “Are you going to perform the exorcism?”
“House blessing,” corrected Father Peter. “Do you need to rest?”
“No no,” she puffed. “Look. I found these.” She held out a wad of crumpled white printer paper.
“Never mind those,” snapped Fawkes.
“They’re Andrew’s essay. I found them on the walk up the Hill,” said Dr. Kahn. “He’s come this way. Maybe back to the Lot.”
“Okay, good. He can join in, if we ever get there,” said an exasperated Fawkes. “We have to start the ritual, right away.”
THEY REACHED THE Lot after a few minutes. Music and television blared from the house into the street. The corridors echoed with ball-playing and shouting. The place seemed to thud with noise. And Macrae thought he would tidy it up; get it under control, Fawkes smiled bitterly to himself.
“Right. What do we need to do, Father Peter?”
Father Peter chewed his lip appraisingly. “Where is the main room? The center of the house?”
“This way.”
They pushed into the long, narrow common room where Fawkes had held his house meeting on the first night of school.
Father Peter appropriated a disused upright piano as his workstation. He placed his bag on its top and removed four items: his grey bound booklet, his water bottle, a small brass crucifix, and, to Fawkes’s surprise, the twig of a fir tree, five inches of white and spongy stem with vivid green needles.
Father Peter’s air became more formal. “You are petitioners with me in the blessing of this house,” he explained. “Do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God the Father Almighty?”
Fawkes and Dr. Kahn exchanged glances.
“I’m a Jew,” said Dr. Kahn. “So no.”
“I’m an atheist,” Fawkes winced. “I thought you were going to . . .”
Father Peter ignored them. “Do you accept His authority to cleanse this house of any defilement, to cast out the evil one and all his minions?”
There seemed only one answer to this, and Fawkes and Dr. Kahn, affected by the priest’s seriousness, stood up straighter and answered together: “I do.”
Father Peter nodded. That was better. “I will perform a blessing on this house, especially all those places, Piers, where you feel have been most affected by the spirit. I will need you to be the guide. Judy, if you would, please assist me. If you would hold the water and the evergreen, please.” She took the bottle of water. He held his hand over it. “We thank you, Almighty God, for the gift of water. Over it the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation. Grant, by the power of your Holy Spirit, that this water be sanctified to be a sign of your dominion over all that it might touch. Amen.”
Father Peter peered at them over his glasses.
“Amen,” echoed Fawkes.
“This is now holy water,” pronounced Father Peter. “Judith, in every room we enter, I would like you to dip the evergreen in, then sprinkle some of the water about. Can you do that?”
She nodded.
“Right!” He smiled, and pushed his glasses up his nose. “Let’s start right here, shall we?” He picked up his booklet. The three of them stood in a tight triangle, feeling both silly and, somehow, important, listening to the boys’ games pound the floorboards, and their electronic dance music throb, a storm of distraction whirling about them.
“Lord,” began Father Peter, in his well-bred tenor, “I cover myself and everyone around me with the blood of Jesus. I cover Piers with the blood of Jesus. I cover Judith with the blood of Jesus.” Fawkes watched Dr. Kahn for signs of irony, but her face was grave. “I cover this home with the blood of Jesus. By the power of His blood, I break off every power of the kingdom of darkness for this home, for each of us, and for Andrew Taylor. Please sprinkle, Judith.”
“Hm?”
“Sprinkle now. The holy water.”
“Oh right. Like this?”
“That’s the idea, very well done indeed. Where shall we go next, Piers?”
“Upstairs,” he said. “Andrew’s room. Maybe he’ll be there.”
They moved to the stairs, Father Peter carrying his crucifix and booklet, Dr. Kahn bearing the water bottle and dripping twig. Fawkes remained on edge. He was forgetting something critically important. He knew it, but could not put his finger on it. A clock ticked in his chest, and it was frighteningly close to buzzing. Those papers—Andrew’s essay. Dr. Kahn, as usual, had found the right track. But where did it lead? Fawkes, in the frenzy of the pounding music and the pressure of the ritual, could not locate this misplaced clue, so he merely led them up the narrow stairs with a frown.
THE FIRST THING Andrew felt was a nagging twinge in his throat. He coughed and hacked at it: Surely this must come out somehow. He felt a warm trickle, a clot of something form in his lower throat. He was about to hawk up this ball and spit it out . . . when a moment of self-awareness came on him.
Stop. Wake up.
He was still in the Classics Schools.
The candles had blown out. Confusion swirled around him. Yet Andrew knew one thing with certainty.
Harness had made him sick.
Heat pulsed his forehead, flushed his cheeks. Fever.
You’re sick. And if you spit in here, with ten, eleven others, you’ll make them sick, too.
Andrew covered his mouth with his hand, and fled for the door in the dark.
Outside a cool evening awaited. The perspiration on his back and neck turned icy. His body quaked. He staggered through the darkness. Harness intended to kill him now. He had tried seduction, tried to lure him, but Andrew had resisted. And so Harness had seized him like a beast, a monkey sinking fangs into him, clinging to him and weighing him down, waiting for him to tire; a predator making a kill.
Get as far from the Classics Schools as you can, he thought; get away from people. You’re infectious.
He climbed the stairs to the street. His breathing came heavily. When he reached the top, he stumbled. He pulled up a trouser leg and found his calves and ankles had swollen: taut, puffy, dragging beneath him like bags of fluid.
What was happening to him?
The thoughts came with pure, primitive panic. He had no time. Sir Alan said Persephone had only hours to live. She would be a corpse, Roddy, too, if he did not do something now.
Andrew leaned against a building and coughed again. He spat blood onto the sidewalk. He went faint. In this swoon—it must have been just in his mind, subject to the fever, or to the exhaustion of writing all night, because how could this be real—he perceived the High Street as it would have been on the night of his essay—in 1809. The night of the murder.
No concrete, no sidewalks, no paved roads. A narrow dirt road, with ruts from carriage and cart wheels, and beaten firm by horse and human feet. A few lamp-lit windows. And beyond their feeble halos, darkness. Here the great night hung over the Hill; it slithered between the trees; it dripped. It was here Lord Byron had carried Mary’s body and dumped it.
Asphalt again. A car swooshed past.
The pain in Andrew’s throat increased.
He understood, suddenly, what Harness was doing to him.
He was forcing Andrew to endure the journey from health to death, to experience that same, slow, consuming disease that Harness had suffered. Only Andrew would live it—die from it—in a single evening. He reached up with his fingers and touched his face; felt the ridge of his own cheekbone, and traced it with his fingertip. The fat had melted away. The sores grew in his mouth. The fever burned his cheeks.
Harness was going to kill him. He was going to kill all of them.
All of them?
What if I give myself to him?
Wasn’t that the idea that had occurred to him before? And Fawkes had dissuaded him. But Fawkes was not always right. Fawkes did not know about dead Daniel Schwartz, about the overdose, about rising into the sky alone in a balloon, and being left behind and feeling in your churning stomach that you deserved were fated to die, too. Fawkes did not know about your father selling the canoe; or about being through. Fawkes, in his selfish way, loved himself; could not bear to part with himself. Could not know how Andrew might just know, with certainty, that he did not belong, and would never belong.
The idea grew ever more clear.
If I give myself to Harness then maybe he’ll leave the others alone. I’m what he wants. Just let him know he could have me, if he gave the others back.
Andrew propelled himself forward on the mossy brick pavement, leaning against the plane trees. His breath came in gulps. His muscles scarcely obeyed his commands. His flesh had been devoured away.
He was emaciated.
He might not have the strength to make it to the Lot. He saw a car come around the bend and pause at the light at the crest of the Hill.
Andrew flung himself into the road, holding up his hand. The headlights were blinding.
“Can you . . .” The rest of the sentence died on his lips. Can you give me a ride, just a few blocks up? The pain in his throat was excruciating—a dagger stroke. But worse, perhaps, was the look of shock on the driver’s face. He was fortyish, fit, wearing an exercise tank top, heading home from the gym. He started to respond to Andrew, then recoiled. The driver saw a gaunt youth, cheeks thrusting from wilted skin; dark hair over a starved, angular face. The boy—if you could assign such a vibrant word to the thing he was looking at—had the appearance of something freshly exhumed. But what truly frightened him was the eyes. They were sunken in their sockets. They stared out at him with a kind of dull desperation; they wanted things from him, yet they knew asking was futile; they were going through the mere motions of survival. The figure mumbled. It was wearing some odd, old-fashioned coat. The driver slammed the stick into neutral, let the car ease down the gradient a few feet—away from the figure, who had lurched into his headlight beam, and then, when the vehicle pulled clear, gunned the engine. As the driver put distance between himself and the figure, he glanced back. Was he dreaming? He dismissed the notion of calling the police or even an ambulance. Instead he would speed home, move quickly to his own door, and lock it tight.
“STOP, STOP,” INTERRUPTED Fawkes.
Father Peter regarded him quizzically. He had been reading in a strong voice, trained by years of projecting into the back corners of chapels. They stood in Andrew’s nooklike room. The desk contained the debris of Andrew’s burst of research earlier: stray printer paper with circlings and underlines. Beside the wardrobe lay a large duffel bag, unzipped, stuffed with some hastily packed items.
“We’re in the wrong spot,” Fawkes said, frowning.
“The ritual calls for the principal rooms in the house to be blessed,” countered Father Peter. “You did say the spirit had appeared to Andrew here . . .”
“I know,” Fawkes admitted.
“Well, Piers, make up your mind,” Dr. Kahn said.
“The basement,” he replied, finally uncovering the answer that had been nagging at him. “The cistern room. When we uncovered it—when I uncovered it—that’s when the real trouble started for Andrew. It’s where the spirit is strongest. That’s where we can drive him out.”
“It was their hiding place,” Dr. Kahn agreed. “Byron and Harness,” she explained to the priest.
Dr. Kahn and Fawkes looked to Father Peter for approval.
“All right.” The priest sighed. “We’ll just finish this prayer, shall we? Lord, how many adversaries I have,” he continued. “How many there are who rise up against me.”
“Peter.” Fawkes raised his voice in impatience. “Now.”
THE WORKMEN HAD begun to repair the hole. With the anxiety oppressing the school, and with the headmaster’s threat hanging over Fawkes, any historical interest in the hidden cistern room had been set aside for the needs of short-term morale. The stretch of basement corridor was littered with building materials and tools, stacked on paint-spattered drop cloths that lined the floor. A stack of boards would constitute the new stretch of wall. Plaster in a tub would fill the gaps. Trowels and sandpaper were ready to smooth it over. While they waited to begin, Reg had found a fortuitously sized square of wood paneling and had affixed it with epoxy over the hole leading to the cistern.
Andrew felt his breath coming shallower and shallower. He had to squint through his fever and occasionally shake his head to refocus on his surroundings. Whether by luck or by virtue of the shadowy zone he inhabited, he saw no other students as he climbed down to the basement, stopping every few steps to rest against the wall and listen to the sound of his own breathing. The popping. He did not have the energy to feel afraid anymore. He merely experienced the exhaustion, the desire for relief—a cold compress, a cool bed . . . or something else. Death. Up to now it had been an abstraction, something that happened to grandparents, not to you, not in a damp basement stairwell in England.
By the time he reached the basement corridor, sweat slicked his face. He tugged feebly at the wood panel. It would not budge. He lay down next to it, on the paint-stained sheet. He closed his eyes and rested.
Maybe he would die right here. Alone.
Persephone and Roddy. They were dying alone, too. Only they did not know the way out. He, at least, saw the exit. He understood, or guessed, that if he surrendered himself to Harness, the others might go free. Harness had wanted him all along. Harness was hungry. Let him devour Andrew. Here was, perhaps, his sole gift: his ability to understand and solve this riddle.
After a moment, he tried again. He wrapped his fingertips around the top of the wood panel, then threw his weight backward and pulled the board free. He managed to thrust his legs—bone-thin, his trousers now flopping like sail canvas—into the hole. On instinct he propped the board back into place behind him. He was not sure how he descended the ladder. He was not sure if there was a ladder. He might have been borne into the gloom by the glowing white arms of Harness, his white angel in the blackness. He did reach the bottom, though, and felt the damp stone under his fingers, the carved gutters running into the cistern’s hole; the sandy grit, cold and unappealing. He eased himself to the floor and lay there. He had made it. The cold felt magnificent, a salve on his fever. Even if the ridges of the stone dug into his skin. Even if it was dirty.
He reached out to see how close he was to the edge. The cistern was full. It brimmed with cold water, shimmery, welcoming. Of course it did.
He closed his eyes. He could not move anymore. He lay on his back, enjoying the peace. The silent, sensationless void of the cold room.
That was when he heard it.
Hrr hrr hrr hrr
Hrch
The noise rose from his own gullet.
Hrch
Sir Alan had said the words. The death rattle. The sign that there was no return, that the slide to death had begun. He felt its pull.
Hrr hrr hrr hrr—inhale.
Hrch—exhale.
His breath had become a feeble bong. A poor exchange of gases. There was very little of him left.
Millimeter by millimeter, Andrew raised his body. He pushed himself up on his elbows. He thought he might vomit from the effort. He thrust out one brittle arm, and raised himself on it like a tent pole. He remained there for a moment, poised, nearly fainting, and then, like a statue toppling, he fell into the water.
The cistern water enveloped him with a sigh.
His fever was relieved.
ANDREW TAYLOR STOOD waist-high in the chilly river Cam, his feet in the muck.
It was midsummer. He was drunk. He was naked. A glorious bright blue sky blazed above him. John Harness splashed a few feet away. This was a swimming hole they had found—another in a long list of their hideaway spots. Andrew’s body had been restored. His skin was full again—goose-bumped from the cold, and from excitement.
Harness. He is showing me the reason he came back
He and Harness had never kissed before; only chaste pecks that could have been confused with friendship. Well, not really. But they could not have been confused with lust. But now, the alcohol made it inevitable, and it was just a matter of waiting; his whole body reached out, through the air, it seemed, toward Harness. Andrew had never seen anything more gorgeous: blue eyes against the fair hair and the white skin, pale and shapely; he seemed a kind of river god, stirring from marble; Andrew wanted to own him, to consume him. Harness stepped toward him and their faces met in a kiss so hungry they nearly bit each other. Andrew pulled away. He felt something under his hand, some flotsam in the water, and he raised it, water dripping away, and held before his eyes: a late June blossom, round and white with a black rim, the shape of a fingernail. A petal, the pure coinage of summer. Fragile, fresh, delicate, and good.
he had seen it before
He looked in Harness’s eyes and saw there what was to come.
That sunny protected spot in the Cam vanished. Time summoned him somewhere else.
and this is where it all led
He was in a cramped room in London. There was a bed, and a small chest, and a wardrobe with one hinge broken. This was all John Harness could afford. Outside it was dark. Who knew what time it was, day or night; it might have been four, five in the morning; the deathwatch had been continuous. On a little table, a candle nursed a tiny flame, a mere bead of light. On the bed, Harness’s jaw moved in that random gyration that preceded death. His white-blond hair was shaggy, unkempt, and uncut. His cheeks had sunk to starving hollowness. His chest emitted the death rattle. No one was there, except this young man, expiring. The candle, eventually, sputtered out and the room went dark. No one relit the candle. The death sound continued on. But by the time the dawn rose over London and the horses’ clopping and voices of the day got under way, its rays, filtering through the shutters, lit on a corpse.
Praise the LORD with the harp; play to him upon the psaltery and lyre
Sing for him a new song; sound a fanfare with all your skill upon the trumpet.
The voices pulled Andrew from the scene.
Andrew was aware of the water now. His limbs, in it. No longer fevered. He was swimming, but in a narrow space. He knew where he was. The cistern. He was free of his disease. He had survived! Some chanting from a handful of voices—amateur, and off-rhythm, yet booming and strong—filtered through to him. He felt the keenest desire to be with those voices.
But then he saw Harness before him. Harness’s hair floated in the dirty grey-brown water—all the rain that Harness himself had brought that autumn. Together they swam in it. They were still locked together in struggle. Harness’s face grew fierce. His eyes were angry, it was true. But just as much, Andrew realized, they were confused and frightened. John Harness had not known the person he had killed—and now he did. He had not understood the wrongs he had committed—and now he did. And he had not grasped—here, in his prison, in this cave, outside and underneath time—that he was truly dead.
Those eyes were now comprehending it all.
It was Andrew’s doing. But also the work of these words and poems that rang in the well water around them. Fawkes and Father Peter and Dr. Kahn had arrived. They were performing the house blessing. Andrew might be saved.
He gathers up the waters of the ocean as in a water-skin; and stores up the depths of the sea.
Harness’s face twisted. The prayers seemed to enrage him. He reached out in the murk, gripping Andrew’s arm. In return, Andrew kicked his feet wildly—those wingtips, heavy, water-sodden, impossible!—and in a final burst of effort, pushed himself to the surface. He gasped. One deep breath.
The voices hesitated—had they heard him? Andrew filled his lungs to cry out.
Harness reached out again and pulled him down.
Andrew choked on the cold water. He flailed with his arms and legs, and struggled to reach the surface. But his tailcoat and thick trousers became a kind of wet parachute, dragging him under the water—and Harness’s grip was irresistible. The bubbles ran out of Andrew’s nose. Panic wracked every cell. He clawed at the sides.
And then he remembered.
What if I give myself to him?
Andrew released his grip on the craggy cistern walls and felt himself sink. He held his hands up so Harness could see them—free, no longer fighting. Andrew met Harness’s gaze one final time. He understands. The fierceness slowly went out of those piercing blue eyes, and by degrees, they faded into the murk. Harness was gone.
Andrew had won.
Water poured into his nose and mouth. He felt himself sinking deeper into the black water. Exhaustion seized him and he succumbed to it.
THE THREE COMPANIONS heard the sharp gasp. They exchanged a glance. The presence had been so powerful here, they expected any sudden sound to come from it. But there was another explanation for this disembodied noise. Fawkes said it first.
“My God, Andrew’s there!”
He began ripping at the wooden panel. He needn’t have—it came away in his hands. They had not brought a flashlight, so Fawkes fought his way blindly into the hole, kicking at the broken plaster with his heels, and lowered himself into the darkness. He dropped, stumbled, and fell over backward. The ground was hard, and slick. Father Peter followed (more athletic, he had a better landing). Scraped, but unharmed, they let their eyes adjust to the darkness. And for a moment Fawkes could not comprehend it: the cistern was full. It had been nearly empty before, drained except for a foot of rusty runoff and debris. Yet here it was, sloshing over, like a creek swelling under heavy rains. An arm, and a white hand, protruded from the murk.
“That’s him!”
They squatted, then heaved. Pulling a human being in wet clothes from water was hard work. They grew soaked as they scrambled; they scraped their knees against the stone. Finally Andrew cleared the water.
Oh my God he’s not moving
Fawkes’s mind reeled. He almost did not hear Father Peter saying something practical, something urgent. Fawkes found himself pushed to the side, to witness the priest pumping the boy’s chest. A few desperate minutes later, Father Peter stood, a dark silhouette, staring down at the figure . . . in triumph? In despair? Is he all right? Fawkes flung himself forward, his shoes squelching, and pulled the wet body to himself. He held it. He squeezed it to him. He could not let this one go. He could not. He began to speak to the boy, eagerly, but choked on his words. Andrew’s flesh had gone a kind of fish-belly grey, seemed to be slicked with the dirty cistern water. His eyes stared forward. But the expression on the boy’s face is what stopped Fawkes. Instead of showing the panicked horror of the drowned man, Andrew’s lips, in death, had parted and curled, very slightly, at the corners; as if he’d had a secret whispered in his ear, and it had made him smile.