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The Headmaster of Millyard Boy's Primary School was an old-school utilitarian. His doctrine (like his Father‘s before him) was one of the cornerstones of the schooI's constitution; for a young man to reach perfect maturity and attain true success and happiness, he must first know and understand the need to fulfil his potential in the classroom and on the sports field. By whichever means were required to achieve this.
Sweat and swot. That's what you got.
Sure, today there were other interfering influences. There was rock and roll. In his day, music was, weII...music! These days, it‘s become a religion. Kids' heroes now are scruffy, pallid; in need of a good haircut and a good meal. Nevertheless, for all that, it looked like this year’s first team was set to go a long way in the interprovincial schools rugby tournament next month.
The desk buzzer whooped. "Yes Miss NeIson?"
"There's a Mr. Doyle here to see you sir," she announced.
Frankie Doyle was going to be a problem, headmaster Aiden Rice thought, as he prepared the set of his tie for his visitor, the boy’s uncle. After the death of his father only a year ago, the boy had become distant and serious. Always a quiet boy, now he seemed withdrawn, distracted, locked off. Now, with the mother's sudden thrombosis yesterday, well — the boy was just not getting a good break.
The heavy mahogany door opened as Rice crossed the carpet. "Mister Doyle. Please, come in."
The visitor was a tall man, extremely thin. He entered the room like a puppet on long strings. His manner was timid, nervous. He looked held together with pins.
"I...I'm the boy's uncle, Tim Doyle."
His voice seemed to puff out of him, like dust off a rug. The headmaster took the half-offered hand. "Thank you for coming, mister Doyle. On behalf of the school, please accept my sincerest wish for your sister's speedy recovery," he said.
"Sister-in-law," the uncle corrected. "She’s my brother‘s wife. He died in Novem..."
"Yes, I know," Rice interrupted soothingly. "Terrible. Terrible.” he said, resting a sympathetic hand on the man's bony shoulder and guiding him to the visitor's chair. "The boy's going to need all the help he can get," said Rice.
Doyle folded into the vast chair opposite the headmaster, who sat down in deep silhouette against the room's only window. Rice tapped his gold fountain Parker on his blotter, staring down at the little dents it made in the soft paper as he spoke. "I understand, Mr Doyle, that you are the boy's only other living relatives?"
Doyle shifted uncomfortably in the huge chair. "Yes. My wife and I, she's rather ill right now, why I came alone..." The headmaster lifted his eyes from the dented blotter and studied the nervous man across the desk.
"Mr Doyle," he said. "Frankie, or Scatter as his friends call him here at Millyard, is in a desperate situation. The authorities have been very understanding and he is in good care over at the clinic, but sooner or later he has to get back to life on life’s terms. Even before this...tragedy, he was doing very poorly at his studies. Add to this the fact that he has no interest in sporting activities…"
A sad smile softened the Headmaster’s face. "What I'm trying to say, Mr Doyle, is that under these circumstances, I believe it is very important for a boy of his age to have some sense of the familiar to hold on to right now. Routine as security, I suppose."
Rice looked down, focussing intently on the blotter, as though trying to suck his next thought from its spongy flesh. "I thought, perhaps, that since his mother will be in medical care for quite some time, you'd consider leaving the boy here at the school, as a boarding pupil. I understand that you live quite some distance away?" `
The uncle squirmed again in the chair, causing a tight, Ieathery squeak.
"Yes," said Doyle. "We're in Rhodesdale. It's a three hour drive."
The headmaster linked his fingers under his chin, pointing his first-fingers into a steeple, which he tapped against his sternly folded bottom lip. He slewed his brow into a deep thoughtful knot. "Which would mean he needs to board here, or ...well, I can’t think of any other solution for the short term at least.”
“Unless he changed schools?" the uncle said quietly.
Now the headmaster's steeple fingers traced a furrow between his eyebrows. "Mr Doyle," he said softly, yet firmly, "I don't think that would be a good idea at all. Not right now. We are more than ably staffed at the school and the authorities have allowed for transfer of interim custodial responsibilities to Miss Sykes, the school’s resident therapist. And they have offered to take care of the costs while his mother is rehabilitating.”
Aiden Rice noticed a visible weight lift from the man's shoulders. Doyle looked down into his lap as he spoke. "Of course, I'll be selling the place at Walmer Downs, which should leave enough for his schooling after I’ve settled his mother's medical costs," his voice sounded relieved. " Ellen will live with us, we have the room and we’re all very close, but I agree that right now it's important, as you say, for the boy not to lose touch with his studies and his...routine."
The puppeteer pulled the headstring and, for the first time, Rice saw fear in the man's eyes. "Where is the boy now, Mr Rice?"
Aiden Rice wrote down the directions to the hospital as he spoke. "Frankie‘s at the St Francis Garden Clinic here in Millyard, in good hands. I'm sure you'd like to see him," he said, handing the note across the desk. "Mr Doyle, when last did you see the boy?" asked Rice.
"Oh, two summers ago," said Doyle. "They came up to Rhodesdale for the holidays. Jack, Ellen and...the boy."
Headmaster Rice nodded solemnly, as he rose to see his visitor out. "Happier times," he said.
"Yes, they were," said Doyle, as he lanked toward the door. He paused as he reached for the handle and turned to Rice. "AIthough," he added, "It was a sad time too."
The headmaster took the handle and opened the door. "Oh? In what way?" asked Rice.
Doyle's eyes blurred into a past focus. He shuffled his hat in his hands as a nerve came alive at his temple.
"We were playing draughts on the front porch," said Doyle slowly. "Jack, Ellen, my wife and I. The boy was down at the bottom of the garden, under the old Seringa tree. He was just sitting there with our cat Sooty in his lap. Well, after a while, Ellen took him some tart, and a glass of lemonade." His voice was tightening under the strain of the memory. "When she came back she looked like she'd been...she'd been stung by a bee or something. I asked her what the matter was and she said it was the boy. What about the boy, I asked her. He’s just sitting there, she says to me. Sitting there, staring way in front of him. He didn't look up when I passed him the tray, she says. No thanks, no nothing. Just sitting there, staring way in front of him..."
Doyle stood dead still as he spoke, the stare he described stretched tight across his own face. Slowly, the stare loosened, and he dusted the hat on his hand.
For the first time that morning, Doyle looked directly at the headmaster as he spoke. "Just sitting there staring. Staring and stroking the cat. And all the while the cat stone dead, staring up at the boy."
***
The boy opened his eyes to a whizzy blur. His head throbbed like a split thumb. He squinted tight, to let the light just squeeze in. Soon, pale shapes began to sweal into focus. He sat up slowly.
Beds.
One, two, three, four empty beds. I must be in...
The memories thumped into place. The lake. The black lake and the cave on the other side. The Darkness closing in and the scrambling run home and mamma oh mamma you looked at me so scared, you said my name but your eyes were screaming you didn't know me oh mamma I don’t want you to go there mamma... I don’t want to be alone.
The white walls burned into his skull as the light flooded in through his eyes. His panic burst and he screamed.
The plump nurse froze. She was just entering the ward and looking at his chart when the scream tore into her. She was at the foot of the boy's bed and was about to look up and chirp a cheerful good morning, when the scream slivered into her like spat needles. The wrenching effect of her own fright seemed to pull the boy's face right up to her own in a sudden crash-zoom. She felt a sharp, icy wind whistling up inside her bones. She'd seen pain. She'd shared suffering. That was her job. But what she saw now was deeply shocking. It peeled away her shell and clutched at her core; because, for the first time, she was looking into the tortured face of primal panic. On a small, lonely boy.
She reached out and pulled him into her arms as another nurse skidded into the ward. "Get Doctor Eede now," she ordered. The boy's scream shuddered into violent sobs that exploded in his chest. The plump nurse rocked him gently as her own tears blurred.
"Oh dear God, it's going to be all right you poor blessed little angel, it's going to be all-right.”
She swayed like a glanced skittle, feeling the boy's pain drumming into her like stones. She knew somehow, that her words were meant to calm herself, that the boy was beyond the reach of words of comfort.
At the root of the boy’s scream was the Darkness that had begun to take a shape, to become more than an infinite, terrifying void. It had sharpened its nothingness into a form that pulled its shadows into edges; it no longer gaped and yawed in stillness but seemed to vary in density. Or depth. It was gathering itself, thickening. If the darkness defined itself any further, if the infinity of it curled in any closer, the boy intuited something with absolute clarity; it would begin to move.
That knowledge spawned the screams, then the slow drift back into the Ancience that had always nursed him.
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