The Perils and Dangers of this Night Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise For The Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Chapter ONE

  Chapter TWO

  Chapter THREE

  Chapter FOUR

  Chapter FIVE

  Chapter SIX

  Chapter SEVEN

  Chapter EIGHT

  Chapter NINE

  Chapter TEN

  Chapter ELEVEN

  Chapter TWELVE

  Chapter THIRTEEN

  Chapter FOURTEEN

  Chapter FIFTEEN

  Chapter SIXTEEN

  Chapter SEVENTEEN

  Chapter EIGHTEEN

  Chapter NINETEEN

  Praise for Stephen Gregory

  THE CORMORANT

  'A promising and bizarre first novel, with excellent set pieces . . .'

  The Times

  'A considerable delight . . . the quality of the prose and economy of expression are particularly impressive.'

  Time Out

  'A work of tremendous self-assurance that leaves the reader with a lingering sense of unease and announces the arrival of a considerable new talent.'

  British Book News

  'A sensuous, elegantly written debut that bears comparison with Graham Swift.'

  Publishing News

  'No summary can do justice to the subtlety of Gregory's first novel, with its fresh, vivid, sensual prose and its superb descriptive and evocative power. An extraordinary novel . . . original, compelling, brilliant.'

  Library Journal

  'An artful first novel, reminiscent of the tales of Poe. Gregory uses a low-key style and a subtle lyricism to build an atmosphere of nightmarish horror in a tale that could become a classic.'

  Publishers Weekly

  'The Cormorant has a relentless focus that would have made Edgar Allan Poe proud. A first-class terror story that does for cormorants what Cujo did for Saint Bernards. What sets the book apart, however, is the psychological ambiguity Mr Gregory has woven into his sensual tale of inexorable dread.'

  The New York Times Book Review

  THE WOODWITCH

  'In fairy tales, perhaps the most frightening place of all is the forest at night; the darkened woods hold wolves and witches, ogres and owls, and even time itself can be bent in sinister and unnatural ways. For Stephen Gregory the forest is an equally forbidding place . . . but the story he chooses to set there is distinctly and disturbingly for adults only.'

  Newsday

  'Not for gossamer sensitivities . . . Gregory writes with the hypnotic power of Poe, and this second novel has chilling implications.'

  Publishers Weekly

  'A powerful novel of psychological terror and a thorough reinvention of the Gothic landscape: superbly written, unashamedly dark, Gregory's voice and vision are wholly original.'

  Ramsay Campbell

  'A chilling portrayal of a man whose fear of ridicule is transformed into mindless violence.'

  The Oxford Times

  'An atmospheric story of obsession and breakdown.'

  Kirkus Reviews

  About the Author

  After training as a lawyer and then working as a teacher for 10 years, Stephen Gregory moved to the mountains of Snowdonia to write his first novel. The Cormorant was greeted by the New York Times as 'a first-class terror story with a relentless focus that would have made Edgar Allan Poe proud'. Publishers Weekly recognised its 'nightmarish horror reminiscent of the tales of Poe, in a tale that could become a classic'. Iain Banks called the book 'intelligent and well-written, with a natural feeling for the avian vandal of the title which brings to mind the poetry of Ted Hughes'.

  The Cormorant won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1987 and was made into a critically-acclaimed feature film for the BBC's Screen Two series starring Oscar-nominated actor Ralph Fiennes.

  A second novel followed, set again in the brooding atmosphere of a Snowdonian winter. The Woodwitch provoked similar reactions: Publishers Weekly commented that 'Gregory writes with the hypnotic power of Poe', while the Washington Post called the book 'an ambitious attempt to use the conventions of the contemporary horror novel to say something compelling about the irrational side of human nature'. The Woodwitch was the subject of a television documentary for the BBC's Statements series.

  The Blood of Angels completed a trilogy of novels in which an English incomer confronts the mysteries and vagaries of winter in Wales. It was recognised by Oscar-winning director William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection) as the work of an unusually original horror writer, and the author was flown to Hollywood where he spent an exhilarating, often gruelling year writing stories and script for Friedkin at Paramount Pictures.

  THE PERILS AND

  DANGERS OF THIS

  NIGHT

  Stephen Gregory

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 9780753518472

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Virgin Books 2008

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Stephen Gregory 2008

  Stephen Gregory has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the Author of this work.

  This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 2008 by

  Virgin Books Ltd

  Thames Wharf Studios

  Rainville Road

  London, W6 9HA

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within

  The Random House Group Limited can be found at:

  www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library.

  ISBN: 9780753518472

  Version 1.0

  For Chris, with all my love

  FOREWORD

  Strange: for over forty years, no one ever asked me to tell a fuller story of what happened at Foxwood Manor in the week before Christmas 1966.

  I was questioned very gently at the time, and over the following weeks, but once I had explained in the simplest terms how things had ended so tragically, they left me alone. The police had been able to see for themselves, from evidence at the scene they discovered that Christmas Day, and by piecing together a story of the events that preceded it. And I was a boy, just thirteen years old: they must have thought I was so disturbed, so traumatised by what had happened, that it was inappropriate to press me further.

  Until recently, no one asked me about the killings at Foxwood Manor. More than forty years passed by, and I often sat and thought, I lay awake at night, and I recalled that long-ago week in such vivid detail that every whisper and creak of the old house, the whiff of the dust, the lingering touch of the cobwebs, the very reek of fear and blood, became real again
.

  Now I have been asked to write it down. At first I did not put my real self into the story. Somehow I could not. I wrote and wrote, the words came slowly as the story began and faster and faster as it hurried towards a horrid end, but the boy was not me: he was always 'the boy', he was 'Alan', he was 'Alan Scott', he was a third person separate from the boy I had been, the I who had really been there at the time. And so the reader of my bundled manuscript, leafing through page after page in search of the truth, straining for the voice of someone who had not only witnessed the sensational events but been a part of them, asked me with a note of professional exasperation if I had been at Foxwood Manor or not, in the week before Christmas 1966? And if I had been there, and seen everything, why was I not in the story?

  I have rewritten my account in the first person. If the style is mannered, it is the voice and vocabulary of a middle-aged man recalling a week of his life as a child.

  It all began with a dream. And then there was a boy, a choirboy, running through the woods on a wintry afternoon . . .

  Alone. Angry. Afraid.

  It was me. I was there. I saw everything.

  ONE

  I woke very suddenly and sat up in bed. I was trembling and breathing hard. I felt a keen pain on the palms of both my hands and a scalding sensation on my neck.

  I got out of bed. The nine other boys in the dormitory were sleeping. I stood in the moonlight from the tall window and looked at my hands, blew on them, rubbed them: they prickled and itched, like a nettle rash. There were rows of narrow stripes like cuts across my palms and fingers. I leaned to the glass to catch my own reflection, and saw a reddening on my neck, like a deep wound all the way round and across the bump of my Adam's apple, which mottled and blurred as I touched it with my fingertips.

  I didn't know what the marks were. I think I was afraid. I shivered, barefoot, in my striped pyjamas, looked up and saw that the top of the window was ajar. A flutter of cold air came through it. Dr Kemp must have left it open, after the prayer, before he turned off the dormitory light. I stretched up and pushed the window closed, then I sat on my bed and pulled a blanket around me.

  I placed my hands open on my lap and examined the marks. And it was as though I could read from them the dream I'd had . . . I saw a place I'd never seen before and yet so real that I wondered how I could have conjured it: a gloomy study, with shabby furniture and a huge gleaming black piano, curtains half-closed on leaded windows; every inch of every surface of tables and armchair and sofa, the piano and the floor, strewn with papers and books and sheet music; bottles and glasses and pieces of clothing, the dishevelled aftermath of a party. I heard music, lurching and swooping haphazardly, maddeningly familiar and yet barely recognisable. As I sat on my bed and looked from one of my palms to the other, the face of a young man swam into view. He said 'I disgust myself ' in a perfectly matter-of-fact voice, and moved away again. A girl appeared, blew a kiss and ran her tongue around her lips and tried to smile; but the smile was a fake, it quivered and disintegrated; she burst into tears and disappeared. 'I disgust myself ', a voice said again, although I couldn't find the man who'd spoken as the room turned slowly around me . . .

  And then the room was different. A small difference, but something so terrible that it filled me with an unexplainable fear.

  The top of the piano was wide open. Someone had opened it. I moved towards it and I saw in its glassy shine a reflection of myself: a schoolboy in striped pyjamas, moving closer towards me, closer and closer, as though I and the reflection would meet and fuse into one if we kept on walking. Until, at the last moment, when I held out my hand to the mirrored boy and our fingers nearly touched, I saw that the boy was not me, but a boy I didn't know and had never seen before in all my life.

  He handed me a piece of paper, rolled tightly into a ball. It burned my hand so much I dropped it, and it fell in flames into the black hole of the piano. I leaned into the hole, and my stomach and throat were suffused with a horror of what I might see if I looked inside. Worse than that, there was a pain in my throat so keen and sudden that my hands flew to my neck to try and prevent it. A gagging, suffocating dream . . . I recoiled from the piano with a wrenching jolt.

  I sat on my bed, trembling again, and I rubbed at my hands. The stripes had gone, as suddenly as the dream had disappeared. The pain in my neck had gone. I breathed deeply, exhaling long and hard to calm myself, and my breath was a plume of silver in the cold air.

  I wondered if I'd cried out. I thought I'd heard a cry. Instinctively I looked around me. One of the sleeping boys was muttering and turning over, and then once more the dormitory was silent. I slipped into bed with a feeling of great exhaustion and was quickly asleep again.

  It was the first time I'd had this dream. I would have it again and I would learn to understand it over the following few days.

  'I hate you I hate you I hate you . . .'

  I was running through the woods, so hard and so fast that the words I was hissing kept time with my footsteps.

  I crashed through the bare undergrowth, splintering branches with my arms as I forced my way through. I struggled through dead bracken and dry nettles as tall as myself. As I ran I glanced over my shoulder and saw the chimneys of the school behind me. Still I ran, until my breathing was hoarse. Once I fell, launched headlong when my foot snagged and then slipped on a root, and I landed so hard, flat on my chest with my face in the dead wet leaves, that I lay for a few seconds, winded and breathless. Then, when my breath came back at last, my words were more like sobbing – 'I hate you I hate you I hate you' – and there were tears on my face, smudged with dirt and sweat.

  I got up and ran further, slower now that I was far away from the school. When I turned to look, the chimneys and roofs of the old house and its scattered outbuildings were hidden by the deep woods. A bramble, as vicious as barbed wire, reached out for me as I blundered past: it caught at my neck, the thorns cut into my skin, snagging and tearing, and I clutched at it with both hands as though I were being strangled. The wire tightened round my throat, and I cried out in panic until I wrenched it away . . .

  And then I stood there panting. My white cassock was smeared with the black soil of the forest. The red surplice I wore under it was torn, and there was blood on the white ruff from a long, raw scratch on my neck. Still I hurried further, and when at last I stopped, hardly able to breathe, I fumbled in the pocket of my surplice and pulled out a letter.

  I smeared my face with the back of one hand and stared at the letter through a blur of tears. It was a blue air-mail envelope. I tugged a single sheet of air-mail paper out of it, crumpled the envelope in my fist and then threw it as far as I could into the undergrowth. So angry that every part of the real world was blurred and grey and all I could see was the flimsy piece of blue paper in my hand, I tore it once, twice, three times. Then, as I threw the bits up into the air and they whirled like confetti around me, I wheeled round and round, giddy with rage, and I yelled with all my strength, 'I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!'

  A gunshot rang out.

  The woodland erupted with the cries of the rooks which wheeled from the high bare branches. I stared into the surrounding trees, and for a second I saw a figure moving there, a dark figure which seemed to melt and disappear into the shadows. Suddenly afraid, brought back to my senses by the shot as though it were a slap on my smeary face, I looked down at my dirty hands. I frowned as I saw my dirty cassock and surplice, and I felt at the crumpled ruff and suddenly knew how strange it was for a choirboy to be standing deep in the woods on a winter's afternoon – and when a second shot rang out and the trees seemed to echo with the violence of the sound, I turned and started to run, back the way I'd come.

  It was getting dark. Cold woodland. Late afternoon in December. Dusk and an early twilight. The trees swayed and shook the last of their leaves to the forest floor. A flock of rooks clacked and croaked, blown into the air like cinders from a wintry bonfire. Then, when silence settled and the birds retur
ned to their roost on the highest branches, it was as though I'd never been there, shouting and hissing, as though the explosions of the gun had never happened.

  Only, among the wet black leaves where I'd been standing, there was a crumpled blue envelope and a few scattered pieces of thin blue paper . . .

  I ran back to the school. As I got closer, as I crossed the football fields and then the lawns in front of the house, the building was warmly lit with the glow from upstairs dormitories, with streaks of soft golden light through the wooden shutters of the library downstairs and the great hall. I caught the movement of boys, up and down the long corridors, and the thought that they were excitedly packing for the end of term filled me with dismay. I moved past the house itself and hurried around it to the stable-yard, where I skidded to a standstill on the cobbles and leaned on one of the stable doors.

  It was dark in the yard. I pressed my forehead on the door, trying to control my breathing. The anger felt like a bubble inside my chest. Then I fumbled with the latch and flung myself inside.

  I closed the door quietly behind me. Still careless of my cassock and surplice which were already so dirty from the wet woodland, I felt my way through pitch blackness until I found a shelf on the opposite wall.

  There was a rustling movement in the darkness. A shuffling, a flutter, a scratching, and the shivering tinkle of a little bell. 'Ssshhh,' I said very softly. I felt along the shelf until my fingers fell on a box of matches, and, fumbling a little because my hands were slippery and cold, I took out a match and scraped it three times until it flared alight. 'Ssshhh,' I said again, because the sound of the match and the suddenness of the light brought another scratching and fluttering and tinkle from the far corner of the stable.

  I applied the match to an oil lamp, and the room was bathed in a yellow light which threw great black moving shadows everywhere: to the rafters of the roof, to the empty stalls where horses had stood and stomped years and years ago, over a dusty jumble of old school trunks, broken desks and abandoned cricket bats. I blew softly on the match until it plumed a little feather of smoke, then I carried the lamp across the room.