At the end of the hall was the most impressive display. A full-size combustion engine, polished and gleaming inside its glass case. It was put there to commemorate some Mortingham genius who’d designed a new and more efficient fuel conversion system for small aircraft and seaplanes.
“Knew him,” the janitor grunted, thumbing at the engine as they passed it.
“Did you?” Paul said, half interested.
“Yeah.” The janitor wiped his nose on the sleeve of his overalls. “He was a little git.”
The basement was reached by an unmarked door of sturdy wood, set into an alcove. The janitor unlocked it, turned on the lights, and led him down a stairwell. There was none of the grandeur of the old academy here. The walls were bare brick, lit by stark fluorescent lights.
They descended to a corridor that ran both ways into darkness. The janitor thumped a press-switch and one end of the corridor lit up. Paul heard the switch ticking as its timer counted down. It would turn the lights off again after thirty seconds or so, to save energy.
“You don’t want to get caught in the dark down here,” said the janitor, grinning again.
He set off, and Paul followed nervously. The janitor was right: He really didn’t want to find himself down here in the dark. Maybe he was just unsettled by the sight of that strange dog, but this place made his skin crawl. It felt hungry, as if the cold, sucking, empty blackness at the end of the corridor was just waiting for its chance to swallow him.
They passed through a maze of corridors, with closed doors to either side, bearing signs like DUCT ACCESS 2/A and CABLE STORAGE. He saw one with a simplistic silhouette of a man being hit by a bolt of lightning, and the caption: KEEP OUT! DANGER OF DEATH! Each time they turned into a new corridor, the janitor hit another press-switch to light it up. A few seconds afterward, the lights in the corridor they’d just passed through would go out. Paul had a disturbing feeling that they were racing against the dark, and only just winning.
They passed several large grates set into the wall at floor level. Paul didn’t notice them until he saw one with the grate removed, leaning against the wall. Inside was a shaft of reflective metal, big enough to crawl through.
“Billy,” the janitor said, and tutted. “I keep fixing it; he keeps taking it off.”
“Who’s Billy?” Paul asked automatically.
“You don’t know about Billy McCarthy?” The janitor sounded surprised.
“I haven’t been here long,” Paul said.
The janitor just chuckled to himself and walked round the corner. He stopped in front of a door with a sign on it that read: DANGER. It wasn’t new and plastic like the other signs down here, but old and made of discolored copper.
“In here?” Paul asked doubtfully.
“Oh, no. Can’t go in there. That’s the boiler room. Behind that door is the whole heating system for the entire building. Great big Victorian gas-fired monster, takes up half the basement, pretty much. All those huge old air ducts, they were built at the same time, though I don’t think they ever got used.” He gave Paul a sidelong look. “Not by us, anyway.”
Paul waited to hear what he meant by that.
“Billy McCarthy …,” said the janitor. “Billy McCarthy was a boy about your age. He was at the academy back in nineteen-fifty-something, before my time. Little troublemaker, so they said. Anyway, one day he found his way down here, don’t ask me how. The janitor left the door unlocked, I suppose. They didn’t have any lights in the basement back in those days, so Billy gets himself a flashlight and decides to have a bit of a look around. And that’s when he sees this sign.”
He tapped the sign on the door, as if Paul didn’t know what he meant.
“Well, Billy was one of them boys couldn’t resist something like that. So in he goes, and while he’s in there, he takes it into his head to start messing around with the boiler. Maybe he thought he could shut it off and they’d have to cancel classes the next morning. It was winter, see?”
Paul was beginning to get the sense that the janitor had told this story many times before. There was a slick and rehearsed quality to it, as if he were a tour guide.
“Anyway,” the janitor continued, “next day the heating doesn’t come on, right enough. So when the janitor comes in that morning he goes down to the basement to investigate. Straightaway, he notices the smell. It reeks of gas. Thick enough to choke you. But this janitor, he weren’t the sharpest tool in the box, and it wasn’t all health and safety in those days. So he decides to shut off the leak himself. Coughing and spluttering, he is, by the time he gets to this spot. He pushes the door open, and it bumps against something, so he shoves it a bit harder, and then he sees what’s blocking the door.”
The janitor leaned closer, until Paul could smell his sour-milk breath. “It was Billy McCarthy’s body.”
The lights went out.
Paul stood stock-still, shocked by the sudden and complete loss of sight. He’d never known a darkness as total as this.
From nearby, he heard a slow cackle. “Some say he’s still down here,” the janitor said, his voice disembodied. “You hear him sometimes, creeping round in the air ducts. Sometimes you catch him, looking up at you, them eyes glittering in the dark. Might be he’s watching us right now.”
Fright was suddenly overtaken by anger. The janitor had played him. Brought him down here, spun him a ghost story, and timed it so the lights went out at just the right moment. Evidently he was getting his revenge for Paul’s rudeness earlier.
Well, Paul wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of showing he was scared. He just stood where he was, silently, and folded his arms to show he was unimpressed.
“He’d messed with a gas valve, hadn’t he?” said the janitor. His voice was farther away now: He was moving off down the corridor. As Paul’s eyes adjusted, he saw a tiny orange light in the darkness, a little way away. “He got himself trapped inside, suffocated on the fumes. But it could’ve been worse, you know. If that janitor had made so much as a spark, this whole school would’ve been blown to bits. Even the spark from a light switch would’ve done it. If we’d had these handy-dandy press-switches installed back then, he’d have hit the button and BANG!”
The lights flared again, dazzling Paul. The janitor was standing at the end of the corridor, near where Paul had seen the orange light. He realized it was a guide light, so you could find the button in the dark. Which was exactly what the janitor had done.
“And that’s why you don’t go into the boiler room,” the janitor said, and he went off up the corridor, cackling to himself. Paul gave the boiler room door one final glance, then swore under his breath and followed.
A little way farther on, they came to a metal door marked COMMUNICATIONS. The janitor reached in and flicked a switch — a normal light switch this time. The room lit up for a second and then went dark with a glassy tink as the bulb blew out. The janitor cursed and dug out a small flashlight from his overalls. It was the size of a tube of lipstick, but when he turned it on it was startlingly bright.
“These lights are always going out,” he grumbled. “Can’t understand it sometimes.”
“Must be Billy McCarthy’s ghost,” said Paul sarcastically.
The janitor grinned at him and they went inside. After a few seconds, the light in the corridor went out, leaving them with only the flashlight to see by. Eerie shadows lunged and swayed across their faces as the janitor shone it around. Paul felt a lot less brave all of a sudden.
The room was large and dank. There were piled-up cardboard boxes that had sunk with the moisture, and thick heating pipes running along the back wall. Near the door was a large junction box, with a key on a chain hanging off it. The janitor opened it up. Inside was a bewildering mass of wires.
“There’s only one phone cable out of this place, see, on account of how isolated we are,” said the janitor, shining the light around inside. “Everything gets routed through this automatic switchboard, then it’s sent on its way down the li
ne. Storm’s probably done something to it.”
“No,” said Paul. He reached over and tilted the flashlight up. “I’d say it was more likely because of that.”
A thick cable ran from the junction box up to the ceiling. It had been entirely chewed through.
The janitor snorted. “Mice,” he said.
“We need to get a doctor,” said Paul. “There’s a sick kid in the medical block.”
“Well, someone’s just going to have to drive to town, then, ’cause there’s nobody calling out of here until that gets fixed. Looks like they got the Internet cable, too.”
Paul opened his mouth to reply, but at that moment they heard a sound, loud in the underground silence. A scrabbling, clicking sound, as of tiny claws.
“I can hear them, the little buggers!” the janitor snarled. He whirled and shone his flashlight in the direction of the sound. The beam played among the boxes and pipes. “Where are they?”
“Let’s just go,” said Paul. “We need to tell the nurse.”
The janitor ignored him, shining his light this way and that. Paul stepped back toward the wall. He felt safer if nothing could get behind him. The knowledge that there were other things down here in this darkness, even little things like mice, had made him suddenly afraid.
Something scuttled. The janitor swung his light. Paul caught only a glimpse of it before it disappeared behind a pile of boxes on the other side of the room. Something many-legged, something writhing and moving fast. Something silver.
“We have to get out of here,” he said quietly. He wanted to run, but the janitor had the only light. He looked toward where he thought the door was, and saw nothing. Then, a few feet to the right, he glimpsed a small orange light. The press-switch in the corridor outside. He could see it through the open doorway.
“Did you see that?” the janitor said. “What was that?”
“We have to get out of here!” Paul told him again, pulling him in the direction of the orange light.
There was a squabbling babble of squeaks from the darkness. The sound had a metallic edge, as if it were being played through an old eighties synthesizer. But the janitor, instead of retreating, was still trying to find the source of the noise with his flashlight.
“That’s not mice,” the janitor muttered. There was a scrabble of claws again, and something scrambled out from behind the boxes. The janitor shone his light on it, and it froze.
Paul’s blood went cold. They weren’t mice. They were rats. Five huge silver rats, their tails wrapped together in a tangle, crouched in a grotesque pile. Their matted fur was covered in mesh, plates of metal sewed in and out of their skin. They were a horrible patchwork of flesh and machine, like experimental animals that had escaped from the cruelest laboratory imaginable.
Then, suddenly, they broke apart, tails whipping as they unwrapped themselves; and now they were racing toward the intruders, squealing, long teeth bared as they came.
Paul ran. He couldn’t help himself. He flung himself into the darkness, toward the tiny orange glow that offered light and salvation. For an instant, he was blind. His shoulder struck the edge of the doorway, and he bounced off it, careering through, tripping into the corridor beyond. He crashed into the wall on the far side, and suddenly light blasted the corridor. He’d fallen against the press-switch.
Dazzled, he shaded his eyes and looked back through the doorway. The janitor hadn’t moved. He was still dithering in terror, shining his light on one rat and then another as they raced across the room toward him. He turned and stared at Paul. Finally he began to run.
Too late. The rats swarmed onto him, racing up the legs of his overalls. Paul scrambled away, his heart pounding, panic bubbling up inside him. The only thought in his mind was that he couldn’t let them get him. He couldn’t. He couldn’t.
The janitor’s screams rang in his ears. He fled headlong down the corridor, slapping light switches on the way, racing ahead of the dark.
This time, he didn’t think he’d be able to outrun it.
Paul ran through the corridors of the school, breath burning in his chest, his footfalls echoing around him. The screams of the janitor still sounded in his ears, the awful cries of the rats like angle grinders on a girder. He’d put a heavy door and a lot of distance between himself and that room by now, but he still felt they were on his tail, that if he looked back, he’d see them, their silver eyes glittering, teeth bared.
The rats … the dog …
What was happening here?
There, ahead of him: a fire door, hidden away in an arched stone alcove. Suddenly he knew how the teachers got out at night after the janitor locked them in. He ran at it, shoved down the bar, and pushed it open. Lightning and thunder met him. He slipped through and slammed the door behind him. No handle on this side. No way back.
Gasping, he leaned against the cold, wet metal. A stitch was jabbing him under his ribs. He was in a nook around the side of the school, concealed by the stone folds of the building, where the sight of a fire door wouldn’t ruin the effect of the Gothic facade.
I’ve got to get help, he thought. But who could help him? Who’d even believe him?
It didn’t matter. He had to tell someone.
The nurse. I have to tell the nurse.
Paul set off for the medical block, guilt gnawing at him. Should he have stayed? Should he have tried to help the janitor? Wouldn’t that have been the right thing to do?
He couldn’t deal with those questions now. He was too shocked to make sense of everything. All he could do was what had to be done.
The medical block was not far away. Light from its windows glowed in the dark. Paul ran toward it, and burst through the doors into the waiting room.
It took him only a moment to realize that something was wrong.
There were a dozen or so kids in the waiting room, standing there in dripping raincoats. The younger ones were scared; he saw it in their faces. Nurse Wan was nowhere to be seen.
He stared at them all. “What’s happened?” was all he could think of to say.
His answer came a moment later. A roar from somewhere out of sight, a man bellowing at the top of his lungs, with the kind of savagery that only the deranged could manage.
Into the silence that followed, Paul said quietly: “What was that?”
“Mr. Harrison’s gone crazy,” said someone. “He’s locked up in one of the treatment rooms.”
Nurse Wan came hurrying out from the corridor where Paul had seen her lead the headmaster earlier. “What are you all still doing here?” she cried, then fixed her eyes on Paul. A flicker of disappointment crossed her face. She seemed to have been expecting somebody, but it wasn’t him. “Did you get through?” she snapped at him.
It took him a moment to work out what she meant. “The doctor? No … the phones are all out….” And then he remembered why they were out, and he remembered the janitor, and his legs went weak.
The door behind him was flung open and Mr. Sutton came hurrying in, along with that redheaded kid with the big forehead. The one who’d lied about Adam on Paul’s behalf, who’d tried to help him with his DT assignment, and who’d been acting generally weird all day. Mark somebody, that was his name. He had a satchel over his shoulder and was carrying an umbrella, which he shook out and folded up.
Paul put the picture together. Mr. Harrison’s yells had attracted some of the younger kids on their way to the dining hall, who had in turn attracted more, the way a crowd gathers around a fight or a car crash. They were all scared, but nobody was leaving: They all had to find out what was going on. Nurse Wan had sent one of them to fetch help. Mark had tracked down Mr. Sutton.
The crowd made way for him. Mark followed behind, and Paul, motivated by some instinct he didn’t understand, went after them. The other kids were frightened. He and Mark were the only older students there. It gave them an authority that obliged them to involve themselves.
Nurse Wan stopped a little way down the corridor, in front of a
plain beech-wood door with a white plastic sign on it: TREATMENT ROOM 2. As she turned back to Mr. Sutton, she noticed Mark and Paul there, but she was too flustered to worry about them.
“He started raving and screaming. I had to lock him inside, for safety’s sake. I’ve got another patient here, too, you know! That little boy who was bitten, down by the lake!”
“You did the right thing. It’s alright,” said Mr. Sutton in an attempt to calm her down.
“It’s not alright! Listen to him!”
It was hard not to. Mr. Harrison sounded like he was throwing furniture about in there. Something crashed into the wall and made the door shake. He roared again, and there was a strange quality to his voice. Inhuman. Metallic.
Paul felt himself begin to tremble.
“Mr. Harrison!” Mr. Sutton shouted through the door. “It’s Mr. Sutton! Please tell me what’s wrong! We want to help you!”
The roaring stopped. Inside the treatment room, everything went silent.
“Mr. Harrison! Malcolm!” Mr. Sutton called. “You’re scaring the children. Talk to me! It’s Alistair!”
Nothing.
“Did you call someone?” Mr. Sutton asked Nurse Wan.
“The phones are all out,” said Paul again, automatically. The janitor. The rats.
Mr. Sutton thought for a moment. “I should go in there,” he said.
“No!” Paul blurted. “Don’t!”
“He could be in trouble, Paul. I have to help him.”
Paul opened his mouth and shut it again. There’s something bad in there, he wanted to say. Something very, very bad. But his throat locked up, and somehow the words wouldn’t come out. How could he explain it? How could he make them believe? Whatever he told them, they’d go in anyway. They believed the world was a sane and orderly place. In their world, Mr. Harrison was maybe having an epileptic fit, or just freaking out, or something else that was not too dangerous, something nice and easy to explain. They didn’t know how the world could turn on you in an instant, how everything could change in the blink of an eye.