The Quickening of Tom Turnpike (The Talltrees Trilogy)

The Quickening
of

Tom Turnpike

Talltrees vol.
1

W.E.Mann

prologue

The
screaming was coming from every direction by now, savage shrieks of freakish
agony and wails of devastation rising above the crackling flames and punctuated
by ringing gunfire.  Their strategy was brutal in its simplicity:  Torch the
homes and wait for the families to come scrambling out; kill those that
resisted.

She
stopped and took him urgently by the shoulders.  The fire danced in her eyes.

“You
must go.  Help Edmund,” she shouted over the din.  “I’ll take them the rest of
the way.”

He
was torn.  “I can’t let you go alone.”

Another
gunshot rang out with the shattering of glass.  She looked over his shoulder
into the pandemonium as distraught terror howled from a burning hut nearby.

“You
must.  They need you.  Go now.”  She pushed his chest and took the children by
their hands.  “We are nearly there.”

He
took two steps back, his expression of despair hardening to one of military
resolve.

“Go
straight there as fast as you can,” he shouted.  “For Heaven’s sake, stop for
nothing.”

He
paused to look at her, to soak her up, imprint her in his mind.  Then turned
and ran towards the flames.

one

My
heart was thumping, but I didn’t dare to breathe.  How on Earth had I ended up
down here, hidden among the coffins, with the most terrifying man I had ever
met coming after me?  Why did I listen to Freddie?  Why do I
always
listen to Freddie?  No good ever comes of it, and this time it would be worse
than ever.

Colonel
Barrington was a member of the Nazi party.  He was an informant.  I knew that. 
My mother had warned me about him before I had even started at the school. 
That was almost three years ago now, but it had stuck in my memory.  Never say
anything bad about the Party, she had told me, keep your deepest thoughts to
yourself, and never disobey Colonel Barrington, Mr. Wilbraham or Doctor
Saracen.  They were all members of the Party even before Britain lost the War. 
And they were all informants, dangerous men who could ensure that people they
don’t like are never seen again.  I was all she had left, she had said, and she
couldn’t bear it if I was sent away to Behavioural School.  Boys sent to
Behavioural School never come back.

My
poor mother. 

I
could hear his footsteps now, approaching the Dungeon door.  He was sure to
find us.  All he had to do was look.  Oh
why
did I follow Freddie?  How
did I end up in this awful situation?

I
stared blindly into the carnivorous void.

My
poor, poor mother.

It
had all started at lunch the day before.

***

“You
want ghost-stories?  I know all of them.  I know what you can hear in the
corridors at night.  I know about the Wandering Monk, the Fallen Boy and the
Blizzard of Glass.  I know what drives the teachers insane.”

The
First Formers were captivated.  Freddie had a real talent for ghost-stories. 
He told them with such morbid, lip-licking enthusiasm that you couldn’t help
believing everything he said.

“You’ve
heard about the Deathly Screamer, haven’t you?”  He asked, eyes glinting darkly. 
“No?  The boy who fell from the top of the Spiral Staircase?”

Not
one of the First Formers moved, already under Freddie’s spell.

“It
was his
birthday
, you see, the twenty-
ninth
of February, and he
was incredibly excited because most years there
is
no twenty-ninth of
February.  He couldn’t even
remember
the last time he’d been sent a
birthday card.  In fact, maybe he’d never been sent a birthday card in his
whole
life
.  Imagine
that
! 

He
put his dressing-gown and slippers on
before
he got into bed that night,
the night of the twenty-eighth, so as not to waste any time in the morning. 
And he was so excited that he couldn’t sleep
all night
.  He just lay
there in bed, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the wake-up bell to ring.  He
waited and he waited and he waited, listening to the ticking of his
alarm-clock.  Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock...” Freddie’s speech became
slower and quieter.  The First Formers leant in with their elbows on the table
and their faces cradled in their hands, wide-eyed with stupefied anticipation. 
“He waited so long that during the darkest hours of the night he started
thinking that his birthday was just a cruel myth invented by his mother, that
tomorrow would never come and he would be imprisoned in that night forever,
with the rest of the world sleeping soundly. 

But
finally
the wake-up bell went and he
sprang
out of bed like a jack-in-the-box
and out of his dorm as fast as he could to get to...”

“Which
dorm was he in?” blurted one of the enthralled First Formers, unable to stifle
the interruption.

“I
heard he was in Red,” said another.

“No. 
It was Wolfhall,” asserted a third, with the agreement of a couple of his
friends.

“Well,”
replied Freddie, “you are all wrong.  It was Marlborough.  And perhaps next
time you should raise your hand if you have a question.”  He paused to remember
where he was.  “So, as I was saying, he ran out of
Marlborough
to go
downstairs and check the post.  But, when he got to the top of the Spiral
Staircase, he decided it would be much quicker to get to the bottom if he slid
all
the way
down the banister.

Anyway,
you can just
imagine
what happened next.  As he got onto the banister
and started sliding down, his dressing-gown cord got caught up in the
railings.  He tried desperately to release it, tugging and tugging.  But he toppled
over the edge and dangled there for ages, screaming like a lunatic for someone,
anyone
to save him.  The cord began to fray.  One thread at a time.  And
with each thread breaking, he was one inch closer to his horrible death.  Just
imagine
:
 Knowing exactly how gruesomely horrid your death is going to be and not being
able to do anything to stop it!  Well one of the Masters arrived on the scene
and ran down below him to try to grab him before he fell.  But he was too
late.  The very last thread broke.

 I
heard it took him
literally
five minutes to hit the stone floor at the
bottom.  He broke his back and
all
of his fingers, and there was so much
blood that it gushed down the corridor and through to the Changing Rooms and
turned all the white football shirts red.

But
the strangest thing of all was that his body was
never found
.”  Freddie
paused and eyed each First Former, ensuring that each one fully understood the
horror of the situation, the fact that the mystery was still out there.  Most
other boys had finished their lunch and were filtering out of the Dining Room,
voices echoing down the corridors, leaving a cavernous void of oak beams and
ancient benches.  Silence settled upon Freddie’s story.  “He had landed right
in the middle of the floor at the bottom of the Spiral Staircase with a Master
looking straight down at him.  But, by the time the Master rushed down to the
bottom to see if he was still alive, the body had
disappeared
.  Vanished
into thin air.  Nobody knows where it went.  Some people say the Devil was
waiting for him at the bottom and snatched him away as soon as he could.  But
I
reckon he hit the floor so hard that he went right through it, like... like
when you push a spoon into a jar of jam.”

Some
of the First Formers looked positively sick at this point, while some others
looked longingly into the middle-distance, thinking about the last time they
had tasted jam.

“Which
Master was it?” asked one of the smaller ones.

“Nobody
knows,” replied Freddie, “because all of the teachers swore that they wouldn’t
tell anyone who it was”.

“How
long ago did this happen?” asked another.

“
Ages
ago,” said Freddie.  “Like ten or eleven years.  Before the Occupation began, I
think.  If you listen carefully, some nights you can still hear his ghost
screaming.”

“That’s
true,” said one of the wide-eyed First Formers.  “My brother said that it used
to keep him awake at night!”

“Well,”
said Freddie, “that’s why Turnpike and I are going to go down to the Dungeon at
midnight tonight.  We’re going to find the Deathly Screamer and tell him to
keep the blasted noise down!”

Well
I had to agree to it.  What choice did I have?  I couldn’t very well decline in
front of a group of First Formers who were already looking at me like a hero. 

So,
it was with this stupid display of bravado that I found myself cornered into a
midnight ghost-hunt.  And it would set me upon a path far more grizzly and
horrifying than any of Freddie’s most feverish imaginings.

So,
at midnight, when he shook me awake, why did I not simply disagree, roll over
and go back to sleep?

Well,
this was Freddie Strange, the most persistent and wilful boy I’ve ever known. 
I should have realised that the fact that I didn’t disagree with his suggestion
at lunchtime was, for him, as good as a contract signed in duplicate and
witnessed by the Reichs Kommissar.  And there was no doubt that we would get
into trouble.  None at all.  Freddie was always getting into trouble.  I think
it was partly due to the fact that he simply had one of those mischievous faces;
a mess of insolent freckles under a tangle of brown hair, and a constant
smile-verging-on-a-smirk that always made teachers think he was plotting
something devious.  He may well poke fun at my regulation blond side-parting
with Luftwaffe back and sides, but I’m sure it meant I spent fewer hours in
detention.

But,
in spite of this, I followed Freddie in dressing-gown and slippers, crept out
of our dorm long after Third Form Curfew, and padded down the corridor to the
Main Hall in order to confront the ghost of a child who had fallen victim to a
hideous twist of fate.

In
trustworthy daylight, the Main Hall was a palace of pillars, portraits and
sculptures, overlooked from the First and Second Floors by majestic galleries. 
But looking down on it now, in the creaking night, it was a demonic haunt, it
was Dracula’s castle.  It was a place where every twitch, flutter and heartbeat
spelt a frantic, gurgling death.

The
moon glared cruelly through the glass ceiling, creating a pandemonium of
slanted shadows, darkening from mellow blue to nightmarish black towards the
hall’s recesses so as to provide numerous hiding places for escaped murderers. 
Or worse. 

Blazing
across the carpet below, and dramatically illuminated in the moonlight, was an
enormous swastika.  It was a mesmerising and terrifying design, which always
put me in mind of the rotors of a combine harvester, hacking up everything that
stands in its way.  I still had the faint, precious memory of my father
spitting in anger onto the swastika on the uniform of the soldier who came to
take him away.  But that was a long time ago.

 “Hurry
up or we’ll get caught,” whispered Freddie nervously.  “They’re just pictures. 
Just don’t look at their eyes.”

I
tried to tear my eyes away from one hideous crone in particular, her
gorgon-hair writhing hypnotically, drawing me into her petrifying spell.

Freddie
grabbed my arm.  “Come
on
.  They can’t harm us unless we do something to
upset them.  Keep looking at the floor, and run.”

We
scampered around the First Floor gallery towards the Spiral Staircase, the
central core of the school building, plunging from the Top Floor, past the
dorms on the First and the classrooms and the Main Hall on the Ground, right down
to the Basement.

 “Look,”
whispered Freddie, catching his breath.  “That’s where he fell from.  Up
there.”  He was pointing with a glint of morbid intensity to the place one
floor up where the banister began.  “Look how far down it is!”  Freddie really
seemed to be enjoying this.

“Oh
come on, Freddie.  You don’t really
believe
it, do you?”  I asked, more
out of hope than anything else.  In daylight, I would have known that ghosts
are just make-believe, but the shadows and the portraits had infected my mind
and now I had absolutely no doubt:  Ghosts do exist, and so do all of the other
twisted creatures of horror.  And they’re following us.

My
heart was thudding.

“Look,”
he said, peering over the banister through the netting.  “You can see that the
Basement floor is darker in the middle than it is at the edges.  Still stained
with his blood.”

I
tried to master my fear, think clearly.  “That could be anything.  And explain
this,” I whispered.  “Marlborough, in fact
all
the dorms are on this
floor.  If he was in such a hurry to get downstairs, why would he have gone
up
a floor before he...?”

“Shh!”
Freddie interrupted sharply.  “There’s something there.”

I
froze, scarcely daring to breathe.  I concentrated all of my efforts on
listening for footfalls, worrying that I wouldn’t be able to hear anything over
my pulse pounding my eardrums.

Then
I heard it too.  A deep, menacing growl.  I looked around frantically for the
escape routes, but whatever it was had stopped growling and I had no idea where
it had come from.

Then
we heard it again.  More clearly this time.  I realised with relief that it was
a voice, a human voice.  It sounded like Colonel Barrington, the Physics and
Chemistry teacher, and it seemed to be coming from the direction of the Sick
Bay, through the door to our right.  The Colonel was not the teacher you would
want catching you out of bed after lights-out.  He was a tall humourless man
with long, bony fingers, a strong smell of Brylcreem and eyes set so deeply
that you could scarcely see his pupils.  We could be sure that if we were
caught, the next morning we would find ourselves facing Wilbraham, our grizzled,
mammoth Headmaster, and the prospect of a caning.

“Barrington!”
whispered Freddie, looking puzzled.  “What do you think he could be doing?”

“How
on Earth should I know?” I whispered tersely.  “Maybe he’s talking to Head
Matron about the sick boys.”

“But
she’s
the only one who’s allowed up there.  That’s the whole point: 
They’re being
quarantined
.”