May 10, 1964
The attic was the way he remembered.
Except that someone (probably his mother) had moved the old dresser aside to get into a trunk that had been shoved against the sloping wall for aeons, and then shoved the dresser imperfectly back into place. He was incurious about the trunk; he had been into them all at one time or another, and he knew that particular trunk to contain scarves and fancy-dress costumes that had long since faded and lost their excitement. It was the wheeled clothing rack at the other end of the space that he wanted to see: and he made his way carefully toward it, sidestepping trunks and ducking silently around a wicker dress-form that still wore a yellowed slip.
The cobweb he had strung from the sleeve of the green jacket to the floor had not been disturbed. He breathed out silently in relief and bent to move it. This particular cobweb was beginning to run thin; he was going to have to find another to replace it soon.
Once the cobweb was out of the way, he crawled quietly under the coats and dresses into the tunnel of trunks and boxes he had made for himself. A few years ago the tunnel had been gloriously spacious; now that he'd gained a few inches (though he was still woefully short, his father's reassurances about growth spurts notwithstanding), the tunnel was a comfortably snug fit.
At the end of the tunnel was his hiding place: walled on one side by piled trunks, on another by a rickety chest of drawers, on a third by the sloping wall of the attic, and on the fourth—well, the fourth and fifth, actually, by a dressing-screen and several boxes of china. Roofing his space was a cork-board that he had dragged out of its space wedged against a wall and laid over the chest and behind the screen with a careful appearance of carelessness.
His tin box of treasures was where he left it, in the bottom drawer of the chest, wrapped in an old scarf. He pulled it out and examined its contents with satisfaction. Three toy soldiers; an old RAF insignia patch he'd found and clipped from a banner; an odd chessman, a knight, in the form of a fearsome wizard brandishing a sword from atop his horse (even with the paint fading, the wizard's glare was bloody and thrilling); a shining half-crown; and a ring, a small one that he'd been given as a baby and now could barely wear on the tip of his little finger. The ring had a curious stone; no one had been able to tell him what stone it was, nor could anyone agree on the color. He liked to imagine that it was a talisman, given him by some august personage to protect him from evil—like the story he'd read in that book in his father's study. Why his father had to put the fairy tales on such a high shelf, he had never properly understood.
He lounged on the floor of his space, curled round his treasures, and pulled out the paperback he'd stuffed into his back pocket. From under the waistband of his shorts he lifted out the packet of biscuits he'd swiped from the pantry, along with his pocket torch. He opened the packet (quietly), switched on the torch, hitched it up between his jaw and his collarbone, opened his book, fished out a biscuit, and began to read, trying to chew without dislodging the torch.
A sudden clink, as of disturbed glass, sounded in the stuffy air of the attic. He looked up sharply, and the torch fell from its perch to clatter on the wide boards of the floor. He let the book fall shut, grabbed for the torch, and turned it off. He listened hard, letting the silence settle again; but nothing else happened.
All the same, that sound had put the wind up. He moved as silently as possible to the peephole he had created between the screen and the trunks. The view of the attic it afforded was rather good; unfortunately, a look through it produced no result this time, as there was no one there.
But he had not imagined that sound.
He abandoned his treasures, the book, the torch, and the biscuits to crawl again, silently, slowly, like a panther, back through his tunnel and out from under the clothing rack to investigate. Standing upright again, he surveyed the room.
Nothing.
Where would there have been glass? He ticked off the possibilities in his mind. Not the china; it didn't come from there. Not the balloon glasses packed carefully in the opposite corner. Perhaps the old chandelier, resting in a box near the window? He went to it and looked it over. It looked as undisturbed as ever.
As if warned, he glanced back over his shoulder to the darkest corner of the room; and there he saw it.
It wasn't a light, exactly: more like a disturbance of light, an unnatural warping of the pattern of rays and atoms—as if some invisible heat source had placed itself in the corner. He went slowly toward it, keeping his eyes on it, daring it to move. The disturbance, or whatever it was, quivered harder at his approach.
Then two things happened at once.
A bit of dust caught on its way down his throat, and he doubled over in a paroxysm of sneezing and coughing.
As he recovered, he heard the sound of his mother's voice, both sweet and insistent, calling him from downstairs.
"Rupert?...Rupert!"
He straightened, wiping his nose and mouth on the back of his hand. The disturbance of light had evaporated, leaving no trace of its presence.
Whatever it was, it was going to have to live with him. He had been here first. He sighed to himself and went back to the entrance to his secret place. Just as he had crawled beyond the draping coats and dresses into the tunnel, his mother's voice reached his ear again, sounding more peevish this time:
"Rupert: now, young man!"
Rupert lowered his head between his shoulders and delivered himself in a whisper of all the curse words he had learned last term. He backed at a silent crawl out of the tunnel, dusted himself off, and took quick stock of his appearance.
He was filthy, and he didn't have time to do anything about it. He licked his finger and rubbed at the dust ingrained in the skin below his knees, but that only made the dirt darker. His white t-shirt was smeared with dust, and the bottoms of his socks were the color nightmares were made of. He sighed, uttered another string of curse words under his breath, and crept quietly out the door and down the attic steps. With any luck, he'd get down the next corridor and down the next flight to his room before she saw him.
As it happened, however, he met her at the door to his room.
She was undoing the knot of her apron at the back; when she saw him, she redoubled her efforts. "There you are," she said. She glanced him up and down with a shrewd eye. "I'm not even going to ask where you've been. And there's no time for an inquisition anyway; your father's coming home and we're leaving at once to stay with your cousins."
Rupert was too irritated to be relieved. "Why?"
"Go on, bath first, questions later." She got the apron off and flapped it at him.
He turned and moved off down the corridor toward the bathroom, thinking about his abandoned torch, book, and biscuits and grumbling under his breath. "So much for my bloody quiet afternoon."
"What's that?"
"I said, Yes, ma'am."
"That's what I thought you said. Now, hop it."
Reluctantly, Rupert hopped it.
May 25, 1964
"Go on, then!"
"You go," Rupert said, planting his feet and scowling.
"I said it first. You're just afraid."
"I'm not afraid of heights," Rupert said disparagingly.
"Prove it."
"I don't have to prove anything."
"Stanley! Tell him."
Stanley rolled over and peered languidly over the lip of the byre loft. "Oh, go on, Rupert," he drawled, "you're not going to get any peace till you do."
"Not likely to get any peace anyway," Rupert muttered; but he went forward anyway and gripped the runnels of the ladder.
At the top he took hold of the rope hanging before him, looked down, and drew a long breath, wondering clinically if he was going to make it to his birthday tomorrow. He decided that the risk was negligible.
Below were the three of his cousins still on the byre floor: Richard, his challenger, his brother Giles, and Simmie, the tomboy, standing a little apart with her arms crossed. Rupert glanced aside to the two of his cousins in the loft: Stanley, lounging blissfully on a pallet of straw reading a comic book, and Edward, who (Rupert could see now) was smoking a cigarette. Well, at least somebody in this byre was doing something stupider than what he was about to do. He looked up at the rickety pulley that was supposed to bear his weight down to the byre floor. He gave a little shrug to himself, took a strong grip on the rope, and without listening to the little scream in his stomach, launched himself off the platform.
The ground rushed up terrifyingly, but otherwise everything was going swimmingly—that is, until the pulley caught on a rough place in the loop, jerked, and brought the whole thing down. The rope yanked itself out of Rupert's hands just as he swung forward drunkenly—he was falling, and the roof of the byre was retreating from him—I knew it! he thought—
His feet skidded on the packed earth floor, then his bum hit with the thunder of a falling building, then his back, and finally the back of his head.
When the grey cleared out of his vision, he saw all his cousins' faces suspended over him, wearing horrified expressions of varied intensity; Edward's burning cigarette drooped from where it stuck ridiculously to his lower lip.
Rupert drew a breath (the air screamed its way into his lungs), and said to him: "Mind that—fag, would you—this place is a—firetrap—"
"God," Stanley said admiringly.
The thunderous pain of a thousand earthquakes was still vibrating in the fibers of his bones. Edward still hadn't done anything about the cigarette.
Rupert was suddenly quite furious. "Well? Help me up, you bloody morons."
"Are you sure you don't need us to get uncle first?" his cousin Giles said, tentatively.
"Oh balls," Rupert said, reaching up a hand. "I'm fine."
Several hands were proffered suddenly for assistance; Rupert took one indiscriminately and let the others variously haul, shove, and lift him upright. He couldn't quite stifle a groan, nor could he stop the water coming into his eyes. Everything hurt.
"Are you sure you're all right?" Simmie asked him, still supporting him at the elbow.
Rupert nodded and swallowed hard to ward off the tears. He looked round at them all. Edward was still standing there with that damned cigarette hanging off his lip. Rupert shook his arm free of Simmie's grasp, snatched the cigarette out of his cousin's mouth, threw it on the hard ground, and stamped on it, not caring how much each of those several actions cost him in pain. "I told you," he snapped, "this place is a bloody firetrap."
It mattered very little at the moment that Edward was two years and a few months older; Edward wasn't up to withstanding his cousin's patent glare.
Rupert rounded on Richard. "And you," he snarled, "I hope you're happy. Are you?"
"Perfectly," Richard said coolly.
There was a silence, and an air of sudden danger; Stanley said suddenly, "Let's do something else. I know just the thing. Come on!"
He led the way to the ladder and swarmed up it; everyone followed. For lack of a better alternative, Stanley was usually the leader in these things.
At the topmost loft they all gathered around Stanley as he brushed the straw off a large and ancient tome and set it in their midst.
Sundry Magicks, read the legend on the front.
"Where'd you get it?" Simmie said in a whisper, kneeling to touch the peeling leather of the binding.
"That came from Dad's study," Edward said, licking his lips. "If he finds out…."
"He won't," Stanley said, glancing around confidently at the others.
They all sat down around the book; Stanley opened it and passed it to Edward. "Here: pick a spell, and let's see if I can do it."
"Oh, this is bollocks," Rupert said.
"And we're sure to get into trouble," Giles said gloomily, agreeing.
"Shut up: both of you," Richard said. "I want to see him do it."
Stanley leaned to look over Edward's shoulder as he flipped through the thick uneven pages of spells. Of all the cousins in the Giles-Vandiver clan, they were the oldest, separated by only a few months. Edward was the elder; a few months later, a family dust-up had occurred and Stanley's mother had christened her new son after Stanley Baldwin in a fit of pique. It was the boy, of course, who was forced to live down the name, which he did with aplomb.
"Here's a spell," Edward said with a sly look at Rupert, "to set things on fire."
Rupert folded his arms and smiled faintly, waiting.
"Right," Stanley said. "What shall we set on fire, then?"
"A stone," Simmie suggested.
"No, you moron, something flammable." Richard scoffed at her.
Simmie protested: "But that's no challenge."
The argument threatened to escalate, but Stanley put an end to it by fishing from his pocket a bit of pencil and laying it in the center of their circle.
Edward passed the heavy book to Stanley, who settled himself tailor-fashion with the book in his lap. "Right then," he muttered. "Instructions…." He pored over the text, his lips moving faintly.
Giles frowned. "What's taking so long?"
"It's in Latin, you boob."
Richard elbowed his brother. "Stanley ploughed in Latin, I'll bet."
"Shut your hole, or I'll shut it for you," Stanley said without looking up.
Richard rolled his eyes and was silent.
After another long moment Stanley raised his head. "Right, we must all hold hands, palms up on the right—or is it the left?—no, the right, like this—" He demonstrated, and they all copied his example, taking one another's hands as he showed them. "Now, we are to close our eyes and go into a state of concentration." All of them save Stanley shut their eyes, though whether any of them were actually concentrating is anyone's guess.
"And now I chant….Powers of air; powers of earth; powers of water; powers of fire: hear me now…."
"That's not Latin," Giles said.
"Shut it," Stanley hissed. "That comes next. Ab infinitum—"
Rupert frowned as the incantation went on, but he kept his eyes and his mouth shut. He had an instinct that magicks of this sort ought to be treated carefully: and anyway, his bum and his head hurt him very much and he was finding it difficult to concentrate.
Stanley's voice escalated dramatically and ended with a cry. They all opened their eyes.
Nothing happened.
"It's your delivery," Richard said cruelly.
"Perhaps you shouldn't yell it," Edward suggested.
"Perhaps you should have used a stone, like I said," Simmie said.
"Perhaps this sort of magic is obsolete," Rupert said flatly.
"Gimme the book," Richard said. "I'll do the bloody spell."
Stanley hesitated, flush-faced, but in the end he handed over the open book to Richard. They all closed their eyes and took hands; and Richard also read the spell; and again nothing happened.
"See, it needs a challenge," Simmie said.
"What it needs," Rupert said, losing patience, "is somebody who actually knows how to read Latin."
Richard and Stanley both bristled at him. "Then you do it," Richard snarled, "if you're so bloody clever."
"I've only had one year of Latin," Rupert told them coolly. "You're calling me an expert?"
"Well, you seem to know where we're wrong," Stanley said, narrowing his eyes.
"I know enough to know you don't pronounce 'infinitum' that way." Rupert folded his arms, attempting to ignore his headache. "And I'm still reeling from the last dare I took, thank you very much."
"Which is why you'd damn well better take this one," Stanley said, "unless you want a real fight."
Rupert shut his eyes a moment, then opened them to heaven. "Fine. Give me the book."
Richard passed the book across his brother's lap to Rupert, who took it and read the incantation through carefully. Then he flipped a few of the pages to look at other spells. The others protested, but Rupert ignored them. "Setting things on fire seems like one of the tamer spells in this collection," he noted half to himself. ("Come on," Simmie said.) "But let's keep it simple, shall we?"
"If this doesn't work," Richard said, "your arse is dead."
Rupert's face was serene. "Hold hands as before," he instructed.
Again they all held hands. "And if you're going to concentrate, concentrate on—" Rupert picked one of his aches at random— "the small of your back, where you're sitting. At the root." It seemed as good a place as any.
"Now—" Rupert began to chant, placing his words delicately and as naturally as possible. He had no expectation of its ever working; and anyway his arse was dead regularly, so it mattered very little.
There was a wind-rushing sound as he spoke the last word: Rupert opened his eyes fully and saw a tongue of flame appear out of nowhere to consume the pencil stub and the bits of straw surrounding it. Everyone gasped, not least Rupert himself.
Unfortunately it didn't stop there. Rupert hadn't been wrong in calling the byre a firetrap. They all leaped up, their delight turning to horror, and began to beat vainly with their hands and sleeves at the flames that leapt mockingly from straw wisp to straw wisp, crackling louder and louder.
"Somebody go raise the house!" Rupert howled, tugging off his shirt to beat the flames with. Through the crackling he could not quite hear the tearful argument that began between Richard and his brother, and he didn't care; he grabbed one of them by the arm—Giles—and kicked him hard in the backside. "Go!"
The shadows and lights changed in the loft as the fire grew; the cousins beat vainly at the flames with whatever they could get their hands on. Edward was panicking—the flames had caught on the burlap sack he was using. All in all, it seemed forever before the shouts in the byre deepened to grown male voices, and another aeon before Rupert saw the first fire extinguisher plume arc through the air.
A short time later they were all summoned, dirty as gypsies, to stand in a ragged company front in the Vandiver study, facing the executioner's stare of their various elders. Edward's father, whose house it was, was stormy-faced.
"...lucky the whole byre didn't burn to the ground! What on earth could have possessed the lot of you to—"
"Possessed?" Rupert's father raised a cool, if slightly singed, eyebrow. "That's not far off the mark, cousin." He lifted the guilty tome from where he had carried it unobtrusively next to him. Edward's father snatched it out of his hands, wiped the soot from the lettering on the cover. He lifted his eyes from the book to the children in a cold rage that did little to dim the truculent expression on Richard's face, though they all stood a little straighter.
"Who," Edward's father said slowly, "was so abysmally stupid as to take this book out of my study?"
Richard and his brother looked at Edward, who looked at Stanley, who looked down the line, past Simmie, to Rupert.
Slowly all eyes gathered on Rupert's smoke-smeared face.
Edward's father brandished the book at his nephew. "You," he said. "Are you responsible for this outrage?"
Rupert looked back at Stanley; for a moment, his lips twitched in the faintest of wry sneers. Then he looked back up at Edward's father. "Yes, sir," he said, calmly.
"He set the pencil on fire," Richard said eagerly.
"Nobody else could—" Simmie began, but Stanley elbowed her.
"Let me understand," Edward's father said. "You took this book into the byre with the express purpose of setting something on fire?"
"I am responsible," Rupert said gravely, trying to curb his sudden buoyant cheer. With any luck he'd be shut up in his room for the rest of the weekend. Though with his luck, they'd probably set him to clean the byre while everyone else watched. Rupert's spirits dropped as quickly as they'd risen. He had a brief vision of himself toiling away under his cousins' taunting and finally breaking under the strain to pound Richard to Kingdom Come; which, all things considered, might be a decent trade-off, even if it only got him into worse trouble.
Rupert's father's eyes had lit on Simmie with a speculative, distant look that nobody, least of all Rupert, found encouraging. Edward's father noticed where his cousin's attention was drawn, and looked over at Simmie himself. "You were all trying spells out of the book? Arthur, we'd better make sure nothing else has been conjured—"
"Just the fire spell, sir," Edward said quickly; Stanley gave him a very mean look. But Rupert figured that Edward would rather face the wrath of his cousin than risk having his father search the byre and find his pornography stash.
"I don't think we need worry," Rupert's father said. "I think we may reasonably expect there will be no more danger to life and property if we send the children to bed—" his eyes flicked over the lot of them— "now."
"Now?" Richard's eyes went wide. "But it's not even dark yet!"
But the silence that settled over the adults in the room grew pregnant with agreement. The children, elder and younger, all looked at one another in dismay.
Rupert's father lifted his chin and his eyes calmly to the paneled ceiling. "Good day to you," he said. "You'll receive your more apposite punishments in the morning."
Edward's father went to the study door and held it open silently. The children took their dismissal, knowing better than to emit an audible protest, and filed in unified disgruntlement out of the study. Rupert followed without cavil; he couldn't speak for tomorrow, but today was looking up.
"Rupert," his father said, "a word, if you please."
Or not.
Stanley and Richard's mother and father went on out of the room, but Edward's father paused. Looking up at them, Rupert saw a significant look pass between his father and his cousin that made his stomach twist uneasily. "May I make use of your study to have a word with Rupert, cousin?" Rupert's father said politely.
"By all means," Edward's father said, and went out, shutting the door quietly on Rupert and his father.
"Have a seat," his father said, flicking his had at one of the large leather-upholstered chairs. Warily Rupert went to the chair indicated and climbed into it, swinging his legs once (they did not quite reach the floor).
His father sat down in another chair close by. He pulled his pipe out of a pocket and began to fill and light it; Rupert squirmed quietly, knowing that they would have no conversation at all until he was comfortably puffing away: as a piece of rhetorical strategy, it had been quite effective in the past at undoing Rupert's resolve.
At last a steady tendril of smoke was rising from his father's pipe; he drew on the stem, shutting his eyes briefly, and said: "I understand from Sophia that she chased you out of the study this morning and made you go play in the byre with the others."
Rupert made no answer to this. As evidence for his having taken the spellbook, it was quite damning.
His father raised an eyebrow. "Is it true?"
"Yes, sir," Rupert said.
Puff...puff. "You don't like your cousins very much, do you?"
"I hate them," Rupert said, evenly. And you know I hate them, and yet you still made me come out here for my birthday, when I could have been with my friends.
"And yet you still cover for them," his father said. "Very good form. In the best public-school tradition."
Rupert blinked; but he wasn't really surprised. He made no answer.
"Who took the book from the study?" his father asked.
Rupert made no answer. His father opened his eyes and set them on his son's face. "I don't know, sir," Rupert said belatedly. "It was either Edward or Stanley."
His father grunted. "Naturally. And neither of them could produce the flame?"
Rupert shook his head.
"Who attempted it?"
"Stanley and Richard."
"And?"
Rupert squirmed again. "And me."
"'And I,'" his father corrected automatically. "So you were the successful one?"
"Yes, sir."
"And to what," his father asked, with that deadly lightness that never failed to make Rupert sit up and suck in his breath, "do you attribute your success?"
Rupert said: "I think it was because I have better Latin."
His father smiled suddenly, and covered it by scratching his nose with his pipe-hand, which still carried a streak of soot from the conflagration in the byre. Rupert breathed a little easier.
Except that then his father turned on him a speculating look that was all the more unnerving for being completely unfathomable. "You've never meddled with such things before?" he said.
"No, sir," Rupert said. "I didn't think it would work."
"Indeed," his father said. "Let us keep it that way, shall we. You may go."
"Sir?"
"Yes?"
Rupert had paused in the act of sliding out of the chair; a thought had occurred to him. "Why does Uncle Edward have a spellbook?"
His father was silent for a moment; he drew on his pipe once, and then again. "That is a question better not asked," he said—Rupert made to go— "but since you've asked it, I'll tell you this: In certain places knowledges are kept, to keep them safe from people who would misuse them. It does, of course," he added, the corner of his mouth twitching humorously, "beg the question why a house with Stanley and Edward in it should be called safe. I'll see you in the morning, Rupert."
"Good night, sir," Rupert said, and made good his escape.