england / october 29, 1943
prompt: "rainy days"
word count: 2,864
xXx
for those who wanted "the freckled, spectacled boy" to return from last year's winter oneshot "the ice cracks"
xXx
Edmund rolled over on his bunk, reaching down to move a red piece across the checkerboard in the middle of the cramped dormitory floor.
His wiry, redheaded opponent sat cross-legged with his back against the opposite bunk, watching keenly through round spectacles as rain pattered against the tall, heavy-curtained window, dull lamplight flickering on the walls despite the clock reading only 5:30—a time when they should have been outdoors playing soldiers along the boundary wall, or raking up heaps of leaves as high as their heads.
Instead, Edmund tucked an arm behind his head again and propped the book of Grimm's Fairytales open on his chest, searching for the spot where he'd left off.
"They laid the coffin on the ground and took the lid off," he read. "A dead man lay inside. The boy felt his face, and it was cold as ice."
"Eugh," shuddered Pryer, tucking his toes properly under his legs as he studied the checkerboard, "imagine that. Touching a corpse—no thank you."
Edmund breathed a short grunt of a laugh.
To hear him talk, one would never have suspected it had been Arthur Pryer who'd asked for a scary story in the first place.
In fact, no one last year had expected the quiet, studious creature to associate with "that Pevensie kid" at all, having once been one of the smaller boys Edmund had taken such cruel pleasure in tormenting before the bombing raids shut down the school. But it seemed the incident with the frozen creek last winter had proven a bit of the change in him, and Pryer had quickly become one of his favorite classmates, not least of all for his willingness to stray into all manner of strange subjects which the others tended to avoid.
Edmund read on. "The boy without fear carried the dead man to the bed, put him under the covers, and lay down next to him."
"Oh, why."
A creak in the top bunk behind Pryer indicated that Roger Morton had rolled over, and a moment later the round-faced boy poked his head out over the rail. "Really, Pryer? This stupid stuff scares you?"
"It's not stupid," muttered Pryer, but the defeat had crept into his tone even before he spoke.
Unfortunately, Morton's bullying days were not quite so far behind him as Edmund would have liked to hope.
He scoffed. "Ghouls and goblins and corpses that come to life are all just silly, if you ask me. It's never really going to happen, so why bother yourself about it?"
"How do you know?" asked Edmund.
The bunk above his head shifted as Lawrence Wood leaned out, too, all four occupants of the room now roused by the conversation. "What's that, Pevensie?"
Edmund shrugged, though from his position only two of his roommates could actually see the gesture. "What if it did happen? I bet you'd feel differently if you had a corpse in your bed, Morton. Or if you really met a ghoul."
Morton barked a derisive laugh. "If you really met a ghoul. Do you think we're babies or something? I don't believe in ghosts."
"Then I'm very sorry if you ever do meet one."
"What are you going on about?"
"Oh, you know." Edmund waved a hand in vague dismissal.
"Well, I don't," said Wood, shifting with a loud creak overhead and throwing his legs over the side of the upper bunk, hooking one foot into the ladder and swinging down to plop himself at the foot of Edmund's mattress. "If you know so much about ghosts and ghouls, what would you do if you met one?"
Edmund bit the inside of his lip to stifle a self-satisfied grin and sat upright, closing Grimm's Fairytales with a crackle of the binding and laying it to the side of his pillow. "Tell you what, why don't we play a game?"
Wood shrugged, brown hair mussed as usual, ink stains on his wrists from Latin period still peeking out from his cuffs as he played with his fingers. "Fine by me."
"All of us?" asked Pryer from the floor, big eyes made even bigger by silver-rimmed spectacles.
"Sure, just answer when I say so."
Morton rolled back onto his bunk. "I never said I was playing."
"You don't have to," said Edmund simply, and looked instead to Wood and Pryer, both boys watching him with evident curiosity as to what he would say next.
He fixed them full in the eyes, and his voice lowered to a much more serious tone. "Now imagine, you're walking through the woods at night. Perhaps your family is staying in a cabin nearby, or perhaps you've come out on a solitary walking holiday, but whatever the case, you begin to come among strange shapes jutting up out of the earth, and you realize you've stumbled upon some kind of ancient ruin, overgrown with moss and bracken, abandoned perhaps for hundreds of years to nature's steady corrosion."
"Who would wander into a place like that at night?" asked Morton.
"Lots of people would," said Edmund. "Why, would you be too scared?"
"No."
"Then keep your opinions to yourself." Edmund propped his elbows on his knees and lowered his voice again. "You know that sort of place is always haunted. Old ruins and abandoned places, the ones allowed to fall so far into disrepair. How do you think they got that way? Why do you think nobody ever went back?" He looked meaningfully from Pryer to Wood. "Of course, no chap wants to think himself a coward, so you carry on to get a better look at the place. Most of the old stone walls have crumbled down by now, but you pass a tall grey archway and for a moment you catch something standing in its shadow out of the corner of your eye. When you really turn to look, though, it's empty. Would you turn around and go back now?"
"I'm turning back," said Pryer without hesitation, shaking his head with a visible shiver. "I can't even pretend."
"Coward," said Morton from his bunk.
"Well, I would!" puffed Pryer. "You can go on if you want."
"I'm not playing."
"I'll go on," said Wood, and crossed his arms, leaning back against the rail at the end of Edmund's bunk. "I want to see what happens."
"Alright. It's beginning to get colder the further you venture into the ruins, the frost is creeping in, and you feel it almost more in your stomach than in your fingers. But you press on, and the walls gradually climb higher and higher, until you come to a wide round courtyard that might once have been the base of a tower, bathed in silver moonlight where the overhanging branches don't cast their dark shadows onto patches of grass and brush and ancient cracked paving stones below. Where the wall rises highest, it's almost fifteen feet tall, and in the middle of the circle there's an open well; its cover long gone, yawning like a pitch black mouth, almost obscured from your view by long grasses and loose stones."
"There's probably something dead inside," said Morton with lazy disdain.
Edmund sighed. "You can play and find out, if you want."
"I'm just saying, it's predictable."
Edmund looked instead to Wood, and the boy gnawed his lip thoughtfully.
"I suppose I would look around before going up to the well. Maybe look for another door or something."
Edmund nodded. "You make your way around the perimeter and examine the walls, gazing up into the holes that used to be tall windows, all fairly ordinary for a ruin. It's only when you reach the far side that a shadowy flutter in one of the windows catches your eye. For a moment you think it might just have been the shadow of branches waving nearby, but then you catch it again, a scrap of dark cloth billowing like a curtain in the wide gap between stones. And when the branches shift again, it all comes clear for a split second: a figure standing in the window just above you, pale moonlight striking the frayed edge of a loose hood."
The lonely sound of wind and rain against their own window lent an extra layer of eeriness to the image his words conjured.
"What nonsense," scoffed Morton.
Edmund pursed his lips.
This time even Wood shot the other boy a look of perturbation. "We get it, you don't believe in ghosts, now play along or shut up."
"But it would never happen!"
"Well," snapped Edmund, "what would you do if it did happen?"
Morton sighed and rolled over. "If it did happen, I'd throw something heavy at it and be done with the whole stupid charade."
Edmund crossed his arms. "Alright. You pick up one of the crumbled fragments of stone along the bottom of the wall and throw it as hard as you can. It strikes the figure with a crunch, and it leers over the edge for a second before tumbling like a ragdoll from its perch and hitting the ground at your feet with the snap of brittle bones."
"See?"
"The moonlight hits it fully now, and you see the long-rotted remains of a man, still shrouded in the weatherworn tatters of an old traveling cloak. Its toothless mouth opens and closes, paper-thin flesh stretched over the jaw you dislocated, and it writhes quickly toward you on dangling, broken skeletal arms, grasping with blackened fingers at your ankles."
"Ugh," shuddered Pryer from the floor, hugging his own knees up against his chest.
Morton scoffed. "I would kick it. Stamp its bloody head in."
"It's stronger than you. Both of your legs have already been locked in its grip, and when you try to move you trip yourself over onto the paving stones, blank eye sockets searching for your face as the corpse claws its way up your body."
"Why, you— I'll beat it with a rock, then."
"You grasp a rock the size of your fist and cave the side of its skull in with a crunch like paper mache, even knocking its hood back with the force of the blow. But its bony fingers have already closed around your throat, and the moonlight pours through the hole you've made in its head through gaping empty eyes. The body has been dead for years, one more injury won't hurt. It's the spirit you should be worried about, but you're too late, and it strangles you to death under the cold, clammy flesh of dead fingers, leaving your corpse sprawled vacant on grassy stone as it collapses into a heap on the wayside. When something moves again, it's you, still dead, eyes wide and white in the moonlight, nothing but a vessel now. You are the wraith of the tower. And you rise, abandoning the last unfortunate traveler's bones where they lay as your empty body strides off into the night."
For a moment only the pattering of rain against thin glass broke the silence of the dorm, water streaking in shadowy rivulets against a world of darkening grey as the lamplight flickered dull on yellowish walls, illuminating three pairs of wide eyes all staring at Edmund before glancing tentatively at each other.
When at last Wood spoke, his voice seemed abrupt and loud in the comparative silence. "Do I still get to try?"
"Be my guest."
"I think… I would run away before it fell."
Edmund cocked his head. "Really? Before you saw what it was?"
The boy swallowed, and a crisis of conscience seemingly ensued before he admitted "Maybe not. At least— I would run away after it fell, for sure, straight back the way I came."
"Very well. The shadowy figure strikes the ground, and in the moonlight, you catch a glimpse of its haggard face for a single instant before you turn and bolt, straight back for the crumbling arch through which you came. But the open well lies between you and that doorway, and your foot goes over the edge before you see it, pitching you down into the black abyss and the dry bottom a hundred feet below. Your bones shatter, dead on impact, never to see the scattered occupants with whom you share your grave. You are far from the first to meet this fate, and far from the last, rotting there in the depths, never to be discovered by another living soul until your bones have turned white none yet live who knew them."
"Oh, it's all rot," snapped Morton before the quiet could fully settle in this time. "There wasn't even a good answer in the first place!"
"Yes there was," said Edmund calmly.
"And what was it?"
"Pryer got it right."
The small, freckled face glanced up in surprise. "Me?"
"Sure. You could have gone further if you wanted, but the real point is you turned around the moment things seemed to grow beyond your control. A little fear is healthy, sometimes, when you're dealing with things you don't understand. That's why the ones who don't believe always die first." He leaned back against his headboard with a shrug. "But I suppose it doesn't matter." He smirked. "I've heard from very reputable sources that it would definitely never happen."
"Oh, don't play with me," snapped Morton, "it's all ridiculous and I don't care."
"What, I didn't scare you, did I?"
"Of course not! You're a terrible sport and none of you are any fun." The boy swung his legs over the edge of his bunk and jumped down, storming heavily across the floor. "I'll find someone who'll play a real game, if this is how you're gonna be." He opened the door before anyone else could speak and slammed it on his way out.
Edmund gazed after him for a moment before glancing between Pryer and Wood.
The boy at the foot of his bed pressed the thumb of an ink-stained fist to his mouth, failing to stifle a grin of extreme entertainment.
"Didn't he look white as a ghost?" asked Pryer from the floor.
And they all shared a glance amidst one last singular moment of silence before Edmund and Wood burst out laughing.
Even Pryer giggled as the bigger boys struggled to recover themselves, the sound of laughter echoing all the more merrily off the flickering yellowish walls for how haunting they had seemed only moments before, like sunlight pouring into a tomb.
"Say, Pevensie," choked Wood, swallowing a laugh like a sob as he just barely managed to get the better of himself, "that story wasn't half bad."
Edmund grinned, coughing from the excessive use of his lungs.
"Better than Grimm's," put in Pryer, and Edmund laughed again.
"I wouldn't go that far."
"He's right," asserted Wood. "You should really just tell your own all the time, if you want my opinion."
"Alright, maybe I will."
"It's your turn, by the way." Pryer nudged the checkerboard, and Edmund glanced down to the game which until this moment had completely fled his mind.
He ran a hand through his hair, and leaned over the side of the bed to pluck up one red piece and tap it in a criss-cross pattern across the far side of the board. "King me."
Pryer sighed, begrudgingly capping the piece with a second. "How do you always do that? You're not even paying attention."
"You'll get the hang of it, don't worry." Edmund grinned.
Wood cocked his head, tousled brown hair flopping to the side. "Wait… in that game, what would have happened if I'd looked into the well to begin with?"
Pryer scooted a black checker over one space with a careful forefinger before he looked up, too. "Yeah, and what was on the other side of the tower?"
"And how did that wraith or whatever get there in the first place?"
Edmund laughed. "Alright, alright, one question at a time."
"Just start at the beginning," said Pryer, scrambling up to sit on his own bed as his round spectacles gleamed in the lamplight.
Edmund shifted into a more comfortable position against his headboard, propping both hands up on his knees and looking from one eager boy to the other as he collected his thoughts.
"It begins with a witch," he said mysteriously, voice once again low and even. "Her enemies called her the White Witch, but in truth, she had existed long before even that ancient name came into use, and she brought her evil magic from another world altogether."
The dormitory fell into rapt attention, rain still pattering against the window, lamplight still flickering over the walls, and Edmund's voice fell into a steady cadence as he spoke, words flowing easily as he recounted the all-too-familiar tale and wove his own details in wherever he pleased.
Dusk fell without notice, and from that night forward it became rather a popular tradition to ask for ghost stories on particularly dreary afternoons, when the schoolmaster allowed no one outdoors and boys congregated in common areas for entertainment.
And by the time term ended, several teachers would declare with surprise that they could almost believe their Year 9 students looked forward to rainy days.