5. The Seemingly Endless Opening of Doors #4
Relief floods Briar and they open their mouth to shout, despite Tate’s hand on their arm, despite the fact that there’s twenty scholars and only one of them - but it’s another of the masked boys below who speaks.
‘Wait, Buck - God fucking damn it, I can’t breathe.
’ He pulls off his mask, revealing a face that looks scarlet even in the dim light.
The boy in charge - Buck, Alistair Buckingham, of course it’s him - seems unmoved. ‘For Christ’s sake, put that back on right now.’
‘I’m serious. My face is like . . . burning. There’s something in my throat.’ He rubs at it with both hands, then kneels by the rancid water and actually splashes some on his face. ‘Fuck. It’s getting worse.’
A second scholar rips off his own mask. Briar recognises another one of the boys from the courtyard, Seb’s new friends, and with a lurch, wonders if they might spot a shock of silvery hair. ‘Me too. What the hell?’
Briar looks sideways at Hadley, and discovers that inexplicably, she’s got her phone out. Filming.
The pip crawls down the bridge and vomits into the water.
One maskless scholar is wheezing now, clutching at his throat, and the other is making an odd noise, a panicked lowing, like stricken cattle. The pips don’t seem to know what to do. Some of them are backing away.
‘Satisfied?’ Westby hisses at Briar’s shoulder, tugging on their arm. ‘Now come on.’
The sound of swearing and shouts of genuine panic echo behind them as they shuffle-run back down the tunnel.
Briar can barely feel the pain in their ankle any more.
It’s irrelevant. When they reach the trapdoor, Briar has to be given a boost, but with the amount of adrenaline pumping through their veins it’s easy enough to shove the trapdoor open and then haul themself up and out, reaching back down to help the others.
Hadley is last by a good ten seconds, shoving her phone back into her pocket before she accepts Briar’s hand.
‘What did you do to the masks?’ Briar pants, once the trapdoor is closed. Tate smiles, but it’s not entirely convincing. He’s sweating under his polo neck.
‘Nothing.’ Hadley ruffles her fringe back into place as they exit the outbuilding. ‘Christ, you couldn’t just do as you were told?’
‘They’re torturing those kids,’ Briar spits back, full of brimstone. ‘And you just stood there and let it happen. Somebody needs to . . . I don’t know, tell the teachers.’
Hadley laughs. She’s already got an unlit cigarette in her mouth as they jog for the graveyard. ‘Pips need a little light torture. Keeps them honest.’
‘What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with everyone here?’
‘Keep your voice down,’ Westby says, punctuating his words with his raised hand.
‘Look, nobody tells the teachers, because the teachers already know. It’s just how things are done here, all right?
The plods were pips once, too. And then they were Mons.
They’ve taken their turn on the ducking stool.
It’s like that odd monkey says, in the film. Circle of life.’
The implications of this are horrifying. ‘But . . . someone has to do something.’
‘We just did,’ says Westby.
‘Was it . . . was that magic?’
‘Oh God,’ says Hadley, rolling her eyes.
Tate hushes her, and Westby says, ‘No. Allergens.’
‘Allergens?’
Westby coughs. Clearly, he’s not much of a runner. ‘Look, Rudersberg happens to have quite a severe nut allergy. I know because I’ve seen him kick up a huge fuss about it during chambers. And Belcourt reacts quite poorly to limes.’
‘It’s the lime oil,’ Hadley says, ‘actually. That’s what it said in his file.’
Briar thinks of the panicked wheezing. ‘Jesus.’
‘Oh, they’ll be fine,’ says Westby. ‘Won’t they, Hads?’
‘Probably,’ says Hadley, bored. ‘I don’t know. I was very liberal. It was bloody hard to get access to those masks. And those limes. I wasn’t going to take any risks.’
Ritual drownings. Anaphylactic poisonings.
Briar had felt cavalier walking down that tunnel, sure that nothing more than minor hijinks awaited them.
They’d been lulled into a false sense of security by the na?ve idea that an institution like this one might be lax - there’d been plenty of bloodied noses at Dunts & Heaves, after all - but would never allow anyone to come to any serious harm.
They’d been wrong.
‘You’re . . . protecting them?’ Briar says slowly, as they reach Jim’s infamous passage, the tall wooden fence on either side lightly graffitied and stained green with algae. ‘The pips?’
‘Absolutely not,’ Hadley snaps. ‘We’re declaring war on Mons.’
She lights her cigarette with surprising efficiency considering that she’s on the move, lip curling at the thought of a good deed. Briar is not convinced.
‘Jones,’ Westby says, very out of breath. ‘Those arms of yours are just the beginning. You’ve got the core strength of a snake and the constitution of a boar. My mind is erupting with a thousand possibilities.’
‘Sounds painful.’
‘Oh, it will be,’ Hadley says, turning to look at them with a slow-creeping smile that puts Briar in mind of a haunted puppet. ‘Just not for us.’