16. Nobody Knows What Powers a Pool
The timings are mostly guesswork. The fact that they could be entirely wrong has not escaped Briar as they sit crouched behind a beige, concrete outbuilding at midnight on Friday in the area the scholars call no man’s land, the walls lightly graffitied and waiting sadly to be demolished.
They’re near the staff car park, in the condemned seventies blocks that somehow look far older and more exhausted than the parts of the school that were built before the discovery of electricity.
The idea is that at some point, a hundred pips will be silently quick-marched through the entrance - but they’ve been waiting for half an hour without any signs of life.
‘Is it always like this here?’ Briar asks, their knee bumping against Tate’s as they adjust position. He’s been agitated, jiggling, uncharacteristically grim-faced and serious. ‘So cloak and dagger?’
‘Ha,’ Tate whispers back. ‘No. You caught us at a very strange time.’
‘What’s it like? Normally?’
‘Um.’ Tate shifts. He smells like peppermint today, and he’s wearing a subtly pinstriped black moto jacket that looks far too expensive for mucking about near an old pool.
‘I don’t know. Fine. Hard. Exams have been hell this year, but we get lots of study hours, so when the weather’s nice we go out to the graveyard, or sit by the lake.
Sometimes I swim. West spent seventy-two hours straight in the library because he refused to give up the good desk by the window, and we had to stage an intervention to get him to change his pants.
We walk to the pub in the village on Fridays.
The parties can be good, if we’re invited.
We spend a lot of time just the three of us.
’ He pauses, rubbing at the skin of his ankle where it’s exposed above his black-and-grey houndstooth socks.
‘I do like it here. The blossom over the moat in the spring. Tea by the fire, especially when it snows. Dressing up for the winter formal. The architecture, all that shit.’ He flashes a smile in Briar’s direction, cheek dimpling, his teeth bright white and perfect. ‘Must be Stockholm Syndrome.’
Eleven-year-old Briar rushes to the surface, hurt, jealous. Yes, there might be some level of delusion required to enjoy all those things about Temple despite the rest, but . . . tea by the fire? Snow dusting the gables and cupolas? Fucking blossom? That’s exactly how they’d always imagined it.
‘No,’ they say. ‘I get it. It sounds nice.’
‘It can be. When no one else is around, you can almost forget.’
There’s a noise from nearby, and both of them freeze, but nobody comes into view. They wait for a long time, listening to the soft hiss of the trees and the distant whooping of some unseen bird.
‘I think they’re already inside,’ Tate whispers suddenly. ‘I think we missed them completely.’
‘You sure?’
‘Nope. But . . . maybe. Yeah. I’m calling it. Let’s go.’
They run at a half-crouch towards the gym complex, and when they reach the thicket of nettles, start wading grimly through.
They’re both wearing long trousers for this exact reason, tucked into socks pulled halfway up their calves, but somehow Briar gets stung anyway, and they shiver in the humid night air as they feel creeping pinpricks of acid-bright pain spread up their leg.
At the peeling maintenance door, which was once painted cobalt blue and is now marred with craters of rust, Tate shines his phone torch at the lock while Briar takes out the keys and starts shuffling through them.
‘It’s a Yale,’ Tate says. ‘It’ll be yellow brass, to match the lock. Small.’
There are about twenty small yellow Yale keys, and only half of them are legibly labelled.
Briar tries to make as little noise as possible as they start methodically working through each one, the process painfully slow.
Tate doesn’t say anything, a silent guard, and Briar is grateful.
Hadley would have already called Briar a bitch three times by now.
After a couple of false starts, Briar finds the key, its very faded label proclaiming it P MAINTENANCE 1.
It’s hard to turn, and the door doesn’t swing open; they have to put their shoulder into it and heave, and the grating screech that results makes both Briar and Tate wince.
They wait, breathless - but nobody in a cape appears to kill them, so Briar pulls the door open just a bit wider and together they slip inside.
By the light of Tate’s phone torch, Briar sees large, dusty cylinders and a complicated mass of pipes all crowded against one side of the room, organs in some great, mechanical abdomen.
There is an internal door, just as Westby had predicted.
Briar fumbles for the keys again, trying to stay quiet, but Tate puts a warm hand on their wrist and then simply . . . tries the handle.
It opens. Briar slowly puts the keys back in their pocket, wedging them in the cushion of toilet roll they’d stashed there to prevent jingling.
‘You can wait around here,’ Tate whispers, barely more than a breath. ‘Keep watch.’
Briar shakes their head vehemently. This is not the moment to hang back.
They’re not just the keys guy. They said they were in, and they meant it.
Tate might be more than capable of fending for himself, but if there’s any chance that somebody needs to be punched, Briar is going to be the one to do it.
Besides . . . they’re curious. Call it morbid fascination, some failing of character, but even after the atrocities down in that cavern, Briar wants to see this. The second Trial. The Blessing.
‘Idiot,’ Tate whispers, but he’s not angry really. ‘Fine. Stay close. Go slow.’
The hallway beyond the maintenance room is uncanny, the setting of one of those post-apocalyptic, subaquatic video games Kay likes to play in the dark with the volume all the way up.
Everything’s crack-tiled and smells like wet Lycra left to rot, the floor sprinkled with evidence of mice and larger intruders: tiny animal shits, discarded Bic lighters and empty cans, too-neat tags Sharpied on the walls.
There’s cold light coming from somewhere up ahead, casting blue-green shadows as they walk, and roosting pigeons cooing above them, the sound echoing strangely off the tile.
They’re too exposed here, an unknown number of doorways ahead.
Tate takes a chance on the first left and they find themselves in one of the old changing rooms, even more horrifying than the corridor.
Part of the ceiling has fallen in, crumbled away to nothing, revealing a dark chasm beyond.
Shower taps spew long strings of mineral crust and brown rust down the walls, and there are lumpy shapes under some of the benches.
Briar tries not to look too hard at any of them as they walk.
At the opposite end of the room, around a sharp corner, a slowly disintegrating white plastic curtain is still clinging to life, half-obscuring the changing room from the pool beyond.
There are voices bouncing off the walls, the space obviously occupied - they can hear some restrained whispering, the nervous shuffling of feet and the murmuring of older scholars in conference with each other.
Tate approaches the curtain with the utmost caution and Briar follows, coming to a stop when the angle is just right to remain hidden with a glimpse of a view.
There’s a large, stopped clock looming over the shallow end, the school crest enlarged and painted below, faded now, the skull still leering ominously; half-eaten red-and-white bunting at the five and twenty metre marks sags forlornly, one of the lines cut and trailing.
The pool itself is drained, and the pips are crowded up on the side at the deep end by the diving boards.
One electric light from an adjoining office badly illuminates the room with a seasick pallor.
In other places a few candles burn, but they’re sparing, the glow concentrated in the empty pit of the pool, so that the nervous faces of the eleven-year-old hopefuls are uplit and starkly shadowed.
On the way there, Tate had explained that the evening’s Trial had been updated in the twentieth century, inspired by the work of a Serbian performance artist by the name of Marina Abramovi?; in the seventies, she’d hired a space, provided an array of objects - including a gun, a rose, a whip - and instructed attendees to use them on her body.
She’d stood there for six hours, completely vulnerable to the whims of the public.
‘Someone drank her blood, people touched her, assaulted her. It was fucked up. And some sociopathic Mon back then clearly thought their Trial needed refreshing to add objects instead of just fists and spit, ’cos she was onto a great idea for a children’s game. ’
The Blessing had already seemed like a bad idea in theory, but the reality had the potential to be truly monstrous.
‘Off you go,’ somebody says authoritatively from out of view - it’s Alistair though, Briar knows his voice, already hatefully familiar - and everyone starts moving.
One by one, the scholars climb awkwardly down into the pool, using the ladder that stops slightly too high and forces them to jump the final foot.
One of them turns their ankle on the landing, and another goes to steady them.
This sense of comradery will surely be dead within the hour.
What would little Briar have done? Hung back like some of the pips are doing, hugging the wall, desperate for the anonymity of the shadows? Or stepped forward towards the candlelight, eager to prove themself?
At eleven, Briar had already hurt people.
Schoolchild scuffles, mostly coming to Seb’s aid, blood shed in his honour.
The gang from the village, Jason Page and his cronies.
It had felt good to fight back. Briar remembered cracking Jason’s tooth, after he’d made Seb bleed, and thinking, good. Seb had always hated watching.
God. Eleven-year-old Seb, here. He’d have been utterly terrified.
Briar wouldn’t have been able to watch the other pips torture him back then without swift and severe retribution - but if this new stranger Bastian was standing in that pool now, totally at Briar’s mercy, it’d be a lie to say that Briar wouldn’t want to lay their hands on him.
Tate catches Briar’s eye and jerks his chin back the way they came.
‘Other room,’ he mouths. Briar nods, and follows him back out into the murder hallway, in through the neighbouring door to the twin changing room, everything in reverse.
It smells much worse in there, like blocked drains and something organic and putrid.
The plastic curtain is pulled fully across the door, but it’s conveniently full of ragged holes, just the right size for spying.
An old-fashioned bell rings poolside, high and clear.
From this angle, Briar can better see the pips in the pool. They’re gathered in a circle around one small, snub-nosed brunette boy who’s standing alone, waiting. A sacrificial lamb with chapped lips and one shoelace untied. On the floor, an array of objects; scissors, a stick, soap, rope.
There’s silence, and then some nervous giggling that’s abruptly cut short. One pip shuffles forward, and the boy in the middle tenses up, his hands fists, but all she does is flick him gently on the ear and then step back into the crowd.
‘Now, this isn’t very much fun, is it?’ Alistair says from outside Briar’s field of vision, sounding extravagantly bored.
Briar finds a different curtain-hole. Through this one, they can see five caped and masked Mons standing at the edge of the pool, foreboding as death.
Most of them are entirely anonymised by their uniform, but Briar spots a lock of silvery hair falling carelessly from a hood and can’t look away until one of the other capes hops lightly down into the pool and stalks towards the pips, who scatter like a flock of twitchy birds.
The Mon - presumably Alistair - bends, straightens up, considers their victim with the casual menace of a predator, and then reaches over and grabs him, hard, by the back of the neck.
Briar flinches - but a second later the boy has been released.
Alistair holds up a pair of scissors in one hand, flashing orange in the candlelight, and a huge hunk of brown hair in the other.
He opens his fingers, lets it flutter to the floor of the pool, and then hands his weapon of choice to the nearest pip.
‘Let’s try again - and this time let’s use our fucking imaginations.’