The Quickening of Tom Turnpike (The Talltrees Trilogy) (10 page)

fifteen

That
night I slept very deeply, but was awoken at some unrecognisable hour by a
freakish nightmare.

It
was about Milo Blackadder.  He was standing there in our dorm, by his bed, with
the moon slicing through the shutters and casting a strip of white light down
him.  He was pale and dishevelled.  His pyjamas were ragged and grubby and hung
from his thin shoulders.  His toenails and fingernails were thickly ingrained
with grime.  His hair matted greasily to his forehead.  He seemed emaciated and
his mouth hung open dryly, revealing teeth that looked as if they would soon
drop from his gums.  But the most startling aspect of his appearance was his
eyes - glassy and lifeless, and the surrounding areas of his face were black,
giving the impression that he had not slept for an age and that his eyes had
receded into his head.

My
body was frozen still.  Well, not so much frozen as pinned down by an invisible
block of cement.  I wanted to run or scream, but I felt bound and gagged.  I
could not even close my eyes.  Around me, the rest of the dorm was sleeping
soundly.  If only I could close my eyes, I could at least pretend to be asleep
and this nightmare might go away.

Milo
slowly raised his grubby hands towards me.  Somehow I knew he wanted to
explain, but he couldn’t speak.  Strangely, though, I felt as if I understood
him.  It was like he was speaking directly to my mind, explaining that he needed
to get away from something.  And there was thirst.  He was unquenchably
thirsty.  But most of all, it was sadness.  He was consumed by a sadness that
not even death could assuage, and he needed to escape.  He was desperate for
help.

But
then something much more terrifying loomed into view behind him and placed a
haggard, rotten hand on his shoulder.  A tall figure in a shabby, brown cloak,
the face completely shrouded in the shadow of a hood.  Terror sheared like a
frozen knife straight through me as I felt the eyes of this horrifying ghoul
fall upon me. 

Then
they were gone.  My nightmare echoed with the sound of hooves trotting off into
the night. 

Or
were they paws?

sixteen

I
awoke with a start and a dry mouth.  I looked around at the familiar
surroundings of my dorm.  It was a creepy room at the best of times, but I was
comforted to see that everything seemed to be as it should be.  And as I
wondered whether dreams really could contain messages from people in distress,
I fell back to sleep.

Sunday
was a good day.  Other than Prayers in the Orangery, we could do whatever we
wanted.  A day set aside for everyone’s favourite activity:  mucking about. 
There were always so many possibilities:  climbing trees, doing dares, building
huts, declaring wars; there was the Walled Garden, the Deer Park, the Swimming
Pool, the Games Pitches; stinging-nettles to dodge, pheasants to bash,
booby-traps to prime and a never-ending supply of hidden locations to discover,
name, annex and render as part of the semi-mythical realm we occupied.

Sundays
started in the best possible way.  An extra hour in bed.  So, at the sluggish
hour of seven, I would wake up and have a few moments to face the depressing
thought of heaving myself out of bed and traipsing downstairs to be herded
through a tepid shower.  But then, once that thought had fully awoken me, I
would have that blissful realisation that I had the next hour in bed.  And that
hour was always the one hour of the week when my bed was more comfortable than
it was during any of the other one hundred and sixty-seven.

So
I closed my eyes and sunk back into my mattress and a flickering almost-sleep
when my dreams masqueraded as reality.  I saw Blackadder slithering out from
the Burrow with Boateng and the Colonel standing above him in Polizei tunics,
necromancing him from the soil, and Blackadder blinking in the light with the
unfamiliarity of a newly-born baby.  And then I was seeing myself, hidden
behind the barricade which Pickering was still constructing.  I knew I had been
seen and I wanted to run.  But I could not command my body because, of course,
my body was over there and I was still here, watching.  And then I was drinking
water straight from the tap at the sinks by the Showers in the Basement.  The
water was cold and perfectly clear.  It woke me up.

***

It
was another fine day and Peregrine Trout had just opened up the shutters as the
rest of us were dozing and struggling to wake up. 

“Guyth,”
said Peregrine suddenly.  “Hath Blackadder been here?”

I propped
myself up on an elbow and rubbed my eyes.  The others ignored him.

“Why?”
I asked.

“Oh
nothing,” he said.  “I jutht didn’t think thith photo of hith family wath lying
on hith bed before lighth-out.”  He picked the framed picture up from where it
lay on Milo’s bed.  “I thought it wath on hith chair latht night, that’th all.”

“I
thought so too,” I said, pulling myself out of bed and into my slippers. 
“That’s where it always is.”

“Oh
well,” he said dismissively.  “Hmm, but
that’th
odd.  It’th got a load
of mud on it.  Very thtrange.”  He tossed it back onto the bed.

I
went over to have a look.  Peregrine was right.  There was no reason why I
would usually be bothered by this sort of detail – after all, things were
always disappearing mysteriously or being found somewhere other than where they
were left.  But this time I felt a faint twitch of panic inside me:  In my
dream, Milo had been here, trying to tell me something, and his hands had been dirty. 
In fact, I thought to myself, either this was a bizarre coincidence, far too
bizarre, or my dream had not been a dream at all, but a nightmare reality.

Could
it be possible that when I thought I was dreaming, I was actually seeing one of
my best friends in the form of a zombie, coming to me for help?  And what was
that petrifying ghoul that had loomed behind him to take him away?  Milo had
certainly looked zombie-like, but his behaviour was far from what I had been
led by cartoons and films to expect of a zombie – no staggering about,
attacking people or sucking out their brains.

It
must have been a dream, I reassured myself.  Of course it was a dream.  But I
realised that there was so much more that I had to find out:  how zombies were
made, how I could identify them and, most importantly, the cure.  Sunday was
the perfect day to do that.  No distractions.

***

Mr.
English’s English classroom, which was also the Second Form prep-room, was
empty after breakfast.  Though the room was not strictly out-of-bounds like
Wilbraham’s flat or the Dungeons or the Science Labs, I shouldn’t really have
been in here and if Mr. English happened upon me, he would hit the roof like he
had with Reggie yesterday.  Last year there had been a spate of stationery
thefts from people’s desks, so anyone found poking around in another form’s
prep-room outside lesson-time would have his honesty subject to discussion in
the teachers’ common-room over ersatz coffee and Eccles cakes.

Mr.
English’s room had a crusty smell of nicotine, just like his breath, only not
quite so obnoxious.  Maybe he had spent so many years here that his breath had
imbued the walls, the floor and the pale yellow ceiling with the sickly stench
of cheroot-smoke, like a pub with a despondent landlord.

On
Mr. English’s desk was an open box containing copies of Frankenstein by Mary
Shelley.  I guessed that he would soon be imposing this upon the Fourth Form as
their summer holiday reading project.  In the far corner of the room were two
bookcases containing novels for boys in the lower part of the school and a brand
new set of the English version of the Encyclopædia Germanica.  I heaved the last
of these (Typewriter – Zygote) from the shelf and slammed it onto the
mantelpiece behind Mr. English’s desk, puffing up a plume of dust as I did so. 
I flicked towards the back.  I knew that I was unlikely to find a full account
of the attributes and weaknesses of zombies, but what I did find was shockingly
enlightening:

“Zombi,
also spelled “zombie”:  In Voodoo folklore, a corpse reanimated after burial by
a Necromancer (a Bokor) and compelled to do his bidding.  Scholars believe that
actual zombies exist as living persons under the influence of powerful drugs,
including nitrous oxide, poisons from berries of the Deadly Nightshade and
tetrodotoxins derived from the livers of poisonous puffer fish.”

I
took a sharp breath.  I could hardly believe it.  It was set out here in black
and white, and it was so matter-of-fact.  The poison from the livers of puffer
fish is used to make zombies.  That’s what it said.  And it was the livers that
Miss Prenderghast wanted us to remove from the fish we dissected in Biology the
other day.  Surely there was no way that could be an innocent coincidence.  So this
must be Miss Prenderghast’s role in all of this:  She is helping Barrington by
producing the potion to turn boys into zombies.  And what was worse was that we
had all unknowingly helped her.  I read on.

“In
certain versions of Voodoo, the Bokor reanimates the corpses during a ritual,
known as the Quickening.  The Bokor enters into an often violent trance during
which he is possessed by a Loa (which is a Voodoo deity similar to an angel or
a demon).  Once the ritual is complete, it is said the souls of the reanimated
corpses enter Fetishes (dolls commonly made from wood) where they will remain
until the Bokor dies.”

The
door opened sharply and I quickly, guiltily rifled through to another entry.  I
had to be able to pretend that my reason for being here was innocent.  Oh dear,
“Wendy House”.  How am I going to justify that?

“Hullo,
Tom!”

I
breathed a sigh of relief.  “Blimey, Freddie!  Open the door like a normal
person!”

“I’ve
been looking high and low for you.  Reggie’s off to check out the Hidden
Library before the Morning Service.  You know, look for clues.”

“Quick,
Freddie, close the door!  You’ve got to have a look at this!”  I showed him the
encyclopædia entry and waited for him to finish reading it.

“Whoa! 
No way!”  He looked at me, open-mouthed.  “Miss Prenderghast... she...”

“Exactly! 
We already knew that Miss Prenderghast was under the zombie spell.  But now
it’s obvious that she’s helping Barrington.”

“I
can’t believe it!” he said, shaking his head.  “So when we were doing the
dissection, we were actually helping to make the poison that they plan to use
on us!”

“Grim,
isn’t it?  So Prenderghast produces the poison, or perhaps she produces part of
it and Barrington produces the other part, and then Head Matron injects it into
the boys.  Hey, do you know what either of these other ingredients is?  Nitrous
oxide or Deadly Nightshade berries?”

“I
don’t know anything about Deadly Nightshade, but I know about nitrous oxide,” he
said.  “It’s laughing gas.  They gave it to my brother Charlie.  What happened
was he was playing rugby a couple of years ago and got smashed by these two
ginormous
blokes so badly that his kneecap went all the way round to the other side!”

“Urgh!” 
I felt ill thinking about it.  “Hey, could he bend his leg in the opposite
direction?”

Freddie
paused, perhaps toying with including that idea into his next rendition of the
story.  “Dunno.  He didn’t try coz he passed out from the pain.  When he woke
up, he was in the front seat of his housemaster’s car outside the hospital. 
The doctors couldn’t figure out a way of getting him out of the car without
making it hurt really badly.  So they made him inhale loads of nitrous oxide.”

“Really? 
 Did it work?”

“Yeah! 
He was laughing his head off!”  Freddie grinned.  “It’s used in whipped cream
too.  It’s the stuff that makes the cream come out of the can all foamy.  Anyway,”
he said, “You look up Deadly Nightshade and I’ll look for tetro... tet... that
puffer fish poison.”

I
pulled volume three of the encyclopædia off the shelf and found the entry for
“Deadly Nightshade”.  Freddie was already nosing through volume eighteen.

“Deadly
nightshade.  Here it is.  Blah, blah, blah... Aha!  The berries of the Deadly
Nightshade are extremely toxic.  Consumption can be lethal.  Symptoms of
poisoning include:  hypersensitivity to light, loss of balance, staggering, dry
mouth and throat, confusion, loss of memory, impaired speech, blurred vision...
and constipation!”

Though
I couldn’t really comment on constipation, it seemed to me that all of these
other symptoms were classic hallmarks of zombiness in the comics.

“The
Deadly Nightshade plant grows bell-shaped flowers that are dull purple with a
green tinge.  The berries are half an inch in diameter...”  I turned the page
to see a coloured diagram showing a specimen of the plant.  It looked very
familiar...  Of course!  It was the plant which Miss Prenderghast was picking
berries from when we saw her on our way to the Burrow.  So that meant that she
was working on two ingredients of the zombie-poison.

I
then flicked to the entry for “Bokor”:

“Bokor: 
In the Voodoo religion, necromancers who practise evil magic.  According to
folklore, there is at any time one Grand Bokor and a number of Lesser Bokors. 
Each has a relationship with a particular Loa (a lesser deity) which he summons
to perform rituals.”

“Hey,
Tom.  Listen to this.  It’s awful!  Tetrodotoxin:  A very strong poison found
notably in the livers of the puffer fish.  When swallowed, the victim’s body
becomes paralysed, but he is left fully conscious.  Tetrodotoxin has
no
known
antidote.”

What
a horrible situation, I thought.  Like those horror stories you hear of people
in comas who can hear everything that’s going on around them, but can’t tell
the doctor not to turn off the life-support.  Freddie continued:

“The
first symptom of tetrodotoxic poisoning is a slight tingling of the lips and
tongue.  Next there is an increasing numbness in the limbs before
total
paralysis
takes hold, with the brain still working.  At high doses, it can
leave its victim in a state of near-death for long periods.  For this reason,
tetrodotoxin is thought to be used in the Voodoo practice of creating zombies.”

“Wow!”
exclaimed Freddie, looking up.  “So your brain works, but your body goes
dead
. 
Imagine spending all that time knowing what’s going to happen, but not being
able to do anything about it.”

The
door banged open and I jumped.

“Here
you are!” panted Reggie.  “Guys, look!”  He excitedly brandished what looked like
a torn scrap of paper.

“What
is it?” I asked.

“Well
I found it on those stairs that go up to Wolfhall from the back of the Hidden
Library.”  He paused for breath.  “That book you said you saw in there wasn’t
in there today.  I looked all around the shelves, but there was nothing other
than all those ancient books.  But then, when I was just getting to the door to
that dirty old bathroom, this was just there lying on the top step.  I reckon
it’s a clue.”

“It
must have fallen out of that book when Barrington and Boateng were chasing us
up the stairs,” said Freddie, peering at it.  “It’s the one that we saw
before.  Look, it’s that strange picture of the circles and lines.  The writing
here must be in that Eewoo language Samson was talking about.”