Little cries and moans of pain and bits of words he couldn’t articulate came stammering out of his mouth. He was sobbing and dribbling with terror. He was knocking his head hard against the metal sides of the wheelchair. There was blood.
Roger Stott called out from his seat, ‘Miss Willis?’ The look she gave him wasn’t one of her warmest. ‘Roger, you must have the courtesy to wait your turn before you ask our guest a question. What must she think of our manners?’
‘But Miss Willis, Stevie is shaking. Really shaking.’
She didn’t even look over to his wheelchair. ‘I’m familiar with Stevie’s condition, thank you, Roger. To resume: Miss Mitchell-Hedges — Anna, if I may — what is the most useful thing to take with you on expeditions to the wild parts of the world?’
Stevie Templeton was beside himself, and no wonder. If he was too frightened to stay in a dorm with me after a blown fuse had made a ghost story seem a little too real, then what chance did he have of coping with Anna Mitchell-Hedges’ carefully orchestrated spook show?
Even at that age, I could smell a prepared question, a put-up job. To her credit, Marion must have glanced over to Stevie and seen that something was wrong, just as Anna was getting into the stride of her answer. Anna raised her voice to cover the noise he was making.
Boiling without fire
‘Yours is a good question, Miss Willis, and one to which I have given much thought over the years. My answer is the same as my father’s: Eno’s liver salts. It is useful in two ways. It settles the stomach and is a tonic to the system. But it can also serve in an emergency to impress savages. Nothing makes a greater impact on the primitive mind than the white man’s ability to make water boil without using fire. That is how they understand the effervescence of the salts. If any of your audience remains unconvinced, your ability to drink the boiling water you have made without being scalded will certainly do the trick. If you decide to administer the salts to a native for their original purpose of soothing an upset stomach, you would do well to intone a spell beforehand, to account for the coldness of the liquid. Anything sonorous will do for a spell. On such occasions my father would recite the Twenty-third Psalm, not for sense but for rhythm.’
A handy tip in its way, but by this time few of us were resonating on Anna’s wave-length. Even while Anna Mitchell-Hedges was answering her question Marion started to sober up. At last she saw that Stevie Templeton was doing more than shaking in the ordinary way and she whisked him from the room. She didn’t appear again, but I can’t say that Miss Anna Mitchell-Hedges seemed to miss her. She had thoroughly enjoyed herself.
I wasn’t sure about taking up the offer to inspect the Skull at close quarters, but I certainly felt the artefact’s fascination. Everyone else seemed to be giving it a wide berth. At last I Wrigleyed up to the desk which Miss Mitchell-Hedges had used for her nasty son et lumière. She smiled at me. ‘Young man,’ she said, ‘have you come to consult the Skull of Doom? You may touch it. You may speak to it.’ I found I wasn’t afraid. I came right up to the desk and gazed at the object. There were still people in the hall, but they melted away and then it was just Mitchell-Hedges, the Artefact and Me. She whispered, ‘In fact there is no need to speak. The Skull is fully telepathic. If you merely think towards it and listen carefully, you will hear what it has to say. Simply gaze on eternity.’
The Skull was very deep and beautiful. I looked at it, touched it, caressed it and felt very honoured. The witch from Reading murmured in my ear, but I wasn’t really listening. As I gazed at the Skull, I felt the pain of Stevie Templeton, now dying away, and I knew without having to ask that the Skull would never have an interest in frightening a nervous little boy who had a huge task simply getting from one end of a day to the other. The Skull wasn’t baleful in itself, though it served Miss Mitchell-Hedges well in that respect. There was any amount of knowledge hidden away in that crystal chamber. Things seen and unseen swirled within its depths. As the Skull’s aura resolved more clearly in my mind, I began to have the surprising thought that it was actually female rather than male. In some strange way the Skull was a lady.
For a moment I thought of owning the Skull, but only to be able to spend time with it alone, and to give it a less ominous name. At the same time I realised the emptiness of treating it as a possession. I communed so deeply with the artefact that I began to think Miss Mitchell-Hedges knew nothing about it, apart from its ability to amplify her fantasies of control through fear. She was really just another Judy Brisby, a Miss Krüger too fastidious to touch her victims, and I had grown beyond the reach of such people.
From my vantage-point I could also see that the Skull was not in fact made from one piece of crystal. The lower jaw was detachable, held on with a piece of wire. At some stage an upper tooth had been chipped, one next to a canine. I wondered whether a clever dentist might not be able to make a little quartz crown for it.
Anna Mitchell-Hedges wrapped the Skull in cloths before putting it back in its case. ‘I wonder where Marion has got to?’ she asked, but she didn’t really seem concerned. She seemed pleased with her afternoon’s work. Her act was essentially ventriloquism, with the element of misdirection being crucial. Archie Andrews would have been shocked, though, by what was really going on. The crystal jaws of the Skull didn’t move, but everyone was looking at it, and meanwhile Anna Mitchell-Hedges had bitten into a schoolboy’s bone marrow, while Miss Willis looked foolishly on, pleased to have a friend who had cut the toe-nails of the Duke of Windsor, until the damage got out of hand. It was clear that she got a kick out of the fear and pain she caused Stevie Templeton. It couldn’t have been more obvious if she had gone over to him and licked the blood from his wheelchair.
She packed the Skull away and drove it back to Reading. With no real idea of where or how she lived, I visualised a gingerbread maisonette with a garden whose herbaceous borders were decorated with arrangements of children’s bones, and a basket in the hall for the Skull like a dog’s, except when it was allowed up on Anna’s lap while she watched Bruce Forsyth presenting Sunday Night at the London Palladium.
Abrasive enterprise
The Skull of Doom had been shaped over generations by sand held in the hands of slaves. For years now I had been engaged on an abrasive enterprise of my own. Ever since the interview at Sidcot School, when I had been accepted without needing to apply, I had been determined that I would go to a proper school, a normal school, a grammar school. I’d realised by now that there had never been a possibility of being sent to Lord Mayor Treloar. I was one of the best students in the school. It meant something to me, too, that Jimmy Delaney/Kettle thought I would go mad if I stayed at Vulcan.
The lump of rock quartz that I needed to abrade into shape was Dad’s resistance. I needed to wear down a mass of No into a sliver of Yes. My only tool was my tongue. I had to keep on at him. It was bad enough from his point of view when I pestered him for dry ice or square balloons, but now I was committed to the campaign of attrition. I wouldn’t let it go. All I needed was a recently built grammar school. Then it would have lifts. Dad might claim that there was no dry ice and no square balloons to be had in any shop, including Harrods, but he could hardly maintain there were no grammar schools in Berkshire with lifts. Sooner or later he was bound to say, ‘I’ll make this phone call if it means I get some peace. If it means you’ll finally shut up …’