Soul Stealer (12 page)

“If that’s so,” Tim said, “he’ll come back for it and we can follow him…”

“He will come at night,” Sebastian cut in, “and we can hardly lie in wait for him, hour after hour.”

“At least we’ve got the spell key, not him,” Pip said.

“Another will be made with ease,” Sebastian stated dismissively and, bringing his arm swiftly back, he tossed the oblong into
the middle of the river. It skipped three times like a flat stone, then sank.

“What are you doing!” Tim exclaimed. “It must be worth…!”

“It is tainted with evil,” Sebastian answered with a shrug, “its value is immaterial and I wish not to possess it.”

T
im pulled up his shorts and made sure the laces of his gym shoes were tight. All about him, thirty Year Seven boys milled
around the locker room, changing into their PE clothes, joking and talking loudly. It was their first gym session, and most
were eager to begin.

Paying little attention to the hubbub going on around him, Tim concentrated on Scrotton, who had chosen to get changed at
the far end of the room, half hidden by an equipment locker. Nevertheless, Tim could still see his clothes were tattered and
badly needed laundering.

“Why does Scrotton hide himself?” he whispered to Sebastian, who was wearing Tim’s spare clothes.

“When the class ends,” Sebastian said, “position yourself so that you might see him. Then, you will come to understand.”

One of the gym coaches blew a whistle.

“Form a line!” he commanded in a voice as strident as a sergeant major’s.

Cowed into silence, everybody obeyed, following him into the gymnasium. There an obstacle course had
been laid out involving wall bars, ropes, a vaulting horse, a parallel beam and some rolling mats in addition to a long row
of benches. The gym coach went around the course first to show what was required of the pupils. As he tackled each obstacle,
he shouted out his actions in number sequence. Another PE teacher stood by the vaulting horse to help those over it who found
the apparatus difficult.

The whistle blew a second time.

“Form a line at the end of the gym!” bellowed the military voice. “At the double!”

The boys instantly complied. Scrotton positioned himself in front of Tim, Sebastian standing behind him.

“You any good at gym?” Scrotton grunted, turning around before they started.

“I don’t know,” said Tim. “We didn’t have a gymnasium at junior school.”

“I’m brilliant,” said Scrotton arrogantly.

“No doubt,” Tim replied sarcastically.

The whistle blew again, and the pupils set off at intervals of about five seconds. When it came to Scrotton’s turn, the coach
standing at the head of the line said, “Right! Off you go, boy!”

Yet Scrotton did not move. He seemed to be studying the equipment, as if plotting his way around it.

“Get on with it!” the gym coach said impatiently. “It’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ve shown you what to do.”

At that point, Scrotton obsequiously said, “Yes, sir, I was just thinking, sir.”

With that, he set off at an incredible speed, his agility astonishing. One of the sets of bars was standing
at right angles to the wall. The boys had to climb up the bars for six or seven rungs, reach out, get hold of a rope, wrap
their legs around it, slide down the rope hand over hand and then run along a bench. Most boys went as fast as they could
to the bottom of the bars and then gingerly climbed up the six or seven rungs before tentatively reaching for a rope.

Scrotton, however, did nothing of the sort. He ran straight at the bars, jumped from the ground up to the seventh rung and
then, with a leap into mid-air, grabbed hold of a rope and slid down it at an amazing rate. Once he touched the bench below,
he set off along it at little less than a sprint. At the end of the bench, he proceeded without pause around the entire course,
soon catching up with the boy in front of him and having to wait until he cleared the next obstacle. The teacher by the vaulting
horse did not need to help him over it; he rolled perfectly three or four times across the mats, and, when he got to the beam,
he simply hoisted himself straight up on it and ran across it as if it were no more than a centimeter above the floor. Eventually,
he reached the back of the line again.

Tim, following him around, simply could not keep up, even with his very best efforts. Sebastian took his time.

“That was fast,” Tim said with begrudging admiration when he came up to Scrotton at the back of the line.

“Yeah,” said Scrotton immodestly. “Told you I was good at gym.”

The class continued. In every task that was set for them, one of the games masters stood by the apparatus to assist the inexperienced
or prevent injury: Scrotton
required no help or guidance. He was nimble, swift and incredibly agile. Several times, Tim caught sight of the teachers looking
at each other with surprise.

The gym period over, Tim made sure he was first into the locker room where he positioned himself so that he could see behind
the lockers. Sebastian held back. Scrotton came in and, believing he was not being observed, swiftly removed his undershirt
and tugged on it as quickly as he could. Yet Tim still saw a thin ridge of tightly matted black hair down Scrotton’s spine.
Across his shoulders, he was also very hairy. His arms were dark with hair but it was much shorter and seemed to have been
cut.

“Ape-lout!” muttered a voice over Tim’s shoulder.

He turned to find the boy who had told him about Scrotton on the first day of term.

“You should have seen him in junior school,” the boy went on. “If there was a tree, he was up it, swinging by his arms like
a scruffy little Tarzan. The teachers were forever chasing him off the infants’ climbing bars.”

“You don’t know where he lives, do you?” Tim asked.

“No. Never saw his parents, not on open evenings or anything. We used to say he wasn’t born but made out of a packet of Insta-Fool.”
The boy grinned. “Just add water and stir.”

For the remainder of the morning, Tim and Sebastian tended not to watch Scrotton to avoid arousing his suspicion. Instead,
Pip turned her attention his way.

In class Scrotton was clumsy. He was continually restless, tapped his fingers on the desktop and jiggled his foot. His attention
span seemed to last little more than a
minute. When he wrote in his exercise book, he held his cheap plastic ballpoint pen between his second and third fingers instead
of his index finger and thumb, writing with his hand curved and arched around with the pen pointing in towards him. His writing
was scrawling and he stuck his tongue out when faced with a difficult question, licking his lips and frowning, reminding Pip
of an iguana. She also noticed he frequently put one of his hands inside his shirt to scratch his stomach.

Close up, his skin was sallow and there were spots with large blackheads in them on the back of his neck. His filthy fingernails
were long, as thick as horn and split in places, more like claws than ordinary fingernails. The lines of his palms were ingrained
with dirt. The skin behind his ears was flaky and gray. His clothes were disheveled, his unpolished leather shoes scuffed,
a line of dried mud along the edge of the soles.

Pip also noticed he had very few of the kinds of possessions the other pupils owned. He did not have a mobile phone nor even
wear a wristwatch. His pencil case was just an old wooden cigar box held shut with a perished rubber band, the words
Cuba Corona
printed on the lid. His calculator was an old solar-powered Casio, the casing held together with peeling tape.

All the while Pip was, as Tim put it,
on Scrotton’s case,
Sebastian decided to discover what he could about Yoland. As the head of chemistry was teaching a double-period senior-school
class in the chemistry laboratory until lunch break, Sebastian reasoned he was very unlikely to come out of his laboratory
and so, waiting until the school had settled down to the timetable, he
excused himself from the class they were in and headed for the staffroom.

Knocking lightly on the door, Sebastian entered without waiting for a response. Inside, three or four teachers were sitting
around a large table, marking exercise books. Another lounged in a battered chair, reading a newspaper, a mug of tea balanced
on the arm.

Against a long wall stood a rank of large wooden pigeonholes, each bearing a name card in a tarnished brass holder. Sebastian
walked calmly across to them, soon finding Yoland’s. He was about to start looking in it when the teacher reading the paper
put it down and said, “What do you think you’re doing, boy?”

Sebastian had to think fast and, casting a quick glance at the pigeonhole next to Yoland’s, read the label on it.

“Miss Williams asked me to get a book for her,” he said.

“Next one over,” the teacher replied, “and don’t just barge in. Wait at the door.” He resumed reading his newspaper.

“Thank you, sir,” Sebastian replied, yet he continued to look in Yoland’s pigeonhole.

There was nothing of interest in it: some Year Eight answer sheets, a few textbooks, a box of pencils and markers and some
teaching notes and printed examination papers.

At lunch break, Pip bought Sebastian a pack of tuna and cucumber sandwiches and a carton of orange juice. Sebastian bit into
the sandwich, chewed briefly upon it and swallowed: then he reached over and read the label on the packet.

“What is tuna?” he asked.

“A large fish,” Pip told him.

“And cucumber?”

“A sort of vegetable,” Tim replied after a moment’s thought, “but keep your voice down. You’ll be branded a weirdo if you
don’t know what a cucumber is.”

“Do you like it?” Pip inquired.

Sebastian considered for a moment and began, “It has a most piquant…”

“It’s wicked,” Tim interrupted.

Sebastian smiled and replied, “It’s cool.”

At that moment, Yoland appeared in the dining hall carrying the Year Eight answer sheets Sebastian had seen in the pigeonhole.
At his arrival, the hubbub died down a little only to become louder a few moments later. Yoland chose a table at the far end
of the room, bought himself a coffee, sat down and started to mark the answer sheets.

“He’s on lunch duty,” Pip said.

“What a chance!” Tim exclaimed. “We’ve got him for the next forty minutes.”

Tall, thin and with a lean face, Yoland moved with an almost insect-like precision, reminding Pip of a pale green, giant praying
mantis she had seen on a wildlife documentary. His hands had very long, bony fingers ending in nails that were trim and neat.
They looked as if they had been buffed by a manicurist. His graying hair was thick around the sides of his head, his nose
and chin sharp, his eyes always on the lookout for trouble. He wore a trimly tailored pinstriped suit, which was quite unusual
because most of the teachers chose more casual clothes, and he also wore a tie with a college crest on it. His legs were long
and thin, his ears flat against
the side of his head, with, on this occasion, his hair curled neatly behind them. He looked, Tim considered, fastidious, a
typical scientist, a man fascinated by intricate details.

When he walked around the dining hall, he did so in an almost upright fashion, not leaning forward but striding out as if
his legs were determined to go first, his body following without any choice. Whenever he turned his head it was with a quick
motion, like that of a wary lizard.

And, whenever he approached their table on his occasional patrol of the room, the pendant vibrated.

After they had finished their lunch, Sebastian suggested they go out into the playground, where he led them to the farthest
point from the school buildings. There, a centuries-old horse chestnut tree stood on the boundary of the playing fields, the
grass beneath it scattered with conkers.

“If Yoland needs a familiar, he must be up to something serious,” Tim reasoned.

“It is on the subject of Scrotton,” Sebastian said, “that I wished us to come outside.” He looked around to ensure Scrotton
was out of earshot.

Tim, recalling the boy’s Tarzan comment and Scrotton’s performance in the gym, looked into the branches of the horse chestnut
above them. Scrotton was nowhere to be seen.

“Now that I have seen Scrotton’s nimble demonstration in the gymnasium,” Sebastian began, “I am convinced, as my father once
suspected, that Scrotton is a wodwo.”

“A wod what?” Tim exclaimed.

“A wodwo,” Sebastian repeated. “It is a word long lost from the English language and very difficult to explain. It is — or
was — a creature that lives in the forest.”

“The Monkey Man of the Woods!” Tim joked, swinging an arm over the back of his head, gripping his chin and grunting.

“Tim’s jest may be nearer the truth than you expect,” said Sebastian. “A wodwo is not entirely human, nor yet animal. It has
the cunning and instincts of a wild beast, but,” he went on, “where Scrotton is concerned, because of his time spent in the
company of humans, he has acquired many human attributes and much intelligence. Furthermore, as a familiar, he has also gained
much alchemical or magical knowledge. This wodwo, therefore, unlike most, is a very dangerous creature.”