Skippy Dies: A Novel

In the afterglow of Skippy’s victory, the mood in Ruprecht’s dorm room, where Team Condor has assembled for its final run-through, is buoyant. As omens go, the fight couldn’t have been better; and now the stage seems set for a second contribution to the history books.

The full line-up looks like this: R. Van Doren (Team Commander and Scientific Director), D. Hoey (First Officer) and M. Bianchi (Navigator and Cinematographer) constitute the ‘A-unit’ that will carry the pod into St Brigid’s; G. Sproke has the dual role of i) Janitor Diversion, and ii) Point Man back at Seabrook HQ.

The plan is simple and bold. While the St Brigid’s janitor, Brody, is being diverted by Geoff in search of a lost football, planted earlier that evening, the A-unit – having neutralized Brody’s dog, Nipper, with dog biscuits – will breach the partition wall via rope-ladder, Geoff keeping them apprised of his and the janitor’s exact location by casually singing the theme song to Bunnington Village, which apparently is the only song he knows all the words to. Upon successful breach of the main school building, the A-unit will proceed to the Locked Room and unlock the Locked Door using Ruprecht’s OpenSesame!™ Skeleton Key, ‘Guaranteed 100% Effective on Every Known Form of Lock’, as endorsed by Mossad and purchased by Ruprecht on eBay; an electric drill, purloined from Potato-Head Tomms’s woodwork class, is to be brought as backup. The pod having been erected in the Locked Room, and the power cable relayed back to the lab via Geoff, a portal into higher-dimensional space will be opened, this time recorded by a functional camera, and international fame and fortune, newspaper headlines to the tune of NEW DAWN USHERED IN BY SCHOOLBOY, last-second rescue of Earth from ecological disaster, golden era of harmony and peace, etc., etc., will ensue.

‘Are there any questions?’

‘What about this Ghost Nun?’ Mario says.

Ruprecht pooh-poohs the notion. ‘There is no Ghost Nun. That’s just some silly story they tell to make the girls behave.’

‘Oh,’ Mario says, not looking entirely convinced.

The time of the strike has been set for nineteen hundred hours, when the residents of St Brigid’s, staff and students alike, will be in the dining hall. With twenty minutes to go, everything is in place. The pod lies on the floor in a tennis bag, attending its hour. Geoff pores over the instructions for the Cosmic Energy Compressor. Victor Hero has been primed to sign the team in at study hall. Ruprecht paces about, working on his speech for the camera: ‘… history books have been written in pencil… though we be young, scorn us not… (awestruck look) Can it be so? Are we the lucky ones for whom God has left the door on the latch? (With growing sense of rapture) Into what lambent destiny have we taken the first step?’

And though none says it, this same lambent destiny seems already to invest the room, to fizz at their pores, as if the Mound, anticipating their arrival, has sent its emissaries to hurry them on. Or rather, sent her emissaries. Earlier that evening, seeking to fill the nervous interim as much as for extra information, Geoff had returned to the Druid’s website, and found tucked away there a poem by Robert Graves, on the subject of the White Goddess who ruled the Otherworld:

If strange things happen where she is,So that men say that graves openAnd the dead walk, or that futurityBecomes a womb, and the unborn are shed,Such portents are not to be wondered at,Being tourbillions in Time madeBy the strong pulling of her bladed mindThrough that ever-reluctant element.

None of them knew quite what it meant (‘what’s a tourbillion?’) and Ruprecht said it had no immediate relevance to the task at hand; but ever since then, each of them finds himself with a vivid mental impression of the Goddess herself, imprisoned by floorboards and masonry and centuries of coercive unbelief, somewhere underneath their sister school; and experiences this curiously externalized impatience, as of something tugging at their sleeves…

Then, with five minutes to Zero Hour, there is a groan from the doorway; they turn to see Dennis propped wretchedly against the jamb. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ he croaked. ‘A minute ago I was fine, then suddenly I started feeling really bad.’

‘What do you mean, “bad”?’

‘I don’t know… Kind of tingly? And energized? It’s totally inexplicable.’

‘Holy smoke,’ Geoff looking round wildly to the others, ‘it must be his radiation sickness returning.’

‘No, no,’ Dennis dismisses this. ‘Although now that you mention it, the symptoms are completely identical.’

‘Will you be able to do the mission?’ Ruprecht wants to know.

‘Oh yes, absolutely,’ Dennis says, and then collapses.

‘What are we going to do?’ Geoff says after they have carried him over to the bed.

‘We have to get the nurse,’ Niall says.

‘No nurse,’ Ruprecht replies tersely. ‘Nurses ask questions.’

‘But Ruprecht, he’s sick.’

‘We can’t jeopardize the mission. Not now.’

‘Maybe you could go instead of him?’ Geoff proposes to Niall.

‘I have a piano lesson,’ Niall mumbles sheepishly.

‘What about you, Victor?’

‘No way,’ Victor says. ‘I’m not getting expelled.’

‘Looks like we’ll have to put it off till another night,’ Mario says to Ruprecht.

‘We can’t put it off till another night,’ Ruprecht replies through gritted teeth. ‘Tonight’s the end of the Cygnus X-3’s radiation burst. It has to be tonight.’

But a condor can’t fly on one wing, everyone knows that. The Operation is in serious trouble, and it must be said that the Team Commander’s reaction to the crisis leaves something to be desired: stamping about the room like a giant, bellicose toddler, kicking the wastepaper basket, slippers, anything else that crosses his path, while the rest of the team bow their heads plaintively, something in the manner of humble banana farmers in the midst of a tropical storm. And then fate intervenes, in the form of Mario’s room-mate Odysseas Antopopopolous arriving at the door looking to borrow some anti-fungal cream.

Five machinating pairs of eyes fix on him.

‘Well, I don’t know if it’s a fungus,’ Odysseas says. ‘It might be a reaction to rayon.’

The situation is explained to him in double-quick time. It isn’t clear, at the end of it, whether Odysseas has any real idea what he’s getting himself into, but after months of listening to Mario’s fantasies on the subject, he is keen to see the interior of St Brigid’s for himself. The Condor is aloft again! Odysseas, furthermore, has a whole wardrobe of black fencing gear, custom-made for covert operations, which he invites the Team to make use of.

As the hour strikes on the school clock – with Geoff Sproke gone on ahead to buttonhole the security guard – the three others jostle at the door, synchronizing their phones, resembling, in their dusky regalia, not so much condors as fugitive punctuation marks: two brackets and one overfed full stop. ‘So long, Victor! So long, Niall! We’ll send you a postcard from the next dimension!’

With that they run out the door and down the stairs, and into history.

Five minutes later, as Skippy is sitting down to eat with Lori’s family, they are straddled on the partition wall. From somewhere in the darkness beyond, the theme to Bunnington Village may be heard, as Geoff thrashes through dock leaves with the St Brigid’s gatekeeper. Directly below, staring up intently and wagging its stumpy tail in a decidedly foreboding manner, is a small brown-and-white beagle.

‘Maybe it just wants to play,’ Odysseas suggests.

‘Ha,’ Mario says. The dog’s eyes gleam at them through the darkness; its long tongue palpitates over smiling rows of teeth.

‘In a glade in a forest,’ Geoff Sproke’s voice wafts over faintly, ‘where there’s magic in the air…’

A cold, rain-laced wind plays over their cheeks.

‘This is some plan,’ Mario says sarcastically to Ruprecht’s ignominious silence. ‘Oh yes, clearly the work of a mastermind.’

It appears that at some point during the lead-in to the mission, Operation Condor’s Team Commander and Scientific Director ate the biscuits intended for the neutralization of Nipper.

‘Here comes William Bunnington,’ sings Geoff anxiously, ‘with his friend Owl – he’s the Mayor…’

‘Dog biscuits! You draw up this big complicated plan, with the bells and the whistles, and then before we even leave you eat the dog biscuits!’

‘I couldn’t help it,’ Ruprecht replies miserably. ‘When I’m nervous I get hungry.’

‘They were dog biscuits!’

‘Well, we can’t stay up here for ever,’ Odysseas says.

‘I’m not going down there to get my family jewels chewed off,’ Mario states, then scratches his ear. ‘This damn rayon, it’s making me itchy!’

‘Bunnington Village,’ Geoff, with mounting urgency, ‘where the squirrels make Nut Soup…’

‘Lad, why in God’s name do you keep making that infernal racket?’ comes the rough voice of Brody the janitor.

‘It helps me concentrate,’ they hear Geoff reply. ‘When I’m looking for things?’

‘Are you sure your ball even came in here?’

‘I think so,’ Geoff says.

Below, the dog flexes itself in a settling-in sort of way.

‘Maybe we should just abort the mission,’ Mario says.

‘Never!’ comes the defiant reply from his left.

‘Well, what are we going to do, just stay up here all night?’

Ruprecht does not answer.

‘Isn’t that a football right there?’ they hear the guard say.

‘Where?’ Geoff’s voice says.

‘There, right there, you’re looking right at it.’

‘Oh yes – hmm, I’m not sure that’s my football…’

‘Well, it’ll do ye –’

‘A bunny place, a funny place…’ desperately –

‘Ah for Jesus’ sake –’

‘… an always bright and sunny place, Bunnington will keep a space for you…’

‘Stop it! Go home now! I don’t want to see you in here again!’ the guard starts clapping his hands and calling the dog. The dog, without taking its eye off the top of the wall, barks. ‘Hold on, sounds like Nipper’s found something…’

‘Wait!’ Geoff implores. ‘I have to tell you something! Something of the utmost importance!’

‘Well, commandante?’ Mario inquires acidly. ‘May we please go home now?’

But before Ruprecht can reply, Odysseas has peeled off his black sweater, leapt off the wall into the yard and thrown it over the dog. ‘Quickly!’ he urges the other two, as the sweater charges blindly left and right, emitting muffled barks of ever-growing anger. Mario and Ruprecht land painfully on the wet asphalt, just as the dog’s vengeful snout pokes into view. ‘Go!’ Odysseas exhorts, stepping protectively before them; and they take to their heels and run to the shadow of the school. Snarls and the sound of tearing fabric echo across the empty yard. But there is no time to wonder or grieve, nor is there any way back. The guard’s feet thump over the ground, his torch-beam flashing in every direction. Without stopping to think, they scurry around to the back of the school and up the rickety metal staircase, wrestling open the window sash and hurling themselves through it –

It’s only as they pick themselves up from the moth-eaten carpet that they realize where they are. Inside St Brigid’s: inside the grey walls that have stared back at them for so long, teasing them with the mysteries they conceal. Not yet ready to speak or move, every breath seeming like a thousand-decibel explosion, the boys roll their eyes at each other in mute incredulity.

One aspect of the plan has panned out – there doesn’t seem to be anybody around. Silently, warily, Ruprecht and Mario tread away from the window, leaving the dark crenellations of Seabrook behind. The deserted hallway is both alien and familiar, like the landscape of a dream. There is a chipped dado rail and a picture of Jesus, dewy-eyed and rosy-cheeked as a boy-band singer; passing into the girls’ dorms, they see through the open doors rumpled bedcovers, balled-up foolscap, posters of footballers and pop stars, homework timetables, bottles of spot cream – uncannily like the dorms in Seabrook, except in some unplaceable but totally fundamental way completely different.

As they descend the stairs to negotiate the ground floor, this creepy schizoid feeling only grows. Everywhere they look, there are analogues of their own school – classrooms with cramped benches and scrawled blackboards, printouts on the noticeboards, trophy cabinets and art-room posters – almost identical, but at the same time, somehow, not, the discrepancy too subtle for the naked eye and yet omnipresent, as though they’ve entered a parallel universe before the portal has been opened at all, where instead of atoms everything is composed of some mysterious other entity, quarks of hitherto unseen colours… It is quite different from how Mario imagined breaking into a girls’ school would be, and the idea that this place has been here, existing, the whole time he’s been around is one that he finds deeply unsettling.

If Ruprecht is struck by this he shows no sign; he treks on wordlessly, five or six steps in front of Mario, the pod clinking gently in the bag slung over his shoulder. Then, up ahead, they hear footsteps, and Ruprecht yanks Mario into an unoccupied classroom just as two grey-frocked nuns round the corner. In the very back row they crouch beneath the desks, bathed with sweat, Mario’s breathing heavy and rushed –

‘You’re making too much noise!’ Ruprecht hisses at him.

‘I can’t help it!’ Mario gesticulates. ‘These nuns, they give me the willies…’

The nuns have stopped right outside the door. They are talking about a Brazilian priest who is visiting in spring. One nun suggests they take him to Knock. The other says Ballinspittle. A polite argument ensues over the competing merits of the materializations of Our Lady in these two places, one being more accredited, the other more recent, and then – ‘Did you hear something?’

Under his desk, Mario gazes in horror at his phone, which has just released two loud, self-satisfied bleeps, and now emits two more. Hysterically, Mario fusses over the buttons, trying to shut it up –

‘Could it be mice?’ one nun wonders from the corridor.

‘Funny sort of mice,’ the other says, her tone hardening.

‘Coronation Street’s starting.’

‘I’ll just have a peep –’

The light comes on: the nun’s eyes scan the bare surfaces of the desks. The boys hold their breath, clench every muscle, painfully aware of the fug of sweat and hormones and odours that pump from every pore, waiting for a nostril to twitch in recognition –

‘Hmmph.’ The light goes off again, and the door closes. ‘That didn’t sound like a mouse to me, you know.’

‘No?’

‘Sounded more like a rat.’

‘Oh goodness, no…’

The voices recede: Mario whips off his balaclava and sucks in lungfuls of air. ‘These nuns,’ he pants, ‘in Italy they are everywhere, everywhere!’

By the time he has calmed down sufficiently to carry on, their window of opportunity is starting to look decidedly narrow. Dinner hour is over at eight, and although the students will be continuing from there to Study Hall, the nuns, of whom it seems Mario has a pathological fear, which Ruprecht thinks is the kind of thing that ought really to have been mentioned prior to entering the convent, will be at liberty and on the loose.

They exit the classroom and hurry along as directed by the map. Nerves are strained now, and the uncanny familiarity of their surroundings paradoxically disorientates them, leading them repeatedly down false paths – ‘That was the chemistry lab back there, so the gym must be this way!’ ‘No, because the lab was on the right, by the AV Room.’ ‘No, it wasn’t.’ ‘Yes, it was – just trust me, it’s this way – oh.’ ‘Oh, this is the gym, is it? This is the gym, that they have disguised as a second, identical AV Room? And they play badminton with the televisions, and hockey with the VCRs? Wow, they must be strong, these girls, to use heavy AV equipment instead of balls –’ It starts to seem like the school itself is misdirecting them, reacting hostilely to their presence here – either that, or the corridors simply don’t link up in a linear way, don’t actually correspond to the map, but instead are obeying some circuitous, rhizomatic feminine principle, the influence of the Mound, maybe…

And then, quite by accident, they find themselves in a recognizably older part of the school. Here there are holes in the wainscoting and crumbling walls; even the light seems dimmer, greyer. They hasten along by dilapidated rooms stacked full of chairs, till they arrive at a pair of wooden doors. Very softly, Ruprecht twists the doorknob and peeks inside. Inside there are climbing frames and mini-soccer nets: the gym. ‘Meaning that this,’ turning one hundred and eighty degrees to the door across the corridor, ‘must be the Locked Room.’ He can’t keep the quaver out of his voice.

The door, of course, is locked when they try it. Ruprecht sets down his equipment on the floor, produces the OpenSesame!™ Skeleton Key and inserts it in the keyhole. After jiggling it around a moment, he tries the door again. It is still locked. ‘Hmm,’ Ruprecht says, stroking his chin.

‘What’s the matter?’ Mario asks him. He does not like this corridor. Mechanical noises are emanating from somewhere, and a draught that seems unnaturally cold circles his ankles. Without replying, Ruprecht examines the teeth of the key and replaces it in the keyhole.

‘What is it?’ Mario repeats, hopping from one foot to the other.

‘This is supposed to be able to open any conventional lock,’ Ruprecht says, twisting it about.

‘It’s not working?’

‘I can’t quite seem to get it to connect…’

‘We don’t have time for this! Try something else!’

‘It has a guarantee,’ Ruprecht points out.

‘Just use the drill and get it over with.’

‘The drill will make noise.’

‘It’ll take two seconds with the drill.’

‘All right, all right –’ He looks at Mario expectantly.

‘What?’ Mario says.

‘Well, give it to me then.’

‘I thought you had it.’

‘Why would I have it?’

‘Because I don’t have it…’ The realization hits them simultaneously; Mario’s shoulders slump. ‘I thought you said you planned this.’

‘I did,’ Ruprecht says humbly. ‘It’s just that I made the plan before I knew what was going to happen.’

It is then that they hear the voice. By its pitch it is clearly a woman’s, but any feminine softness has long desiccated away, replaced by an eldritch darkness and attended by what sounds an awful lot like the snipping of spectral shears… For a moment they remain frozen to the spot, and then – ‘Run,’ gurgles Ruprecht. Mario doesn’t need telling twice. Scrambling his bag from the ground, he is set to scarper down the corridor when a hand fastens about his arm –

‘What are you doing?’ hisses Ruprecht.

Mario stares at him, nearly apoplectic with terror. ‘I’m running.’

‘It’s coming from down there,’ Ruprecht blinks back at him.

‘It’s not, it’s coming from up there…’

They pause, almost but not quite clutching each other, with their ears cocked. The hideous dried-out croak is drawing inevitably closer – apparently, whether by some quirk of the architecture, the type of stone in the masonry perhaps or the curious way the corridor bends, from both directions at once. The boys gibber at each other helplessly. With every passing instant now the temperature drops precipitously, the grey light wanes; the ghastly voice chants its message, necrotic and Latin, over and again, as though doomed to repeat it, doomed for eternity, a doom that any second now they will be sharing, when the voice’s owner comes around that corner, or the other corner, or possibly even both corners, to find them quaking before her –

And then a hand – whose hand neither of them can remember afterwards, but a hand in desperation – reaches for the door, and this time, miraculously, it gives. Without a second thought they hurry through it to crouch on its far side, ears pressed to the wood, as the voice outside, now accompanied by an ugly dragging noise, passes right by them, no more than a couple of inches away (they can’t suppress a shudder)… and then recedes, or rather ebbs, or rather, actually, dissipates…

As soon as it’s gone they feel warmer, braver; straightening up, they dust themselves off, scoffing at the idea that either of them thought for a second that whatever was outside was the Ghost Nun: ‘I don’t even believe in the stupid Ghost Nun.’ ‘No, me neither.’

It is the smell that returns them to their surroundings, like a finger tapping them on the shoulder. Potent and alien and deep, it suffuses the air to the point, it almost seems, of replacing it; as they inhale, they realize that it has been present in the atmosphere all along, too rarefied to notice until now. Whatever the mysterious feeling of difference is, this is the source, the omphalos.

‘We, ah, seem to be in the Locked Room…’ Ruprecht says at last.

‘Yes,’ says Mario.

There is silence, silence and darkness. The dead walk… futurity becomes a womb…

‘Okay then,’ Ruprecht says, with false bravado, ‘let’s get this show on the road.’ He stumps with his pod into the shadows; Mario hastens after, following the clinking from Ruprecht’s bag, trying not to think about the legends Niall’s sister spoke of – and then he sees it, the blue corpse of a girl suspended from the rafters, dangling there right in front of him!

Luckily he is too shocked to scream. And when he has steadied himself, he realizes that it is not a girl at all, only a school blouse, hanging there weightlessly in space.

Ducking beneath it, he presses on. Even in the darkness the room appears considerably larger than they expected. As their eyes adjust, they make several other unexpected discoveries. It is not, for instance, bare.

‘Show me that map again,’ Ruprecht says. Bringing it right up to his face, he studies it carefully. ‘Hmm,’ he says.

This is unquestionably the place. And yet, instead of cobwebs and cracked floorboards, there are clothes horses, washing machines, jumbo-sized boxes of detergent. ‘More of a laundry than a classroom,’ Ruprecht muses to himself. Perhaps an abandoned laundry? And yet the tracksuit tops with the St Brigid’s crest, the skirts and jumpers, some damp, some dry, heaped in baskets or strung on criss-cross lines, none of these looks especially old –

He studies the map again. ‘You don’t hear any music, do you?’ he asks Mario. ‘Like supernatural music?’

Mario doesn’t reply. With another Hmm, a kind of verbalized frown, Ruprecht forges on through the thick foliage of wet fabric. No evidence of a looming Otherworld presents itself; reaching the back of the room, his only new discovery is three huge sacks filled to the brim with girls’ unmentionables, waiting to be washed. This puts the tin hat on it, as far as Ruprecht is concerned –

‘There’s no Mound in here!’ he exclaims. ‘Just piles and piles of schoolgirls’ underwear!’

A sound from outside. Someone’s coming! These voices are unambiguously modern, vital, somewhat raucous, the kind that might shout matily to one another over the judder of laundry –

‘We have to get out of here!’ Ruprecht says. ‘Quick, the window!’

He pries open the bolt and shoves up the sash, and is on the point of wriggling through when he realizes he is on his own.

‘Mario!’

Team Condor’s cinematographer and navigator is rooted to the spot, slack-mouthed and staring, as if in a trance.

‘Mario!’ Ruprecht cries. ‘What’s wrong with you! Mario!’

The voices outside stop abruptly. But still Mario does not respond. A huge, happy smile spreads slowly across his face, like the man who has found the back door to the Promised Land; then, uttering a single, incomprehensible noise, like bleer or meep, he breaks loose of Ruprecht and dives headlong into the pile of knickers –