Doctor Illuminatus Read online

  Pip inwardly winced to hear her full name. Tim grinned at her and nudged her with his elbow.

  As they were ushered in, the headmaster stepped from behind a large leather-topped desk, cluttered with papers and report forms, a telephone and a notebook computer.

  “I’m Dr. Singall,” the headmaster introduced himself. “Come in and, please, do sit down.” He indicated a semicircle of comfortable chairs before him, perching himself informally on the corner of his desk.

  Pip and Tim exchanged glances and looked around the room. One wall was covered with annual photographs of the staff and pupils, various triumphant sports teams and a portrait of a man in a gray suit shaking hands with the headmaster, the flourish of a signature in one corner. Printed on the picture mounting was HRH Prince of Wales visits Bourne End Comprehensive School — July 2000. Beside it was a map of the town and surrounding countryside, red felt-tip marker delineating the different areas served by the school buses, the routes picked out and numbered in blue. Another wall bore shelves of books and file boxes, and a glass-fronted cabinet.

  “I understand from Mr. Bradley,” the headmaster began, “who is in charge of admissions, that you have been given a tour of the school and our introductory folder, and that you have completed the relevant paperwork. There is nothing more for me to do but welcome you.” He smiled expansively. “As we discussed on the phone, Mr. Ledger, I think there’s little point in Philippa and Timothy joining us with only ten days to go to the summer holidays. Far better,” he continued, looking from Pip to Tim and back again, “you start fresh in September.” He scanned the admission forms on the desk beside him briefly. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “I see you are the new owners of Rawne Barton.”

  “We moved in yesterday,” Mr. Ledger confirmed. “Do you know the place?”

  “Indeed, I do,” the headmaster replied. “Old Mr. Rawne was most kind to us at the school. He had, I recall, a great interest in the education of young people and invited the year nine history class to visit the house every year. Just prior to his death, he let us conduct an archaeological dig in one of the fields. Nothing terribly ambitious, you understand, but it brought history alive for the students. The resulting coursework folders were exceptional and we had our best-ever history examination results. The science department was also given access to the Garden of Eden for their natural-history project.”

  “The Garden of Eden?” Pip echoed.

  “All fields and many woodlands in the countryside, Philippa, have a government registration number,” the headmaster explained, “but many of them also have names that go back hundreds of years. Our school is called Bourne End Comprehensive because it was built on a field of that name in which a bourne, or stream, once ran. At Rawne Barton, the Garden of Eden is a small clump of trees on a hillock down by the river. It never floods, no matter how high the water might come. Miss Hall, our head of biology, says that in the center of the trees there is a circular clearing where some very exotic plants grow.”

  “When did Mr. Rawne die?” Pip’s mother inquired.

  “Ten or eleven years ago,” Dr. Singall said. “He was in his late eighties, I believe, and had lived alone in the house for about six years, after the death of his wife. At the end, he was only living in a few rooms, with the remainder of the house left unheated and unoccupied. It not surprisingly deteriorated quite rapidly.”

  “Who inherited it?” asked Mr. Ledger.

  “No one exactly,” the headmaster responded. “Mr. and Mrs. Rawne had no children, although, during a field trip, I once saw the old man with a young boy. His nephew, I think he told me. He was a pale little chap, didn’t look at all well. I would have thought the property might have been left to him or his parents, but it was, in fact, left in trust. The trustees, a law firm in London, only finally wound the trust up two years ago. At least, that is what I’ve heard. The property was then sold to the developers from whom I assume you purchased it.”

  Rising from the desk, Dr. Singall opened a glass cabinet on the wall, taking from it a polished wooden box held closed by brass clasps.

  “During our dig, we unearthed a lot of quite interesting finds from Rawne’s Ground. That’s the name of the pasture to the north of the house.” He opened the box and started to take items out of it. “A pair of fifteenth-century scissors and a key — rather rusted, I’m afraid.” He put them on the blotting pad on his desk. “A broken mortar with its accompanying pestle, a few pieces of what may have been a retort of some sort, some clay pipe stems and this —” he held a small, polished silver disc between his finger and thumb “— which is an English penny dating to the reign of Henry the Fifth. The most intriguing find, however, is this . . .”

  From the box, the headmaster gently lifted a tall, thin bottle. It was made of rich blue glass and sealed with a lead plug. When he held it up to the sunlight streaming in through his office window, Pip could see it contained a clear liquid.

  “What’s in it?” Tim asked.

  “We don’t know, Timothy,” Dr. Singall replied. He tilted the bottle upside down and watched as an air bubble drifted slowly up through the dense, viscous liquid. “As the seal has a curious symbol embossed on it, we assume it might be a medicinal substance of some sort.”

  He held the bottle at an angle so that they could see the top. Impressed into the dull grey lead was a strange hieroglyph:

  “Don’t you want to know what the liquid is?” Tim inquired.

  “Yes, of course,” the headmaster answered, smiling patronizingly at Tim. “Academic curiosity. But it seemed a shame to break the seal to analyze the contents, which are probably nothing more than a common remedy. Castor oil or the like.”

  “Do you know what the sign means?” Pip asked. “We do not,” the headmaster told her, “but Mr. Carson, our head of geography, informs me it is sometimes used today in meteorology to denote exceptional visibility on a fine day.”

  He placed everything back in the box carefully and returned it to the cabinet.

  “So,” the headmaster remarked, addressing Pip and Tim, “when you dig your garden, you’ll never know what you might turn up. As we say to the field course students, always watch the blade of your spade! And,” he turned to their father, “Mr. Ledger, if you would not be averse to it, I should like very much to revive Mr. Rawne’s tradition and bring our history field trip to you next year.”

  “I’m sure we would be delighted,” Pip’s father said, rising to his feet.

  “Well, I shall see you two in September,” the headmaster said to Pip and Tim as they left his office. “Do enjoy the holidays and come back bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

  Pip watched as her parents’ car disappeared down the drive, then she returned to carefully unpacking her ornaments and arranging them on her bookcase. It was only when Tim opened the door and walked straight in that her attention was broken.

  “Aren’t you ever going to remember to knock?” she complained.

  “That’s what I want to talk to you about,” Tim replied.

  Pip threw him a look. He reveled in avoiding straight answers. Ask him what time it was and he would reply that supper would be in twenty minutes, the news was on television or, when he last saw a clock about an hour ago, it was coming up to three-thirty.

  “Look at this,” he continued.

  Standing by Pip’s door, he started to measure, heel-to-toe, the distance from the door frame to the wall behind her bed that separated their bedrooms.

  “There!” he said. “Five times eighteen centimeters, the length of my foot. That’s about ninety centimeters. Now come with me.”

  She followed him into his room, where he did the same thing, measuring from his door to the separating wall.

  “Four times eighteen — seventy-two centimeters. All right? So ninety plus seventy-two —”

  “Tim,” Pip interrupted him. “What are you doing?” “— makes a hundred and sixty-two centimeters.” “Tim!”

  “All will be revealed.”

  He
went into the corridor and started to heel-to-toe the distance from his door to Pip’s.

  “Get it?” he asked as he reached her door.

  “Get what?” Pip replied, now beginning to lose her patience.

  “Our rooms take up a hundred and sixty-two centimeters, but the distance, door to door, is roughly two hundred and ninety centimeters. That means the wall’s a hundred and twenty-eight centimeters thick. One and a quarter meters!”

  “So what? It’s an old house. They have thick walls.” She turned back into her room, exasperated by Tim’s foray into architectural surveying, and started, once again, to unpack her ornaments. Tim followed her.

  “Did you hear a knocking in the wall last night?” he asked suddenly.

  “Yes,” Pip said, somewhat taken aback.

  “What do you think it was?”

  “The central heating pipes.”

  “In summer?” Tim answered.

  “Hot-water pipes, then,” Pip retorted. “So what do you suggest?”

  “Do you know what a priest’s hole is?” Tim asked in his usual infuriating way.

  Although she hated to admit it, Pip did not. Once again, Tim, who seemed never to read a book and yet knew an amazing number of obscure facts, had the better of her.

  “It was a hiding place for a priest,” he went on. “In Tudor times, when Roman Catholicism was banned, rich Catholics hid their ministers to avoid detection and arrest. I think the wall’s hollow and the sound traveled upwards —”

  “— in a secret chamber,” Pip cut in, scornfully. “Well, Tim, you get high marks for imagination.”

  “. . . and if it is hollow,” Tim continued, undaunted by his sister’s sarcasm, “there must be a way into it somewhere. I’ve tested the panels in my room. It’s not in there. Can I test yours?”

  Pip shrugged and lifted a china horse out of the ornament box. Little balls of polystyrene stuck to her arms with static electricity, like fake snowflakes.

  “Suit yourself,” she said.

  Tim knelt by the wall and started tapping his knuckle on the paneling, his ear close to the wood to detect any hollowness. On reaching the panel by Pip’s bedside table, he knocked twice. His knock was answered.

  “Told you so!” he said, triumphantly. “It echoes.”

  He knocked again, twice.

  Three knocks were returned.

  “Some echo!” Tim exclaimed.

  “Do it again,” Pip said. “Do a pattern.” Yet, no sooner had she spoken than she felt suddenly, unaccountably, very afraid.

  Tim knocked twice, paused, knocked three times and stopped.

  The reply came back: knock-knock, knock-knock-knock.

  Pip’s spine crept: it was as if the blade of a cold knife had been run up her back.

  “It must be Dad playing his silly tricks,” she muttered.

  “They went to the supermarket, remember?” Tim whispered back.

  Knock, knock-knock.

  The first knocks had come from far down in the building. These were nearer.

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  Each was nearer than the last. It was as if something were rising up through the wall towards them. At any minute, Pip thought, it might burst through the paneling, erupting into her room like the massive claw of a prehistoric monster in a horror film, and reach out to spear her on its slimy talons and drag her to the paneling, where a mouth like an octopus’s beak would rip open her chest and suck out her still-breathing lungs.

  Tim got quickly to his feet and stepped swiftly away from the wall.

  Knock. Knock.

  Whatever it was, it was now in the paneling right behind Pip’s bed. She and her brother exchanged worried glances.

  “I’ll never sleep here again,” she whispered.

  “Nor me,” Tim murmured. He ran his tongue over his lips. His mouth was dry and his hands clammy with fear. “What do we do?”

  “Get out,” Pip suggested in an undertone. “Quietly. And when we get to the top of the stairs,” she added softly, “run like the devil.”

  On tiptoe, they started towards the door. The floor-boards creaked out the message of their progress at each step. Pip’s heart was racing.

  As they went through the door and were about to flee, Tim stopped.

  “Listen!”

  The knocking had stopped, only to be replaced by an insistent tapping.

  “It’s not so loud,” Pip replied.

  “Not that,” Tim said. He waited a moment, then added, “That!”

  Muffled by the paneling was a voice.

  Tim stepped back into the room, Pip grabbing him by the arm.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she hissed. “Listen,” Tim said again, but no longer in a whisper. “Help!” called the muted voice in the wall. “Please help!”

  “It’s coming from behind your bed,” Tim declared. “Give me a hand.”

  Much against her better judgment, Pip helped her brother pull the bed away from the wall. As she tugged, the thought occurred to her that this might be a trap, that they were being tricked into releasing a demon that had lived for centuries, incarcerated in the walls of the house. Perhaps it was the ghost of a priest long since martyred for his faith, hung, drawn and quartered for conducting Mass. When he appeared, his intestines would be swinging like rotting coils of khaki rope from his belly, one eye dislodged from its socket to roll to and fro across his cheek, suspended by its optic nerve.

  The bed reached the center of the room. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, with a barely audible click, a small section of paneling at floor level swung back slowly on heavy, iron hinges. Through the opening appeared the pale face of a boy. He looked as apprehensive as the two faces peering down at him.

  “Please, may I beg of you a drink of water?” he asked cautiously.

  Two

  Sebastian’s Story

  The boy sat on the edge of the bed and sipped a second glass of water, having drained the first in one long gulp.

  “I had a great thirst,” he explained, breaking the silence, “for it is a long while since last I tasted water. Now that is quenched.”

  Pip and Tim watched him, bemused. He appeared somehow weak, as if he had just come through a long period of illness, and was dressed in grimy gray flannel shorts, long gray socks, a soiled white shirt and a brown, V-neck pullover. His shoes, which were spotted with mildew and badly needed polishing, were of brown leather with their thin laces tied in a tight bow. He looked, Pip thought, as if he had just stepped out of a film set in the 1950s. All he needed was a little peaked cap with an embroidered school badge on the front.

  “You have many questions you would ask me,” the boy said, “but first I would know your names and how you come to be here.”

  Pip told him who they were, how their parents had bought the house, which had been derelict for some years, and had just moved in.

  “What has become of the old man who lived here?” the boy inquired.

  “He died,” Tim said bluntly. “Was he a relative?” “Yes,” replied the boy, without any sign of emotion. “He was,” he paused as if unsure of quite how to describe their relationship, “my uncle.”

  “But ... ,” Pip replied, somewhat confused and a little shocked that the boy was not upset by the news, “. . . but he died years ago.”

  “At least ten,” Tim added. “You won’t remember him. You must have been about two.”

  “Indeed, I remember him well.”

  Pip and Tim looked at each other. Neither of them could remember their fifth birthdays clearly, never mind their second.

  The boy took another sip of water and said, “There is much I must tell you yet, before I take you into my confidence, I must know if I may trust you.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, then, suddenly opening them, stared hard first at Tim, then at Pip. As his gaze fell upon her, Pip felt as if a small electric charge were running through her. Looking down, she noticed the fine hairs on her arms standing up. The sensation laste
d only a few seconds.

  The boy then smiled and remarked, “We live in a dangerous time and I must be certain of you. Now I know you will be for me.” He placed the glass on Pip’s bedside table. “Are your parents returned?”

  “No,” Pip said, wondering how he knew they had gone out, “they won’t be back for at least an hour.”

  “Nevertheless,” replied the boy, “please close the door, for what I shall tell you must remain between us. There is much at stake.”

  As Tim shut the door, the boy left the bed and sat cross-legged on the carpet, signaling for the others to join him. Once they were seated, he leaned forward.

  “My name is Sebastian Rawne,” he began. “This house was built by my father, and my family has always lived within it. The land was granted to my family in perpetuity by His Majesty, King Henry the Fifth, shortly before his death. My father was in the king’s service as . . .”

  “Hang on!” Tim interrupted. “You’re telling us your father built this place?”

  “Yes.”

  “But, according to the estate agent, it was built in 1422.”

  “It was begun in 1422,” Sebastian corrected him, “yet it was six years in the making.”

  “Right!” Tim said sardonically.

  “Surely you mean your great-great-umpteen-times grandfather built it,” Pip suggested.

  “No, it was my father, Thomas Rawne.”

  Tim snorted. “Are you trying to tell us that . . .” he did a quick calculation, “. . . you’re coming up for your five hundred and eightieth birthday?”

  “I am twelve,” Sebastian replied, “yet I was born in 1430. On the first day of July. As it happens,” he looked around almost nostalgically, “in this very room. And it was here that, eight days later, my mother died. She gave her life that I might be.”

  Pip felt a wave of sympathy sweep over her. It was strange to think that anyone could know exactly where they had been born. She and Tim had arrived in one of a dozen identical, anonymous delivery rooms in a huge county hospital. To know also that your mother had died giving birth to you was horrific, and to live in the same house, passing the door to the very room every day, was, she thought, something she could not do.