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By Root 832 0

the classroom, Miss Pegg raised her head and looked at him. Her movements seemed clumsy and somehow reluctant. The classroom was authentic with detail, down to the spotless condition of the inkwells, each obediently rinsed as the final ritual carried out at the end of each dutiful school day. But its teacher was a troubled, troubling figure, lurching and scary, wretched with lack of life. Her feet made a slithering sound when she shifted. From the back of the class, Seaton could see that they were wrapped in bits of newspaper bound by rags. She smiled and her mouth was a chasm of decay. He remembered the shoes Marjory Pegg had worn in her picture, punctilious with repair. Had she become destitute after the events described? Perhaps she would tell him. He wanted, less than anything just then, to hear the apparition speak.

Watching her, he remembered something else. Wheatley had made the remark to Pandora on the way to the Fischer house scullery as they went to scrounge coffee early on a November morning in 1927. He had said that suicides could be very useful to the beast they intended to spawn. He hadn’t bothered to explain to her precisely how.

Light twinkled through the windows. There was a pattern to it, a line of progressing dots of brightness, evenly placed, each about the height of a man. Seaton knew what it was. It was the helmet lamps of miners on their trudge to the pithead for their shift. Miss Pegg turned her head to the lights and she dropped her chalk to the floor with a small clatter and held her hand over her open mouth. They were singing, the miners. It was something heartfelt they were singing, something rousing, inspirational. Was it ‘Men Of Harlech’? Had there ever been coal deposits to bore and dig for in this part of Wales? Seaton struggled to remember. He hadn’t thought there were. He thought there might be slate quarries within marching distance of Aberdyfi. But he didn’t think there were pits.

Marjory Pegg, her hair an unkempt shawl across her shoulders, rocked on ragged feet. To his right, next to the bookcase, Seaton saw that a row of coat hooks had been screwed into the wood. The pupils had collected their coats before their departure, of course. Except for one. A child’s raincoat, blue with a belt trailing from sewn loops, hung on the nearest hook. There was a blue scarf hung over the coat. And above these items, a blue cap with a single hoop of white and a badge embroidered in silver and red, neat above the peak. Then there was nothing until the farthest hook, at Miss Page’s end of the classroom. A cane hung by its curved handle from the farthest hook. The cane was about three feet long and the final eight inches or so of its jointed length, to the tip, were stained with some dark stuff that had dripped into a small puddle on the floor beneath. Seaton’s eyes shifted and he saw that the teacher was watching him, had noticed him looking at the cane. He could no longer see her eyes. They were just hollows now, filled with unreadable shadow.

Had the light dimmed? It must have done. It wasn’t ‘Men Of Harlech’ they were singing outside. It was something maddeningly familiar and at the same time strange. But it wasn’t ‘Men Of Harlech’. And looking through the window, he was no longer sure that the procession of lights came from the lamps on miners’ heads. They seemed too violent and uncertain, torn out of the general blackness, more like naked flames. In the charged stillness in the classroom, Seaton heard blood drip from the tip of the cane into the congealing puddle under it. And the teacher moaned. And he launched himself and bolted past her and threw himself at the classroom door, praying for the night breath of Brightstone Forest in the rain and escape.

Except that the door opened on to the saloon bar of the Windmill pub in Lambeth High Street.

The pub interior was almost exactly as he would have remembered it. It must have been after closing time, though, because there was no one behind the bar itself and present, only a trio of late customers, playing cards around one of the bar’s small,