Free Blood and Water and Other Tales by Patrick McGrath Page B

raincoat. Ambrose could not identify him, and Father Mungo remarked that he was no doubt off for a smoke in Blackburn’s Bog. These words produced in Ambrose an involuntary shudder, and the color flared in his cheeks once more.
    “What’s the matter, Ambrose?” said the rector, with concern, turning toward him in his chair. “You look feverish.”
    A large, glass-fronted cabinet stood against the wall of the rector’s study. It was filled with masks and totems the old man had collected in Africa. Suddenly it seemed to Ambrose that the eyes in the heads of all these ancient idols were peering directly into his own guilty soul. With a small cry of distress he steadied himself against the desk, and turned away—only to meet on the opposite wall the gaze of a large hanging Christ! He was seized then by an intense claustrophobia; pressing a palm to his forehead he murmured something about the flu.
    “Get on, then,” said Father Mungo, gently; “and send a prefect after that boy. I shall want to see him.”
    “Yes, Father,” said Ambrose Syme, and hurriedly left the room. Glancing over his shoulder as he reached the corridor, he saw the rector’s nodding head etched sharply against the window, the lips moving silently over the opened breviary in his lap.

    The land attached to Ravengloom was still leased to the fanners who had grazed their sheep and cattle upon it for centuries, and of these tenants the oldest and most durable were the Blackburn family. Their holding included a stretch of low-lying, heavily wooded country about a mile-and-a-half from the school, a damp pocket of the moors which had always been known as Blackburn’s Bog. Generations of schoolboys had found in its wild and dripping heart a welcome refuge from institutional existence, and these occasional outlaws would generally gravitate towards the pond in the middle of the bog; for there was in its black depths—its shadowed and unmoving surface, its swampy banks of drooping bullrushes and nodding convolvuli with trumpet-shaped flowers of pale blue—a sort of darkly exotic aura of tragedy that proved irresistible to the gothic soul of the Ravengloom boy; and the nameless lad who had cut so boldly across the rugby pitches was just such a boy. By this time he was over the gate that gave onto the lane leading to the bog and sloshing happily through rut and puddle. The sky was gray, and the rain continued in a steady drizzle. To either side of him stretched the rolling, soggy moors, intersected by low stone walls and scrubby, bedraggled hedges, and over in the east the great brown back of Broadmoor Pike reared up dimly through the misty film of rain. Ahead he could make out the first trees, vague, leafless, skeletal structures whose slender dripping branches he imagined to be the dendroid limbs of some bewitched and denatured army of lost Arthurian knights. As he tramped into the wood and down the narrow quagmire of a track that wound through the soggy bracken he could hear no sound but the steady plash of rain on dead leaves and the damp squelch of his boots in the mud. Gently descending into the heart of the bog, he caught a glimpse between the trees of the black water ahead, and a few moments later he was standing on the bank beneath the withered branches of a blighted old willow. An eerie, dripping silence seemed to lie upon the place, and the only motion the spreading ring of ripples about each drop of rain that touched the dark surface of the pond. The boy smoked quietly, leaning against the tree, and watched each set of ripples become the epicycloid of a new ring, until that ring was subsumed by a third, and it by a fourth, and so on, such that the whole expanse of water resolved to a patterned flux of constant transformation more complex and geometrically perfect than the eye could for more than an instant comprehend. And then, as his gaze wandered over the water toward the mist-enshrouded forms of the birches and willows on the far side, he