ONLY IN THE CORRIDOR going back to the main house did I realize exactly how loud the party music had been. There was a squeaking in my ears, but we left the thumping basses behind, and finally only our footsteps echoed at unnaturally loud volume on the polished granite flagstones.
I turned around. “Where’s Jasper?”
“He’s mixing us a couple of drinks, then he’ll follow. This way.” We had reached the end of the corridor and turned into the front hall, where the fountain was peacefully playing. There was no one in sight, but you could hear muted voices and piano music.
“The cinema and the film archive are down on the lower floor,” Arthur explained, opening a door.
Ahead of us, a flight of stairs led down. My feet stopped of their own accord.
“Maybe it’s not the best idea to go down into a gloomy cellar with two guys you hardly know, eh, Liv?” Henry appeared next to me, looking at me sideways, his eyebrows ironically raised as usual.
Oddly enough, I’d been thinking exactly the same thing (and so, obviously, had my feet). Hadn’t Mom said, only a few hours ago, that she was afraid I’d never do anything in my life without mulling it over first, just like my father? Who did she think she was kidding?
But as Mr. Wu always said, “He who thinks too long before taking the next step will spend his life standing on one leg.”
I started moving again. What was there to be scared of, I asked myself with my sweetest, most innocent smile. (I could do the eyebrow-raising trick myself, too, and pretty well, but I was going to keep that for later. You want to go easy on imitating tricks like that, or the effect soon wears off.)
“The lower floor isn’t a gloomy cellar, and we’re not strangers.” Arthur sounded slightly insulted, and sure enough the word cellar turned out to be unsuitable when we arrived in the home cinema. Thanks to a series of handsome ceiling and wall lights, it was bright as day, and the corridor—which, with all its doors, reminded me a little of the corridor in my dreams—was luxuriously carpeted.
“All the same, the walls here are really thick. No one would hear your screams.” Henry didn’t seem to know when to drop the subject.
I shrugged my shoulders casually, and this time I quoted out loud from Mr. Wu’s wide range of proverbs: “But if the dragon wants to rise in the air, it must fly against the wind.” Also, I can do kung fu.
Henry laughed, and Arthur opened a heavy door at the end of the corridor.
“Come in!” he said with an inviting gesture and stood aside for me.
Impressed, I stared at the rows of cinema seats upholstered in red velour and rising like a ramp, at least ten seats per row, framed by steps to left and right. The fitted carpet on the steps was soft and black. Crazy. These people really did have a genuine cinema in their cellar! When Arthur turned a switch near the door, the auditorium was gently illuminated by countless tiny lights shining like stars on the ceiling, which was lined with black fabric.
A sharp scream rang out. I looked instinctively at the loudspeakers, because the scream could easily have come from Scary Movie, but two heads emerged in one of the back rows of seats. One was the head of a man, gray haired and distinguished looking, the other the head of a woman with an expensive Bond Street hairstyle, although at this moment she seemed to be beside herself.
“Oh, Mrs. Kelly. And Sir Braxton. Sorry to disturb you,” said Arthur politely, turning the switch farther until the starry sky consisted entirely of supernovas, and the cinema was bathed in bright, clear light. “My friends and I will be gone again in half an hour’s time, or thereabouts.”
“Bloody hell,” muttered the man, and he began frantically adjusting his clothes. It took him only a few seconds, and then he came storming down the steps, his shirt still unbuttoned. I didn’t get out of his way fast enough, and he promptly ran into my shoulder with the force of a suburban train coming into a station. If Henry hadn’t caught me, I’d have fallen over.
“Lout,” I said. Even though I understood why he was in such a hurry, he didn’t have to use me as a buffer.
“Do you mean me?” Henry laughed quietly and stroked the hair back from my forehead before he let me go. I tried to go on breathing normally. The last thing I wanted was for him to notice how confused he made me feel when I was near him.
It took the poor woman a little longer to get fully dressed again. When she finally came down the steps, red in the face, she kept her gaze fixed on the floor.
“How nice to see you again, Mrs. Kelly,” said Arthur, sketching a bow as she raced past us. In spite of her high heels, her speed was worthy of the Olympic Games. “And give your husband my regards if he happens to be at the party too.”
Mrs. Kelly hurried along the corridor as if she hadn’t heard him.
“That was mean of you,” said Henry.
“Sir Braxton could have waited for her,” I said sympathetically.
“Ah, well.” Arthur closed the door to the corridor and dimmed the light again. “Real gentlemen are nearly extinct these days, as my grandmother is always saying. Where were we? Oh, yes.” He smiled at me. “Well, what do you think of our cinema?”
I was wide awake again at once, and on the ball. “It’s great,” I said cautiously, stroking the soft velour of an upholstered armrest. And why exactly were we here?
“I could find us a 1950s horror film from the archive next door,” suggested Arthur. He was still standing beside the door, hands in his jeans pockets. “They’re not a bit scary, but if my father’s to be believed, they’re amazingly valuable from the cinema enthusiast’s point of view. What do you like best, Liv? Zombies, ghosts, vampires…?”
“Or maybe demons?” added Henry.
Was that the cue? Were secrets finally about to be aired?
I assumed my innocent-little-lamb smile again. “But we can’t watch a film right now—you have fifty guests up there.”
“More like seventy by this time, I guess,” said Arthur, shrugging his shoulders. “But they’ll do fine without me. This is more important.”
Something bumped into the door.
“Good, our drinks.” Arthur opened the door, and Jasper stumbled in, laden with glasses, several bottles, a bucket of ice cubes, and two oranges that he had wedged between his ear and his shoulder, with his head tilted to one side. His face was half hidden by a bunch of mint that he’d stuck in his mouth. It fell out when he started talking. Henry was just in time to catch it before it fell to the floor.
“I couldn’t find a tray, so I thought I’d just mix the drinks down here,” explained Jasper, trying to put everything else carefully down on one of the seats. “Well? Have you asked her yet?”
“Asked her what?” I retrieved the oranges as they were rolling away over the black fitted carpet.
“Well, whether you’ll … join in our game instead of Anabel,” replied Jasper. “Only, of course it won’t work unless you’re still a virgin. So first of all we ought to ask, right away: Are you a virgin?”
What in heaven’s name was that to do with him? What was the idea?
“Oh, keep your mouth shut, Jas,” said Henry as the innocent-little-lamb smile disappeared from my face.
“What do you mean?” Baffled, Jasper frowned. “What’s the point of spending hours explaining what it’s all about to her, and then maybe it turns out that she wouldn’t be right for the part anyway? I read only the other day that, on average, girls first do it aged fifteen, and she’s fifteen and hot stuff, or she would be if she didn’t wear those funny glasses, so it’s a perfectly reasonable question. Are you still a virgin, Liv, yes or no?”
I stared at them, thunderstruck. “You’re involved in a game which only virgins can play?”
“Oh, brilliant, Jasper. Now she thinks we’re out of our minds.”
“I didn’t mean to do that.” Jasper looked repentant. “I just didn’t want to waste time. How would you two have gone about it, then?”
Henry leaned against the wall and folded his arms. “Presumably we’d have begun by pointing out the advantages of the game before going on to the crazy part.”
“Slowly and carefully.” Arthur looked distinctly less amused than Henry.
“What kind of game, exactly, is it?” I quickly asked.
Arthur opened his mouth to tell me, but Jasper got in first. “Not a game you play with dice. And it’s not about winning, either. It’s more a kind of role-playing game—not that anyone is really playing a part. Basically it’s not a game at all. If you feel confused now, so do I. I call it confusing too. Very confusing. So confusing that right now I’m going to mix us a drink before I go on.” He had lined up the glasses on the armrest of the cinema seat and unscrewed the top of a bottle of gin.
Arthur was looking as if he’d like to grab Jasper and hold his mouth closed, but after a glance at Henry, he contented himself with flashing his eyes furiously at Jasper instead. In his own turn, Jasper took no notice whatsoever of his friend’s attempt to communicate wordlessly with him. “I’m ready to admit that I still don’t really understand it,” he chattered on. “Especially all that dream business—it’s really way out. But with a little practice it worked for me, too, and wow, all that about the wishes bowled me over, and yup, it’s cool, or anyway it was cool until … Oh, shit, I’ve gone and forgotten the chalice for saying the Mass.”
This just could not be true! Now he was carrying on about the stupid chalice for saying Mass! “It was cool until what?” I asked, more impatiently than I meant.
“Until we broke the rules. Well, it was really only Anabel, but that makes no difference to him.” Jasper had decided to stop complaining about the chalice. He poured lavish amounts of gin over the ice cubes. “It’s like this: at least one of the players must have virgin blood, because the last seal can be broken only with virgin blood, and at Halloween last year, when we began playing the game, well, I still thought that just about qualified most of us, up to and including Anabel—sorry, Arthur.…”
“That’s okay.” Arthur had dropped into one of the cinema seats, burying his head in his hands. He’d clearly given up trying to make Jasper keep quiet.
I rubbed my arms inconspicuously, or so I hoped. They had come up in goose bumps, because only then did it dawn on me that what Jasper said made reasonably good sense, in light of the story Anabel had told me in my dream last night. About a game they had begun playing last Halloween … a game that had gotten out of control, and Anabel said it was her fault.
I glanced quickly at Henry, who was still leaning back against the wall. Like Arthur, he had stopped making any attempt to stop Jasper. Maybe because so far I hadn’t run away screaming, or maybe simply because no one could have stopped Jasper at this point.
Jasper had put down the gin bottle and was now pouring vermouth into the glasses—plenty of it too. The mere smell was enough to make you tipsy.
“But then it turned out, surprisingly, that Grayson had a relationship with Maisie, and Henry is a stupid mysterymonger who never tells us anything, while Arthur had lost his virginity when he was fifteen to that really cute French trainee teacher, but unfortunately he’d forgotten to tell his best friend about it.” Here Jasper favored Arthur with a reproachful glance. “So, in fact—and who’d have thought it?—at the beginning of the game, Anabel really was the only one of us who hadn’t had sex yet. Basically, one of us would have been enough. But then Anabel went and, er, broke the rules of the game, exactly when and who with I don’t know, but anyway it’s a very complicated and dramatic story, and everything went wrong, and now we need a new Anabel, one who’s guaranteed to be a virgin and stay a virgin until the end of the game. So how about it, Liv? Are you a virgin, yes or no?” As he’d come out with the last few sentences all in a rush, he was now gasping for air.
Arthur gave a hollow groan.
“Well, Liv, so now you’re in the loop,” said Henry sarcastically. “Are you well and truly scared?”
Unfortunately I wasn’t. If anything, the opposite. I was burning to ask a few concrete questions, but I didn’t yet want to admit how much I already knew. Particularly as most of what I did know came from some very dubious dreams.
“I think I’d like to know something about the advantages of the dreams,” I said. “You mentioned those.”
“Oh, there are plenty of them! Let’s see…” Jasper frowned, thinking hard. “If you join the game, for instance, you’d have four potential partners for the Autumn Ball right away. Any girl at our school would be envious of you!”
Henry laughed briefly. “You’re using the Autumn Ball as bait?”
“Why not? Other girls would commit murder for such a choice of partners. I should have mentioned that first, shouldn’t I?”
“Oh, Jasper, you’re a hopeless case.” Arthur put his hand out. “Give me a glass of that.”
“I haven’t finished mixing the drinks yet,” said Jasper, rapping him on the knuckles. “They still need Campari and a slice of orange. And a sprig of mint. We were going to get sozzled in style, remember?”
At that moment the door was opened, and bright light from the corridor fell into the home cinema.
“Hi, Grayson.” Arthur fished up the gin bottle from Jasper’s seat.
“‘Hi, Grayson,’ is it?” repeated Grayson angrily. “Have you all lost your marbles? Simply going off with Liv when for once I don’t keep an eye on you for a minute?”
“It was much more than a minute,” murmured Henry.
“The drinks are ready now,” said Jasper.
“You’re the utter end, all of you!”
Arthur heaved a deep sigh. “Come on in and shut the door, Grayson.”
But Grayson shook his head. “It’s getting late. I must take Liv h—oh, for heaven’s sake, Arthur, are you drinking gin straight from the bottle?”
“Get off your high horse, Grayson,” said Henry. “Nothing’s happened to Liv.”
“Exactly.” Arthur draped his legs over the armrest of the seat next to him and offered Grayson the bottle. “Have a swig of that and don’t look at us as if we just robbed a bank. We were only trying to initiate Liv into our mystery.”
“Oh yes? I hope you didn’t leave anything out—Anabel’s dog, for instance, and the nightmares, and what—oh, forget it!” Grayson looked as if he’d explode with fury any moment now. “Come along, Liv. We’re leaving,” he said through his teeth.
I didn’t move from the spot. He was looking rather desperate, but I just couldn’t leave yet, not when I was so close to finding out what was at the heart of the mystery.
“It’s only ten fifteen, man. Relax,” said Arthur, glancing at his watch. “Please,” he added almost pleadingly.
Grayson closed the door. “I’ve told you a hundred times, we have to find another solution—but you just ignore me, of course. Why won’t you listen, for once in your lives—oh, damn it! Whatever they’ve told you, Liv, you must simply forget it again!”
“I’d like to understand it first,” I said.
“That’s the trouble,” said Arthur. “It’s really hard to understand if you haven’t experienced it.”
“And I explained it very well,” said Jasper, offended. “Particularly considering that I don’t understand it myself.”
Grayson was going to say something, but I got in first. “So you were playing a game last Halloween—a game that isn’t a real game, and at least one of the players still has to be a virgin,” I said hastily. “Right?”
“Right!” Jasper cast a triumphant look around the rest of the company. “There, you see? She does get the idea!”
The others didn’t react. Grayson rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand, Arthur took another swig from the gin bottle, Henry picked separate leaves off the bunch of mint and rubbed them to pieces in his fingers.
“But why?” I asked.
Henry looked up. “Why are we playing the game, or why do the rules of the game say that at least one of the players must be a virgin?”
“Both,” I said.
The silence went on for some time. Even Jasper didn’t answer me but took a pocketknife out of his jeans and tried slicing one of the oranges with it. He wasn’t very successful.
“Well, let’s put it this way.” It was Arthur’s voice, slightly metallic and hollow, that finally broke the silence. “It was Halloween, and there was a power cut all over North London, so our party ended earlier than expected. We were all wound up and in love and ready to do something crazy.”
“You were in love,” Henry corrected him. “The rest of us were just drunk.”
“True.” Grayson, resigned, leaned back against the door.
“Anyway, we were in a really good mood,” Arthur went on. “It was the middle of the night, we were on our own in Anabel’s house, and the red wine from her father’s cellar was good stuff.…”
“And don’t forget to tell her it was really scary Halloween weather outside, dark and misty and so on.” Jasper was taking center stage again, although he was still slaughtering the orange. “Anabel had lit a lot of candles, and when she brought out that mysterious book and suggested trying something quite different for a change, it kind of felt, well … the right thing to do. Conjuring up a demon on Halloween—I mean, sounds perfect, doesn’t it? It was fun, too, at first, and it seemed to me as harmless as … as telling your fortune by reading the tea leaves. No one expects the tea leaves to develop an independent life of their own and come tormenting you in your dreams by night. Or go about murdering dogs…”
Ah, we were coming to the point at long last.
“So that’s your game? Conjuring up demons?” And what did the dog have to do with it?
Jasper nodded. “I know it sounds totally idiotic.”
“It is totally idiotic,” said Grayson.
“It was only meant to be a joke. None of us expected it to work.” Jasper sighed. “We simply repeated the words after Anabel, added a few drops of our blood to the red wine we were drinking, drew a funny sort of penta-thingy on the floor—”
“Pentagram, Jas, for about the thousandth time,” said Henry.
“Whatever you say.” Jasper rolled his eyes. “Then we made our wishes. No one could have guessed that the whole thing would turn out so … so real.”
It sounded to me like they needed an exorcist more than a virgin. “You mean conjuring up this demon really worked?” I was making such an effort to banish any doubt or mockery from my voice that I sounded like a psychotherapist in a bad TV film, doing her level best to understand. A psychotherapist whose voice shows how crazy she thinks her patients are. “Exactly how do I picture this scene to myself?”
No one told me. Henry, apparently lost in thought, was letting scraps of green mint leaves drop to the floor, a frowning Arthur was watching the ice cubes in Jasper’s glasses melt, Grayson was biting his lower lip, and Jasper was still murdering the orange.
I was beginning to feel tired of working so hard to winkle their secrets out of them, especially since an answer always gave rise to another ten questions. “So on Halloween last year you conjured up a demon, for fun,” I said, summing up the results to date. “According to a game that you found in an old book, with instructions saying one of the players must be a virgin. But because your virgin turned out not to be a virgin anymore, you need a substitute player. And for some reason or other, that’s why you picked me.”
But I knew the reason: it was because I’d landed right in front of them during that dream on Monday night.
“Assuming you are still a virgin,” confirmed Jasper.
“Yes, I get that bit. What I don’t get, apart from just how the game works, is why you don’t stop playing it. Simple.”
“No, it’s not simple at all. That’s why.” Jasper leaned forward and went on, lowering his voice, “We did try, but you see, you can’t make a pact with a demon and then just wriggle out of it.”
“I see. Of course you can’t,” I replied in my best psychotherapist’s voice, looking inquiringly at Henry. For a moment I felt as if I were back in Highgate Cemetery. Henry suspected that they hadn’t been dreaming of me, they’d been dreaming with me, I was fairly sure of that—but the way it looked, he hadn’t shared his suspicions with the others. Apart, maybe, from Grayson, who kept on asking for his sweater back.
I tried to phrase my next question in such a way that they’d be forced to give me more information. “But what, exactly, did this demon do to you? Looks like you really believe in it, right?”
Once again, all I got was silence. Silly mistake. I ought to have refrained from asking that second question. I sighed. I wasn’t about to get any further this way.
“Okay,” I said, to cut the whole thing short.
“Okay?” Jasper wasn’t the only one to give me an inquiring glance.
I took a deep breath and looked all around at them. “Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll take over for Anabel in your game, but only if you answer all my questions, and believe me, I have a whole lot of them.”
The moment I’d said that, the atmosphere in the room was entirely different. They suddenly all began talking at once.
“Do you mean you really are still a virgin?” cried Jasper. “I knew it! An ugly pair of glasses like that must be good for something!”
Arthur put the gin bottle down, stood up, and said solemnly, “Liv Silver, you’ve saved our lives! And I promise to answer all your questions as well as I can.” He laughed. “Oh, I’d just love to give you a hug—only, if I do that, I bet Grayson will land a punch on me.”
Grayson did indeed look as if he’d like to hit Arthur. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said, adding something else, but it was lost in all the noise his friends were making.
Only Henry said nothing. He just looked at me and shook his head almost imperceptibly. Then he smiled.