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…