Work Text:
[tape recorder clicks on]
[echoes of sobs and sniffles]
WILL: But- but what if- if- what if they do tell? What if they-
GILLIAN: I’m telling you, they won’t. They’ll know it wasn’t our fault. They’ll know we didn’t mean to. (doubtful) They should know. They should believe us. Besides, we’re kids.
WILL: Okay. O-o-okay. I’ll try—
[deep breath]
I’ll trust you.
GILLIAN: Hey, you were the one who wanted to ‘get a better idea of what happened’—
WILL: —No! No, no, no, don’t you start now! You’re right. It- it was my idea. But you’re saying the bit—
GILLIAN: I will, I will, okay? (kinder) Now calm down. Breathe.
WILL: Breathe. Yeah, breathe. S-so I’m gonna—
ARCHIVIST: (pissed and loud) Excuse me!
[startled gasp from Will, who starts breathing more erratically again]
ARCHIVIST: The Archives are closed to the public, what on earth are you doing here?!
WILL: We- we’re here- here to- we’re here to make a statement! We just wanted to- because- because— (unintelligible noises)
[silence accompanied by quiet sniffles]
ARCHIVIST: …Get down here, then.
WILL: okay, okay, okay, okay, okay…
GILLIAN: Calm. Down.
[footsteps, door opens and closes]
GILLIAN: Yes. I- we want to make a statement. The two of us.
ARCHIVIST: (under breath) Good Lord…
Is your parent or carer or… just any adult with you?
GILLIAN: Just us.
ARCHIVIST: (tangible sarcasm) Wonderful. Could you tell me who your parents are, then?
WILL AND GILLIAN, SIMULTANEOUSLY:
NO!
WILL: We’re on our own. Our parents can’t know. They’ll- they just can’t know. You need to promise you won’t tell anybody. Nobody at all. Don’t tell anyone. Just don’t—
ARCHIVIST: (stern) Alright. (calmer) Alright. I suppose I can do that for you. Let me just turn on a tape recorder, and we can get going.
GILLIAN: I think that one’s already on.
ARCHIVIST: Oh. Well, then, you can give your names, date and subject of your statement.
WILL: So my name is William Hartwell, that’s Gillian Jackson and our statement’s about… it’s about…
GILLIAN: About what us and our friends did over the last month or so. From the fifth of September to a couple of days ago. Is that enough?
ARCHIVIST: Perfect. Statement recorded live from subjects on the second of October, two thousand and sixteen by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Now, if you’re comfortable, start from the beginning.
WILL:
[deep breath]
Okay. I think this would make sense with a little bit of background. My family’s not great. Uh, far from it, to be completely honest. My dad’s in the army, so he’s… pretty tough. Not saying he doesn’t love me or anything, but he’s tough. But he’s also rarely ever home. Then there’s my mum. Half the time she’s even worse than dad. The other half, she’s… off in her own world. Yeah, that’s what my sisters would say. She didn’t even try to hide her drinking from me. So she’d end up forgetting to do a lot of things and I just got used to doing them myself. Things were better when I was younger and I had my sisters. They’d help me, sometimes even talked back to make sure I’d not get yelled at too hard. My eldest sister Quartz is twenty three and left as soon as she could. Angel turned eighteen earlier this year and did the same. Things got hard being just me and mum.
…might’ve gotten a bit carried away there; I’m not just here to trauma dump. This just makes what I did next make more sense. Come the beginning of the school year I decided I was going to run away from home. But not by myself. I had thought that it would be a great idea to gather a group of others who’d also been considering running away. I’m not even sure what my thought process was, like, how many people did I think would randomly decide to run away from home because some rando year eight asked them to?
Apparently quite a few. There was Gillian, of course, but we had some others with us. We hadn’t known each other before and we weren’t asking about last names, so I can’t tell you those, but I remember the names of the others. It was Peter, Molly, Jen, Alex and…
GILLIAN: Mikey.
WILL: …yeah. Mikey. So we had seven whole people in our group. We all met up during lunch break and planned to prepare things like food, clothes and money.
The first day was a whole load of nothing. We treated it like the school trips you’d get when you were in junior school, spending most of the morning mucking about in a park. We weren’t really sure what you’re meant to even do when you run away from home, but it was… a lot less exciting than book and movies make it out to be. By lunch we were pretty drained and barely exchanged a word.
Except for the arguing, of course. There was a bit of a power struggle between the two of us. Being the oldest, naturally I thought that I should’ve been in charge, which I was, but Gillian over here thinks—
GILLIAN: I AM more qualified! I’m a Girl Scout! …anyway, you were saying?
WILL: So quite a bit of what could’ve been a nice time was sucked away by that. I was deciding where exactly we’d be going and trying to sort out rationing.
On that first night, it had gotten dark before we managed to make the mood lighter, so it was just piling on to an already weird day. We just wanted to sleep. We just wanted rest, but the cold wouldn’t let us.
And then, we heard the drumming.
GILLIAN: Oh! Oh, oh, the drums! It was the most beautiful drumming we’d ever heard. That first time we heard it was magical. It was quiet at first, in the background. A gentle, incessant thrumming. But when I- when we heard it proper, we had to keep listening. It was just that… hypnotic. Yeah, it was hypnotic.
There was something about how the rhythms layered together. Then it got louder. It swelled into this gorgeous crescendo and I swear that you could- you could hear chanting so then I started to sing along. The others started too, we were all singing in the end. And even though it was so late it just made us want to dance. Despite how tired I was, I picked myself up and danced along. Nothing very good, I’ll admit, but I was moving.
WILL: It’s like- it wasn’t just dance music. It wasn’t just that. It made us feel energised. At least it did for me. I didn’t even notice the cold. After that we felt like we had the strength for just about anything, even though all we were going to do was sleep.
Next morning was completely different. Normally, hauling myself out of bed for school is a chore, and I wasn’t even planning to get up early, but I was up and running at six thirty. So had almost everyone else. Well, except Mikey. He took a little more waking up.
That day went far better. I was feeling much more alert. I felt stronger, and more confident. We were all running around like anything. But by the time we reached the afternoon we were at a low again. Almost even more than the day before. Groggy, even. Every few minutes there was someone asking to take a break. It’s not even that we were tired or hungry or anything. We just had no energy.
We didn’t realise how much we missed the drums until they started again. Instantly, it was like everything had brightened up. A whole bunch of us got up to move along to that… sweet, sweet sound.
GILLIAN: And! And, and I swear it was louder. There were more drums? More drummers? Either way, there was more. I can still hear the way it built up so wonderfully. Once again, we’d been replenished. At around this point we’d pretty much put two and two together: the drumming was directly giving us energy. I- I personally thought that was brilliant. And that seemed to be what most people thought too.
WILL: Days went by and they were pretty much all going like the second. We’d wake up feeling great, do what we had to, have a sort of a crash then dance to the drums so we’d feel better. It was kind of- it reminds me of when we were learning about drugs in PSHCE. You know, you take a bit and it feels great but then you have a low so you need more to get the same high? None of us made that connection then. We never thought it was a bad thing. We never saw it as a bad thing. So we just let the highs get higher and the lows get lower, and we slowly got further and further from the city. Hearing the drums was daily, but it became special. We’d gather in circle and dance together. We actually had a good time. It felt like a campfire. Yeah, without the fire, but still. It felt like camp. Another thing we somehow didn’t notice was how we seemed to be… getting a bit more physical? Aggressive? I don’t know, I wouldn’t exactly say violent or aggressive or anything but there was definitely something. I got really bossy and started to yell whenever I got annoyed. I yell a lot normally; I’m just loud, but this was proper irritated-yelling. There started being more scuffles between us that got bigger than just pushing and shoving. There was one person who didn’t seem to be affected, though. Mikey. He’d been acting a bit funny from the beginning. When I asked him about the music, he said he had been trying to ignore it.
GILLIAN: Yeah, he was being pretty weird about the drums. And he wasn’t that neutral. He hated it, he did. Absolutely refused to have anything to do with it. Honestly, I’m not even sure why he came with us; he was so goody goody about everything as if we weren’t already runaways and truants. But for some reason listening to the drums was where he drew the line. He just wasn’t able to appreciate them. He didn’t understand just how amazing they were. He didn’t get it. He wasn’t able to see how much they were helping.
WILL: …Back to the statement, things were mostly pretty smooth until Molly made a suggestion: to play along with the drums. Honestly, I’ve got no clue how someone didn’t think of that earlier. Probably because we didn’t have anything that could work as drums. But sure enough, she grabbed a couple of sticks and hit them together along to the rhythm of the drumming. I’m not sure I ever saw such raw emotion on her face. Nobody dared join her on that first night. It sounds mean looking back, but we had just all decided to use her as a test case to make sure nothing bad would happen. After a quick trip to the pharmacy to get bandages for the fist she slammed into a tree, we decided that it was safe. When I say we, I mean… at this point I started thinking something was off. I wasn’t sure I wanted to join in anymore.
GILLIAN: But you do have to admit, it was very smart. If we could join in we’d get even stronger. And even if we weren’t joined in, we could always have our own music.
WILL: Yes, and everyone found that a brilliant idea. We all got in our circle and stood up. Me and Mikey sat down. Now, with everyone singing and dancing as the drumroll crescendoed, it felt just like—
GILLIAN: Like camp!
WILL: —Like a cult. I didn’t know what to think. I just sat and watched and stared while people took turns play fighting, then actually fighting if the others were cheering them on hard enough. It sounds odd saying it, but even though I was so sure that I didn’t like it and wasn’t going to join, I didn’t actually find what was happening unusual. Just… not to my liking. Even then I still found myself humming or tapping my fingers to the beat.
The day we actually set the fire was- it was- it was when it all went downhill. We- I- I can’t say this bit. I don’t want to say it. I don’t want to-
GILLIAN: Then I’ll continue. We had gotten so far from the city that we were in a forest, and we didn’t want to go back. All we wanted was the music. We needed to hear it again. Alex had pinched a zippo lighter on the third day just in case, and there were loads of sticks to actually start it. That’s when Mikey got up and absolutely lost it! He just started screaming at us- screaming at me! About how we were losing it and about to something ‘dangerous and ridiculous’. After his rant, he stood there, almost panting and glaring straight at me. I didn’t know what to do so I started drumming. I played the first beat I could remember. It was just a poor imitation, but soon all of us played. We chanted and slowly walked forwards. I saw in his eyes how quickly he realised he’d messed up. I struck the first blow. All at once, I heard the pulse of the drums themselves getting louder and louder until it felt like it was pumping in my own veins. They had finally joined in. The feeling of every note rousing my energy was an experience like no other. I’ll never forget the beautiful melody that played as I struck at what may well have been a punching bag. I don’t think I’ll ever hear something quite like it again.
WILL: I- I heard it too. I FELT it. I felt it and I let it run through my body and I was with everyone else— I hit him and— and I- I- I didn’t even feel bad then— I- I felt warmth spilling onto my hands and it was blood and it was everywhere- it was just everywhere. There was red everywhere I looked— it- it-
[heavy breathing]
GILLIAN: By the time the rhythm of the drums died down, we had long stopped playing and just stared in silence. Mikey lay there in a puddle of blood. I think it was mostly his own. His fingers twitched like a crushed spider’s legs. If I saw him then again now I think I’d be sick. It didn’t register then what happened— no, what we’d done. All that mattered then was that we had a body and needed to get rid of it. As the fire crackled invitingly, we realised that we were all rather hungry.
I don’t think I need to say what we did. The gentle beating of the drums and what smelled much like cooking pork made for a strangely nice atmosphere in the dark, damp forest.
WILL: Far, far, far too nice. Far too ordinary. As if we were just having dinner. As if we hadn’t just—
[pause]
The music went away the next morning. It vanished just like that. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so thankful for silence.
When we got up, none of us said a word about it, except swearing to absolute secrecy. Alex said that he wanted to go home and left just like that. Molly and Peter spent all morning trying to keep the fire going and recreate the tune, but they complained that it was too faint in their memories.
I’ve also considered going home. Mum’s probably worried sick. But home means explaining things. Maybe some kind of foster place, but that’s going too far. It wasn’t that bad so… I’m not sure. I think I’m sticking with Gillian. I- I don’t know what she was planning to do, but-
GILLIAN: No way I’m going home. I was staying out there either way.
WILL: Yeah. So this is the last time this is ever getting talked about. I just want to know what happened. What actually happened, like what caused it. What the hell those drums were, what to do if it happens again—
ARCHIVIST: Rest assured, we will come up with something. Whether you will believe the answer is up to you, though.
GILLIAN: ‘Course we’ll believe it. There’s no way what happened was just a mass hallucination.
WILL: Is it fine if I come back in a week?
ARCHIVIST: It should hopefully—
WILL: Then I’ll be seeing you! We’ve got to go!
[footsteps, door opens]
ARCHIVIST: No, wait! You’ve still got to—
[door closes]
ARCHIVIST: —Never mind. Statement ends, I suppose.
[click]
[click]
ARCHIVIST: Information about this statement was, unsurprisingly, very hard to find. Finding Mr Hartwell’s missing person notice revealed that all of the children went to Highgate. Miss Jackson doesn’t have any kind of notice for her. I think I understand why she didn’t want to go home. Nothing noteworthy about any of the others except for the one who went home, Alexander Creeley. His mother made a post on a forum for parents which lines up with the statement: he refuses to speak about why he ran away. Since, just like the others, he had only been absent, nobody else who knew Michael Morris has any idea he is dead.
I have no doubt that the Slaughter is at play here. Why it would go for a group of schoolchildren, however, I have no clue. I don’t believe that Mr Hartwell is at any more risk. Miss Jackson, however, still sees to be clinging very hard to whatever song she heard. I worry she may hear it again and do something she really doesn’t want to.
[click]