Richard Platt's Nose

They were sitting in the school dining room, a place where the roof
was far overhead and cobwebs hung between its wooden beams. Paul always
thought it was more like a church than a dining room. The walls were a
forbidding and dirty grey, and the battered old tables were arranged
like pews either side of a central aisle. Even the windows were like
those of a church, stained with obscure images from the scriptures,
their colours dulled by age and neglect. Sometimes though, on a bright
day, some of the red tint would catch a shaft of sunlight and warp it
into a pool on the wooden floor. That reminded Paul of being in a
church as well, where you might suddenly come across a patch of
bizarrely-coloured light that seemed to have no source until you looked
up and saw the sun glinting through a high window.

But the dining room was never quite like a church. Breakfast started at
7:30, lunch was at 1:00 and tea was at 6:15. Breakfast could be a
little subdued. People hadn't quite woken up and were often staring at
the overcooked bacon and congealed eggs on their plates as if in a
trance. Lunch was always the noisiest because the day boys were there
and it was often difficult to find a place to sit. Tea was loud as
well. It was the last chance to talk before everyone settled down to
two hours of homework, or, as was more usual in Paul's case, to stare
out at the night through his study window and wish he was miles from
this place, running through the fields towards home where he could talk
when he wanted and not worry about saying the wrong thing to sixth
formers. At home he was the centre of attention, being an only child.
Here, he was just another snotty little third former, lost in a
frightening world of chores and punishments.

Despite the noise, the dining room was still more like a church than
the school chapel, an ugly sixties building whose internal walls were
painted a garish red and where a hideous image of crucified Christ hung
over the altar. He had nightmares about that painting sometimes. Jesus
was surrounded by a crowd of people mocking and abusing him and their
faces displayed all the sins of the world that could be imagined; hate,
jealousy, lust. But worst of all was a figure that lurked at the very
edge of the painting, half off the canvas in fact. The skin of his face
was a greyish, pallid colour and the hair that hung down either side of
it was straggly, lank and black. His eyes were the worst thing, the
thing that sometimes made Paul sit bolt upright in his dormitory bed in
the early hours of the morning, his pulse racing. The artist had
apparently forgotten to add irises or pupils. They were simply blank
and white. Soulless. This awful man didn't convey any particular sin to
Paul. He was just evil. Purely and irredeemably evil.

Paul knew he was being stupid, knew that it was just his over-active
imagination getting the better of him as usual, but he had started to
believe that more and more of the man was becoming visible in the
painting each day, as if he was slowly dragging himself from the limbo
that lay at the edges of the artist's imagination and reaching out into
the real world. When he'd considered this horrible idea for some time,
it occurred to him that once the man was fully visible, he'd be able to
extricate himself from the canvas and come looking for him at night.
When that happened, when he woke up from yet another nightmare, he'd
see a familiar shape crouched at the end of the bed, a silhouette save
for those blank eyes that would pierce into his like the sun pierced
through the dusty stained glass in the dining room.

He even told his friend Andrew about all this one day. It was just
getting too much for him to keep it bottled up within himself and he
thought he'd feel better if he shared it with someone. Andrew did just
what Paul had feared he'd do and laughed.

"One day you'll have to gather all this stuff together and write a
novel", he said.

And then he told him about all the other legends that had become
connected with the school since it's founding 400 years previously. A
lot of them seemed to be about paintings, which worried Paul immensely.
It was lunchtime but the dining room wasn't quite as busy as usual and
they could just about hear each other talk. Paul played with the fish
and chips on his plate but wasn't really feeling very hungry. What
Andrew told him made him even less so.

"The best one I've heard", said Andrew, "is about something that's
supposed to happen in this very room. I'm sure it's true, because
people have really had accidents because of it. It's a bit like the
story of Aladdin and the lamp, I suppose, because it involved rubbing
something and then releasing what's inside it into the world. You don't
get three wishes from this particular genie, though. More like three
curses. Anyway, it's got to do with the painting of Richard
Platt."

Paul immediately glanced down the central aisle towards a large
painting that hung in the dead centre of the far wall, behind the head
table where the teachers were having their lunch. He was the founder of
the school, a rich merchant of some sort who wanted to do something to
help the community in his area in the last years of Queen Elizabeth the
First's reign. Paul had always thought he looked quite harmless. He had
close-set, pig-like eyes sat in a ruddy face that suggested he drank
too much. A high white ruff hid his neck and he wore what looked like a
tunic of brown velvet. A black hat with a white feather topped his
head.

He looked far nicer than the other paintings in the dining room,
anyway, mostly of old headmasters. A lot of them were balding,
stern-looking men with round spectacles perched on the ends of their
noses and wearing black gowns. Paul was particularly disconcerted by
the painting of a chap who perched on the wood panelling on the wall
opposite Mr Platt. The painting was little more than a sketch and
showed the wild wispy hair and mad-looking eyes of some headmaster from
the nineteenth century, a strict Victorian disciplinarian, no doubt.
Paul snapped out of his reverie when he realised Andrew was still
talking.

"It only works once a year, apparently, and surprise surprise, that's
the night before All Saints' Day. Halloween. Anyway, you have to be
standing in front of Richard Platt's painting at the first stroke of
midnight on Halloween. The clock tower's not far from here so you
should be able to hear it. And on the stroke you've got to reach your
hand out and touch him on the nose. This is the stupid bit. Supposedly
his nose will feel real, and will carry on feeling real until the last
stroke. But there's no way you should be around to find out. If you're
not back in your bed by the end of the twelfth stroke, something very
nasty will happen to you."

Paul, for once, found the rational side of his brain speaking. "Andrew,
I can see a couple of things wrong with that. First of all, how does
anyone know that his nose feels real until the twelfth stroke if you're
supposed to get back to bed before that? And secondly you'd be in such
a rush to get back that you'd be bound to have a nasty accident of some
sort. I'm sure his nose wouldn't really feel real, either."

Andrew replied that it wasn't his fault that there were holes in the
story because he hadn't thought of it. But it started some interesting
thoughts going in Paul's mind.

He began to wonder how exciting it would be if he actually tested the
legend out. The biggest problem with it was that Beevor's House, where
he slept, was across a large expanse of grass from the dining room and
there was no way he'd get back to bed before the last stroke of twelve.
That would only be a problem, though, if the legend were true. If it
wasn't, and it surely wasn't, he'd get back to his dormitory long after
the last stroke had echoed away into the night and would sleep secure
in the knowledge that he'd defied the supernatural, and won.

His first task was to get someone to witness his daring deed. It would
be no good to do it on his own because no one would believe him the
next morning. He was an insignificant, downtrodden third former and as
such held no respect or credibility. Andrew was the obvious choice,
because he'd told Paul the story in the first place. As usual, he
laughed when Paul first suggested it, but then came round to his way of
thinking.

"The problem is that even with two of us no one will believe us" said
Andrew. "I'll take my camera. It's one of those fancy ones that print
the date and time on the photo. When it says 12:00, November 1st,
that'll be all the proof we need."

So they were ready. Andrew first told Paul the story in mid September
and as the evening's grew darker and the air colder, Paul became more
and more excited. His imagination began to play havoc. One night he
stood on his bed to look out the tall dormitory window and saw the
skeletal outline of a tree against the moonlit sky, just outside the
old gym. He saw the profile of a face, complete with hooked nose and
eye that curved sharply upwards, like the villain in a comic book. One
evening, just before homework, he was playing table tennis in the house
dining room, a smaller, paler imitation of the school dining room. He
felt eyes boring into the back of his head and spun round suddenly to
meet the benevolent gaze of Edmund Beevor, the founder of his house.
Every year, at the house Christmas dinner, they would pass a
cider-filled cup from person to person, round the tables that were
somehow crammed into the room on the only day of the year that the
dining room was actually used for eating. The custom was to look to the
left, then look to the right, and then proclaim loudly "To Mr Beevor!"
before sipping the contents.

Mr Beevor always seemed to Paul a kindlier, more human character than
the intimidating paintings in the church-like school dining room. He
stood on the grass in front of Beevor's, a pipe clutched in his right
hand and a military moustache nestling on his upper lip. The 1920s sky
was mostly blue, flecked with a few wafer-like clouds, and the brick of
the building he'd founded was a brilliant red. He must have been
looking towards the dining room while he was being painted, where the
brick was dour and grey, and the sky was surely dark and thunderous on
that long ago day. Paul nodded briefly to Mr Beevor before continuing
his game. The benevolent spirits of the school were on his side.

The last event, that, truth to say, worried Paul slightly occurred a
week before Halloween, when the winds had started to whip up and blow
the remaining leaves from the trees. Apparently a group of boys from
McGill's, the neighbouring house, had experimented with something
called a Ouija Board. This apparently involved sitting around a board
with one's hands on a glass and then asking any ghost that might be
present questions about the future, or the past for that matter. The
glass would then move in a manner appropriate to the spirit world's
answer. According to rumour, the window of the study where they were
holding this ceremony shattered as soon as their hands were on the
glass, and a rubbish bin fastened to the wall outside detached itself
and hurtled twenty feet onto the grass, where the wind blew its
contents all over the school.

Paul even considered calling the whole thing off after this. He was
afraid evil spirits had been let loose, and the wasted, sickly man in
the painting of Christ's crucifixion had inched a little closer to the
real world. But he stood before Mr Beevor for a few moments to dispel
these thoughts and Halloween was upon them before he had any further
doubts.

Paul shared a study with Andrew and they settled down to homework as
usual at 7:30 on the evening of October 31st. Fortunately it was a
Friday, which meant they had the whole of the weekend to complete their
homework. This usually meant rushing through the translation of twenty
Latin sentences after chapel on Sunday evening, but it was worth it for
the sake of a blissful hour and a half of free time on Fridays. Andrew
had started to get cold feet, which pleased Paul because he was
normally the timid one, and it was often Andrew who stood up for him
against bossy sixth formers. Paul, however, was well prepared for such
an eventuality and had secreted a small hip flask of whisky in the
battered cupboard beneath his desk. He risked suspension or worse if he
got caught, but it was worth the thrill of knowing he was rebelling
against the system. This was the first time he'd ever behaved in such a
manner, all for the sake of disproving an old school legend, and it
made him feel good inside. For the first time in his life, he really
began to feel like an adult.

Roll call was at nine and they had to attend or people's suspicions
would be aroused, and they even went to bed as usual at 9:30.
Unfortunately the whisky had an undesired effect on Andrew and Paul
heard him loudly snoring by ten. It was no good. He had to go through
with the expedition on his own. So at 11:30 he crept out of bed,
wincing when a floorboard creaked beneath him and then making his way
careful down three flights of stairs to the ground floor. He sneaked
into the house dining room to cast a last, reassuring glance at Edmund
Beevor's silhouette and then, after throwing on some jeans and a
t-shirt that he'd left in his study, he plunged out into the night and
across the grass towards the main dining room.

If anyone had caught him at that stage, he'd probably have been sent
straight to a mental institution. Why on earth would anyone be walking
across the grass at 11:40pm carrying a blanket and a torch?! The
purpose of the torch, of course, was to find Richard Platt's nose when
the time came. The blanket was his bed. There was no way he was going
to rush buck to Beevor's and get into his bed in the dormitory while
the clock struck twelve times. But Andrew hadn't specified which bed it
had to be when he'd explained the legend to Paul so his plan was to lay
the blanket out on the dining room floor and simply lie down on it
before the clock stopped striking. That way, there was absolutely no
danger of anything nasty happening to him.

Unfortunately he hadn't considered the possibility that the dining room
might be locked, and it was. Paul swore to himself but then brightened
up when his eyes alighted on a window into the kitchen that had been
left slightly open. He wriggled through, dragging the blanket after
him, and after manoeuvring his way through several rooms cluttered with
pots and pans, and taking great care not to knock anything over, he
found himself in the dark expanse of the dining room, breathing in its
familiar scents of disinfectant, stale food and dust.

It was truly beautiful. It was like someone had taken a black and white
photograph of the hall on a sunny day, when patches of multicoloured
light shimmered on the floorboards and even the dusty stained glass
windows were too dazzling to look upon. The moon had taken over the
sun's role and the patches were now white, the rest of the room utterly
black. Paul walked carefully along the aisle, still afraid to light his
torch in case the school caretaker was walking around outside. He was
aware of the shapes of tables and benches sliding vaguely by on either
side of him and then he stumbled slightly when he reached a step that
led up to the stage where the top table stood. Only then, after he had
edged his way around the table and stood between it and the wall, did
he shine a beam of light directly onto Richard Platt's face. Paul
thought for a moment that he was squinting, but laughed to himself and
looked at his watch. 11:49.

The next ten minutes dragged awfully. As Paul's eyes adjusted to the
darkness he made out a faint red light glowing from the direction of
the kitchens. The emergency light, of course. He saw outlines of the
other paintings, but was too afraid to point his torch at them in case
the light fell on the terrible sketchy man who would be frowning at him
from the opposite wall. He kept it focused solely on Mr Platt, and
then, when the seconds rolled on to 11:59, stood, poised, before the
painting, the torch clutched in his left hand, which had started
trembling, and his index finger a few inches away from the nose in
question. Paul felt his heart thudding away and wished he was back in
his cosy warm bed in Beevor's.

The clock struck twelve and Paul's heart danced a jig. He was about to
reach forward, to clasp Richard Platt's Elizabethan nose and damn the
legend forever, but then he realised the clock always struck four times
first on the hour, and would strike twelve times after that. If he
touched the painting now, he would feel only canvas and would probably
lose his chance for another year. So he waited a little longer, and the
silence between each of the four strikes was longer than the ten
minutes that had preceded them.

The clock struck a fifth time and Paul lunged forward, his finger
stabbing out and touching warm, rough skin! He screamed and fell
backwards, his arms flailing out behind him and reaching for the high
table. The torch clattered onto the floor and went out. When he'd
touched his nose, he'd been sure Richard Platt had actually winked at
him!

There was no time to lose. Still in shock, he swung around the side of
the table, jumped over the step onto the aisle, and then realised with
growing panic that he'd completely forgotten where he'd left his
blanket. He bounded forward, his left knee painfully clipping the
corner of a table, before he slipped on something soft that moved
beneath him. His bed!

He lay on the blanket while the clock struck again and again before
lapsing into silence. Then he jumped up, grabbed the blanket and
hurtled back out through the kitchens, clambered through the half-open
window and then sprinted back across the grass towards Beevor's. As he
did so, a greyish figure whose shape seemed to blur at the edges like a
character from an impressionist's painting appeared from the direction
of the chapel and ran soundlessly past him, overtaking him and heading
for Beevor's. When Paul finally reached his bed he rolled onto it to
find it already occupied. Had he gone back to the wrong dormitory?
Instead of pursuing the matter, he staggered back downstairs and fell
fast asleep in his study.

He awoke feeling stiff in the morning and wondered whether Richard
Platt's nose had really felt real, or if it had all been a dream. He'd
certainly been to the dining room, but surely it had just been his
imagination playing tricks on him again. When Andrew entered he
launched into the story, telling him everything apart from actually
touching the nose. In a funny sort of way he felt ashamed of himself,
as if he'd desecrated something.

Andrew totally ignored him.

"OK, I'm sorry I didn't wake you. You'd just had too much of that
whisky."

Andrew still ignored him. In fact he didn't even look at him, and when
he glanced in his direction his eyes went straight through him as if he
wasn't there, and the other strange thing was that at morning
roll-call, when his name was read out and he said "Yes" in a perfectly
clear voice, there was an awkward pause before someone said "He's still
in bed." Paul raised his hand and shouted "I'm here!" but his
housemaster simply frowned and wrote something in his notebook before
moving on to the next person. And indeed for the next hour before
chapel, everyone completely ignored him. His task that morning was to
sweep the corridors, and to be sure, he found it rather more difficult
to gather up the dust than usual, but there was no reason for the sixth
former to shout out "Where the hell's Paul? The corridors are a bloody
mess!" as he walked straight past him.

Even more peculiar was Paul's encounter with Edmund Beevor in the house
dining room. He walked in to find the frame containing only a painting
of Beevor's House from across the grass and a few wisps of pipe smoke
floating forlornly in the air. Mr Beevor himself was playing snooker on
a battered old table in the far corner. The air reeked of tobacco.
Ancient, 70 year old tobacco, Paul assumed.

"Ah, my dear boy" said the apparition. "I'm afraid you've done a very
silly thing and damned yourself for eternity. I saw you looking up at
me on all those occasions, you know. And when that blasted cup was
passed around last Christmas, you were the only one who gave any
meaning to the words "To Mr Beevor." I really appreciated it, I can
tell you that. I was trying to warn you, you know. Not to go through
with your dratted scheme. But you tend to feel rather immobile when
you're a painting."

"But what did I do wrong?" asked Paul, feeling not in the least
self-conscious as he talked to a man that was made of paint. "I got
back to bed in time, didn't I?"

"Yes, but it wasn't your own bed," replied Mr Beevor. "You can't play
games with legends, you know. Look at all those Greek chaps that
trifled with the gods. They all got their come-uppance. And I'm
terribly sorry to say, but so have you."

When Paul returned to his study, he wasn't terribly surprised to see a
splitting image of himself sitting in his chair chatting happily to
Andrew. He was a little more upset when himself ignored him, but he
supposed he'd better get used to this sort of treatment for the rest of
eternity. Nevertheless he followed them over to chapel and sat next to
them for morning assembly. When they got to the prayers, his
doppelganger finally looked at him and winked nastily. "I'd never wink
like that" thought Paul, as his double's eyes turned suddenly to a
ghastly, eggy white and his skin turned a sickly grey. He was back to
normal in an instant.

When Paul, if that's what he could still be called, looked towards the
painting of Christ's crucifixion above the altar, he noticed that the
figure he'd always been terrified of, the one that lurked at the edge
of the canvas, had vanished.

He wasn't terribly surprised.