Wylding Hall

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Authors: Elizabeth Hand
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burns. You know stories about kids putting each other to licking a flagpole in winter? This is how I imagined that would feel—not that I was licking her.
    And it really did burn me. Right there, those white marks—that’s where I touched her. It blistered, hurt like hell for a few days. When it finally healed, I was left with that scar.
    Still, we quickly got over Nancy’s fit. Will took her up to bed and shagged her and that put her to rights. You couldn’t sneeze in that place without everyone knowing it.
    We had a party that night: stayed up till two or three A.M., singing and dancing. Nancy was a wonderful dancer. Saint Dominic’s Preview had just come out, and she’d brought it down. “Jackie Wilson Said”: we played that over and over again. It was a big deal when a new record came out; you’d buy it then find one of your mates who had a stereo and everyone would come over to listen to it together for the first time.
    We had several record players at Wylding Hall—Julian had one, and Jon and I think Ashton. They were expensive, as were albums. Jon had brought his turntable to the rehearsal room, and that’s where we’d play whatever we were listening to, so everyone could hear it.
    That night it was Van Morrison. Sexy music, everyone was feeling very friendly. Hormones running at high tide. Nothing like adding a new face to the mix to spice things up. That’s where the rumors of orgies came from, that one night. God knows who started them, I know I never said anything. It must have been Nancy when she went back to London. No, my lips remain sealed.
    Nancy
     
    There was no orgy. It was all very innocent. We ended up on the floor, that’s all, stoned and lying on our backs with our hands touching. This game they played in the dark. It was the shank of the night, and we closed our eyes and just lay there, breathing.
    After a while, someone began to sing. It was the most haunting song. No words, just a melody.
    I could never recall it afterward, but it was something I never forgot. It’s true. I can hear it sometimes, still—it’s there in my head and I can’t get it out. I thought it was Julian. But he said no, he wasn’t singing. But he heard it, too.
    Jon
     
    It was definitely a male voice—a boy’s. Someone whose voice hadn’t yet broken. Julian had a reedy voice, but this was a true boy’s soprano. It made the hair on my neck stand up. I couldn’t make out the words.
    Ashton
     
    We were all fucking stoned out of our minds, that’s all. We’d been playing and singing earlier, and then Jon put on that damned Van Morrison album and left it so it just played over and over and over again. Everyone finally just zonked out on the floor; at some point, the stereo got turned off and we fell asleep. Someone dreamed they heard singing. I think Lesley was singing in her sleep. It happens. Anyway, there was no one else there, no … ghost, or whatever they say.
    Yeah, I heard something. Like, I said, it was Lesley. Didn’t sound like her but it was. Definitely a woman’s voice.
    Definitely not Nancy. She couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.
    Lesley
     
    It wasn’t me, because I wasn’t asleep, and I heard it too. I thought it was Will—gorgeous tenor, almost a counter tenor, a bit of a quaver in it. A very eerie melody. Like “the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance.” Will collected old tunes like that, and I suppose that’s why I assumed it was him. He refuses to talk about it.
    Julian heard it. I asked him the next morning, Had he heard the singing? We had stumbled off to bed together, but we didn’t have sex. He didn’t say anything. He pretended not to hear me. That was when it ended between the two of us, not that it had ever really started.
    The thing that disturbed me about that night in the rehearsal room—it wasn’t the singing. We all heard that, even if some won’t talk about it. It was afterward. We were all still lying on the floor in the big room. People were asleep. I know Ashton was

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