Mefisto Read Online Free PDF Page A

they had seen nothing. I looked about at them with interest. Why should they be alarmed? It was at me the spectre had pointed its pale, implacable hand.

 
    IN THE END IT was Mr Pender himself who was spirited away. One day simply he was gone, no one knew where. He had vanished, from school, from his digs, without a trace. Father Barker too was quietly removed. He fell ill, and was sent to the sanatorium. These things came to me like secret signals, indecipherable yet graphic. The summer holidays had begun. I woke in the mornings with a start, as if my name had been called out. The weather, seeming to know something, laid on its loveliest effects. I walked under drowsing trees, through the dreamy silence of sunstruck afternoons, and was so acutely conscious of being there and at the same time almost elsewhere, in a present so fleeting it felt like pure potential, that I seemed to be not so much myself as a vivid memory of someone I had once been. I stood in salt-sharpened sunlight before the glide and glitter of the sea, and the great steady roar of wind in my face was like the future itself bellowing back at me, berating me for being late already.
    I spent hours shut away in my room above the square, hunched over my textbooks, scribbling calculations. Half the time I hardly knew what I was doing, or how I was doing it, or what would come next. Things happened in a flash. One moment the question was there – an equation to be solved, say – the next it was answered, presto! In between, I was aware of only a flicker, a kind of blink, as if a lid had been opened on a blinding immensity and instantly shut again. There might have been someone else inside me doing the calculating, who was surer than I, and infinitely quicker. Indeed, at times this other self seemed about to crack me open and step forth, pristine and pitiless as an imago. Bent there at the table by the bedroom window, I would stop suddenly and lift my head, as if waking in fear out of a muddled dream, my heart thudding dully, while around me in the deepening stillness a sort of presence struggled to materialize. I remembered a picture pinned on the classroom wall when I was a child in the convent school. It was done in satiny pinks and dense, enamelled blues, and showed a laughing little chap playing ball on the brink of a tempestuous river, watched over by a huge figure in white robes, with gold hair and thick gold wings. That was his guardian angel, the nuns said. Every child had a guardian angel. I stared at the picture, struck by the thought of this creature hovering always behind me, with those wings, those wide sleeves, and that look, that to me expressed not solicitude, but a hooded, speculative malevolence.
    I had no friends. Figures were my friends. The abacus in my head was never idle. I would devote days to a single exercise, drunk with reckoning. Sometimes at night I woke to discover a string of calculations inching its way through my brain like a blind, burrowing myriapod. A number for me was never just itself, but a bristling mass of other numbers, complex and volatile. I could not hear an amount of money mentioned, or see a date written down, without dismantling the sum into its factors and fractions and roots. I saw mathematical properties everywhere around me. Number, line, angle, point, these were the secret coordinates of the world and everything in it. There was nothing, no matter how minute, that could not be resolved into smaller and still smaller parts.
    My mother worried about me. What was I doing up there in that room, all those hours?
    – Nothing, I said. Sums.
    – Sums? Sums?
    She shook her head, bewildered. Behind her, Jack Kay looked at me and smirked.
    She nagged me to go out in the fresh air, play games, be a boy like other boys. She would stand motionless on the stairs, as she used to do when I was an infant, and listen to my presence beyond the bedroom door, like a doctor auscultating a suspect heart. I was run down, she said,