awake, he might have shivered in the cold. His breath appeared as a faint white cloud, hovering around his mouth.
A plump man wearing a white coat had been waiting to receive him. The man, who was about forty, had yellow hair that he wore slicked back, and a face that was rapidly sinking into middle age, with puffy cheeks and a thick, fatty neck. The man had glasses and a small mustache. Two assistants were with him, also wearing white coats. Their faces were blank.
The three of them set to work at once. Handling Alex as if he were a sack of vegetables—or a corpse—they picked him up and stripped off all his clothes. Then they began to photograph him, beginning with a conventional camera. Starting at his toes, they moved upward, clicking off at least a hundred pictures, the flash igniting and the film automatically advancing. Not one inch of his body escaped their examination. A lock of his hair was snipped off and put into a plastic envelope. An opthalmoscope was used to produce a perfect image of the back of his eye.
They made a mold of his teeth, slipping a piece of putty into his mouth and manipulating his chin to make him bite down. They made a careful note of the birthmark on his left shoulder, the scar on his arm, and even the ends of his fingers. Alex bit his nails; that was recorded too.
Finally, they weighed him on a large, flat scale and then measured him—his height, chest size, waist, inside leg, hand size, and so on—making a note in their books of every measurement.
And all the time, Mrs. Stellenbosch watched from the other side of the window. She never moved. The only sign of life anywhere in her face was the cigar, clamped between her lips. It glowed red, and the smoke trickled up.
The three men had finished. The one with the yellow hair spoke into a microphone. ‚We’re all finished, he said.
‚Give me your opinion, Mr. Baxter.' The woman’s voice echoed out of a speaker concealed behind the wall.
‚It’s a cinch.' The man called Baxter was English. He spoke with an upper-class accent, and he was obviously pleased with himself. ‚He’s got a good bone structure. Very fit. Interesting face. You notice the pierced ear? He’s had that done recently. Nothing else to say, really.'
‚When will you operate?'
‚Whenever you say, old girl. Just let me know.'
Mrs. Stellenbosch turned to the other two men. ‚
The two assistants put Alex’s clothes back on him. This took longer than taking them off. As they worked, they made a careful note of all the brand names. The Quiksilver T-shirt. The Gap socks. By the time they had dressed him, they knew as much about him as a doctor knows about a newborn baby. It had all been noted down.
Mr. Baxter walked over to the worktable and pressed a button. At once, the carpet, bed, and hotel furniture began to rise up. They disappeared through the ceiling and kept going. Alex slept on as he was carried back through the shaft, finally arriving in the space that he knew as room 13.
There was nothing to show what had happened. The whole experience had evaporated, as quickly as a dream.
“MY NAME IS GRIEF”
THE ACADEMY AT POINT Blanc had been built by a lunatic. For a time it had been used as an asylum. Alex remembered what Alan Blunt had told him as the helicopter began its final descent, the red and white helipad looming up to receive it. The photograph in the brochure had been artfully taken. Now that he could see the building for himself, he could only describe it as … crazy.
It was a jumble of towers and battlements, green sloping roofs and windows of every shape and size. Nothing fitted together properly. The overall design should have been simple enough: a circular central area with two wings. But one wing was longer than the other. The two sides didn’t match. The academy was four floors high, but the windows were spaced in such a way that it was hard to tell where one floor ended and the next began. There was an internal courtyard that wasn’t quite square, with a fountain that had frozen solid. Even the helipad, jutting out of the roof, was ugly and awkward, as if someone had thrown a giant Frisbee that had smashed into the brickwork and lodged in place.
Mrs. Stellenbosch flicked off the controls. ‚I will take you down to meet the director,' she shouted over the noise of the blades. ‚Your luggage will be brought down later.'
It was cold on the roof. Although it was almost the end of April, the snow covering the mountain still hadn’t melted and everything was white for as far as the eye could see. The academy was built into the side of a steep slope. A little farther down, Alex saw a big iron tongue that started at ground level but then curved outward as the mountainside dropped away. It was a ski jump—the sort of thing he had seen at the winter Olympics. The end of the curve was at least fifty feet above the ground, and far below, Alex could make out a flat area, shaped like a horseshoe, where the jumpers were meant to land.
He was staring at it, imagining what it would be like to propel yourself into space with only two skis to break your fall, when the woman grabbed his arm. ‚We don’t use it,' she said. ‚It is forbidden. Come now! Let’s get out of the cold.'
They went through a door in the side of one of the towers and down a narrow spiral staircase (each step a different distance apart) that took them all the way to the ground floor.
Now they were in a long, narrow corridor with plenty of doors but no windows.
‚Classrooms,' Mrs. Stellenbosch explained. ‚You will see them later.'
Alex followed her through the strangely silent building. The central heating had been turned up high inside the academy, and the atmosphere was warm and heavy. They stopped at a pair of modern glass doors that opened into the courtyard Alex had seen from above. From the heat back into the cold again, Mrs. Stellenbosch led him through the doors and past the frozen fountain. A movement caught his eye, and Alex glanced up. This was something he hadn’t noticed before. A sentry stood on one of the towers. He had a pair of binoculars around his neck and a submachine gun slung across one arm.
Armed guards? In a school? Alex had been here only a few minutes and already he was unnerved.
‚Through here!' Mrs. Stellenbosch opened another door for him, and he found himself in the main reception hall of the academy. A log fire burned in a massive fireplace with two stone dragons guarding the flames. A grand staircase led upward. The hall was lit by a chandelier with at least a hundred bulbs. The walls were paneled with wood. The carpet was thick, dark red. A dozen pairs of eyes followed Alex as he followed Mrs. Stellenbosch down the next corridor. The hall was decorated with animal heads: a rhino, an antelope, a water buffalo, and, saddest of all, a lion. Alex wondered who had shot them.
They came to a single door that suggested they had come to the end of their journey. So far, Alex hadn’t encountered any boys, but glancing out of the window, he saw two more guards marching slowly past, both of them cradling automatic machine guns.
Mrs. Stellenbosch knocked on the door.
‚Come in!' Even with just two words, Alex caught the South African accent.
The door opened, and they went into a huge room that made no sense. Like the rest of the building, its shape was irregular, none of the walls running parallel. The ceiling was about fifty feet high with windows running the whole, way and giving an impressive view of the slopes.
The room was modern with soft lighting coming from units concealed in the walls. The furniture was ugly, but not as ugly as the animal heads on the walls and the zebra skin on the wood floor. There were three chairs next to a small fireplace. One of them was gold and antique. A man was sitting in it. His head turned as Alex came in.
‚Good afternoon, Alex,' he said. ‚Please come and sit down.'
Alex sauntered into the room and took one of the chairs. Mrs. Stellenbosch sat in the other.
‚My name is Grief,' the man continued. ‚Dr. Grief. I am very pleased to meet you and to have you here.'
Alex stared at the man who was the director of Point Blanc, at the white-paper skin and the eyes burning
