This room, where no one ever set foot, had been used to store old stage sets from performances that no one could remember.

Even on bright afternoons the daylight on the stairs was suffocated in a gloom choked with old dust, because this approach to the attic, facing towards the wing of the massive building, was hardly ever used.

From the last step of the stairs Beineberg swung over the banisters and lowered himself down between the stage sets, holding on to the posts. Reiting and Törless did likewise. There they were able to find a solid footing on a crate that had been put there for that purpose, and from there they leaped to land on the floor.

Even if the eyes of someone standing on the stairs had grown accustomed to the dark, he would have been unable to distinguish anything other than a motionless confusion of jagged stage sets, variously shoved into one another.

But when Beineberg pushed one of them slightly aside, a narrow, tube-like passageway opened up to the boys standing below.

They hid the crate that had helped them in climbing down, and pushed their way between the stage sets.

Here it became completely dark, and one would have needed a very precise knowledge of the place in order to find one’s way forward. Every now and again one of the big canvas walls rustled as someone brushed past it, and there was the scurrying sound of startled mice, and a mildewed smell of forgotten trunks.

The three boys, who knew this way well, felt their way forward, extremely carefully, taking care with each step they took not to bump into one of the strings stretched across the floor as a trap and alarm.

After a while they reached a small door on the right, just before the wall that separated off the attic.

When Beineberg opened it, they found themselves in a narrow space below the top landing, which, in the light of a small, flickering oil-lamp that Beineberg had lit, looked quite bizarre.

The ceiling was only horizontal where it ran directly beneath the landing, and even there it was only just high enough for a person to stand upright. But it sloped away towards the rear, following the outline of the stairs, finishing up in an acute angle. At the opposite side of the room a thin partition wall divided the attic from the stairwell, and its third wall was naturally formed by the masonry supporting the staircase. Only the second side wall, into which the door was set, seemed to have been added specially. It seemed to owe its existence to the intention of creating a little storeroom for implements here, or perhaps it was even down to a whim of the architect, who might, at the sight of this dark corner, have had the medieval notion of walling it up into a hiding place.

At any rate, apart from the three boys, no one in the whole school knew of the existence of this room, let alone bothering to assign it a purpose.

So the boys were able to deck it out according to their own bizarre purposes.

The walls were lined with a blood-red canvas, which Reiting and Beineberg had purloined from one of the attic rooms, and the floor was covered with a double layer of a thick, woolly fabric, like the material used as second blankets in the dormitories in winter. In the front part of the store room stood narrow little fabric-covered boxes, which were used as seats; at the back, where floor and ceiling ended up in the sharp corner, a sleeping place had been arranged. It provided a bed for three to four people, which could be darkened by a curtain and separated off from the front part of the storeroom.

On the wall beside the door hung a loaded revolver.

Törless didn’t like the storeroom. He did, though, like the confinement of it, the solitude, like being deep in the interior of a mountain, and the smell of the dusty old stage sets filled him with vague sensations. But the concealment, the alarm cord, the revolver, which were supposed to give an extreme illusion of defiance and furtiveness, all struck him as ridiculous. It was as though the boys were trying to convince themselves they were leading the lives of bandits.

In fact, Törless was only joining in because he didn’t want to lag behind the others. But Beineberg and Reiting took these things terribly seriously. Törless was aware of that. He knew that Beineberg owned copies of the keys to all the cellars and attic rooms in the school. He knew that Beineberg often vanished from class for hours at a time, to sit somewhere — high up in the beams of the attic or beneath the ground in one of the many branching, crumbling vaults — and read adventure stories by the light of a little lantern that he always carried with him, or think thoughts about supernatural matters.

He knew something similar about Reiting. He too had his hidden corner, where he kept secret diaries; but these were filled with deranged plans for the future, and with precise notes about the cause, staging and development of the many intrigues that he instigated among his classmates. For Reiting knew no greater pleasure than setting people against one another, defeating one with the help of the other. He revelled in extorted favours and flattery, feeling the resentment of hatred behind the mask.

‘It’s just an exercise,’ was his only excuse, and he delivered it with a charming laugh. His other form of exercise was to go almost daily to some remote place and box against a wall, a tree or a table, to strengthen his arms and reinforce his hands with calluses.

Törless knew about all of this, but he understood it only up to a point. On a number of occasions he had followed both Reiting and Beineberg on their unconventional journeys. He had indeed taken pleasure in the irregularity of it. And afterwards he also enjoyed walking into the daylight, among the other boys, into the midst of the general merriment, while within him, in his eyes and ears, the stimuli of solitude and the hallucinations of darkness still quivered. But when, on such an occasion, in order to talk to somebody about themselves, Beineberg or Reiting dissected what it was that prompted them to act in such a way, his comprehension failed him. He even found Reiting somewhat hysterical. Reiting liked to talk about the fact that his father had been a curiously unstable person, who had finally gone missing. His name was thought to have been an incognito for that of a very noble family. He believed that his mother would yet tell him of exalted claims to which he was entitled; he dreamed of high politics and coups d’etat, and consequently wanted to become an officer.

Törless could not seriously imagine such ambitions. The age of revolutions seemed to him to have been consigned to the past once and for all.