Now You See Me

by Chris McGeorge

  “What the hell is going on here?” Matt barked, rather like Amy. The dog jumped and looked around at him as though he were a canine. The others looked equally shocked.

  “Matt,” Rachel said.

  Suddenly the boat came to a stop. The others probably didn’t notice, but Matt had been on boats for a long time. He felt the small shift in direction stop and the motor stop. It seemed like Tim had at least worked that out.

  “Someone tell me what this means,” Matt said before Pru wrenched her arm away from him.

  “What are you doing, Matt?” Pru said, not knowing he had seen two other tattoos exactly the same. The realization seemed to dawn on her as she looked at her own wrist. The fact they didn’t care enough to even know what he was talking about was somehow even worse than the act itself.

  “Edmund, Robert, show me your left wrists,” Matt said.

  “Don’t be crazy, mate,” Edmund said.

  But Matt’s look obviously convinced them to do what he said, because they looked at each other and both held up their wrists. The word on each wrist was too small to read from any distance but he knew what it was. On Edmund’s and Robert’s.

  All of them.

  “Why? What is...?” Matt said, whirling around, not knowing where to look. “Have you all joined some crazy cult or something?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Edmund said, grabbing Matt. Matt tried to force himself away. But Edmund wrapped his arms around him.

  “Tim,” Rachel called.

  “Are you okay?” Edmund said in Matt’s ear.

  “I’m fine,” Matt spit, and Edmund let go of him.

  Matt just stood there, in the middle of them all. He didn’t know what to think. Thoughts came fast and short. He couldn’t clutch on to any of them long enough to decipher them. What was happening? Why—

  Tim had entered the cabin and suddenly a calm came over the space. Even Matt felt it. The others seemed to freeze, waiting for their leader. Matt looked at him and saw him jump down into the cabin, calm as always. “What’s going on?”

  “Ascend,” Matt said, trying to temper his speech. “What does that mean?”

  “It’s just a word,” Tim said, like that was that.

  Matt tore his eyes from Tim to look around before returning. They had all adjusted their bodies to gravitate toward Tim. It was like seeing some weird congregation worship a priest. “Just a word...tattooed on all of your wrists.”

  “We just...wanted something to remind us of each other,” Tim said.

  “Everyone except me, huh?” Matt spit.

  Tim sighed. “Matt, your lack of self-worth isn’t endearing. In fact, it’s starting to piss us all off.”

  “I have done everything for this group.” Matt was fighting back tears. “And you all repay me by ignoring me, sneaking around behind my back, talking about me, freezing me out...”

  “Matt...” Rachel started, stepping toward him.

  Matt pushed her away, harder than he’d meant to. Rachel was forced onto the couch. Any harder and she would have gone into the wall. “You’ve all been meeting without me. Haven’t you?”

  Matt looked from one shocked face to another, and he stopped at Rachel. The one he trusted most. “Yes,” she said, almost a whisper, “but I can explain, Matt.”

  “You all lied to me. Saying you were staying at uni? Why?”

  “Matt...” He didn’t even know who it was. Didn’t care.

  “Why would you come back to Marsden and not tell me?” He was crying now. “Someone, please just tell me.”

  “Matt,” Tim said, stepping forward and putting his hand on Matt’s shoulder, “I promise you, everything will be explained. We just need to do one thing first. We need you to take this boat through our tunnel, our tunnel—you, me, Rachel, Ed, Robert, Pru—our tunnel. And when we come out the other side, everything will be better. What did you say once? Going through Standedge is like leaving the world and coming back to it? Let’s do that. And let’s enjoy it. And afterward, you can ask anything you want. Promise.”

  Matt looked at him through tears. He didn’t know what to think. But he knew one thing. “I don’t know who you people are anymore.” And he pushed past Tim to the hatch, looking back long enough to see their reactions. Pru, Edmund, Robert and Tim—even Amy—were staring dumbfounded. Rachel was crying. He didn’t care—they were meant to be his best friends.

  He went outside, slamming the hatch behind him. He started up the motor again, almost on autopilot looking down on himself. He picked up one of the cans of beer on the deck and wiped it across his forehead before opening it. The air was cold and he looked up to see the sunny day had turned sour, with dark clouds threatening rain, as if the weather was being dictated by him.

  Matt leaned against the steering column, watching the mouth of the tunnel grow ever closer. He drained a full can in less than a minute. He didn’t care anymore—he didn’t care if he lost his job. There was only one real reason he had got it in the first place—for this exact scenario. And it was ruined. All of it was. His friends were ruined.

  Tim popped out and said they all had to get the annual photo by the tunnel. It was obvious to Matt now he didn’t care. He didn’t care about the tunnel. He was just trying to save face—damage control. Everyone filed onto the side to take the picture but Matt stayed in the background. And then when they were done, they just went straight back to how they were. Tradition done—for the last time. Good riddance. So long, Matt. He started the boat up again, as he realized Tim had made sure to shut the hatch when he’d got on the boat.

  Standedge got ready to swallow them, as the tip of the boat entered the tunnel. Every second more of the boat disappeared into darkness and, for once, Matt didn’t blame himself. Whatever had happened between him and the group wasn’t his fault; it was theirs. They met in secret. They got matching tattoos. They spent a Christmas without him. They chose to do that.

  Half of the boat was in the tunnel now, more every second. And Matt looked around at the world one last time, as he always did. But he didn’t feel excited or awed. He just felt empty. He felt like he had invested so much of himself in a group of people who treated him like a joke. He felt like the life he had been leading had been the wrong one, a planet orbiting a fake sun made out of cardboard and LED lights. He felt that who he was as a person was wrong. And, as the tunnel swallowed him, he started to feel an emotion he had never felt toward the group before.

  Anger.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Robin looked at Matthew. The young man had stopped talking. He was staring down at his hands, as though wondering what they’d done. They were shaking. “What happened next?”

  He jumped, as though coming back to the present, tucking his hands under the table. “That’s it. That’s the last thing I remember. The anger. And then—nothing. Then I woke up, lying in the hospital with a doctor standing over me and my hands cuffed to the side of the bed.”

  Robin rubbed his eyes. Matthew’s story was relentless—he told it with the pace and emotion of a painful experience—like he was reliving every second. It hadn’t given Robin much time to think.

  “So you remember going into the tunnel, and nothing else?”

  Matthew thought for a moment. “Yeah. I don’t remember anything afterward. No getting hit on the head, nothing with the others, nothing at all. The doctor said it’s probably short-term amnesia brought on by the concussion.”

  “Hmm,” Robin said. He couldn’t help thinking how convenient that was. But he also thought Matthew had seemed truthful—he had willingly told Robin the story, even the parts that made him look bad. It was hard to think he could be lying, seeing as he made himself look pretty guilty.

  “They’re gone and those were the last things I ever said to them.” Matthew was still wading in the past. Robin looked at him and wondered how Matthew would go about killing and disposing
of his friends. As usual, he came up with nothing.

  As soon as questions started with How...? this whole case slammed into a brick wall.

  Because, well. How?

  Robin took out his phone, swiped to the picture of the Standedge Five in the basement of The Hamlet. He slid it across to Matthew, pointing at the smudge on Tim’s wrist. “This was the tattoo you saw?”

  Matthew only had to glance at it. “Yes. That’s it. ‘Ascend.’” And then he looked at the picture, really looked at it. “What is this? I don’t remember this.”

  Robin realized his mistake too late.

  Matthew’s eyes sparkled, with equal amounts of regret and redemption. “This proves it. This proves they were meeting. I was right. Where did you get this?”

  “It’s hanging in the basement of The Hamlet.”

  “When was this...?”

  Robin sighed and ran his hands through his hair. He decided to tell the truth. “It was taken three days before the Incident.”

  Matthew looked up from the photo and surprised Robin—by laughing. Uncontrollably. “Three days. Three. Days.” He gave out a fresh cackle. “I was right. I was damn right.”

  Robin just watched as Matthew rapidly went through the stages of grief.

  “Why the hell would they do that? Three days before... I was right there. Right there.”

  Robin changed the subject. “So you’d go through the tunnel a lot—like a ritual? Like the tunnel was important to the group? Did something happen that first time you went through the tunnel when you were young?”

  The question helped Matthew calm down. He sniffed. “Nothing tangible, physical. I think as kids, we spent so long being afraid of that place—afraid of what was lurking inside Standedge. Then that day, we found out that we were afraid of nothing. And even more than that, it was actually kinda cool. You understand?”

  Robin mulled it over for a second and then nodded. He’d had things like that when he was a child too. He had been afraid of dogs until his grandma got an old sheepdog. Now he was a dog person. It was a coming-of-age moment—when you realized your worst fears were utterly unjustified. Of course, that led into the discovery that there were far more tangible fears in the world, but that was by and by. “So the trip was what brought you all together?”

  “Yes,” Matthew said. “Before that I hadn’t really said two words to the others—not any of them. But the trip changed that—I think we all felt exactly the same. We came out the other side a little different—a little older. And we felt we had some kind of bond because of it.”

  “What about the other kids? The ones that were in the class but didn’t become part of the ‘group’?”

  “Some of them didn’t get it. Some of them hated it. Two of them even had to get off.”

  “I’m sorry—get off? How would someone ‘get off’?”

  Matthew looked at him as though it were obvious, but seeing Robin’s confused expression dropped his. “Sorry, I forget people don’t know, but you wouldn’t if you hadn’t gone through at least once. When you go on a trip through the tunnel—if you’re going on one of the tour boats, anyway—there are four pilots that go through with you. Two are drivers—one at the front and one at the back—one is the tour guide, and the last takes a van through the abandoned rail tunnel next to the canal tunnel. There are half a dozen cut-throughs between the canal and the rail tunnel where the guy can appear and ask if anyone wants to get off. Say someone’s suddenly claustrophobic—panicking, screaming, I had someone projectile vomiting once—the driver can take them back in the van far quicker than the boat can. And that way, everyone else can carry on.”

  Robin wrote down Abandoned Rail Tunnel—this wasn’t a mystery of one tunnel; it was a mystery of two. If someone could’ve got into the abandoned tunnel, they would have had access to both. He paused, then wrote down Other workers?? too.

  “Let’s get back to the group,” Robin said. “You seemed to all be quite loved in Marsden. Why was that?”

  Matthew shrugged. “I think the ‘grown-ups’ liked to see young people not acting like hooligans. We were a ‘gang,’ I guess, in the true sense of the word, but we didn’t go around making trouble for anyone. We kept ourselves to ourselves mostly, and when we didn’t, we liked to help out around Marsden. Marsden is my home—I love it—so I like to help out any way I can. We used to do charity events, help out at the old folks’ home when they needed it, stuff like that...”

  “You were proud of the group?”

  Matthew frowned. “Of course. What kind of question is that? They were my best friends and we were good together. At least... Nearly ten years of friendship and then...”

  “You said it was Tim’s idea that this year be the final trip? Do you know why?”

  “It was Tim’s idea,” Matthew said, “but everyone agreed. Just like Standedge helped us to grow up, I think he thought it was holding us back. He thought we could be friends without the rigid structure.” Matthew stopped.

  “Go on.”

  “I think Tim—and the others—kinda wanted to leave Marsden behind. I guess the Claypaths were done living in their dad’s shadow. And Edmund, Pru and Robert...well, maybe they thought they were destined for something bigger. They were prepared to turn their backs on where they came from. And turn their backs on...” Matthew couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “Turn their backs on you?” Robin said.

  Matthew nodded, sniffling. “I never thought I was bigger than Marsden. I never wanted to be. I love it. It’s my home, and it has done just as much for me as I have done for it. I knew I was never as clever or as creative or as handy as my friends—but I never wanted to be. I wanted—want—a quiet life. And Marsden is perfect for that.”

  Robin didn’t even want to think, let alone say, that that future was gone for Matthew McConnell. Even if he were totally exonerated, Marsden—and the people in it—would likely never forget his part in what happened in Standedge. Matthew’s love for Marsden was as genuine as Marsden’s hate for him. But looking at Matthew, he realized that he didn’t have to say it. Matthew already knew. And that made Robin feel a pang of the young man’s pain.

  Robin pressed on. “When did your friends start to exhibit some of these feelings?”

  Matthew didn’t need to think. “When school started pushing us to apply for universities, that was when it came to the forefront, I guess. But even before then, I suppose. They were always more than the town, more than me. Tim and Edmund were razor sharp so fell into Physics and other Sciences. Rachel understood people so was a natural psychologist. Pru wanted to know how things worked and Robert could write a mean story. If they’d stayed in Marsden, they would have been bored. I guess that’s what it really comes down to. Boredom.”

  Robin knew what he meant. He had often wondered if Sam was bored with their life. She was so much more—so much more than him. “It’s only natural you felt angry.” And Matthew saw his understanding and warmed slightly. “When the group started to pull away, you must have felt incredibly upset.”

  Matthew surprised him by giving a joyless laugh. “That’s the thing. Looking back now, I see I was kidding myself. But I had never really known that they were going to leave me until that day. The Incident. But then I saw it—life without them. I guess that’s what I’m living now.”

  “You said someone told you that the group was meeting without you? Do you remember who told you?”

  Matthew went to dry his eyes again. Robin handed him a tissue. “It was a guy named Benny Masterson. He works in Marsden Butchers’. We used to be friends at school...before... Before them.” He gestured to the photo.

  Robin nodded, writing down the name. Maybe Mr. Masterson would be able to shed some light on the group without Matthew.

  “I gave them everything,” Matthew said, and pushed the photo away.

  Robin ignored that. “Do you have any clue w
hy they chose the word Ascend to tattoo on their wrists?”

  Matthew shook his head. “You don’t think I’ve been wondering about that ever since? No, I have no idea.”

  Robin suppressed another sigh. Matthew was there—on the face of it, he was the only person who could unlock what happened in that tunnel. But he didn’t know much. And Robin didn’t think he was lying, didn’t even suspect he was holding back.

  Robin needed to think. And he was glad when Matthew said softly, “Do you mind if we finish for today, Mr. Ferringham?”

  He had a thousand more questions, but they were not for today. There was just one he needed to ask. “Do you know anyone who would want to harm your friends?”

  Matthew started crying again.

  “Matthew.”

  Matthew looked at him through his tears. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  Robin straightened up. “Do you know anyone who would want to hurt you?”

  Matthew stopped crying instantly. He looked into Robin’s eyes, making it clear that he had never been asked that question before. He had never had to think of an answer. And he knew he wasn’t going to get one anytime soon. “What do you think happened, Matthew? To your friends? What happened in Standedge Tunnel?”

  Matthew seemed to think for a long time. When he finally spoke, he spoke the truth, hard and fast and breathless—“I honestly have no idea.”

  Robin watched him, almost as breathless as Matthew presented himself to him. He caught his breath and nodded slowly, closing his notebook and putting it back in his backpack. He got up.

  “Mr. Ferringham...”

  “I think you better call me Robin.” Robin smiled with no joy.

  “Okay. Robin. What do you think happened to my friends?”

  Robin didn’t say anything. He looked at the young man in front of him, scared, alone—staring down the barrel of multiple life sentences in prison.