The Plague Stones

by James Brogden

  ‘Thir-thirteen.’

  ‘You had pussy yet?’

  Toby stopped himself just in time from asking another question. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Pussy! Sex! You know? You got a girlfriend? Shit, are you gay? Not that I give a fuck one way or the other, you understand.’ Toby turned crimson with embarrassment. Why was this guy trying to start a conversation? It was excruciating.

  Toby took a deep breath. ‘You can take whatever you want,’ he muttered, ‘but I’m not talking to you about that kind of thing.’ He clenched his eyes shut, hunched his shoulders and waited to be fucked up in ways he couldn’t imagine.

  ‘Whatever. So, whyn’t you show me where they keep passports, birth certificates, important shit like that.’

  ‘Okay.’ Clutching his arm, Toby got up and led Green Skull to his parents’ bedroom at the end of the short hallway. He didn’t actually know where his mum kept important documents like that, but it seemed like a good bet. Theirs was a cramped, claustrophobic ground-floor flat and there wasn’t much to it beyond two bedrooms, the bathroom, kitchen, living room and a closet in the hall overflowing with coats, brooms and boxes of random junk.

  He saw his parents’ bed, with his mum’s old silver crucifix – the one she never wore but sometimes took and looked at when she thought nobody was watching – hanging over the bedpost by her pillow, and felt a stab of guilt about how easily he was letting this guy get away with it. Even helping him.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You can take my Xbox, my games, all of it – just leave their stuff alone, please?’

  Green Skull turned slowly to look at him, and for a moment Toby let himself think that it would be okay. He’d wrestle the crowbar out of the guy’s hands, and maybe he’d get away or maybe he wouldn’t, and the guy would do something like clap a heavy hand on his shoulder and laugh and say Shit, kid, seems like you do have some badass in you after all and the grizzled old career criminal would take him on as an idealistic apprentice and they’d run off and have adventures through which they’d come to acquire a grudging respect for each other, just like in one of those films.

  What actually happened was that the burglar who had trashed his parents’ living room because Toby had been too stupid and lazy to lock the back door grunted, ‘Cheeky little cunt,’ and backhanded him so hard his head bounced off the doorframe. He was too stunned to even beg as he slid to the floor and Green Skull kicked him twice in the stomach. He hoped he might pass out, but that didn’t happen either. Later, at the hospital, the doctors told him that he was a very lucky young man: his arm wasn’t broken, no ribs had been cracked and he’d suffered no internal injuries, and the worst that he could expect was some spectacular bruising. Right at this very moment, however, he felt far from lucky. He just lay there until the guy was finished, curled around a burning knot of agony in his guts which felt like it was eating him from the inside out; then, as the intruder went on to ransack the flat, he remained there pretending to be unconscious, lying in a puddle of his own tears and snot. Finally, when there was only the sound of his own sobbing to bruise the silence, he got to his knees and crawled in search of a phone.

  3

  BAIT STATION

  TOBY FEENAN GLANCED UP FROM HIS PHONE LONG enough to look through the car window at the house that his dad had pulled up in front of, more because the car had stopped than out of any real interest in their destination. The glance became a stare and he sat up straighter.

  ‘Wait, what?’ he said, and pointed. ‘We’re going to live there?’

  ‘Yep,’ said his mum. She closed the folder of real estate documents that she’d been reading through and unclipped her seatbelt.

  ‘So, are we rich now?’

  His father turned and gave him a goofy, beatific smile. ‘Only in our love for each other, my dearest darling son.’

  ‘Sorry I asked,’ he muttered.

  ‘In other words,’ added his dad, ‘no.’

  The estate agent’s car had pulled up ahead of them – a black Lexus, Toby noted with approval – and the agent got out to meet them. She was a little taller and a little older than his mum, wearing glasses and a smart suit, with an iPad tucked under one arm. Her name was Natalie Markes, and she was the director of property and development for the Haleswell Village Trust Estates department, but estate agent was the closest Toby had got to understanding what it was she actually did. She’d been around to their home several times – their old home, he supposed he’d better get used to calling it – in the months during which incomprehensible legal wrangles had prevented them from moving into the new place, but now that it was all sorted out she had insisted on personally escorting them to their new home. ‘Short of a red carpet for our newest Trustee, I’m afraid I’ll have to do,’ she’d said. Toby didn’t understand how his mother – Trish Feenan, about as ordinary a mum as any you could imagine – had come to be a Trustee of a posh village neighbourhood in the suburbs that she’d never lived in just because an old lady she’d barely known had died, but if it meant she got to drive a Lexus too instead of their current shitty old Peugeot that was fine by him.

  Toby got out of the car and tugged with a finger at the collar which had been chafing his neck throughout the journey. He couldn’t believe they’d made him wear an actual tie on a non-school day. Apparently after this they were going on to meet the rest of the Trust at an actual garden party at an actual vicarage, for which he needed to appear smart – or at least, in his father’s words, ‘as little like a Hunger Games reject as possible’. Repeat: garden party. Vicarage. Like in those TV detective shows like Midsomer Murders or whatever.

  It seemed impossible that they could still be in the city. The road was lined with broadly spreading trees, and the houses all sat back behind high hedges, but behind even those he could still hear the muted background roar which reminded him that he only had to go half a dozen roads in any direction and he’d be back surrounded by dodgy takeaways, snarling traffic and high-rises just like the home they’d left – what? He checked the time on his phone. Twenty minutes ago. Impossible.

  He looked at the house for a moment, imagining how it might be described in an estate agent’s listings. Then he took a photo, found a filter which made it fuzzy around the edges and a bit muted like an old postcard.

  PIC0507181 shows a high hedge of beech, its leaves like sheets of beaten copper, and a gap with a wrought-iron gate between stone posts. In one of them is the rectangular slot of a letter box. A glossy green veinwork of ivy twists through a name which has been worked into the metal: Stone Cottage.

  He added a caption: stoner cottage lol, and picced it to his friends.

  Ms Markes produced a set of keys and unlocked the gate. ‘We couldn’t be sure who Mrs Drummond might have given spare keys to, so we took the liberty of changing all the locks – though we couldn’t change this one, obviously. The Estates office does have a copy of the new ones, but only in case of emergencies.’ Toby caught an anxious glance pass between his parents.

  Ms Markes pushed open the gate and then stood aside for Toby’s family, holding out the bunch of keys, but his mother hesitated, standing with her hand to her mouth and her eyes shining as if she was either about to burst into laughter or tears, or both.

  ‘Everything all right?’ asked his dad.

  ‘I just…’ she started. ‘It’s hard to believe that it’s finally ours, that’s all. I keep expecting someone to come out of that door and say sorry, it’s all been a big mistake, clear off. Things like this don’t happen to people like us.’

  ‘People like us is people like them, now,’ said his dad. ‘Listen, if you don’t want those keys I’ll take them, but then me and Tobes get first dibs on a games room, isn’t that right, fella?’

  Toby stared at him. ‘We get a games room?’

  ‘Oh no!’ His mum plucked the keys from Ms Markes’ hand and strode through the gate. Toby followed, taking photos all the way.

  PIC0507182 shows a gravel path circling a trim
lawn and beyond it a detached two-storey suburban house. It has a large bay window on one side of the arched front porch, and a roof which is a lopsided ziggurat of steep gables and dormer windows set at odd angles to each other. Despite being perfectly straight and neat, with cleanly painted window frames and tidy guttering, it nevertheless gives the impression of having been caught in the act of turning around, like a man peering over his shoulder at something following behind.

  ‘Well it certainly looks a lot tidier than the last time,’ observed his dad.

  ‘We haven’t been able to do much to the garden, I’m afraid,’ said Ms Markes. ‘There was so much that needed doing on the house. I won’t bore you with the details – it’s all in the surveyor’s report – but basically it was the first time since the seventies that anyone’s been able to get in and give it a really good going-over.’

  ‘I remember we came here once,’ said Mum. ‘When I was little; I think I must have been five. One of those big family get-togethers, probably somebody’s birthday. There never were any again – not that there was a feud or anything like that, it was just that you know how sometimes two sides of a family will drift apart? Well, that. I remember it being very dark and smelly in the house. Full of big old pieces of furniture and things that you weren’t allowed to touch.’

  His mum unlocked the front door – a hefty latch with a chain and a row of four thick deadbolts, Toby noted with approval. Ms Markes saw him looking.

  ‘We’ve replaced both the front and back entrances with state-of-the-art security doors,’ she said, ‘with oak cladding over a steel core and steel frame, though you’d never know it to look. The windows are made of laminated safety glass, like in cars or shop windows, so that if they break there are no jagged pieces to hurt you, and anybody trying to break in is going to have a very hard time of it.’

  His dad gave a low whistle. ‘Expecting a siege, are you?’

  ‘It’s standard on all Trustees’ homes. The Trust takes the security of its members very seriously.’

  ‘I’m getting that impression.’

  There was no darkness in the house, and no heavy items of furniture – not much by way of furniture at all. The interior had been stripped right back to allow light to flood every room and hallway; it shone from the freshly repainted walls and glowed golden from newly varnished floorboards, gleaming from worktops and modern appliances in the kitchen and glittering from mica-flecked granite in the bathrooms. The windows were spotlessly clear and, he checked, also fitted with solid locks. Their flat, being rented, was only as well maintained as the landlord needed to avoid breaking the law. It was permanently damp, which meant that his mother was fighting a continual war against an insidious variety of black mould that seeped out of the ceilings and from the bathroom grouting like shadows taken root, and so everything smelled simultaneously of bleach and dank plaster. From as early as Toby could remember, he’d been fighting off one respiratory problem or another. Here it was dry and smelled faintly of pine- and lemon-scented cleaning products. In the old place, mismatched and draughty floorboards were covered with cheap, hard-wearing carpet which had actually given him serious road rash once when he’d fallen down the stairs; here he reckoned that if he took his shoes off he could glide down the long hallway on his socks like a curling stone. It was almost intimidatingly clean, and Toby followed the adults on tiptoe, afraid to touch anything for fear of leaving smeary fingerprints while his mum uttered variations of ‘Oh my God!’ as they went into each new room.

  ‘We’re going to need a bigger sofa,’ said his dad, as they stood gazing in wonder at the expanse of the sitting room with its wide fireplace and the sunlight streaming in through the panes of the tall bay window. ‘Honestly, this is just embarrassing now.’

  ‘All of Mrs Drummond’s belongings were put into storage while we were completing the renovations,’ said Ms Markes. ‘You can have your pick and what’s left will be auctioned.’

  His dad was peering at the old-fashioned light switches by the door. ‘Hold up, are these original Bakelite?’ Toby sighed. He didn’t know whether being an electrician had turned his dad into a heath-and-safety freak or if he had always been that way, but once introduced to a new environment it was only ever a matter of time before Peter Feenan started judging how likely it was to be a Potential Death Trap.

  Ms Markes shrugged. ‘I imagine so.’

  ‘Can you show me where the fuse box is?’ There was no way he was going to take assurances about the quality of Haleswell Village Trust’s own electricians on faith.

  ‘Of course. It’s down this way.’

  Toby followed them as far as the hallway. ‘Hey, Dad?’

  Peter turned. ‘What is it, mate?’

  ‘I’m going to go have a bit of an explore outside, okay?’

  There was a moment’s hesitation in which he knew his dad was thinking about telling him No, stay where we can see you, but then he said, ‘Okay. Just don’t go too far.’

  Too far. As if he were six and they were at the beach and afraid he’d drown or get abducted. Since the break-in his parents’ baseline level of worry about their dodgy neighbourhood had escalated into something approaching full-blown paranoia; instead of walking to school he’d been driven and collected by Dad in his electrician’s van, and his social life had all but died. All he wanted to do was check out what the rest of the property boundary was like – did the garden have any hiding places, was the fence or wall climbable, whether there was a back gate, and if it was secure. Surely that was just sensible in a new place: to know its vulnerabilities.

  PIC0507183 shows a narrow passage down the side of the house turned into an obstacle course by piles of junk and debris: stacks of old fence boards, terracotta plant pots, empty cement bags, bits of trellis, a rusted bicycle frame with no wheels, piles of glass panes from a long-dismantled greenhouse, and more besides.

  The wall of the house was on his left, and above it the steep roof slope, and above that still the cliff face of the house’s upper storey, blank on this side except for drainpipes and the narrow window of what was presumably a bathroom. He could have taken the wider, clearer path on the other side of the house, past the windows of what he was already thinking of as the study, but he wasn’t interested in that. An intruder would never use something so open. These shadowed and narrow places were where the world kept its secrets and hid its true face.

  PIC0507184 shows, tucked in against the wall, a low box about the same size and shape as an overhead projector. It is made of black plastic with wide holes in either end and the logo of a pest control company stamped on it, along with the words ‘Warning! Contains rodenticide! Do not touch!’

  Rat poison.

  Last year’s school scandal had been a boy in the sixth form who had ended up in hospital after taking a batch of fake steroids laced with rat poison. Apparently they were all at it, juicing up either to get onto a team or into a girl’s pants by turning themselves into one of the swaggering tools from Love Island. He’d looked it up, because it was one of those sick, nasty little nuggets of knowledge that were currency amongst his mates (the ones who emphatically didn’t try out for teams or watch Love Island). Apparently it was like a maxed-out blood thinner which caused internal bleeding and slow death over a matter of weeks. Lethal stuff, basically. Do Not Mess.

  He knelt beside the bait station and fiddled with the lid, managing to pop it open. Inside was a circular reservoir containing a handful of bluey-green pellets, with more scattered in the body of the casing. Disturbed by something that’d had a curious, maybe fatal, nibble.

  ‘Winner winner, chicken dinner,’ he murmured.

  He clipped the lid back on and continued exploring, but found no furry little corpses, so it seemed that the resident rat population had gotten away with it for now.

  The back garden had the same manicured look as the front, with a tall green hedge running along the rear and a raised area with a summerhouse. The only place where it was not tidy was in the centre of
the lawn, where a large stone protruded from the ground. He pulled up short at the sight of it. It was only about a metre high, very roughly conical in shape and made of something which was probably granite though he couldn’t be sure, and there were strange bumps and hollows all over it which might have been the traces of weathered carvings, so it was obviously very old. There was nothing especially striking about it in itself, but somehow its very existence here, in this place which was otherwise so ordered and sane, felt wrong. It jutted like an erupted molar or an open fracture, splitting the skin of the world. It shouldn’t have been here. It should have been out on a desolate moorland, part of a circle with its brothers guarding the grave of someone long dead, not surrounded by flowerbeds and herbaceous borders.

  PIC0507185 shows a close-up of the grain of the stone; coarse, pocked and cratered, a desert landscape photographed from high orbit, patches of lichen spreading in an archipelago. The soft furrow of a carved line long eroded invites a finger to trace its length. No, more than invites – insists. Demands.

  This close, Toby fancied he could feel the chill radiating from the granite as he reached out to touch—

  ‘I see you’ve found it, then,’ said Ms Markes from behind him.

  He leapt back and whirled, as if caught in the act of committing a crime.

  She was in the back doorway, smiling. He hadn’t heard it open, his attention in thrall to the stone.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The parish stone,’ she said, and stepped out to join him. He wondered where his parents were. ‘It’s why this is called Stone Cottage, after all. Although it’s been here for a lot longer than the cottage – probably longer than every other building in the village, for that matter.’

  ‘Uh, really?’ He was still flustered from having been crept up on, but she seemed to take it as an expression of interest.