‘Yes. Well. If you say so. Sorry, but I’m right in the middle of a thing…’
‘Sorry, no, my fault. You get on. Thanks!’
Trish hung up, tapped her phone thoughtfully against her chin for a moment, and then went to see if she could find any more witch marks.
* * *
She found them everywhere.
They were above the back door, carved into the floorboards in the cupboard under the stairs, in the wooden frames of every single one of the original sash windows, and there were four carved into the rafters of Toby’s loft-space bedroom alone. They weren’t all the same kind of flower design as on the mantelpiece, and it took her a bit of googling to realise what she was looking at: some were zigzags, while others were kites, crosses and patterns of stars. They could easily have been dismissed as random scrapes and scratches, which was probably why she hadn’t noticed them before.
There was a sense of desperation in the way they had been carved in every room multiple times. If these were meant to be protection against witches, then someone who had once lived in this house had been seriously and genuinely terrified.
* * *
‘Has anybody seen my Leatherman?’ asked Peter, peering about.
A chorus of nopes came from the blokes working in the building around him.
He sighed. It wasn’t necessarily the best for a lot of the jobs that he had to do, but it was a good little general-purpose multitool and even something of a good-luck charm. It had been a gift from Trish when he’d passed his apprenticeship, and those things weren’t cheap; it had taken her months to save up for it. Normally it sat in a little pouch on his belt but when he’d reached for it to crimp a couple of wires together he’d found the pouch empty. It was like discovering that his wedding ring was missing off his finger.
Then there came a snigger. ‘Actually I think I saw a pigeon taking off with something shiny in its beak just now.’ The sniggerer was a new apprentice – a thin lad called Lance Purslow whose facial piercings, they joked, had more metal than one of these buildings – and suddenly Peter knew what was going on.
This was a wind-up.
Pranks and wind-ups were as much a part of site culture as boots and hammers. Most were as unimaginative as dropping stuff on blokes’ heads or spraying them with fire extinguishers, but occasionally they displayed streaks of truly creative sadism, like getting apprentices to hoover up puddles, or collect steam samples, or one he’d seen where a lad was asked to help out with a ‘seismic test’ by repeatedly whacking a spray-painted dot on the ground with a heavy sledgehammer while his supervisor pointed a voltmeter at it and pretended to take readings and everybody else just fell about as the lad got more and more exhausted. In construction site pecking order the only thing lower than an apprentice was fresh meat like Peter, and Lance was obviously enjoying the novelty of being able to roll some shit downhill for a change. This had probably been his idea in the first place, a way of becoming one of the lads. As a practical joke, nicking and hiding someone’s stuff wasn’t particularly original or funny, but that wasn’t the point. It wasn’t even about whether or not you had a sense of humour. It was about whether you took offence and showed that you thought you were better than the other blokes, or whether you shrugged your shoulders and sucked it up like everyone else had done when it had been their turn. Everyone was a victim, so everyone was equal.
He went over to where Lance was working with two other chippies – Arun Aliman and Craig ‘Bully’ Turnbull – to fit insulation batts into the spaces between wall studs. ‘So did you happen to notice where this irritating little shit took it?’
Bully chuckled at the dig but Lance was either too thick or enjoying himself too much to notice. ‘Dunno,’ he grinned. ‘I think maybe over to Lot 9.’
‘Lot 9, you say?’
Lance shrugged. ‘That’s what I saw.’
Peter nodded. ‘Cheers, mate.’ He slapped Lance on the shoulder in gratitude, good and hard.
As he left the half-built house, Bully said, ‘Hey, Peter.’
There was something in his tone that made Peter turn back. Bully was a thickset Scot who had a good thirty years on all of them. He’d worked on rigs in the North Sea, pipelines in the Gulf and construction all over the UK, and could give and take a joke with the best of them, but when he was quiet and serious and turned those granite-coloured eyes on one of the lads, they listened. ‘What is it?’
‘You be careful, okay? That part of the site’s more dangerous than it looks.’ It seemed like Bully wanted to say something else, but he just nodded and repeated, ‘Just be careful.’
Puzzled at the older man’s intensity, Peter just muttered, ‘Okay.’
The Clegg Farm development was being built on farmland next to an existing estate from thirty years ago with roads all named after mountains or hills – Snowdon Avenue, Nevis Close, Kinder Scout Road – and whose residents had for decades used the neighbouring fields for dog-walking, jogging, and collecting blackberries. The path that they had worn along the field’s edge had become a de facto right of way which the Trust had been forced to temporarily block during construction, as it simply wasn’t safe for members of the public to be walking so close to a load of heavy machinery, the intention being to open it again as an alley between the old estate and the new when it was finished. A temporary fence had been built across the access point next to a row of garages on Bredon Road, and the entire ten-acre site was enclosed with modular wire-mesh security panels six feet high, like crowd-control barriers, clamped together and seated in concrete blocks. This stopped all but the most determined of trespassers, who tended to be either angry middle-aged suburban warriors who Knew Their Rights and refused to have their Right to Roam curtailed under any circumstances, never mind whether or not they got a pile of bricks dropped on their heads, or local kids looking for somewhere to fuck or get high, or both.
Which was why, on his way through the development, Peter wasn’t particularly surprised to see a young girl. This was a quiet part of the site where the units were virtually finished: roofs on, tiled, windows in, electrics done, ready for new owners and looking like the shrink-wrapping had just come off.
‘Oi!’ Peter yelled at the girl. ‘This is a building site! Clear off!’
If she heard him she gave no sign, but she wasn’t moving in either direction, through the site or out of it. She was just standing there, bare feet on the muddy path churned by heavy workmen’s boots and wheelbarrow tyres. Now that he looked closer, he saw how dirty and ragged she was – obviously neglected and probably malnourished, and his blunt anger took on an edge of concern. If there was a mother or father in this child’s life, they needed a rocket put up them by social services.
‘Look, it’s not safe! You can’t come through here! You’ll get hurt!’
That must have done the trick because she turned and walked away – except instead of turning back to the fence she wandered off between two of the units and disappeared around a corner.
‘Fucksake,’ muttered Peter, and jogged after her, trying not to imagine her falling off a scaffolding tower or disappearing into an open drainage culvert or any one of a dozen ways that a kid could hurt themselves in a place like this. But when he rounded the corner she’d disappeared. He walked quickly past these units to the next open space where he had a good view of the immediate vicinity, but there was still no sign of her. Obviously she was scared and hiding from him. But did you notice the way she moved? a sceptical little voice whispered. Kids who are scared tend to run. She was more like strolling, wouldn’t you say? Like she felt at home here? Didn’t matter – he was going to have to tell site security either way. But their office was right at the other end of the site and Lot 9 was just around the corner, so what he’d do was pop in, find his Leatherman that Lance had so hilariously nicked, and then call it in.
He was in the oldest part of the development now, the finished units just waiting for decorators and landscaping. Beyond this was the perimeter fence
and then the houses which families had already moved into. It seemed unreal to him that anybody could walk into a property showroom and buy a house off-plan maybe a year before it even existed, and then move in while watching the houses of their future neighbours being built. But then he supposed that it was just as unreal to have moved into a house like Stone Cottage that had probably been built when his grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather was a baby.
Lot 9 stopped him with a frown. It was still only half built. Barely that; it was a shell of breeze blocks with a triangular ribwork of open roof trusses pointing to the sky and windows which were nothing more than rectangular holes opening onto darkness. Why hadn’t it been finished? Was there something wrong with the plot – some kind of subsidence, perhaps? It wasn’t unknown for new builds to run afoul of old mine workings that didn’t show up on surveyors’ maps. Maybe that was why Bully had told him to be careful. The problem with leaving something like this unattended for so long was that it inevitably attracted vandals; above the main doorway somebody had spray-painted a rosette of six interlocking circles that formed a crude flower shape where they overlapped at the centre. A step up from tits and dicks, he supposed.
Swearing to come up with some supremely evil retribution for Lance, Peter moved cautiously inside.
The smell of damp concrete, mortar, and wood enveloped him. Without the first-floor supports having been put in, the grey breeze-block walls rose to their full two-storey height so that even though he could see the sky through the roof trusses he was still walking in shadow. Water dripped, forming wide puddles in which litter and building debris floated, and the sound of his sloshing reverberated in empty rooms further on. Sheets of plastic flapped in ragged strips from rafters and window openings. Chalk marks on the bare bricks showed where cables and pipes were supposed to have run, drawn by the men who had abandoned this place. He saw a half-empty packet of cigarettes in one corner, and that was when he felt the first fluttering of something which he refused to acknowledge as fear. Nobody left their cigarettes. Nobody.
Then, in the middle of the main hallway, sitting on the base of an upturned bucket, was his Leatherman. Heaving a sigh of relief, he stepped forward and reached for it. ‘Lance, you fucking—’
The attack came from a dark doorway to his left, the shape pale and blurred, screaming at him through the smudged suggestions of mouth and eye sockets, and he fell backwards, yelling, thrashing at the clammy limbs that it wrapped about him which were more like wings and were cold and slick and… plastic.
Lance pulled the plastic sheet off from over his face and wailed, ‘Whooooo!’ then fell about laughing.
‘Lance, you fuckhead!’ he shouted. ‘That’s not fucking funny!’
‘Yes it is!’ cackled Lance. ‘The look on your face, man! Absolutely fucking priceless!’ He chucked the rest of the sheeting to the ground and took out his phone, beckoning Peter over. ‘Selfie, man, yeah? No hard feelings?’
There was a moment when the urge to punch Lance’s smirk through the back of his skull was almost overwhelming. But he and Trish had toasted a fresh start for all of them, himself included, so he swallowed it and forced himself to simmer down. Besides, he had to admit that the boy had got him good. Fast on his feet, too, to have got here before him. His heart was still hammering, but he let Lance take the selfie, and while the younger man was checking it out he scooped up a couple of inches of filthy water in the bucket and dumped it over his head.
‘No hard feelings,’ he agreed, and left with his Leatherman as Lance gasped and spluttered behind him.
* * *
‘Hey, Peter,’ grinned Arun, as he returned. ‘What’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘Nice one. Think of that one all on your own, did you?’
‘What did it look like?’
‘Like a twat wearing a shower curtain.’
They all laughed at that, including Lance, because he was now one of the lads. Peter went back to what he had been doing, up a ladder in the roof trusses putting in the main run of the first electrical fix on this house, looping thick grey cables through the open roof joists and stapling them to the beams in neat bundles. He took pride in doing a tidy job. He liked to think that any domestic electrician who worked on these for whatever family ended up living here would be able to find everything – and then he realised that it might very well be himself. He found the idea that he might be here for as long as Bully, updating and maintaining the systems that he’d put in place right at the start, oddly reassuring.
‘Hey, Bully,’ he called down. ‘What’s going on with Lot 9, then? Why’s it unfinished?’
‘Haunted,’ replied Bully, as terse and matter-of-fact as only a Scot could be.
‘No, cut the bullshit. Really, what’s up with it? It looks like it hasn’t been touched for months.’
‘That’s because nobody’ll work on it. Too many accidents. Lads working that plot have been electrocuted, put nails through themselves, lost fingers, even an eye. One old fella had a heart attack and nearly karked it.’
‘Hasn’t anybody looked into it?’
‘Looked into what? A bunch of cack-handed chippies? They’ll look into it when it’s the last one of this phase that hasn’t been finished; in the meantime there’s too much else to be done and not enough lads to do it.’ Bully’s voice dropped, and he edged closer. ‘I will tell you one thing, though; the kind of thing that doesn’t have a box for it on an accident form and you don’t tell your supervisor because he’ll call the men in white coats to cart you off to the nuthouse if you do. In some cases, the man concerned has said that just before it happened he saw a wee girl hanging around – quite a few others won’t say anything at all. They’re too scared.’
Peter put down his cable stapler and looked down at Bully. ‘A girl. Seriously.’ She’d been barefoot, raggedly dressed and starved-looking. He felt his skin crawling with a sudden chill that couldn’t be explained away by the weather.
Bully returned his gaze without any of the smirking or signs that this might be a wind-up. ‘Aye, seriously. Nobody knows who She is, all they can say is that if you see Her, you’d best keep your wits about you because She’s a vicious little bitch. Y’ask me it was a stupid idea Lance playing his joke there, but what can you do?’ He shrugged as if to say that the motivations of ghostly girls and apprentices were equally unfathomable and turned back to his insulation job.
Peter manufactured a laugh which was meant to sound casual and unconcerned. ‘Okay, mate, whatever you say.’ He continued stapling his cables – but he checked the ladder to make sure it was properly secured all the same.
The rest of the day passed without any problem.
The accident – he refused to call it an attack or an ambush, despite how it felt afterwards – happened on the way home.
He was making his way past a house with only half its roof tiled; the other half had its red felt open to the air, crossed with the horizontal lines of yellow pine battens so that the whole thing looked uneasily like the raw flesh of skinned muscle. A few small stacks of brown roof tiles rested on the battens, and the whole building was surrounded by roof-high scaffolding. At the point where Peter passed it, on top of the scaffolding were two pallets of more roof tiles ready to be broken out for the rest of the job. They were packed vertically and bound with thick strips of blue plastic tape, although someone had removed the shrink-wrapping.
Later, nobody could provide a satisfactory explanation for how the tape had snapped. Someone said that the broken ends didn’t look as though they’d been cut with a knife, so much as frayed, or chewed.
At first it sounded like a set of giant fingernails dragging down the world’s biggest blackboard. He looked up – and he might have seen the dark shape of something like a rat scurrying away across the scaffolding, or in hindsight that might have been his imagination – as two hundred vertically stacked concrete roof tiles cascaded one after the other like a pack of cards pouring out of a magician’s
hands, except each card weighed nearly seven kilos and could easily have cracked his skull from that height. He flung himself to the side, into the road which at that point was little more than a muddy, puddle-filled track, as the first tile fell inches from his left hand. He scrambled backwards through the mud as the other tiles followed – ricocheting and rebounding, shattering in the debris and stinging him with shrapnel, deafening him with their clatter and din. By the time he’d shuffled to a safe distance he was drenched and filthy down his back from shoulders to ankles, sitting in the gutter, shivering with shock and adrenalin and staring at the debris in a daze. People came running to help him up, asking him if he was all right, and he said yes, he thought so, and by some miracle – with the exception of a few minor cuts – that turned out to be true.
By the time he got home his nerves had settled enough for him to spin a harmless tale for Trish about how he’d simply slipped and gone arse over tit in the mud, and she didn’t question it because it was exactly the sort of thing he’d do. No way was he going to say anything to her about the strange girl; in the safety and sanity of his home there was no reason to believe that she’d had anything to do with the accident, or Bully’s tall tales. A series of improbable coincidences, that’s all it was. But if it was just a coincidence, said a small, sly voice in the back of his mind, if She was just an ordinary estate kid, why didn’t you mention it to site security? Peter told that small voice to shut it, dumped his clothes in the washing machine, got changed and sat down to a normal dinner with his family. He asked Trish if anything interesting had happened to her today and she said no. Toby was quiet, but that wasn’t anything to write home about for a moody fourteen-year-old.
The only way in which it was different was the large loaf of home-made bread which sat on a wooden board in the middle of the table along with a butter dish and a long serrated knife.
‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘Packet of pork scratchings, what do you think?’ she replied. ‘Try some!’
The Plague Stones Page 8