The October Boys

by Adam Millard

  “Just give me the damn water,” Marcus said, snatching the bottle out of his father’s hand and replacing it with a bloody gum-shield.

  “You’re too old to fight,” his father went on. “You’re ruining your legacy with this shit. People would have remembered you for being Marcus ‘The Banger’ Berry, three times heavyweight champion of the midlands, and now what? They’re going to remember you for the time you lost your fucking mind and decided to have one last fight.”

  “You’re supposed to be encouraging me,” Marcus said.

  “I didn’t want to be any part of this, son,” Clive said. “You’re making a damn fool of yourself out there. The only thing keeping me here is the fact someone’s got to drive your busted-up ass home afterward.”

  Marcus swilled water around his mouth and spat it into the bucket at his father’s feet. Saliva, pink with blood, now covered the base of the bucket. “You’re getting paid for this,” he reminded his father, whose addiction to buying expensive boxing memorabilia would be sated for the next month or two. “I’d appreciate a little respect.”

  “Respect is earned, son, and I don’t respect any of this.” He handed Marcus the gum-shield back and dropped onto his haunches so that they were eye to eye. “Just do me a favour, yeah, and finish this guy so we can get the hell out of here and put this all behind us.”

  Nodding, Marcus thought about telling his father that he planned to fight on after this, that the organisation had already lined up his next opponent, Frankie McMahon. That tonight was merely a warm-up bout, and that the real fight was going to come six months from now in London. He thought about telling his father all those things, then saw the concern etched into the old man’s face and decided against it.

  He climbed to his feet and jabbed the air three times. His father removed the stool and climbed from the ring, shaking his head.

  Samuels Jr. was ready to go across the ring. He looked fresh, as if he could manage another twelve rounds. Marcus knew he had to knock the sonofabitch out in this one, or at least give him something to think about. On points, Samuels Jr. was winning. Marcus knew that, and so did his opponent. If this went the distance, there would only be one outcome, and that simply wouldn’t do.

  The bell rang, the referee stepped aside, and Marcus charged forward. The crowd—a half-filled arena of fight fans—were chanting his name again, but when Samuels Jr. connected with a heavy right hook, everything went silent once again. Marcus was momentarily rattled; his head buzzed as his skull returned to its proper place. He threw his guard up and blocked one, two, three body-shots before swinging wildly, hoping to meet his opponent’s jaw and put an end to the round, and the fight, but he missed, went over the top of Samuels Jr.’s head. From the corner, he heard his father bellowing to Get a fucking grip, son!

  Marcus grabbed onto Samuels Jr., held him in place. The referee was already trying to break them up, and that was when Samuels Jr. whispered something into his ear which turned his legs to jelly and his blood to mercury.

  “I’m coming back, Marcus.”

  Marcus pushed his opponent off and took three steps back. Samuels Jr. was no longer standing there. In his place, a jet-black shadow of a man. Dark red eyes—as if they had been taken out and marinated in blood before being popped back in—bore into Marcus, into his soul.

  The Ice Cream Man.

  Time froze, and Marcus struggled to stay up. His knees threatened to buckle. His heart raced so quickly that he feared he was in the early stages of a coronary. This isn’t real, he told himself. He had taken one too many punches to the head and now he was hallucinating, seeing their childhood aggressor in place of Samuels Jr. Almost thirty years had passed since he’d seen that infernal face for the first time, and although it haunted his dreams—and often his waking hours—this was the most real it had ever been.

  “Ah, you remember me!” said the Ice Cream Man. “This pleases me.”

  “You’re not real,” Marcus mumbled through his gum-shield, then swallowed a mouthful of bitter blood. All around the ring the crowd had fallen still, as if someone had paused real life. Marcus turned to find his father, rendered motionless in mid-shout. When he turned back, the Ice Cream Man was right in front of him, his hellish face an inch from Marcus’s own. Marcus could smell the evil; sulphurous and wicked.

  “I’m coming back, Marcus, for the ones who got away.” A thick black tongue—split into tendrils at its tip—darted out of The Ice Cream Man’s mouth and lapped at Marcus’s sweaty cheek. “I’m the dark in the corner of your room, the stench you can’t quite put your finger on, the feeling you get when you’re home alone.”

  “You’re a fucking figment,” Marcus said, but if that was the case what was happening in reality? Had he been knocked out by Samuels Jr.? Was he currently lying on the canvas, his father looming over him with the smelling-salts and a ‘told you so’ on his lips? Time had ceased to move forward, and that just didn’t happen in real life.

  “A figment?” the Ice Cream Man hissed. “I like that one. I might keep that one, if you don’t mind.” Then, before Marcus had time to realise what was happening, a cold black hand reached out and snatched him by the throat. His feet lifted off the canvas—all two-hundred-and-twenty-seven pounds of him, hoisted into the air as if he weighed nothing—and all Marcus could do was stare down at the monster, a monster which grew realer with each passing second. “I should have taken you twenty-eight years ago. You and your friends.” His eyes blazed with fury now. Crimson flames danced around his eyeballs, reminding Marcus of a NASA video he had watched not too long back about sunspots. “I got one of you, though, didn’t I?” he said, somehow sibilant without the required consonant. “Little fat bastard didn’t know which way to run, did he?”

  Marcus kicked out, but the Ice Cream Man didn’t even flinch.

  “You cost me dearly that year,” said the demon. “But I’m coming back, Marcus, for you and your friends.”

  Marcus’s feet were back on the canvas, and there, in front of him, stood Samuels Jr., his face contorted with rage, his fist already making its way toward Marcus’s jaw. He didn’t have time to throw up his guard or sidestep the imminent blow.

  He didn’t have time for anything.

  Darkness came less than a second later, but, even though he was unconscious, Marcus felt every ounce of pain as his body thumped to the canvas.

  * * *

  October 31st, 1988,

  Havering, London

  Marcus felt a little lost once his friends and the policemen left. It was just him and his father, and his father wasn’t in the best of moods; it was as if the presence of the law—in his living-room, no less, where he weighed and bagged up his weed and counted the illegal profits he made from it—had only served to fuel his rage, and Clive Berry was not what anyone would call ‘chirpy and approachable’ at the best of times.

  “You’d better get your arse up to bed,” his father said, settling down in front of the television and switching it back on. He didn’t look at Marcus as he spoke, just continued flicking through the channels, looking for something to watch. He came across a boxing match; the red graphic in the corner—a large ‘R’—suggested the fight had already been won by one of the fighters, and his father was simply watching the highlights.

  “We almost died out there, Dad!” Marcus said, exasperated. Didn’t his father care? Would he even have mourned if, instead of Ryan, he had been the one the ice cream truck mowed down?

  Still focussing on the television set, which flickered intermittently as a gale blew through the street and the rain drum-rolled at the windows, his father said, “You kids sure do like to exaggerate. There wasn’t no ice cream truck out tonight. I would have heard it. You and your retarded boyfriends just shit each other up real good, that’s all. And if you really want to get into it, shall we talk about that fuckwit mate of yours, Tom Craven, and inviting every pig on the beat over for a good look around the place. Shall we talk about that?”

  Marcus shrugged
, though he wasn’t sure why. His father was too engrossed in the fight, was already dodging left and right, throwing out weak jabs as if it were him standing there in that ring. “If Mom were here, she’d—”

  That did it. Clive Berry snapped his head around, an angry owl, and bore into Marcus’s eyes with unreserved fury. “You’d better apologise now, boy, or so help me God, you’ll be going to bed with a sore arse and a black eye.”

  There were many things which pushed Clive Berry’s buttons, but Marcus had learned quickly that mentioning his mother, or the night she’d been hit by a speeding Volvo and thrown twenty-five feet across the street, was undoubtedly the quickest way. Marcus seldom brought her up, but when he did, you could guarantee it was during an argument, to unceremoniously hurt his father.

  To elicit some kind of response from him.

  It never failed, and Marcus never felt guilty about it afterwards.

  “I’m sorry,” Marcus said, though he really wasn’t. His mother would have believed him about the ice cream truck; she would have believed anything he said.

  For the longest time his father just sat there, head on a swivel, anger in his bloodshot eyes. In the background, the two featherweight boxers continued to pummel one another. Marcus concentrated on the screen rather than his vexed father.

  “I want you to go upstairs,” his father said, “and I want you to take off that ridiculous outfit. Put the gloves back in my memorabilia room and brush your teeth. I don’t want to see you again until morning.” He turned his attention to the television and relaxed back into his armchair as Marcus mouthed a curse-word and left the room.

  Upstairs, Marcus changed out of his Muhammad Ali costume and returned the boxing gloves—worn once by Michael Spinks, according to his father—to their case. The memorabilia room was nothing more than a spare bedroom filled to the brim with boxing ephemera: a pair of trunks once worn by Larry Holmes hung on the wall, a fading signature at the corner of the accompanying poster; a gum-shield which had once protected the teeth of Gerrie Coetzee sat encased in glass upon a waist-high shelf; a stack of The Ring magazine, whose earliest issue was printed in 1922 (that particular one sat behind glass) and costed only twenty US cents, according to its cover. What would twenty cents buy you these days? Marcus thought. A ten-pence mix? If that.

  Downstairs, his father was laughing maniacally at something or other. One of the boxers must have gone down; that never ceased to cheer the cantankerous fucker up.

  Marcus left his father’s memorabilia room and headed across the landing to his own room. Closing the door behind him, he found himself wondering if everyone had made it home okay; if Ryan had somehow managed to evade that careening ice cream truck. Death, for a twelve-year-old boy, was inconceivable, especially when the person doing the dying was of the same age. Would Ryan be at school tomorrow, excitedly explaining how he’d managed to outrun a maniac on four wheels?

  Marcus hoped so.

  The alternative didn’t bear thinking about.

  Intentionally not brushing his teeth—in an act of betrayal that made him feel as if he had somehow got one over on his father—Marcus readied for bed.

  His sheets were cold, scratchy, and unwashed. He couldn’t remember the last time his father had put them through the wash. “Mom wouldn’t let them get in this state,” Marcus mumbled, pulling the itchy coverlet up so that only his nose, and the features north of it, were exposed to the cold bedroom air.

  He lay there awhile, listening to his father cackle and curse at the television set, watching the lights come and go beyond his He-Man curtains, an eerie effect resultant of passing cars. Somewhere off in the distance, the sound of sirens penetrated the night, and Marcus wondered whether they belonged to the same policemen who had, up until a half-hour ago, stood in his living-room, shaking their heads doubtfully and taking three very scared boys at their word.

  No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t sleep. There were a million things he should have been doing in that moment; like trekking over to Ryan’s house to see if he had returned safely. Ryan and he were not as close as Ryan and Tom, or even Ryan and Luke, but they were four corners of the same square. Take one away and the whole thing collapses.

  Marcus listened as his father’s laughter turned into a cough and splutter. What could be so damn funny down there? Funny enough for his father to almost choke on his own merriment?

  When he was absolutely certain that sleep was not forthcoming—and that he was wasting his time just lying there, staring at the cracks in the ceiling—Marcus threw off the covers and climbed out of bed.

  It was going to be a long night.

  Seating himself at his desk, which took up an entire wall of his room, Marcus flicked on the table-lamp and picked up a pencil.

  When he grew up, he wanted to be a comic-book artist. He wanted to draw superheroes for a living, people like Captain America, and Judge Dredd, and Green Lantern. And though he wasn’t very good now—human anatomy was awkward, and no matter how much he practiced he just couldn’t get the knack of hands or feet—he knew that if he applied himself properly, he could do whatever he wanted to.

  His father didn’t know about his aspirations; it wasn’t the kind of thing you could tell a man whose entire life revolved around boxing and drugs and making easy money, no matter how illegal it all was. Marcus had often wondered how that might go. “Hey, Dad, I’m going to be a comic-book artist when I grow up.” To which is father would undoubtedly reply, “Over my dead body.” The only way he would ever make his father proud was by becoming a fighter, by doing the very thing his father could not, due to a bleed on the brain he had suffered during birth. His father wanted to live vicariously through him, and how the fuck could he do that if Marcus was creating superheroes and villains all day long?

  Marcus was currently working on a new character: The Sphynx. She was a little like Catwoman, and a little like Wonder Woman, but that didn’t matter to Marcus. She looked great in spandex, and once he’d figured out how to do her hands and feet, she would be amazing.

  He was just about to start working on a side-profile of The Sphynx when a tinkling of bells froze him stiff.

  Half a pound of tuppeny rice.

  Half a pound of treacle.

  Leaping to his feet, Marcus rushed across to the window. Peering through a crack in the curtains, he saw the ice cream truck slowly moving down the street toward his house, but it made no sense.

  Where were the cops?

  It wasn’t as if the sonofabitch was inconspicuous, driving around with his chimes at full volume in the middle of the night. All they had to do was follow the sound of the creepy Nursery Rhyme and they’d catch him.

  That’s the way the money goes.

  Pop goes the weasel.

  The truck pulled up to the kerb just beyond Marcus’s minute front garden, and it was then that Marcus realised it was here for him.

  “Dad! Dad! The ice cream truck! It’s right outside!” He ran for his bedroom door, almost tripping over an untidy mess of dirty clothes he was hoping to get around to washing this week. He yanked the bedroom door open, but then something very strange happened. The door slammed shut again. Marcus pulled it open, just an inch this time before it crashed back into its frame. Downstairs, his father cursed and bellowed for him to ‘Shut the fuck up and get into bed, or so help me God…’.

  Marcus could no longer open the door. It was stuck fast; something was keeping it shut, keeping him trapped in his room.

  Making his way over to the drawing desk he had just abandoned, Marcus picked up his sketchpad and pencil and moved back to the window. The chimes were quieter now, but that didn’t make them less terrifying. Marcus was about to draw the driver, if only he could get a good look at the man, when he saw a dark shape, almost liquid, move from the front of the truck to the open hatch on the side.

  “What the…” Marcus didn’t get to finish his sentence as the shadowy figure spilled out onto the street via the hatch, ostensibly breaking up and com
ing back together in front of Marcus’s disbelieving eyes.

  Either he was mistaken—and he had fallen asleep after all, and this was the resulting nightmare—or he had inhaled too much of his father’s wacky backy, the scent of which had begun to permeate his bedroom, which explained why his father was laughing so heartily. There was no third option as far as Marcus was concerned, because people didn’t just come apart and then mesh again like that. He was not great at physics or biology, but he knew what was possible and what was science-fiction.

  The figure, jet-black and ominous, stood motionless for a moment or two. It wasn’t until a minute had passed that Marcus realised the fucker was trying to sniff him out. Every now and then it would throw its head back, inhaling the air all around it, trying to locate the boy who had escaped.

  And then its head snapped upwards, and its eyes settled upon Marcus, partially concealed by the curtains and wishing he would wake up already.

  A voice, wet—as if its speaker was talking through its owns bile—suddenly filled Marcus’s bedroom. Startled, he turned to face the semi-darkness, expecting to find the figure standing there. But the room was empty; the thing, whatever the hell it was, was still down at street level. “No esssscape,” it said. “Now or later, your choice.”

  It wasn’t much of a choice. It wasn’t any kind of choice. It wasn’t fucking happening! It couldn’t be.

  “No,” Marcus said, his voice tiny and frightened.

  “Yessss,” replied the voice.

  How could this be? The figure was down on the street, staring up at him with glowing red eyes and its body writhing and drifting away from it like oily tendrils. How could its voice be so near, so distinct, as if it were coming from just behind him, a breathy and sibilant whisper which caused every individual hair upon his body to stand on end?

  Marcus, for reasons unbeknownst to him—although he thought the police might be interested in what the truck and its driver looked like—began to sketch the apparition and the vehicle behind it. The truck was absent a number-plate; that was one of the first things Marcus thought to take down as he started drawing, but it just wasn’t there.