The October Boys

by Adam Millard

  Screw Danielle for taking the car, he thought. On foot, Tom was extremely limited as to where he could go and the things he could do, but he was determined to make a start.

  He had to.

  Tom arrived at the library and was pleasantly surprised to find the lights on. He could just make out, through the library’s front window, some old biddy slipping books into spaces on half-empty shelves, smiling as she worked.

  Of course she was smiling. Poor Arthur back at home wouldn’t be smiling this morning, though, while his wife of fifty years put the free hours in just to get a moment’s peace.

  Inside, the library wasn’t much warmer than outside. A small convector heater, clearly too tiny to heat such a large environment, hummed away in the corner. From the counter where he stood, Tom could see that the desktop computers in the adjacent room had yet to be switched on.

  The woman, who appeared to be working alone this morning, saw Tom standing there and, after emptying her arms of books via their corresponding shelves, made her way toward him.

  “Good morning,” she said, far too cheerfully for Tom’s liking. Why were old people always so happy? Was it because they knew they didn’t have long left, that death was just around the corner, and so there would be just a little more pain, a soupcon of misery to go, and then boom! Into the ground we go, not a problem or a care in the world?

  “Morning,” Tom said, noncommittally.

  “Is it still raining out there?” she said, motioning to the door.

  Tom didn’t think it had rained all morning, but he must have been wrong, otherwise the woman wouldn’t have been asking. “Not at the moment,” he said.

  The woman clucked her tongue; Tom didn’t think it would be the last time she did it today. “It’s that time of year again,” she said. “You don’t think you need an umbrella, but you do.” She smiled, her too-white dentures reminded Tom of the scene from The Snowman, when the titular character tries in Jamie’s father’s falsies. “So, what can I do for you, or are you just here to browse?”

  “Actually,” Tom said, gesturing toward the room with the black-screened computers, “I was hoping to use one of the library computers for a few hours. I’ve got some stuff I need to look up.”

  The woman’s artificial grin disappeared. “Oh, deary me,” she said. “The computers are down at the moment. We’ve got one of them technician fellas coming in this afternoon to get us back up and running.”

  Shit! Tom had worked himself up, and was ready to go at it, and now this. “That’s a shame,” he said, unable to keep the disappointment from his voice.

  “The microfiche reader’s still working, if that’s any good to you.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s the newspaper archive machine,” the old woman said. “I’ll bet you’ve never used one before, have you?”

  Used one? Tom thought. I didn’t think they still made them. However, a newspaper archive machine was perfect; better, even, than the computer, which would try to distract him at any given opportunity, leading him away from the job at hand with its promises of money-saving advice and one-pound auction sites. “I’ve never used one, but if you’ve got a few minutes to spare, I wouldn’t mind a quick lesson?”

  The woman, it turned out, had all the time in the world, and was only happy to assist. It must have felt extremely stranger for her, giving someone younger than her a guided tour of a piece of technology. Most old people Tom knew were frightened of microwaves; you so much as mention a Blu-Ray player, it’s likely to result in a life-changing stroke.

  But this woman, whose name—when she finally introduced herself to Tom when he was seated in front of the microfiche reader—was Margaret Banks, knew her way around this particular piece of machinery. Tom, not for the first time in his life, felt useless.

  But Margaret explained how everything worked, how to load the film-rolls, how to navigate the pages, and how to rotate the image on the screen (but that, she said, shouldn’t be necessary).

  “This thing is amazing!” Tom said, and it was. Who would have thought, with the advancements in technology—and the readily available plethora of information provided by the World Wide Web—that an archaic machine reading microfilm would get him all excited?

  “The library wants to get rid of it,” said Margaret, disappointedly, “but not on my watch.”

  “You stand your ground, Margaret,” Tom said, instantly realising how ridiculous he sounded. Margaret didn’t seem to notice, for she brightened, as if he had given her crusade to retain the microfiche reader more purpose. “Well,” Tom said after a few seconds of silence. “I think I’ll be able to manage now.”

  “In that case,” Margaret said, “I’ll get back to my alphabetising and leave you to get on with it. If you do need any help, just give me a shout. I’m thinking the weather’s going to make my day a relatively simple one.”

  Tom smiled, wished her well with her alphabetising, and watched as she waddled away, seemingly pleased she had been of service to at least one of a younger generation.

  Right.

  Down to business.

  Tom cracked his knuckles—it sounded unnaturally loud in the otherwise silent library—and began scanning.

  The Romford Recorder was first up, and it didn’t take Tom long to locate the front page from November 1st, 1988. There, at the foot of the article, was a photograph of Ryan Fielding, looking happier than Tom ever remembered him being. The headline read: HAVERING BOY MISSING. The subtitle read: LOCAL BOY, 12, FEARED DEAD.

  It hit Tom hard in the gut. He remembered reading that front page all those years ago, remembered how his mother had snatched the newspaper out of his hand and ordered him to his bedroom, recalled—with perfect clarity—how she had come up not long after and held him while he’d cried.

  His entire childhood was made up of bad memories but sitting there on his bed while his mother rocked him gently back and forth… that was one of the only times he had ever truly felt safe.

  As he began to read the article, mumbling out loud at first and then reverting to reading it in his head, Tom felt everything come flooding back. The pain, the uncertainty, the feeling of loss amongst the community. He remembered how, just a few days later, there had been a special assembly at school. Hundreds of kids, his age and older, gathered in the main hall for prayers. Mrs Coulter, the Head, had stood at the front of the assembly and sobbed as she read messages of hope, messages of sadness, of denial. Tom had had no idea just how popular Ryan Fielding was until that day; it seemed every kid in school had something to say about the boy whose final action was running away from a phantom ice cream truck dressed as Pugsley Addams. Marcus and Luke had sat beside Tom, shaking their heads, still unable to comprehend what had happened to their friend, listening to sad story after sad story and—if they were anything like Tom—wondering just who the fuck the madman behind the wheel of that chiming death-trap was and why he had done what he had done.

  Madman?

  That was not right.

  The thing behind the wheel of that ice cream truck was no man. Tom knew that now. As a twelve-year-old boy, he had doubted what he saw—what he thought he saw. His imagination as a child had always been wild. But what he’d seen in Kurian’s office yesterday, what he felt when he heard that familiar Nursery Rhyme coming from the doctor’s mobile phone, that was real.

  It had taken almost thirty years, but now Tom knew he wasn’t going mad. What he and his friends had witnessed as kids was no product of an overactive imagination.

  The Ice Cream Man was real.

  I’m coming back…

  He read and reread the article from November 1st and, once he knew he could glean no new information from it, moved on. There was no mention of Ryan Fielding in the November 2nd edition, or even the 3rd. But there, on the front page of The Romford Recorder November 4th edition, next to an article about fireworks safety, was a new photograph of Ryan beside a headline reading: HAVERING BOY, 12, STILL MISSING.

  He would b
e missing for a lot longer, Tom thought.

  Ryan Fielding, the local boy who went missing on Halloween, is still missing. His parents are appealing for any information which might lead to the boy being found. While the disappearance is being treated as a missing person, Sergeant Wood of Romford Police Station has not ruled out abduction.

  “We are working closely with the Metropolitan Police, as well as Essex Police, in order to locate Ryan Fielding quickly and safely, however we would also like to talk to the owner of an ice cream truck, seen in the area at the time of Ryan’s disappearance,” Wood said in a statement released yesterday.

  It was an appeal. Sergeant Wood had nothing at all, not a morsel of information, and was relying heavily on the input of local people for something—anything—to point him in the right direction.

  It had been another waste of time. Tom thought back to those weeks following Ryan’s disappearance, remembered how the police scoured the area over and over before moving on to the next. There had been a Panda parked outside the Fielding house for weeks, or so it seemed back then, and the local constabulary were even questioning students in the nurse’s office at school.

  Sergeant Wood had returned to question Tom on no less than three occasions, once when his mother was there. That was the time Tom remembered the most, because his mother had threatened to sue Wood for harassment, even though he was just doing his job. And besides, Tom had been there at the time of Ryan’s disappearance. It made sense that Wood kept plumbing him for information, pestering him with the same tedious questions: what was the ice cream truck’s number plate? It didn’t have one. What did the driver look like? A shadow. Anything suspicious about the truck? Yeah, it was going about a hundred-miles-per-hour in a thirty zone. It was all so damn repetitive, and yet all so damn necessary.

  Tom sighed. The number at the bottom of the article was several digits too short to actually work now, but he wished he could ring it. He wished he could ring it and Sergeant Wood circa 1988 would answer in that belligerent fashion Tom had grown used to back then. He would tell Wood he might as well stop looking for Ryan, for the boy was long gone, had been kidnapped by the Devil.

  Or something just as evil and ethereal.

  He would tell the Sergeant that search parties would prove fruitless, and that the money collected by the local churches (donations amounting nothing, in the grand scheme of things) would be better spent on a paranormal investigator, or a fucking exorcist.

  Tom angrily navigated to the next page, and the one after that, and one more. There were no more articles about Ryan Fielding. Not even updates. The boy was gone, let’s just all try to forget about him, yeah? Here’s a nice heart-warming story about a prostitute beaten to death with a shoe. No? How about this one, December 16th, about an old lady found half-eaten by her own cats? Three months they reckon she’d been there. How’s that story grab you?

  Tom changed the microfiche and began looking through the Havering Post. This one featured even less on Ryan’s abduction than The Romford Recorder. There wasn’t even an accompanying photograph of the boy, just one of Sergeant Wood looking like he hadn’t slept in months and serious as hell.

  How was anyone supposed to find the boy if they didn’t even know what he fucking looked like? What good would it do to let the concerned public know what the inept copper in charge of the investigation looked like? No one was looking for him. He could easily have been found in any number of pubs after finishing his shift. It was no wonder Ryan had not been found.

  Again, there was a statement from Sergeant Wood, seemingly just as artificially optimistic in this one. It was his job to remain positive in the face of adversity; it was everyone else’s job to call bullshit.

  “Once again we are asking people for any information leading to the whereabouts of Ryan Fielding. Ryan was last seen Trick or Treating on Halloween with his friends. He was dressed in costume, that of the Addams Family’s Pugsley.”

  There followed a whole list of Ryan’s traits: height, weight, eye- and hair-colour, as if that would help. By this point, Tom knew that even Sergeant Wood had given up hope of finding Ryan alive.

  ‘In one piece’ would have been the best they could hope for, and twelve-year-old Tom thought that, though it was a macabre submission, even that would have been a miracle. An open casket would have been small consolation.

  The Havering Post had no more news in the weeks following Ryan’s disappearance, and Tom was running out of ideas. The microfiche reader was good for its time, but if you were unsure of exact dates or it didn’t have what you were specifically looking for, you were screwed. At least with the World Wide Web you could sometimes fluke it. He returned to the front page with the last article on Ryan, hoping to find something he might have missed.

  “Everything going okay?”

  Tom almost leapt out of his skin, which seemed to amuse Margaret no end. She stood beside him, a cup of something steaming in one hand.

  “Thought you might like a nice cup of tea,” she said, presenting him with the cup. Tom took it and was grateful for it. “Find what you were looking for?”

  Tom sipped at the tea, burning his tongue in the process and trying not to cringe at the complete absence of sugar. He hadn’t always taken his tea sweet, but by god once you got used to it, it was hard to take it any other way.

  “Some,” Tom lied. For some reason, he didn’t want to tell the old librarian the microfiche reader had turned up nothing new, that he could have gleaned more information from an outdated copy of Fortean Times. He figured it would upset her somewhat, though perhaps he was underestimating the mettle of Margaret Banks.

  “Glad to hear it,” she said, stooping to see what he was looking at. Part of him was embarrassed, as if the librarian had caught him with a screen full of porn. “Hey, that’s Trevor!” she said, excitedly and pointing at the black-and-white photograph on the screen.

  “Excuse me?” Tom frowned and leaned in to see what Margaret’s liveried finger jabbed at. “You know Sergeant Wood?” It had never occurred to him that Sergeant Wood would still be around after… after what happened. As far as Tom knew, the poor bastard had retired the year after Ryan Fielding went missing; it must have been one of his last cases, and perhaps the straw that broke the camel’s back.

  “Know him?” Margaret snorted. “He’s our number one borrower. Oh, yeah, Trevor comes in all the time, takes out a lot of stuff on…” She let the sentence trail off, as if she had already said too much. “Well, let’s just say I don’t approve of his choice of reading.”

  Tom felt as if he might be getting somewhere; where that was, he didn’t know. “Don’t tell me. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince?”

  Margaret shook her head. “I wish.” She reached for the tiny cross hanging around her neck. Tom was only now seeing it for the first time. She fairly grasped it until her bony knuckles whitened. “He takes out books on…” Another pause as she considered the confidentiality of her number one borrower. “He takes out stuff on the occult, witchcraft, supernatural stuff, a load of old hogwash, if you ask me.”

  How bizarre, Tom thought. Sergeant Wood had never shown any interest in that stuff when he was on the force. But every man needs a hobby when retirement comes a-calling, and surely it was more interesting than flying model aircraft on an empty field in the middle of fucking autumn.

  It occurred to Tom, just then, that Margaret Banks—she of the unsweetened tea and propensity to jump out on you when you least expected it—might be able to help him.

  It was worth a shot.

  “Margaret, I’m going to be honest with you,” Tom said. “I’m really struggling to find out what I need to know with this machine—”

  “But you said—”

  “But if I knew where to find Sergeant Wood—I mean, Trevor—then I really think I’d be able to get to the bottom of my little problem.”

  Margaret released the cross and regarded Tom with no small amount of suspicion. “I really don’t think I can help you,”
she said. “I’m not supposed to give out lender’s details, and—”

  “You’d be doing me a huge favour,” Tom said. “You see, Sergeant Wood and I go way back. A friend of mine went missing when I was just a kid, and Wood was the fella in charge. I just need to ask him a few questions.”

  “I really can’t give out that kind of information,” Margaret said, “but if you want, Trevor comes in most Wednesdays. Wednesdays and Saturdays are his days, and he always takes out the maximum number of books allowed. I honestly don’t see how he has the time to read all of them. Unless he doesn’t sleep at all, I’d say it was impossible.”

  Tom thought about pushing for Trevor Wood’s address, but he didn’t want to infuriate the librarian, who had been nothing but wonderful to him from the moment he set foot in the place. “Do you know what time he usually comes in on a Wednesday?”

  Margaret nodded. “Around noon,” she said. “He likes to spend the afternoon in the pub, poring over his new borrows. You’d do better to catch him there, to be honest. If he doesn’t come in today, chances are he’ll be there, working his way through whatever blasphemous tome he’s got to hand. The Walnut Tree, it is. You know it?”

  Oh, Tom knew it alright. Cheap beer, one of those smoky huts out back covered over by a three-metre parasol. It was a proper geezer’s boozer, the kind of place you could catch a good fight—or be in one—if the mood struck you.

  So, if Wood turned up at the library on schedule before making his way to The Walnut Tree, it would be around one by the time he arrived.

  Three hours from now, Tom thought, checking his watch.

  “Margaret,” Tom said, pushing himself up from the chair. For a moment he forgot he was holding a cup of molten lava disguised as Breakfast Tea; over the rim it went, dripped down his knuckles. He hissed and was about to curse when he caught sight of the cross around Margaret’s neck and quickly edited himself. “Ah, shiiiiii…silly me.”

  “Oh, dear!” Margaret said, taking the cup from him and placing it down on the desk next to the microfiche reader. “Did you burn yourself?”