by Adam Millard
Keep walking, the voice in Tom’s head said, though it was not his own voice but one he recognised. One which caused every hair on his body to stand on end, one which turned the saliva in his mouth to dust. Don’t stop, Tom Craven. He hasn’t seen you yet. Out the door and up the street, back to your empty house. Wait for me there. I’m coming back…
The voice of the Ice Cream Man.
It wasn’t real, of course; at least, Tom didn’t think it was. Truthfully, he was uncertain what was real and what was not anymore.
What was definitely real was the chair in front of him—one of four, since Wood remained seated upon his scooter—and the man sitting, reading the back cover of some nonfiction book and licking beer froth from his upper-lip stubble.
What was definitely real was the feeling Tom had in the pit of his stomach, almost as if he knew this had to be done. Wood had something for him, something which would help, and now was the time to found out what it was.
Tom reached Wood’s table, and Wood looked up at him. “Sorry,” he said. “Someone’s sitting there.” He motioned to the empty chair whose back Tom had placed a hand upon.
Tom smiled, hoping Wood recognised him. He didn’t. “Trevor Wood?” he said. For some reason it came out as a question, even though he knew for a fact who the man was.
Wood frowned. “Do I know you?”
“You probably don’t recognise me,” Tom said. “I was just a boy when we last saw one another. Tom Craven?” He held out his hand, expecting Wood to shake it, if only out of courtesy. He did no such thing; instead he just stared at Tom’s face, his bottom lip quivering slightly, his frown a seemingly permanent thing now.
“Tom Craven?” Wood said. “Name rings a bell, but I…” He trailed off there, and then he snapped his fingers and said, “Hell! Not Tom Craven from Havering? It is you, isn’t it? Shit, you got old!”
Not as old as you, Tom thought but didn’t say. He had always been taught to respect his elders, and no matter what, Trevor Wood would forever be an elder to him. “You haven’t changed a bit,” Tom said, which was a lot kinder than the alternative. “I was… erm, I was just sitting over there, wondering where I knew you from, and then it just clicked.”
“I saw you when I came in,” Wood said. “You were watching me, weren’t you?” Tom didn’t answer. “Yeah, I thought so. In fact, I knew you were. You see, Margaret Banks from the library told me I might bump into you here today. ‘Lovely chap called Tom Craven, or something,’ she said when I went in there to pick up some new reading material, ‘came in this morning, played with the microfiche, told me he knew you’.”
Tom felt incredibly uncomfortable all of a sudden, but then he realised that, despite the old crow at the library snitching on him—when he expressly told her not to—Wood had still turned up. That meant one of two things.
Either Wood was here to kick his ass, or he was here to listen to what Tom had to say.
“Look,” Tom said, “I didn’t know you were living in Redbridge. I was using the microfiche when the librarian looked over my shoulder and saw a picture of you on the screen. She told me she knew you, and that I—”
“I don’t give two shits about any of that, Tom,” Wood said, the frown lines in his forehead disappearing momentarily. “It’s actually not terrible to see you after all these years. After what happened to your friend, I thought you kids might go off the rails.
So, he remembered what happened to Ryan Fielding. He had come here to see Tom, and was not, it seemed, as angry as he’d initially appeared to be. “Do you mind if I sit down?” Tom said. “I want to ask you a few questions, you know? About some of the stuff that happened back then? If that’s okay with you.”
Wood shook his head. “I didn’t come here to talk about that stuff.” He picked up his beer and swallowed half of it down in three gulps before placing the glass down on the table. “I came to see if you were okay, that’s all. And you look alright, so my work here is done.”
Tom took a seat anyway, placed his jacket and glass down on the table and leaned in so that only Wood heard what came next. “I’m not okay,” he said. “I don’t know… I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve got a really bad feeling that whatever happened to us when we were kids is going to happen again—”
“Trust me,” Wood said impatiently. “You don’t want to drag all that shit up again. I mean, what happened to your friend was terrible, and all, but it was a long time ago, Tom. We didn’t figure it out then, we didn’t figure it out the second time, and I wasn’t even there for the third or fourth. So let’s just talk about sport, or—”
“What do you mean the second time?” Tom was confused. Were they even talking about the same thing? “I’m talking about Ryan Fielding. I’m talking about when Ryan went missing.”
Now Wood seemed apprehensive, as if he had put his foot in something dirty and he was looking for somewhere to wipe it off. “Look, forget I said anyth—”
“Are you telling me Ryan wasn’t the only kid to go missing?” Tom’s heart was racing as if he’d just necked several energy drinks in quick succession. Wood couldn’t even make eye-contact with him.
“I’m saying drop it,” Wood said. “You were a good kid, Tom Craven. A good kid in a shitty situation, but it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie, okay?”
“Trevor, I need to know,” Tom said. “I saw the sonofabitch. I saw him when I visited my doctor.”
“That explains a lot,” Wood said.
“You know as well as I do that whatever happened to Ryan, it wasn’t just a kidnapping, or a murder. He just straight up disappeared, and the thing that took him was no man.” He looked into Wood’s eyes, and yes! He knew it, too. Had he always known it? Had he always realised the Ice Cream Man was something else entirely? “You know something,” Tom said. “You know something and you’re scared to bring it up in case…”
In case he comes for you, too.
Wood sighed, turned his beer-glass around and around on its mat, anything to distract himself from the conversation. Eventually, he said, “You know I left the police force in 1989?”
Tom nodded. “Yeah, but none of us knew why. Marcus reckoned you’d lost your marbles, and Luke said he’d heard you’d run away to join the clergy, or something like that.”
This elicited a tiny smirk from Wood. “The clergy, huh? I wonder where he got that from.”
“Kids can be cruel,” Tom said. “You drop off the map, you’d better have a decent backstory.”
“Well, I’d like to say I ran away and joined the clergy,” Wood said, “but it was nothing like that.” He picked up his half-full glass and proceeded to wipe the condensation from its side as he spoke. “After your friend went missing, things went downhill for me fast. I don’t know how much of the truth you heard—if any—but that was the worst time of my life, right there. I was married, both to my wife and to my job, but there was apparently only room for one. Pity I didn’t realise that until it was too late. After Emily left me, I put all my efforts into finding Ryan, but there was no evidence, no nothing, to suggest he’d been hit by your phantom ice cream truck. We went over that street with a fine-tooth comb, more times than you could ever imagine. Some days I had three constables out there, searching for trucks like the one you described to me during that first interview. Do you have any idea how many white-and-yellow ice cream trucks there are out there? I’ll give you a clue; it’s a lot. We questioned so many ice cream men they all forged into one, and the only way we could be sure it was none of them was by having them play us their truck chimes. We were trying to catch them off-guard; you see. Figured we’d nail the sonofabitch by turning up unannounced and marching him out to his truck, forcing him to run the music through the speaker. Pop Goes the Weasel and we would have him, or at least enough to arrest him for questioning. But that song never came, Tom. We had ‘Do Your Ears Hang Low?’, ‘The Entertainer’, ‘Turkey in the Straw’. We had ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘It’s Now or Never’ and ‘You Are My Sunshine’.
But it was never ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’. Did you know, Tom, that ice cream trucks can only play their chimes for four seconds at a time? That’s all. Any longer than that and they’re breaking the law. I don’t think it’s a law that’s enforceable, but it’s a real thing. Anyway, I started to lose my mind. I was letting the whole thing consume me. Mrs Fielding killed herself in ’89, did you hear about that?”
Tom nodded. He knew that Ryan’s mother had climbed into her car while it was still locked up in the garage, and he knew she had started the engine, slowly poisoning herself in the process. Losing Ryan had done that to her. Less than a year later and she was dead—just like her son, Tom had thought at the time.
“I don’t know what happened, but I knew that the only way to get away from it all was to quit. When Cassie Fielding took her own life, it was as if I had been handed a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card. I could stop looking for Ryan now, because his mother was dead. I was angry at myself for being such a selfish prick, but I just wanted to make a clean break of it, and since I had nothing to prove to anyone now that Cassie was gone, I worked my three months’ notice and retired with a half-decent pension and fifty percent of the equity from the house Emily and I used to live in together.”
Tom finished the whiskey in his glass, savoured the burn as it reached his stomach. How could he be angry at Wood for abandoning the search for Ryan, for taking the easy way out? “So, that’s why you left? Because Cassie Fielding killed herself?”
“I knew I’d never be able to give her the news that Ryan had been found, alive safe and well, or that some jogger had found his body, half-covered over with foliage in the middle of the woods.” He seemed to grimace at the thought. “Either way, the only person who wanted to know what had happened to Ryan was gone—”
“Not the only person,” Tom said, reminding Wood that Ryan had friends, too, people who cared deeply about him.
“You know what I mean,” Wood said, defensively. “Family.”
Tom nodded.
“So I quit, became a little bit reclusive, I suppose you could say. There were days when I didn’t leave my flat, days when I would lie on my bed and just stare at the cracks in the ceiling. I knew it couldn’t last. Eventually I would have to get up and go out. My pension was paying the bills, but I was going crazy in there. I had to make myself busy. I felt like I had to work again, and it didn’t matter what I did so long as it helped me block out the guilt.”
“A busy mind is a happy mind,” Tom said. He’d heard that somewhere, and it made perfect sense. But did it also mean that you couldn’t be happy just existing? That you had to occupy your brain just to attain some sort of contentment was disconcerting.
“I worked six years as a school caretaker,” Wood said. “Nice school, smart kids, parents with more money than sense. I was part-time, which meant less than four hours a day, fixing lights, painting walls, chasing stray dogs from the playground before the kids got too excited.” He took a huge gulp of his beer and set it back down. “I wasn’t happy, but I was getting there, you know? No more drug busts, no more murders, no more rapes; the dirtiest job I had back then was unblocking the boys’ toilets.
“Just when I thought everything was going to be okay, well…”
* * *
October 31st, 1995,
Broadfield Primary School, London
“Goddammit!” Wood cursed as his wrench slipped off the radiator valve and he skinned his knuckles on the wall. Whoever thought stippled paint was a good idea for a school classroom was an idiot; not a day went by when Wood didn’t leave a slice of flesh or a piece of skin hanging there next to the colourful paperchains and class photographs.
“Having problems?”
Wood started. He turned to find Henry Baker—Mr Baker to the kids, or Big-Beak-Baker to the naughtier lads on account of his massive nose—standing there with his arms crossed. “Oh, I didn’t hear you come in,” Wood said. Motioning to the radiator, he said, “This whole thing’s rounded off. I don’t think I’m going to be able to fix it with the tools I have.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” Baker said, scratching that huge hooter of his, which looked to Wood like something athletes skied down at the Winter Olympics. “It’s rare I turn it on. This room’s stuffy at the best of times, and the kids are warm enough, what with their shirts, jumpers, and blazers on.”
Wood nodded and climbed to his feet, dusting his knees off in the process. “I’ll be able to mend it by Friday, but it’s going to need a whole new valve. In the meantime, I’d keep the windows shut. Don’t want the kids coming down with colds.”
“Cheers, Trevor,” Baker said. Wood assumed he was thanking him for not quite fixing the radiator, which was strange. “You were in the police force, weren’t you?” Baker said. “Before you came here?”
The question caught Wood off guard. It was a well-known fact that Wood had made it all the way to Sergeant before throwing in the towel; he would love to be a fly on the wall in that staffroom to hear what everyone thought about him, to hear their postulations as to why he was now a caretaker at a primary school. “Eighteen years, give or take,” he said.
Baker brightened. “I thought so,” he said. “Look, I was wondering if you could do me a favour? You see, I’m writing this book—a novel, actually—and there are some things I need to fact-check with regards to police-work. Nothing major, but I want it to be as accurate as possible.”
Wood shrugged. “What do you need to know?” It wasn’t as if he had anything better to do in that moment; the boys’ toilet was blocked again, but that could wait half-an-hour or so.
“I have a list back in the staffroom,” Baker said. “Give me a minute and I’ll be right back, that okay?”
Wood nodded. A list, huh? A whole list of things he needed Wood to verify? This wasn’t a spur of the moment thing; Baker had sought him out. For some odd reason, Wood felt nervous.
What if I can’t answer the questions?
What if Big-Beak-Baker wants to know something I’m not allowed to tell him?
What if I just run away right now? Just run and hide before Baker gets back with his list?
Placing his tools back in their box, Wood thought about what Baker was going to ask him? How many days does it take for a body to rot completely? What’s the maximum amount of weed you can get away with before it becomes an imprisonable offence? How many constables can you fit into a Mini?
It was while he was working out just what kind of novel Baker was writing anyway, that he heard it.
Distant at first, the chiming of an ice cream truck.
An ice cream truck in October?
On Halloween?
Pop goes the weasel.
And Wood’s heart skipped a beat. More than one, in fact, as the distorted melody drew closer and closer, louder and louder, a nightmarish cacophony, a symphony composed by demons, and before Wood knew it, he was running from the classroom, barrelling along the deserted corridor toward the school’s main entrance.
It was him!
It had to be. The fucker who kidnapped the Fielding kid seven years ago, back for more, still plying his trade on the same streets he liked to snatch helpless fat kids from.
Out through the front entrance and down the three steps to the playground, Wood didn’t even think about what he was doing. He was no longer a police office, had quit years ago, and yet all he wanted to do was catch a glimpse of the fucker in the yellow-and-white ice cream truck. If he just saw… something—anything—he could take the description to the lads at the station. Brownlee was in charge there now, and Wood was certain he would appreciate some new information.
Out through the school gates and halfway along the street when the yellow-and-white ice cream truck, spotted with rust and without a number-plate, appeared at the junction just ahead.
The chimes were deafening now. Those kids had been right all along. It was a noise that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Still running toward towards t
he truck even though it was coming toward him. They would meet somewhere in the middle.
I could pretend I just want an ice cream, Wood thought. Just a Whippy with a flake, and no syrup, please, thankee very much.
Would he stop for a grown-up?
Wood didn’t think so. This prick was only interested in children. Defenceless kids that he could man-handle into the side of his truck.
Close enough now to see the driver, and yet Wood didn’t see a damn thing. Where there should have been a man there was just a… shape. A blackness, as if someone had cut around a man with scissors in the fabric of time and space and thought ‘fuck it, that’ll do’.
It didn’t make sense; Wood’s brain couldn’t figure out just what he was supposed to be looking at. There are a few things in this world we are not able to comprehend; the Universe, quantum particles, feeling blue for absolutely no reason.
And this thing driving along Lawnwood Street in a beat-up old ice cream truck.
Wood stopped running as the truck approached, squinted through the drizzle, his brain still playing catch-up.
What was it those kids had said on the night the Fielding kid went missing? They were sitting there, all three, in the black boy’s living-room—
just a shadow
—and Wood had questioned them about the driver.
Just a shadow.
And they were absolutely right, for that was what peered out at him through the truck’s windscreen as it drove slowly past. A shadow with trailing tendrils which looked and moved like smoke.
From somewhere—the rear of the ice cream truck, where there were no ice creams or lollies, Wood thought, just a rack of surgical implements, meat-hooks hanging from the ceiling, body-parts strewn across the floor—there came a scream.
A girl.
The bastard had another kid in there, and she was screaming for help.
“Stop!” Wood cried, and he threw out a hand, hitting the side of the truck with his open palm. But then it was past, and quickly moving away from him. The words MIND THE CHILDREN seemed out of place on the back of this particular ice cream truck. It should have read KILL THE CHILDREN.