The October Boys

by Adam Millard

  There was another brief silence, far more uncomfortable than the last, and Luke wondered what the consequences of him standing up, crashing his cup-and-saucer down on Dave’s melon head, and leaving with his pride intact might be. What was the worst that could happen? Another seven years of not seeing his mother. Bring it on. She might not even make it that long, for she was already looking impossibly tan, and there was only so much sun-damage the body could take before deciding to start punishing.

  “Passing through?” His mother reached forwards and poured herself a second cup.

  “Huh?” Luke had been too busy picturing Dave pulling shards of china from his bald head to hear properly.

  “You said you were just passing through,” said his mother. “From Luton? Without Karen or Lydia? Passing through to where?”

  Luke shrugged. He didn’t know what to say, what he could tell her and what he should keep to himself. She hadn’t believed him the night Ryan Fielding had been plucked from the street, never to be seen or heard from again. What could he tell her now, all these years later? That he had a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach. A burning, almost, and it was tugging him inexorably toward Havering. That he believed—no, that he was certain, albeit without proof—that the Ice Cream Man was not a man at all, but a demon, a thing from another realm, and that it was coming back. That he had wrapped his hands around his daughter’s throat and had attempted to choke the life out of her because he was having some sort of breakdown. That Karen had asked him to leave, and he had done so because she was right, goddammit! She was right to want him out of the house because he had tried to kill Lydia and needed to be punished. That he feared the police were already after him, pursuing him from cheap hotel to cheap hotel, and that he was terrified to stop moving in case they caught up and threw him in jail for what he had done.

  That he was terrified.

  That he was cold and hot all at the same time.

  That he wanted to die.

  That he feared he might.

  His mother waited patiently as he tried to figure out the words, and in the end, he simply repeated himself. “Just passing through.”

  Dave sighed deeply and dipped a biscuit in his tea before forcing the whole soggy thing into his disgusting mouth. I hope you choke in it, Luke thought.

  “I hope you choke on it, huh?” said Dave, but then it wasn’t Dave at all. Sitting there, next to Luke’s mother, was the Ice Cream Man. Black tendrils licked at the sofa, teased his mother’s hair from behind. She didn’t seem to notice; she simply smiled wistfully at the shadow-person, as if her beloved Dave was still sitting there and not some malevolent kidnapper in his place.

  This isn’t real! This can’t be real!

  “Oh, it’s real, all right,” said the Ice Cream Man. “I’m being big Dave. I don’t know which of us you hate more.”

  “I hate you!” Luke said.

  “Luke!” his mother said, shocked. That was when he knew he was the only one that could see the foul creature, that big Dave was still there, underneath, and that his mother thought Luke had just voiced his animosity toward her future husband, and not the thing only he could see.

  The black shape’s red eyes darted around the room, and it hissed. “Sssssuch a ssstrange fassscination with dollsssss. Creepy, don’t you think?”

  Luke knew he was wasting his time talking to the thing; not only that, but his mother was looking at him as if he had lost his mind. He didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of believing he had.

  Slowly he stood, placed his lukewarm tea down on the coffee table, and thanked his mother for the hospitality.

  “Going already?” she said, sounding genuinely upset.

  “Yeah, you’re not going already, are you?” said the creature sitting beside her. “Ssssoooo much to dissscusss… ssoooo much to reminissssce about.”

  Luke ignored it, instead aiming his response at his mother. “Yeah, Lydia’s got Brownies tonight, and if I’m not back to take her, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  “Issss that the name of the girl you almossst killed?” The Ice Cream Man said, the oily tendrils of its torso dancing languidly in time with its voice. It was enjoying this. It seemed to be getting pleasure from watching Luke squirm.

  Once again Luke ignored it. “I’ll see you again soon,” he told his mother, knowing it was a lie. He didn’t know when he would see her again—didn’t know if he would ever see her again—but if he did, it would most probably not be ‘soon’. And the look on his mother’s face suggested she knew it too. “Nice meeting you, Dave,” Luke said to the man behind the demon. He didn’t think Dave would hear him, part of the reason why he kept it civil. “I’d shake your hand, but…” But there’s a fucking monster sitting on your lap and you probably don’t even know it.

  “I’ll show you to the door,” said his mother. She started to stand.

  “It’s okay,” Luke said, holding out a hand: don’t get up. “I know where it is, but Mom?”

  “Hm?”

  “Look after yourself, yeah? And if you see Dad, tell him the same.”

  “I won’t see that sonofabitch as long as I live,” his mother said, her face contorted into something like pure anger. She was about to continue her tirade when Luke cut her off.

  “Next time I come,” he said. “I’ll bring Lydia.” Just another lie. And why not? He was on a roll.

  His mother smiled. “That would be lovely.”

  And all the time the creature sitting beside her listened, sneered, licked its thin black lips with an even blacker tongue.

  Luke left the living-room and, once he was out of sight, he ran to his car. The thing wasn’t in the passenger seat as he pulled off the driveway; it was waving from the living-room window, net curtains flapping around it like a superhero’s cape.

  “Fuck you!” Luke yelled as loud as he could, hoping the Ice Cream Man could hear him over the roar of the engine, the crunching of gravel, the screeching of tyres as he sped away from the house.

  Luke was driving so fast, so wildly, that he forgot to brake when he came to the junction at the end of the street. Although it was too late, he pulled the wheel hard to the left, hoping he’d done enough to prevent crossing over into oncoming traffic.

  He hadn’t.

  He saw the BMW for a split second, and then there was an almighty crunch, by which time Luke had closed his eyes and braced himself for impact. The car seemed to travel for an age, hitting things that hadn’t been there a moment ago, and then it was flipping, turning over and over. Luke didn’t know what was the sound of twisted metal and what was the sound of his own screams as pain wracked through his entire body and the seatbelt cut into his shoulder and chest.

  I’m dead, he thought, and it was the last thing that occurred to him before the darkness came.

  FIFTEEN

  October 28th, 2016

  Redbridge, London

  The library was a little busier than the last time he’d been here, which, Tom guessed, might have had something to do with the working computers and the fact it was Saturday. This was where jobseekers came to look for work, where adulterous husbands and wives came to contact their chat-room lovers, where the older generations came to learn how to fill in spreadsheets, save word documents, print manuscripts and type with both hands at the same time, where immigrants new to the country sought to learn a new language so that the next time they were in Starbucks they could order precisely what they wanted without looking like a complete dick and pissing off the irate queue building up behind them. The library was a commune, a kibbutz of wannabe-betters, a gathering of the general populace, from Ahmet the Barber to Sir Steven the cheating Lord.

  This was where it all happened.

  The library.

  “Did you find him?”

  Tom turned from the shelf he had been staring blankly at for the past two minutes to find Margaret, the librarian who couldn’t even hold her own water even if the CIA told her it was classified, standing there, smiling thinly.
“Oh, Sergeant Wood?” he said. “Yes, I caught up with him in the pub, just like you said I would.”

  Margaret slipped a thick hardback book on UFO’s into an empty space on the shelf in front of her. “Hope you didn’t mind me telling him you were looking for him,” she said. “Trevor’s a good man, and I’d only just met you. For all I knew you were going to give him a good hiding.”

  Tom laughed at that. “Wouldn’t that have been something,” he said. “And you would have pointed me straight at him.”

  It was Margaret’s turn to laugh. “It was only fair I should warn him, just in case,” she said. “Don’t think I would have been able to live with myself if he’d turned up here the next day with a black eye and teeth missing.”

  “I’m sure Wood can look after himself,” Tom said, and he meant it. Even though Trevor Wood was now confined to a wheelchair or a mobility scooter, he still had about him a formidability which Tom found quite overpowering. You could take the man out of the police force, it seemed, but you couldn’t take the police force out of the man.

  “He’s certainly a tough cookie, that one,” Margaret said, and for the first time Tom wondered if she harboured something for the old copper, a secret love, perhaps, or something more than just friendship. “I see he’s got you into his way of thinking,” she said, motioning to the books sitting on the shelf in front of Tom and frowning. “Is he starting some sort of supernatural club? Somewhere you lads can go to talk about ghosties and flying saucers and things that go bump in the night?”

  Clearly, Wood hadn’t shared with Margaret the way she ostensibly did with him. This woman had no idea what Wood had been through, what had happened to them all those years ago—what was still happening. If Margaret saw an ice cream truck, she wouldn’t run away from it, afraid that the bogeyman was behind the wheel; she would, like most people, pucker up for a creamy treat.

  And that was just the thing: Tom and Wood were so alone in this that it was almost impossible to find anything out.

  “Don’t you believe in ghosts, Margaret?” Tom asked, trying to keep the tone light. His question was accompanied by a smile which said, Didn’t you watch Casper?

  “I believe in… something,” she said, “but not that we die and become poltergeists and headless horsemen.”

  Tom wanted to tell her that you would have had to have been a horseman, killed by decapitation, for that to happen, but decided against it. “But you believe in God?” Tom said, motioning to the necklace she wore.

  “Very much so,” she said, “but does that mean I’m going to start hanging around supposedly haunted hotel rooms, like they do on those asinine TV programmes, waiting for something to blow into my ear just so I can say I had an encounter?”

  “I guess not,” Tom said. “But there are people out there who have already seen things that can’t be explained, and Trevor Wood is one of those people.”

  “Ah, I like the man,” Margaret said, “but that doesn’t mean I believe a word he says. He once told me that he got run over by a petrol tanker. That’s how he ended up in his chair. It wasn’t until almost a year later that he told me the truth, that he’d fallen down a well trying to rescue a little girl. Since then, I’ve taken everything that man says with a pinch of salt.”

  Fallen down a well?

  Tom almost shit himself laughing.

  “So, what’s he got you looking into?” Margaret said, perusing the spines of the titles on the shelf. “Cryptozoology, whatever that is? Haunted Ireland? The Bermuda Triangle?”

  “Something a little closer to home,” Tom said. On your own doorstep, in fact. He didn’t want to terrify the woman, so he kept that part to himself. “I may have to use one of your computers, if that’s okay?”

  “You should really be a member if you want to make use of the facilities,” Margaret said. “Do you even have a card?”

  Tom told her that he didn’t, that he would like very much to be a member, that he had time to fill out the forms and that, no, unfortunately, he didn’t have photo identification on him, but could he bring it next time?

  Ten minutes later he was sat at one of the whirring machines in the computer room. To his left and right, people checked their social media, something that Tom had never had an urge to become embroiled in. He didn’t have any friends in real life, and he had even fewer willing to speak to him digitally.

  He had acquaintances, people at work he liked to bullshit with at the water-cooler or while waiting for specs to print, but could he call them friends? Not really. His last real friends had all grown up and moved on with their lives—apart from the one who never made it. Marcus was a renowned boxer, had fought some of the best. Tom had even saved all the newspaper clippings, kept them in a folder with the name MARCUS BERRY scribbled across its front. Marcus had made something of his life, had moved to the Midlands and become a superstar of sorts. Then there was Luke, who Tom had not seen since school. Tom often wondered what Luke was up to, whether he would even remember Tom if they were to meet in the street. Perhaps not. So much had changed, lives had chuntered inexorably onward, and memories had faded like a photograph left out in the sun for too long. Even Tom now struggled to picture what they had once looked like, all four of them, riding their BMX’s or hammering together pieces of wood and calling it a den.

  They had looked happy, that much he was certain of. Happier than they ever had been in their lives? At least that was true for Tom. Sure, he had Danielle—or not, as the case might be—but he had never felt so damaged, so unsure of himself, feelings that had never been present as an eleven- and twelve-year-old boy.

  As he sat there, Tom began to wonder what his friends were up to right now. Marcus would probably be training; Tom had read in an article recently that he was thinking of coming out of retirement. According to Marcus, he had at least three more fights in him, and by God he would have them.

  But what of Luke? Was he married? Did he have children? Did he ever make it as an Aerospace engineer? Tom wished there was a way he could get in touch, let them know what was happening in Havering once again. That the Ice Cream Man was coming back—every seven years, it seemed—for more children. And how, Tom thought, might that conversation go? Hey guys. Guess what? The ghost that took Ryan when we were twelve is still active, still driving around in that beat-up yellow-and-white ice cream truck, and I’m pretty certain he’s going to return this year. So, how are things with you? Kids? Wives? Do you like Game of Thrones? They would tell him not to contact them ever again; at best they would shrug him off as mentally disturbed, tell him to get some sort of help.

  Tom sighed and clicked the browser icon, waited for the screen to load.

  The girl to his right answered her phone with what Tom liked to refer to as ‘wilful ignorance’. As she began to regale the caller—a girlfriend by the name of Rochelle, apparently—with a story about the immense size of her current squeeze’s genitals (“Seriously, girl, I couldn’t walk right for three days after!”), Tom navigated to a search engine and sat, fingers hovering over the keyboard, trying to decide what to do first.

  The world at his fingertips, and he was at a loss. Once again, he realised just how old he was getting. Kids all around him were typing at the speed of light, their fingers a blur as they worked the keys. Tom wasn’t the slowest typist in the world, but these fuckers made him look like Stephen Hawking. As the cursor blinked in its little box, Tom typed three words he hoped would bring up some results.

  Ice cream murders.

  Two million and something results, most of which were about some turf war in the East End of Glasgow during the eighties which came to be known as the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars. Tom had never heard of it, but he was curious, nonetheless, and read through the Wikipedia article. Turns out a bunch of criminals were using ice cream vans to sell drugs and stolen goods, using the sale of regular ice creams as a front. It was, as far as Tom could tell from the article, all very farcical, the behaviour of the belligerent gangs akin to something one might see on a
BBC sketch show—something by Hale and Pace, perhaps, or Little Britain.

  Tom clicked the arrow at the top left of the screen, which took him back to the search results. The girl to his left was now telling Rochelle what she was wearing for tonight’s party. A slutty black dress, apparently. No doubt to impress her big-dicked suitor, Tom thought miserably.

  The next article Tom found himself reading—for no other reason than he had three hours to kill before meeting Wood at The Walnut Tree to discuss their respective findings—was about a woman called Goidsargi Estibaliz Carranza, or ‘Esti’, an ice cream parlour proprietor who had done things to two men—her ex-husband and her lover—that would have made The Krays reach for their nut-sacks in sympathy. She had shot the men in the backs of their heads at close range, cut up their bodies with a chainsaw, stuffed them in a deep freeze, and then later interred them in concrete under the cellar of her store. In other words, she was a bit of a maniac. The pictures accompanying the article, however, revealed her to be somewhat photogenic, a regular thirty-four-year-old woman who just so happened to need psychiatric help. By the time he reached the end of the article, Tom felt sorry for Esti.

  The girl to his left laughed boisterously at something she had seen on her monitor. Tom had a surreptitious look, saw a plump-looking girl on screen—a picture taken during a holiday, it seemed—and shook his head with disgust as phone girl began to ridicule and fat-shame the poor girl while Rochelle seemingly did the same from her end.

  Tom could feel the anger rising within him, but he swallowed it back down and went about his business, hoping Margaret, who was lurking somewhere between the stacks like that thing from the opening minutes of Ghostbusters, would pluck up the courage to ask phone girl to leave, and take her uncouth attitude with her.

  On and on the results went: there was an article about a 1919 murder in Monmouth, one from a clickbait page which had somehow concluded that there are more murders when sales of ice creams go up. Tom didn’t quite understand the correlation between the two—something to do with heat driving people crazy, perhaps—and he didn’t really care. There was an article about an episode of Murder, She Wrote entitled ‘Frozen Stiff’, plenty of stuff about Richard ‘The Iceman’ Kuklinski, a mafia hitman who liked to freeze his hits to obscure their time of death; there was an article about a pair of ice cream vendors who had been hacked to death in Iloilo; an article about Constable John Larmour, shot dead by the IRA as he helped out at his brother’s ice cream parlour. There were lots of articles, but none of them were relevant.