The October Boys

by Adam Millard

  Pop Goes the Weasel.

  “I don’t… that can’t be…” Luke looked astounded. “It has to be a different one. There’s no way it could have got all the way over here from Bromley, not—”

  “It’s him,” Wood said. “This isn’t just any old ice cream truck we’re talking about. It doesn’t even exist, not really. It’s simply a door to its netherworld.”

  Tom took his foot off the brake, hit the accelerator, and the 4x4 worked its way back up to thirty-forty-fifty…

  “It’s coming for Lydia now,” Luke said. “Shit, it’s trying to take more than one. It’s coming for Lydia.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Tom said, following the inharmonious chimes through the night. “It has to be stopped.”

  We’re going to be the ones to stop it, Tom thought. Or die trying.

  * * *

  Karen had to give it to Anne, she had certainly pulled out all the stops. The table was laden with party food, far too much for just one little girl. Lydia didn’t eat a great deal at the best of times, and so there would almost certainly be lots left at the end of the night. Meanwhile, Karen was trying to shake off the uncomfortable feeling which had swamped her since arriving. It was so strange, being here.

  Without Luke.

  Almost as if they were imposing upon a complete stranger.

  Lydia was having no such trouble. Sitting on the sofa next to her grandmother, she looked happier than she had in months, which only added to Karen’s guilt. She had tried to prevent this, tried to keep her daughter from having a relationship with Luke’s mother all over a silly dispute. They had all been selfish, too stubborn to see what they were doing, how unfair it was to Lydia.

  Dave, Anne’s new boyfriend, stood at the dining-room table filling a paper plate with goodies. Karen wasn’t too sure about him, but he seemed nice enough, and he’d been good with Lydia so far, making her laugh with ridiculous magic tricks and daft jokes. Karen knew that Luke would never like the man, but that was just Luke.

  “You’re such a clever girl!” Anne said, clapping her hands excitedly together as Lydia finished reciting her seven-times-table. “I’ll bet you’re going to be a scientist when you’re older.”

  “Actually,” Lydia said in that precocious way she had fine-tuned over the past year, “I’m going to be a dog-walker.”

  Karen smiled. “We talked about that, honey,” she said. “I don’t think you’ll ever make enough money to live in London by walking other people’s dogs.”

  “I think you’ll make a wonderful dog-walker,” Anne said, running her fingers through Lydia’s hair. “But your mother’s right. That’s something you do as a hobby. If you really concentrate at school, you can be anything you want to be. Aim for the stars, sweetie.”

  Dave, with a mouthful of scotch egg, returned from the table and collapsed into an armchair. A sausage roll slipped off his paper plate, but he didn’t hesitate in picking it up from his lap and pushing that into his mouth also. After a few seconds of noisy chewing, he said, “Your husband owes me a new handbrake.”

  “Excuse me?” Karen must have misheard. How can anyone owe anyone a handbrake?

  “Not now, Dave,” Anne said, shooting daggers at her boyfriend. It seemed to do the trick; Dave sucked the pineapple and cheese from a stick and nodded.

  After an awkward silence which seemed to stretch on forever, Lydia said, “Daddy’s not here tonight because he’s in Mommy’s bad books.” Just like that, and without any inflection whatsoever. She might as well have been a robot.

  “Is that so?” Anne said. “Well, I’m sure your father is very sorry for what he’s done to upset Mommy.” She cast inquisitive eyes toward Karen (“What’s going on?”) but Karen was in no mood to go into it, especially not with Luke’s mother, who would defend her son’s behaviour, no matter what he’d done.

  “Mommy says Daddy’s getting help, but I don’t know who is going to help him. Daddy doesn’t like help from anyone.”

  “Well, sometimes,” Anne said, in that patronising voice grown-ups use when talking to children about something they have no right to be discussing, “even the strongest people need help. Even your father.”

  “Not Daddy,” Lydia said, shaking her head adamantly.

  Anne sighed, gave up on the argument. “Go and get some food, darling,” she said. “And when you come back, I want you to tell me all about your favourite lessons at school.”

  Lydia bounced from the sofa and marched toward the table, with its feast of sweet and savoury, and as she went, Anne turned her attention to Karen.

  “Is everything okay?” Anne said, her face lopsided with faux concern. “At home, with Luke?”

  So, this is how it ends, Karen thought. With a punch to her mother-in-law’s nose. This was how her marriage finally reached its climax, not with a whimper but with a geriatric assault. And to think that, up until last week, both she and Luke would have both taken a shot, should the opportunity have ever presented itself. Something had changed, though, and now here she was with Lydia in tow, playing nice with the in-law(s) because it’s what Luke wanted.

  “Everything’s fine,” Karen said as an exhale. “Luke’s just having a few issues, that’s all. We’re getting through it. Lydia must have just heard us arguing, that’s all.” Oh, and your son tried to kill her, but we’re not talking about that, not unless you try to bolster his good character.

  “He’s off his tits, that one,” Dave said, wiping grease from his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Dave!” Anne said. “And don’t use your hand. There are napkins on the table, you animal.”

  Dave growled playfully, and Anne burst into hysterics. Karen imagined she was in some terrible nightmare from which she would soon awaken. This was all too much. Too much and too soon. She wanted to scoop Lydia up into her arms and run out into the night, call a cab from somewhere further down the street.

  “Do you hear that, Mommy?” Lydia said. Her plate was overfilled with cupcakes and biscuits. A solitary chicken leg balanced precariously on the edge of the plate, Lydia’s way of saying, Look! I’m being healthy!

  “Hear what, honey?” Karen couldn’t hear anything, at least not at first.

  “Is that… sounds like an ice cream truck,” Anne said.

  “Don’t be silly, Anne,” Dave said, making his way back to the table for seconds. “In October? He’s wasting his time if it is.”

  Karen’s heart began to race, for this couldn’t be happening. A coincidence, that’s all it was. An ice cream truck on Halloween? It was bound to happen sooner or later.

  As it drew closer, its chimes fluctuating up and down some hellish musical scale that was like nothing she had ever heard before, Karen identified the tune, and then she knew it was no coincidence.

  She stood, pulled Lydia up into her arms. Lydia’s plate tipped, fell in slow-motion to the carpet. Cakes and biscuits broke and crumbled and bounced underneath the sofa, where they would remain until Anne next vacuumed.

  “No,” Karen said, staring toward the drawn curtains as if she expected the truck to come barrelling through the front of the house.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Anne said, pushing herself to her feet. Weary bones cracked. “I’ll get the dustpan and brush.”

  A screech of tyres out front.

  The chimes grew louder

  (half a pound of tuppeny rice, half a pound of treacle)

  and time froze as Karen realised that something terrible was about to happen.

  * * *

  The ice cream truck turned onto Blackmore Street, its tuneless music echoing around the estate like some hurricane warning siren. Its driver, tendrils of black smoke gripping the wheel, could almost taste the little girl, couldn’t wait to add her to its collection. Twenty-eight years was a long time to wait, but now the moment had finally arrived.

  It was time to make those bastards suffer.

  Two streets to go.

  The Ice Cream Man/Ghuul/Frederick White licke
d its lips, for tonight it would feast upon the tastiest souls it had ever captured.

  * * *

  “Please don’t let it be too late… please, please, please…” Luke was a wreck in the passenger seat, rocking back and forth, head between hands: how could we have been so stupid? How could we have let this happen yet again.

  “We’re gonna make it, Luke,” Marcus said. Just words—meaningless—but Tom was glad someone other than Luke had said something.

  “Take a left here!” Luke yelled. “And then second right. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  Tom did as Luke said, for a lot had changed since they were children. New roads had been added, new housing blocks built, islands where there hadn’t used to be islands, and Luke knew the area better than anyone right about now.

  Soon they were on the street Tom and Luke had visited earlier that day in order to return Dave’s cherished TR7, only now it looked different.

  Eerie.

  There were no Trick or Treaters here, just flickering pumpkins and unlit houses. Tom focussed on the road ahead, tried to block out Luke’s anxious shuffling in the seat next to him.

  “There!” Wood called from the rear.

  Tom had already spotted it. The yellow-and-white ice cream truck approaching from the other end of the street. “Motherfucker!” Tom said.

  “This is not going to end well,” Marcus said, bracing himself for impact.

  Fifty yards…

  Twenty…

  There was no way Tom was going to move. To hell with the 4x4; this was a matter of life and death. Jayden Lebbon’s life. Lydi Davis’s life. “Hold tight!” Tom cried.

  A second later, there came the sound of twisted metal, of screeching and crunching. The last thing Tom thought before the 4x4 flipped onto its roof was:

  Gotcha.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Tom pulled himself free of the overturned Range Rover, pain coursing through his entire body, but it was a pain he would have to deal with, could deal with. Luke was already out, doubled over and gasping for breath on the pavement. He had a cut to the head, but nothing more.

  “Shit, Tom,” Marcus said as he dragged himself free of the wreckage and climbed to his feet. Other than a bloody shoulder, he seemed to be in good condition; not good enough to go twelve rounds with Samuels Jr., Tom thought, but not bad given the circumstances.

  Between them, they managed to pull Wood out of the car. Marcus pulled the wheelchair out through the smashed rear window and quickly unfolded it. “Get him on this,” he said, snapping the wheelchair into place.

  Wood grunted and groaned as they carried him across to his wheelchair, but he was conscious. They were lucky. All four of them extremely lucky. Tom had never been involved in a car crash before, and it wasn’t something he’d do again, given the choice.

  At the edge of the road, a hundred metres away, the ice cream truck was also on its roof. Smoke drifted up from its exposed undercarriage; even from where he stood, Tom could hear its serpentine hiss. “I’ll be damned.”

  Just then, someone called out Luke’s name, and when Tom turned, he saw a woman and a little girl running towards Luke. The little girl—Lydia—looked happy. Happy to see her father again. Happy he hadn’t just died right in front of her grandmother’s house. The woman, on the other hand, looked terrified. Confused and terrified.

  Luke pulled his daughter into a tight hug, whispered something into her ear, and put her back down again. “Take her back inside, Karen,” he said to the woman. “And lock the doors, okay? This isn’t over—”

  “What the hell is going on, Luke?” the woman cried.

  “I’ll explain later. Please, just take Lydia and get in the house.”

  Reluctantly, and after providing Luke with an angry stare, the woman snatched Lydia up from the pavement and run-walked back to the house. Tom wondered whether they were cursed. All of them cursed by what had happened to them back in ’88, and what was happening to them again tonight. Cursed to live their entire lives with people who simply wouldn’t—couldn’t—understand that what was happening was real.

  “Come on,” Tom said as he moved slowly, cautiously, along the road towards the overturned truck. Luke was right there with him and, bringing up the rear, Marcus pushed Wood’s wheelchair.

  “Second worst Halloween ever,” Marcus said.

  “You’re still alive, ain’t ya?” Wood grumbled. “Quit your yapping.”

  Tom was pleased to hear it; Wood had had him worried for a moment back there.

  The rear of the truck was buckled; once it had read MIND THE CHILDREN, but now the decal said MID E CHIDRN. “Jayden?” Tom called out. “Jayden, are you in there?”

  No reply.

  “He’s in there,” Wood said. “And not.”

  “What does that even mean?” Luke said as he circled the truck. “That fucker’s not here. Gone. Fuck!”

  “It’s in there, too,” Wood said, motioning to the rear doors. “Get the doors open, quickly.”

  It didn’t take much effort; the doors were practically falling off already. There was a groan as the buckled metal swung open, and then Tom saw it. They all did.

  Inside, the truck was not a truck at all. It was a hole, a tunnel, a pathway to another world. Pitch black and swimming with stars, the strange effect was terrifying and mesmerising and tangibly impossible. It hurt to look at, and Tom blinked away the pain, but how could you not look at something so beautiful, so strangely captivating?

  “Just when I thought this shit couldn’t get any weirder,” Marcus said.

  “It’s the doorway to its realm,” Wood said, and it should have sounded ridiculous but didn’t. “It’s where it takes the children, where it resides for seven years at a time before…”

  “Are you saying Jayden is in there?” Tom said. “That thing has him in there?”

  Wood nodded, sighed sadly. “We’re going to have to go in after it. If we don’t bring that boy back tonight, his soul will be lost forever. Just like Ryan’s, just like those other children.”

  “Sure,” Marcus said. “We’ll step into the whirling vortex of nightmares and stars. I don’t see how that could possibly go wrong.”

  Tom, once again hypnotised by the strange portal inside the truck, wiped blood from his lips. “This is what it’s all been leading up to,” he said, trance-like. “It ends tonight.”

  Luke nodded, patted Tom on the shoulder. It was such a small gesture, and yet its implications were massive. Luke was saying, I’m with you, buddy. Every step of the way.

  “Well?” Wood said. “Are we going to stay out here all night, shivering and bleeding like stuck pigs, or are we going to finish that sonofabitch once and for all?” He motioned to the back of the truck.

  After you.

  “Watch each other’s backs in there,” Tom said. “We have no idea what we’re going in to, but we’re on its turf, now. It will be strong, stronger than ever before.”

  “As pep-talks go,” Marcus said, “yours needs a little work.”

  Tom nodded.

  Tom shook each of their hands.

  Tom stepped first into the back of the van and was swallowed up by the starry black portal before he’d even had a chance to take a breath.

  * * *

  October 31st, 2016

  Somewhere, Nowhere

  Despair. Wretchedness. Self-loathing. Hate. Tom had never felt such emotions so powerfully; he thought his head might implode under the weight of anguish.

  This is what it feeds on, Tom thought. This is how it survives here in the place, this world between worlds.

  At first there was only darkness—a blank space in reality, as if the Creator had simply forgotten to put something here—but then shapes began to appear. Spines, the vertebrae of fallen creatures, needles and thorns taller than buildings, trees limned by some distant red moon, human limbs as fronds and trunks of flesh. This place—whatever it was, and wherever it was—was Purgatory.

  This was Hell.

  And here, Ghuul w
as in charge.

  Tom turned to discover his friends had followed him through, were standing there with equally dumfounded expressions upon their faces as they tried to comprehend their surroundings. Marcus tried to say something, but there was no sound. Here, it seemed, there was no cause to speak. Marcus pointed to his mouth, shocked that nothing would emerge, but Tom simply nodded. He understood.

  Behind, the star-speckled vortex continued to whirl. It was their door out of here, their link back to reality. To get lost here was tantamount to death.

  Somewhere, off in the distance, a child screamed. Not all voices were silenced in Ghuul’s netherworld, it seemed. Jayden’s cries echoed around them as if they were standing in some sort of underwater cave.

  Tom turned, and now that his eyes had adjusted to their new surroundings, he could see a pathway lined with fiery crosses. Symbolism, perhaps? Or just the place-markers for each soul Ghuul had devoured over time? There were so many of them, Tom hoped it was not the latter.

  They walked for what seemed like hours. Bones crunched beneath their feet, beneath the wheels of Wood’s wheelchair, like forest twigs. Ash drifted through the air, carried along on a wind hot enough to bake bread. Sweat poured from Tom’s face, soaked his clothes as he moved inexorably through the netherworld in search of Jayden. Every now and again the boy cried out, and each time his voice seemed to come at them from a different direction.

  Even here, the Ice Cream Man/Ghuul/Frederick White liked to play games.

  The first body they came across was an emaciated glitter-cat; a young girl dressed for Halloween, only now she looked more like something you would find at the edge of a road during a missing persons search. Her eyes were wide, her mouth even wider. The drawn-on whiskers had faded but were still visible.

  Cheryl Mitchell, Tom thought, and when he turned to Wood and saw a tear roll down the old man’s cheek, he knew he was right.

  They left that gaunt little girl lying there, for she was beyond saving, had been here far too long.

  Jayden screamed again, this time from their right. Tom altered their course and began to ascend a mountain made of smooth red rocks which were hot beneath their feet. Wood struggled initially, but Marcus was once again behind him, forcing him up the incline using his shoulders, his legs, his entire body. No one was getting left behind here. No one.