by Ben J Henry
The door was now open, facing the woodland to their right; they could not see inside from the angle of their approach. Gus’s eyes were on the rusted lock hanging from the door, twisted and broken, when he froze at the sound of voices coming from within the shed.
In unison, Gus and Alicia gripped each other’s upper arms, pulling down to crouch behind the raised line. Through the wild grass, they watched two figures emerge from the wooden doorway. Winter stepped out first, tears streaming down her face. Alicia did not recognise the woman that followed. She was half a head taller than Winter, her striking face taut with impatience. Her expression softened when Winter turned and threw her arms around her. Winter’s shoulders heaved up and down as she wept and the woman patted her back, muttering something about Jack. With Winter’s head on her shoulder, the woman glanced down at the tattoo on her wrist and gave it a quick rub as though it had itched.
Gus kept low, motioning for Alicia to follow him towards the right of the bank as the women headed for the other side of the truncated tracks. Alicia waited for them to cross into the trees before whispering: ‘The new counsellor?’
Gus nodded, ‘Rainn.’
The pair stared at one another, wordlessly transmitting a question they needn’t voice aloud: why had Winter led this woman to the shed?
Long grass grew either side of the wood-panelled door, which did not budge when Gus pressed against it; it had been open for some time. He flicked a loose screw hanging from the lock before stepping into the small structure. The interior was bare apart from a stone well protruding from the soil.
‘Well, well, well,’ said Alicia, following her neighbour into the musty shed.
‘Creepy, secret well,’ Gus added.
‘A well, kept secret.’
Alicia traced her finger around the circle of time-worn bricks. The shed was barely wide enough for her to complete a full rotation while staring into its depths.
‘Why would my mother keep a sketch of a shed that hides a well in the back of that book?’
Gus’s first thought was that it would be a convenient place to dump a body, but he kept this to himself. The door was east-facing, not receiving the light of the sun that had started its descent over the trees to the west; orange rays through cracks in the roof did little to illuminate the well. A couple of iron rungs descended into shadow. Alicia opened the torch application on her phone and a brilliant white beam spilled into the darkness.
Following the rusty footholds rung by rung, she estimated the shaft to be ten feet deep, ending in the soil used to fill it. She played the beam across the floor of the well, half-expecting to see the outline of a skull staring back at her. She shuddered.
‘What’s that?’ asked Gus, taking the phone from her hands. He shone the light against something caught between broken bricks in the soil. Alicia recognised the postcard instantly, having overheard the whispers that filled the school corridors on Monday, courtesy of the Carpenter twins.
‘That’s the postcard Winter sent to Jack from Sri Lanka,’ she said.
Gus traced the torchlight across the card, struggling to read the writing.
‘Wish you were…?’
‘Dead,’ said Alicia.
‘Ouch! Some sense of humour.’
It was their last connection before she died, Alicia thought, dramatically. In the half-light, she saw a ghostly image of Winter casting the postcard down the well. Remembering bottle caps and a plastic wrapper by the swing set, she whispered: ‘Jack and Winter used to come here.’
Jack was in the book. And now he’s dead.
Alicia left the shed as a cacophony of thoughts jostled for her attention. She took a deep breath, drawing fresh air deep into her lungs and forcing down the rising anxiety. Focusing on the railway track, she distracted herself with memory: David standing on the track pretending that a train was coming; shrieks of delight as he managed to balance perfectly on the iron girder, placing one foot before the other. Alicia had waited until he was standing on the section of track highest up the bank and then asked him to jump. She could only have been eleven; he must have been five. He did not know if she was really waiting beneath him, but he jumped.
He always trusted her.
The trust for her mother frayed like an old rope. Until David’s disappearance, Anna Harrington was unfailingly lighthearted and bubbly; it was inconceivable to imagine her playing any part in Jack’s death. But Alicia could not accept that this was all coincidence. Her mother’s hunt for David had led her into the shadows. What had she found within their depths?
‘Jack was in that book,’ she said aloud as Gus stepped beside her. ‘Do you think he saw something in that well? Something he shouldn’t have?’
The pair glanced back through the door of the shed. The well lingered in shadow, its rim barely visible.
Gus’s eyes were steady when he met Alicia’s gaze.
‘You need to talk to your mother. I need to know if my parents were in that book, and why she’s hiding it.’
‘You need to talk to your uncle. If Jack did find something down that well, Winter just told that woman. And if she knows it’s your birthday, she’s not just here for Jack.’
‘You don’t think I’ve tried? I’d have a better chance of getting Winter to rename the planet after me than getting my uncle to loosen his lips.’
‘These deaths must be connected, Gus. Your parents, Jack… and Mrs Lawson’s on that list. If they want us to keep our mouths shut, they’re going to have to tell us everything.’
Lucid dreaming club
Gus sat on the unopened box with a photograph in his hands. His eight-year-old self, with a mop of unruly black hair, held out a parkour trophy as he perched on a low wall between his grinning parents. Benedict stood with a hand on his son’s shoulder, his posture straight and proud. His dark hair had been tamed in a manner that Gus was yet to master. The smile on his face was warm as he faced the camera. In Gus’s fatigued state, he could almost feel the weight of his father’s hand on his shoulder. Sylvie’s blonde hair was tied back and her large eyes gazed slightly to the left. Laughter creased the corners of her eyes; perhaps she had caught a joke from a friend in the background. As his gaze oscillated between their faces, Gus wondered what his parents had done to deserve their fate. Had they chased names in a book of murder? Had curiosity killed the pair of them?
The edges of the photograph were faded with fingerprints so he searched the open box beside him and withdrew a framed picture of himself and his grandmother, Blithe. The pair were sitting in a rowing boat on Lake Windermere, the shot taken by his father at the bow as he climbed aboard. It looked as though Blithe was resting her hand on Gus’s shoulder, but he was pretty sure she had just told him to stop wriggling and was attempting to hold him still. With not an ounce of affection towards the cold and impersonal woman, he pulled the photograph from its silver frame and cast it into the box. As his parents were placed safely behind the glass, Gus caught his eyes reflected back at him, dark-ringed and bloodshot.
Happy Birthday, Augustus.
His father and uncle had lived in Cranleigh with their parents, Augustus and Blithe. Augustus died when the boys were sixteen, and Benedict left for Galway, where he met Sylvie. When Sylvie gave birth, Benedict named his son after his late father. But everybody called him Gus. The only person who referred to him as Augustus was his uncle, who had joined his twin in Galway when Blithe passed away.
Perhaps the new counsellor had checked the register before class, noting Gus’s date of birth and full name? Or perhaps this tattooed stranger had known exactly where to find the police officer’s nephew? Perhaps if his mind was not so harassed by the need for sleep, he might assemble his fractured thoughts and make sense of the situation.
When he and Alicia had returned from the cottage an hour before, Gus was not surprised that the police car was still out; in Galway, Joe had left the house at all hours to settle disputes. He would return in an irritable mood, furious at whatever he had been expec
ted to deal with. Gus was convinced that his uncle had joined the police force to be provided with a constant supply of delinquents at whom he could direct his rage. As Gus waited for Joe to return, a dormant shadow rose with each hollow thump in his chest. While his father had been benevolent and his mother polite to a fault, Gus understood the anger that lay behind his uncle’s impatient movements and gruff tones. He had seen himself in those bullet-hole eyes.
A second hour passed and Gus paced the bedroom floor. Thoughts fell like snow on restless animals, unable to settle. Like a panther in an inadequate enclosure, his feet padded the floor while fierce eyes saw nothing but memory. He had worn circles into the carpet of his empty dormitory at boarding school, waiting for his parents to collect him. Enough was, apparently, enough: having scaled the front wall of the boarding block at midnight and speared his roommate’s teddy bear on the arrow-headed minute hand of the decorative wall clock, Gus was expected to return home with his parents and discuss whether he saw a future at Beckingdale. Since it was blindingly obvious that he did not, this charade was the school’s final message to Mr and Mrs Crow that their son’s behaviour was not the sole responsibility of the school. If they could not talk sense into the unsettled teenager, he would be expelled.
When he heard a knock at the dormitory door, Gus had braced himself for a mixed reception. His father, gentle as he was, would be disappointed at having to cut the trip to Portugal short to discipline his son. His mother would be unable to suppress the excitement of seeing him on his birthday, despite the lavish celebrations she had thrust upon him the weekend before. The combination of forced parental admonition and delight would be rather comical.
But Benedict and Sylvie had not come to collect him. It was his father’s twin brother who had stood awkwardly in the empty corridor. At the sight of his humourless uncle, Gus’s disappointment had been palpable. Send the police: that will straighten the boy out. He had thought better of his parents.
The journey home was endured in silence, broken only when the pair sat across from one another at the living room table. Gus braced himself for another lecture, wondering how ‘bad cop’ his uncle intended to be. His head was resting in his hands, elbows cold against the knotted oak, when Joe’s words fell.
‘Augustus, your parents have had an accident.’
Those seven words were about the extent of the information that Joe divulged. Gus interrogated the police officer for details, but Joe had the temperament of a wounded bear, and any mention of the subject was like driving a hot iron into open flesh. The more he demanded—the greater the pressure he applied—the more his uncle withdrew within himself.
The ‘accident’: two heart attacks, two minutes apart.
Gus found the lie offensive.
At first, he thought Joe was silenced by a grief so total that it numbed his every move. Receiving sidelong glances and irascible tones, he wondered if the officer resented having to welcome his nephew into that grey and joyless home. But as the months passed and Gus worked his way through three schools and four home tutors, he realised that it was another emotion that sealed his uncle’s lips: fear.
With his thoughts swirling like the contents of a snow globe, Gus probed the root of this fear. Was Joe afraid that Benedict and Sylvie’s murderers were still at large? Did he fear what Gus would do if he discovered the truth? Flurries of thought stole the spotlight of his attention for only a moment, unable to outstage the question that plagued his mind every waking hour: why were his parents murdered?
He stepped up to the window. A large moon supplemented the orange glow of street lamps, illuminating the Harrington’s empty driveway. Night had fallen and Alicia’s mother had not returned. In the snow globe that was Gus’s mind, a storm of competing questions worked him round and round the bedroom floor until the glass cracked.
It was half past nine in the evening when Joe returned. He stepped through the front door to see his nephew sitting at the living room table with a rucksack in his lap. The young man fought back a yawn as he straightened in his chair, and Joe wondered how long he had been waiting for him. Closing the door, he pulled something from the pocket of his uniform and tossed it to Gus.
‘Happy Birthday.’
With one hand on the rucksack in his lap, Gus raised the other and caught the pot of pills.
‘Latest blend,’ said Joe. ‘Eight hours of dreamless sleep.’
Gus said nothing, twirling the pot in his hand while his uncle crossed the room to the bay window. In the gloom behind closed blinds, he lifted the northern hemisphere of a large wooden globe to reveal bottles of liquor within.
‘You’re welcome,’ Joe muttered.
‘My parents died a year ago and you have told me nothing.’
Joe turned, whiskey bottle in hand, and Gus met his eyes: a sliver of blue around large pupils. Joe opened a glass-fronted cabinet beside the fireplace, withdrew a tumbler and set it on the mantelpiece.
‘And why do you think that might be?’ Joe asked, his eyes on the glass as he poured generously. Gus placed the pot on the table. The bag was heavy in his lap.
‘Because you think it will upset me? Because you think I’m too young—that I’ll do something stupid?’ He chewed his lip, tapping a foot on the carpet. What had he forgotten? Which memories did his uncle strive to keep on the dusty shelves of his mental library? ‘I don’t know, Joe. Maybe you’re responsible?’
Cold eyes held his gaze as Joe crossed the room towards him. The man’s jaw tightened, his nostrils flared and a part of Gus was drawn to that anger like a cat to the fire. Joe placed the glass of whiskey on the far end of the table and settled his hands either side. He spoke with the steeled manner of an interrogator.
‘Maybe my brother and his wife—the only two members of my goddamn family who deserve to be alive—were murdered, and I was left with the child that they were never supposed to have?’
Gus swallowed.
‘Rainn Burnflower,’ he said, and his uncle’s eyes widened a fraction. ‘Who is she?’
Joe shifted his focus to the high-backed chair, manoeuvring himself into it as though the act of sitting required his full attention. Gus gripped the outline of the object in his bag, his palms sweating. It was not too late; he could still return it.
‘I don’t know anybody by that name—’
‘I’m off.’ Gus stood abruptly, knocking the table so that the pot fell on its side and the whiskey sloshed in the glass. He slung the rucksack over his shoulder.
‘Where?’
‘Lucid dreaming club,’ he said brightly. ‘Alicia will be waiting for me.’
Gus opened the front door and his uncle rose from the chair. For a moment, the man looked defeated, and then sincerity filled his eyes and a low rumble carried across the room.
‘Your parents were murdered by a group of people more powerful than you can imagine. And I mean that in the most literal sense. These people have come for Anna Harrington. I asked her to stay out of it, but she has made up her mind. They will come for Alicia. And if you do not take your pills, these people will come for you. And there will be nothing that I, or anyone else, can do about it.’
The door caught in a breeze and slammed shut.
‘Now sit down.’
Gus’s chest tightened. He walked back to the table and gripped the back of a chair.
‘Why were they murdered?’
Joe swilled the whiskey in his glass, selecting his words like a chess master, calculating each move and their probable outcomes.
‘Because they stole a book.’
A tremor ran through Joe’s fingers and he took a long draw of the amber liquid. Gus returned to his chair and shifted the rucksack into his lap. He pulled an object from the bag and tossed it onto the table between them.
‘This book?’
Joe Crow choked on the whiskey. Suppressing a cough, he reached towards the leather cover, but his fingers did not brush the golden foil. A memory surfaced: his brother drawing an eye in the sand at Sa
lthill beach while Sylvie coaxed her infant son into the water.
‘Where did you get that?’
‘I’ll answer your questions, Uncle. When you answer mine.’
Reality check
The alarm clock by Alicia’s bed displayed 20:07. She glanced at her open door and then back at the clock. The boxy digits had not changed. Returning through the woodland, she had drilled Gus for information on Lucid Dreaming: A Beginner’s Guide, and he had described reality checking. Eager to recall what he could from the book that his uncle had confiscated, Gus explained how the dreaming brain has difficulty reconstructing numbers and text. Unlike the natural contours and textures our minds have generated for millennia, these symbols are harder to reproduce; if you look at writing on a poster or the time on a digital clock, glance away and look back again, the symbols will scramble. That’s how you know you’re dreaming.
20:08. The numbers had not scrambled, but they continued to change: another minute marking Anna’s absence. Alicia pushed the door to, leaving it open so that she might hear the front door, and kicked off her jeans. Lying back on her bed, she checked the call history on her phone: Mum (7) – unanswered. It was not uncommon for her mother to run out of battery on her phone; Alicia and Rory were not surprised when she failed to return their calls. Anna would disappear at weekends, make up some excuse about visiting relatives or attending art courses, and return with receipts from coffee shops and petrol stations that did not match her stories. When Alicia first suspected that she was searching for David, it had filled her with hope: her mother had not given up, tossing posters in the bin like it was time to move on. She talked herself through Anna’s need for discretion: what mother would give her daughter false hope? For months, Alicia swallowed the lies and cradled a flame of positivity in her chest.