Beast

by Matt Wesolowski

  —You were kindred spirits?

  —Yeah. Call it destiny. We’d both been through the ringer as well, when we lived in Ergarth. Elizabeth Barton ruined me up there, so when I first met Jason here I was scared. He knew exactly what his sister was though. She’d been abusing him since he was a little kid, but he knew that no one would believe him if he said anything. Just like George, just like Martin, just like me. The quiet ones, get reputations they can’t shake.

  I was still in touch with George, believe it or not. Despite what happened between us, we were still friends. I knew everything that was going on in Ergarth through him.

  I ask Gemma to go back again in time, to that party she held. The one that went viral on Facebook. According to Amirah Choudhury, Gemma had deliberately not invited Elizabeth Barton.

  Gemma nods.

  —This was how Elizabeth ruined your reputation, wasn’t it?

  —Yeah. That was my plan that went all wrong. The thing was, Elizabeth had left school by this point; so I couldn’t get to her that way. After I saw what she’d done to George, I realised Elizabeth was on another level. I saw how she behaved. I knew what she was and that party was just supposed to show people that, you know, there was more to life than Lizzie B – that she wasn’t everything. I was just trying to bring her down a peg or two. And look what she did to me? You know she had no actual friends, right? She had no one who she actually liked, no one she could hang out with. For her, everything was about likes and subs and … God, that’s fucking depressing isn’t it?

  —I have to say I cannot find anyone who was genuinely close to Elizabeth Barton.

  —And you won’t either. She had plenty of followers but no friends. It would be sad if she wasn’t such a monster. That car of hers – that stupid red one with the fucking eyelashes and twee bumper stickers; there were some people in Ergarth who were terrified by the sight of it. There were girls who would start physically shaking if they saw it go by; they would start checking their phones, praying that they’d not said something bad; that they’d given Elizabeth’s latest photo a like or a positive comment. It was terrifying. You know what we need to do with monsters; you’ve said it yourself on your podcast: shine a light on them. For this monster, though, the story doesn’t quite fit.

  —To be honest, the majority of people I’ve spoken to have been positive about Elizabeth.

  —That was her power. I’m surprised at you for not seeing through it. Anyway, I saw her for what she was, even if you can’t, yet. So I threw this party and I didn’t invite her. Cos I knew that would hit her where it hurt.

  Gemma explains that she had used her survival and social climbing to become quite popular at Ergarth High. Bear in mind, she tells me, she was only sixteen at the time. Elizabeth had left school by then and her YouTube videos were becoming incredibly popular. It was, Gemma thought, a good time to teach her a lesson.

  —I was in a good place at school; top of the tree, year eleven, Elizabeth was gone. I thought I was ready. I thought I had enough about me; that this might undo her a bit. But it all went wrong. I was only young. I wasn’t strong enough to tackle a creature like Elizabeth Barton yet. I also hadn’t reckoned on Solomon Meer.

  Solomon Meer has passed through Gemma’s story so far without mention. As we begin our descent from the peak of Arnos Vale, I ask Gemma about him.

  —People talk about Elizabeth weaponising George and Martin. That’s not true, she just had those two at her beck and call. It was Solomon Meer she had her claws deep inside. He was like the other two, almost completely under her spell, under her control. He would have done anything for her. In fact he did do anything for her. Including locking me in a fucking toilet at my own fucking party. George was trying to get me out – so was Martin – but it was no use. That was humiliation. That was my lowest point.

  Gemma’s voice cracks and she begins to sob. We stop under a line of trees. The cemetery spreads out below us, still and silent. A few other people are moving quietly through the graves below, and a man sits on the seat of a council lawnmower, enjoying a cigarette, the sun on his face. I allow Gemma time to compose herself.

  —Things were never the same after that party when Elizabeth invited all her followers, her ‘flying monkeys’, to destroy the house just cos she hadn’t been invited. My name was mud and the landlord went batshit at Mum. We had to move. Again. This time it was across the country to here. Luckily we settled here. But I never forgot George, and I never forgot Elizabeth fucking Barton. I never forgot what she did to me.

  These revelations, if they are true, are confusing – I’m struggling to get the story straight. George Meldby, Martin Flynn, Tommy Fellman, Jason Barton, Amirah Choudhury, Gemma Hines – they were all victims of Elizabeth Barton on her climb to the top. So far it is Jason and Gemma who have shown the most animosity to Elizabeth and I’m struggling to believe all of what they say is true. Gemma understands when I express this. Of course I don’t believe it, Gemma says, because that’s not the narrative. Popular, beautiful, powerful people, wannabe celebrities like Elizabeth Barton, aren’t vindictive. But the stories she’s told are the ones no one tells.

  Suddenly I finally feel that I’m ‘forcing the story’. I’m also starting to realise who might be its author.

  I want to move on to the night Elizabeth died. Gemma, of course, was three hundred miles away by then. But, she tells me, through the Internet, no one is really that far away.

  —Like I say, George and I were still in touch and his obsession with Elizabeth never went away. If anything, with me gone, it got even more intense.

  —Can I ask about Solomon Meer’s involvement in all this? He seems a bit of an anomaly, yet it was he who is supposed to have orchestrated Elizabeth’s death. Was that a story too?

  —It’s all a story. Everything’s a story. But stories have power – I found that out when I got in touch with Solomon Meer online.

  —You contacted Solomon Meer?

  —Maybe I’m more like Elizabeth than I think. Solomon Meer was a messed-up guy, he was vulnerable. Maybe I took advantage of that? Maybe it was for the best. In all stories, someone has to take the fall – for the greater good. That’s just how life is. I learned that the hard way. George and Martin weren’t supposed to fall too though. Blame Elizabeth for that.

  The graves we pass are squeezed together, rows of wonky grey teeth in a green gumline. Birds twitter and hop on and off the path before us.

  —I met Solomon Meer in Ergarth – everyone knew who he was. Back then though, I didn’t have anything to do with him. Then I left Ergarth and pretty much forgot about him. But then he popped up again online.

  —Destiny again?

  —It was the Dead in Six Days thing – Solomon’s famous video on YouTube. It was everywhere! I remembered how he used to talk about vampires all the time. He knew loads about them. Especially about the Beast from the East; the Ergarth Vampire. Yeah, he had his problems but I remember he had a good heart. I found him on Facebook and got in touch. Don’t ask me why – I guess I was just intrigued to see what had become of him. He was still talking vampires, but there was something else he kept saying, he was right on the money with that.

  —What do you mean, he was right?

  —The Beast from the East. Solomon kept saying that the Ergarth Vampire had returned, and he had to get rid of it. At first I thought he’d just lost it, but then I realised he’d been right all along. There was a vampire in Ergarth; it just wasn’t a vampire in the traditional sense.

  —Did Jason know you were in touch with Solomon Meer?

  —It was Jason who made the connection. He was the one who made me realise that a vampire had actually returned to Ergarth – in the form of Elizabeth Barton. The story goes that the farm lads in the legend never really killed the Ergarth Vampire. They never cut her head off. Elizabeth was its second coming.

  —And you believed that?

  —Not that there was an actual blood-sucking vampire. But it made sense in other ways. I
think Solomon took it literally though.

  —Solomon believed in vampires.

  —Solomon was already running round Ergarth Dene dressed up as a vampire on Elizabeth’s command, wasn’t he? It took some work to make him realise that she had him under her control. As vampires do.

  —I wonder if you notice the irony of what you’ve just said, Gemma.

  I think about the vulnerable, pliable Solomon Meer and wonder just how much he was being manipulated from both sides. Gemma tells me that she indulged Solomon and watched as he concocted a plausible theory. Solomon had been researching the legend of the Ergarth Vampire and had come to the conclusion it was either a Siberian vampire – an ‘Eretiki’: a sorceress who became a vampire after death – or a Ch’ing Shih – originating in the lands between China and Siberia. The Ergarth Vampire was buried in Ergarth Dene and according to lore, if a person dies far from home and is not buried there, the Ch’ing Shih will return with red eyes, curved fingernails and pale skin. It feeds off the blood of men and has a voracious sexual appetite. Whichever one he finally settled on, Solomon Meer was convinced it was up to him to destroy it.

  —Yes, I do see the irony. But you have to think to yourself, who was doing it for the right reasons? Me or her?

  I think that somewhere here, the lines between reality and fantasy became blurred for Solomon Meer and perhaps Gemma realised this. The Ergarth Vampire legend states the vampire, in whatever form it was, brought an eternal winter to the town. When the 2018 cold snap hit Ergarth, this only confirmed what Gemma was encouraging Solomon to believe: that Elizabeth Barton was the second coming of the Ergarth Vampire. As bizarre as it sounds, for Solomon Meer, it was the answer he’d been searching for all this time. It was the validation that he needed. His life suddenly had purpose. If I hadn’t spoken to Jo and found out about Solomon’s mental deterioration and his delusional behaviour, this would have been unbelievable.

  —It sounds to me, that the only person who was weaponised was Solomon Meer and not by Elizabeth.

  —I accept that yeah, it might have got out of control, if I’m honest, the vampire stuff. But did what I’d done really make a difference to what Solomon Meer thought? He was already obsessed with Elizabeth being a vampire. He was posting all over the forums about the second coming of the Beast from the East. He said he’d conducted some sort of ritual to stop her; burning flowers on her grave. He wasn’t daft enough to name her – he knew what the consequences would be of talking shit about Elizabeth online. But then the cold snap came. I never thought he’d actually do it. I got worried and I texted George about it. I told him that Solomon Meer was after Elizabeth, he wanted to kill her. George and Martin appointed themselves Elizabeth’s personal bodyguards, always keeping Solomon away from her. I know George threatened him if he went near Elizabeth again.

  —What did Solomon want to do with her?

  —I think it was a mess of fascination, adoration and hate. Those are the feelings most people had when they got close to Elizabeth Barton. Sol was more vulnerable that anyone else, though. And when someone was into her, she would encourage it, she would invite it. She loved the attention.

  —I’m still not sure why Elizabeth let Solomon Meer in, why she let him anywhere near her to be honest.

  —Solomon had got Internet-famous with his Dead in Six Days video, the one with all the dogs and the shopping trolley. That whole craze was going round Ergarth, and Elizabeth wanted a piece of that. It was that simple. He told me he was helping her make her videos and doing things for her social media; running round Ergarth dressed up as a vampire to scare people in the build up to her Dead in Six Days series.

  —I mention Jo’s sighting of Solomon lying in the snow with vampire make-up on, taking photographs of himself.

  —Honestly, he would have done anything for her. It was pathetic really.

  —What was the Dead in Six Days challenge going to culminate in?

  —It was a meme or whatever, a craze. Elizabeth made up all her own challenges. That’s what everyone did – made them up and pretend someone else had sent them. There was no ‘vampire’ – it was just a way to get popular online. Do a good video and you’ll get likes and subscribers. Everyone knew that. Elizabeth was using it to supplement her channel, she had Solomon Meer helping her do these challenge videos, and they were getting edgier and edgier. At the end there was going to be some great big thing that they’d planned. God knows what it was. Solomon Meer was useful in more ways than one; if anything went wrong while they were making the videos, he would get the blame. She was smart, I’ll give her that.

  —Elizabeth had hundreds, thousands of fans and followers, surely anyone else would have been a safer bet?

  —There was another reason she used him. He’d become the subject of Elizabeth’s next ‘project’.

  —This was going to be after Dead in Six Days, correct?

  —She was always one step ahead. Solomon Meer was more-or-less homeless. His mother wouldn’t have him in the house because of his behaviour. I think she was scared of him. He was sleeping in the bookshop, Ergarth Dene, sometimes in Tankerville Tower. He was perfect for Elizabeth.

  —What does that mean?

  —Look.

  Gemma pulls out a phone; it looks older, slightly scuffed; a crack in the screen. She unlocks it and scrolls through the photo gallery before stopping on a photograph. I reach out to look but Gemma holds it tight.

  —Just look. There’s plenty more like these.

  The pictures start off rather blurry. They’re dark and grainy. If I’m not mistaken, many have been taken inside Tankerville Tower. It’s the lower level beneath the ruined staircase and there’s a shape, coiled into a nest of muddy sleeping bags. It’s a man, hair over his face. He looks like he’s asleep. A few more, clearer now. This is Solomon Meer.

  —Look at this.

  Next is a short video clip. Meer is awake this time; he looks like he’s in a bad way, shivering and filthy, his eyes rolling back into his head and his lips muttering. If this is staged, it looks horribly authentic.

  —It gets worse.

  A second video. Longer this time. Elizabeth Barton wanders into shot. She’s dressed in immaculate woollen gloves and scarf, and is clutching a flask. She crouches in front of Solomon Meer, who takes the flask, looking at her with a puppy-dog expression. Suddenly there’s a voice; a high, girlish hiss:

  ‘Say thank you then, you prick.’

  Elizabeth whips around and glares at whoever’s holding the camera.

  —Was that…

  —George Meldby? Yes. I have them all on here.

  There’s more, a lot more. Elizabeth walking into shot with the flask from numerous different angles. Solomon Meer muttering to himself and thanking her in a reedy voice. There’s another one: Solomon Meer sat beneath the echo bridge in Ergarth Dene, filthy, wrapped in a blanket. Elizabeth walks into shot and begins to talk to the camera. A gust of wind ruins the audio and Elizabeth tells George to cut. To come closer. Now I understand the videos Jason sent me earlier.

  —These were all Elizabeth’s?

  —Of course. And there are outtakes too. Look at this.

  Gemma shows me a clip of the video I watched on the bus. This time, it’s a longer shot, and there’s sound. Elizabeth enters the alleyway, her face a mask of benevolent concern. I realise now that whoever was shooting it was crouched on the floor, behind the bins in the alleyway. It’s slightly lighter in this one, and as Elizabeth gets close, she proffers a steaming cup of something, her perfectly painted lips now smiling. She is genuinely beautiful.

  A grimy hand reaches up to take the cup. Then there’s a cough from somewhere. Elizabeth’s face switches instantly into a snarl and she looks around. A hulking figure is visible in the periphery. Elizabeth stands up.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Martin!’ Elizabeth says, her eyes rolling. ‘Go and get yourself a fucking sandwich or something.’

  Martin Flynn grunts and moves out of shot. Elizabeth stands up straight a
nd takes a drink from the cup, sighing dramatically. She looks back into the camera. Gone is any sort of beauty from earlier. The difference is striking.

  ‘Maybe you’ll actually get to have a little drink this time,’ she says, her voice thick with poison. ‘Can you do something with your hand? Make it look a bit more…’

  The camera moves down and out of focus; there’s an unpleasant scraping noise.

  ‘Is that any good?’

  ‘Not bad. Can you make it bleed a bit more?’

  ‘Sure.’

  More scraping. The camera moves up again and we see Elizabeth nodding. She turns to the camera.

  ‘Turn it off, then.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  I don’t recognise the other voice. Gemma smiles and shakes her head.

  —One more?

  This time Elizabeth is being filmed from the side. She’s walking down the alleyway again, no Martin Flynn in sight. I realise I’m holding my breath as Elizabeth bends down. There, in a nest of old blankets and newspapers is Solomon Meer. He reaches up for the steaming cup and Elizabeth holds it just out of reach. The knuckles of one of his hands is red raw, a little blood trickling down between his fingers. Elizabeth’s face has slipped again as she turns to the camera.