“You should have.”
“Oh, believe me, I shouldn’t have,” I said, smiling.
“So tell me what they said. Pretend it’s 1985 again, we’re at school and now’s your chance to tell me everything you ever want to tell me.”
“No. I don’t want to talk anymore.”
We shared a first kiss that was twenty-five years in the making.
* * *
“I wanted you to hold me when we got off the Big Wheel,” she said. She wasn’t looking at me. “You have no idea. I was so frightened. Lost. But you pushed me away.”
I didn’t remember that. It’s funny how one person’s memories can differ so much from another’s. I can remember the music playing on the rides and the sugar rush of the candy floss cloying in my throat, and remember the fortune the robotic swami fortune-teller gave me, but I can’t remember the most beautiful girl in school reaching out wanting to hold me. “I must have been in shock,” I said, rolling over onto one elbow and leaning down to kiss her.
I wanted to stop her talking.
I didn’t want to think about Spider kissing her before he fell so I kissed her again, a little more forcefully this time, knowing that once we got out of bed the real world would return and more likely than not I’d never get to do this again. I wasn’t sure if I wanted that, but I did know I wanted to remember every single detail, every sensation, from the look in her eyes while I was inside her to the feel of her breath on my skin and our sweat cooling together between us, just in case.
If it was going to have to last me a lifetime, I wanted to be able to remember it all. I wanted it to be perfect. No nerves this time. No “I can’t believe this is happening” flutters. No ghosts in the bed with us. No ’80s music to keep them alive in our minds. Just us, naked in so many ways. And maybe because of that there was something incredibly sad about it this time.
Afterward we lay in silence, both of us knowing the other was lost for words, and not in a good way. We couldn’t go back to small talk and we couldn’t make plans. It was the time during a one-night stand when the smart move was slipping out the back door, but I couldn’t do that either.
So I lay there and the awkward fifteen-year-old ghosts got back into bed with us.
Rachel kept the duvet up around her neck to make sure I couldn’t catch a glimpse of stray skin.
I thought about kissing her again, but even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have. It would have felt wrong. I felt vulnerable lying there in the tangled sheets. I wanted a shower but I wanted to keep her on my skin for a few more minutes too. I didn’t regret what had happened, but I was suddenly very conscious of the idea that some dreams shouldn’t come true.
I was just beginning to realize that so much of our shared history was actually just my story—stuff that had happened to me, stuff that I’d thought about, stuff that had worried me, got me down, raised my hopes, stuff that had seemed so important and had seemed to have been all about the people around me was actually just all about me. That’s a hard thing to realize, that I might not have been as important to her youth as she was to mine. All those memories I had really were just my filter. My perceptions. My emotions. But then, it was my life, wasn’t it?
“You okay?” I asked, hoping she wasn’t silently wrestling with regret. It’s not fun to think someone might regret sleeping with you.
She turned to face me and I still couldn’t tell until she smiled.
“Coffee?” she asked.
I looked at the curtains, the vee of sunlight creeping in. “No rush.”
“Got to make a start clearing up the bar,” Rachel said. “I told Kenny to make himself scarce last night. I couldn’t very well ask him to clean up as well as run the bar on his own. The peasants would revolt.”
“I’ll give you a hand,” I volunteered.
She snuggled into my chest. So maybe the only ghosts had been mine? I never could judge what was going on in the mind of a woman. “Have you got things you need to do today?”
“I was thinking of looking up a couple of old friends, see if I can find out what happened to Scotty.”
“You want to have a word with Gary Shannon. He used to check in on him for a while, I think. I know he was the one who convinced him to check into the hospital.”
“Gazza?” He had been at the fair that night, but after the whole thing with cleaning Old Man Harrison’s yard, he hadn’t been with us.
I remembered him putting on his headphones as he stormed off. Funny the things that stay with you.
“I don’t think Gary’s wife was too happy with him hanging around with him, but it’s difficult, you know, going to school together, being the ones that stay behind, you’re bonded. I can understand that.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
She gave me directions to a cottage near the village school.
It meant driving close to Mum’s, and that meant dropping in to say hello. Otherwise the twitching curtain brigade would have told her I’d been by without saying hello, and life wouldn’t have been worth living.
“You going to come back later?” Rachel asked.
The million-pound question.
I looked at her lying there on one elbow, looking up at me, the girl from twenty-five years ago, the woman from last night, and said, “Only if you want me to.”
And realized that despite everything I really wanted her to.
17
Present Day
I found Gazza working in his front garden.
The cottage was small but immaculately kept unlike the next one along, which lay empty and needed a lot of TLC. A FOR SALE sign lay in long, untended grass.
“I wondered how long it would take you to get to me,” he said, barely looking up from his work.
“You knew I was back then?”
“Ha! It’s not that often the Prodigal Son comes home, is it? Has your mum killed a fatted calf in your honor?”
I hoped he was joking.
He knew no more about my family life than I knew about his. Some families are harder to deal with than others. Mine was one of those. I really didn’t want to talk about it.
“I came back to see Scotty.”
He put down the strimmer he’d been using to clip the edge of his lawn, and leaned it against the fence. He straightened up and turned to face me. “Well, maybe if you’d come back to see him sooner, he might not be in the hospital.”
“I didn’t put him there,” I said.
“Maybe not, but you let him down. Least that’s the way he sees it.”
“How do you make that out?”
Gazza looked up and down the street. I realized he was checking to see if there was anyone else around. We were alone. There was the sound of laughter in the distance, but no one close enough to hear what we were saying.
He didn’t answer my question.
“Do you remember the day we did all those jobs to get some money together to go to the fair?”
“Of course I do.”
“And you remember I didn’t want us to go to Old Man Harrison’s house?”
I didn’t remember it quite like that. I remembered him stomping off because it looked like we weren’t going to get paid for it, but I didn’t remember him putting up a big fight to stop us before that. That didn’t mean it didn’t happen that way, of course. At least for him. Sometimes we just remember things slightly differently, and with twenty-five years between then and now it was quite possible neither of our memories were 100%. Didn’t they say memory was unreliable at the best of times?
He waited for me to answer.
I nodded.
“There was a reason I didn’t want to go there, but no one wanted to listen to what I had to say.”
“You were just worried about us not getting paid. I remember that. And I guess you were right.”
“It wasn’t about the money,” he said.
He picked up the strimmer again and I thought for a moment that he wasn’t going to tell me what it was about then.<
br />
Instead, he invited me inside.
I followed him through the green painted door, along a narrow hallway and into a decent-sized kitchen-diner.
He nodded to the table, inviting me to take a seat, and then opened the back door and put the strimmer down on some sheets of newspaper.
It was all very domestic.
I scraped the chair legs a little too heavily on the flag-stoned floor, earning a disapproving look from my old mate. He checked the kettle to make sure there was enough water in it before flicking the switch to turn it on. Like I said, domesticated.
“So, are you going to tell me about Old Man Harrison?”
Gazza pulled another chair back and sat down.
He really had aged a lot since I’d last seen him, though not in the same way Scotty had. In the dimmer kitchen light I could see the lines around his eyes and the deeper creases along his forehead. This was the leathery face of a man who spent a lot of his time in the outdoors. He was in no hurry to talk even though we were very much on his territory now.
“You never heard the stories about him?” he asked eventually.
I shrugged. “I remember stuff about the cats. He was an odd ball. Bit of a miserable git; the sort of man who’d burst a football if it went into his garden and chase you with his walking stick if you tried to sneak in to get it back.”
“He was a pervert,” Gazza said. He looked at me, properly, right in the eye. “He got me to go into the house once. I had to kick him in the nuts to get out.”
I didn’t know what to say to him. I’d certainly had no idea the old man had been like that. “Did you tell anyone?”
“Sure, I told my dad.” I remembered Gazza’s dad, a quiet man who never seemed to have anything to say. “He gave me a clip round the ear and accused me of making it up.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, but maybe you can understand why I didn’t want to be anywhere near that place? I didn’t want Scotty to go into that house because I knew what the old man would do to him.”
“Scotty could look after himself.”
“Could he? Do you really think so? You’ve seen him. Does he look like a man who could look after himself?”
“Well, not now,” I said.
“Yeah, well you ask me we’ve all become what that summer made us.”
The kettle finished boiling.
He made a cup of instant coffee and put a mug in front of me without asking if I wanted milk or sugar.
“You mean what happened to Spider and the Big Wheel?” I wondered if Scotty had told him anything about what had happened to us down in the tunnel under the Batters, but I wasn’t about to so much as hint about it until I was sure what he had and hadn’t been told.
“Spider? That wasn’t Spider on the Big Wheel,” he said, shaking his head.
“Of course it was. We even walked across the common to the fair with him when he cooked up his grand plan.”
Gazza put his mug down on a beer mat he was using as a coaster. “You really have no idea, do you? Spider went back to Old Man Harrison’s house the next day to try to get him to cough up. He didn’t think Scotty had tried hard enough to get cash out of him and we’d worked our bollocks off. I tried to stop him, but he was having none of it. He was going to have it out with Harrison and that was that.” He lowered eyes to his mug and stared into the coffee. There were no grounds, so I couldn’t imagine him finding any answers down there. “I waited outside,” he said and I realized he was ashamed he had not gone in with him. I could understand that. “I’ve got no idea. I waited and waited, but he didn’t come out. Then I saw you and Scotty over on the Batters and didn’t want either of you to see me hanging around outside Old Man Harrison’s so I scarpered. I saw him again a few hours later and he never said a word about it. It was like he’d forgotten I’d been waiting for him. He wasn’t the same.”
“How do you mean, not the same?”
“Not the same as in different. Sure it looked like him, but it wasn’t him. He just wasn’t the same. Ask Scotty what he saw inside the house and he’ll tell you he’s not sure. Whatever it was kept changing.”
“I don’t understand. Spider fell off the Big Wheel. He couldn’t change. He couldn’t have gone into Harrison’s and come out a new…what?”
“I don’t know, but that’s why Scotty had to go back into those tunnels.”
So he did know about it. “He told you what happened, then?”
“Eventually. But he didn’t get down there again until after he’d bought that old house for himself. He found a way into the tunnels through the cellar. Didn’t he tell you all about it when you went to see him?”
“How did you know I’d been to see him?”
“Because, unlike some, I don’t leave it twenty-five years to see how he’s doing. I ring every day. Either talk to the nurses or to him.” It was basically an accusation. I suppose I deserved it. It was hard to argue differently. But part of me just wanted to say, look, I’ve come, isn’t that enough?
“No,” I admitted. “He just kept saying that he’d seen him again.”
“Seen who?” Now Gazza was suddenly alert. “Who did he tell you he had seen?”
“That’s just it, he didn’t say. When we went down into the tunnels that time, we killed something. Did he tell you that?” I shook my head. “I don’t know what it was. It was dark. It came through a door at us. It just came. It happened so fast. So when he said he’d seen him, that’s what I thought he meant. Why else would he be asking for me?”
“But he said ‘him,’ didn’t he? He didn’t say ‘it.’ So that must mean he’d seen a man.”
“I guess.”
“I’m not guessing. He’d seen Spider.”
“Spider? But…” I shook my head again. “He’s not dead?”
18
Present Day
The god of sons-not-wanting-to-talk-to-their-mothers smiled down on me.
There was no one home.
Mum had left a key under the plant pot. She always did and probably half the village knew it was there. It was the same with half the houses in the village. I’d never had a key of my own because they’d never trusted me not to lose it, but it was fine to just leave it lying in the street by the very door it was supposed to open? That’s the difference between villages and cities. I used to live in a part of Manchester when I was a student where they joked if you left your door open to walk to the corner shop for a paper and a Mars Bar you’d be cleaned out before you got back. And like every good joke there was more than a grain of truth in it.
The kettle was still warm.
She couldn’t have been gone long. But knowing Mum she wouldn’t be back for a while. She had her routines. I needed a little time on my own to think about everything I had been told over the last couple of days. It was hard to wrap my head around it all: what was the truth and what wasn’t. I wasn’t even sure I could trust myself to remember it all right.
I needed a shower.
Showers are good for the soul and my soul was in need of some TLC, for sure. I set it running, leaving it a few minutes to warm up while I stripped off and sorted out clean towels. Then stood under it for ten minutes as red-hot needles struck my skin, washing away the surface of memory that was blocking the way to the truth and the bathroom mirror steamed up. The water felt good. Pure. It was like some sort of cleansing ritual.
I leaned forward, resting my arm against the ceramic tiles and let the water pour down over my head and reenacted yet again that visit down into the tunnels under the Batters.
Had my recollection changed over time?
Had I constructed a new memory to mask the horror of what we’d really done down there?
I was beginning to believe we had.
And it frightened me.
Parts still refused to reveal themselves, but I was beginning to think I might remember something different, the same events but not quite. And they were different enough for me to know that Gazza might have been telling th
e truth about Spider and everything else.
But…
I don’t know why I even doubted myself. I already knew that just about anything was possible; if there was a creature like nothing we had seen before, a creature that had lived down there under the Batters all this time, then why shouldn’t it be able to change shape?
Why couldn’t it appear as someone else?
It was a dangerous thought and threatened so much I thought I knew.
And then it struck me: how could I be sure Gazza wasn’t the creature? I dismissed that one quickly—after all, he was the one who had told me about it. But then it could have been a double bluff if he was the creature in human form, making me discount him?
What if I had spent the night with that thing in the shape of Rachel? What if I’d been curled up in the bed with a monster beside me, its skin against my skin? What if I had been inside it? Could it drain something from me? Feed on me? I shuddered to think. The possibilities were jumbling over and over but they were all just panics. There was only one real candidate if there was something monstrous walking around pretending to be human: Scotty.
19
1985
The thing burst through the door in a flash of movement in darkness; blackness in shadow. So fast. My heart hammered in my chest. Blood pounded in my ears. I was dizzy with fear.
Scotty dropped the flashlight.
It’d only given us the briefest of glimpse of itself.
That was more than enough.
That single moment was enough for me to see what had come through the door—or rather who—and even though I screamed at Scotty not to shoot, he fired blindly before being slammed to the ground.
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