by Will Harker
A curse, an apology, a question—I can’t say what he called after me. My mind was reeling, my blood pounding almost in time to the roar of the fair. I headed straight for it, desperate for its numbing clamour to envelop me. To hide me. What if someone had seen Nick and me together in that moment? And what if they then happened to mention it to Haz? This unexpected intrusion of my old life made me nervous. And yet it wasn’t only those years I had spent doing Mark Noonan’s dirty work, nor the intimacy I’d shared with Nick that unsettled me. For weeks now, things hadn’t been right between me and Haz, and I had no idea why. All I sensed was that we were hanging on by the slimmest thread and that it wouldn’t take much to sever it entirely.
I came to a stop. Tried to let my thoughts settle. The first of the crowds were streaming in, squeaking and squabbling as they always do. In a few days, this Halloween event would be over, I told myself. The fair would move on and us with it. Nicholas Holloway and all he represented would be gone. Then there would be time for Haz and me to talk, to figure things out, to start again.
I wanted that, didn’t I?
I started shouldering my way between the throng. Travellers called out greetings from their stalls and in answer I plastered on the most convincing smile I could. Turning a corner, I found the kiddie’s carousel we had rented from my dad, gleaming and ready for the night’s trade. Sal Myers and her daughter Jodie straightened up from their work, my goddaughter flicking a wet sponge in my direction. Buckets of soapy water stood at their feet, suds sprinkled in their matching auburn hair. I came over and cupped Jodie’s raw little hands in mine, rubbing warmth into them.
“You didn’t have to do this,” I said.
“Someone had to,” Sal muttered. “The ride looked a proper state before Jodes and I got to work. Didn’t it, love?”
The mirror image of her mother, Jodie treated me to an identical scowl. Then that pixie face cracked into the biggest grin and she tugged at my sleeve. “Wanna hear the song I’ve been practising with Uncle Haz?”
Not waiting for an answer, she launched into a surprisingly soulful rendition of Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen. Even Sal stopped glaring at me for a full ninety seconds. As Jodie hit the final note, me, her mother, and a passing family all broke into spontaneous applause. Haz had worked his usual wonders and it was pretty clear that the munchkin had found her forte. She’d certainly abandoned her former ambition of following in my footsteps and becoming a detective. Smart girl.
“Where is Haz?” I asked, leaning in and tweaking her nose.
I looked up to find Sal gazing at my knuckles. Specifically at the burn marks from the wet bedsheet.
“I need you to go back to the trailer and put the buckets away, sweetheart,” she said, her eyes still on my fists. When Jodie started to moan, Sal threw her the kind of look that turned pissed-up punters sober on the spot. I gave the little girl a reassuring wink and she sighed glumly and heaved away at the first bucket, dirty suds splashing her dungarees.
“So,” Sal said when her daughter was out of earshot. “Been finding trouble again?”
“Just a tussle with the laundry.”
“You know something, Scott, I… Yes, what?” A customer had approached with two small kids, asking if the carousel was open yet. That forbidding stare soon sent them scuttling. Sal then marched straight over and prodded me in the shoulder. The very spot where Nick had landed his jab. I winced. If anyone possessed true psychic abilities, it was probably my oldest friend. “If you’re pulling your usual shit, I will end you,” she said. “And don’t even begin to say you don’t know what I’m talking about. Just because we haven’t all interrogated you about Bradbury End doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten. Not me, not your dad, and most of all not that doe-eyed puppy dog you’re lucky enough to call your boyfriend.”
She was right. Haz hadn’t asked about any of it. Not a single question since I’d found him waiting for me on Travellers Bridge the night Lenny Kerrigan had died. He knew Garris had blackmailed him for a purpose, he knew the historian Gerald Roebuck had mysteriously disappeared, and he knew I’d been investigating something tied to the tragedy of the Jericho freaks. And that was all he wanted to know. I wasn’t surprised. It had always been in Haz’s nature to shy away from upsetting truths. It was, in fact, the reason he had rejected me after he’d killed his father. But Harry Moorhouse was no fool.
I remembered him visiting the hospital following Kerrigan’s attack on me and saying, “How is this ever going to end? He could have killed you.” More unspoken truths. More secrets, growing like weeds between us.
But Haz wasn’t the only one avoiding questions. As Sal had said, no one on the fair had pried into those final days in Bradbury. Except that wasn’t quite true. After Kerrigan had been reported missing, my dad had come to find me. By then we’d accepted his offer of travelling with the fair and I’d been busy setting up the children’s carousel he’d rented us to make our living.
“I’ll ask you once,” he’d said, leaning on a merry-go-round horse, his expression neutral. “Did you do for him?”
I had told him, “No,” and that was the end of the matter.
“Nothing’s going on,” I now assured Sal. “Not like in Bradbury anyway.”
She searched my face for a moment before nodding. “Then tell me what’s wrong between you and Harry.”
“What do you mean?” I stared at her. “Has he said something?”
“He doesn’t need to,” she sighed. “That boy wears his pain in his eyes.”
I looked up into the smoky darkness. No stars there, no light of any kind, except the pulsing heartbeat of the fairground. Sal knuckled my chin.
“I’m worried about the pair of you. You’ve seemed so distant recently.” She had spoken softly but her old edge soon returned. “Bloody hell, Scott, why do you have to be so… You?” She swatted my shoulder and I grimaced again. “I’m here if you need to talk, all right?”
“Talk about what?”
We both turned around like a pair of guilty schoolkids.
Haz stood with his long, nervous fingers twining between the drawstring of his canary-yellow cagoule. At first, I thought he might have been crying, but then he wiped his eyes and said something about the smoke from the burger truck. Those gentle jade eyes, crinkling at their edges as he looked at me. Not quite a smile. We seemed stuck for a moment until eventually, he came over and I wrapped my arms around him, kissing that mop of mousey brown hair. It felt almost paternal, not the sort of embrace shared by lovers.
“Where’ve you been?”
“Choir practice,” he said, pulling away and showing me his music bag. “I told you this morning. We ran over a bit, I'm sorry.”
I nodded. Our circuit for the fair had been pretty limited lately and Haz had found a choir group in a nearby town. He’d even started composing again. In fact, his face only seemed to light up these days when he spoke about his music.
“Oh God,” he said, glancing at Sal’s grimy work dungarees and then at the spotless carousel. “I’m sorry, have you done all this? And I’m late for opening night as well. I really am the worst joskin-turned-traveller ever.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Knowing Sal, she’ll have already decided on how we can pay her back. Anyway, you head to the trailer and have a wash. I’ll open up and then—”
“Opening can wait,” my dad’s voice, the word of God itself on the fair, called out to us. We turned to find him and Big Sam Urnshaw steaming in our direction.
“I don’t like the look of this,” Sal murmured.
She was right. There was something stony and relentless in my father’s expression. A look that I had seen before and which never failed to remind me of his contained fury after my mother’s death. Others had seen it in different situations and it always signalled one thing—someone from outside had harmed one of his people. That look. It almost made me feel sorry for whoever had been so foolish.
CHAPTER SEVEN
My dad and Big Sam ap
proached and together with Sal and Haz we formed a circle.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
Dad wiped a finger across his salt-and-pepper moustache while Sam ground his teeth. Like most large, loud men he was a sentimental soul and I could see the emotion shimmering in his eyes. But his cheeks were dry and so it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. No one was dead, at least.
“It’s Aunt Tilda,” Dad said. “Something’s upset her.”
I almost laughed. Something upset Aunt Tilda on an almost daily basis: chavvies playing too boisterously around her trailer; Joskins and their ‘strange gorger smells’; the price of teabags was enough to launch her into fits. Dad must have seen my scepticism and shot me a baleful glare.
“It ain’t no moody bollocks,” he barked. “I find out who did this and they’ll be in their box and buried ahead of time, I swear. It’s a wicked trick to play on an old girl.”
Haz reached out and laid a comforting hand on the back of my father’s. It was amazing really. If I’d done such a thing, the old man might have belted me one. As it turned out, he just smiled and gave my boyfriend a grateful nod.
“I’m all right, son,” he said. “But Tilda ain’t. She’s asking to see you. Both of you.”
“Me too?” Haz asked in a wondering tone.
“You come as a pair now, don’t you?” Big Sam grunted. “Sal, would you be all right looking after the juvenile until they come back?”
“Course.” Sal nodded, unconsciously patting the head of a carousel lion. “Tell Aunt Tils I asked after her.”
Without another word, my dad turned and led us through the crowds towards the quieter end of the ground. It was a spectacle that never failed to astound me, how punters would automatically make a path for him, as if they knew on an instinctive level that he was the master of the show. As we walked, I shot a few questions at Big Sam but he said it would be better if I saw for myself. I knew this was the old man’s instruction, and I suppose it made me proud. He understood how I liked to approach a puzzle, fresh-minded and without preconceptions.
A puzzle. The word resounded in my head. This was what Garris had said I needed. I thought back to how I had questioned Miss Rowell about Purley Rectory and its ghosts, probing her strong but weirdly abstract revulsion for Darrel Everwood, then interrogating Nick about Everwood’s morbid certainty that he would die if he came here. Unconsciously, perhaps, I had been seeking a problem.
I looked again at Haz. Here was another.
“How was practice?” I asked.
“Fine.” He nodded. “Good.”
“Still working on that Mozart piece?”
“Yes. Lacrimosa.”
“Remind me of those lyrics again.”
“I’m not sure—”
“The ones you sang for me a few nights ago,” I persisted. “You remember.”
He cut his gaze away. “Lacrimosa dies illa; Qua resurget ex favilla; Judicandus homo reus.” He spoke in a sing-song voice but without its usual melody. “Full of tears will be that day; When from the ashes shall arise; The guilty man to be judged.”
“The guilty man,” I echoed and thought again of how he had so ostentatiously shown us his music bag when I asked where he’d been.
I kept him in view for the remainder of our walk to Aunt Tilda’s. A blaze of colour in those endless cheekbones, his shoulders slumped. I wanted to reach for him, to ask what was wrong, but fear kept my hands at my sides. If I pushed too hard, that final thread might snap and then what would become of us?
We came at last to the red-and-white striped tent, set a little apart, on Aunt Tilda’s orders, from the other stalls. Apparently, it gave the impression that even her fellow Travellers (who were under strict instructions to bring her tea and sandwiches only when there were no punters about—their joskin smell putting her off her scran, so she said) were a little afraid of her, adding to Madam Tilda’s allure.
A sign outside the tent did the business too: LOVE! DESTINY! FATE! MYSTICAL PROGNOSTICATIONS—FORTUNETELLING, CRYSTAL BALL-GAZING, PALM-READING, TAROT CARDS. ENTER NOW AND MEET THE FUTURE!
The antiquated charm of the fortune teller’s tent was a rare sight on modern fairs. My dad, who could never be accused of being a sentimentalist where money was concerned, nevertheless gave Tilda her pitch practically rent-free. She had been a friend of my mum’s and I still had fond memories of them together, shelling peas on their trailer steps, trading gossip between each other like a game of pass the parcel.
Pushing aside the damp canvas flaps, Dad led us into the tent. Almost at once the chaos outside was muted. Here incense fragranced the air while lamps shaded with coloured veils cast an eerie light across the painted enlargements of tarot cards that hung around the walls. These consisted of the usual suspects: the Sun, the Moon, the Devil, the Hanged Man, the Wheel of Fortune, the Hermit, the Lovers, the Fool and the rest. An obligatory crystal ball sat at the centre of a circular table that was covered in a red damask cloth. The only incongruous detail was a small electric heater gasping away beside Tilda’s high-backed chair.
The mystic herself rose to greet us. A small, hunched figure, her stubby fingers mounted with rings up to the second knuckle, Aunt Tilda possessed a wide, generous mouth, her blonde hair only now turning grey in her seventy-third year. She walked with a stick in her right hand, and just occasionally her features would tuck up with pain. A case of crippling arthritis meant she rarely stood if she could help it.
“You wanted to see us, Aunt Tils?” I said.
I bent down so that she could kiss both my cheeks. She then moved on to Haz.
“Ain’t he got an handsome mooie, this mush,” she said, her voice redolent of forty-a-day habit.
“She says you’ve got a nice face,” I translated for Haz. Old-timers like Tilda used the secret Traveller tongue more than most and some of her words were a mystery, even to me.
Turning a gummy gaze upon us, her expression darkened. “Someone broke into me tent this afternoon. Didn’t chor nothing but left me a little treat.” She waved me closer. “You ain’t got the sight, Scott Jericho, but you can see almost as well as any genuine dukkerer. I wanted your opinion on it.”
She swept her hand towards a small wax figurine laying beside the crystal ball on her table. It was a crude effigy, childish in its way, and yet horribly sinister. For one thing, the face was featureless and had, in fact, been spooned out so that all that remained was a shallow well carved into the head. Steel sewing needles peppered the rest of the body like the quills of a porcupine, while the arms of the figure appeared a little foreshortened. Attached to the left leg was a scrap of paper with ‘Ex 22:18’ shakily inscribed in pencil and below this, a sort of floral design encompassed by a circle.
While I took in these details, I sensed Haz beside me on his phone. He stiffened, and leaning in, whispered: ‘It’s a Biblical citation. The Book of Exodus, chapter twenty-two, verse eighteen. In the King James version, it says—”
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” Tilda croaked, hobbling back to her chair. Haz went to kneel beside the old woman, folding her arthritically twisted hands between his.
Meanwhile, I followed Haz’s example and Googled the six-petal flower motif drawn below the citation. It was a relatively obscure symbol, but I found it eventually.
“It’s called a hexafoil,” I said, turning to Big Sam and my dad. “Designed after the lily to represent purity. Apparently, they often used it in Gothic architecture as a sign of protection.”
Tilda stirred. “Also known as a witch mark, used by some of the old religions to guard against witchcraft and the evil eye. And then there’s the poppet.” She hovered her hand just above the needles that forested the doll. “Folk magic used to cause harm to whoever the doll is meant to represent. All makes a pretty pattern with the Bible passage, doesn’t it?” She looked at Haz and winked. “Someone doesn’t like me much.”
“When was it left here?” I asked.
Big Sam answered. “Sam Jun
ior and a few of the chaps set up auntie’s tent an hour ago. She came to inspect it and found that nasty thing on the table.”
My gaze roamed around the interior. The tent had been securely anchored down on the outside, no one could have got under it. “Were the flaps tied up when you came to do your inspection, Auntie?”
She shook her head.
“The boys forgot both the ties and the padlocks.” Big Sam grunted. “I’ll have their guts for bloody garters.”
Approaching the table, I knelt and examined the effigy from every angle before picking it up. “Anyone touched it?”
My dad came over. “Tilda says not.”
“No fingerprints,” I murmured, turning it over carefully in my hand. “Must’ve used gloves of some kind to mould it.”
“Does that worry you?”
“I’m not sure. It shows a certain premeditation. As if it isn’t intended to be a single act. As if there could be a sequel. Is there any CCTV running here?”
“Nothing much worth nicking in this corner of the fair,” Dad said. “So no. But look, don’t you think it’s probably just some stupid game? Maybe the local farm kids getting their own back. They’ve been rucking with our chavvies ever since we got here.” He lowered his voice. “Maybe they thought they’d give one of us a good scare as payback.”
“They’d have to do better than that,” Tilda snapped.
I smiled. I was pretty sure that most of Madam Tilda’s gift was down to her sharp ears, listening into the hopes, dreams, and anxieties of her punters as they queued outside her tent. But when I looked again at the effigy, my smile died.
“I don’t know, Dad. This? It seems consciously ritualistic. Perhaps even overdone to a certain extent—the Bible quote mixed up with the poppet doll and the hexafoil. A jumble of ideas from different sources. But still, there’s nothing rushed or playful or giddy in it, like some kid’s revenge. I mean, would a bunch of children even know what a hexafoil was?”
“So what do we do?” Dad asked. “Call in the gavvers?”