by Julia Jones
“I only want to go to bed. Can’t you ever leave me alone!”
Her mum hurt and retreating. “I could bring you up a nice warm drink? Hot water bottle?”
Angel ran for the stairs.
“Don’t forget to put your uniform in the laundry basket,” her mum called after her. She was narky now. “I’ll want to take your blazer to the cleaners while you’re on half-term.”
Angel made it to her room and slammed the door. She leaned against it wishing, like she wished every night, that they’d let her have a lock.
Of course she wasn’t going to read. Reading was really hard, even with all them special cards and overlays. She didn’t understand how everyone else could do it so easily. Downstairs was completely stuffed with books and her dad went to work in a Records Office where he did nothing all day except read and sort out papers and scan things into files. Her mum had been an assistant librarian before she’d had to give up work to care for Angel. She didn’t see how them two top-grade readers had produced her.
They probably didn’t see it either. Something had gone badly wrong.
In bed at last she curled herself tight, clutched the grubby doll she’d had all her life and allowed her body to tremble. She was freezing cold and at the same time hot. Whether she shut her eyes or opened them she couldn’t stop looking at that man lying on the pebbles with the boat on top of him. Crushing him. She wondered what he’d looked like when they got him out.
If they had.
She should have stayed.
That blue light. Hurt her. She could have had one of her turns.
She’d probably get put in prison if they found out she was there. Angel had been in trouble before. She’d been in trouble most of her life. But this was trouble in a different league. She’d never go down the skate-park again. Never go near them boats.
She was home now. And if she didn’t blab there wouldn’t anybody find out. The man hadn’t opened his eyes and the lads weren’t going to tell.
The paramedics would look after him. They’d have blankets and they’d give him oxygen or something. Then they’d call the boatyard or the firemen to come and lift the yellow boat. They had all the gear. And the hospital wasn’t far. Not if they hurried. He’d be there quicker than she’d got home.
But if she couldn’t ask, she’d never know for certain that he was okay.
There was a banging on the front door. The bell rang.
Too loud. Too long.
Angel lay rigid. Straining every nerve. She should have told her mum and dad.
She heard the TV go off and the front door open. Then she heard giggling and shouts.
“Trick or treat, missus! Trick or treat!”
***
This wasn’t the Land of Legends. This was Worst Dreams Come True.
His dad had forgotten he was coming. Forgotten that their holiday had started today.
Luke had made the tea and it had gone cold. He had unpacked his clothes and put them away in the locker; had laid out his sleeping bag and folded a blanket over it.
He hadn’t brought his Nintendo. It was part of the special deal for this week. Lottie thought he played fantasy games too much and Anna said she wished she’d never given it to him. Which was so unfair when she was always on her iPhone or her laptop.
Lowestoft Lass didn’t have TV. She didn’t have mains electricity though she would one day. There was a 12V system that worked off a battery but you had to run the engine to keep the battery topped up and Bill only did that once a week. He said he was going to fit a solar panel but he hadn’t done it yet. His first priority was to make her leak-proof for the winter. Fitted boat covers were expensive so he’d bought tarpaulins. He said he’d need Luke to help him put them on. The tarpaulins were folded ready on the foredeck together with a coil of long, thin rope. It was one of the jobs they had planned to do.
But Bill wasn’t here.
He’d finished work, must have done, and he hadn’t come home. Maybe he’d stopped somewhere for a pie and a pint. He didn’t drink much these days but there were shanty-nights at the Red Lion pub and Bill liked to join in with his concertina. Luke didn’t think shanty-nights happened on Fridays but he didn’t really know.
There was lots he didn’t know about his dad. Like would he have his phone switched on if he’d gone to play his concertina?
If Luke wanted to try and phone his dad he’d have to go back up the hill and through that wood again to get reception. And now it was completely dark outside – except for those horrible grinning pumpkins.
How had he ever thought that Halloween was fun?
Luke decided that he’d just as soon wait. His dad would have to be back when the Red Lion closed. He’d got the wrong day. That was all.
***
In the deep metal hold of Drie Vrouwen, Hendrike was manic. She hadn’t taken any of the dried mushroom but she was still getting visions. It didn’t seem that she could control them any more.
Helen tried not to show that she was frightened. The only way to deal with her mum in this mood was to keep very calm and do everything she said. Do it as soon as she said it but without getting shaky or rushing, That just wound her mum up more.
They kept chickens in the forepeak on board Drie Vrouwen. Hendrike had packed their coop with straw and ferried them across the Noordzee. Most of the hens were there to lay eggs but every two weeks, Hendrike chose and killed one and then she plucked it and took its insides out and they ate it. When they’d eaten the meat she boiled everything else into stock for soup together with the potatoes and the dried peas and the strings of onions and the root vegetables from the sacks that were almost empty.
They had been here since Lughnasadh and now it was Samhain. They had made their own bread, caught and eaten little fish, harvested samphire from the marsh, nuts and berries from the hedgerows. Three months and there was only one chicken and the cockerel left. The wheat for their feed wouldn’t last much longer.
Soon they would complete their task and then, on the top of the highest tide, they could leave this muddy creek and return home. Helen dreamed of home as a neat little house in a row of other, identical, neat little houses but she knew that was only a dream.
Even the cheapest canals in Amsterdam would be better than this. Her mum would be given her job back and then she and Elsevier could be as weird as they liked because Helen would be going to school and to the rowing club and out with her friends and there would be cycle tracks and shops – and hygiene.
Hendrike’s hair was white. It had used to be the colour of dirty sand. Then she started dying it to make it pale gold like Helen’s but something had gone wrong and there wasn’t any colour left at all. During the day she wore it in two plaits coiled either side of her head. Tonight Hendrike had combed her hair so it spread like a cape over her shoulders and down her back. She told Helen to go to the forepeak and bring Leo, the cockerel, to the cabin.
Surely her mum wasn’t going to do it here? Normally she managed it seated out on deck, quick and neat, the bird held firmly between her knees. A twist and a pull. It wasn’t cruel – if you could accept that killing was a part of living. Both Elsevier and her mum kept telling Helen that.
Helen had asked to become vegetarian. This had not been allowed.
Tonight she felt depressed and sick. She didn’t want to fetch the cockerel.
“Wouldn’t it be better tomorrow?” was all she managed to say.
“Tonight is Samhain, All Hallows Eve. Tonight the veil is thin between the worlds. Tonight we can learn from the dead. This is the first night of the waning moon, the beginning of the end.”
Helen thought of poplar trees planted in straight lines, of gardens filled with bright flowers that had no medicinal or hal-lucinogenic properties, of living in any place where you could get away from your mother and you didn’t have to pretend all the time and hide what you were doing f
rom the neighbours.
“There’s someone on the boat next door,” she said. “It’s probably the man.”
“The man,” said her mother. “We must get rid of the man.”
She had lifted the carpet from the cabin sole and chalked a circle on the wooden boards. Now she was trickling wheat and pumpkin seeds around the circumference, counting them.
“Seventy five pompiert: ninety three woote. Where is Leo? I will wait no longer.”
Helen recognised the numbers. Her mother was back in the seventeenth century. There was no danger to the cockerel there. She did as she was told.
***
It was two in the morning. It was still Halloween. The graves had opened and the ghosts would roam. Bill couldn’t have gone to shanty-night because his concertina was here in its box on Lowestoft Lass.
Luke’s skin was crawling with cold and he couldn’t breathe quite right. He’d gone to bed and tried to sleep and this new thought had come into his head like ice-damp.
What if something bad had happened to his dad?
The more he thought the more frightened he became. His dad couldn’t have forgotten what day the holiday was meant to begin because Lottie had rung him that morning before school to tell him she was going shopping and to check if there was anything in particular he needed Luke to bring with him “this evening”. Those were her exact words.
His dad was more likely to nod than to speak, even on the phone, but he was totally reliable. Luke knew he was. He was gutted with himself that he’d thought any different. If his dad wasn’t here it was because something had stopped him. Maybe he’d been jumped by a zombie or river troll.
He had to stop thinking that way. River trolls and zombies Did Not Exist.
But muggers did. Maybe Bill had been jumped by a mugger on his way home from the yard.
Should Luke ring the police? His dad had been put in prison when he shouldn’t have been. They didn’t much like the police, his family.
The fear in Luke’s head was worse than his fear of the dark.
He’d gone to bed properly in his pyjamas. Clean teeth even. He’d wanted to show his dad that it was all okay. That he hadn’t been worried; that he could quite well look after himself alone on Lowestoft Lass for a few hours. Any twelve-year-old could.
Now he reached onto the floor for whatever clothes were there and pulled them on quick. He used the backlight from his phone to find socks. Should have thought of it when he was in the wood earlier.
Luke climbed up into the wheelhouse. He wasn’t happy with himself and he didn’t know what to do next. He looked through the windows to the black boat next door. The lights inside the pumpkin heads were guttering. Hours ago he’d thought he’d heard music. A hand drumming on stretched skin and a hollow-sounding pipe. He hadn’t any headphones with him. He couldn’t block it out.
A patch of cloud gleamed grey as rippled armour. There should have been some moon but the night was overcast. None of the other boats was more than a low shape humped against the dark. He didn’t know any of these people. He couldn’t wake them up to ask about his dad.
Luke zipped up his fleece. He patted his pocket to make sure his phone was there, then hurried across the gangplank and up the track to the gate.
He rang his dad. He rang Anna. He rang Lottie. Even texted Liam:
Hi Bro!
None of them answered.
He still didn’t think he ought to ring the police. Who else did he have in his phone that he could call at two in the morning for help about his dad? It was half-term. They were most of them away. Donny and Skye and Strong Winds were at sea. Xanthe and Maggi too. Last proper sail before the winter, they’d said. Taken a good forecast and gone north.
He could ring Wendy and Gerald, his ex-carers, but they had their baby to look after. Anyway what could they do? Luke wasn’t sure what Wendy and Gerald deep down thought about his dad. All those monthly visits to the prison and the dogs and that room with the tables and never knowing what to say. Liam being sick on the way back. Every time.
Someone was shouting.
“No! No!” over and over. It wasn’t his dad but it was someone in trouble.
Luke ran to the rescue. Along the top hedge, then downhill among the trees. Kept hitting things and tripping.
The shouting strung out into howling. Luke stopped. If he was going to search for his dad, he couldn’t risk getting eaten by a werewolf. His heart was beating faster than the skin drum.
Then, in the quiet, he heard a door close. That was such a normal noise.
Luke carried on, feeling his way. Slow and careful now, listening all the time and holding out his arms so he didn’t collide with tree trunks and low branches.
Could this dark get darker? Yes, when it was a wall.
Luke’s hands felt leaves and rough stone. He moved sideways to his left and then sideways to his right. Only a couple of steps each way. He worked out that the leaves were ivy. Did bats live in ivy? Or spiders?
His right hand flapped into empty air. Then he was round a corner and fumbling along a second wall. Brown light came struggling from a dirty window. And if you peered right close and rubbed a bit you could see there was something inside that was possibly a lamp. And a human shape bent over, pawing its way around some tiny room filled with the backs of books.
A human shape that was covered with fur.
***
It was three in the morning. It was still Halloween until sunrise.
Hendrike and Helen were coming back across the reed beds. They had made their own path using random pieces of debris to mark the way and stolen planks to bridge the drainage ditches. Whenever they had crossed a ditch, they pulled the plank behind them so they could not be followed. It was a clever system and they’d had months to make it perfect.
Tonight they wore dark cloaks with hoods to muffle their shapes and hide their pale hair from the clouded moon. Under the cloaks they carried files and small torches and the sacks which they had used to remove the plaster. They had been sinking the evidence among the reeds as they walked. Their trophy was loose, the escape route ready. As soon as Elsevier arrived they could act.
Helen had been glad to get out from the cabin, even when she could hear the old madman shouting in the woods. Her mother’s crazy rituals made the whole boat feel bad. Helen didn’t believe in ghosts or witches. Or angels or demons either. Nothing except life here and now. She was a rationalist and Halloween – or Samhain as her mother liked to call it – was simply another date in the calendar. It meant nothing.
Her mother was stupid because she’d messed with her mind. She was harmless though. She was acting up, she didn’t have any power. Even their mission wasn’t hurting anyone. It was just a stunt to please Elsevier.
And they would so soon be gone.
Helen looked across to the fishing boat where the man lived. There was a light shining from the wheelhouse. That was okay then. It had been off earlier. Now it was on. There was no reason for her to worry.
CHAPTER THREE
All Saints
Saturday 1 November, first of the waning moon
Luke, Helen
He forced himself to stay flat. This noise! Was it a banshee, a strangling or had the aliens landed? Luke’s hand groped for his Nintendo. He always kept it under his pillow when it wasn’t in his pocket.
There was no Nintendo. He remembered. Anna had taken it.
The noise was coming from somewhere really close. Malfunctioning smoke alarm? Donkey trying to sing opera?
“Urki-urki-oooooo, urki-urki-oooooo.”
Not donkey…cockerel. A full-on, high-decibel, non-stop cock’s crow. Not your cosy cock o’doodle-doo. More strained, more painful. And so close. It must coming from the boat next door, that spooky black barge with the pumpkin heads.
“Urki-urki-oooooooo!”
A cockerel on a boat? This whole place was weird and he wished he’d gone to Italy.
Last night – early morning – whenever – he’d run away from the hut in the woods: from the werewolf prowling through his books. He’d pitched himself across the gangplank, slammed the wheelhouse door and locked it from the inside.
What if his dad came home and couldn’t get in?
But his dad wasn’t coming and the werewolf might. That door was staying locked. And he was going to leave a light on. He didn’t care if he was wasting the battery: them dark spirits would be afraid of light.
Skid into the cabin. Kick his trainers off. Dive into the sleeping bag and pull a blanket over the opening.
Luke wriggled down far as he could then lay rigid in the stuffy darkness. Fell asleep as if he’d been unplugged.
Not any more. No more sleep with that cockerel leading off.
Was that footsteps, running? Luke sat up to try and listen better. He looked around the cabin. His dad still wasn’t here.
Think on a bit…a cock’s crow was good. A cock’s crow meant that it was morning. It meant Halloween was properly over. All the bad things from last night had gone back underground.
Luke remembered the light in the wheelhouse and the locked door. He rushed up the cabin steps to open it. His dad would be sitting outside, cold and a bit reproachful, in his donkey jacket and his woolly hat.
Except he wasn’t.
Luke found his trainers, switched off the light and checked that his phone was still in the pocket of his fleece. The others could have called him back by now but he wouldn’t know until he got reception. He wasn’t going scampering up that hill any more. He was going to walk along the river wall to the Phoenix Yard and wait there till he found someone who could tell him what time his dad had finished work last night. And if he’d said where he was going.
Sometimes people’s dads didn’t come home because they’d gone off with someone else. Luke wouldn’t be calling Lottie to tell her that. There was going to be a row anyway once she discovered that Bill hadn’t been with him for the night and Luke hated rows. He switched his phone off. It was going to stay that way until he knew exactly what had happened to his dad. Then he’d decide who he should call and what he was going to say to them.