Dead Branches

by Benjamin Langley

  “But it’s my game.”

  “I only want to play for a minute.”

  Jimmy sighed. He knew the rules. If a bigger kid wanted to join your game, then it was by their rules. “Okay, I’m a ghost.” He raised his hands, wiggled his fingers, and gave off a ghostly moan.

  John threw his hands up in fake-terror, and then started the longest highest-pitched scream I’ve ever heard and ran off into the distance.

  At first Jimmy looked at him with a puzzled expression on his face, then the memory of his own reaction must have hit him, and he looked down at the ground sheepishly.

  I looked across the field and spotted John. He’d finally stopped screaming and had collapsed on the field.

  Before I even got close to him, I knew he’d be in another one of his giggling fits. I lay on the grass next to him, and his infectious laughter spread to me.

  At some point Liam came trudging over and sat down beside us. “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “Stupid kids in year three,” said John between bursts of giggles. “Playing Ghostbusters.”

  A wrinkle formed on Liam’s brow, his cheeks puffed out, and he pouted. “What’s wrong with Ghostbusters?” he asked without making eye-contact, instead choosing to pick a daisy and toss it at his feet.

  “Nothing, but these kids think ghosts are real!” John burst out into laughter again.

  “Don’t you?” asked Liam, throwing another daisy at John.

  John shook his head. “I don’t believe anything I can’t see with my own two eyes.”

  “What about you, Tom?” asked Liam.

  I kept my mouth shut.

  I guess I’d been out of the classroom a little too long as Mrs Palmer was peering out of the classroom door when I wandered back along the corridor.

  “Are you okay, Thomas?” she asked.

  I wanted to say that I was worried about John, but I was afraid that if I did, I might start to cry, and I couldn’t let that happen in front of the class, so I nodded my head, and figured that I better get stuck into the maths if I was going to have a break at all.

  I dashed through the maths questions to make sure I was let out for break, but it felt even stranger then when we went to play football. Because John was one of the best players, he was usually a captain, and even though I was a bit crap he’d always pick me (not first, he had to get some of the good players in, but I’d never be left until the end). Without John to pick me, I was left until the end, when it was down to me and Stu who always toe-punted the ball and tripped over his feet. I got picked before Stu, but only because Will was insisting that Chris (one of the team captains) should pick me.

  Chris was assigning roles on the team. He told me that I had got to be Richard Witchge, the Dutch player who’d come on as a sub in the game last night. “I’m going to be Gazza,” he said.

  “No,” I said, without thinking.

  “What do you mean?” he said. “It’s my team. I can be who I like.”

  “John would normally be Paul Gascoigne,” I said.

  “Well John’s not here, is he?”

  “But you can’t just take his player. Be someone else.”

  “Right, I’m swapping you out for Stu,” he said, so I had to go onto the other team.

  Everyone played as if everything was normal until Stu toe punted the ball into a group of girls (including Laura Matthews) who were making daisy-chains and they ran off with the ball and went and told Mr Inglehart, who liked to patrol the field to make sure no one was having too much fun, and partly to keep an eye on how his favourite pupils who played for the school football team were getting on. Surely, he was concerned about John? But he seemed to be acting normally. Maybe there was nothing to worry about. Maybe John was already back at home and he’d be back in school in a day or two, but something didn’t feel right, and I didn’t like it.

  At the end of the school day I waited with Liam for Will and Andy. Liam and I were in the same class at school, and even though I was six months older than him, he was bigger than me in every way: He had bigger feet, he had a bigger belly, he was taller, and he had a much bigger head. The only thing I secretly suspected was smaller was his brain.

  “Shall we walk round by John’s to see if there’s anything going on?” I said.

  “Might as well. We’ll have to walk past Shaky Jake’s though.” Liam did his awful Shaky Jake impression, for which he clenched his fists tightly and tensed up all of his muscles so his whole body shook until his face went red.

  “Think he’ll shout at us again?”

  Liam sniggered. “Maybe if you walk into his yard.”

  “No way.” I shook my head.

  “Dare you.” Liam shoved my shoulder with the palm of his hand and as I was about to grab him into an inescapable headlock, Will came wandering out of his classroom.

  “Guess what?” Liam said to Will.

  “What?”

  “Tom’s gonna do a knock-door-bunk on Shaky Jake.” Liam was hopping from one foot to another and grinning from ear-to-ear.

  “Watch he doesn’t touch you with those stuttery old hands and turn you into a freak.” Will then did his (better) Shaky Jake impression, which involved only shaking one hand, but holding it up towards my face.

  “I’m not,” I said, batting Will’s hand away. “I was only saying we should walk round the long way to see if John’s home.”

  Liam started clucking at me and flapping his arms, and then Andy jumped between the two of us and shouted, “Cowabunga.”

  Andy was only in class three, so still an infant, and he acted like to too, though I was always glad to have Andy around, as it meant that I wasn’t the shortest.

  With our rucksacks on our backs, together we walked down Main Street. We had to cross the road before we reached the Post Office if we were to go by Shaky Jake’s house on the corner of Downham Close and Main Street. Waiting for a gap in the traffic, we were almost knocked onto our arses by the gust from a couple of heavy lorries that went flying down the road. Mum and Aunt Anne would have been angry with us for not crossing outside the school with Mrs Barnes, the lollipop lady, but that was for the little kids (Andy had us to look after him) and Mrs Barnes had crazy hair and worse so much perfume that it made you retch.

  Shaky Jake had the relatively normal looking bungalow on the corner with the front fence which was rotten and bent away from the posts. Often, standing nearby was enough to rile him and he’d come running out of the house, sometimes holding a saucepan or a wooden spoon and he’d stand there on the spot and start shaking and then try to yell at us but he could never get the words out and spittle would go everywhere while the strands of his greasy fringe would flap around. One time some of the spit flew out and hit John on the hand and he tried to wipe it on us to give us the lurgy.

  “Come on, let’s go to John’s,” I said.

  “You’re not getting out of it so easily,” Liam said. “Knock-door-bunk.” He started to chant, and Andy joined in.

  We saw the kitchen curtains twitch and thought he was about to come out, but then Will called out, “Look.”

  We turned around to see a police car drive past us and turn down Downham Close. We broke into a half-run and then stopped at the end of the road to see the car pull up outside John’s house. Maybe they’d found him and were bringing him home. But only two policemen got out of the car. They went and knocked on John’s door. We couldn’t see who opened it, but a couple of seconds later they were inside.

  Will started walking into Downham Close.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Investigating.”

  We followed. We slowed to crawling pace as we got closer to the police car. I’d never been so close to one before. Will was first to peer in.

  “Is he in there?” asked Liam.

  Of course, he wasn’t going to be in there. If they’d found him, they would have taken him in.

  “No,” Will said.

  “What is in there?”

  “Nothi
ng.”

  “What’s in there?” Liam said again, his voice high.

  “I told you: nothing.”

  Liam, Andy and I all peered in at the same time. Will was right, there was nothing interesting in there at all.

  “I guess they haven’t found him,” I said.

  “So, what should we do?” Liam said.

  “Why don’t we go back to Moon Base One?” Will said.

  “All right,” Liam said. “We’ll drop our bags home and then see you in twenty minutes.”

  Moon Base One was guarded by a dyke in a little spinney out by the field furthest from our farmhouse. A couple of hundred metres up from here the drove crossed the bypass but would lead on to Wissey Hill if followed far enough.

  We’d used rocks to build a path across the dyke and hidden the entrance using some elderberry bushes. The advantage of the elderberry was that we always had plenty of the tiny berries at our disposal if we ever came under attack. We’d dug holes inside Moon Base One and cleverly disguised them with interwoven branches, so we could store provisions in there without fear of it ever being found. Will and I had been in there about five minutes when Liam pushed in through the branches.

  “Look what I’ve got,” he said, and held out a stack of cards.

  “Horror Top Trumps? You’ve had them for ages,” Will said.

  “No, look,” he said and as he went to show us the cards, he dropped them onto the ground. An evil face stared out at me from one of the cards with sickly yellow flesh. It had a beard and hair. Both with horrible curls (I always knew curly hair was a bad sign, and a good reason not to eat crusts), with two horns sticking out of his head. He had sharp fangs and was surrounded by fire. It was called ‘Fire Demon’. I’d never seen this card before.

  “Liam, what are these?” I said as I glanced at the other cards.

  “Series Two. Thirty-two new cards. Check this one out.” Liam picked a card from the floor and held it up to us.

  “Horror rating one-hundred?” Will said.

  It was called Death and had hideous long teeth and a finger pointing out of the card.

  “No way,” I said. “Only Dracula has a horror rating of one-hundred.”

  “Not anymore,” Liam said. “And check this one out.” He held up a card called ‘Alien Creature’. “Who does that look like?”

  It was a light-brown-coloured creature with dark hair in a bowl-cut and with ugly twisted teeth.

  Will laughed. “Bloody hell. It’s Mrs Palmer!”

  I couldn’t see it myself. The Alien Creature was much uglier than Mrs Palmer, and it had only two fingers on each hand, though its fur was the same colour as her cardigans. “It doesn’t look anything like her,” I said.

  “You would say that, wouldn’t you?” Will said.

  “What d’you mean?” Liam said.

  “Didn’t you know? Tom always gets crushes on his teachers.”

  Liam and Will rolled around with laughter. It wasn’t true. I didn’t always get crushes on my teachers. There was one time, with Miss Wishaw, who had lovely long red hair, but that was it.

  “Ooh! Mrs Palmer,” Liam said. He pulled the card towards his face and puckered his lips. “I’m Tom, and I love you.”

  I let them laugh for a minute. “Where did you get them from?”

  “Mum bought them for us. She saw them in the toy shop in Downham Market.”

  “Cool. We should have a game. Where’s Andy?”

  As soon as I said it, he jumped into the base. “Surprise attack,” he shouted as he clung on to my back and squeezed as hard as he could.

  “Get off,” I yelled. He’d shocked me. For a second, I thought I really was under attack, but it’s not like I was close to turning my pants into a lemonade factory. I guess with the Top Trumps in front of me with those horrible pictures and all of the possibilities running through my head, I was on edge. “Come on,” Will said, collecting up the rest of the cards. “Let’s play.”

  We played a couple of rounds and I got to see a few new cards. Some of these monsters I’d never heard of, like The Living Skull and Dr. Syn, and others were gory like The Fiend and Venusian Death Cell.

  “What we should do,” Liam said as he handed his last card over to Will, “is combine the two sets and play an epic game with all sixty-two cards.”

  “Sixty-four,” I said.

  Liam looked at me with a squint, his lip curled in confusion.

  “Two sets of thirty-two would be sixty-four.”

  “You’re such a bighead.”

  Liam took back the cards and started to clumsily shuffle them.

  “Deal them already, will you?” Will said, tossing a berry at Liam.

  “Let me shuffle them first.”

  “So, what do you think’s going on with John?” I said.

  Liam started dishing out the cards. “Well the police are involved. We know that.”

  “Maybe Shredder got him!” Andy said, his eyes wide.

  “He could have run away from home,” Will said. “He hated his dad.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think he hated him.” John and I had spoken about our dads a few times, and his didn’t seem anywhere near as bad as mine.

  “What do you think happened to him then, Tom?” Liam said.

  I picked up my cards. The top one was The Sorcerer. Maybe something magical had happened to him. Maybe a great wizard had enlisted him to go on an amazing adventure where HE was the hero, like in one of my Fighting Fantasy books. Or maybe he’d uncovered a monster’s lair, and it had captured him and taken him away. “I don’t know,” I said.

  After a couple more games Liam checked his watch and said it was time to go home if they were to be back in time for dinner, and possibly catch the end of the Uruguay versus Spain match. Will said that he was going to walk back with them, and I said I’d walk round the long way across to the back field, just in case. They knew what I meant.

  When I got near the end of the field, where it met the bypass, I heard a rustling in the dyke. It was overgrown with stinging nettles. I could see them moving. Over the sound of the heavy vehicles which were levelling the verges at the side of the bypass I thought I could hear something else, perhaps a groan. Maybe John had come for a walk all around here if he had no one to play with at home. I edged towards the dyke and the nettles quivered again. There was a slight breeze, but it didn’t seem strong enough to swirl the nettles that way. I peered in but could see nothing through the thickness of the nettles. The grass was not trampled and none of the nettles were squished or broken as they would have been if something had fallen in. The machinery stopped and I could hear slow breathing. “John?” I said, and the breathing sound changed into a low growl. I thought back to our game of Top Trumps. The card that stuck in my mind was The Fiend with its sharp talons slicing through its victim’s neck.

  The machines coughed back to life, disguising a louder growl. The nettles seemed to part as if the thing was coming towards me and I ran down into field of oilseed rape. I could hear my feet, heavy against the ground and over the snarl of the machines I was sure there was another sound pounding the ground behind me. It was chasing me, and it was going to tear my head off. It had probably done exactly the same to John. I ran faster than ever. I could barely breathe, and my face felt like it was burning. I made it across the field, jumped the ditch and clambered up the other side onto the narrow drove which led straight towards home. I daren’t look over my shoulder because I didn’t know its powers. If it captured me in its gaze, I might have been under its spell and be forced to halt and I’d be powerless to stop it removing my head and feasting on my tender neck-flesh. As much as I didn’t want to turn my head, a squeal, like the excited laughter of a toddler, made me look round before I could stop myself. I caught sight of that damned old oak tree, my toes hit something, and I crashed to the ground. I tried to listen for the approaching beast but all I could hear was my pulse, the blood racing thickly through my veins. I managed to glance over my rig
ht shoulder and could see the tree. Its crooked grin was wider than ever and the way its branches were shaking made it look as though it was laughing at me. I felt the breeze ruffle my clothes and cool my back, wet with sweat. Every second that passed I was sure would be my last, but the end never came.

  Eventually I rolled onto my back, certain that the creature would be there waiting for me, mocking me, wanting to look into my eyes before he stole my life (and possibly my ever-living soul too – as I said, I was not sure of The Fiend’s powers). At first, I was blinded, but when I shielded my eyes from the sun, I saw there was nothing there. I traced my path along the drove to where I’d fallen and stared at the tree root in the ground, I’d caught my foot on. It was almost black and covered in wet soil. It wasn’t dull and grey and hard like the rest of the earth on the drove. The nearest tree was a good twenty metres away. The oak was even further away, but when I looked at its warped face, I was sure that was where the root had come from. It had tripped me, deliberately, and wanted to see me get eaten by The Fiend. Or maybe it controlled The Fiend and would have had me taken to it and it would have plucked out my eye. But what had stopped it? Did I have magical protection over me? Was I the chosen one, and destined to be a hero?

  “Oi!”

  I turned to see that it was Dad marching down the drove towards me.

  “What d’you think you’re playing at lying in the middle of the drove like you’re dead?”

  Why did he always have to appear at the worst time?

  “There’s a young lad missing, could be dead for all you know, and you make out you’re a dead body. What are you, simple or something?”

  “I tripped,” I said as I got up.

  “And look at the state of your bloody trousers.”

  I looked down and saw my dusty kneecap through the tear in the material.

  “You think we’re made of money, and can replace your trousers and shirts every time you act like a daft bugger?”

  My face was hot, and I couldn’t talk. I swallowed heavily and concentrated on breathing normally as I marched past him.