“They must be working on how the body got into the ditch.”
“It looked like he’s been running away. There was blood near the tree.”
“Maybe he ran away from someone.”
“What about the tree? Do you think that had anything to do with it?”
“Don’t be silly, that can’t do anything.”
“It stole Granddad’s eye. And don’t you remember the wasps?”
It was a few years ago, and we must have felt really brave that day. We’d been out there in the morning helping Dad as he was tinkering with a tractor that had come to a stop on the land, when we heard the tree make a groaning sound. Normally that would have scared us to death, but Will had just got into reading the Hardy Boys books which they had in the school library and he wanted to investigate everything like it was a mystery. So, after lunch, when Dad had finished with the tractor and was busy in another field, we went back. The closer we got to tree the louder the rumble got. There was a deep crack in the tree that got wider at the top. Will had shined his torch in at the bottom of the crack, but it was too narrow to see anything. He’d asked for a boost up, and using my fingers as a step, he was able to shine the light in higher up. With his other hand he poked away with the pen knife, and then he jumped off my hand and told me to run. His voice was quivery, and I knew it was serious. I looked up and there were wasps pouring out of the top of the tree trunk. We both sprinted straight for the bank opposite. We jumped over the ditch and clambered up it and didn’t turn around until we were on drove, which Granddad later told us was called Black Fen Drove and would become the bypass. Luckily the wasps hadn’t followed us, but it only made me more suspicious of that tree.
Will shook his head, “We’ve got to think about real possibilities, not trees and monster and all that bullshit.” He walked towards the group of policemen standing in the drove, and I walked back to the house.
NOW
It smells exactly the same: an equal mix of ancient engine oil and wasted grain. Billy is pointing at the tractor’s engine, and Charlie is nodding, feigning keenness.
“Thought you would have wanted to go straight up to see your Dad,” says Liam as we approach our sons.
No. Not yet. Being this close is hard enough. I’m not sure I can bring myself to look at him. I don’t know what I expect to see, a man or a monster.
When I get to the tractor, I make the mistake of asking what they’ve been up to, and Billy goes into great detail about the work he’s been doing. He’s clearly a smart young lad, and he must have a good relationship with his Dad, so Liam can’t have it too far wrong. But then I think back to how close Dad was with Will, and how that all turned out and the bitterness wells up inside me again at being allowed to live in a fantasy land for so long.
As Charlie is listening intently, I don’t want to drag him away too quickly. Maybe it’s seeing Liam again. I may have shut him out after that summer, but what we had meant something back then, and Charlie’s never been allowed that. Cruel of me, I suppose, but I had my own way of protecting him.
I glance around the shed and see an old metal bin lid which reminds me of Andy’s Michelangelo costume. “How’s Andy?” I ask.
Liam shakes his head. “Same,” he says.
Same as what? I want to ask, but then wonder about how many cans of worms I might be opening.
“What about your Mum and Dad?”
“Well, Dad’s all right, but… don’t you know?”
“Don’t I know what?”
Liam takes out the handkerchief out again and squeezes it in one hand.
“She’s dead. Cancer. Three years back.”
My mouth falls open and I don’t know what to say.
“I thought your mum would have told you,” says Liam.
And I stand there, flabbergasted, feeling a loss I should have felt long ago, and feeling it harder for the delay. That’s what my stupid rules get me.
I want to run into the house and yell at Mum for keeping all of this from me, but then my own voice plays back in my head, telling her clearly that I didn’t want to know about anything that was going on in Little Mosswick.
When you’ve been in the dark too long, a little light sure can be blinding.
Tuesday 26th June 1990
Word must have spread round school that I was the one to have found John because everyone was staring at me, and at break time I could see people pointing at me. Some of the kids who would never have bothered to speak to me before came up to me and started conversations, “Got any swaps?” “See the football last night?” The answer was “No,” in both cases and I’d walk away before they got to ask me about what they really wanted to know. Would I have been the same if I wasn’t the one to find it? Would I be chasing someone around asking what a dead body looked like? I can’t say it was ever on my list of things to do, but when the opportunity is presented to you, I don’t know, maybe I would have been curious.
There was another assembly after lunch. We never had them after lunch. The infants were being really noisy and all of the chatter echoing around the hall made me think that my head was going to explode. Maybe I was going to have a case of spontaneous human combustion again. Mr Inglehart came in and settled them down and I was glad of the quiet until he started speaking.
“We have contacted all of your parents in order to make arrangements for everyone to be collected after school. The police have suggested that a curfew is put in place and stated that no children should be allowed to play out after school, effective immediately, until further notice is given.”
The hall gasped and the chatter started again. I suppose it didn’t make much difference to us, we’d been under a curfew for the last week anyway, with our parents watching us all of the time and telling us not to go out to play, but I thought they were being over-protective. If it was coming from the police then that meant there was something seriously bad out there, and they were worried about it getting more kids.
At the end of the day Mum had walked down to school to pick us up. There were a few police cars about, and policemen and women were going door-to-door to speak to people. There was a car parked up outside Mrs Johnstone’s house which made me think about her TCP and soft biscuits. There weren’t any police around the farm though, which made a change.
“Do you boys want to go over to watch the football with Liam and Andy tonight?” asked Mum.
I’d forgotten about the World Cup until that moment, but then I remembered that England were playing Belgium for a place in the quarter finals. When England made the second round, I was sure that it meant that John would be okay, but he wasn’t. Was everything going wrong? England were going out, I was sure.
Aunt Anne had made a cake with jam and cream and when we arrived, she cut us all a slice.
“Can we take it up to my room?” Liam said. He had his own room. He didn’t have to share like Will and I did. Their house had four bedrooms, even though it was just as old looking as ours. I guess Will and I could have had our own separate rooms, because there were other spare rooms in our house, but they were full of junk.
“No, you can watch the football down here,” said Auntie Anne.
“But won’t you want to watch your programmes?” Liam said.
“Missing them for one night won’t do me any harm.”
Andy was holding his plate with one hand and not really looking at it as he tore off little mouthfuls. I could see the cake sliding towards the edge of the plate in slow motion. I wanted to say something, but I froze, and it slid off the plate and plopped onto the kitchen floor.
I thought he was going to get told off. He looked at Aunt Anne and I could see his eyes were going all watery. Andy turned into a bit of a cry baby when he was at home, even though he never cried when we were out, even that time he ran into a barbed wire fence and tore his t-shirt open and had blood running down his arm
“Pick it up, then,” said Auntie Anne.
He bent down and put it back on his plate. He rea
ched to break off another bit.
“Put it in the bin. I’ll cut you another slice.”
Andy looked at Aunt Anne then moved very slowly over to the bin. The second slice of cake he got seemed even bigger than the first.
“Now hold it with both hands.”
I followed Andy into the living room. Aunt Anne had really plump cushions on her sofa. They were great for plonking down onto and hearing the air whoosh out of them.
We had a bit of time before the game started so we went up to Liam’s room. I took out my notebook to show Liam what I’d been thinking about.
Will refused to talk about it and went back downstairs to watch the build-up to the game with Uncle Alan.
I showed Liam what I’d crossed out, and the possibilities that were left in the book, and then we looked again at the Top Trumps, looking for more clues. I held out the pack and Liam pulled one from the centre. It was the stupid beast card, with the monster (with surprisingly good stats) on the stage. It didn’t look like what we were after, so we flicked through looking for proper suspects. There was The Fiend. The picture showed him slicing off a man’s head at the neck with its really sharp claws. Maybe that’s why John’s neck was so bruised, because The Fiend was clawing at it. Or there was Talon, which was like a massive bird and that picture had it biting a man’s neck. The Lizard Man was strangling a man, so it could have been him, but the worst was the Venusian Death Cell. This weird creature had a bloody curved knife and on the floor was a chopped off head. There was only one thing for it, we were going to have to take a very close look at all of the cards to see exactly how many of them were possibilities.
“It’s starting,” shouted Will, and we all went traipsing down the stairs, where we found Will sitting alone.
I could hear Mum talking to Aunt Anne in the kitchen, and the clink of teacups.
“Where’d Uncle Alan go?”
“Went off with Dad,” Will said as the referee blew the whistle to start the game.
Every time that Belgium came forward, I was certain that they were going to score, but somehow, they didn’t. The commentator said that England’s goal must have been ‘charmed’, and maybe it was under some kind of special protection. There was certainly some kind of magic in that England team, and I could see it every time Paul Gascoigne got the ball. Somehow, he could run, and the ball would never be more than a few centimetres from his foot, and it would move from one side to the other, leaving the defenders looking bedazzled. The only thing the Belgians could do to stop him was to kick him in the shins. They must have really annoyed him, because one time, after they got the ball off him, he tried to get it back by kicking them, but the referee said that was a foul and gave him a yellow card.
Neither team scored, so the game went to extra time. Still the Belgian’s kept kicking Gazza, and for once he actually got a free kick. There were only a couple of minutes to go, and it looked like there was going to have to be a penalty shootout. Gazza took the free kick. He floated the ball into the air, and it seemed to hang there for ages, giving David Platt enough time to shoot it into the goal with an awesome volley.
England had won.
We were all jumping around on the sofas when Aunt Anne came in, her eyes wide.
“Whatever are you boys doing?”
Will and I dashed off the sofa and stood with our hands behind our backs. Together we said, “Sorry Aunt Anne,” while Andy and Liam laughed.
“No need to apologise, boys; with all the noise I thought one of you had had an accident!”
“England won!” Andy said.
“Fantastic,” said Anne. “That sounds like a good excuse for more cake.”
After we finished our cake, Dad and Uncle Alan came back in.
Uncle Alan dashed over to Liam and Andy, picked one up in each arm and started jumping up and down. “We won!” he cried.
“Come on boys,” Dad said. “Time to go.” He had a weird smile on his face, which had gone red.
“You okay to drive, dear?” asked Mum.
“What? Course I bloody am.”
As we were putting on our shoes Liam asked both my dad and his, “Did you hear anything about John?”
“No, nothing new,” said Alan. “It’s nothing for you to worry about. Make sure you come straight home from school, and it’ll all be back to normal soon.”
How could it ever be back to normal again? John was gone, and he wasn’t coming back. Something had taken him and killed him. The police were so worried, they’d put a curfew in place to stop the thing from getting us too. How could we not worry about that?
Wednesday 27th June 1990
Chappie wasn’t in his bed when I got up, and his dinner bowl was full.
“Have you seen Chappie?” I said to Mum and Dad, who were eating toast at the kitchen table.
“And good morning to you too,” Dad said. “Sometimes I think you care more about that daft dog than you do your mum and me.”
It was in that half-teasing, half serious way that I never knew how to react to. Maybe that’s because the dog doesn’t make me feel like a bag of crap, I thought to myself.
Dad flicked out his hand and caught me on the forearm with the tips of his fingers and smiled at me. “I’m only teasing you. He was asleep by the doorstep.”
I waited until I was out there before I gave my arm a rub. It was surprising how much it had felt like a burn.
Chappie was in the shade, sleeping. His legs were moving, and his tongue lolled hung out of his mouth. He looked peaceful, so I left him to it.
Aunt Anne arrived a couple of minutes later. Normally they all waited in the car, as we had to hurry to school, but Andy got out, and Aunt Anne followed him. She opened the boot, and he leant in so far that both of his feet were off the ground.
Andy walked towards me, holding something long and brown in both hands. He also had something tucked awkwardly under his arm. “This is for you,” he said, holding out the long brown stick, with some masking tape around the middle. “I made it this morning.”
“Thanks,” I said, trying to sound grateful, but not fully understanding what I was supposed to do with it.
“You can be Donatello,” he said, “I made you his staff, so you can fight off the baddies.”
I smiled, then realised what he had under his arm. A piece of cardboard cut into the shape of a sword and covered in tinfoil: Leonardo’s katana blade for Will.
“Let me take it in,” I said. I couldn’t bear for Will to start another argument about whether we were the turtles or the crusaders. If Andy wanted us to be the Turtles, I was happy to be a turtle for him.
There wasn’t much talk about the football, because everyone had seen something; that’s how it seemed. As soon as Aunt Anne dropped us in front of the school gates, we heard bits of people’s conversations, and the line, “You won’t believe what I saw last night,” came up again and again.
Andy ran off to line up for his class and Will stopped to re-tie his shoelace, but I stopped by Laura Matthews and Becky Reid who were having a similar conversation.
“What did you see?” I said.
Laura looked at me funny, probably because I don’t often just go up to girls and start chatting. Also, it was probably obvious we’d all been earwigging into her conversation with her friend. “Nothing,” she said.
“But I just heard you. ‘You won’t believe what I saw’, that’s what you said.”
“Well maybe you should have listened a bit longer instead of interrupting us,” said Becky. She tucked her arm around Laura’s and pulled her away from me.
“Sorry,” I said, after jogging to get back in front of them. “But what did you see?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“Because we’re investigating,” Liam said.
“Don’t tell anyone else, then,” said Laura.
“Okay,” I said
“Can we write it down? You know, in our evidence book,” Liam said.
“Only if you show us it,” said
Laura.
“We don’t have it with us now,” I said
“Then how are you going to write it down?” said Becky. Smarty-pants.
“We’ll record it when I get home,” I said.
“Okay. But don’t laugh.”
Me and Liam nodded. Laura leant in and the four us made an enclosed circle. “You know, where I live?” I nodded. Of course I knew where Laura lived. She lived on the other corner of Downham close and Main Street. “And you know who lives opposite?” It was Shaky Jake. “Well I swear I heard him howling like a wolf last night.”
We all took a step back.
“What?” Liam said.
“I don’t know what time it was, but it was dark, and something had woken me. I had the window open because it was so hot, and that’s when I heard it.”
“How do you know it was him?” I asked.
“I looked out of the window and his front door was open.”
“That is weird,” Liam said.
“He is weird though,” I said, and Laura smiled at me.
At lunch Liam and I went around talking to as many people as we could, and there had been sightings of things everywhere. Brian had seen something running across the field out the back of his house at around ten o’clock. Sarah saw something that must have been a ghost, moving around quickly, like the Tasmanian Devil when she got up to go to the loo. Half a dozen people heard weird noises at different points during the night. We had a map of the village and charted everything on it, but it was all over the place. None of it made any sense. What was out there that could be causing so much weird stuff to go on? Were the dead rising from the graves and attempting to capture the living? Why was John the only one who had been targeted, and why did everyone think we were in so much danger? It all had to come from one place. I drew lines between each even and noticed that the centre was in line with our house, and with the tree too.
Dead Branches Page 18