Devil You Know

by Cathy MacPhail

  “We could just go in for a look,” Baz said, and I could see he really wanted to know what was inside. I did too.

  “The place is derelict, what would be the harm in looking?” I didn’t want to go against Baz, but I didn’t want to annoy Gary either.

  “There must be something in there, if he wants in so badly,” Gary said. That just seemed to make Baz more determined.

  “Oh come on. Who’s for going in, just for a minute? Double dare you!” No one answered him. “Oh well, I’m going. I’m not scared.”

  “Me neither,” Mickey said, and he was the bold one who stepped in after Al Butler. He turned back to us. “Aw come on, what’s the harm?” And then he too disappeared into the gloom. It was as if they had gone through some black hole.

  “Where are they going?” I asked. “Into the Twilight Zone?”

  “Mickey?” Claude called out. There was no answer. Claude took a few steps inside. He called Mickey’s name again, and still there was no answer. “Is anybody there?” he asked in a spooky voice. That made us giggle. And then out of the darkness, Mickey ran forward with a roar, his arms spread wide. Claude, taken completely by surprise, stepped back too quickly, and tumbled over a pile of boxes lying on the floor behind him.

  Gary pulled at my arm. “We should just go,” he said again. “I’ve heard of this guy. He’s real trouble.”

  Why didn’t we listen to him?

  “Hey, we’ve had a really good night,” Baz said. “We tricked the Young Bow, Gary. I might have come up with the idea, but you were the brains behind the rest. Don’t tell me you’re scared to go inside an old derelict warehouse. You’re not, I know you’re not, Gary.” He pointed right at him. “You’re scared of nothing.”

  He threw his words at him. It was a compliment, and it was a challenge too. I thought that was clever of Baz. It wouldn’t have worked if he’d called Gary a coward, if he’d said he was too afraid to go inside. But to praise him, tell him he was scared of nothing – that was smart. And it worked.

  Gary stood tall. “That’s me. Your actual hero!” And with a whoop, he leapt inside, punching the air.

  Me and Baz were the last ones in. Baz was usually first and I suppose I held back to go in beside him.

  The warehouse was like a Tardis, it seemed so much bigger on the inside. It certainly wasn’t empty. There were rolls of carpets and rugs piled up on the floor, and aisles of carpets all around, standing upright, like soldiers at attention.

  “It’s a carpet warehouse,” Mickey said, disappointed.

  Baz whipped out a rug lying in a pile. He flung it open. “You could pick up a nice wee something for your mammy,” he said.

  “Who does this place belong to?” I asked.

  “Who cares?” Al Butler’s voice came from somewhere between the carpets. I could hear him, but I couldn’t see him.

  “What do you mean?”

  We must have all looked foolish then. His head popped up above a pile of rugs.

  “Do you own this place?” Claude asked.

  Al Butler didn’t answer him. Instead he went again to the front door. “Here, help me get the shutters doon again. Don’t want anybody spying on us.”

  Now was our chance to go. Why didn’t we? But we didn’t. Baz even helped him pull the shutters down.

  I expected us to be plunged into darkness, but instead some kind of emergency lighting came on, and we were all bathed in an eerie red glow. It gave everything a surreal feel, as if we were caught up in some kind of weird dream. That’s exactly how I felt. As if I was caught up in something unreal.

  Mickey began walking around like a zombie, and in the dim red light he managed to look pretty scary. Claude immediately joined in. It was hard not to laugh at them. “No make-up required!” Gary said. And then it seemed we were all laughing, that nervous way, you know, when you’re in a situation you’ve never been in before, and you don’t know whether it’s funny or serious. We all began walking about like zombies then.

  We hardly noticed Al Butler, though I was vaguely aware he had gone into a room at the back. It sounded as if he was pulling out drawers, throwing things on the floor, not caring if anyone heard him – and how would they? There was no one anywhere nearby.

  A few moments later he came swaggering down the aisle of carpet with a smug smile on his face. “Not bad, not bad,” he was saying. He patted his pockets: they were bulging now. “Nice wee stash here,” and he held up a wad of notes. “I always know where to look.” He had a box in his other hand. “You can’t leave empty-handed, boys. One good turn deserves another.” He threw the box at Baz. “Here!”

  Baz caught it deftly. “Hey, thanks.” He actually said thanks! It was filled with Xbox games and Baz took them out and shoved them into my hands. “Stuff them in your pockets, we can sell them – come on. Who’s going to miss them?”

  I looked at Gary. He was shaking his head. And I knew he was right. We should just get out of here. I wanted to drop the games from my hand, but I felt as if they were glued there.

  Everything seemed to be moving out of control. I began to be really afraid, and I couldn’t think why. Let’s get out of here. That’s what I wanted to say. Why couldn’t I say it?

  Sixteen

  Al Butler suddenly swung round. He looked up to a corner. “Aw naw, we’ve been spotted.” He pointed, and we all followed his gaze. There was a camera in the corner, its one eye watching our every move. “Big Brother is watching you!”

  Why didn’t we run then? The CCTV camera scared me. We’d been seen. I could imagine that camera capturing us all looking up, our excitement turning to fear.

  “Let’s go,” I said. I’m sure I was the one who said it.

  Al Butler began to shout to the cameras. “Say hello to my boys!” He turned to us then, as if we were his best friends. “Don’t worry about the cameras, boys.” He held out his arms as if we should applaud him. “Destroy the cameras, and nobody sees us. Am I right? Of course I’m right.”

  “How are you going to destroy the cameras?” I asked him.

  “Same way we’re going to destroy everything else.” His hands went deep into his hoodie and he brought out a yellow plastic bottle. I recognised it. It was stuff you use to light barbeques. We stood still, watching him, as he unscrewed the cap and began tipping it all over the carpets.

  “What are you doing?” Claude asked. Yet we didn’t need an answer. We knew what he was about to do. Al Butler took a box of matches from his pocket and opened it. He took out a match, a long match, and struck it, and a moment later a tiny flame appeared, pure yellow gold with flecks of green. I couldn’t take my eyes from it, suspecting – knowing – what was going to happen next.

  “You’re not serious?” Baz asked.

  Al Butler turned those ice-blue eyes on him. “We’ve been spotted. Only way to get rid of the cameras. We’ll show them. Go up like a bonfire in here.”

  We all stood there for a moment, still like statues.

  “No,” I heard Gary behind me. That flame made him afraid too.

  Al Butler waved the flame over the carpets, his eyes never leaving us. “It’s up to you. What do you think?”

  We were all silent. Mesmerised by the flame.

  Baz broke the silence. His voice was a whisper. “I double dare you.” I couldn’t believe he’d said that.

  Don’t do it! I wanted to shout. Couldn’t say a word. Al Butler wouldn’t have listened anyway. Nothing would have stopped him. He’d come here prepared for this, with his lighter fuel and his long matches. Fire had always been his intention. He dropped the match to the carpet and a moment later he lit another, then another, and they all fell like little torches. The flames flickered for just a second – they seemed to reach out tiny tongues of fire, searching around for something to taste. For a moment I thought they would die. And then in a split second they touched the fuel and it was as if they became one and a monster opened its fiery mouth. In seconds the flames spread, sending tongues of orange and red and whit
e leaping from one carpet to another. It had been a hot summer – everything was dry, dry as dust. It would go up quickly. I knew this in the moments the fire took hold, yet I still couldn’t move. None of us could.

  I had never seen a fire move so fast. Within minutes it had engulfed the whole warehouse. The carpets on the ground, the carpets in the aisle, all ablaze. It was scary and fascinating at the same time. I was expecting the sprinklers to come on, but when I looked up, there were none. Nothing was going to stop this fire. The place was enveloped in flame.

  Al Butler leapt and grabbed at the camera. His fingers clutched it and he brought it down from the wall angrily. “There!” he yelled, throwing it across the floor. “Cannae see us now, pal!”

  The fire was moving too fast, it seemed to be bouncing from one wall to another, searching for a way out of this enclosed space. And that’s when I remembered the shutter door. We had dragged it down, shut ourselves in. We were trapped.

  Seventeen

  At last I was able to move.

  “Gary! The shutters!”

  We leapt for the shutter door together, as behind us the fire raged closer.

  “Come on, everybody, help!”

  I think real panic began to set in then. Even for Al Butler. What if we couldn’t get the steel shutter lifted? It wouldn’t just be the cameras that would be burnt to a crisp, it would be us, too.

  It was harder lifting it this time. We didn’t have the same leverage, but determination and fear made us strong. Smoke was beginning to fill the warehouse. The shutter rose slowly at first. And then, once again, it zoomed to the top. We were out of there and into the open in a flash, coughing and spluttering, tears in our eyes from the smoke.

  “Come on!” Claude shouted, moving back from the fire step by step. I moved too, back out onto the street. That’s when I heard a scream. I looked around. The flames, the smoke had begun to seep into the premises beside the warehouse and the flats above them. And they weren’t derelict after all. They weren’t empty. People still lived there, worked there. Claude had seen it too.

  “Come on!” Baz yelled. I grabbed Gary and we stumbled away from the scene. I was excited, frightened, mesmerised, I can’t even explain the emotions that were racing through me as fast as that fire was taking hold. We ran until we were sure we were out of sight, and then we headed for higher ground so we would have a view of the whole block and the fire. We stood for a moment, trying to get our breath back and shaking the smoke from our clothes, watching as a tornado of flames erupted from the warehouse roof. The whole block was now ablaze.

  Then, the worst thing, the worst thing ever. People came running from the flats we had thought were empty – from doorways, from the back, from the front. Hurtling down stairs to the street. Through the smoke we could even make out a couple jumping from windows.

  “They’ve got to be out. All of them,” I said to Gary.

  “Got to be,” he said.

  In the distance I could hear a siren coming closer. Fire engine? Police? Didn’t matter. Time to get out of here.

  Al Butler was still with us. He was leaping up and down screaming, “Brilliant! What a night!” Loving the fire, the destruction. This had been his plan all along. He looked mad. The fire reflected in the ice-blue of his eyes gave him the look of something alien, someone not quite human.

  Baz was laughing. “They won’t need central heating in them flats now.”

  Was Baz trying to impress Al Butler? I thought he was. Because I surely knew him too well to believe that seeing people flooding from that burning building wasn’t worrying him. It was worrying me.

  He looked round at me and winked.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  Al Butler didn’t move. For him, we weren’t even there any more. He still stood, fascinated by the fire. It was the last time I ever saw him.

  We were back on the other side of the estate before we stopped running.

  The fire lit the night sky. Little fireflies of light floated up into the darkness. Sounds were everywhere; we could hear them in the distance. Sirens and yells, screams, shouts.

  “Do you think all those people got out?” Gary’s voice was shaking.

  “Fire brigade’s there, I think they must have. You saw them.” Claude squeezed Gary’s shoulder, as if to reassure himself as much as Gary that it was true.

  “They’ll be ok. They’ll be ok.” I think I was trying to reassure myself too.

  Time to go.

  Time to get out of here.

  Eighteen

  My mother was in when I got back. She didn’t say a word about me going out, she was just relieved to see me. She had heard rumours about a gang fight somewhere on the estate, and it had worried her. I lied when she asked me if I’d heard about it, told her me and the boys had stayed at the precinct, just chatting, we weren’t involved in any fight, this was the first I’d heard about it, I said. Maybe I should have told her the truth then. But I didn’t. I didn’t want another argument, and she obviously didn’t want one either.

  “I think I’ll just go to bed, Mum.”

  I don’t know how she didn’t smell the smoke. I was sure it must have soaked though my clothes and into my skin. If she did, she said nothing about it.

  I stood under the spray in the shower for ages, trying to get clean, trying to calm down, stop shaking, trying to stop my heart from thumping. I was still scared, yet I’d never felt so excited. I can’t put the feeling into words. How can you have two different feelings at the same time? I kept listening for the police bursting through the door, imagining that they had followed me home, that they knew who I was and what I had done. Imagining that the CCTV camera hadn’t been destroyed after all.

  I went into my room and flopped on the bed. I couldn’t sleep, just kept going over and over all that had happened that night. Dodging the Young Bow, leading them right into a trap with the Dragos. That’s how it had started, and it had been exciting, it was smart. Had that only been tonight? So much had happened since then, it seemed a long time ago. We’d run through the streets, our excitement building, the car alarms going off, running again… Then meeting up with that Al Butler, and everything seemed to change. As if it wasn’t real any more. We had followed him inside that warehouse; I can see it now with that red glow around us. Just a bit of fun to begin with, until Al Butler had spotted the camera. And suddenly it seemed it was all taken out of our hands.

  Over and over in my mind I was in the middle of that fire again. I could feel the heat of it. I saw the orange and red and white flames leaping, dancing, racing through the warehouse, almost as if they were living things searching out what they could touch and destroy. I didn’t want to move. I wanted to keep looking.

  But I felt sick when I made myself remember the people in the flats nearby. Had all of those people managed to get away? Had the fire been put out? If I’d been the cause of someone being hurt I’d never forgive myself. I had never seriously hurt anyone in my life. I took out my phone, wanted to call Baz, decided against it. Because I bet he didn’t feel guilty. And if I wouldn’t call Baz, then I wouldn’t call any of the others.

  Later, I heard Vince coming in. “Heard about the fire?” he asked Mum. As soon as he said it, I sat up in bed. “Massive fire, further up on the estate.”

  “Oh my goodness, anybody hurt?” my mum asked.

  It was a moment before he answered her. Cliffhanger moment. I could imagine him, pulling open the fridge door, taking out the milk, having a swig. He always did that as soon as he came in. Mum always giving him into trouble for it. She didn’t give him into trouble now.

  I wanted to shout, ‘Answer her! Was anybody hurt?’

  “Quite a few were taken to hospital. Don’t know how serious they are. Big fire though. Started in a carpet warehouse, I heard, then everything round about it went up. Still raging.”

  “How did it start?”

  I held my breath as I waited for his answer.

  “Who knows? Always somethin
g going on. There was a big gang fight on the estate as well.” He paused. “Is Logan in?”

  Right away he was suspicious that I was involved.

  “He’s been in for ages,” Mum said. “Thank goodness.”

  “Been a busy night on this estate, police everywhere,” Vince said.

  “Oh, Vince, I wish we would hear about that house,” her voice became a worried whisper.

  I didn’t listen after that. I fell back on the bed. They didn’t know who started the fire, not yet. I was a tumble of emotions. Why did Baz dare Al Butler to do it? Why hadn’t we tried to stop him? Why did we follow him inside? We could have just helped him lift the shutters, and then run on. Why didn’t we? If anybody died because of that fire, I’d… I’d… I couldn’t even think about what I would do.

  Nineteen

  I went to the same school as Lucie. The other boys all attended the big high school on the estate. I once said to Lucie that I wondered why that was, and she had an easy answer. “This is the loser school. You get sent here if nobody else wants you. Everybody here is a loser, just like you and me. A loser or a weirdo.”

  “I’m not a weirdo.” I’d never to admit to that. “Or a loser.”

  “Well, I am definitely a bit weird. Can’t deny it.”

  We, both of us, had been excluded more than once. I had run with a bad crowd up in Aberdeen, got into all sorts of bother, and that reputation had followed me here. That was why I still had a social worker. Our school was especially for kids like us. ‘Troubled teens’ I think they called us.

  “We’re special,” I told Lucie. It was what the social workers were always telling us anyway. “So this is a special school.”

  “A special school for weirdos!” she had insisted with a giggle. Then she stared at me for a moment in that strange way she had. “You’re not as weird when you’re on your own,” she said. “You should try it more often.”