—So we started off talking about the BEKs.
—BEKs?
—Sorry, the black-eyed kids.
—Sorry, I know what they are but, why? I’m not sure I follow…
—Oh, I just thought you knowing about Skexxixx, that’s all.
—Are you talking about the lyrics in that song where he mentions them?
—Well that and … Oh, it’s a stupid story, just an internet thing. It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Let’s move on.
—Hang on. What if it does? This is what these podcasts are about – exploring all the apparently irrelevant stuff.
—Well, if we must. So you must know about the rumour? The one about Skexxixx and the BEKs?
—No.
—There’s this theory that someone posted online, on Reddit, I think, or Tumblr – probably both. It’s this theory that Skexxixx let them in. That he went to their world and that he came back and it sort of … It made him what he was.
—What was he? What was he to you back then?
—The thing is, I know he’s now just a rich musician with good PR. I sort of knew it back then too. But that sort of thing doesn’t come from nowhere. There was a lot of cross-referencing of his lyrics with the symbols on the inlay cards and that hidden track on the Japanese import version of Through the Mocking Glass that all adds up. Looking back it was probably just a really smart way to get everyone to buy the album twice.
—But…
—I don’t know, you only have to look at him. I’ve heard interviews and stuff. He’s a weird guy I suppose. And, I don’t know, I guess it doesn’t matter, but me and Arla, we were always on about it.
Despite his protests, I’m suddenly on my guard that Anthony might be playing me here. I haven’t yet asked him if he knows about Arla’s account of the night of the 21st of November 2014. Of course, there’s every possibility he’s listened to episode one, in which she describes the black-eyed children at the back door of her house on the night of the killings. So has he dropped this element into our discussion in response to that? Or is he in fact being entirely open and honest. After all, it is true that Skexxixx mentions the BEKs in an oblique way in his music. I think back to the lyrics of the track ‘Dead-Eyed March’:
‘A thousand black-eyed girls,
A thousand black-eyed boys,
Marching to a distant drum,
Looking for a place called home…’
—So you said Arla was with another girl when you met her – someone else from the hotel?
—Yeah, she sometimes knocked around with this other girl. But she just seemed … well … not like us – nothing like me and Arla. This girl was streetwise, she was hard. I had no idea why she was there with Arla. She was more like Kyle and the boys.
How interesting. For all Anthony is amiable, humble and forthcoming, it is a shame that he’s guilty of being as close-minded as those who picked on and bullied him. Notice he only talks about Arla and doesn’t even mention Angel by name. If only he’d spoken to Angel properly rather than focusing on Arla, he’d have found, like Arla did, that they had much in common. But it seems like the story of Arla Macleod is one that is filled with what-ifs and could-haves.
—So back to what Arla and her friend were doing with the lift. Did you recognise anything there?
—Yes. I’d spent a lot of time reading about that sort of thing online. Arla was doing the elevator game. Again, it was something that just clicked between us, it was something that we had in common. Like it was destiny or something. I found a new sort of lease of life, as you might call it, just talking about Skexxixx and stuff with Arla. She was always asking about the games. She wanted to try the more dangerous ones.
—Dangerous?
—Well, yes. I mean, these games mostly originate from Japan and Korea and there’s warnings and disclaimers all over the internet not to play them.
—Had you ever played them?
—No. I’ll admit that. I was too scared. I always wanted to try the Hooded Man Ritual or something like that, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Until I met Arla.
I leave a pause to allow Anthony to expand on this. He doesn’t, so I decide to change tack – for the moment.
—What did Arla tell you about her life?
—You know, that’s another thing I beat myself up about. Like with Alice, I was so obsessed with telling Arla about my own problems, I guess I didn’t listen too much. But, like Alice said, her parents were odd, religious. Arla thought Alice was the favourite, the ‘normal’ one, the ‘pretty’ one. Arla said that her mum used to tell them she had the brains and Alice had the looks. When they took Alice to her swimming training, they’d leave Arla behind at home. She was an embarrassment to them. All of them. I think that’s what they used to say. What sort of thing is that to say to a kid? A young girl especially? The Macleod sisters were never allowed boyfriends – hardly allowed friends. Their entire worth was based on how pious they were, how well they did at school, how much they conformed. Their parents’ love was conditional. I remember that so well. How horrible.
—Did Arla ever strike you as being ill – mentally, I mean?
—There’s no way I could say. She was odd, I remember that. Like no one I’d ever met before. But I liked that, I thought she was great. When I found out what she did to her family I wished I had been more sensible. But there I was, failing at life again.
—Earlier, you said that everything went wrong when you met Arla. It doesn’t sound that way so far; it sounds like the two of you were close. Surely that was a good thing?
—That’s what I thought, yes. That’s what immature, naive me thought, but in reality, it was no good for either of us.
—How so? You didn’t find solace in each other?
—We did, but that was the problem. Instead of the holiday making us better, making us more normal, better at being social, it didn’t. It drove us further underground. It made us.
It saddens me again that Anthony thinks that it was a bad thing to meet someone more like him than the other boys who treated him so poorly were. From what I have learned about Anthony, he is a bit of a paradox: in some ways he was desperate to fit in; yet he also kept his identity as a Skexxixx fan in full knowledge that he wouldn’t be taken seriously by most people. It seems that, unlike Arla, who flaunted her identity as an outcast, there was always a small part of Anthony that wanted to be universally liked.
—So how did it feel to find someone like Arla? Did it help how you were feeling about yourself?
—It was liberating. That’s the word. Finding someone who liked all the same stuff as me. Who didn’t judge me for liking it.
—Did Arla’s parents know she was into Skexxixx, the games and all that?
—It wasn’t hard for them to see it, it was right in front of them. Arla just felt like they didn’t ever try to understand the things she was passionate about. They weren’t tangible, like church or school or swimming. It didn’t make sense to them, so they just ignored it. I mean she never said anything about wanting to kill them! She said nothing about what she eventually did. It was, I guess, normal teenage stuff, you know? Rebellion. It was sad, though, the way she was always looking to escape, to get away from the world.
—And you joined in with that?
—Yeah. There was always a part of me somewhere inside that knew it wasn’t real – that we were sort of playing make-believe. But that was so good, it was like being a kid again. Although at the time I was just caught up in it, I had no idea what I was doing. But it was like when I was in school and everyone else was playing football and charging about in the yard, all I wanted to do was hide away in the corner. To have someone else joining me in that corner, it was special.
—I hate to sour the memory, Anthony, but let’s move onto what went wrong between you and Arla.
—It was my fault really. Like always…
Anthony sighs and there is silence for a while. This particular memory is something we’
ve been skirting around and now it’s come down to it, I’m worried he won’t want to talk, that it’s going to be too much for him. I want to tell him that it’s ok, that we can leave it be. But I really feel that it isn’t, that there’s something in this part of our story that will help us understand at least some of who Arla Macleod was and why she committed the heinous acts of the 21st of November 2014.
—All my life I’ve been frightened. Of other people, other children – everyone. I’ve cowered, I’ve hidden, I’ve not told, I’ve kept secrets. Now it’s time to start talking.
—It’s up to you if you do. Only you can make that decision.
—OK. No more fear. I haven’t told this story before, not to anyone, not even my family, it’s so horrible. After this episode goes out I’ll no doubt get my comeuppance and that’ll be right – it’ll be what I deserve. But I’m going to tell it anyway.
A part of me is begging to stop and ask Anthony what he means here. A part of me wants to know whether he has received the same threats I have. Has Anthony had the same abuse online? Is that why he retreated to the sanctuary of his parents’ house, why he never left and took his place in the big, bad world? I want to know if his phone has been plagued by texts, whether it sits, like mine, muted in my pocket, little pulses of hate alighting every few minutes. I hold back though; I let Anthony continue to tell the fifth story.
—So Arla and I had been playing the lift game, Elevator to Another World. I always got scared when we got onto the part where the woman might enter the lift. When we got to that floor, I could always feel pressure in my bladder, the hairs rising on my arms. What would happen? What would I do if the woman entered the lift? Would I look at her? Would I try and speak to her? Would I piss my pants?
Just to remind you, the Elevator to Another World game Anthony is talking about is supposed to transport the player to another dimension. Elevator buttons are pressed in a certain sequence, and at one point a young woman is supposed to enter the elevator and game players are not permitted to look at her. If the game goes the way it’s supposed to, the player will then press the button for the first floor and the lift will instead begin ascending to the tenth.
—I remember we got to the fifth floor and when the doors opened there was someone there and I nearly screamed out. It wasn’t a young woman though. It was Alice.
—Arla’s sister?
—Yeah, and she was as surprised to see us as we were to see her. She was just standing there as the doors opened, looking at us. I saw her do a bit of a double take, look from me to Arla and back again. She cocked her head to one side and this sort of flutter went through me, like, I’d almost forgotten how beautiful she was.
‘Mam’s looking for you,’ was all she said to Arla.
I don’t know what I expected right at that point. Maybe more from Arla – like a flash of rebellion; she was the older sister after all. Maybe I thought she would tell Alice to get stuffed or something, but she didn’t. I remember it really clearly, Arla just put her head down, nodded like a beaten dog, you know? Compliant.
Alice seemed different then too. She seemed more assertive, clearly the dominant one in the relationship. It was like she was the parent and Arla was the kid. I said nothing, I just kept quiet, let them get on with it. Arla got out the lift and they went off. Arla waved at me without even looking back. I was pretty surprised, disappointed, but I got it – I understood. Of course Alice was the boss; she was the pretty one, she was the one that had been assimilated into normal society. Arla was the outcast, the freak. It made a horrible sort of sense. I could relate, anyway.
But as they walked off, Alice turned round and she gave me this smile, this big, warm smile like everything was OK again between us.
—What time of day was this?
—Late morning I think, maybe lunchtime. It’s funny, you don’t even think about that when you’re young – meals and stuff – but when you’re an adult it becomes so important. Anyway, I had lunch in the hotel with my mum and dad. It was a buffet style all-inclusive thing. I’m standing there at the hot plate having this internal debate because all I want is the chips and the pizza but I know I should be eating the salad, and suddenly there’s someone right next to me. I’m properly scared, really terrified, and can feel myself starting to collapse in on myself.
—Alice again?
—‘Alright, Anth?’ he says. It’s Kyle. But, not the Kyle from before, the Kyle who laughed at me and called me ‘Empty’. It was the Kyle like he was when I first met him – when he was just a friendly sort of person, before Jack and Greg showed up. It was the Kyle who I’d thought I’d made friends with.
—I imagine you didn’t want to have anything to do with him, though?
—You’d think that, wouldn’t you? But there was still this part of me, this little part, that was so desperate for acceptance. I still cringe thinking about it, the way I was just so eager to welcome him back. I guess because he was speaking to me like a proper person, calling me Anth, not ‘Empty’.
So he starts telling me about this party – that him and the others are going to this party in some old, abandoned house up on the cliff. He says they met a guy – some local – and there’s going to be booze and girls and DJs and stuff. No parents, nothing like that. He kept going on about the girls, how there’d be loads of them. And underneath it all I realised what he meant. I knew he was saying, ‘Even one for you, Empty, even one for you.’ That’s what seduced me … Man, I mean, I was only sixteen.
—Not many sixteen-year-old boys would have turned it down, to be fair.
—True. But you know the real reason I wanted to go? The thing that swayed me? It’s so pathetic. It was the fact that if they were going, then I knew Alice would be there too. If she hadn’t given me that smile she gave me as she and Arla walked away … it was pathetic that I just fell for it.
—You were only young.
—I was. And here was Kyle on his own without Jack and Greg, and I just thought that we might all be OK again. I figured that, if things got bad, I could just leave, you know? If they started with that ‘Empty’ stuff I could just walk away. Maybe being with Arla for those few days helped my confidence a bit?
So I arranged to meet Kyle and the others later. When I told my dad that I was going out with the boys he looked so pleased, so proud. I was almost in tears again, determined not to let him down. I had a shower and got changed. I picked out the most ‘normal’ clothes I had – just plain T-shirt, jeans, trainers. There was nothing I could do about my weight but at least I wasn’t wearing that damn ‘Empty’ T-shirt.
It was a really warm evening, I remember that. I remember it was six or seven and still boiling. I met Kyle at the mini-golf course round the back of the hotel. Jack and Greg were there. When I saw them all together I nearly turned back, but Kyle was shaking my hand, clapping me on the back, really welcoming me. The others were sort of sheepish, subdued, and I wondered if they were actually sorry, like they regretted what happened?
We walked down that long path, down to the beach and I remember they all got cigarettes out. I didn’t ask for one and they were pouring vodka into this two-litre bottle of Coke. They passed it round and I nearly said no but I drank too because, if nothing else, it would give me some courage. All of them seemed tense, their smiles looked painted on and I got this really bad feeling, this sudden longing to just be back with Mum and Dad, to watch one of the cheesy shows or sip one of the silly virgin cocktails in the bar and play Scrabble or dominoes. I guess that was the moment I could have turned back.
‘They won’t be long,’ one of the boys said, and I remember wondering where Alice was. Then Jack pointed and he was, like, ‘Oh no!’ and the others all started hooting and groaning.
I looked up and I saw Alice walking down the path. The boys were laughing and I swigged more of that Coke and vodka mix. Alice was stunning. She hadn’t even got make-up on but she blew everyone away – I could see it in their faces; I could hear it in the hush that fell. When
she got there, Alice pulled out another bottle of vodka and waved it at us. I remember laughing along with the boys but I still had this nagging feeling that everything wasn’t right.
—Who else were they waiting for?
—See, I wasn’t really paying much attention. Sounds stupid, doesn’t it? We just started walking across the beach for ages and ages, right over to the other side. I could see the top of the cliffs. There were these fields or something on top. It looked like corn, you know when corn is all green? Not ripe? That’s where we were making for – those cliffs. The house was up there, some old mansion. Everyone was drinking from the bottles and I could feel myself getting braver and braver, and then suddenly my phone bleeped. I looked down and I’ve got a text from Arla: I’m doing the Hooded Man. Alone.
That’s all it said.
And that’s when I felt my heart drop.
Just to reiterate, the Hooded Man Ritual, which was mentioned in episode four by Angel, is like the elevator game. A sequence of numbers are inputted, this time into a rotary telephone and a request for a taxi is spoken into the receiver. Said cab is supposed to turn up, driven by a man in a hood, the suggestion being that this hooded man drives you far from the world as you know it and into another, before bringing you home at your request.
The Hooded Man Ritual is regarded as one of the most dangerous games you can ever play, according to discussions about it on the internet. There are countless Reddit threads, Tumblr posts and blogs on the subject – significantly more now than back when Arla and Anthony met.
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