The burn, when he finally reaches it, is no longer a burn but a pool – barely – of stagnant water, obscured by thorns and roots.
But the pipe is still there, jutting from the bank. The flimsy-looking and badly rusted grille across its mouth lattices the darkness therein. He turns his ear towards it and listens, his breath coming in white bursts. Corroded beer cans bob in the pool. Shining his torch there, he sees a thin scrim of white liquid on the surface.
‘Hello?’ he says.
The top of her head emerges; black hair against white water.
‘It’s Jim,’ he says. ‘It’s me.’
Slowly, out of less than two feet of water, she rises: rivulets of scum contour her bones, her skin a ghastly green pall, her stomach a concaved twist. Black nipples erect on small breasts and a shadowy patch of pubic hair between wasted, ossified legs. She stands fully upright.
‘Hi Peg,’ he says.
Peg doesn’t answer. Her chest rises and falls, rises and falls.
He takes a shambling step into the pool. ‘I’m sorry I took so long.’
Peg is taller than he is. She lets him come.
‘You’ve been dreaming of me,’ he says.
She rests her numbing hand on his scarred jaw.
He brings out the ecstasy Alive sold him, and swallows one with a palmful of white water. He puts the other on Peg’s black tongue. She lets him tilt back her head and dribble water into her mouth. Sinew shifts in her throat as the drug goes down.
‘We’ll start small,’ he says. ‘Just the two of us.’
The pool begins to bubble and a thick fog creeps through the trees. Peg takes Jim’s clawed hand in her clawed hand as the world dissolves, until it’s impossible to see where she ends and he begins, until they’re…
…going…
…going…
MIDNIGHT
Frank and Scott Hulme
of Second Avenue
Scott skulks five, six steps behind Frank, toe-ending pebbles and milky cubes of safety glass from the kicked-in bus stop. He’s in a huff, but alright – let him stew. After the stunt he’s pulled, Frank’s not exactly itching to talk either.
They keep their distance until the downturned mouth of Hollis Road, which splits the estate in two. Traffic sounds like grey waves on a slag shore, a torrent of vehicles using the road as thoroughfare to places, perhaps, where things like this mess now unfolding don’t happen. Frank shields his eyes. Should’ve gone a bit further up, he thinks, crossed at the zebra by the Labour Club, but then Scott’s beside him, eyeballing his feet, chewing his lip.
‘Son,’ Frank says, ‘screw your head on while you’re crossing.’
Scott hoiks a gob of something nasty onto the grass verge and, for the first time since the phone call earlier that day, looks at his father.
‘I’m sorry, right?’ he says. ‘Can we just go home? I don’t want to go there. I really don’t want to go there.’
Join the club, Frank thinks, but before he can say this, a gap appears in the traffic and the two of them dart like assassins between the headlights.
From Hollis Road, you go along Stanhope Street then cut across Emery Street onto the Crescent. Two options then present themselves: either head up to Vivienne Avenue via Ashworth Road, or across the Green and through the alley onto Tan Row – skirting the bins behind the precinct – and up to the house that way. Frank chooses Tan Row because it takes longer. The streetlights emit clouds of flat orange light that falls like dust. On the north-western edge of the estate, the six Brutalist high-rises crowd the sky; beyond them, the slow-fingered spotlights of the greyhound track on the dual carriageway crisscross as if warding off hoodoo. The Missing poster slapped to the bricks in the alley: Lily Butler. Vanished weeks ago. Appeal for witnesses, etc. Neither father nor son acknowledge it.
‘Tell me again what you’re going to say,’ Frank says.
Scott shrugs.
‘You can’t just shrug at this man.’
Scott shrugs.
‘Be respectful, say it was an accident. You got carried away, but you’ve learned your lesson. Sound like you mean it.’
When Scott shrugs again, Frank grabs him by the shoulders, thrusts his face into his son’s close enough to smell his menthol gum. Not quite fifteen, and already his boy is a shade taller than he is. ‘I mean it, Scott. This isn’t just about you.’
‘What’s it matter?’ Scott says. ‘In a month’s time we won’t even be here.’
‘It matters because when we come back – and we will – who’s to say we won’t end up even nearer him? Neighbours?’
‘When we come back? You act like it’s going to be next week or something.’
‘Christ, not this again.’
‘It’s easy for you,’ Scott says. ‘You don’t have mates.’ He struggles out of his father’s grasp and for an instant Frank thinks he’s going to run. But he doesn’t.
‘That doesn’t change this,’ Frank says. ‘You know who he is, don’t you?’
Scott pulls up his hood. ‘I know.’
He lives at the end of Vivienne Avenue, by the garages. The biggest house on the estate because it’s actually two terraces knocked through. There’s an ancient Peugeot 505 in the front yard, Barr Autos & MOTs on the side, a pair of steel-toed boots lie where they’ve been kicked off beside a badly listing bird table. Crushed rollies everywhere. Light from the front windows brush all with an eerie deep-sea glow. They slow to a shuffle at the front gate.
‘This’ll take five minutes,’ Frank says. He puts an arm around Scott; a small gesture which ordinarily his son would shirk but this time does not, and for that moment Frank forgets about the blood-red door on which he’s about to knock. About the man who waits behind.
Paint flakes off in his hand when he opens the gate. There’s no movement in the windows, but from somewhere inside Frank hears the short, sharp bursts of a power drill.
‘Haway, Scott.’
The drill gets louder, rising in pitch.
‘Five minutes…
(He thinks about the last time he was here, at this door. That horrific day.)
…five minutes and we’re out of here.’
There’s a lull in the drilling. Frank takes a deep breath and bangs on the door. The sound is monstrous. He can hear voices – more than one, he’s sure – coming from inside. Scott moves instinctively behind his father, but Frank says no, that won’t look good.
‘And get your hood down,’ he says. ‘Ready?’
Ambient estate noise swallows his son’s one-syllable reply.
Footsteps, and then Vincent throws the door wide, stands before them in a blaze of light.
He hates how fast he’s speaking. ‘Mr Barr – Vincent – I’m Frank Hulme, and this is my son Scott. You rang before. You’re expecting us.’
Beside his father, Scott shrinks.
‘That I am,’ Vincent says.
—
Way back when, a derelict waterworks stood where the spacious detached and semi-detached homes of Moorside now stand. Bombed by the Nazis, it was left to rot, along with a monstrous concrete water tower terrifyingly reminiscent of a tripod from War of the Worlds. Surrounding both was what was generally referred to in those days as The Field, a tract of wasteland where the Japanese knotweed was six feet high. You could miss your tea trying to escape.
All of which, of course, magnetised children. Rolling games of Hide-and-Seek, Manhunt, Armies – games at which youths these days with their Playstations and their Benson & Hedges would scoff – took place there, though caution was advisable. Jagged bricks, rusty cans, and broken glass lay half-buried in the undergrowth, glinting with tetanus. There was a well, too. Or rather, a maintenance shaft that had once granted engineers access to the now-dry and defunct water channels below. The well stood in a clearing of knotweed and might have once
been covered by a safety grille, though by the mid-1980s it had vanished, leaving nothing between you and a sheer drop into pitch black zilch. How far down it went was a mystery. Rocks were dropped but never heard to land. Children dared each other to step up onto the edge – an edge rimmed with corroded steel and rusted bolts – to lean out over the darkness, and spit. Doing so was a show of bravado, a substratum in the complex hierarchy of prepubescence, and commanded respect not only by dint of the obvious perils, but due also to that which remained unspoken: that a child craning his or her neck over the void might get the distinct sense something was down there, looking up at them. Watching. Some even heard a whisper, like a seashell at the ear. Their own blood – something that lived.
Naturally, mothers warned their offspring to steer clear, and teenage Frank’s mother was no exception: Don’t mess on round that well!
And Frank, sprinting from the house to meet his friends, already half-blinded by dazzling hexagons of summer sun, shouted back, I won’t!
But he would.
And keep away from that Alan Barr!
Alan Barr was Vincent’s son.
Frank: I will!
But he didn’t. And here’s the rub: if he had, you wouldn’t be reading this.
—
Vincent’s house smells like meat. Not frying sirloin or roast chicken, but meat – dripping claret.
‘Shut that door,’ he says, ‘you’re letting the heat out.’ It’s impossible to believe Vincent is in his seventies. The same age as Frank’s own father, or would have been had the strokes not claimed him a decade ago.
Frank manages what he hopes is a comforting look at his boy. There’s a nest of spots on Scott’s forehead, vivid like spackled blood. He has his mother’s jaw but his skin, and that’s a shame because acne is an awful thing. Whenever Franks thinks of his teenage self – attempts to tap into the youth he once was – the memories are opaque, thought and deed best-guessed and second hand; but the visceral misery of acne…even nowadays, tracing fingertips across his own flesh, he can almost feel the raw boils, the hot pus pulse. Scott, it seemed, was to be similarly cursed, and lately Frank has sensed his son resenting him for it. Felt it added to the list of mounting grievances against his name.
They follow Vincent down a hallway lit by unshaded, high watt bulbs. The wallpaper is the spongey stuff everyone had back in the 80s. Framed photographs: a long-haired Vincent with his wife, a peroxide-curled woman so tiny it’s hard to imagine how Vincent hadn’t simply crushed her like a starling egg. Next, a black and white portrait of an unsmiling young man in an RAF uniform, a crease in the photo slicing neatly across his throat. Beside that, a picture of a giant, grizzled man clamping onto his knee what appears to be Vincent as a toddler. Child Vincent’s face is set hard, as if attempting to ignite something with his mind. Alan’s photograph is the last one. In it, he looks much like he did that day at the well: young and scraggly and grinning that doomed grin of his. Not much older than Scott is now. Frank looks away.
Vincent is waiting for them in the living room. His antifreeze-blue eyes crawl over Frank’s face. ‘It’s been a long time,’ he says. He shifts his gaze to Scott. ‘And this is your boy.’
Scott nods.
Frank says, ‘We won’t take up too much of your time. Scott here has something he wants to say, don’t you Scott?’
For a moment, Frank thinks his son’s going to flub his lines but then, in a voice that holds a knife to his heart, Scott says, ‘Mr Barr, I’m sorry for what I did. It was –’
‘One sec,’ Vincent says. His white beard is stained yellow at the corners. He smoothes it down with his free hand. ‘Before we get into that, I need a favour.’
Father and son exchange looks.
‘Relax,’ Vincent says. ‘It’s a simple job. I just need a hand with something in the back room.’
Frank knows he should be balling his fists, planting his feet. But he says, ‘What job?’
‘Easier if I just show you.’
Frank glances at his boy. Scott could be in Madame Tussaudes. ‘OK,’ he says.
Vincent smiles. He still has all his own teeth, and they are black, pin-like things.
‘Champion,’ he says, like he and Frank are old pals. Like he doesn’t recall what happened between them in this very house all those years ago. ‘Champion.’
—
Alan was in the year above Frank and his friends at school, and just one of those kids. Just off. In P.E., the rare times anybody passed him the ball, Alan was like some mouse-startled woman in a cartoon, up on her stool, twisting her petticoats. And forget trying to speak to him because as soon as you opened your mouth he’d literally cringe, this God-awful grin leaking across his spastic face, like he didn’t understand a word you were saying. Like you were conversing in Moonspeak. That he was the son of a man like Vincent made little sense to Frank.
Until, that is, the day Frank was on his way to Fat Gary’s for football stickers and saw the two of them leaving the chip shop. The buttons on Vincent’s waistcoat flashed heliographs in the sun as he strode ahead to the car, though they lived only five minutes away. Alan trailed behind with the bags of food. Chip shop carrier bags are perennially flimsy affairs, and one started to droop and tear, disgorging wrapped packets and cans of pop. Alan dropped to his knees, desperate to salvage what he could, and foolishly picked up a portion by its greasy corner, unravelling chips all over the pavement.
Vincent went ape. He stomped back to his boy and even from the other side of the road, where he was now peeking from behind a parked car, Frank heard: ‘You’re not even fit to carry fucking chips now?’ He reached down and Alan skittered backwards through the mess, but all Vincent wanted was to yank the rest of the bags off his son’s wrist. Then he got in the car and screeched off.
Surrounded by battered sausages, Alan stayed on his knees while the gulls moved in. He looked like someone kneeling by the side of a pit, awaiting the bullet to the base of the skull. Then he got to his feet, wiped his nose on his sleeve, and started home.
Once he’d gone, Frank broke cover. There was a can of Tizer in the gutter and he opened it at arm’s length, wary of fizz. It was warm, but he sipped it anyway and began for the first time to question the supposed anomaly that was Alan Barr. Maybe it did, after all, make some sense that Alan was Vincent’s son.
Maybe it made perfect sense.
—
There’s something maritime about Vincent, some aura of brine. White shirtsleeves rolled up over densely tattooed forearms – skulls, sirens, krakens, scimitars – the black ink long since gone a queasy myrtle green. The buttons on his waistcoat strain against the man’s sheer bulk; braces almost as wide as gurney straps hanging down the backs of his pinstripe trousers. He whistles in a delicate, soaring register as Frank and Scott follow him to the backroom.
They reach a closed door. Vincent scratches his shaved head, the action kicking up flakes. ‘Just in here,’ he says.
Vincent extends a hand, palm out, inviting them to step inside, and it occurs to Frank that at the front door, he’d sworn there had been not one but two voices coming from the house.
‘It’s your gaff,’ Frank says, feigning nonchalance, ‘so after you.’
Vincent’s pleasant smile does not change. His open palm, fissured like a salt plain, does not close.
‘Dad,’ Scott says.
So Frank makes a decision. He opens the door and steps inside.
—
It happened during the summer holidays of 1986. Frank was as old as Scott is now – fourteen going on fifteen – part of a listless pack of boys murdering the long days by kicking balls off the sides of houses, and making single cigarettes go around five sets of lungs. It was late afternoon on one such indolent day when they saw Alan coming up the other side of the road, jumping from paving slab to paving slab to avoid stepping on cracks. He hadn’t seen th
em.
‘Hey Al!’ Tommy Greener shouted.
Alan froze. He pushed his glasses up his nose and peered over, grinning that terrible, trembling grin.
Tommy was their leader. A thick-necked boy with moles and a mean streak. ‘Al, we’re heading up the field if you fancy?’
Alan didn’t respond.
Some boys stared up a chant – ‘Aaaa-lan, Aaaa-lan’ – but some vague sense of self-preservation appeared to be holding Alan back.
‘Haway, Al,’ Tommy said. ‘It’ll be a laugh.’
Alan took a step towards them, stopped, looked up the street in the direction of home. What was he weighing up at that moment? Surely he had to have sensed something malevolent afoot? But if so, why did he go with them? What those boys did to him in that field, was it still better to risk that, than continue home to Vivienne Avenue and his father?
And if it was then…well.
At the field, Tommy hoofed the ball into the knotweed and Alan plunged eagerly in after it. Tommy had this look on his face, all his moles coming together in a smirk. Tommy’s best friend Brian Simm sniggered.
Tommy had kicked the ball in the direction of the well. The rest of the boys followed Alan’s path, melting into the knotweed like beings from another world.
—
The first thing Frank sees when he steps into the room is the disembodied head of a St. Bernard. It rests on the table, its large glassy eyes pondering the aertex ceiling. Scott sees it a second later and clamps his hands over his mouth. Vincent closes the door behind them.
‘That’s Ludwig,’ he says. ‘The greatest beast I ever knew.’ He puts one blunt-trauma hand on each of their shoulders.
‘Where’s the rest of him?’ Frank asks.
Vincent’s breath is an underground coal blaze. ‘The rest of him’s fucked.’ He goes over to the table and swivels the head so as to be able to look into the thing’s eyes. ‘Had him since he was a pup,’ he says. ‘He used to be able to fit here, in the palm of my hand…a gentle giant, he was.’ He laughs softly, fondly.
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