The Challenge

by Tom Hoyle

‘It’s Jack. Keep going.’

  I could see Sam ahead, standing in the entrance of the mine, the long chain dangling in one hand and a shiny padlock in the other. Yes – a shiny new padlock.

  I squinted as we strode out of the tunnel. Jack leaned against the metal door, pushing it as tightly closed as possible, while Sam threaded the chain round the handle and round a metal hook screwed into the rock. The door fitted securely: for anyone inside, it must have blocked out all but paper-thin slithers of light.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I said. ‘Darren’s still in there.’

  The Twins laughed. ‘We warned him,’ Jack said.

  ‘We said that if he did anything to you that we didn’t like, we would put him in a bad place,’ Sam added.

  ‘I don’t think he understood we meant it literally,’ Jack concluded.

  I stared at the door – it was chipped and dented, but there was no way it could be forced open.

  ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ I said. I was unsettled, scared, and excited as well. I nudged a few gravel-sized stones with my feet. My eyes darted from Sam to Jack, to the door, to the Lake in the distance, but my imagination was with Darren.

  Sam put his hand on my shoulder. ‘We did this for you. How long do you want him to stay in there?’

  ‘I dunno,’ I muttered. ‘I didn’t really want him there in the first place.’ I think I was worried about getting into trouble.

  ‘Perhaps we should let him out?’ said Jack.

  There was a shout from behind the door, then another, closer. We stared at the metal. I put my hand to my mouth. The Twins smiled. Then the metal shook and rattled.

  ‘You bloody bastards,’ Darren shouted. ‘Let me out!’ He beat his fist on the door. ‘Let me out – I can’t see a thing in here. I don’t like it any more.’

  Sam pulled Jack to him as they grinned.

  There was a deep scream from inside. ‘Please, please help me – please! I know you’re there. Please!’

  I went forward to the door. ‘Darren, listen. This was just a joke, and to teach you a lesson. I’ve had enough of you pushing me around.’ I couldn’t hear anything from the other side of the door. ‘You’ve done worse things to me than this.’

  Darren spoke through his teeth: ‘OK.’

  Sam stood beside me. ‘We want you to apologize to Ben. And we want it to sound good.’ A silence followed that ended as Sam kicked the door hard.

  ‘I’m very, very sorry,’ said Darren.

  ‘And I know I will suffer if I ever insult Ben again,’ said Jack.

  ‘I know I will suffer if I ever insult Ben again,’ Darren chanted as if bored. He shook the door; the chain pulled tighter. ‘Now let me out!’

  Sam went close to the door and spoke in little more than a whisper: ‘If we leave you, you’d never know if someone was passing, so you’d have to shout for hours, or days, even when you were tired and thirsty.’

  Sam walked away from the door and was followed by Jack. I trailed after them, binding myself emotionally closer to them with each step. We didn’t stop walking until we were away from the mine entrance and had the spectacular view of the Lake from the top of Ward’s Fell. There was no one else in sight.

  ‘Ben,’ Sam said, ‘we should leave him there longer. At the moment he’s an angry snake, waiting to strike. We have to tame him. We need to show him that we’re in charge and he needs to respect you.’ He pulled out the key to the padlock. ‘It’s your decision. You’re intelligent.’ The key was placed in my palm. ‘You can let him out now, in a minute, or in an hour.’ Sam put his mouth so close to my ear that I could feel his cheek against mine. ‘Or never. Your decision.’

  A few minutes earlier I would have rushed over and let Darren out. Now I put the key in my pocket. It wasn’t just that I wanted to please The Twins; and it wasn’t just that I could see Sam’s logic. It was partly because I couldn’t see or hear Darren. But that wasn’t all: I felt the warm excitement of being in control over another person. The fuel that powers a bully burned within me.

  ‘I think Darren needs to learn a lesson,’ I said, walking a little way and sitting down on the grass. ‘This is nothing compared to what he’s done to me.’ The final stage: justification for my actions.

  ‘Stand up,’ said Sam. ‘And come over here.’

  Like a puppet, I went over. Jack joined us, and we put our arms around one another and rested our three foreheads together. ‘We’re three brothers now,’ Jack said.

  ‘Three musketeers,’ said Sam.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. I had forgotten about Darren.

  After we parted: ‘Hey – catch!’ Jack threw me a bar of chocolate, and then one to Sam. He threw to me first. Something had changed. Jack then reached into his rucksack a second time. ‘Want a cigarette?’

  After about an hour, as the sun began to dip down towards the hills on the far side of the Lake, I decided to go back and let Darren out. The Twins stood some distance behind.

  ‘Help! Help!’ Darren was calling.

  ‘Shut up, Darren, I’m here with the key,’ I said.

  There was silence from the other side of the door as I calmly put the key in the padlock and threaded the chain through the loop.

  ‘About time,’ said Darren as he blinked in the light. Seeing that I didn’t have The Twins with me, he growled in a low voice, full of anger: ‘I’m going to kill you. I’m going to make you scream, Benny!’

  I brought my fist up against Darren’s chin so fast and hard that his head shot back like a snapped piece of wood. A second fist brought blood, and then, after he fell, I had my right hand round his neck on the ground. ‘If you touch me again, I’m going to rip your throat out. Understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ he slurred through split lips. ‘I’m going to leave you alone from now on.’

  ‘What’s my name?’ I whispered.

  There was something in his eyes I hadn’t seen before. Fear. ‘Ben,’ he said.

  ‘What’s my name?’ I shouted, slapping him.

  ‘Ben,’ he said, louder.

  ‘This one is for Blake.’ I hit him one more time, hard, striking nose and mouth together. Finally defeated, frightened to move, Darren covered his face with his hands.

  I wonder what he saw in my eyes. Whatever it was, Darren didn’t just stop bullying Blake and me. He hardly spoke to us again.

  I walked back to The Twins. ‘Well done, bro,’ said Sam.

  ‘There’s one other person we need to bring into line,’ said Jack. ‘We have the Challenge of bringing to justice whoever murdered Will.’

  I thought of the letters, of Mike Haconby’s guilt, of how the police seemed to know it was him but couldn’t prove it. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s the main thing.’

  Sam spoke louder, nearly a shout, as if he wanted someone high in the sky to hear. ‘It is a Challenge. And we never, never, never fail in a Challenge.’

  Attachment

  NOVEMBER 2011

  GAME THEORY

  The Twins were flesh and blood like the rest of us, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if they’d turned out to be robots. They were never ill and never looked tired. When there was a Sixth Form photo taken under the trees by the Science Block, a shaft of light crept between the branches and fell, centre stage, on The Twins. I still have the picture: two hundred people, but two stood out. It was the little things. In History, while we were concentrating on Dr Richardson’s text, Caroline accidentally nudged a pencil from the table and Sam’s hand flashed out to catch it. There are a thousand stories.

  The Twins even convinced coolest-of-the-dudes Ethan and no-nonsense Anna to become an item.

  I felt guilty that I went for whole days without thinking about Will.

  I began to spend a bit of time with Caroline. ‘Hey, Ben, can you help me with this essay after break?’ she said after one lesson. ‘Jack says you really understand it.’ We sat together over History books in the library. To begin with, I made her smile; before long, I made her laugh.

/>   In the week after Darren was locked in the old mine, I again looked for opportunities to tell The Twins about Will’s letters, but the time never seemed right. I also knew that I was going to sleep at their house on Friday night.

  The Twins were left almost completely alone by their parents, who I never saw and had only heard a handful of times on the phone. I didn’t really have a yardstick for how odd this was – my gran hassled me about the tiniest mess, but I knew that she was different, older, fussy. ‘Dad’s been in Zurich on legal business for three weeks,’ said Sam, ‘and Mum’s down in London.’

  To get to and from school, we took a small school bus that twisted its way round Lake Hintersea. But on the Friday evening of the sleepover, The Twins’ dad collected us from school after driving up from Heathrow. His Mercedes E-Class stopped on double yellow lines outside the school.

  ‘Get in,’ he said immediately, with no other greeting. ‘I’m going in there to the loo.’ He nodded towards the main school building.

  The Twins just said, ‘OK.’

  I wanted to call him by name but couldn’t seem to remember the right one. Then my head was full of the portrait of Samuel John Thatcher, Ward of Hintersea that I’d seen the night of the party. ‘Mr . . . um . . . Thatcher, you’re parked on double yellows.’ I had seen tickets slapped on cars before.

  He gave a little snort. ‘Lines on a road,’ was all he said.

  Being with The Twins made me confident and helpful. ‘They sometimes give tickets.’ The Twins’ father, surely, would be like his sons. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

  ‘Is that the worst that will happen?’ He looked at me dismissively.

  ‘Yes, I s’pose,’ I muttered.

  The teacher on duty strode over, eyes bright at the doubly wicked combination of posh car on yellow lines. ‘Excuse me, is that your vehicle parked there?’ she huffed.

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Thatcher said, and walked off into school.

  Mr Thatcher had never told me his first name. He instructed The Twins with the cold control of a chess player moving pieces, but that didn’t affect their mood one bit: their banter with me was as friendly as ever. I’d grown up knowing that my own father had separated himself completely from my life, so – secretly, horribly – I enjoyed that The Twins didn’t seem to have a very close relationship with their dad.

  At Timberline, as always, we went to one of their rooms. It happened to be Sam’s, which I preferred as it had a huge piece of modern art on the ceiling – something I’d never seen done before. I threw myself down onto a beanbag and looked up at the splashes and swirls of colour. ‘I think I see a camel sitting on a lily pad,’ I mumbled, trying to make sense of the shapes.

  I closed my eyes. The little pods inside the beanbag rustled as Sam arrived next to me. ‘We’ve become great friends, haven’t we?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied. Friday nights before The Twins arrived were just like every other night: tea with my gran, perhaps some television, then upstairs to practise magic or play on the computer. ‘Yeah.’ I shrugged, pretending they weren’t the most important thing to me, more important than magic, more important than Gran. More important than Will.

  Jack moved to the other side, his shoulder leaning against mine. ‘Can you really keep a secret?’

  It was a question I was about to ask them. Will’s letters were in my bag, waiting for the right time to be mentioned.

  I sat upright. ‘If the secret had to be kept, then yeah. Abso-lutely.’ It was the sort of response The Twins would have given. ‘Go ahead. Trust me.’ I tried not to sound pleading.

  ‘Ben: you’re one of us,’ said Jack. Again, The Twins’ eyes: hardly any pupil, marbles, as hypnotizing as Kaa in The Jungle Book. ‘We want you to know about, let’s call it a . . . hobby that we have. It’s nothing fancy, but we’ve set up a website that sets Challenges.’ He stood up and wiggled the mouse on the computer desk next to his bed and the large computer screen blinked into life. The Challenge was written as a banner at the top of the page. ‘The address is thechallenge2.’ He gave me an ‘It’s-just-a-little-bit-of-fun’ smile. ‘Our family has always liked to set Challenges and play games.’

  ‘A website? That’s amazing.’ But I wished they’d mentioned it before; I didn’t like that any part of their life was secret from me.

  Sam leaped up and joined his brother. ‘It’s a basic site. Put a traffic cone on a famous statue, bare your arse in front of Buckingham Palace – that sort of thing. Evidence is posted online.’ He returned with two newspaper cuttings: Internet Pranksters Paint Sheep Pink. ‘That – is us.’ Internet Craze Girl Returns Home. The second story was about someone who had been away from home for forty-eight hours: she had disappeared (and reappeared) without warning ‘because of an online game’. Near the end of the article there was a reference to a name: The Challenge.

  ‘It started with us,’ said Jack, ‘but now it’s basically a chat room for sharing dares. Perfecto!’ He was tapping the screen. ‘Now that’s an awesome Challenge! An acid smiley flag in the weirdest place possible. A classic.’

  THE CHALLENGE. I thought the banner behind Jack’s bed was cool.

  ‘Not all of the Challenges are online. On the night of the party it was a Challenge to get you and Caroline to kiss,’ said Jack.

  ‘You bastards,’ I said. ‘But thanks, guys!’ We laughed. ‘And I won’t tell anyone . . .’ There’s no one to tell, I thought. There’s only really The Twins.

  ‘That’s just one secret,’ said Sam. ‘In any case, you’re a Challenger with us.’ We slapped hands.

  ‘There’s something more,’ said Jack. ‘Something that’s top secret. Something no one else knows.’

  ‘You know I won’t tell anyone. You know that I’m totally, well, loyal to you.’ It didn’t sound wrong, though it looks stupid written down. I almost said ‘devoted’.

  ‘If you told someone else, we’d have to kill you.’ There was silence for a moment before they both burst out laughing. ‘And you know we can’t do that,’ said Sam, ‘because you’re too important to us.’

  ‘Thank God!’ I chuckled.

  ‘We sometimes set Challenges ourselves,’ said Jack. ‘And one of them involves you.’

  ‘Me? Who has set the Challenge?’

  ‘Now that would be telling,’ Jack whispered. ‘But every game needs a Games Master.’

  I assumed that the Games Master was Sam or Jack – or both of them.

  ‘It’s to do with your friend, Will Capling,’ said Sam. ‘We know about Will. And our Challenge is to punish the man responsible.’

  This was the moment. I reached in my bag and pulled out the two notes from Will. ‘Guys, hold it. There’s something I really have to tell you.’ In my hands the letters looked insignificant; it would be easy to lose them and forget. ‘I want you to see these.’

  In silence, they read them a couple of times and swapped them over. I closed my eyes again and listened to their breathing and the tiny rustles of Will’s notes:

  Hi Benny. I’M NOT DEAD.

  Everyone wants to know what happened to Me – I know that. Look, I know I can trust you. Its importent you dont tell anyone at all. Definately not the police.

  PLEASE just play along. Perhaps you’ll want to tell Sylvie or my parents, but don’t.

  (Think of me whenever you eat a curliewurly. I’ll be back.)

  Will

  And:

  I’m still fine. Don’t worry.

  Im actully writing because I want us to be friends.

  I’mve had to have some secrets from you. I’ll send one more letter soon.

  Then everything will make sense.

  I’m much closer than you think.

  I’m even trusting you now. Please please please keep this a secret.

  Will

  Sam swore. ‘Have you showed these to anyone?’

  I explained that they were the only people to see them. ‘They’re probably fakes to creep me out . . .’ I still wanted to believe t
hat Darren or one of his heavies was responsible. After all, no notes had come in since I’d thumped him. ‘But the handwriting is right, and only Will would understand the thing about the Curlywurly. It was a stupid joke we had.’

  The Twins looked closely at the notes, smelt them, held them up to the light. ‘No good for fingerprints,’ Jack said slowly. ‘Our hands have been all over them.’

  ‘Any killer with half a brain would have worn gloves,’ muttered Sam.

  ‘You don’t actually think they’re genuine, do you?’ I’d hoped that they would see a flaw – but instead they saw something else:

  ‘I can’t see a message in the second one,’ said Sam. He tapped his index finger to his lips and then muttered random words from the note, tracing his finger down the page.

  ‘Message? The stupid thing is that there isn’t really a message,’ I said.

  ‘It’s much clearer in the first one . . .’ said Jack. He pointed at the start of the lines.

  Hi Benny. I’M NOT DEAD.

  Everyone wants to know what happened to Me – I know that.

  Look, I know I can trust you. Its importent you dont tell anyone at all. Definately not the police.

  PLEASE just play along. Perhaps you’ll want to tell Sylvie or my parents, but don’t.

  ‘Oh my God,’ I said, hands to my mouth.

  ‘It was starting the sentence with Everyone,’ said Sam. His finger slid down the page, pointing four times: H, E, L, and P.

  HELP.

  Why the hell hadn’t I seen that? I was too busy reading the words to look at the letters. It changed everything.

  Jack swore loudly and pointed at the second note. He was half talking to himself. ‘I’ve got it. Look – the crossing out before the ve, and the “actully”, and the even, that’s an odd word to put in – what the . . .’ He swore again. ‘Look at the second words! Look!’

  I’m still fine. Don’t worry.

  Im actully writing because I want us to be friends.

  I’mve had to have some secrets from you. I’ll send one more letter soon.