Hometown

by Luke Walker

  Caffeine Nights Publishing

  Luke Walker

  Hometown

  Fiction to die for

  Published by Caffeine Nights Publishing 2016

  Copyright © Luke Walker 2016

  Luke Walker has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998 to be identified as the author of this work

  CONDITIONS OF SALE

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, scanning, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher

  This book has been sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental

  Published in Great Britain by

  Caffeine Nights Publishing

  4 Eton Close

  Walderslade

  Chatham

  Kent

  ME5 9AT

  www.caffeinenights.com

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-910720-58-5

  Cover design by

  Mark (Wills) Williams

  Everything else by

  Default, Luck and Accident

  Contents

  One 10

  Two 15

  Three 21

  Four 27

  Five 31

  Six 34

  Seven 36

  Eight 38

  Nine 40

  Ten 44

  Eleven 47

  Twelve 50

  Thirteen 55

  Fourteen 58

  Fifteen 63

  Sixteen 67

  Seventeen 72

  Eighteen 74

  Nineteen 77

  Twenty 81

  Twenty One 84

  Twenty Two 87

  Twenty Three 90

  Twenty Four 93

  Twenty Five 95

  Twenty Six 98

  Twenty Seven 101

  Twenty Eight 105

  Twenty Nine 107

  Thirty 110

  Thirty One 112

  Thirty Two 114

  Thirty Three 116

  Thirty Four 119

  Thirty Five 121

  Thirty Six 124

  Thirty Seven 128

  Thirty Eight 131

  Thirty Nine 134

  Forty 138

  Forty One 141

  Forty Two 143

  Forty Three 146

  Forty Four 150

  Forty Five 155

  Forty Six 160

  Forty Seven 163

  Forty Eight 166

  Forty Nine 168

  Fifty 171

  Fifty One 174

  Fifty Two 175

  Fifty Three 177

  Fifty Four 180

  Fifty Five 183

  Fifty Six 187

  Fifty Seven 190

  Fifty Eight 192

  Fifty Nine 194

  Sixty 199

  Sixty One 202

  Sixty Two 203

  Sixty Three 205

  Sixty Four 206

  Sixty Five 207

  Sixty Six 208

  Sixty Seven 212

  Sixty Eight 214

  Sixty Nine 215

  Seventy 219

  Seventy One 222

  Seventy Two 226

  Seventy Three 228

  Seventy Four 232

  Seventy Five 233

  Seventy Six 236

  Seventy Seven 237

  Seventy Eight 240

  Seventy Nine 243

  Eighty 247

  Eighty One 248

  Eighty Two 252

  Eighty Three 254

  Eighty Four 255

  Eighty Five 257

  Eighty Six 260

  Eighty Seven 262

  Eighty Eight 267

  Eighty Nine 270

  Ninety 273

  Ninety One 275

  Ninety Two 279

  Ninety Three 281

  Ninety Four 284

  Ninety Five 287

  Ninety Six 294

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: 297

  This is for Rebecca. The light of all lights.

  One

  Inside Stu Brennan’s head, a dead woman screamed his name.

  Stu’s hand jerked, his cup flew and smashed against the sink. Coffee splashed the floor. The crash of the breaking cup rang around the little staffroom and the scream filled his head again.

  He slammed his hands against his ears, closed his eyes and held his breath. For a beat of a few silent seconds, there was nothing but his own interior voice, desperate to reassure him with simple noises of comfort. Then he heard his name a third time, a horrific bellow behind his eyes.

  Stu collapsed; his hand struck the splashes of coffee and a piece of his broken cup.

  He knew who was calling his name.

  This isn’t happening.

  The thought was so solid, so comforting it was easy to think it was true.

  This isn’t happening. This is not happening.

  Right. He was at work; this was a Tuesday morning; the other shops and the rest of Dalry were all right outside and everything was where it should be so there was no way this was happening.

  His legs refused to work properly and he had to move somewhere between a crawl and a shuffle for the short distance towards the toilet. Pulling himself up and using the edge of the sink as leverage, Stu staggered a couple of steps to the toilet door. Breathing much too quickly, he pushed it shut, locked it and dropped onto the lavatory.

  The thud of music from below on the shop floor pounded in steady beats. Stu held on to the sound with as much focus as he could. Through his panic and confusion, he tried to picture Rich downstairs, Rich sorting the tills, Rich probably tapping on the counter to the rhythm of the music as he readied the shop for opening.

  Stu took a few deep breaths. Doing so helped to bring some small degree of focus and rational thought.

  Stand up. Wash hands. Sort out the mess he’d made with his coffee. Make another drink. Sit in front of his computer before anyone else arrived at work. Talk to people. Be normal.

  Rational thought spoke again while he remained perfectly still. Sandra was in the cash office and the only reason she wouldn’t have heard the breaking cup was down to her door being shut. There was nothing to stop her from needing the loo or coming out to make her own drink. What would she think if she saw the mess and nobody cleaning it up? How could he explain it?

  Sorry, boss. I just heard my name shouted inside my head by someone who can’t be speaking to me and I needed a sit down.

  Stu shook and swallowed the ugly taste of vomit. He closed his eyes again. Images swam in front of him and his eyes flew open. The images remained.

  He saw a house and his first thought was this was his house. The thought was wrong.

  He stood in front of his parents’ house, close to the wide front garden, the low wall bordering his mother’s flowers and the healthy green of the grass. Their car sat on the long drive and that was normal. What wasn’t normal were the broken windows, the black stain of fire damage on the bricks and the spray paint covering the smashed in door.

  Stu heard his shout of horrified negation despite being aware of his lips clamped together and his tongue immobile with shock. His feet moved, forcing him to back away, and
he tripped on the uneven pavement. He dropped, landed heavily and his hands slapped down on dark stains. Wet stains.

  Cold blood covered his fingers and palms. And still the horror arguing against this filled his head, still he couldn’t do a thing but see it all here, all right in front of him: his parents’ house, his childhood home like something out of a horror film, while the moon shone and his breath rose and the rapid thud of running feet drew closer.

  Running to him. Dozens of people by the sound of it, their shoes and boots thundering on the ground as they sprinted towards him. Stu lunged upright, panic swallowing him.

  The runners were coming from both ends of the road. The only way to go was forward, into the house.

  Into the black of the house.

  They were coming closer. They were coming and they were coming for him.

  ‘Stu?’

  His eyes jerked open and strained to focus on the white of the toilet wall. The toilet, the little sink, the window behind him, open to let in the cool air of a normal October day. Everything was as it should be.

  Apart from the faraway echo of the final scream in his head and the crash of all the running feet from somewhere else.

  ‘Stu?’

  Stu did his best to control his panicked thoughts. It was Rich outside. He was at work in his record shop, in the toilet at work, and Rich was outside the door.

  ‘Stu? You in there?’

  Rich’s voice edged close to panic, a ridiculous idea but a fact with which Stu couldn’t argue.

  ‘Yeah. Out in a sec,’ Stu said, aware of the tremor in his voice. ‘Miles away. Sorry.’

  The double meaning of his last few words hit him and he swallowed a mad laugh. He gripped the sink as hard as he could and pulled himself up. His face in the mirror was much too white, much too strained.

  What the hell is this?

  ‘Want me to clear up your mess?’ Rich asked.

  ‘No. I’ll do it.’

  ‘All right. Just make sure you open the window if you’ve done a stinker.’

  Stu listened to Rich walk from the staffroom to the stockroom and he glanced at his watch. Quarter to nine. Less than two minutes had elapsed since he’d picked up his coffee and heard the first scream.

  No scream. There was no fucking scream.

  He had to phone Kirsty. Had to tell her.

  Tell her what?

  He tried to formulate an answer, tried to force one to make sense. The effort was too much and the attempt collapsed into nothing.

  Call Kirsty. Of course. And tell her he’d either gone nuts or he was being haunted.

  A scent breathed, faint but unmistakeable. Against his will, he inhaled.

  The aroma of perfume filled his nostrils before fading. Memory came to life and Stu’s shocked whisper followed it in one breath.

  ‘Oh my God.’

  The perfume shop. Three days before her twentieth birthday. Going into the shop with Will; Will talking to the woman behind the counter, telling her what he wanted and it was a birthday present so he needed a big bottle, needed it in a nice bag.

  Stu placed a gentle finger on the bridge of his nose, remembering the smell of the perfume, remembering catching the scent of it three days later when they’d all been in the pub for her birthday. A warm night in September, the lights from traffic outside striking the window they sat opposite and …

  ‘Poison. She liked Poison. It was her favourite.’

  Staring at his reflection, Stu struggled not to weep.

  ***

  She’s in her bed, arms around herself and she can’t stop watching the shadow grow in front of her window. It moves millimetre by millimetre over the carpet towards the wall. Eventually, she knows it’ll reach the wall and slide over the paper towards the ledge, and then it’ll be on the glass and night will be here.

  She can’t move and more than that, she doesn’t want to. If she remains utterly still, then nothing happens and nothing will have happened. That’ll be the best thing in the world.

  Sweat slides in narrow trickles from her neck down her back; her t-shirt sticks to her skin and there’s no need for a duvet, not in August. Even so, she doesn’t remove the bed covers. Her head’s still visible as well as a little of her neck. The rest of her is secure in the dark and heat and stink of her bed.

  She watches the shadows and the red light of sunset. Lying here perfectly still, it isn’t hard to picture her window open wider than it is, open fully to let in the warmth here at the end of the day; not hard to think of herself climbing up to the ledge, dangling her feet and legs over the edge into the space of air and jumping down to the bushes at the front of the house. She did that once before a few months ago. Easter holidays. The house empty, sunshine doing its best to break through the clouds, and Stu and Andy laughing, calling to her, telling her to come out and she’d jumped right down to the bushes without considering it or wondering if the impact would hurt. Easy to remember that, just as it’s easy to picture the shocked circle of Andy’s face as he watched her launch, watched her fly and watched her fall, laughing, into the deep green of the bushes.

  She could do that again, launch, fly and drop. Then stand and run to the road, run to the pavements and grass and run all the way into the centre of Dalry where she’d never been by herself. She could walk through the little side streets, take shortcuts through the old part of the city she knew only vaguely and run from those little streets and squat buildings into the wild and secret spaces of the fields and trees in the Meadows.

  Be in there.

  Be in the secret places where there were no shadows and no creeping sunset trickling into her bedroom.

  She could do that. She could be away from this bedroom and its dark and heat and stink. All it would take was one quick movement of the duvet thrown back. Do that and it would take nothing to run to the window and jump. Do that and leave this all here behind her, be rid of it, be someone else without this dark and heat and stink.

  She remains utterly still, eyes on the growing shadows, and she thinks of the heat of the ending summer, of jumping from her window, of Andy’s face as she flew down to the ground.

  Two

  The darkness blew apart without a sound.

  Andy Pateman turned in a circle as quietly as he could and tried to make sense of his surroundings just as he had three times before.

  Fourth time lucky, his mind whispered. He wanted to punch that voice as hard he could, silence it.

  ‘Get a grip,’ he whispered which didn’t help.

  The light wasn’t overly bright by any means, but it illuminated his surroundings enough for him to place them.

  St Mary’s Court.

  How long’s it been?

  Fuck off, Andy thought back and the voice miraculously fell quiet.

  He knew how long it’d been. He didn’t need any interior voice to ask him.

  ‘Twenty-eight years,’ Andy whispered.

  The time didn’t matter. The years he’d spent away from this building were gone. The past was here now and it had brought all its grim squalor with it.

  The layout of the building was close to how he remembered it. A wide door, lined by single pane of glass, opened to a gloomy foyer. Two lifts ahead, graffiti covering both doors; stairs at the far end of the foyer. The stairs curved sharply, eight steps up and darkness peeked around the corner.

  Flat nineteen.

  The thought came without any sense of nostalgia and that didn’t surprise him. Whether this was actually happening or not, he had few happy memories of the flat he’d lived in for two or three years all that time before. While he’d been too young to understand his mother’s financial state after his dad left her, he’d known enough to know the building they’d moved to was a horrible place full of banging doors, bad smells, raging people and grey days that stretched ahead as far he could see. Getting out of St Mary’s Court soon after his eighth birthday had been probably the happiest day of his childhood.

  And now here it was. St Mary’s, b
ack as if he had never been away.

  From somewhere not too far above, a door banged and Andy heard the first scream.

  Flat nineteen.

  The short plank of wood lay where it had three times before. He took it from beside the foot of the stairs and wondered who’d left it there and why.

  For you, idiot.

  Andy took the first few steps, paused, then rounded the corner before his nerves could stop him.

  Another scream. It was of fear, not pain. There wouldn’t be long before that changed, though.

  Andy counted the steps as he ascended. Twelve steps to the next floor. Then there’d be another ten to the corner, and twenty after that to the front door of his old flat. All those steps in the thin light coming through the occasional broken window.

  If all the windows were broken instead of just dirty, I’d be able to see where the hell I’m going.

  Ahead in the dark, someone yelled, the words lost to Andy. He gripped the plank as if it was a club and took the steps to the corner. Murky daylight brushed the hallway ahead at irregular intervals. None of it was sufficient to show anyone hiding. Andy remained still, gathering his nerve. During the first vision, he’d stood at the corner for much longer, an hour, maybe; stood there while harsh screams broke out. The second time he’d moved forward when the screams began but lost it after five steps. He’d sprinted back to the ground floor, shrieking as he ran.

  The third time, he’d made it halfway to his old flat before the screams changed into something awful, something full of more pain than he could imagine. After those three times, he’d come to in the real world of his own flat, his cries silent while he wept.

  Now he’d do it. Get to flat nineteen and stop whoever was causing the other person’s pain.

  Simple.

  A crawling sensation ran down Andy’s back and he registered the trickles of sweat as if he’d never felt the touch on his skin before.

  A squeal, then a laugh, then the sound of someone being struck. The squeal fell into a choke which was followed by more laughter.

  Andy walked to where he guessed the centre of the hallway to be, held his plank and counted the steps. He made it six before the shouts became distinct words. Andy froze.

  ‘Fucking bitch. You love this. I’m telling you. All the girls do.’

  More screams, slightly muffled, and Andy’s stomach took a lazy roll. The words were definitely from a man, but there was something wrong with them. They’d been more barked than said, more guttural than a normal voice.

  That’s someone who isn’t all there.