Red Gloves, Volumes I & II

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘She must have known what she was doing, even if she ran off.’

  ‘Thirty quid,’ said Jamie out of the blue.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s how much she has on her. She told me, change from a gorilla or something?’ He was right. Her father had given her a fifty-pound note. We’d split the restaurant bill on credit cards and she’d paid cash for the gorilla.

  ‘She’ll calm down and get a taxi back,’ I said.

  ‘What makes you so sure of yourself, Miss Know-It-All?’ spat Sofie. ‘You think I’m going to trust you after you fucked Ryan, and don’t try to deny it because Bethany told me.’

  So there it was, out in the open. Sofie was breaking up with him, Ryan and I hit it off—or at least I thought we had—and I lost my virginity to him. Then he went away to uni. And Bethany knew because I’d stupidly told her.

  ‘You’re so fucking pompous, you know that?’ Sofie yelled at me. ‘Thinking you’re so cool because you wear black and read and you’re a Goth, but you’re just the same as the rest of us really!’

  ‘I am not a Goth,’ I told her. ‘I’m an individual.’

  ‘Yeah, all your friends are. A big identical gang of fucking individuals.’

  I was going to protest about that, then changed my mind. Sofie had spiraled into a major arm-flap. ‘Turn the car around, we have to find her! He tried to rape her, then she probably fought him off and he killed her, shoved her into a skip or something!’ The idea was stupid but it set me wondering; perhaps he’d taken her up on her offer, she’d chickened out and he’d somehow knocked her out or something.

  Korfa had had enough. He restarted the stretch and pulled out into the traffic. We got to the third set of lights on a blank, bright ribbon of road studded with discount computer outlets, B&Q barns and closed supermarkets when everything suddenly went quiet and we coasted to the side of the road.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Sofie’s voice was in a permanent state of scream now.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Korfa popped the hood, took off his jacket and got out to take a look. Sofie pummeled her mobile but got no signal. ‘Jamie, do something, don’t just sit there!’

  Jamie shrugged and got out of the stretch.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Sofie screamed.

  ‘Going to find a signal.’ He ambled off up the road, moving out of the streetlights. I think he really wanted to get away from her.

  ‘Come back, you can’t do this!’

  He ignored her and carried on walking.

  ‘This is crazy!’ she kept shouting, as if she did it long enough someone would come. ‘I don’t believe it! This is fucking crazy!’

  Korfa slammed the hood and got back into the stretch. He tried the engine and it turned over. Slamming the doors, ignoring Sofie, he drove off.

  Now she wanted him to stop. ‘We can’t leave Jamie,’ she shrieked, ‘turn around!’ Then to me, ‘He’s faking it, it’s all a trick, he’s a fucking nutter! He’s trying to kidnap us! Stop the car, you black fucker! Stop the car!’

  And before I knew what was happening she had half-thrown herself over into the front passenger seat and taken something from his discarded jacket, opening the window and throwing it out.

  ‘What was that?’ I asked, but I already knew it had been Korfa’s wallet. He slammed on the brakes and she crashed forwards, banging her forehead on the half-opened partition.

  Jumping out of the car, he stopped to lock us in and ran back up the road for his wallet. Sofie was screaming and crying, tugging ineffectually at the door handle, but I noticed her eyeliner hadn’t smudged. When Korfa came running back she fell suddenly silent, fearful for the first time that she might really be in danger.

  He remained silent as he started up the stretch once more, squealed the thing in a great big turning circle and slammed off up the road, cutting back and forth, bouncing across the sidestreets so that Sofie and I were rolling from one side of the great leather seating units to the other. I tried to make out where we were going but saw blank bright shops and deserted pavements. Sofie was crying and mumbling and smashing her mobile against the armrest, and there was nothing I could say or do that would calm her down.

  I had no idea where we were; there was nothing outside I recognised. Suddenly he braked hard and reversed, looking over his shoulder, muttering something to himself. Then he slowed to a stop.

  ‘What are you doing, Korfa?’ I asked as calmly and clearly as I could. Ignoring me, he was about to place the stretch in Park when Sofie flew at him, slamming his back with her fists and trying to scratch his face, his neck.

  He hadn’t been expecting the attack. The stretch jumped back in gear and reversed violently. There was a horrible wet thump and we rocked to a stop.

  This time, we all got out. We’d reversed into the wall by the off-license where Bethany had gone missing. Korfa had been using his Sat-Nav to find the fastest way back to the spot where we’d lost her.

  Bethany had been coming out of the off-license.

  She was under the car with a box of KFC still gripped in one hand. I guess she’d been waiting for a cab. The rear bumper had crushed both her legs so badly you could see white shards of shattered bone sticking out. She looked a bit like her fried chicken meal. She looked up at us from under the exhaust pipe, open-mouthed and kind of surprised. I remember noticing her designer trainers for the first time and wondering if they would fit me if she didn’t walk again.

  And she didn’t. I mean, she had a lot of operations and got a lot better, but when she got out of her chair she could only do a kind of rolling spazz-walk, and after about thirty seconds she had to sit down and rest.

  Her parents were really pissed off, because first they had to cancel their holiday in Florida to look after her, then they pretty much had to cancel everything else forever. Which meant that her father quickly broke off with my mother, and she married an alcoholic who beat her up and now we’re all in rehab together.

  I heard Sofie ended up on some cable channel selling perfume. Apparently she made a lot of money. Then she had a facelift that went wrong. It left her looking like the Elephant Man. She spent all her money fighting the doctor in court, and still lost.

  Bethany never explained what really happened that night. Personally I think she got him excited, then panicked and ran off, but if she ever talks about it, it won’t be to me. When I visited her, she hadn’t been out of her bedroom for a year. I only went once. It was too depressing to go back.

  Korfa had to pay for the repairs to the stretch out of his salary. When the vehicle went to the insurers’ garage, they discovered it was a reconditioned hearse that had been badly converted into a party limo. It had never been granted a safety certificate, so Korfa got deported, which must have been a bummer.

  At school we did this course on Victorian literature, and how the women suffered from a kind of hothouse hysteria whenever they were all together, and they kept having fainting fits because they wore tight corsets. I think what we had that night was a similar thing, caused by us all being together in the hearse-stretch. I thought of all those corpses it had carried through the years, and wondered how many people had gone angrily to their deaths, and whether all that pent-up furious death-energy had somehow charged the atmosphere inside the car that night, affecting our behaviour.

  Or maybe we just naturally brought out the worst in each other.

  I know it’s uncharitable, but I kept thinking. If only Bethany hadn’t come back from the alley, if only she’d been found dead, everything would have been all right for the rest of us. I mean, is that so wrong?

  I saw the hearse-stretch once more, cruising up Charing Cross Road with a new driver at the wheel, and all the girls inside it were screaming as if they were being killed, and I wondered if something bad was going to happen to them too. I’ll admit, part of me hoped it would. Just so I’d know that there was another more sinister force at work, and it hadn’t just been our fault.

  Because if it had j
ust been us, it wouldn’t make us very nice people, would it?

  The Deceivers

  This is a police statement, but they said I could tell it in my own way. So I’m not writing it down, I’m dictating it into the desk sergeant’s laptop, like he even knows how to operate it. He sticks Post-it notes on the lid, the keys are filthy and there’s software on it from before I was born.

  I’m not worried. I’m going to get out of here because there’s someone coming who can prove what really happened.

  They want me to put everything down, so first I have to explain about the hill.

  The boundary line between Devon and Cornwall is dotted with small villages that pretend they’re towns, but they’re not. For a start, everyone who lives in them is either really old, over forty at least, and has lived there all their lives, or they’re from London and only come down at the weekends. The locals all hate them, although my dad says we should smile as we charge them double, like the French do. There’s no-one of my age to hang out with here, and nowhere to go if you do find someone. If you travel to one of the bigger towns with your mates, there’s a good chance you’ll get beaten up just because you’re from somewhere else.

  My folks are obsessed with getting fresh air. ‘Let’s go for a walk and get some fresh air’, like there’s ever anything else to do. ‘Let’s go up to the hill.’ We live in a village called Trethorton Hill. It consists of a short high street, about a hundred and twenty houses, two pubs and a hill. That’s it. There’s nothing even remotely interesting about the hill, it’s just a huge pimple of grass and scrub with a single white rock set in the top, not even a proper standing stone, and when they get up there hikers say things like ‘You can see all the way to Dartmoor from here’, as if that’s a good thing. I hate hikers, with their billy cans and red knees and woollen hats, and their rulebooks and guidebooks and hard little eyes. But that’s what everyone around here does every Sunday. On Saturdays they go to Liskeard for their shopping, and on Sundays they go up the hill. I used to think that was boring until I realised that people actually come here from other towns to go up the hill, and what does that make their villages, if it’s more interesting here than staying where they are?

  The locals think they’re cool and that they’ve been around, but they haven’t. I heard some old guy in the supermarket telling the cashier that he’d just been up north, and she was reacting in amazement, like he’d just told her he’d been to Alpha Centauri. Then he added, ‘Yes, I went all the way to Tintagel’, and I realised he meant North Cornwall. Jesus.

  I have an older sister, and she got out while she could. I say ‘got out’, what she did was get pregnant by some docker who’d gone to work on container ships out of Liverpool, so now she’s stuck in Swansea with two bulldog-faced kids, in a hell of her own making.

  Not for me. Once I get a job offer you won’t see me for dust. I’m smart, I’m awake, I’ve got a mind. But it doesn’t pay to be too clever in a village. People get suspicious of you. Best to keep your mouth shut and stay indoors mucking about on the internet, taking to smart people on the other side of the world. Someone asked me if we had WiFi, and I had to explain we don’t even get decent mobile phone reception here. The internet stops you from getting too lonely, because there are people in places with exotic-sounding names, and they’re just as bored as you are, so it makes you feel better.

  I made one friend but he’s not my friend anymore, a kid called Daniel who came from the next village. I met him at IT club, and then at the Trethorton Charity Climb—we weren’t taking part, we were just hanging around—and I thought, ‘We’re alike. He’s awake too.’ Daniel lives in a damp shadowy dell called Crayshaw. It’s a village which loses its sunlight before lunchtime even at the height of summer. Daniel’s parents are rich—his old man had invented rubberized flooring for factories and had sold it all around the world. So Daniel got an amazing allowance but had no-one to share it with, because he had a gimp leg which meant he couldn’t play football, and the flybrains at school treated him like dirt because he was from the wrong village and couldn’t do sports. He never told them he had money, but he told me after I stuck up for him in a fight.

  Daniel got excused from double games on Fridays (he only did the midweek swimming) and I didn’t go because I hated it. I once forged a doctor’s letter to Mr Phelps the gym teacher saying I had a defective heart valve and couldn’t do contact sports, and the moron never even bothered to check it out with my folks. So every Friday afternoon we kicked around Trethorton Hill looking for ways to annoy the hikers. Once we tied fishing wire over the grass and filmed them all falling over on our phones.

  Although Daniel had money he couldn’t really spend it. He was only allowed to catch the bus as far as Liskeard because of his leg, so it wasn’t like we were going to whip off to Ibiza for the weekend, but we bought stuff online, and for a while we had a lot of fun hanging out together.

  My old man says when things go wrong there’s always a woman involved, and in this case it was a girl called Tara Mellor. She was in our year and had been suspended twice for wearing incorrect school uniform. She was tall and thin with cropped blond hair, and I was nuts about her, but for some incredible reason she seemed to prefer Daniel. But at the start the three of us hung out together a lot.

  The lardy desk sergeant just came by, saw what I was doing and said could I get to the point. I wanted to say ‘Could you get to the gym?’ but he’d already waddled off.

  I think the problem was that Daniel and I kept trying to impress Tara. To his credit, he never flashed his cash at her—he was too cool for that—and besides, she wasn’t interested in money. She wasn’t like the other girls we knew from school, who spent all their spare time planning shopping trips to town on Saturdays. She read a lot, and was interested in ancient history. The trouble started on the day she dragged us to Liskeard’s ‘Man, Myth & Magic’ Museum. The locals wanted to get rid of the word ‘man’ because they said it was sexist, and rename it ‘The Liskeard Early Civilisation Centre’. We wrote in to the Liskeard Gazette with a suggestion of our own, but I guess they worked out that the acronym we suggested would be pronounced ‘Dogs’ Cocks’ and they didn’t run our letter.

  We were in the museum and there was a section on local legends, the usual guff about ghosts, human sacrifices, phantom hounds and highwaymen, and Tara said there was no proof that any of the stories were true, they were just made up by drunk old publicans, and she pointed out that Trethorton Hill didn’t even have any decent legends attached to it, that’s how lame the place was, and that’s when we decided to make one up.

  We decided it had to be a believable legend, something with evidence to back it up. It also had to be something that could scare the hikers off the hill. So Daniel said how about aliens, and I said no because crop circles had been discredited years ago, all you needed was a couple of dopeheads armed with a piece of rope and a plank. We needed something more sophisticated. I thought we should create a plausible unsolved mystery, so we decided on a desperate sailor who had come ashore after murdering his violent captain in a mutiny, and who for some unknown reason dragged a local girl up the hill and cut her throat. Then we added a supernatural element that would provide proof of the legend, a ghostly wailing you could hear on certain nights when the air was still.

  PC Porky just came by again and asked me if I was writing a novel, and I told him if I was I’d let him know so he could hire someone to read it to him.

  Daniel knew quite a lot about sound technology, and figured we could rig outdoor speakers around the hill, running from two synced-up MP3 players. We decided to record the ghost crying and phase the sound so that it appeared to circle the hill, and preset the time so that we wouldn’t have to be there when it happened. I didn’t involve Tara in this because I wanted to surprise her, to show I was interested in myths and stuff. We ordered the components we needed on Daniel’s PayPal account, and when they arrived we tested everything in the fields beyond Trethorton, down near the river
.

  Next, we needed to record the sound of the crying woman, and Daniel said he had a bit of software that could replicate the human voice but also distort it. We aimed for something between a child in pain and a fox at night. It had to be haunting and otherworldly, and after a weekend of experimentation we had mixed it to perfection. The effect was so spooky it made the hairs on my arms stand up.

  Then it was time for the trial run.

  Late one night we loaded the equipment into our backpacks and set off for the hill. It took over three hours to set up the sound parameters because we hadn’t allowed for the wind noise up there, but we eventually got it so that the crying echoed from one speaker to the next. The effect was subtle, so that you weren’t aware you were being directed between the speakers. And Daniel had recorded it a dozen times, switching the equalizer settings so that you never heard the same sound arrangement twice. He was also able to vary the start times, so we set the switch-on at different hours between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. We figured the battery charge on the MP3 players would hold for a long time because they were only being used for a few minutes at a time. Then we sealed the players in plastic bags and buried them. The four speakers were more of a problem because we needed them to be above ground. We put one deep inside a hawthorn bush and another in a wet ditch, after first making sure that the connections were all covered. The other two we hid in clumps of grass, hoping that no-one would stumble across them.

  Then we went home to write the letters. We targeted both of the local papers, the Gazette and the Chronicle, and used false names. We assumed different identities, becoming hikers and pensioners, fathers and kids, and varied the content of the letters. One said he’d heard a sound like a trapped animal on the hill, another said it sounded like a woman being tortured, and so on. Daniel thought there was a risk the paper might check the senders’ addresses, but I said why would they? Two weeks after the first letter appeared, we hooked our first outsider—some old guy had been walking his dog and heard the sound for himself, and wrote in to the Gazette.