by Tom Becker
Jamie stayed silent as he trooped several paces behind his dad, preoccupied with gloomy thoughts. Roxanne’s strange warning had been unsettling enough, but it was the vision of the malevolent girl in the pew that was haunting him. That was the second time that Jamie had seen her. What did she want from him? Why could only he see her – was she a real threat, or just a figment of his imagination? As he looked out over the sloping roofs of Alderston, beyond the edge of the town and across the fields to the woods and the Moss beyond, Jamie felt suddenly very small: a trespasser on some bleak, unimaginably vast landscape.
At the bottom of the graveyard, they jumped down through the gap into the wall and crossed over the narrow road to their house. Sarge immediately strode up to Jamie’s bedroom, where he stood staring out of the window at the church. There was a moody edge to his silence, as though his brain was chewing on a piece of gristle. Jamie and Liam lingered in the doorway behind him, waiting for their dad to speak.
“What do you think?” Liam asked finally.
Sarge didn’t turn round. “About the funeral or the job?”
“The job.”
“Not much to think,” said Sarge. “It’s child’s play. There aren’t any security cameras and the watch house isn’t alarmed. The only house with a clear line of sight of the building is this one, so the chances of a law-abiding civilian spotting us are pretty slim. We can’t get the van up close so it’ll take a few trips to carry the mortsafes through the graveyard and down to the road, but that’s about it.”
“So it’s an easy job,” Liam said cautiously. “That’s a good thing, right?”
“Maybe. But if the job’s so simple any idiot with a hammer could do it, you have to ask yourself why everything else is so complicated. Why all the big mystery? Why this house? Why us?” Sarge tapped a finger against the window frame. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Redgrave’s a professional,” said Liam. “He wants everything done properly, no shortcuts. I thought you’d appreciate that.”
“I think there might be another problem,” Jamie said slowly.
Now Sarge turned round. “What’s that, son?”
“Keeley.”
His dad looked at him blankly.
“That night when I was ill, I saw a light in the graveyard and went to see what it was,” Jamie explained. “It was Keeley’s.”
“Was this the lass you were talking to outside the church?” asked Liam. “Funny-looking thing, with black lipstick?
“She’s not that funny-looking,” Jamie said defensively. “People don’t like her because she’s different, so she goes to the graveyard at night. No one bothers her there.”
Liam shook his head. “Bloody goths,” he muttered.
“What kind of girl spends her nights sauntering round a cemetery?” asked Sarge disbelievingly. “Doesn’t she have a home to go to?”
“Her mum’s a nurse,” Jamie replied. “Maybe she works nights. Keeley didn’t mention her dad, and he wasn’t at the funeral. I’m not sure he’s around.”
“You were worried it was too easy,” Liam told Sarge, with gloomy irony. “Happy now?”
Sarge shot his son an irritable look and turned to Jamie. “It’s down to you, son,” he said. “Didn’t I see her give you her number?”
“Um, yeah.”
“That’s easy, then,” Liam said casually. “Ask her out on a date.”
“No!”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to!”
“Scared she’ll turn you down?”
“No! I just…”
Sarge strode over and wagged a finger in Jamie’s face. “I don’t care how you do it, lad,” he said threateningly, “but I want Marilyn Manson out of that churchyard tomorrow night. If you can’t make it happen then I will. Understand?”
Jamie nodded. He understood, all right.
That afternoon Sarge carried his toolkit in from the van, laying out his apparatus on the kitchen table for inspection and selection. There were thin lockpicks and a bunch of skeleton keys, pliers and hammers, a crowbar and a set of heavy-duty bolt cutters. The display of metal tools made the kitchen look like some kind of medieval torture chamber, with Sarge poring over his implements with the terrible carefulness of an executioner.
Jamie left his dad to it, changing out of his funeral clothes before heading back into Alderston. As he walked down the arcade of shops towards the main square he saw a van parked outside Withershins. Two old men appeared in the bookshop doorway, examining a fold-out map. One of them was carrying a metal detector under his arm. He glared suspiciously as Jamie walked past, and folded up the map.
Withershins felt as though it had somehow shrunk since Jamie had last been there – or perhaps the unruly stacks of books had just grown. In the middle of the cramped cubbyhole, Lawrence was sitting cross-legged on the floor, a long red scarf draped around his neck. He was going through a stack of books in a large cardboard box. When the bell above the door tinkled, he looked up and smiled.
“Hi, Jamie,” he said. “How’s it going?”
“OK, I guess. I went to Greg’s funeral this morning. I didn’t see you.”
“I’m not sure anyone wanted me there.”
“I’m not sure anyone wanted me there either,” said Jamie. “But we went anyway.”
“That’s Alderston for you,” said Lawrence, with a rueful smile. “Unless your great-great-grandfather used to drink in the Royal Oak they don’t want to know you. I could live here until I was a hundred, I’d still be an outsider.”
“Who were the guys with the metal detectors?” asked Jamie, pointing out through the door. “What did they want?”
“The usual,” Lawrence said dismissively. “Maps. X marks the spot. Wealth beyond their wildest dreams.”
Jamie frowned. “Sorry?”
“The countryside round here is crawling with treasure hunters,” explained Lawrence. “They spend their time pacing up and down fields with their metal detectors, desperately waiting for that precious bleep. They’re not interested in the past. All they’re interested in is money.”
“Money? What money?”
“I take it you haven’t heard about Aldus’s hoard, then,” said Lawrence, brushing his hands as he climbed to his feet. “The Viking sagas claimed that, when he was a young man back in Scandinavia, Aldus broke into a chieftain’s burial mound. It was a terribly reckless act – the Vikings believed that graves were protected by powerful, vengeful spirits. Aldus was gone for the whole night, and when he returned to his feasting hall he was carrying a spear and a hoard of priceless silver jewellery and coins.”
“So Aldus was a grave robber too?”
Lawrence smiled thinly. “Our very own Viking Resurrection Man, yes. There’s something about this town that seems to draw thieves and vagabonds to it like a magnet.”
Jamie looked quickly at Lawrence to see what he meant by that, but the bookshop owner was walking back behind the counter.
“Anyway,” Lawrence continued, “when Aldus settled in Alderston he brought his spear and his hoard with him.”
“I saw them in the stained-glass window in the church,” said Jamie.
“Right. It was thought that he was buried with them, but the fire that engulfed the graveyard the year after Aldus died meant that we don’t know for sure if that was actually his final resting place.”
“I get it,” Jamie said slowly. “So these treasure hunters go around searching for Aldus’s grave.”
“They have been for nearly a thousand years now, and I’m guessing they still will be a thousand years from now. Some things never change: greed is one of them.” A phone started ringing in the flat upstairs. Lawrence sighed, running a hand over his bald scalp. “Here endeth the lesson,” he said, disappearing through the beaded curtain. “Come back soon, though. You’re my best customer!”
“But I haven’t bought anything!” Jamie called after him.
“Don’t remind me!” Lawrence called back.
Jamie left the bookshop and headed back to the Lodge. He crept in through the front door and immediately made for the stairs, hoping to make it up to his bedroom before anyone realized he was back. The TV was on in the living room, masking the creak of the stairs beneath his feet. As he tiptoed towards the landing, Jamie glanced over his shoulder, smiling with satisfaction at the empty hallway. He turned back, and started.
Sarge was standing at the top of the stairs, his arms folded. “You asked that girl out yet?”
Jamie shook his head.
“Why the hell not? I ask you to do one thing, Jamie. One simple thing!”
Sarge grabbed Jamie and marched him downstairs into the living room, where Liam was sprawled across the settee, staring at the television.
“Phone,” ordered Sarge, holding out his hand.
Liam rummaged around his tracksuit pockets and tossed his dad his mobile, which Sarge pressed into Jamie’s hand. Jamie wasn’t used to texting, his fingers stumbling across the tiny keys, and it took him several attempts to type out his message.
“There,” he said. “Done.”
Liam examined his message.
Hi. Want to do something tomorrow night? Jamie
“Steady there, Casanova,” said Liam, grinning. “You don’t want her fainting from the romance of it all.”
“You’re not funny, Liam.”
“Not as funny as you, little bro.”
Taking the scrap of paper Keeley had given Jamie, Liam typed her number into his phone and pressed send. They didn’t have to wait long for a reply. Within a minute the phone buzzed into life, and a terse message flashed up on the screen.
The War Memorial. Midnight. K
A leathery smile snaked across Sarge’s face.
“Perfect,” he said.
The minute and the hour hands were creeping ever closer to the top of the dial as Jamie hurried beneath Alderston’s clock tower. He kept to the shadows of the main square, aware of his loud footfalls in the empty hush. The only sign of life in the whole town was outside the Royal Oak, where light and laughter spilled out from the pub on to the pavement. For once Sarge wouldn’t be at his usual station in the back bar, though. Tonight there was business to take care of.
Back in the Lodge, the family had eaten their dinner in silence, Sarge’s knife scraping against the plate as he scooped gravy into his mouth. The night’s business had hung in the air like a chill fog. When Sarge and Liam disappeared upstairs to change into dark clothes, Jamie’s nerves began to jangle and his stomach lurched queasily. Secretly, guiltily, he found himself praying that something would happen at the last second to stop them from going ahead – a call from Mr Redgrave cancelling the job, or a police car driving past the church. Even if it was just for one night; anything to stop his dad and brother going to the graveyard.
But the phone didn’t ring and no police cars appeared, so Jamie said goodbye to Sarge and Liam in the hallway and walked on his own through the town. Following the directions his dad had given him, he turned left at the road at the bottom of the main square, crossing a bridge over a trickling brook. The rows of shops came to an end, and on the other side of the road the buildings were replaced by a long hedgerow, with two sets of rugby posts jutting into the sky behind it.
Slipping through a gap in the hedge, Jamie found himself in the middle of a large playing field, the majority of which was taken up by a rugby pitch. To the right of the pitch, a squat clubhouse with a sloping roof sat in a patch of scruffy wasteland. The building’s windows were boarded, crumpled cans and discarded newspaper littering the tangled grass around it. In front of the clubhouse, surrounded by a foot-high railing, stood a stone obelisk covered in carved names. This was Alderston’s war memorial, a single, solemn finger pointing towards the heavens.
There was no one waiting for him by the clubhouse. Jamie checked his watch. It was well past midnight. Either Keeley was playing a trick on him or something had stopped her from coming. If she had tried to text him at the last minute it would be Liam who received the message – and Liam would be in the graveyard by now, hard at work. Jamie was alone. He shivered.
“Mwwaaaaaaaaahhhh!”
Jamie jumped as Keeley darted out from behind the monument. She was shining a torch into her face, casting an eerie glow over herself as she cackled loudly.
“Ha ha,” Jamie said. “Very funny.”
“I know.” She flicked off the torch, her face melting into the darkness. “I am a witch, after all.”
“I thought witches spent their time stirring cauldrons and casting spells,” Jamie retorted. “Not jumping out at people shouting ‘Boo’.”
Keeley laughed as she jumped down from the memorial, stepping lightly over the railing. “What are you looking so nervous for? Don’t worry – it’s not like we’re on a date or anything.”
“I’m not nervous,” Jamie said quickly. “Just cold. It’s freezing out here.”
The wind was whipping mercilessly across the rugby pitch, sending pages of newspaper cartwheeling across the wasteland. Now that Jamie was here with Keeley, he realized he didn’t know what to say to her. It didn’t really matter, he thought – as long as he kept her as far away from the church as possible.
“You promised to show me the sights,” he said, nodding at the obelisk. “Is that it?”
“It might not look like much,” Keeley admitted. “But almost everyone in this town knows a name carved on it. A family member who died in the war.”
“The Alderston Pals, you mean?”
Keeley looked impressed. “How do you know about them?”
“Lawrence told me.”
“Mr Withershins? You sure can pick your friends, can’t you? He’s almost as unpopular as I am.”
“He’s a nice guy.”
“He’s an idiot,” Keeley said dismissively. “What did he think was going to happen, coming from nowhere and opening a shop with books on witches and old murders and stuff like that? People round here don’t want attention drawn to that sort of thing. They don’t like other people meddling in their business.”
Jamie walked over to the memorial and peered at the rows of names covering the obelisk.
“Can’t see any Marshalls here,” he told her. “Did any of your relatives die in the war?”
Keeley shook her head. “My mum’s granddad Frank was one of the Pals who went to France during the First World War, but he was one of the lucky ones. Apparently he was a different guy when he came back from the trenches – wouldn’t say a word about what had happened out there. Mum tried to ask him about it once but he went all weird and she didn’t try again. There’s a tape of it somewhere: if you’re interested I can dig it out for you.”
Jamie shrugged. “Sure.”
He had no idea why she was so keen to give him a tape of her granddad, or why she had brought him to the deserted war memorial. Maybe it was because Jamie was an outsider, but every time he talked to Keeley she gave him the impression she knew more than she was willing to let on.
“When we first met at the graveyard,” he said, “you told me to be careful in the Lodge. Why was that?”
“There was a man called George Rathbone who used to live in Alderston years and years ago,” Keeley told him. “He was a real villain, a thief who’d steal anything he could get his hands on. Everyone else in the town hated him, which kind of makes me feel like we had something in common, but anyway, Rathbone had this long-running feud with another guy called John Hawkins. One day Hawkins’s daughter, Kitty, went for a walk in the woods and drowned in the pond. This girl was all perfect and pretty so everyone was cut up about it. Everyone except Rathbone. The night after her funeral him and two cronies crept into the graveyard, killed a watchman and dug up
Kitty’s body.”
“Yeah, the Resurrection Men. I’ve heard about them before,” Jamie told her. “What’s it got to do with our house?”
“George Rathbone’s house,” corrected Keeley. “He lived in the Lodge for years before Kitty died and he had to leave town in a hurry.”
Jamie had been sleeping in a grave robber’s room. No wonder there was such an unearthly cold in the house. Maybe Smiler wasn’t the only body buried in the back garden. Jamie shuddered. He hoped Sarge and Liam had got to work. The sooner they could leave this place, the better.
Jamie turned away from the obelisk. Something about Keeley’s story was nagging at him. He’d said he’d heard about it before, but he hadn’t heard all of it. There was something new here, something important.
“How did Kitty die again?” he asked.
“I told you, she drowned. There’s a pond in the woods, you know, where Greg crashed his car. She slipped and fell in, got her dress caught up in the weeds.”
Jamie went numb, nightmarish images flashing through his head. A dripping shadow in the sunshine on the Moss. A demon in a church pew. A finger pointing at him like a dagger.
“Jamie? What is it?”
“I’ve been seeing things,” he said quietly.
“What kind of things?”
“A girl.” Jamie hesitated. “A dead girl. Soaking wet and covered in weeds.”
Keeley looked at him sharply. “Are you messing about?”
“No! Why would I?”
“I don’t know.”
“I haven’t told anyone else,” said Jamie. “I didn’t want them thinking I was crazy. Do you think it was Kitty?”