by Nick Gifford
“Cassie.”
She stopped. She seemed to sense something in the tone of his voice. She waited for him to continue.
“Cassie, I don’t know what happened in there. I’m not playing at anything.”
“Danny, he said your dad’s locked up. Is that true? You’re not just getting your own back because I made up stories about my own family?”
He hesitated. He had lost track of how much of the exchange with Headkin and FirstLady had been public and how much one-to-one.
“Can we talk?” he said.
He couldn’t let this get out: the past, his father. It would break Val if they had to go through all that again.
“We’re talking right now.”
“Can you come out? It’s not that late.”
“I might.”
“Top of Swiss Lane? Five minutes?”
She hung up.
~
She was late, but she came.
“I can’t be long,” she said. “I told them I was going to Jo’s.” She looked back towards her house. “Come on. I don’t want to stop here.”
They headed back along the road into the older part of the village. At the bridge, they left the road and cut down the bank to a small cleared area in the undergrowth by the brook. This was one of the places where village kids came to smoke and make out.
Danny leaned back against the base of the bridge.
Cassie stood with her hands on her hips, peering at him in the twilight.
“So?” she said.
“I thought you might have some idea what happened. You’ve been to that chatroom before. I haven’t. I don’t do that stuff.”
“It’s never been like that,” she said. “It’s just a place to chat, and those weird spirit hosts spouting words of wisdom every so often. It’s usually funny. It’s usually a gas. But this time ... it really freaked me out, Danny. What was it?”
He’d never heard her like this. Uncertain, hesitant. Scared.
“They knew my name,” he told her. “The one called Headkin: he sent a message to me directly and called me ‘Danny’. Then FirstLady did it, too.”
“I saw that one. Her message was open to everyone.” There was a silence and then Cassie continued, “Okay. Be logical. When you signed in... I can’t remember what you have to tell them when you sign in as a guest. Did you give your name or your e-mail or anything?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. It just gave me that ‘Guest03’ name and let me in. Nobody knew I was there, apart from you.”
“I wasn’t doing anything,” she said sharply. “I–”
“I know.”
“Maybe there was someone you know there. Maybe they worked out who you were somehow. I don’t know. I don’t understand.”
She moved towards him, and leaned with her head on his chest and his chin resting on the top of her head.
“I read some of the stuff about the site,” said Danny. “The Frequently Asked Questions. It did warn about going in with a negative attitude. It said bad things could happen. Maybe they deliberately let it get weird sometimes, just to rattle people.”
“But they knew stuff, didn’t they, Danny? That wasn’t pre-programmed trickery. It was for real.”
He said nothing.
“I told you every family has to have a dark secret, didn’t I?” said Cassie.
Silence, again. Danny had his eyes jammed tightly shut. When he opened them everything was blurred, slowly sharpening.
“One of them said your mum has a new boyfriend. Has she?”
“Maybe,” said Danny. “I asked the guy the other day, but he didn’t seem too certain. He calls round a lot. He’d like to be, I reckon. It’s Little Rick – Mr Sullivan.”
“No! You’re kidding me. But... well, teachers do it, too, I suppose. I mean... Mr Sullivan.”
He rubbed his chin against the top of her head. He could smell the shampoo on her hair.
“And your dad?”
“How did they know? Nobody knows that stuff.”
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “I’m freaked. I don’t think I want to know.”
“Will you promise me something?” Danny said. He had his hands on her arms now, and he gently eased her away, so that he was looking down into her face.
“Promise you what?”
“Don’t talk about any of this – to anyone.” He realised now that he had to say more if he was going to persuade her. “Mum had a really hard time with all this a few years ago. The trouble. She had to cope. That’s why we came here: a fresh start in a place where nobody knows what we had to go through. Nobody judging us. We left all that behind. If it gets out here she’ll be devastated.”
“You’re not making sense, Danny. If what gets out?”
“The past.”
She was still looking up at him and he felt exposed. He pulled her towards him again, so that she was against his chest and he was looking over her. It was easier to talk like that.
“My father’s in prison,” he said. They were words he had never spoken aloud before. “He killed people.”
He felt her tense as soon as the words escaped his lips. This was all wrong, he realised. He was just going to turn her away from him. Quite rightly, too. Anybody in their right mind would run a mile from him.
“‘People’?” she whispered. She had her hands up before her, against his chest, and she pulled them tighter in, and then relaxed a little.
“He went mad one night,” said Danny. Not really one night. It had built up steadily: his father had watched Chris and Val, following them. Eva, too – he had hated her for some reason. Feared her. From what Danny had been able to make himself read of his father’s journal, the madness seemed to have built over a period of a few weeks, until finally, one night, he had cracked.
“There was a big row. Dad was out somewhere. Mum wanted to go out to see a friend. She had an argument with Dad’s Aunt Eva, and Eva went out instead.”
Danny had hidden upstairs in Oma Schmidt’s room, while his grandmother slept, which seemed to be all she did at that time. Eva was yelling at his mother: “I come all this way because my family is calling to me. I come together with my family and what is it that I am finding? You! Schlampe, pulling the family apart. You cannot do it. I will not let you do it. Do you hear my words? You make Anthony like a fool. You see what you are doing to him? You drive a nail through his heart. You tell me where it is that you are meeting this man. You tell me now.”
Eva had gone. She went to tell his mother’s friend that they were to stop meeting.
And so it was Eva who found his father at Chris Waller’s house, kneeling over his best friend’s body so that he could be in the best position to cut out his tongue. It was Eva who saw her nephew looking at her over the sights of her own old Luftwaffe Luger. That pistol must have been the last thing she had ever seen.
“He killed Eva,” Danny told Cassie now. “And he killed a friend of his, who was also ... a friend of my mother. And some others. Three. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“God.”
He had expected horror and Cassie was horrified.
He had expected shock and she was, clearly, shocked by what he told her.
He had expected revulsion, too, but no, far from being repelled by Danny and his story she was clinging to him more tightly, holding him.
“What must it have been like for you? God.” She pressed against him.
After a time, she asked, “So... how did they know?”
For a moment he was thrown by her question.
“Your name,” she said. “That your father is locked up and your mother might have a new boyfriend. How did they know those things in the talk board?”
“Someone from the past?” Danny said. “Someone who’s tracked us down and wants to stir everything up again?” But that still left a lot unexplained.
“Adam and Eve,” said Cassie slowly. “Eve: the first woman. FirstLady. Eve. Eva. She seemed lost. Confused. The talk board’s supposed to b
e like a Ouija board, calling up spirits from the other side, talking to the dead.”
“Eva? No.”
“She said something that looked German.”
“Something -mannchen,” said Danny. “‘Little man’? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know. That’s what she was calling Headkin, though. She seemed to recognise him.”
That was when Danny saw it.
The connection.
All it took was hearing Cassie pronounce the name aloud.
Headkin.
“What?” She had sensed his body tensing. “What is it?”
“I know that name,” he told her. “Headkin. My father – he kept a journal. He wrote about the voices in his head that were driving him mad. He had a name for the voice that tormented him the most.”
“Headkin?”
“Almost. He called it Hodeken. The evil little man in his head. Taunting him. Driving him mad.”
“I’m scared.”
He held her tight.
Danny was scared too. More scared than he had ever been in his life.
12 Hodeken
Back at the flat, Josh was asleep and Oma Schmidt was cleaning the oven. “Danny,” she said, when she saw him hanging up the office key. “My boy. Is okay, ja?”
She seemed upset. Danny wondered if she had sensed his state of confusion and fear.
He nodded and Oma returned to her scrubbing, arms deep in the oven’s interior.
“Where’s mum?”
Oma clicked her tongue in disapproval. “He has been,” she said. “Rick.”
So that was why she was upset. Danny wondered what Little Rick might have said. Had he come straight here from the office to tell Val that her son had been fooling with chatrooms and the paranormal?
He struggled to calm himself.
“They argued,” said Oma. “I did not want to listen, but how to not? She went with him even so. Off together like the two loving birds.” She clicked her tongue again.
Danny suspected he knew the cause of their argument. Rick must have come here to tell Val that he had seen Danny logged into a chatroom. She would have been upset. She would probably have defended Danny. And now they would be discussing how to tackle his “problem”.
He went to his room.
He slid the box out from under his bed and found the envelope.
Sitting in the window seat, he reminded himself why it was that he should always be in control of his own reactions. He reminded himself exactly what it was that he must never become.
And he listened.
In his head: silence. A thin whistling in one ear that he always had when he was stressed. The soft background sound of his breathing.
No voices, though. No evil spirits in his head, telling him what he must do.
Not yet.
~
It was after eleven when Val came home. Kicking out time at the Wishbourne Inn – maybe that was where they had gone to debate Danny’s failings.
He went out to the kitchen. Best to get any trouble over with as soon as possible.
She was at the sink, clutching a glass under the running cold tap. She turned. “Danny,” she said. “Okay?”
He nodded, and sat at the table.
Val drank, then stood with her hands on the edge of the draining board and sink, breathing deeply.
“Are you okay?” said Danny, uncertain how to interpret her mood.
She turned and stood, leaning against the sink edge with her arms wrapped around herself. “Me? I’ll survive,” she said.
“Oma said Rick was here.”
Val’s embrace tightened. She nodded.
“I saw him earlier. In the Hall.”
“Oh?”
She didn’t seem interested. They couldn’t have discussed Rick finding Danny at the computer. Best to leave it, perhaps.
“Night.”
She looked at him, and nodded. “Hmm,” she said. “G’night.”
~
At lunchtime the next day, he was with Won’t and Scott Davies and a couple of the others, down where the science building backed onto the playing fields. Won’t and Davies were arguing about something. Danny wasn’t sure what: it had started over football teams and had moved onto who was the sexiest girl in their history group. Won’t never agreed with anybody on anything. That seemed to be a goal he set himself every day.
Danny tried to ignore them. His mind kept returning to the events of the previous evening. He couldn’t make sense of it at all. He was even beginning to doubt that it had happened as he remembered – it all seemed so weird.
Someone batted him on the arm and he looked up, puzzled.
“I said, what about Mr Cool?” said Won’t. “What do you reckon, Danny?”
“About...?”
“Biggsy and Becky Taylor. I reckon they are. Davies says Biggsy’s just daydreaming.”
Danny shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“Hey, why d’you call him Mr Cool?” asked one of the others, someone Danny didn’t know.
Won’t said, “You can say what you like to our Danny, but he won’t lose it. Will you, Danny? He’s Mr Cool. You’d have more chance with Becky Taylor than you would of rattling Mr Cool.”
Then he grinned, and added, “Except, of course, when Cassie Lomax is around.”
Danny stared at him, but he didn’t lose control. The sudden burst of rage he felt at Won’t’s digging and teasing never reached the surface. He sensed it, trapped it, squashed it.
He didn’t lose his cool.
He didn’t dare.
Won’t was right. Cassie was the one person who got all the way through his barriers. She was the flaw in his defences, and suddenly that scared him. Things had started to go wrong since he’d got to know Cassie – since he’d let her weaken his guard.
Later, he left Won’t and the others. He walked up under what they called the Bridge, where A and C blocks joined, heading for the top gate.
Cassie was there, with Jo Lee and Sally Gupta.
She looked pale and tired.
As soon as she saw him, she opened her mouth to speak, but then she must have sensed something about his mood and she stopped.
Sally and Jo laughed at something, and Danny strode past, avoiding Cassie’s look.
Not now.
He had to be alone.
~
Wlk hom 2gtha? ...C
He didn’t answer, but she was waiting at the gates, even so.
“You okay?”
He nodded.
“You going to ask if I’m okay?”
He shrugged.
They walked. Danny heard Won’t and Tim talking loudly somewhere behind them as they headed along Morses Lane. He glanced back, gave them the finger, carried on.
“You scared?”
“I don’t know,” he told her. “I don’t know what I am.”
“So what have you found out?”
“What do you mean?”
“What are you like, Danny Schmidt?” She shook her head as she walked. “You mean you haven’t tried to find out what’s happening? You’ve done nothing?”
She jerked her bag up by the strap and started to rummage through its contents. A short time later she waved a sheet of A4 at him. “Here,” she said. “Have a look at this. Have you ever heard of kobolds?”
Danny took the sheet. It was a printout of a web page.
The Kobold
Kobolds are to be found in Germanic (Teutonic) folklore.
A kobold is a small, goblin-like, domestic spirit, who can be both helpful and mischievous. He often helps with household chores, but sometimes hides tools and implements. He can get very angry if he is not fed properly. The kobold can be an unpredictable creature, dangerous when crossed, and fiercely protective of the family in his care.
Some kobolds are believed to be spirits dwelling in caves and mines. Other kobolds have specific names - like Goldemar or Hodeken. Goldemar can see the secret sins of the clergy, while Hodeken taun
ts unfaithful wives.
“You’re telling me we have a family gremlin?”
“You’re the one who talked about inner demons,” said Cassie. She snatched the paper back and shoved it into her bag.
“In my father’s head,” said Danny. “He was mad. Hearing voices.”
“Hodeken’s voice, you said.”
He nodded. “Maybe he knew the kobold legend,” he said. “Maybe it was in a story he was told when he was a child, and when he started to crack up it came back to him: the name, the memory of an angry little spirit.”
“This is like Scooby Doo,” said Cassie.
He looked at her, waited for her to explain.
“In every episode something freaky happens, but they always end up finding a perfectly rational explanation for it all. It’s usually the janitor.”
“It’s better than not having an explanation.”
“But what about the talk board?” Cassie reminded him. “How do you explain that?”
He couldn’t.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go with the Hodeken thing. Some kind of domestic demon that’s attached to our family, causing all our problems. A German curse. So where is it? Where is it hiding? Why haven’t we seen it?”
“It’s spoken to you,” said Cassie softly, reacting to his raised voice. “On the talk board. Some people say they’re all around us – spirits, ghosts, strange entities – but most of us are just too blind to see anything out of the ordinary. We’ve all forgotten how to see them.”
“You believe that?”
“I don’t dismiss it,” she said, still talking softly. “Maybe you just need to learn to look properly.”
He shook his head. He was worked up and he fought to calm himself.
“Maybe it’s me,” she said hesitantly.
“What?”
“Maybe I’m the kobold. The mischievous spirit that’s entered your life. You have to think the unexpected.”
He remembered his earlier realisation that Cassie was the one person who could get under his defences.
He shook his head again, angry and confused. “I don’t need this,” he muttered. She was playing mind games with him, stirring up things best left untouched.
Silence. They were near the end of the track now.
“I can’t work you out, Danny Schmidt.”