“What? What did you do?” She sounded frightened. Properly scared. She should. She had no idea what he was capable of. He’d only just found out himself.
Jam said his name, “Ollie. He had to pay for what he did to you.”
“He didn’t do anything to me. We did it together, Jam. I’m not a victim.”
“You didn’t know what you were doing.”
“I did.”
“Stop it. Stop talking like that, Aye. Tell me what to do. Just tell me.”
“Everything all right, Eye?”
Eye. That was what they called her here. Eye. Eye of the Tiger. Not Aye like him. They thought they were being clever. She turned slightly, showing him the wing tips of that hummingbird on her shoulder. Flaunting her imperfection.
“It’s all good,” she told the brute. He’d stepped away from the heavy bag. The fighters sparring in the ring had dropped their guard, too. It wasn’t good. It was far from good. So far from good it could never be good again. He wanted to scream. The edge of the bandage around her right fist had worked itself free. She tucked it back into the wrap. “Isn’t it, Jam?” And when he still didn’t say anything she said, “Why don’t you give me the knife? Just put it down. We can talk.”
He nodded, but that was the last thing he wanted to do.
He looked into her eyes. Once upon a time they’d been every happy ending he could have dreamed for himself. Now they were dead to him. Or he was dead to them. Maybe that was it?
“I think you should go, mate. Get yourself cleaned up.”
He nodded again, but he wasn’t listening to a word they said.
“It’s none of your business, mate,” he spat out the last word, making it perfectly obvious they were anything but. “So why don’t you just fuck the fuck off.”
“Watch your mouth, kid.”
He stopped listening to them. He could hear something else. Another sound, like the gentle susurration of wind through fallen leaves. He couldn’t focus on it, but it demanded his attention.
Hwaet! Áríseaþ!
She hadn’t said that. He’d been watching her lips the entire time. She hadn’t said a word.
“Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“The voice? The whisper. Like the wind. Did you hear it?”
“You’re really beginning to scare me, Jam. What’s wrong with you?”
“You,” he said, as though she was the answer to everything. “You broke me.”
“You really should go,” the Brute said again, always interrupting him, stopping him from saying what he wanted to say, from explaining. He felt the Brute’s hand on his shoulder and couldn’t help himself—Jam reacted to the touch instinctively, lashing out.
The knife cut across Aye’s throat, opening up a second smile.
She didn’t scream.
She clutched her hands to the wound like she thought she could somehow hold the blood back. Maybe she wasn’t that smart after all. The arterial spray bled out across the spit-and-sawdust floor as her legs buckled.
“What the fuck have you done?” The Brute half-yelled.
The knife fell from Jam’s hand.
He lurched away from the Brute’s grasp.
Come to me.
He heard it again, louder this time.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he said, over and over; the prayer for forgiveness losing all meaning.
He ran.
And he didn’t stop running.
3
They stood outside of the huge old house on Holly Lane.
“Are you sure there’s no one in there?” Rupert Brooke asked. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like the climbers clinging to the weeping bricks, the little pitted holes where they dug into the grouting, or the broken glass set into the cement along the top of the walls; he didn’t like the skeletal limbs of the trees or the rustle of the wind through those disfigured boughs; he didn’t like the way the city felt like it didn’t exist here, that it was just them and the house, hidden away from the world. The windows that hadn’t been bricked up were thick with the accumulated filth of a century’s pollution. A plaque with a leafy face spewing vegetation dominated the lintel above the front door, grinning down at them. The inscription above the face read DIO VRIDI SCANCTO. He had no idea what that meant.
“You’re really starting to piss me off, Ru.”
“What about the lights?”
Stephen Blackmoore hawked and spat a wad of phlegm onto the gravel. The logo on his T-shirt was as bright—and feral—as his grin. “On timers. I’m not an idiot. I know what I’m doing. I’ve watched this place for weeks. The lights come on about an hour before it gets dark now because they forgot that the clocks changed last weekend. No one’s reset them. Trust me, no one’s home. There’s no alarm, either, it’s a dummy box.”
They watched the empty windows for a couple of minutes.
“So, what’s the plan?”
Blackmoore held out a stone the size of his fist. “Why make things more complicated than they need to be?” The quiet went both ways; if they couldn’t hear the city out there the city couldn’t hear them in here. And with that, Blackmoore crunched off across the gravel. His black leather jacket and black jeans rendered him nigh on invisible. Ru didn’t follow him. Not at first. Not until he heard the sound of breaking glass.
Blackmoore punched the stone through the small stained-glass window inset in the heavy old door, shattering another leafy face, and reached through to open it from the inside. It was as easy as that.
Ru pulled down his balaclava and followed him inside.
The first thing he noticed was the sea of takeaway menus and unopened bills and final demands on the doormat. There must have been six months’ worth of them. More. The second thing he noticed was the music coming from upstairs. It had an ethereal raspy quality to it, a woman’s soulful voice above the crackle and hiss of old vinyl. The words were spellbinding. He stood there in the hallway listening to the singer belt out a challenge to the sinners trying to hide from their fate come Judgment Day like she was judgment and wrath rolled into one.
Ru shook his head, ready to turn tail and bolt, but Blackmoore stopped him.
He gestured toward the open door of the front room.
Ru began to shake his head again as Blackmoore turned a look of withering disdain on him, making no attempt to mask his utter contempt. “Just fucking grow a pair,” his friend said and set off deeper into the house looking for cash convertibles: jewelry, money under the mattress, that kind of thing.
Ru went into the lounge. The room was a time capsule to the ’70s with garish wallpaper and too-bright fabrics that were worn threadbare. It was bigger than his entire flat. The bay window that looked out over the gravel courtyard was big enough to screen a movie on. There were dead flowers in the vase on the coffee table. The water in the vase was a black sludge that smelled rank.
There was a bowl of red-striped mints on top of the piano and an oil painting of forest creatures, woodland nymphs, and fae folk frolicking in a leafy glen. They each had weirdly human expressions that gave him the creeps. More so when he noticed the details hidden in the shadows, another figure hinted at by the leaves, lurking there just out of sight. Beside it were two solemn clowns that could not have looked more different if they tried with their angular faces and sad eyes. They were both signed with the same name. Ru didn’t know much about art, but he couldn’t imagine anyone paying more than a few quid for the clowns, and the woodland scene was far too unwieldy to be worth the effort.
There was a tobacco tin on the table and a packet of cigarette papers resting on top of a newspaper that offered a headline from the best part of a year ago. There were tacky brass ornaments on the mantelpiece, none of them worth more than a fiver secondhand. There were a pair of slippers beside the open hearth, and burned-out white coals still banked up in the pit.
The only big bit of furniture that could conceivably have been hiding treasures was a mahogany dres
ser with glass doors and hundreds of little shot glasses, fragile glass ballerinas, and other oddments inside; things collected over a lifetime and filled with meaning and memories, but of precious little real value. He turned the three drawers out onto the floor; they were filled with Kodak-yellow paper wallets stuffed with photographs and pens of every color and size imaginable, notepads, lottery ticket stubs, and other nonsense.
He turned his back on the mess.
The music stopped as he reached the door. His heart hitched a beat as the silence dragged out for a moment, only to be broken by the sound of the mechanical arm dropping the needle back at the beginning of the record. The crackles of the lead-in lasted a couple of seconds before the first haunting strain of piano filled the house.
Blackmoore emerged from the kitchen, looking pissed off.
He pointed up the stairs. Ru really didn’t want to go up there. While there was music they could move about down here unheard, but going up increased the likelihood of things getting messy. Blackmoore didn’t hang about, he took the stairs two and three at a time. Ru had no choice but to follow him.
The music came from one of six rooms on the landing. It was the only one with the door open. A low yellow light burned beyond the threshold.
Blackmoore stood in the doorway.
He didn’t move for the longest time.
The singer’s voice wove a spell around them both, holding everything in the house absolutely still.
It couldn’t last, but even so Ru didn’t take the final step from the staircase onto the landing until Blackmoore breathed out a barely audible, “Fuck me.”
There was a strange smell in the air. It wasn’t just the rancid water in a couple of vases. Up here it was all-pervading. Sickness. Rot. It was everywhere—in everything.
He stepped into the room.
One entire wall was taken up with bookcases, another with records, sleeve after sleeve after sleeve crammed in so tightly they all seemed to blend into one. There was another woodland painting, too. This one darker: the shadowy creature more obvious in the brushstrokes, hinting at the emergence of an antlered man. There was a red velvet love seat and another low table with the fixings of a pipe spilled out across the top of it.
Ru didn’t see any of this. He only had eyes for the mummified corpse sitting in the floral-patterned armchair beside the still-playing gramophone. The old man was long dead. Not days or weeks. Not even months. He’d been alone in his chair for almost a year, shriveling down to a withered husk that barely resembled the man he had been. Ru stared at him, unable to look away. His skin was blackened and leathery, stretched taut around a perpetual scream. There had been no graceful journey into death. The old guy had died in agony.
Ru heard the dead man’s voice speaking right into his mind.
He was sure it was him; not part of the song.
He stared at the corpse as, without moving his lips the dead man said to him:
Hwaet! Áríseaþ!
He had no idea what it meant; only that he must answer the call.
4
Charlie Mann was alone in the world.
Once upon a time that simple statement hurt—like being doused in petrol and set alight pain—but in the six years since he’d lost everything, the hurt had dulled. Now, whenever he thought about it, the pain was less visceral, more like the tip of a blade pressing up against his cheek. While he may never heal, he could at least hope that in a few years’ time he’d barely register it. There would always be days like today though that brought it back.
He walked the damp streets back to the group home, the rain on his face serving as tears.
Today was always going to be a bad day. Every birthday was. But this one started the countdown on his last year in Herla House. He had twelve months to find a job—any job, it didn’t matter how shitty, and get some money behind him so he could move out on his eighteenth. It was all about twelve months from now. The long game. The escape.
He kicked a stone along the street. It bounced off the metal base of a lamppost and rolled away into the road.
Being told he wasn’t good enough to answer the phones for a free newspaper was just the icing on the cake he didn’t have.
The test call had been absolute bollocks. He’d gone through the canned response written on the sheet, introducing himself, asking how he could help, and the guy on the other end of the line had said, “I’ve got a punch bag to sell.” He’d sounded completely normal. “Hardly used.” Charlie dutifully wrote down the description, not really listening to what he was being told. “Five five, a little chubby, really fucking grating personality, never shuts up, always moaning, and can’t cook for shit, but she can take a hell of a beating.” He laughed. What else was he supposed to do? It couldn’t be real. It was stupid. So he’d laughed. And they’d said they didn’t think he was suited for the job. They’d been nice enough about it, but that was that. They’d suggested he think about going back to college, maybe try and get some practical skills, maybe plumbing or building or something. There was no point arguing with them. He thanked them for their time and left, feeling like shit.
The familiar iron gates were closed. He could see the silhouette of the old house between the iron bars. There were lights on in more than half of the windows, leaving the dark windows looking like some gap-toothed smile. It was a huge Regency place; the kind of building developers stripped and turned into half a dozen flats to turn a tidy profit. There was a buzzer on the side and a security camera mounted on the brickwork above it. Climbing plants dug into the layers of cement, covering more than half the perimeter wall. There was a smaller wooden door set into the wall like the entrance to some secret garden that the residents used to come and go. They all had keys, but the door was never locked.
He crunched his way across the loop of gravel driveway, and down the short flight of six steps to the basement door. He never used the main door. That meant walking past the office and having to make small talk with whoever was on duty. He wasn’t into small talk. He wasn’t that much of a fan of big talk, either.
Penny was in the kitchen, blitzing a witch’s brew of fruit, yogurt, and multigrains and God alone knew what else into a purple smoothie. It didn’t look delicious. It looked purple; that was about the best he could say for it. “Evening, Birthday Boy,” she said, seeing him with the eyes she obviously had in the back of her head. She didn’t look up or turn around. She was the sportiest of the kids who called Herla House home, more at peace in the gym or on the track running herself into the ground with her dreams of Olympic glory. She was good. Better than good. She was special. She had what it took to go all the way; everyone knew it. It was all down to how much she wanted it, and Penny Grainger wanted it. Fresh out of the shower, her hair scraped back in its usual ponytail, she wore her sweats and a plain white Nike T-shirt. She was three months older than Charlie, meaning three months closer to leaving Herla House for the big wide world. She was comfortably a decade more grown up and street smart than he was though, in that way girls have of just knowing more about life and leaving you feeling insecure about everything you want to say or do.
He wasn’t looking forward to those three months without her around. She’d always said they’d go together, maybe share a flat in Camden, by the lock, and hit the clubs every weekend dancing until the sun came up. It was a good dream. Penny had been here the day he arrived, along with Zoe Fenn, who made up the third corner of their triangle. There were plenty of nights Zoe had put up with his tears and anger at being dumped on by the world while Penny always offered more practical solutions that involved getting drunk or getting laid. That was always her answer. They were his best friends. The sisters he’d inherited. He couldn’t imagine his life without them. It went beyond blood; he was hopelessly in love with the pair of them.
“It is,” he agreed.
“Funny boy. Bracken’s on the warpath.”
Bracken, mein kommondant to the group home’s Auschwitz, ran the place with a bitter, bald fist. I
t wasn’t exactly iron, but there was no getting around the fact he could be a right bastard if he set his mind to it. Charlie had heard all sorts of rumors when he first moved in, including one about Bracken’s hand straying a little too close to a couple of the kids in his care up in the pool room in the attic. Little jokes like teaching them how to handle their balls, that kind of thing. He didn’t know if it was true: the kids in question, Stephen Blackmoore and Rupert Brooke, had left a couple of months before Charlie arrived, but there was no denying there was something a bit creepy about the guy at the best of times. And then there were the vague memories of kindnesses that, looking back on them, might just have been more, Bracken trying to groom him for whatever he had in mind, and his unhealthy interest in Charlie’s sex life, telling him how he should get in there with Penny, how that kind of girl was pure filth. That kind of fake-matey talk made Charlie deeply uncomfortable, so more often than not he just stayed out of the old paedo’s way.
“What am I supposed to have done now?” Charlie asked, but then answered the question himself before Penny could. “‘It’s your fault, boy, it’s always your fault, haven’t we established that already?’” he said, doing a passable impression of the bitter Scotsman.
She laughed.
He liked making her laugh.
It was a good feeling.
“Well, I’m going sit in my room and listen to suicide-inducing music for a while to get in the mood for the party later.”
“You do that,” Penny said. “And maybe think about a shower,” she said sweetly. “You don’t smell so good.”
He did just that, enjoying the ten minutes under the piping hot water before he changed into his armor of ripped jeans and a faded Joy Division T-shirt, then he sat on the bed with his headphones on listening to Closer as loudly as the tiny cans would take without distorting. The music was rich with someone else’s pain, and knowing Ian Curtis’s story only made that aching sadness all the more real. His lyrics were all about coldness, pressure, darkness, crisis, failure, collapse, the loss of control, all of the things that echoed in the turmoil of Charlie’s life. People didn’t understand the importance of music when it came to knowing yourself. People might wear different T-shirts with different band names or clever logos in their uniforms of nonconformity, but the reality was they all wore them just the same, transforming them into a teenage army of fashion-driven drones. Different fashions, different darknesses and lights, but they all echoed the same basic desire to belong somewhere, to be part of something. He wasn’t the only seventeen-year-old kid to find comfort in Joy Division. He was as big a cliché as the girls who fawned over One Direction and Justins Bieber and Timberlake.
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