by Ryan Casey
Carla wandered over and hovered around my uneaten food like a vulture. Adam rubbed his hands together. ‘Don’t give up, cuz,’ he said. ‘She’s probably busy with her parents. You know what she can be like.’
I half-smiled and turned back towards my food, taking a mouthful of mash. I swirled it round my cheeks and swallowed it. It felt really heavy and stuck in the back of my throat.
‘I’ve got something for you later, anyway,’ Adam said, winking.
‘What—’
‘You’ll just have to wait and see.’ He smirked again, before throwing a piece of ham over at Carla.
Gran sprayed her perfume and muttered under her breath as she wandered into the living room. ‘Oh, I don’t know… what’s he like, eh, what’s he like?’ She leaned down to stroke Carla’s head. ‘You okay, boys? Good food?’
I smiled as I tried to disguise the mash still wedged in my cheeks. She patted our heads.
‘Dean, come on!’ she shouted, before turning back to us. ‘Now remember, don’t answer the door to any strangers and don’t you dare let Carla out of your sight, okay? Good. Good lads. Dean, where are you?’
Granddad waddled through, battling to do up the top button on his white shirt. He held his arms out at either side, waving them around. He looked uncomfortable in smart clothes, and I coughed as his sharp aftershave hit the back of my nostrils. ‘I’m here, I’m here,’ he said. ‘See you later, lads. You be good.’
Adam fluttered his eyelashes and smiled angelically. ‘We will be, Granddad.’
They pulled the door shut and started muttering and bickering as they made their way towards the car. Adam peeked through the window as the car pulled away, kicking up stones. He dove off the sofa and pulled a large, rolled up piece of paper from underneath.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘This,’ he said, pausing as he opened it like a magician revealing his trick, ‘is just what we need right now.’ It was a large poster of a lady with her hands on her sides. She wasn’t wearing any clothes. Her breasts looked big, and I thought about how nice it would be to touch one of them. Adam rocked back and forth like a dog, licking at it. Carla sat in the corner of the room, unimpressed and acting more civilised than Adam.
After drinking more milkshake than we were allowed and eating Granddad’s favourite sweets in a matter of minutes, Adam, fuelled by sugar, mentioned Emily for the first time in a while.
‘Have you seen hers?’ he asked.
‘You what?’
He prodded the tits on the poster. ‘Emily’s! Emily’s boobs! Have you seen ‘um yet?’ His grin was wide and his eyes were almost bulging out of his skull. But it didn’t matter how much he fished; I hadn’t seen Emily naked. The thought of it made me feel a little dizzy. ‘Don’t tell me you’re gay or something,’ he said, frowning.
‘No, it’s… it’s not like that. We’re just really close. We talk to each other about things.’
Adam shrugged his shoulders and looked down at the poster, disappointed. He looked back up at me, squinting at me as he spoke. ‘Well, if it was me, I’d fuck her.’
I blushed and looked away. Adam’s stare made me feel a little uncomfortable. I could see the red in his eyes, like Donald’s eyes when he buried the girl. I thought about getting up and going to the toilet. I needed an escape. I didn’t know what to say.
‘Nah, it’s not like that,’ I said, not daring to look back at Adam.
‘You should. You really should,’ he said.
I knew he wasn’t going to let this drop. I cleared my throat. ‘Nah, it’s not right yet. We’re not ready for—’
The sound of smashing glass pierced the air. I saw the rock flying through the room from the direction of our front window, and shards of glass flew towards our face. I couldn’t move. My chest felt tight. I wanted to run into my bedroom and put my head under the covers, but I couldn’t.
Adam’s jaw dropped before he leapt up and ran towards the door. He put his shaking hand on the handle and prepared to pull it down. I could see him breathing heavily. He stopped and stepped backwards.
‘Adam, what’s… what’s up? Come back. Are they there?’ My whole body shook now as my voice stuttered.
Adam stared outside. ‘Liam, there’s something out there.’
My stomach turned. I felt a lump in my throat and began to whimper. Adam walked over to me and pulled me up. I tried to shrug him off but he dragged me towards the darkness of the door.
I could see something on our doorstep. It was round and there was something else underneath it. I turned to Adam, who rolled his lip and stared on, too. Carla carried on barking and our alarm raged.
I turned the lock and dragged the door open slowly. A gust of wind whistled its way into the house. I shuddered. I looked around to check nobody was there. Things looked like they moved in the dark. Nearby, lights began to switch on.
A rock sat on the doorstep. I could see now that a note was wedged underneath. There was something scrawled on it. It was hard to make out in the darkness, and it could have been just a series of doodles. But as I crouched down, the sound of Carla’s barks ringing in my ears, it became a little more visible in the dim glow of the living room lamp. I grabbed the cold rock in my right hand and lifted the note from underneath with the other. I could hear voices close by now; people flocking to see what all the fuss was about.
I read the words on the note and felt my legs go weak. I blinked to make sure I wasn’t seeing things and read it again. Somewhere behind me, Adam asked me what it was, his words jumbled in my ears.
I turned round towards Adam, who clutched at Carla’s collar, determined not to let her go again.
‘Adam, I—I think you should see this,’ I said.
Chapter Twenty
I gulped hard as Granddad’s car rolled up onto the drive. He looked up at me and frowned, a little puzzled at our gaze as we peered toward the headlights. He pulled himself out of the car.
‘You okay, lads?’ he asked, before his eyes moved towards the crumbled wreck of the caravan window. His face dropped. He had to grab his car door for support. Gran sat open-mouthed in the passenger seat. Granddad looked like he had seen a ghost. He stormed towards us and narrowed his eyes. ‘What have you done?’ he yelled, looking from me to Adam and back again.
The accusation hurt, even though it was part of our plan. It’d be better if we took the blame. Better than Granddad finding out about the note.
I shuffled my feet, kicking at the rocks beneath me. ‘It was an accident, Grandda—’
Granddad stamped his foot against the pavement. ‘I don’t care whether it’s a bloody accident or not,’ he roared. ‘Go on, who broke it?’
I looked at Adam and he turned back to me. ‘It was—’
‘It was him—’
‘Boys!’ Granddad exploded.
I held my head down as my face began to blush. I turned to Gran, who perched on the step where the note had sat earlier.
‘Don’t you look at me like that, Liam,’ she said. ‘I thought you were more trustworthy than this.’ She tutted and shook her head from side to side. Carla barked, trying her best to out our lies and confess the truth. Thank God she’s only a dog.
Before Gran and Granddad came back, Adam and I had argued about telling them everything. The thought of the whole situation made my head spin. I wanted to get the truth out there. I didn’t understand, and I didn’t want to understand. Did it mean that Donald was on to us? If so, maybe it was best to keep quiet and pretend we didn’t know what was going on.
It wasn’t long before Martin, the repairman, turned up to assess the damage. He shook his head disapprovingly as Adam and I tried not to make eye contact with anybody else.
‘I should be able to get this sorted in the morning,’ Martin said. ‘Until then, you might want to sleep in a friend’s van or something, ‘cause I’m gonna have someone up here pretty early tomorrow, and there’ll be a lot of banging.’
Granddad shook his head and glanced to
wards us. ‘The lads should stay in here for the night, really,’ he said. ‘Might knock some sense into them.’
‘You can always stay in mine for the night.’ We turned round and saw Mrs. Jeeves approaching in her dressing gown and slippers. I bet she’d been waiting and listening to everything that had been going on for ages, the nosey woman. Adam tutted, and Gran shot evils at him.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ Granddad said, turning back to Gran. ‘What d’you say, eh?’
Gran nodded and pulled herself up from the step. I remembered the note. That writing.
‘I’ve only got space for two, so two of you will have to sleep on the floor,’ Mrs Jeeves said, glancing at Adam and me.
Granddad coughed and followed her towards her caravan. ‘They’re lucky they aren’t sleeping outside tonight.’
Mrs Jeeves’ living room was a carbon copy of ours, right down to the positioning of the picture frames. Instead of family shots, photographs of cats dominated the scene. The van smelled of stale wee and old sweat. Adam and I slept on the floor in the living room. A woodlouse caught my eye under the dust-covered landscape of the carpet. I suppose this was our punishment. Even worse, Mrs. Jeeves had given up her bed to Gran and Granddad, and she slept on the sofa next to us. I had to listen to her wheezy lungs as she snored, saliva dribbling from the corner of her mouth towards the rough pink carpet we lay on.
But we had something else on our mind. Not being able to talk freely about what we had seen was brutal. The note. The truth. We stared at each other. Our mystery had been taken in a new direction. Before, we were just the witnesses. Now, we were targets.
I reached into my back pocket, being sure to check that Mrs. Jeeves’ disapproving eyes were still glued shut. I waited for Adam’s breathing to slow. Even the woodlouse stopped moving, twitching on the spot as it tugged against a tuft of old, discoloured material.
I felt the note in my hand and gulped. The crumpled, yellow paper was stiff against my fingers. Even though it was quite dark, the prominent, unmistakable black lettering still stood out in the dead of the night. The words burned into my eyelids, and I blinked to refocus on them.
Keep your mouths shut, or I’ll shut them for you.
Chapter Twenty-One
Once I finally managed to drift off to sleep, I was bothered by strange dreams all night. I couldn’t put a finger on what they were about, but I was trapped behind some railings. The darkness behind me was chasing me and everything evil resided in that darkness. It scared me to death. I woke up dripping with sweat to find that it was already late morning, my chin marked from the roughness of Mrs. Jeeves’ carpet.
It took me a moment to remember why I was there, and the events of last night came flooding back to me. I turned onto my side and peeked out the front of the van. The new window was almost installed. Trying to shake off the dream, I looked down to find the crumpled piece of paper wedged between my fingers. I’d been stupid and left it out all night. I shoved it back in my pocket. I hoped I’d been the first to find it. I wasn’t ready for this mystery to escalate beyond our control. We had a new lead and solid, physical evidence that Donald—or someone—was watching us.
We sat in the living room and ate dry old Cheerios for breakfast. Granddad still wasn’t speaking to us. Gran talked to us a bit, but she sighed a lot and didn’t say much. Really, we should have told them everything. The whole truth. But something stopped me. Maybe we were just scared. This note was targeted at Adam and me specifically. Did we really want to scare Gran and Granddad? They’d been through enough lately. They’d taken a lot on, and they didn’t need to be worrying about anything else. It wasn’t their problem or their mystery. We’d started this, so we had to find a way to finish it.
I took a deep breath as I emerged from Mrs. Jeeves’ caravan, taking in the earthy smell of rain and damp. The clouds parted over the sea and the sun’s reflection off the water was blinding. The window was fully intact again now. Granddad shook the repairman’s hand and waved him off, his blue mini-van emitting a cloud of smoke as it snaked up the hill and into the distance.
That’s when I saw him in the distance, staring.
It was Emily’s dad. He was wearing a red t-shirt, and he stood out against the backdrop of hedges and the discoloured green of the caravans. He stared towards me for a few seconds before turning away, following the trail of smoke the blue van had left behind. Something was weird. I don’t know whether it was the way he’d stared at me or the fact that he was standing there, right on cue, as the van left.
I wanted to follow him. I wanted to ask him where Emily was and why he was watching. I was probably overreacting, but I didn’t like the way he had looked at me. My arms felt wobbly, and I didn’t know what to do with them.
I felt something hit my back as I stared into the distance. It wasn’t hard, but it was enough to make me notice. I felt it again. I turned round, and Adam stood there, throwing little pieces of stone at me. He looked at me quizzically with his tongue between his teeth and his shoulders slumped. He didn’t look like much of a leader any more. He started to walk towards the caravan before looking back at me. The expected words finally worked their way out of his mouth. ‘What’re we going to do, cuz?’
I felt the responsibility thump against me. My head hurt as I tried to put together all the little clues we had. Carla’s disappearance. The ring. The body. The news about Donald’s loss. And the letter, wedged underneath the rock, left there as a reminder of the meteor that had flown through our window minutes earlier. Could it all be linked? It had to be linked.
The way Emily’s dad had stood there, so out of place, made my hands twitch. Something wasn’t right, and I wasn’t sure how much more I wanted to know about it right now. He seemed to be everywhere. I wanted to go back to solving little mysteries again. Me and my cousin had come here to escape and get away from all that shit back home. Now we’d messed with things too old for us, too far ‘beyond our understanding,’ as Granddad would say.
‘We have to stop this, right now,’ I said. It sounded really triumphant in my head, but my voice crackled when I spoke the words, making me sound a bit like Kermit the Frog.
Adam looked towards the ground. ‘Do we tell Gran? Or the police?’ he asked, after letting out a long, low sigh. He really didn’t want to hear the answer.
I took another deep breath, and cleared my throat. ‘We say nothing. To no one. Not to Gran or Granddad or the police. We don’t know anything. Just bits. It’s not good enough, Adam. We’ve failed, and we need to go back to doing normal things again. That note: it’s no joke, Adam. We’re finished.’
The last words visibly stung him. He flinched as I said them and scrunched his eyes. ‘We never fail,’ he said. ‘We’re a team.’
I sympathised with him. After everything that had happened over the last twelve months, he deserved something to sidetrack him. His chin trembled. It was disappointing how things had ended up, but we’d gone too far. We weren’t supposed to solve this.
‘Maybe we can come back to it one day when it’s all died down a bit, eh?’ I said to Adam as he walked towards the caravan door, head down and shoulders slumped. I didn’t believe a single one of those words I’d said, but I tried to smile. The way Adam shuffled his feet against the ground told me that he wasn’t too certain either.
I looked up towards where Emily’s dad had stood in his red shirt, the breeze battering his dark brown hair, but no one was there now. I still felt his gaze as he looked on at me, deep into my eyes, before turning and walking away.
Gran and Granddad were still mad. Their anger irritated me, not just because we hadn’t thrown the rock, but because we had to pretend we had. All of this disappointment and fake shame. I wondered whether I’d crack first or Adam. Gran had a blank look on her face. Granddad was burrowed in his paper, as per usual. Even Carla sat with her head slumped in her paws, twitching her eyes from me to Adam, sensing the tension in the room.
I needed to get out of the caravan. The shado
w of that piece of paper and the bold black ink had scribed itself into my mind. Adam had shoved it in his bag, far under his bed, beneath his Junior Crossword books and a torn-out Page 3 he’d found flapping about in the breeze before he came to the caravan. That way, if Gran or Granddad did somehow find the bag, they’d be more shocked by the naked lady than a piece of paper with a bit of writing on. I imagine Granddad would probably fake a disapproving look at the girl before keeping it for himself. He wouldn’t tell Gran. If Gran found it, she’d probably end up having another heart attack, screaming ‘blasphemy!’ before collapsing to the ground like a big bean bag.
‘I’m off out,’ I said, cutting the silence of the room. Adam looked at me, knowingly. Granddad stared into his paper.
Gran glanced up at me. ‘Make sure you’re back before four.’ She had a half-smile etched across her crooked face. Carla lifted her head, surprised to hear someone talking. Poor dog. I bet she wished she’d stayed lost sometimes.
I set off to the launderette at around 3:15 pm. I didn’t want to make myself look desperate, especially after Emily’s no-show yesterday. I thought about the bruises on her back. I hoped she wasn’t ill.
As I walked up the hill at the end of our road and turned the corner, I noticed Kenny had started work on a new garden feature. It looked like a giant shoe, which I didn’t really understand, but it was pretty impressive. It was wasted talent though. If I could do that, I’d make a Pokémon or some sort of weird creature, not a shoe. He nodded at me from his window as I marched past, and I gave him the thumbs up, gesturing towards his shoe. He curved his mouth and nodded his head, miming ‘not bad’ through the glass.
I reached the hill near the launderette. The trees blocked my view, but it didn’t look like anyone was there. 3:20 pm now. I climbed up the hill, hoping Emily would swing round the corner with her white teeth glowing before she opened her arms and pulled me in. I knew it probably wouldn’t happen. But I still didn’t know why. Maybe if she didn’t turn up this time, I’d go check on her. I thought of how her dad had stared at me, and I wasn’t so sure any more.