by Luca Veste
I knew it wasn’t going to be as easy as that. We would all carry the weight of what we had done forever. That was the type of people we were. We didn’t get into trouble; we didn’t have arguments with strangers. We kept ourselves to ourselves. The only thing I knew about the police and law came from watching television dramas.
We didn’t know that world. Now, we were forever going to be connected with it.
I also didn’t believe a word I’d said. Or Stuart’s words, or Chris’s. We had done wrong. And we would be judged for it. Not by some higher power, but by ourselves.
There was no way back.
I looked around the group as they stared at the ground. Nicola was whispering something to herself that sounded like the Lord’s Prayer. Stuart fiddled with the hem of his T-shirt and I could see the marks on his arms. They would need to be cleaned up.
My eyes narrowed, ignoring the broken form of Michelle, still kneeling. Twisted on the spot, looking all around us.
“Where’s Alexandra gone?” I said, but I was already moving as I said the words.
Eight
I was running, not thinking about where I was going or what I was doing. Not the movement, the direction, the course. It was Alexandra’s face in the darkness that was running through my mind as I drove my body through the woodland. I could feel the pain from the rocks and undergrowth as they passed beneath my socked feet, but it was dull and easily ignored.
“Alexandra!”
Breathless as I jogged through the trees, taking turns and following paths that I couldn’t see. I was running in circles without knowing. Over and over, I called her name.
“Alexandra?”
I was gasping for breath as the world closed in around me. I had no sense of direction, and all I could see were trees and bushes and soil and blood.
There was a sound from behind me, and my name being shouted. It was Stuart, trying to find me, trying to find Alexandra. I kept moving, slowing down and scanning my surroundings. The clearing where we had…we had done what we had done was over to my right-hand side. I moved forward and tried to think clearly.
Then, I heard her voice.
Quiet and scared. Filled with fear. Not far away at all. I covered the distance in seconds, brushing aside branches that flicked back and scratched my face. I squinted my eyes and slid down an embankment I didn’t see coming.
I almost crashed into her.
It wasn’t as large a clearing as the one from before, but smaller. It was completely closed in, flat ground covered in brown decaying leaves and broken twigs. They crunched under my hands as I got to my feet and grabbed Alexandra, who was facing away from me.
“Are you…”
I didn’t get the chance to finish my sentence as she cut it off with a choked sob. I came to her side and followed where her eyes were transfixed on the ground.
The first thing I saw was the candle. Housed in a metal storm lantern. Burning. It was red. Blood red.
Like the blood on the young man Alexandra was standing over.
My first thought was that Alexandra had done this—that she’d run into someone else and managed to hurt them before they hurt her. Then, I realized that the person on the ground wasn’t making any sound. Wasn’t breathing.
Another death.
I staggered backward as I saw the scene properly for the first time.
The red candle, bleeding light from within its confined space.
The young man must have been around nineteen or twenty years old. Short blond hair that was dirtied by the mud underneath the head. His face turned away slightly, mouth open in one final exhalation. A gouge in his face that ran down from his temple. One that ran along the jawline.
I couldn’t see the other side to see if there was a matching wound there.
There were other injuries.
Too many.
“Oh no…” I heard myself say, then bent over as my stomach contents threatened to release themselves. My throat burned, but nothing came out. My hands were on my knees as my legs grew weaker.
I wanted to collapse there. To roll up into the fetal position and never move again.
When I closed my eyes, I could still see it. The body. What had been done to it.
Then, I remembered Alexandra and forced myself to stand. I couldn’t leave her there alone.
“Come on,” I said to her as I placed an arm around her and tried to pull her away. “We can’t stay here.”
“Look at him,” she whispered in reply. Her eyes were transfixed on the body. The sky was becoming lighter by the second, the color of it matching the candle burning on the ground. “We can’t just leave him.”
“He’s gone,” I tried, but I knew it was pointless trying to pretend we could just walk away. I could see the music festival wristband on the young lad’s arm. Frayed at the edges. Spotted with blood. “There’s nothing we can do for him now.”
From behind us, the trees began to move and Stuart emerged into the small clearing.
“What the hell…”
I turned to look at him and held one hand up. “Alex found him like this. What is this, Stuart?”
Stuart hesitated, then stuttered out a reply. “How am I supposed to know?”
“A guy attacks you in the woods, then we find some lad dead only a few yards away? Did you know about this?”
“I was near here,” Stuart replied, indicating the invisible woodland behind him. “Maybe I heard something…I don’t know. I don’t remember properly now. He was on me pretty quickly, and then I was just fighting for my life, or have you forgotten about that? Do you think he…did I…”
“You interrupted something,” I finished for him. I released Alexandra from my grip, walking toward Stuart. “That’s why he went after you.”
There was more movement, and Chris and Nicola joined us, standing at the top of the embankment I’d fallen down. I spoke before they had the chance to. Both of them had clasped their hands to their mouths as they saw what was there. “This is why he went after Stuart.”
“The man…”
“Yes,” I said, facing Chris now. I looked at the three in turn before glancing back at Alexandra. She was still staring at the young lad on the ground “We need to call someone now. We can’t deal with this on our own. My plan is no good.”
“No,” Stuart said, shaking his head. His hands were balled into fists now. “You were right. This won’t just go away.”
“We’ll be heroes,” Chris said quietly, but I didn’t see any conviction in the statement. “We tried to save someone from…whatever this is. So what if he died?”
“You know what will happen,” Stuart replied quickly, turning to Chris and unfurling his fists. The muscles straining at the arms of his T-shirt began to relax. He flicked a lock of blond hair away from his forehead, then moved his hand onto Chris’s shoulder. “They’ll find cracks in our stories. There’ll be questions we can’t answer. It won’t take long for them to work out the truth. We killed him without knowing what he was doing out here. And then buried him. Did you forget that part? Do you not think they’ll notice that he’s been six feet under the earth? They will be able to tell that we tried to cover it up. Then it’s even worse.”
“This is too much,” Alexandra said, then repeated it again louder this time. “We can’t just walk away from him. From all of this. We’ve got to tell someone.”
“Alex…”
“No, Stuart.” Her voice was a shout now. Loud in the quiet woods. I looked around, suddenly nervous that someone would hear us finally and discover us all standing around another dead body. “We can’t, don’t you see? We have to do something.”
“I want to go home,” Chris said, and he sounded like the boy I had first met in high school. Eleven years old. Quiet and scared. Not the thirty-odd-year-old I knew now. He was twenty years younger and wanted it all to
be over. To go back to a normal that would never exist again. “We shouldn’t even be here.”
“Well, we wouldn’t be if it weren’t for you,” Stuart spat out, disgust filling his features now. “I’m not going to let this ruin me. I have a life. So do all of you. What about your family? About work? This will ruin us all forever. Do you think they’re gonna enjoy having us splashed all over the newspapers. And what about the internet? Social media will crucify us.”
“We didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, pleading now. Every word was a stab at the heart of my life and all it was. “We just have to tell the truth. That’s all.”
“It won’t matter. You think everyone will just believe we interrupted a killer and then made sure he couldn’t do it again?” Stuart paused, breathed in deeply, as if to calm himself. “How do we explain that we buried him? That we were worried he was going to rise from the dead and get us before they came? It’s ridiculous. They’ll wonder why we’re all here. Why we didn’t call the police straightaway. That man back there…it’s already over an hour since he died. Maybe longer. Even if we dug him up, cleaned him up, then put him near this body, they’ll still know. They’ll find his blood, our blood, everywhere. There isn’t a story we can make fit with what we’ve already done. With every passing second, we look more and more guilty. They’ll find witnesses. They’ll find out the truth.”
I opened my mouth to argue further, but I didn’t have any words to say. I couldn’t believe what we were doing. The relative calmness as we stood near two dead bodies. One we were responsible for, the other too late to save.
The world felt like a nightmare. Lucid and tangible, but not real. It couldn’t be. This wasn’t happening. Nothing made sense, yet when I closed my eyes and then opened them again, I was still in the woods.
“We have to get out of here,” Nicola said finally, breaking the silence. “I’m not going to have my life changed because of what you’ve done. Nor is Chris. We’re leaving and I’m not going to talk about this again.”
“Nicola…”
“No, Alexandra,” Nicola said, folding her arms across her chest. Her face was reddening and her nostrils flared with anger. Her face had become even more angular and pointed somehow. “Don’t you get it? It won’t be just them; it’ll be all of us. I’ve worked too long and too hard for something like this to ruin it. I won’t have it. Do you want your life turned upside down? Everything ends if we tell someone. We were too late to save this kid, but we’re not too late to save ourselves. He’s dead. Stuart obviously interrupted his killer and now he’s dead too. That’s all there is to it. We can’t change what’s happened, but we can change what happens next. I’m not going to let you all make a bad decision. It’s as simple as that.”
We let her words fall over us, and I could see that she was right. This was over, unless we made things worse.
Each of us, in turn, seemed to make the same decision. It was Stuart who spoke first.
“What do we do with him now? Do we bury him as well?”
I shook my head. “We leave him to be discovered.”
“You know what this is, don’t you?”
I turned to see Michelle standing in between two trees, almost masked by overhanging branches. She was dead-eyed, staring at the body on the ground. She stretched out a hand and pointed toward the body. Then above it, at the candle. “It’s him.”
“Who?” Stuart said, but Michelle ignored him as she came closer and stood over the body.
“They’ve been saying for months that they weren’t connected.”
“What are you talking about, Michelle?” Chris said quietly, as he released himself from Nicola and moved to Michelle’s side. “You’re not making any sense. Maybe you should go back…”
“No, don’t you see?” Michelle replied sharply, making Chris take a step backward. “There was a documentary about it last year. It’s been all over the internet since then, but the police keep saying it’s not real. This proves it is. Look at it.”
“Look at what?” I tried, glancing at the others, but they were looking anywhere but at the body or Michelle now. “Tell us what’s going on.”
“The candle. It’s what he leaves in all of their houses.”
“Who does?”
Michelle placed her hands on her hips and nodded her head. “It’s him. We killed the Candle Man.”
Nine
“What are you talking about?” Nicola said, looking at Michelle with an air of exasperation.
“It’s this serial killer, who has been murdering people for years.”
“Michelle, this isn’t the time for conspiracy theories,” Stuart said, folding his arms in frustration. “It’s not the time.”
“What is it time for then? Time to kill someone else?”
Stuart opened his mouth to shout back at her, but thought better of it. I moved closer to Michelle. “Talk to us.”
“I can’t…”
“I saw that thing on TV,” Alexandra said, not looking at any of us. “There’s all these missing people that have never been found. There’s this theory that a serial killer killed them, going back decades. There’s that documentary Michelle talked about and the podcast thing that was big for a while. Well, until they moved onto another urban myth. They reckon some of them are connected by something they found after they went missing.”
“Red candles,” Michelle said, pointing at the one on the ground again. “This means it’s real. That…man. He was the Candle Man.”
“I said this before,” Stuart said, rolling his eyes at Michelle. “It’s all been debunked. Some of the people reported as missing and dead are actually alive and well. They’ve turned up a few days later and that hasn’t been reported.”
“Yeah, but look at this.” Michelle gestured toward the body and the candle still burning away at its head. “You think this is normal? It makes more sense than you disturbing someone in the middle of the woods while having a pee, then getting attacked with a machete for your troubles, doesn’t it?”
“It does make sense,” I said, a wave of nausea washing over me. It was beginning to fall into place.
We had killed a serial killer. Interrupted him while he was offing another of his victims and stopped him in his tracks. I had a sudden urge to giggle. To laugh myself silly with the ridiculousness of it all. Maybe that would make me wake up. Instead, I pinched the skin under my left bicep and again felt only a dull pain.
Still awake.
“I’m only telling you what I know,” Michelle replied, turning her back on them all and walking back into the woods. I considered going after her, but thought she wanted to be alone.
“You think this could be…”
“A serial killer’s victim?” I finished the thought for Chris. “I don’t know. We’re not exactly thinking straight, are we? It makes a weird kind of sense though, don’t you think?”
“Maybe.”
I forced myself to look again at the boy on the ground. Very late teens, I guessed. And when I let my eyes wander around the entire scene, it did look ritualistic. The way the candle was positioned, the marks made on the body.
“I think she’s right,” I heard myself say, then turned away from them and faced the trees for a few seconds. When I turned back, Alexandra was standing in the center of the group.
“It would make sense,” she said, her voice cold and devoid of emotion. “That documentary might have been A Current Affair special, but there were a lot of coincidences in it. The candles being one of them. They had a couple of police spokespeople on it though, who weren’t having any of it. But what if this is it?”
“Or a copycat?” I asked, knowing no one could give me an actual answer. We didn’t really know what we were talking about. I suppressed the urge to scream, swallowed it down instead. When I continued, I was surprised at how calm my voice sounded. “Where were the missing people fro
m?”
“All over the place,” Alexandra replied, turning her head away from me slightly. I realized then that she hadn’t made eye contact with me since we had buried the man. I tried now, but she turned away from me. “Even a couple up by us in Merseyside. Cumbria, Yorkshire, down south. Around here, probably.”
“We can’t do anything now,” Stuart said finally, standing up and brushing his hands down his T-shirt. “And I’m not digging another grave. None of us have touched him, have we?”
I shook my head, looking around at the others doing the same.
“It’ll be like we’ve never been here. He won’t be found for a while. By that time, they won’t be thinking of digging around the place. They won’t put the two things together. And even if they do, we’re still in the clear. As long as none of us talks about what we did here tonight.”
“We should move the kid,” I said finally, vocalizing a thought that was running through my mind. I went with it. “Think about it.”
“Okay. I thought about it. Not a chance.”
I gritted my teeth and tried not to rise to Stuart’s signature sarcasm. The type that only surfaced when he was hungover or coming down from whatever recreational drug he’d taken the night before. Even in his thirties, he hadn’t changed. “Think again. Look, we’re not that far away from the other body. If they search the area—which they will—they’ll see the disturbed ground through those trees and wonder what it is. They’ll dig it up and find him. Then what do we do? We need to put him farther away.”
Stuart sighed and put his hands on his hips. He opened his mouth to protest, but Chris shushed him. “Matt’s right.”
“I know,” Stuart said, seemingly coming to terms with what we were going to have to do.
We had already learned where the phrase dead weight came from.
This time it was more difficult.
We wrapped him in a spare sleeping bag that I retrieved from my car, that I’d packed in case one of the group had needed it. Brand new in the packaging, so none of our DNA would be inside, we guessed. The first bit of luck we’d had.