by Luca Veste
I thought of seeing Alexandra, feeling the old wound reopen anew. I wanted to call her when I’d gotten home, but had no doubt how the conversation would go. There was too much that had been destroyed between us. I would only be hurting myself again. And her.
Michelle.
She looked so lost.
I hadn’t thought about her that often in the previous few months. How she’d been or how she was. There was always a little niggle of worry in the back of my mind that she would eventually crack and tell someone what we had done, but I doubted the idea she ever would. Self-preservation was a strong factor in all of this. With every passing day, the judgment became worse. She wouldn’t be lauded for coming forward now.
Still, she didn’t look like the Michelle I’d known for over twenty years. We were never really close—she had always been part of the group, but we were on opposite sides of it. More friends of friends, who just happened to be together almost constantly.
It was because of Stuart, of course. They had been on again and off again for years. That’s all it was. She was hurting and probably blamed all of us for making sure they would never end up together.
And now, it was really over.
I knew Michelle loved Stuart. That at some point they would stop playing games and settle down. We all did. Then, that fractured memory of a night occurred and changed everything.
There was no real chance of sleep, but I still went through the motions. Lying in bed, flitting between playing music, playing talk radio, watching ASMR videos on YouTube. None of it worked.
Still, it kept the quiet away.
I heard a noise downstairs. A shift of something. The television settling or the fridge making a clunk in the night. I could feel my heart beating a little faster as I imagined someone walking through my house. Opening up drawers, trying to find something valuable. It didn’t matter that I knew for certain that I’d locked up correctly and that they would have to make a lot more noise getting in than I’d heard.
I listened for anything else, but nothing came. A tap on the window from the branch of the tree that was outside my bedroom as it moved in the wind. That was it.
I closed my eyes to it all, even as it became lighter outside. The low winter sun peeking its way through my curtains. Counting down the hours of sleep I had left until it was daylight outside and my body would finally give in. Tried to will myself to sleep, even as I felt the hours slipping away.
The next morning, I made a rough estimate that I’d perhaps fallen asleep for as long as two hours. As I was standing in my kitchen, waiting for the coffee machine to kick in, I checked the back door and then the front door, just to make sure no one had been in the house. Everything was exactly how I’d left it the night before. Not a mark on either door.
I drank my coffee, then got dressed. I had made the decision to go without thinking too much about it.
The train tracks where Stuart had been found were a half-hour drive from my house. Forty minutes, tops. A Saturday morning, I thought it’d be closer to forty-five, trying to get through town and then farther south of the city, but it wasn’t as if I didn’t have the time.
I had all the time in the world. What else was I going to do?
It took me forty-five minutes to finally leave the house. Standing in the hallway, staring at the front door, wanting to stay inside where it was safe. Before, finally, I thought of Stuart dying alone and not being there to help him.
That was enough to make me leave.
The tracks were on the southernmost edge of the city—past Speke and Hale, a few hundred yards until the signs would start to say Widnes. Most of the access to where the trains would pass at high speeds was fenced off by metal railings. I had already checked on Google Maps and Street View, finding where I thought Stuart may have started his final journey.
The day was overcast, but not raining, thankfully. I zipped up my jacket as I left the car all the same, as the wind picked up around me and whistled into my ears. The traffic was sparser than it had been in town, but there were still cars passing over the hill that shielded the road from the tracks.
At the end of a lane that ran from a main road into an old yard was countryside on one side, the humming of electricity and power on the other. Overhead, power lines stretched above the multitude of tracks underneath. I could walk directly to the small wall that served as no barrier to the tracks themselves.
Only when the metal gates were open, of course. Which they were in the day, I presumed, but hoped not at night. At the end of the lane, however, I saw how someone could easily gain access at night—three large stones blocked any further route down the concrete path for cars, but were also close enough to the railings that you could hop onto one of them and then launch yourself over to the other side. You might hurt an ankle or two on landing, but that wouldn’t matter if you were trying to meet a train at three in the morning.
I parked and walked toward the stones, making sure I was correct in my assumption. There were a few tired-looking bunches of cheap flowers tied to the railings. I stopped to look at the cards, seeing names I didn’t recognize underneath Stuart’s. The cellophane wrappings were wet and cold to the touch. The railings were the metal kind, with the spikes on top that were dull enough that they wouldn’t pierce a shoe if you lightly stepped on them.
In the yard to my left, a couple of vans were parked and workers in high-visibility vests were leaning against the hoods, talking between themselves.
I looked farther up the line and saw the bridge that had been pictured in all the news stories on Stuart’s death. A few yards away, if that.
This was planned, I thought. Stuart had found this place and come here. Maybe more than once, so he could get the timing right. It wasn’t as if freight trains passed this way every few minutes—especially at that time of night. He would have known exactly when to come and what to do.
“Why? What was going on in your head?” I heard myself whisper. I looked toward the men in the yard, making sure they hadn’t heard me. They didn’t seem to have noticed my presence at all.
I walked farther past the stones, looking for any other access. Looking for some sign that Stuart had been there.
He hadn’t left a note behind, according to his sister. That had been something she’d mentioned at the funeral. More than once. As if knowing what was going through his mind would have made any difference. Instead, we were left to speculate. I tried to picture him in my mind, but nothing came to me.
“I didn’t expect to see anyone here.”
I spun round, recognizing the lilting voice from behind me. I tried to smile, but found I couldn’t. Not there. Not then.
“Michelle,” I said, putting my hands in my pockets for something to do with them. “I could say the same thing.”
“I’ve been coming down here quite often,” she replied, closing the distance between us but avoiding eye contact. “I’m not sure why.”
“Are you still angry with us? With me?”
Michelle smiled thinly, then looked away from me. “Don’t worry. I’ve calmed down a little since yesterday. I shouldn’t have said those things.”
I waved away the apology. “Is this where…”
“Yeah,” Michelle said, before I had the chance to finish a sentence I never would have finished anyway. “But you already knew that. I’m guessing you read the stuff in the papers.”
I nodded in response, following her gaze and looking over toward the train tracks. “They didn’t say much. I kind of worked it out for myself.”
“There’s a camera farther up the road. It’s the last sighting of him. He was walking over the hill, then turned down the lane. He knew where he was going.”
“It didn’t say that. It didn’t say much at all.”
“Well, I spoke to his sister,” Michelle said, shivering suddenly as the wind picked up again. It blew across us from th
e field behind and whipped Michelle’s hair from her face. She smoothed it down with one hand. “She told me what she knew. There wasn’t…there wasn’t much left of him.”
I winced internally, wishing I didn’t want to hear the details. But I needed to know. I wasn’t sure why.
“They found ID in a pocket, driver’s license and credit cards in his wallet. She was shown a picture of the tattoo he had on his shoulder. You know the one he got in Thailand?”
“The panther. Or the jaguar. I forget which.”
“I’m not sure he knew either,” Michelle said with a joyless laugh. “That’s all they were allowed to see.”
I could fill in the rest myself. I didn’t want to picture what they had found of him. What state he was in. I’d never sleep again.
“It’s my fault.”
I shook my head, surprised how quickly she had shifted the blame from the rest of us to just herself. I looked at her and saw the sleepless nights and endless questions running through her mind. I knew what she was going through, and even though I didn’t believe it, I said what you’re supposed to in those circumstances. “No, it’s not, Michelle.”
“Yes, it is,” she said, loud enough to turn the workers’ heads from the yards. “I could have stopped this. I could have helped him.”
“No, you couldn’t. He knew what he was doing.”
“You don’t understand,” Michelle said, stepping backward now as her entire body seemed to shake a couple of times. “He reached out to me. Tried to talk to me, and I ignored him. I wouldn’t listen to him. I never did.”
The wind whistled past us again as a train approached in the distance.
“Michelle,” I tried again, but she was turning away from me now.
“It’s not over, Matt. It never was. And now we’re all going to pay for what we did.”
Seventeen
The café was a few minutes from the train tracks—old style, with Formica tables and red-and-white checkered tablecloths. The smell of grease was hanging in the air, so thick I almost held my hands up to part the mist as I walked in.
Tea was served in mugs, plonked down in front of Michelle and me. Sugar from a bowl on the table that looked as if it had been sitting there since the café originally opened decades earlier.
I loved the place.
I wanted bacon on toast, but didn’t want to eat alone. Michelle looked as if she hadn’t eaten for days but had shaken her head when I’d offered to order something. I didn’t want to push it any further.
“We’ve never done this,” Michelle said with a tight-lipped smile. “We were always together in the group. Never alone.”
“You’re right. That’s strange, isn’t it? All those years and we were always together, just never alone together.” I thought about the past couple of decades, wondering if I’d ever made much of an effort with Michelle. We were friends, but would we have been without the others? Probably not. That wasn’t to say I didn’t like her a lot even so. I knew my life wouldn’t be as good without her being in it, even if we hadn’t really been that close in the past. I wanted to change that.
“That’s not to say I hadn’t wanted to,” Michelle continued, looking toward the table and tracing a pattern in some sugar that had fallen onto the surface. “I suppose it’s one of those things that happens in groups of friends. There’s always a few who don’t really interact outside the whole.”
“I suppose so,” I replied, but I knew there was more to it than that. I remembered twenty years earlier—how Chris and I had met Nicola and Alexandra. It was just expected that once Chris and Nicola had gotten together, and Alexandra and I didn’t, that Michelle and I would. It had never gotten to that point though. It was friends and nothing more. We were very different people.
It took a couple of years, but Alexandra and I eventually ended up together. I remembered those years from eleven to thirteen, when I had tried to pluck up the courage to tell her my feelings. Too young to realize, too young to act on them. We had met Michelle by that point, and I knew she was the only one in the group who could see what was going on with me.
Stuart was later, but Michelle had boyfriends throughout high school. None of them had stuck.
I had a memory then—stark and vivid. Sitting on the promenade, down by Otterspool Promenade. A day out, an adventure. Probably the farthest we’d been from our little neighborhood alone.
A clear and bright day. The kind you remember years later as being how all the summer days were. The sun on our faces, Chris and I making each other laugh. Nicola rolling her eyes at us. Alexandra dangling long legs over the side of the promenade wall. Me trying to perfect my impression of Mick Johnson from Brookside. Chris quoting Austin Powers in the most cringe-worthy way imaginable.
It was Michelle I remembered most now. That day, her bouncing around as we sat. Singing a variety of different songs, providing the soundtrack to our day. One day it would be Spice Girls, the next No Doubt. The one I remembered most vividly was the day we heard “Barbie Girl” by Aqua on repeat.
“Do you remember going down to the promenade when we were kids?” I said, wondering if she recalled those times still. Whether they had been diminished and forgotten about. “Summer vacation and all that?”
“Of course,” Michelle replied, a small smile appearing, then vanishing just as quickly. “They were good times.”
“Every day you had a new song that was suddenly your favorite. You’d sing it all day. Used to drive me mad, but I miss that now.”
“I can’t believe I used to do that,” Michelle said, shaking her head. “My self-awareness wasn’t something I was known for, I suppose.”
“I thought it would be like that forever. Just a group of us having fun, not taking life too seriously. What happened to us?”
“We all grew up, Matt. Things change.”
“I know. I just wish we could go back to that time, that’s all I’m saying. Things were changing from the second we left high school. And I’m not just talking about singing in the street. Everyone seemed to become a little more miserable day by day.”
“That’s being an adult for you.”
I shrugged in response, but I wasn’t sure. I tried to track the moment when life had begun to become different for us. When we had started not to appreciate what we had—the friendships, the relationships.
It was probably around the time we went to university.
The fact that we were now all responsible for the death of someone had only compounded it. We had a shared secret now. One we never discussed and that had driven us all apart.
“I’ve never spoken to anyone about what happened,” Michelle said, seeming to read my mind. She leaned forward as she spoke, wrapping her hands around the mug of tea for warmth. “I’ve been waiting for someone to say we got it wrong, but I can’t find a single person who has been called a victim of the Candle Man in the past year. It all stopped.”
“We know why that is.”
“I don’t think anyone would understand.”
“I agree,” I replied, leaning an elbow on the table and itching the back of my head with the other hand. “It doesn’t mean we can’t think about it. Which is what Stuart was probably doing a lot of, if you ask me.”
Michelle shook her head. “It wasn’t just that. There were other things happening.”
“What kind of things?”
“Have you had anything sent to your house? A message about what we did?”
I shook my head. I didn’t really understand what she was asking. I was about to question it, but she continued talking before I had the chance.
“He was messed up after what we did in those woods,” Michelle said, looking past me and out of the window behind me. “I tried to talk to him a few times, but he was just numb to it all. Then, a couple of weeks ago, something happened.”
“What?”
“I don’t know, but whatever it was made him scared. He wouldn’t talk to me anymore. He slammed the door in my face and wouldn’t reply to any texts or messages. Nothing. He just said it wasn’t over and that we were all going to be next. That we weren’t alone in those woods, and now we were all going to have to face what we’d done.”
I sat back in my chair, trying to figure out what Michelle was telling me. “Someone else knows what we did. And wants what? Some sort of payback?”
“That’s what I think. And Stuart was just the first one they got to. But we’re all going to be found out…”
“I’m sure that’s not going to happen,” I said, talking over Michelle. Shaking my head. Even as my leg bobbed up and down nervously under the table. On some level, I’d known this would happen. As if the past year had been spent in a holding pattern, waiting for the fall to come. It wouldn’t be a smooth descent either. We were going to plummet to the ground. “No one knows as long as none of us has talked to anyone. You definitely haven’t spoken to anyone, right?”
Michelle shook her head. “Of course not. I haven’t talked to anyone. Not since that night. I just wanted to forget about it, but I can’t. It’s always there, just a voice at my shoulder, reminding me how wrong we are.”
I’d said the same thing to myself time after time, but that didn’t mean I completely believed it. I had spent so many sleepless nights trying to rewrite history—how I would have done things differently if I’d known the consequences. It was impossible though. “We did the only thing we could in the situation.”
“You don’t believe that,” Michelle said, and she was right. “That’s just the lie we all told ourselves. Well, now we’re going to have to face up to what we’ve done.”
“We saved him.” I lowered my voice, even though we were the only customers in the café and the cook-slash-waitress was nowhere to be seen. “He would have died out there. You know that. Stuart saw something he wasn’t supposed to and that’s why that man had his hands wrapped around Stuart’s throat. It’s that simple. If we hadn’t done it, he’d have been dead a year ago and we would never have been able to forgive ourselves.”