by Luca Veste
“Maybe,” Michelle replied, but she held no conviction in her tone. “Doesn’t mean we still didn’t do something wrong. If someone knows what we did, isn’t that a good reason to come back after us? And what about Mark Welsh?”
“What about him?”
“Someone moved his body, Matt. Why do we never talk about that?”
I remembered when we first learned the name of the boy who Alexandra had found in the woods. The Candle Man’s last victim, it seemed. A day or so after the festival had ended, his face was everywhere. A young man, who had disappeared and never returned. His family had never really been out of the news since. “I…I don’t know.”
“What if the man we killed wasn’t working alone? What if someone saw what we did out there, moved that lad’s body, and is now out to make us pay for it?”
“What are you saying? That someone hid his body to blackmail us a year later? That Stuart killed himself because he was worried about being outed for what we did?”
Michelle looked across the table, catching my eye for the first time. I found myself wanting to look away.
“No,” Michelle said, lifting the mug of tea to her lips and taking a small sip. She set it back down and drew her coat closer around her. “He wouldn’t kill himself. All I know is that I’m next. I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but I’m next.”
“How can you know any of this? I think you’re letting your imagination run away with you. What happened to Stuart isn’t going to happen to you.”
“I knew him better than any of you did,” Michelle said, her chair sliding back on the floor. She rose slowly from it, running a shaking hand through her hair. She sighed and shook her head. “I would have known if he were going to do something like that to himself.”
“Michelle, wait—”
“I’ve got to go,” she said, cutting me off before I had the chance to ask her to stay. “I can’t be here anymore. I just…I just wanted to see if you had anything to tell me. That’s all. Maybe I’m just going crazy. Grief can do that to you.”
I tried to keep her there again, but she was already out the door. I left some money on the table—too much for a couple mugs of tea, but I didn’t have time to wait for my change. Chucked my coat on and left the café, looking up and down the road to see where Michelle had gone.
There was no one around. I thought about trying to find her again, running up and down the road, calling out her name. It would have been useless. She had already told me as much as she was going to, I felt.
And what had she told me? That she couldn’t believe that Stuart had killed himself. That someone was coming back for them. It wasn’t possible, I decided. Michelle was simply upset and didn’t know how to handle it. That was all it was, I told myself. Grief and fear was a chilling mix to have to deal with, I assumed. It could make us more susceptible to ideas we would never soberly think of, thoughts we would usually ignore.
Still, as I walked back down to where I parked my car, I couldn’t help but feel that someone was watching my movements. The hairs on the back of my neck rose in response to the feeling.
I looked over my shoulder, but the road was empty.
1996
In the dark, anything is everything. A shadow becomes a monster. A whisper becomes a scream. Silence becomes fear. Yet there was always excitement lying in the darkness too. A sense of facing something and staring it down.
I loved the night.
School had finished for summer the previous day—late July, still a few weeks away from it raining every day of summer break. We’d stopped singing “It’s coming home” for now, and even though Chris wasn’t that interested in football, he’d still let me take penalty kicks against him.
I scored every time. Gareth Southgate had nothing on me.
I was still not over Manchester United beating Liverpool in the FA Cup Final, but England doing so well had been a nice distraction.
Fourteen years old. All my friends were already fifteen. It annoyed me more every single passing year.
We were too young to be there, but it was something to do. A way of ridding us of the boredom that was always our enemy. And, if we were being truthful, it would make us look good to the girls. We were in the throes of adolescence now, and it burned underneath every conversation we had. Chris and Nicola were in each other’s pockets every day, so they were fine. I was still trying to ignore the fact that I liked Alexandra, because she didn’t seem all that interested in me.
That night, Michelle had invited Mikey—some lad who lived on her road. He was the same age as us but looked older. He went to a different school as well, so we didn’t know him.
He was a bit rougher than us. Said he’d lived in Bootle until recently, which was an estate farther toward the city center than where we lived. Houses closer together and looking a bit worse for wear than ours.
Mikey took the lead, which didn’t bother us all that much. He had brought the cider, so it was only fair I suppose. Usually, it was always my ideas that they followed, my path, always had been. I’d come up with something, and everyone seemed to be happy to go along with it. I sometimes wondered what the other four would do without me. Probably stay in every day. It wasn’t like they’d be nobodies without me around, but I was the leader of sorts. I was actually happy to have a break from it.
The rumors had started earlier in the week, that someone had been spotted hiding in the scrapyard. Chris had heard it first, then relayed it to us later. Over the week, the story had grown, became something more, until it came to the point where it went from something to be feared to something that could be conquered.
We were deep into high school and people considered us the misfits. The group that was always a little off from the rest. The hierarchy didn’t seem to apply to us. We were separate—our own tier of oddity.
“I’m telling you, there’s nothing here.”
“Then it’ll be a boring night and we won’t have to worry about it then, right?” I replied, shooting a smirk toward Michelle as I spoke. She was standing with her arms folded across her chest, rolling her eyes at us. I could see fear in them when she finally looked back at me. Mixed with excitement.
“We go down there, we have a drink, then we can tell everyone we got drunk right in this spot,” Mikey said, his accent seeming to grow thicker by the syllable. “We’ll be legends.”
“No one will believe us,” Chris replied but didn’t stop walking down into the yard.
The story was that bad people were using this yard for shady stuff. Drugs, more than likely, I thought. I wasn’t sure what the reason for us being on their patch would be, but it was already too late to back out.
“There’s no one here,” Alexandra whispered, placing a hand for balance on my shoulder briefly. I tried not to show how much that affected me. Tried to stay cool. I was fooling nobody, I guessed.
“That’s what I’m hoping,” I replied as quietly as she had spoken. “Don’t worry anyway. If there were anyone here, they’d have run off as soon as they heard that lad’s voice. You can probably hear him from over the water.”
She laughed softly, and the sound almost made me collapse into a heap of teenage hormones.
“Just wait, will yer?” Mikey said, still leading the way. “It’s not even dark yet. Got to be patient like. They’re not gonna do their business when it’s still light out.”
I didn’t think he was that convincing, but we still followed him down.
“Yeah, but I’ve got to be back before eleven; otherwise, me mum will kill me.”
Mikey shot Michelle a look. She didn’t seem to notice, but I’d seen that stare before. It made me tense up. They were on a mission now, and Mikey was the leader. They had to listen to him.
And Mikey wanted Michelle to be impressed by him so much it could only lead to trouble.
The scrapyard was easy enough to get into. T
here were steel railings on one side, only accessible from the railway line that ran behind it. We’d gotten onto that with no problem—a disused station, left derelict and broken down, easy to cross. The night was quiet and still, the sounds of distant traffic barely making their way over to us.
Behind them, a housing estate we’d crossed quickly. We’d all heard the stories about what happened to people from different postcodes entering. Minutes from the city center, but it might as well have been a different world. This was now our place. We would be legends.
That was the plan, anyway.
“I heard it’s that Smith family,” Michelle said quietly, as we made our way through the trees and across the rocky part of the entry. “That they take ears as trophies and that they have a load of them collected. Reckon that’s true?”
“No, why would they do that?”
“Because it makes a statement, doesn’t it? No one is going to try to mess with them if you could lose an ear just by being close enough to wherever they’re doing business.”
“The whole point is that you piss them off and you’re never seen again. How many kids you see walking around with no ears? None. That’s how many. They’d kill you, rather than have you walking around with a story to tell people.”
I smiled to myself as I listened to them talk. Chris’s voice had broken finally earlier that year, but every now and again, it faltered. Usually when he was talking to Michelle and usually when it was to explain things to her that he couldn’t believe she didn’t know.
I shook my head, kicking a fallen branch to one side, watching it skitter off into the distance. There was a gap in the railings, just wide enough for us to slide through. I was careful not to catch my new track pants on the metal, dreaming about the amount of clothes I’d be able to buy when I started making money for myself. It would be better than waiting for my mum and dad to notice I was growing out of everything I already owned.
The air was still as we dropped down into the yard. Colder too. It was pitch-black, my eyes adjusting slowly to the place. No streetlights permeated. It was silent now, as if we’d stepped into another world. A silent world.
One of the group made some kind of exclamation and then a short beam of light extended from a flashlight. It didn’t really help all that much, but it slowed my heartbeat a little.
The shadows began to take form. Broken down cars, big pieces of metal propped up against them. Short, small dirty paths, winding between one wreck and another. From the outside, it hadn’t looked that big, but now, I felt as if I’d entered somewhere I could never find my way out of again.
“Did you hear that?”
I turned toward the voice but didn’t say anything. I’d heard it too. It sounded like whispers on the breeze. Hanging around us, daring me to keep going.
“I definitely heard something,” Michelle said. Her voice was barely audible. I shifted to the center, standing next to Mikey. His breathing mirrored my own—short and stilted.
“What’s the plan?” I said to him, hoping he’d make the decision that we’d done enough.
He turned to me in the faltering light, and I could sense his smile.
“Who wants first swig?”
We were in roughly the middle of the yard, I’d guessed. We dragged a couple of old spoilers and car bumpers from the scrap and sat uncomfortably in a sort of semicircle. It was past ten o’clock by then, Michelle checking her watch every minute or so.
Mikey took the first drink. Gulped from the three-liter bottle of Diamond White cider and then wiped a hand across his mouth when he was done. He passed it along until it got to me. I swigged a little and tried to hide how much I hated the taste.
“Do we just…wait or something?” I said as the bottle came back around my way again and I bought a little time before I had to drink.
“We drink this one, then the other, and then see if we can find anything on the other side.”
“Don’t you think they’d be somewhere else anyway?” Chris said, sitting next to me, shifting uncomfortably on the plastic bumper. “I doubt they do business in some massive scrapyard a ten-minute walk from town, you know? If we know about it, won’t the police as well?”
“Hiding in plain sight,” Mikey replied, chugging down the last of the bottle as it was passed to him. He was already slurring his words and trying to move closer to Michelle. She either didn’t seem to notice or was trying to ignore him. I tensed a little again, wondering how the night was going to end concerning the new lad in our group.
I didn’t want to be there anymore.
“Should we even be here?”
Mikey turned on Nicola, grabbing the bag at his feet as he did so. Removed the bottle of cider, and pointed in her direction as he spoke. “You don’t have to be.”
“I bet you run before I do,” Nicola replied, deadpan. Straight. “Just be quiet when you’re sprinting out of here, calling for your mam.”
I cracked up as the alcohol went to my head a little. Alexandra followed suit, as did Chris. Mikey opened his mouth to say something back, but then caught a look in Nicola’s eyes and seemed to think better of it. Instead, he screwed the cap off and swallowed down the cider.
Then, Mikey thought again and decided to go against his first—correct—instinct. “At least I’ve got a mum to shout for.”
Nicola didn’t move, but Chris was on his feet in a second. I was up with him, a hand on his shoulder. I didn’t think him trying to fight in that yard with someone like Mikey would end well.
“What did you say?”
“It’s just weird isn’t it? Your mom leaving and never coming back. Doesn’t usually happen. Makes you wonder about the woman, that’s all. And the dad. How bad it must have been to just up and leave your kids like that.”
I held my breath, waiting for Nicola to explode. Instead, she seemed dumbstruck by anger. We all knew how touchy a subject her mom leaving was. We weren’t sure of the story behind it, but Chris had once said to me that it hadn’t been easy.
I’d seen Nicola’s dad recently, and he looked a shadow of the man he’d once been. He’d always been a bit of a drinker, but I imagined that had only become worse in the previous few months.
We never talked about it.
There were a few beats of silence, then Mikey broke out into laughter that no one joined in with. “Just jokin’, lad, calm down,” Mikey said, holding out the cider bottle as a peace offering. Chris looked at him for a few seconds, as I gripped his arm a little harder. Then, he took the bottle from Mikey’s hand and downed a large portion of it.
I glanced at Nicola, who watched the exchange with a passive look on her face.
The night should have been over at that point.
“I’ve gotta go,” Michelle said, breaking the silence that had followed. “I’ll just about make it back in time if I leave now. And I haven’t had enough for them to be able to smell cider on me I reckon.”
“Wait, we’ve only just gotten here,” Mikey replied, a definite slurring to his voice now. “Stay five more minutes, for me.”
She didn’t even look at him. I stood up, looking at Alexandra briefly and shrugging my shoulders. “Want me to walk you back?” I asked Michelle.
“No, it’s okay.”
“It’s all right. I’ve got to go as well,” Alexandra said, suddenly on her feet and next to me.
And I was fourteen and didn’t know what I was doing. Somewhere in the back of my mind, there was a part of me that shouted to follow them. That I could walk back with them, then maybe with Alexandra to her house. We could have been alone for once.
Mikey called them chicken and carried on drinking. I could see the fear in their eyes even as they protested innocence. That they had to go home.
I sat there and watched them leave. Jealous.
Just the four of us were left then.
“Let’s go farth
er in,” Chris said, nudging me with an elbow and getting to his feet. “We can really say that we’ve done it then.”
We murmured agreement and stood up. My head swam a little but cleared enough to follow them into the yard. We trudged in silence, save for the occasional nervous laugh or whisper. Walked around the yard, ducking between cars and other pieces of scrap metal. As we moved, the various pieces seemed to grow larger and more enclosing, looming over us like behemoths.
I really didn’t want to be there.
Then, I heard another noise. Like the first, only louder. I had the thought that maybe it was real. That we had entered a place of myth and legend, and we wouldn’t get back out. My heart crashed against my chest as the thought grew and splintered, until the darkness seemed to grow form and creep around me.
It was completely night now. Black. A clear sky above us, somewhere. I couldn’t see it for the old cars and metal that seemed to be endless and formless.
“We need to get out of here,” I said, turning back to where Chris was behind me.
Only, he wasn’t there.
No one was.
I looked around, begging my eyes to see light. To see anything. Only, it seemed to grow darker and darker. I could feel my hands start to shake first, then the rest of my body turned to jelly, as my stomach churned and wheeled around itself.
I forced myself to move. Somehow. I leaned against the shell of a car after taking a few steps, then tried to speak.
I couldn’t.
Fear had crawled into my throat and closed it.
I tried again and managed a whisper. “Chris?”
Even I could barely hear it.
“Chris,” I said again, and this time it was a little louder. I strained my ears to hear any other sound, but it was silent. I was about to talk again when I stopped myself.
As I moved around another crumpled car, it hit me. A scent entered my nostrils and almost knocked me over. It was strong, and it made me move quicker.