by Tom Becker
My room was at the front corner of the house. Or rather, rooms. There was an en-suite shower room at one end, and at the other was what I presume was meant as a walk-in wardrobe, lined with shelving painted in off-white gloss and with three chrome hanging rails. It alone was larger than most of the rooms I’d ever called my own.
We lived here now. Not in some just-for-now, until-we-can-afford-something-else, stop-gap place, but here. Everything I owned filled two big cardboard boxes beside the door.
It was only when I stood beside my wide window, overlooking the removals van and the front of the house, that I noticed the fourth building in Priory Mews. How I’d missed it outside, I’ll never know. Too busy gaping at our place, I suppose.
From the moment I saw it, it unsettled me.
It was set well back from the others, surrounded by tall, narrow shrubs like leafy security guards. A broad gravel pathway led up to an imposing entrance. The house was three storeys high, its two lower levels topped with a series of windows jutting out from very high, angular sections of roof. One of these sections rose up even taller than the others, punctuated by chimney breasts. At the corners, the walls had the kind of inlaid stone you see on old manor houses and castles, like zigzag reinforcements.
The house was more than double the size of the others in Priory Mews. A long, glassy ground-floor extension had been added at the side. Above loomed the tortured, twisted grey branches of ancient wych elms and silver birches in the back garden. A separate, modern two-door garage had been built closer to the road.
This, I later found out, was Bierce Priory, built in 1812. That extension was constructed in the 1920s, at the same time as our house. Even at first sight, even with the excitement of the moment sending my mood soaring, the Priory looked cold and austere. As if it was watching me back.
Despite my impressions of the place, I paid no more attention to the Priory that day. Now, merely writing the name sends a rush of horror through my guts. We had Chinese takeaway for tea, and Mum and I spent hours dragging cardboard boxes from one room to another. Dad spotted our new neighbours at No. 2 getting into their car, an elderly couple, and called them over with a whistle and a wave. I didn’t catch their names but they seemed taken in by that studied chumminess of his. He talked at them for nearly twenty minutes, while they smiled blandly.
I hooked up the TV in the biggest living room. The sound bounced off the bare floorboards as I sat on our threadbare sofa. I patted its stained arm a couple of times. You’ll be chucked out soon, old friend, I thought to myself, without a doubt. I watched gangsters shoot each other while Mum scrubbed the bathroom and Dad clattered about. “Ellen! Where did you pack my… S’OK, babe, I found them!”
By eleven I was snuggled down on my mattress on the floor of my room. The pieces of my wooden bed frame were stacked in a corner, waiting for when I could be bothered to put them together. My anglepoise lamp threw a yellowy glow over the thick paperback anthology of ’70s Doctor Strange comics I’d got on eBay just before we moved.
I was starting at Maybrick High the following day, Thursday. I’d tried to squeeze a couple of days off, to start at the beginning of a week, but with the school only a two-minute walk away and me already being late for the start of the Maybrick term, I had no excuses. I yawned, clicked off the light and went to sleep.
When I got up, Mum had already left for work. Some things never change. She didn’t need to do that job any more, but she did it anyway. I had suggested to her that she could free up her job for someone who really needed the money, but she’d just looked at me as if I’d asked her to boil her head. The only difference now was that she’d chosen which bank branch to work in, rather than letting the bank send her anywhere it liked. I imagined that the Hadlington branch was a little more prestigious than the last one.
I was up, washed and dressed nearly an hour before I needed to leave. I got through two slices of toast and a mug of orange juice, with first-day nerves jangling at my stomach. I made my sandwiches with a care I never normally took. Displacement activity, to mask the jitters. Cake in my lunchbox? Did I want cake today?
I still had forty minutes before I needed to leave. I took a slow tour of the house. The silence was only broken by the clump of my shoes on the floorboards and the sound of Dad snoring.
I told myself not to be such a wuss. No need to be nervous. Best school in the district.
I checked myself in the unhung mirror in the hall. My new uniform was embarrassingly fresh and unworn. My stomach knotted all over again.
Outside, the air was sharp and damp, a fresh autumnal morning. I looked across to our two neighbouring houses, but nothing was stirring there. Opposite them, the Priory seemed a touch less sinister in the cold early light, glowering behind its spiky shrubs.
As soon as I walked out on to Maybrick Road, I could tell something was up. There was a steady flow of uniformed kids along the pavements. From the end of Priory Mews, you could just see the main entrance to the school, but kids were going straight past it. They were hurriedly crossing the road and taking a wide path that led down the hill, ending at the green metal footbridge over the river, which led to the park and the corner of Elton Gardens.
As a handful of younger pupils passed me, I stopped one of them.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Dead body!” said the kid excitedly. “A Year Nine’s put a picture on Facebook.” He and his friends scurried on.
A what? Surely he meant an animal or something? A larger group of pupils, who looked my age, also crossed the road and headed for the path. I wondered if some of them were my new classmates. I allowed curiosity to drag me into the flow.
The path sloped in long, graceful curves down to the river. To either side were broad stretches of grass, and beyond that sprouted bushy swathes of tall reeds and sedges.
As the flow of kids approached the river, I could see a gathering arranged in a ragged semicircle. I’d almost caught up with the group who looked my age, but hung back. I wasn’t sure if the best way to meet classmates was rubbernecking at the scene of an … accident?
A girl suddenly detached herself from the semicircle, staggered a few metres and vomited noisily on to the grass. A couple of her friends rushed to her side.
By now I was at the spot where the gathering of pupils had trampled flat a haphazard patch of the reeds. I could see something stretched out on the ground. Someone was saying that a woman walking her dog had found it a few minutes ago, that she’d already called the police. For a second, the scene flashed through my head: the dog sniffing around, not coming when called, taking a few licks.
I drew closer. I saw it in detail now.
My first day nerves vanished, replaced by icy horror.
It was a man, flat on his back on the damp ground, legs pointing away from me. He was dressed in dirty trainers, fleece tracksuit bottoms and a jumper. His limbs were straight, as if he’d calmly lain down on the spot. His face was upturned; dull staring eyes pointed at the grey sky.
His face was spotted with blood. Much more blood, long sprays of it, fanned out around his head like some hideous spiked wig. The top of his head was gone. He simply ended, just above the face, sliced open like a pepper.
An extract from Bad Bones
by Graham Marks
‘Dope will get you through a time of no money better than money will get you through a time of no dope.’ Gabe had read that in one of his dad’s old underground, hippy comic books, he didn’t remember which one. That was before his dad sold all his comics and his vinyl record collection and old-school stereo system. Before he lost his job and things started to get shitty.
That really wasn’t so long ago, although it seemed like they’d been in a Time Of No Money forever. Everything had changed, and none of it for the better. Not one single damn bit.
Gabe sat on the street bench, his bike propped up next to him, watching the late-afternoon traffic go by on Ventura. Thousands of people, all with a destination, a purpose. All
with money in their wallets and purses, driving on to the next stage in their sweet lives, or their neat homes, or their great jobs. None of which applied to him, his mom, dad or little sister, Remy. They were all stuck in a house he knew for a fact was worth way less than what was owed on it, and with, so far as he could see, no chance of putting that to rights.
His mom cut coupons to save money at the supermarket like it was her religion, and everything they ate was either ‘no brand’, or had about ten seconds left on the ‘eat by’ date, or both. His dad tried to keep a brave face, but didn’t always succeed, and only his sister appeared not to have a care in the world. But then Remy was nine years old. Gabe remembered being that age – when the future was always a cartoon-bright tomorrow and your life was a game. He looked down at his scuffed, frayed sneakers; it was a lot harder to think like that when you were sixteen and tomorrow did not look like it was going to be promising anything any time soon.
He stood up, stretching. He could feel the tension building in his muscles, the frustration at his total inability to figure out a way in which he could solve his family’s problems; even fixing something would be better than doing nothing.
“Maybe…” Gabe muttered to himself, grabbing his backpack, then getting on his bike. “It’ll have to be the dope.”
He was about to move off when his phone chirruped: his mom’s ringtone. He let the call go to voicemail, not ready to listen to whatever it was she had to say in her often tired-to-the-bone voice; it was hardly likely to be good news. No, he was not going to go home just yet, to the wired undercurrent of resentment that there was between him and his dad these days.
Gabe watched for a suitable gap in the unending stream of cars and slipped neatly into place. He had nowhere to go, but at least he might shift the dark cloud that seemed to be sitting right on top of him if he rode until it hurt. And while he rode he could think about Benny’s offer.
What took him off Ventura and up towards the canyon Gabe didn’t know. He’d been there before, any number of times. Generally either with friends, to get a beer buzz on, or with a girlfriend, when he had a girlfriend, for some time alone. Right now, though, with the sun beginning to set, the canyon – empty, serene, somewhere completely elsewhere – felt like the perfect place to be.
He had hybrid Nutrak tyres on the bike, old now, though still with a few more miles left in them yet. Best of both worlds, good on and off the road, the salesman had said, back when Gabe had had spare cash to splash, and the man hadn’t been bullshitting. He took to the pathway, well beaten by dog walkers and hikers, and rode into this small piece of wilderness, surrounded by the endless sprawl of LA.
He knew exactly where he wanted to be, and some ten minutes later he was up on top of a huge, smooth rock, his bike left at its graffiti-covered base. Lying down, using his backpack for a pillow, he felt the warmth the rock had soaked up during the day and was now giving off as the temperature began to drop. He was tired; tired of worrying and tired of thinking too hard about how bad things were. And they had to be bad for him to even consider working for dope-dealing Benny as an option.
Gabe closed his eyes, shutting out the world, and let the quiet chatter, hum and drone of the canyon wash over him…
He didn’t know what had woken him; probably it had been the chill in the air, because he was only wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The sky, dark as it ever got in LA, had no moon yet and only a scattering of stars. Gabe sat up, scrambled around in his backpack and found his phone: 7.23. He’d slept for ages, out for the count too, as there was another missed call from his mom. It was late, so she’d no doubt be worried, and he was hungry now – hungry enough not to care about the mood round the dinner table. Time to go home.
Gabe slid down the rock, now cooler to the touch, most of its heat given back to the night, and got his bike. Standing for a moment he debated what to do, finally admitting there was no way it would be a good idea to ride out. He was going to have to walk the twisting path, which clung like ivy to the steep hillsides.
As he set off, Gabe thought about calling his mom, but decided not to. She’d only ask what he was doing, who he was with and where he was. “Well, Ma, I just woke up, alone in the canyon,” wasn’t what she’d want to hear. He’d figure out a better story by the time he got home.
And, kind of like the way life often is, everything went fine until it didn’t.
Even when you’re trying hard to be careful, if nothing goes wrong for long enough you get cocky and the lazy part of your brain stops paying as much attention as it should. That was how Gabe failed to notice how unstable the pathway was. The next step he took, the ground unexpectedly gave way, he lost his balance and, arms flailing, he fell.
It wasn’t all bad. The drop turned out to be not so steep or so very far down, and also he let go of his bike and it didn’t come tumbling after him. Gabe, who was fit enough and good enough to be in the school athletic team, managed the fall pretty well, skidding down the side of the narrow arroyo, arms and legs held close in. He came to a stop, slightly winded, a bit bruised but with nothing broken, in a bed of dried-up mud.
There’d been a short, sharp late-summer storm, a pretty spectacular one, the previous week. The sky had turned coal-tar black in the middle of the day, there was thunder and it seemed like a ton of water per square metre had fallen in about two minutes flat. Drains had blocked, gutters overflowed, dogs went crazy, traffic snarled up and then, as quick as it had started, it was over. All that water had had to go somewhere, and in the canyon a deluge hurtled downwards, finding any exit it could; it ripped out small trees and dislodged rocks and earth from the arroyo – brick-dry from the long, hot summer – as it raced towards the San Fernando valley.
Picking himself up, Gabe found he was in a two-maybe three-metre deep, four-metre wide cut that wouldn’t have been there before the storm. As he looked around for the best way to get back up to his bike, the moon peeked over the ragged treeline behind him. Its soft, monochrome light made it seem like he was standing in an old grainy photographic negative; it gave everything a weird, spooky look.
A metre or so away from him it also picked out the distinctive shape of a human skull.
Copyright
STRIPES PUBLISHING
An imprint of Little Tiger Press
1 The Coda Centre, 189 Munster Road,
London SW6 6AW
www.littletiger.co.uk
First published as an ebook by Stripes Publishing in 2015.
A paperback original
First published in Great Britain in 2015
Text copyright © Tom Becker, 2015
Extract from Frozen Charlotte © Alex Bell, 2014
Extract from Sleepless © Lou Morgan, 2014
Extract from Flesh and Blood © Simon Cheshire, 2014
Extract from Bad Bones © Graham Marks, 2014
Cover copyright © Stripes Publishing Ltd, 2015
Photographic images courtesy of www.shutterstock.com
ISBN: 978–1–84715–645–7
The right of Tom Becker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any forms, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
www.littletiger.co.uk
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