by Luca Veste
There would be a lot she could get away with for a long time, she realised suddenly. Rules would become strangers for as long as she could manage it.
She stepped out of the room, her right leg dragging a little, the bandage wrapped tightly enough to mask most of the problem. She made her way to the top of the stairs and heard their voices crystal-clear almost straight away. Dopey gets hadn’t shut the living room door and they seemed to think they were talking low enough that she wouldn’t hear. Or thought she’d already be asleep.
That was a laugh.
She didn’t think she’d sleep properly for a long time.
‘What are we going to do though, Jack?’
‘I don’t know . . . our best, I guess.’
She could feel a nasty feeling rising inside her as she listened. Like she would be a problem for them. Still, it was a roof over her head for now, and she’d be out of there before they knew it. She didn’t want to stay there any more than it seemed they wanted her to.
‘I just don’t understand it. Why did it have to be all of them?’
‘It was an accident. There’s no reason for it at all.’
‘Why couldn’t it just have been him, though? Tell me that.’
That horrible feeling inside her grew even stronger as they talked about him. They didn’t know him like she did. They’d always hated him. She’d always thought that, but now she had proof. He wasn’t ever good enough for them. For anyone. No matter how hard he tried, he was always the one in the wrong.
‘He was bad news. From the moment he arrived. I know it’s bad to speak ill of the dead but . . . I always said that, didn’t I?’
‘You did.’
‘And I was right, wasn’t I? You can always tell. Some people . . . they’re just born bad and there’s no coming back, isn’t that right?’
‘That’s right.’
She was sitting at the top of the stairs, arms wrapped around her legs, listening as they discussed her family as if they’d known them. As if they had spent the time she had with them.
They hadn’t done that, of course. She’d barely seen these people until now, when she’d had no other choice. She’d been left with strangers, while the rest of her family left her behind.
‘She doesn’t remember anything, you know. I’ve tried talking to her about things, but she just shakes her head and plays dumb. It’s almost like she’s lost the previous twelve years of her life. Other than little bits, you know. How do we deal with that?’
‘She’ll get better in time. It’s a major shock, it’ll take her a while to get over it. You’ve just got to let her get on with it.’
‘Why couldn’t it have just been him? There was always something about him, I’m telling you. You can tell by the eyes. His were horrible black things. Like a monster or something. He was bad.’
‘Come on, we can’t talk about him like that. We don’t know that . . .’
‘Yes we do. It’ll have started because of him. All of this. And now they’re all gone and she’s the only one left. And what if she’s the same?’
She sat and listened, almost as if it were punishment for some unremembered crime she’d committed. There was nothing she could think of, just the pain inside her, wanting to be released. Wanting to come out and spread and infect and end the rest of existence.
She felt dead inside. A blank slate. The past erased, replaced with blurred memories of someone else’s life.
A voice, inside her head, trying to keep her calm. Soothing her. Telling her everything was going to be all right.
That she needed to fight the urge to stand up, walk down the stairs, take a knife from the kitchen.
And kill the strangers sitting in the living room.
Just to feel something.
Anything other than the darkness growing and festering inside her.
Now
Forty
The backdrop was a dirty kind of beautiful. A cool autumnal breeze steadily blew across the group, as trees swayed and dropped leaves to the ground around them.
‘This’ll do, right?’
The guy holding the camera shared an exasperated look with his producer that he hoped the reporter standing a few feet away couldn’t see. ‘I think we need to be deeper into the woods, but I suppose this will be okay.’
‘I don’t want to get lost, that’s all,’ the reporter replied, brushing the hair away from her face with one hand. ‘Place gives me the creeps.’
The cameraman shrugged and framed the shot once more. Behind the reporter, the river Mersey could be seen in the distance. Water stretching to the horizon and colliding with the Irish Sea, until it disappeared. Unkempt grass crashed into his legs as he continued to stare out at the sea through the camera lens. Watching, as the water tumbled and struggled against itself. Flashes of white against the grey, rising like mountains beneath the surface, angry and unforgiving. The sky grew grey above them, the wind picking up and ripping around his body.
‘Okay, pick it up from after the intro,’ the producer said, checking her watch for the fifteenth time in the past few minutes. ‘Before we lose the light.’
The reporter waited for the signal and then began to speak.
‘It’s here, in the rural parts of the city, where someone using that old myth has been working unseen. There are a number of woodland areas in Liverpool, which belies its urban image. We’re standing in one of the largest, located in the northernmost part of the city. While the woods where a number of bodies were found earlier this week were smaller, you can still really feel a sense of remoteness in them. As if you could disappear and never be found.’
The cameraman kept himself steady even as his senses picked up a shift in atmosphere behind him. He shook the feeling off, deciding it was just his mind playing tricks on him.
‘The Bone Keeper is a legend many within the city know and have grown up telling each other. Now, it seems someone has been using this story in order to kill many people in woods just like these.’
The wind changed again, sending a shiver down the cameraman’s spine. He glanced at the producer. She was still staring at the reporter, but her forehead was creasing as her eyes narrowed.
‘Police are refusing to say whether they are using this information to inform what is now a wide-scale investigation. For people in the city however, this is just another part of a story that has shocked the entire city . . . we’re repeating the word city in that line, Mo.’
The producer shook her head and made a throat-cutting gesture at the cameraman. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll fix that . . . did you hear something?’
The cameraman removed his headphones and looked to his left. ‘What?’
‘I don’t know,’ the producer said, looking past him to where the trees were thicker and more dense. ‘Let’s get this done and get out of here.’
The reporter didn’t respond, instead walking slowly out of shot and towards a nearby tree. ‘Was this here when we arrived?’
The cameraman looked to where she was pointing, trying to remember if he’d even looked at that particular tree when they’d set up their shot. They all looked the same, so he was sure he hadn’t, yet the marks on the bark seemed fresh.
‘That’s . . . is that part of the story?’ the reporter asked.
‘We need to get out of here,’ the cameraman said quietly, almost whispering as his heartbeat increased to a crescendo. ‘Something feels very wrong about this place.’
The sky seemed to darken above them as they began to pack up, not saying another word to each other. The reporter was almost dancing from one foot to the other. ‘Is there any other way out, other than back through the woods?’
‘I don’t know, do I?’ the producer said, helping the cameraman move a bag up to his shoulder, then following him as he began to walk away. ‘I don’t know the place at all.’
The cameraman fixed his eyes on the direction of the road where they’d parked up – not that he could see the safety of the van now. It was a quarter of an h
our’s walk away, which suddenly felt like too far.
They could all feel the change around them as they walked into the thick of the trees. The deafening silence, the smells of nature disappearing and being replaced by something acrid and pungent. It seemed like everywhere they looked, more marks appeared on the tree trunks around them.
He kept moving forward, ignoring the shuffling sounds in the undergrowth. The swiftly quietened squeals of pain behind him, as he refused to accept what was happening.
That he was walking alone now.
He blocked the noise out, refusing to believe what his senses were telling him.
He was the only one left.
The smell hit him, as he willed himself to run. To drop everything he was carrying and sprint for safety. Instead, he found himself slowing down, as his legs became heavy, as if he were walking through ever-thickening mud.
He didn’t trust his ears, his nose. His taste.
Until the world turned black in front of his eyes and death revealed itself.
Forty-One
Louise left the station, driving past the growing hordes of reporters and TV cameras at the gates and onto the main road. She was caught by traffic lights at the first junction, and looked around. There was new graffiti sprayed on the wall to her right.
THE BONE KEEPER IS HERE!
She shook her head, pressing her foot down as the light changed and she could finally get past it. Her house should have been only a fifteen-minute drive, but even this early in the evening when people should have been off the roads, it was more like half an hour before she was finally pulling up outside her house.
Standing at her front door, key in hand, she paused and listened. Waiting for any sound to emanate from within and tell her someone had been in her home again. Was still in there. Her hand shook a little as she placed the key in the lock and turned, but when the door opened and she moved inside, she knew instantly she was alone.
It didn’t stop her moving through the rooms one by one, looking for any sign that someone had been there.
Louise wanted to know who it was who had delivered the message; whether Steven himself had broken into her home before killing the couple in their beds. If this was all part of his plan to break her.
Yet, she knew it didn’t make any sense.
‘He was probably just watching you,’ she whispered to herself, before the voice in her head had the chance to chime in. ‘That’s all it was.’
That didn’t answer the question of who had sent them in the first place, though.
She made her way back upstairs and into her bedroom. The box she had moved there from the spare room the previous night was still lying on the floor, its lid open and contents visible. The card which had come with the burnt pieces of wood was lying on top, its black ink bleeding and message seeming to mock her.
She could almost smell the fire again. The way it burned and flickered, consuming everything in its path and destroying her life.
It was a memory that, most days, she tried to forget, but now she concentrated on the images. The time before she had become a different person. Louise felt her breathing becoming laboured as she sat down on the edge of the bed and closed her eyes. Smoke drifting up and enveloping her.
She couldn’t remember.
It was always there, on the edges of her consciousness, but it was too painful, too real, to bring to her mind fully.
There was something about the blurred visage that was so real, yet she had tried talking about it with her grandparents on a few occasions and received nothing but shakes of the head and a changing of the subject. Her family were all gone and that was that. An accident. She was lucky to be alive. Nothing more to discuss.
They wouldn’t talk about her family. Share memories, or tell stories. It was too painful and they were too British. Stiff upper lip and all that rubbish.
She wished she had pushed them more now.
The handwriting on the card was staring at her as she opened her eyes.
A flash, an image, crashed into her mind. Brief, fleeting, but there. Real.
Something had happened before the fire. An event she couldn’t allow herself to focus on.
The woods.
She was thinking about the woods.
Louise closed her eyes and tried to calm her body. To remember. Picture every memory she’d had in her entire life and try to place them in order.
Don’t . . .
There was the park. Sitting high on her father’s shoulders, her mother walking alongside them. Her brother – further ahead, a stick in his hand that he was dragging along the concrete path. The sun above them, shielding her eyes from its glare.
Leaning against her bedroom door, listening to the shouts from her mother downstairs. Her brother sitting on her bed, his hands over his ears.
The sharp pain in her hand, as she punched a young boy over and over. A rat-faced little brat, his tears and snot splattering across his face.
Walking with her father, as he talked about the history around them.
Her brother . . . her brother crying.
Then, nothing. Only fire.
Her grandparents sitting next to her hospital bed. Telling her she was the only one left.
‘Did that really happen?’ Louise said aloud, into her empty bedroom. ‘Did I make that up?’
She palmed her stiff-feeling face, trying to push life back into it, her eyes stinging from tiredness as her head began to pound. She had to keep going, no matter what.
Louise lifted the box up once more, removing each item and placing it on the bed beside her. Twelve years of her life, summed up in a few items. She discarded the rest, the remnants of her life once she’d moved into her grandparents’ house. Looked at what remained from before that.
The few photographs of the four of them. Her family.
She traced a finger across their faces, in turn, pausing at each one.
Her brother, so different. Older, but more childlike than she had ever been. Fair-haired, a crazy mop on the top of his head. As if he had been dragged through a bush backwards. Wild, but smiling.
That smile.
Her mother, different in this picture than in an earlier one. Thin-faced, lined and cowed. Life had mistreated her.
Her father, a wide grin on his face, his arms circling her and his wife. Her mother.
She couldn’t remember this time. This past life. If she hadn’t known it was her, she wouldn’t believe this had ever been her existence. That once, she’d been in a normal family. A normal life.
Until something changed everything.
There were a few more photographs, but she moved them to one side to look at the handwriting again. A piece of paper, her writing at the top, small and neat. Her brother’s below, followed by her parents’. A game of some sort, the scores and tallies marked in each column. She couldn’t remember what any of it meant, but all of their names were on it. Written by each hand, as if they had been teenagers at school practising different surnames or autographs.
She looked at her name.
Louise
The way the S curved down, in an odd pattern. She compared it to the writing on the paper and saw an instant match.
In the top right-hand corner, someone had scrawled the date. Twenty-two years old and still surviving, kept in a box as if it could be important. Or, more likely, the only thing that had survived a fire.
A few photographs and this. All she had left.
It was a coincidence, that was all. Steven Harris had broken into her home the night before, knowing she was working on the case, and left the message to mess with her. Try to unsettle her. It was simply a fluke that his handwriting was similar to someone else’s, that’s all it was.
He was a psychopath, who wanted to kill and pretend to be someone else.
That’s all it is.
She wanted to listen to herself, but something inside continued to scream. To try to be heard over the quiet and calm voice in her head.
Louise tur
ned back to the other photographs on the bed, looking over them again. She could recognise certain places, even if she couldn’t remember being there when the photographs were taken.
There was one of just the two of them, the last one in the row. She was looking at herself, aged eleven, no memory of herself at that point. Standing next to him, posing for the camera. Behind, brick buildings, half destroyed. Bushes growing over the brick, reclaiming the land. Empty windows, carved into the side, almost covered by moss and greenery.
The woods. She remembered the woods.
Her younger self stared into her eyes, seeing through the facade she put up. Almost judging her for what she had become.
Louise could feel her breathing become shallow as she stared at the picture. Her heartbeat increase, her throat closing, as she stared into the dark eyes looking at her from the picture.
The dark eyes Nathan Coldfield’s mother had described Rhys Durham having. The ones that felt so familiar.
Ones she knew so well.
As she fell backwards on the bed, the woods took over her mind. The fire, the people. It all came together in one moment, overcrowding her thoughts, until she couldn’t focus on any single thing. It was all a mess of images, feelings, emotions.
Hate, love, anger. Consuming her, until she could do nothing but scream into the empty room.
She knew where she had to go.
The house.
The woods.
Back to what the woods were hiding.
To discover what was hidden in her past.
Forty-Two
Caroline stood in the doorway, waiting for her mum to recognise her. It didn’t happen as quickly as she’d hoped, but soon enough the confusion on her face turned into emotion.
‘Caroline?’
‘Hello, Mum,’ Caroline replied, as the recognition settled and became resignation. As if her mum was waiting for her to aim a volley of abuse her way. Again. ‘It’s been—’
‘A long time,’ her mum finished for her.
Caroline opened her mouth to speak, but found she had no words. She tried to breathe through it, but it was too late.
