by C. J. Tudor
—
My eyes shoot open. No gradual rising up through the layers of sleep. My heart is pounding, my body is coated in a slick sheen of sweat and my eyeballs feel like they are on stalks. Something has woken me. No. Correction. Something has wrenched me into wakefulness.
I stare around the room. Empty, except no room is ever really empty, not in the darkness. Shadows lurk in the corners and pool on the floor, slumbering, sometimes shifting. But that’s not what has woken me. It’s the feeling that someone, just seconds ago, was sitting on my bed.
I sit up. The bedroom door is wide open. I know I shut it when I came to bed. The hallway beyond is illuminated by a pale shaft of moonlight from the landing window. A full moon tonight, I think. Appropriate. I swing my legs out of bed, even as the tiny, rational part of my brain, the one that still exists even in a dream state, is telling me that this is a bad idea, really bad, one of my worst. I need to wake up. Right now. But I can’t. Not from this dream. Some dreams, like some things in life, have to run their course. And even if I did wake up, the dream would come back. These types of dreams always do, until you follow them right down to the rotten core and cut out the festering roots.
I slip my feet into my slippers and pull on my dressing gown. I tie it tightly around my waist and walk out onto the landing. I look down. There’s dirt on the floor and something else. Leaves.
I move more quickly, down the creaking stairs, through the hallway and into the kitchen. The back door hangs open. A wraith of cold air caresses my bare ankles while the darkness outside beckons with icy fingers. Through the gap I can smell not the freshness of night air but a different scent: dank, fetid decay. I move a hand instinctively to cover my nose and mouth. As I do, I look down. On the dark, tiled floor of the kitchen, a chalk man—one stick arm pointing to the door. Of course. A chalk man to lead the way. Just like before.
I still wait, just a moment more, and then, with one final regretful glance at the familiar comforts of the kitchen behind me, I step out of the back door.
I’m not standing on the driveway. The dream has jumped, in the way that dreams do, to another place. The woods. Shadows rustle and murmur around me, the trees groan and creak, branches shifting this way and that, spindly sleepers plagued by night terrors.
I have a torch in my hand that I don’t remember picking up. I point it around and catch movement in the undergrowth ahead. I walk forward, trying to ignore the frenetic beating of my heart, concentrating on my feet snapping and crunching on the uneven ground. I’m not sure how far I walk. It seems a long time but is probably seconds. I feel I must be getting near. But near to what?
I stop. Suddenly, the woods have thinned. I’m standing in a small clearing. One I recognize. It’s the same one from all those years ago.
I shine the torch around. It’s empty, except for several small piles of leaves. Not crisp, orange-and-brown leaves like before. These are already dead and curling, rotten and gray. And they are moving, I realize with fresh horror. Every small pile shifting restlessly.
“Eddieeee! Eddieeee!”
No longer Sean Cooper’s voice, or even Mr. Halloran’s. I have different company tonight. Female company.
The first pile of leaves bursts open and a pale hand claws at the air like a nocturnal animal waking from hibernation. I stifle a cry. From another pile, a foot emerges and hops out, pink painted toes flexing. A leg shuffles forward on a bloody stump and, finally, the largest pile of leaves erupts and a slim, toned torso rolls out and starts to push itself across the ground like some hideous human caterpillar.
But there is still a piece missing. I stare around as the hand scuttles, on its fingertips, over to the farthest pile of leaves. It disappears underneath and then, almost majestically, she rises from the rotting mound, hair falling over her half-ruined face, carried aloft on the back of her own severed hand.
But he cut off her arm, my mind whimpers, as though that is the important detail in this tableaux of the grotesque.
My bladder, heavy with bourbon, gracelessly lets go and warm urine flows down my pajama leg. I barely notice. All I can see is her head scuttling across the woodland floor toward me, face still shrouded by a curtain of silky hair. I stagger backward, my feet catch on a tree root and I fall hard on to my backside.
Her fingers clutch at my ankle. I want to scream, but my vocal cords are shot, paralyzed. The hand/head hybrid moves delicately up my leg, skimming my wet crotch, and rests momentarily on my stomach. I have gone beyond fear. Beyond revulsion. Possibly several steps beyond sanity.
“Edddieee,” she whispers. “Eddieee.”
Her hand crawls up my chest. She starts to raise her head. I hold my breath, waiting for those accusing eyes to fall upon me.
Confess, I think. Confess.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Her fingers stroke my chin and caress my lips. And then I notice something. Her fingernails. They’re painted black. That’s not right. That’s not…
She flicks back her hair, newly blonded, tinged red with blood from her severed neck.
And I understand my mistake.
—
I wake in a thrashing tangle of bedclothes on the floor at the side of the bed. My coccyx feels bruised. I lie there, panting, letting reality flood my senses. Except, it’s not quite working. The closeness of the dream is still upon me. I can still see her face. Still feel her fingers touching my lips. I reach into my hair and disentangle a piece of twig. I look down at my feet. The cuffs of my pajamas and the soles of my slippers are covered in dirt and crushed leaves. I can smell the acrid stench of urine. I swallow.
There’s something else, and I need to grasp it quickly before it scuttles away again like the hideous head spider from my dream.
I force myself to get up and scramble across the bed. I turn on the bedside lamp and pick up Mickey’s notebook from the table. I flick hurriedly through it until I reach the final page. I stare at Mickey’s scribbled notes and something suddenly blooms with absurd clarity in my mind. I can almost hear the ping of the lightbulb illuminating.
It’s like when you stare at one of those optical-illusion pictures and, hard as you try, all you can see are a series of dots or squiggly lines. Then you move, just a fraction, and suddenly you can see the hidden picture. Clear as anything. And once you’ve seen it, you wonder how on earth you could have not seen it. It’s so blindingly, crazily obvious.
I had been looking at this all wrong. Everyone had been looking at it all wrong. Perhaps because they never had the final piece of the jigsaw. Perhaps because all the pictures of Elisa, in the papers, in the news reports, showed her before the accident. That image, that picture, became Elisa, the girl in the woods.
But it wasn’t the real picture. It wasn’t the girl whose beauty had been so cruelly snatched away. It wasn’t the girl Mr. Halloran and I had tried to save.
Most importantly, it wasn’t the Elisa who had so recently decided that a change was in order. Who had dyed her hair. Who, from a distance, didn’t even look like Elisa anymore.
“No one wanted to hurt Elisa—important. HAIR.”
1986–90
When I was about nine or ten, I was a big fan of Doctor Who. By the time I was twelve, it had gone really lame and crap. In fact, in my earnest twelve-year-old opinion, it all started to go downhill when Peter Davison regenerated into Colin Baker, who was never as cool, with his stupid multicolored jacket and spotty cravat.
Anyway, up until then I had loved every episode, especially the ones with Daleks and the ones where they let the ending hang. A “cliffhanger,” it was called.
The thing was, the “cliffhanger” was always better than the solution you waited eagerly for all week. The first episode would usually leave the Doctor in massive danger, surrounded by a horde of Daleks about to exterminate him, or on a spaceship about to blow up, or faced with some huge monster that there was absolutely no escape from.
But he always did, and it usually involved what Fat Gav wou
ld call “a huge, steaming cop-out.” A secret escape hatch, or a sudden rescue by UNIT, or something incredible the Doctor could do yet again with his sonic screwdriver. Although I would still love watching the second part, I always felt a bit let down. Like I had somehow been cheated.
In real life, you don’t get cheats. You don’t get to escape the terrible fate because your sonic screwdriver worked on the same frequency as the Cybermen’s self-destruct button. It didn’t work like that.
And yet, for a while, after I heard that Mr. Halloran had died, I wanted a cheat. I wanted Mr. Halloran to somehow not be dead. To turn up and say to everyone: Actually, I’m still alive. I didn’t do it and this is what really happened…
I suppose it felt, even though we had an ending, that it wasn’t the right one. It wasn’t a good one. It was an anticlimax. It felt like there should be something more. And there were things that niggled at me. “Plot holes,” I guess you would call them, if you were talking about Doctor Who. Things the writers hoped you wouldn’t notice, but you did. Even at twelve years old. In fact, especially at twelve years old. You’re pretty hot on not being cheated when you’re twelve.
I mean, afterward, everyone just said Mr. Halloran was crazy, as if that explained everything. But even if you were crazy, or a six-foot-tall lizard in Doctor Who, you still had a reason for doing things.
When I said this to the others, to Fat Gav and Hoppo (because, despite the whole finding-the-body thing together, it didn’t actually bring us any closer to Mickey, and we still didn’t hang out much afterward), Fat Gav would just give me a look of exasperation, twirl his finger at the side of his head and say, “He did it because he was whacko, my man. Round the bend and back again. Looney tunes. A nutjob. A fully paid-up member of the Crazy Brigade.”
Hoppo didn’t say much, except once, when Fat Gav had gone off on one and it was getting close to an argument. Then, he just added quietly: “Maybe he had his reasons. It’s just we don’t understand them, because we’re not him.”
I suppose, beneath it all, there was still a sense of guilt; for my part in things, especially for the stupid, crappy ring.
If I hadn’t left it that day, would everyone still have believed Mr. Halloran was guilty? I mean, they probably would, because of the fact that he killed himself. But maybe, without the ring, they wouldn’t have been so quick to pin Elisa’s murder on him. Maybe they wouldn’t have closed the case so quickly. Maybe they would have carried on looking for more evidence. For the murder weapon. For her head.
I could never give myself a satisfactory answer to those questions, those doubts. And so, eventually, I put them away. With childish things. Except I’m not sure we ever really put those away.
—
Time moved on, and the events of that summer began to dim in our memories. We turned fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Exams, hormones and girls took over our thoughts.
And I had other things on my mind by that point. Dad had started to get ill. Life began to form the routine I would become miserably familiar with for several more years. Studying, then working, by day. Dealing with Dad’s increasingly degenerative mind and Mum’s helpless frustration by evening. That became my norm.
Fat Gav started seeing a pretty, slightly plump girl called Cheryl. He also started to lose weight. Gradually, at first. He started eating less and riding his bike around more. He joined a running club and, although he treated it all like some big joke to start with, soon he was running farther and faster and the weight continued to slip off. It was like he was shedding his old self. And I guess he did. Along with the weight, he lost the more outlandish behavior, the constant stream of gags. Instead came a new seriousness. A steelier edge. He joked less and studied more and, when he wasn’t studying, he was with Cheryl. Like Mickey before him, he began to drift away. That left two: Hoppo and me.
I had a couple of not-too-serious girlfriends. And a few unobtainable crushes, including one on a rather severe-looking English teacher with dark hair and quite incredible green eyes. Miss Barford.
Hoppo—well, Hoppo never really seemed bothered about girls at all, until he met this one girl called Lucy (the one who would eventually cheat on him with Mickey and cause the fight at the party I didn’t go to).
Hoppo fell, and fell really hard. As a kid, I never quite got it. I mean, she was pretty enough, but nothing special. Kind of mousy, even. Straight brown hair, glasses. She dressed a bit weird, too. Long tassled skirts and big boots, tie-dyed T-shirts and all that hippie shit. Not exactly cool.
It was only later that I realized who she reminded me of: Hoppo’s mum.
Anyway, they seemed to get along and be pretty well matched. They liked the same things, although, in relationships, I guess we all bend a little and pretend to like stuff we don’t to please the other person.
Friends do the same. I wasn’t that keen on Lucy but I pretended to like her to please Hoppo. At that point I was seeing a girl in the year below called Angie. She had shaggy permed hair and a pretty decent body. I wasn’t in love, but I fancied her and she was easy (not in that way, although, to be fair, she wasn’t difficult either). She was easy to be with: undemanding, relaxed. With everything else going on with Dad, I needed that.
We went on a few double dates with Hoppo and Lucy. I can’t say Lucy and Angie had much in common but Angie was the kind of affable girl who made an effort with people. Which was good, because it meant I didn’t have to.
We went to the cinema, out to the pub and then, one weekend, Hoppo suggested something different.
“Let’s go to the fair.”
We were in the pub at the time. Not The Bull. No way would Fat Gav’s dad have let us order pints of snakebite there. This was The Wheatsheaf, across town, where the landlord didn’t know us and, to be honest, wouldn’t have cared that we were only sixteen in any case.
It was June, so we were sitting outside in the beer garden, which was basically a small yard out the back furnished with a few rickety wooden tables and benches.
Lucy and Angie both reacted enthusiastically. I remained silent. I hadn’t been back to the fair since the day of the terrible accident. I wouldn’t say I had been actively avoiding fairs or amusement parks, I just hadn’t felt that inclined to visit one.
But that was a lie. I was scared. I had bottled a trip to Thorpe Park the previous summer, claiming a stomach upset, which had been kind of true. My stomach churned every time I thought about going on a ride of any kind. All I could see was Waltzer Girl, lying on the ground with her leg hanging off and her lovely face reduced to gristle and bone.
“Ed?” Angie said, squeezing my leg. “What do you say? Fancy the fair tomorrow?” She whispered in my ear, a little drunkenly, “I’ll let you finger me on the Ghost Train.”
Tantalizing as the idea was (so far, I had only fingered Angie in the rather unexciting surroundings of my room), I still had to force a smile.
“Yeah. Sounds great.”
It didn’t, but I didn’t want to look chicken, not in front of Angie and, for some reason, not in front of Lucy, who was giving me an odd look. A look I didn’t like, as if she knew I was lying.
—
It was hot, the day of the fair. Just like before. And Angie was good to her word. But still, even that didn’t give me all the pleasure I thought it would, although I did have a little difficulty walking when I exited the Ghost Train. It soon deflated when I saw where we had come out. Right opposite the Waltzers.
Somehow, I must have missed them before. Perhaps because they had been obscured by the crowds, or maybe because my mind was on other things, like Angie’s tiny Lycra miniskirt and what waited, temptingly, a couple of inches beneath it.
Now I stood, frozen, staring at the swirling, twirling carriages. Bon Jovi blared from speakers somewhere. Girls screamed in delight as the fairground workers spun the carriages round and round.
“Scream if you want to go faster.”
“Hey.” Hoppo emerged by my side and then saw where I was looking. “You
okay?”
I nodded, not wanting to seem like a wuss in front of the girls. “Fine, yeah.”
“Shall we go on the Waltzers next?” Lucy said, linking her arm through Hoppo’s.
She said it innocently enough, but to this day I’m sure there was something else behind it. A disingenuity. A slyness. She knew. And she was enjoying taunting me.
“I thought we were going on the Meteorite,” I said.
“We can do that after. C’mon, Eddie. It’ll be fun.”
I also hated that she called me Eddie. Eddie was a kid’s name. At sixteen, I liked to be called Ed.
“I just think the Waltzers are lame.” I shrugged. “But if you want to go on a crap ride, fine by me.”
She smiled. “What d’you say, Angie?”
I knew what Angie would say. So did Lucy.
“If that’s what everyone else wants to do? I’m easy.”
And just for a moment I wished she wasn’t. I wished she had an opinion, a backbone. Because another word for “easy” is “pushover.”
“Great.” Lucy grinned. “Let’s go.”
We walked up to the Waltzers and joined the small queue at the side. My heart was racing. My hands felt clammy. I thought I might throw up, and I hadn’t even got on the ride, wasn’t yet enduring the vomit-inducing spins.
The previous riders clambered off. I helped Angie up, trying to seem gentlemanly by letting her go first. I put my foot on the wobbly wooden platform, and then I paused. Something had caught my eye or, rather, something had fleetingly registered in the corner of it. Just enough to make me turn.
A tall, skinny figure stood by the Ghost Train. Dressed all in black. Tight black jeans, baggy shirt and a wide-brimmed black cowboy hat. His back was to me, watching the Ghost Train, but I could see long, white-blond hair trailing down his back.
