‘OK,’ he began. ‘This story is true, right. It happened to my cousin’s best friend’s brother a couple of years ago.’
When he was sure he had everyone’s complete attention, he continued.
‘It was a dark and stormy night and … Johnny was driving home from the cinema with his girlfriend. He was tired and he wasn’t paying attention to the road. He ended up taking a wrong turn onto a country lane. Full of potholes and cow dung and stuff like that. He realised they’d gone wrong, so he decided to turn back. But the road was really narrow and he couldn’t find a place to swing the car round, so he started turning left and right and back and forward and long story short …’
‘Not that short,’ Iano whispered.
‘They got stuck,’ Ziggy continued. ‘Now, all this time his girlfriend was moaning at him: “You’re a muppet, Johnny”, stuff like that. Johnny got annoyed and pressed his foot too hard on the accelerator. The car shot forward and rammed into a ditch. No matter what he did they couldn’t get it out. They were trapped.’
‘Why didn’t they just ring their parents or the AA?’ Amy said.
‘Ahm, there was no mobile reception in the area, so they couldn’t use their phones,’ he said, thinking on his feet. ‘Anyway, they sat there for ages and it got darker and darker, stormier and stormier, creepier and creepier. Next thing they heard a sound on the other side of the ditch. A strange metally sound.’
‘How did they hear the sound if it was so loud and stormy?’ a guy called Peter asked.
‘They just did, right,’ Ziggy said, getting a little hot under the collar. What was wrong with these people? Couldn’t they just listen to him? ‘Oh, wait. I forgot a bit – they turned on the radio while they were waiting and they heard that a killer was on the loose. In the very area they were just after driving to.’
‘How did they know what area that was if they’d taken a wrong turn?’ Amy asked.
‘I …’
‘Aw, man, I know this story,’ Iano said before the host could offer yet another explanation. ‘It’s The Hook. Everybody knows it.’
Stephanie hadn’t heard it before, but she was glad she didn’t have to hear it now. Her hands had been trembling ever since Ziggy had switched off the light.
Ziggy’s face had turned a colour a professional painter might describe as Scarlet Lake. In other words, quite red. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’ve got another one.’
But that didn’t work either. It turned out that Iano had heard nearly every ghost story ever told: The Woman Hitchhiker; The Man Upstairs; The African Mask; The White Dog. It almost drove Ziggy mad. He’d spent ages looking up stories on the Internet. He was going to pretend that they had all happened to people he knew, just to make them scarier, but none of that mattered now. Iano was ruining it, just so he could look good in front of Amy.
What a twonk.
‘Well why don’t you tell a story so, since you seem to know everything there is to know about ghosts,’ he spluttered angrily after Iano had once again ruined the ending.
‘I’m not a storyteller, man. I’m an athlete,’ said Iano, flexing his weedy muscles, which caused Amy to explode with laughter. Cola shot from her nose and onto Ziggy’s favourite shirt.
‘Anyone else got a story? A true story?’ he asked, wiping the snot-fizz from his chest and desperately trying to hold on to his temper. If he gave out to Amy, Iano would definitely have the upper hand with her. They’d probably end up dating, and even though Iano and Ziggy were supposed to be best friends, the last thing Ziggy wanted was for Iano to end up with the girl he fancied.
Stephanie looked in Colm’s direction.
‘What are you looking at him for?’ Ziggy exploded. ‘He’s the most boring kid that ever lived. Five seconds in my world is more interesting than his whole life.’
‘She can look at me if she wants,’ Colm said. He was trying to stand up for Stephanie, but she didn’t take it that way.
‘I wasn’t looking at you, weirdo,’ she said. ‘As if.’
‘Yeah, seriously, Colm. No offence, but who’d look twice at you?’ Amy said. She would have been surprised to know that Colm actually was offended.
‘That was a stupid thing to say, Big C,’ Iano added.
Colm wasn’t going to take the bait and make some sarcastic remark, no matter how much they got under his skin. He was just going to get up, walk out of the room, go home and have a big bowl of cereal and watch whatever programme happened to be on the National Geographic channel. As he got to his feet, Ziggy stood up too.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he asked.
‘I’m going home,’ Colm replied, heading towards the door.
‘That’s rude.’
‘What?’
‘Leaving my party before it’s finished. Shows you’ve got no class. Shouldn’t have expected any more of you anyway. You always wander around acting like you’re better than all of us,’ said Ziggy.
‘You don’t want me here,’ Colm said calmly. ‘I don’t want to be here. It suits both of us if I leave.’
‘What? I don’t want you here, that’s true. But you’re lying when you say you don’t want to be here. This is the coolest party ever. You were lucky to be invited. Nobody wanted you to come, you know,’ Ziggy said, his voice getting a little higher with each passing sentence.
‘I know nobody wants me here. And now I’m going.’
‘Nobody leaves my party until I say they leave,’ Ziggy squeaked.
That was it for Colm. He was sick of all of them. He was exhausted from keeping secrets and telling lies. He just wanted his life to be normal again. Something popped in his brain. It was the part of him that always remained polite. It was as if it was saying: I’m outta here, buddy, do whatever you like, say what you gotta say.
So Colm did.
‘You know what? I hate your party. You lot think you’re so fantastic, but all you ever do is judge other people, moan about haircuts and clothes, and sit around watching movies.’
‘What makes you think you’re so cool?’ Iano sneered.
‘’Cos you’re not. Far from it,’ Amy added.
‘I know I’m not cool, but so what? I’d rather be me than waste my time trying to impress someone so stupid that when our Maths test had a question asking us to “find x” he put a circle around it and wrote “there it is”.’
‘Anyone could have made that mistake,’ Ziggy said defensively.
‘And you can’t even tell a simple scary story without getting it all wrong,’ Colm continued.
‘I suppose you could,’ Amy said.
‘Yes, I could, actually,’ Colm said. ‘And it’d be true too. None of this my mother’s brother’s friend’s cousin’s gardener stuff. It really happened to me.’
‘What frightening story could you have? The day you wet your nappy?’ Ziggy sneered.
‘Yeah, and it was only two weeks ago,’ Iano said to peals of laughter.
‘The time the teacher got cross with him for forgetting his homework? That was really scary, wasn’t it, Colin?’ Stephanie said.
‘It’s real and it’s terrifying and my name is Colm,’ he shouted.
There was a sharp intake of breath from the entire group, followed by a deathly silence.
‘Oooh, Mr Touchy,’ someone whispered.
Colm could hardly believe what he was doing. Was he really going to tell them the truth he’d kept hidden from everyone for so long? The truth that had given him nightmares. The truth that had changed him, turned him into a different person.
Maybe it’d do him some good to get it off his chest. They all hated him anyway; they all thought he was a loser. It wasn’t as if they were going to think less of him. He could hardly sink lower in their estimation.
They stared at him, with none of the hostility he’d expected. A sea of blank faces.
He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. Not a single one.
He couldn’t tell them about that night. He just couldn’t do it. Lif
e at school was bad enough as it was with them just thinking he was a bit odd. If he started going on about supernatural events and zombies and cursed books … no, the secret would have to stay with him. Colm’s heart sank. Why had he said he was going to tell them a horror story? He’d have to make one up now. What could he tell them? Nothing came to mind. When he’d stood there for thirty silent seconds, mouth open, but nothing coming out, they began to snigger.
‘See, I told you he was an eejit,’ Ziggy said to a boy who hadn’t spoken during the entire time Colm had been at the party.
There wasn’t any good explanation he could give them, no reason for standing there like a twonk, so Colm simply left the living room with the sound of harsh laughter echoing in his ears. He opened the front door and escaped into the night, gently pulling the door shut behind him. He was glad the estate was quiet for once. He didn’t want to see anybody right now. He steadied himself on the front wall of Ziggy’s house and took a deep gulp of cold air. His knees buckled. I almost told them, he said to himself. What had he been thinking?
Wrapped up in his thoughts, he failed to notice the dark figure watching him from beneath the solitary tree on the edge of the green as he began his walk home. Or the bounty hunter who’d been tracking his progress all evening. It wasn’t as quiet out there as he thought it was. Far from it.
A big yellow moon hung over the estate. Colm picked up the pace, trying to warm up. A rattling sound carried through the air like a whisper. He paused for a moment. Had he heard something? He was sure he had. He just didn’t know what it was. He considered looking around, but he wasn’t that far from his house. There were some dodgy characters living around here. People you didn’t want to get on the wrong side of, or any side of for that matter. He wished he hadn’t left Ziggy’s so suddenly. His mother would kill him if she knew he was out on his own after dark, even so close to home.
He quickened his step until he was moving like a speed walker and in less than a minute he was home. He unlocked the front door, went in and shut the night outside where it belonged. Tomorrow’ll be better, he said to himself. It had to be.
Boy, was he wrong.
Ten
They were some of the roughest, toughest, meanest men who had ever existed. Men with gold teeth and stubble sharp enough to cut glass. Men who ate with their fingers and considered a punch in the jaw to be a friendly greeting. Men who would sell their own mothers for the right price, even if that price was a Choc Ice and half a pack of cigarettes. The sort of people your parents warn you to stay well away from.
Mercenaries.
Dirty, low-down mercenaries. Thirteen faces, each uglier and more frightening than the last. Every one of the men had spent at least some of his life in prison; most for incidents involving broken teeth and shattered bones, some for crimes too horrible to even consider. And Jean-Paul Camus, the Sorbonne-educated man-about-town, had spent the last year and a half of his life working with them. Leading them. The stress had been unrelenting. It had given him a stomach ulcer that had been around for so long now he’d given it a name.
He called it Fred.
Camus pulled the collar of his waxed coat up around his ears. It didn’t help. The coat was built to withstand the rain, but it was no match for this atrocious weather. He hadn’t been warm in days and the wind was blowing a gale, even though none of the weather forecasts had predicted it. It was so windy that he could have sworn he’d seen a small dog spinning through the air only minutes previously.
But it wasn’t the weather that was really bothering him, it was his location. A Gothic graveyard in deepest Transylvania. The crumbling headstones, the gargoyles at the broken-down entrance gates, the strange cries cutting through the darkness – the whole thing gave him the creeps and he wished he was anywhere other than where he was at the moment. He couldn’t let the men know that, of course. The little bit of authority he had over them depended upon him remaining cool and calm in any situation.
The nasty and violent moneygrabbers from ten different countries stood around impatiently, waiting to be told what to do. They were on the verge of mutiny. The money he’d been given to pay them was good, exceptionally generous in fact, but they hadn’t had a proper day off in months. The work had been exhausting and the last thing any of them wanted was to be stuck here at four in the morning in weather like this.
‘Time to get to work,’ Camus said.
The job they were undertaking was supposed to have been completed during daylight hours – it was safer that way – but they’d attracted the suspicions of the Romanian police once too often since they’d arrived in the country and they couldn’t afford to do it again. That meant toiling under the cover of darkness to avoid detection. The only problem was that working in the night also meant that it was very likely that some of them were going to be killed. Not that the men knew this. It was something Camus had kept to himself.
He scratched his arm. It had been itching for days. He glanced at the tattoo – a skull inside a diamond. The Sign of Lazarus. The remnant of youthful folly when he had run wild and joined a gang purely because he thought it’d make him cool and tough. Instead it was what had led him here tonight to this godforsaken place. He regretted ever becoming associated with that loathsome group. The tattoo had begun to leak tiny pinpricks of blood in the last few hours. It meant he was close. It had done the same when they had uncovered Attila the Hun’s burial site in Istria, but there they had managed to bribe any snoopers and the uncovering had gone smoothly. This one felt different, as if they were teetering on the edge of a precipice and it was only a matter of time before they toppled over into the abyss.
Spending some of the best years of your life looking for coffins wasn’t what he considered a useful way to pass the time. He had tried to get out of it, as he was a weasel by nature, but he had been advised to do as he was ordered. Two others had turned the job down before he was offered it. They were both dead now. Very dead, in fact. Dead enough to have different body parts buried on different continents from what he’d heard.
He climbed onto the back of the four-wheel-drive truck and handed out the shovels. He issued all the men with headlamps so that they could see what they were working on, then instructed two of the stronger ones to remove the most important piece of equipment from the back of the truck – a bulky lamp. A powerful spotlight that produced high-intensity UV light. The men struggled under its weight. Their knees trembled and their feet sank into the marshy ground.
‘What we want light for?’ Alexander, a huge Russian, asked.
‘In case your headlamps fail,’ Camus replied, hoping that everyone was too tired to see through the flimsy explanation.
‘Why not flashlights as back up?’
Thank you, Alexander, you nosy Muscovite, he thought. He needed a distraction and quickly before the others started asking questions too. He slipped his mobile phone from his pocket and held it above his head.
‘I have been talking to my colleague and he has authorised me to pay you double if you get the work done in two hours.’
That should focus their minds. Some of the men grunted, others accepted the news with solemn faces. But the possibility of earning extra money enticed them. They were mercenaries after all. They automatically moved into their pre-arranged positions on a piece of wasteland just beyond the graves and tombs. Each had their own space, a metre radius in which to dig.
‘I not heard phone ring,’ Alexander said.
What was it with this guy and his questions? Should he try sarcasm or intimidation to shut him up? Intimidation probably wouldn’t work. The man was tough. He had callouses the size of bumblebees on his hands. And he probably wouldn’t understand sarcasm.
‘If Alexander doesn’t get to work within the next thirty seconds then none of you gets paid,’ Camus said.
The filthy looks from the others were enough to make anyone’s blood run cold and Alexander was no exception.
‘I work, I work,’ he said, giving in.
Camus consulted the map one last time. Even with the headlamp it was hard to see it clearly. The light glared against the laminate covering he used to keep it waterproof. Rivulets of rainwater ran across the surface.
It looked liked they were at the right spot.
‘Dig,’ he shouted, just as a fork of lightning crackled across the night sky. If that’s a sign, it’s not a good one, Camus told himself. The combination of the rain and electricity in the air, the lamps and the graveyard setting, put him in mind of the end of the world. That’s what it felt like to Jean-Paul Camus. The end of the world.
The men got to work. They eased their shovels into the soft ground, pushing down on the blades with hob-nailed boots. Their shovels sliced through the earth as Camus lit the first of the many cigarettes he would smoke while the men laboured.
They had been digging for over an hour and the lashing rain had finally ceased when one of the men cried out.
‘What is it?’ Camus asked excitedly. The man was standing up to his shoulders in the hole he’d dug. Muddy water swirled around his knees. The others stopped what they were doing, watching, their faces set to grim.
‘I’ve hit something,’ said the man.
‘Could be rock,’ someone said.
Or it could be what we’re looking for, Camus thought with a mixture of excitement and dread. ‘Get him out of there.’
A couple of the men helped the digger climb out. Camus slid down the bank sending chunks of earth splashing down. He plunged his hand into the water. Earth, rock and … metal.
‘Get the buckets and clear this water out,’ he roared.
After a couple of minutes the hole was almost water-free. Camus took out a pocket-sized LED torch and shone it on the area that had been cleared away. A tiny piece of faded brass peeped out from the clogged earth. Could this be it? After all the months of searching? He could feel his heart pounding, his blood pressure rising. Stay calm, he told himself. In control. Don’t let the men know there’s anything amiss.
Colm & the Ghost's Revenge Page 6
