by C. J. Skuse
‘Haven’t you learned yet, Fallon, that paying them off doesn’t work?’
‘It does, though,’ she said. ‘They leave me alone for days when I pay them to.’
‘Days?’ I roared, flecks of spit landing on my knee. ‘Days isn’t good enough.’ Corey was looking at me. Max fidgeted with his bootlace. ‘What? Is no one else going to say anything?’
Max stopped fidgeting and shoved his hands behind his head. ‘What do you want us to say? It’s none of our business.’
‘Of course it’s our business.’ I got to my feet. ‘We need to do something.’
‘Like what?’ said Corey. ‘It’s, like, nine o’clock.’ The little wig-shagging Jack Russell was curled up like an Artic fox in his lap. ‘They’ll all be in bed, won’t they?’
Fallon was scattering some fish flakes into a murky green tank in the corner. ‘No, they’ve gone to the Harvest Home tonight. They said they’ll be round after it finished. That’ll be about ten.’
‘Right, then. We’ll put a stop to it. Tonight.’
Max laughed. ‘Hang on, Liam Neeson. You’re not seriously suggesting we all lie in wait to kick seven sorts out of them, are you?’
‘No, of course not,’ I said, sitting back down. ‘But we could still get our own back. Well, Fallon’s own. We could do something.’ I could feel my fists start to tingle.
At that moment, the lean-to door rattled outside, and heavy footsteps scuffed across the concrete floor. The caged birds and animals squeaked and cawed, and then settled again as Roadkill Rosie wobbled through the doorway of the kitchenette.
‘Hi, Mum. You OK?’ asked Fallon, struggling to her feet.
‘Yeah,’ came Rosie’s gravelly reply. She hadn’t changed one bit, but for a few grey streaks in her long black hair. Still short and squat, with a wide face and the same old wart tucked into the crease beside her nose. No wonder people thought she was a witch.
The moment she clocked us all in the lounge she thinned her eyes. ‘What’s all this, then? If you’re them lot what keeps getting her to give you money, then you can piss off now or I’m calling the police!’
‘No, no, Mum, they’re not the Shaws. These are my friends,’ said Fallon. ‘This is Corey and Max and Ella. You remember them, don’t you? From the old times?’
‘Oh,’ she said, looking directly at Max. ‘You’re the Rittman boy. Surprised your dad let you come out here, what with all that business…’
‘He doesn’t know I’m here,’ he replied, reaching into his jeans for his tobacco pouch.
‘Just as well.’ She sniffed. ‘Have my guts for garters, he would, if he thought you were anywhere near here. If you’ve come to cause trouble—’
‘He hasn’t,’ Fallon interrupted. ‘Mum, they came over this morning, looking for Corey’s cat. I asked you on the phone earlier if you’ve picked up any ginger toms today.’
‘No, no toms. Couple more females but no toms.’ I could hear her scratchy smoker’s breath, even though I could barely see her in the gloom of the kitchen. ‘You keep them out of the Skin Room, Fallon, you hear?’
‘Yeah, I will, don’t worry,’ Fallon replied as Rosie went to the fridge to grab some food for her supper – a hunk of cheese, half a loaf of bread, three bottles of Acid Rain and a family pack of Penguins. She disappeared back through the door without another word.
When she’d gone, Fallon came to sit back down with us, smiling meekly. ‘Sorry about that. She’s a bit protective of me, what with the baby and that.’
We all nodded in understanding, and Fallon started tidying up our mess. None of us said anything for a little while.
But Corey could only hold himself back so long. It must have been killing him.
‘Fallon, what’s the Skin Room?’
*
When she was sure that Rosie had gone to bed, Fallon showed us the Skin Room. It came with a warning though.
‘Look, are you squeamish?’ she said, hand resting on the handle of the basement door. ‘Because if you are…’
‘I’m not,’ said Corey.
‘Depends what it is,’ said Max. ‘What’s in there?’
‘Well, you know what Mum does for a living now, yeah? And before she got busy, she used to do taxidermy as a hobby as well. You know the mounts on the kitchen shelves?’
‘Taxidermy?’ said Corey. ‘Like, stuffing animals?’
‘Yeah. She did a few pets for people we knew, sort of putting them into little poses. There’s a budgie in a rocking chair reading a book and a dog playing snooker – they went a bit wrong and the families sent them back.’
‘Oh, like Bad Taxidermy on Twitter, yeah?’ laughed Max, swigging his bottle.
‘Yeah,’ she said, with a frown. ‘Well, she still likes to do it sometimes, as a hobby. She calls it her ‘art.’
‘Riiiight…’ I said.
Fallon looked sheepish. ‘We just haven’t got round to sorting out what’s for burning and what’s for keeping yet. So, until we know what to do with it all, it goes in here. In the Skin Room.’
‘OK. Can we go in and have a look then?’ said Corey, all but barging past her.
‘We’re all grown-ups here,’ said Max. ‘We can handle it.’
She nodded slowly, then turned the door handle and reached inside for the wall switch. The light didn’t come on immediately. When it did, it revealed a rickety wooden staircase. The light blinked off, shrouding it in darkness again. Then on again, off again.
‘It’ll come on properly in a minute, just takes a little while,’ she explained. ‘Go on down, carefully. Mind the fourth step – it wobbles.’
Down we went, Corey first, followed by Max, then me and finally Fallon, the tube light still blinking above the lower room. On and off. On. And off. On. And off.
We didn’t need a steady light to get the picture though. If Fallon had told us twenty people had been shot dead down there, I wouldn’t have been surprised. In fact, if she’d told us twenty people had full-on exploded down there, I would have believed that too. What I didn’t expect was what I saw.
First thing I noticed was the blood; it was everywhere. Pools on the floor. Dry spatters and spray marks all up the whitewashed walls. A large wooden table in the centre, dyed red with it. And carcasses all over the place. On the side benches, on sheets of blue plastic on the floor, hanging from ceiling hooks. Hollowed out. Skins. Skulls. Ribcages.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I said. I just couldn’t look away from it. The jar of eyes on the huge wooden table. The hollowed-out pig’s head on a shelf in the corner. The three rabbits, gouged out, hanging from three rusty hooks by the door. The bucket full of dead piglets, in an old tin bucket on the floor.
The next thing I noticed was how cold it was. Cellar-cold.
Max was the first to turn around and walk back up the steps… I’d forgotten about his problem with blood. Corey was just staring at it all in wonder, like he’d walked into Wonka’s factory. And me – little details kept screaming out at me.
The full bath of blood, slowly rocking in the room at the back.
‘Don’t worry, it’s only pig’s blood,’ said Fallon brightly. ‘We make black pudding out of it and sell it. Mum invented that structure it’s on to keep it moving, else it clots.’
Corey nodded. ‘I can see why your mum doesn’t want anyone down here.’
‘Yeah. A lot of this stuff is just waiting to go out to the furnace. The ham’s curing. And the pelts we sell to humane fur traders. Mum knows this guy down the market.’
‘I’m just going to see if Max is OK,’ I announced, leaving Corey investigating a barrel of dead rats on ice.
I went back up to the lean-to and into the lounge. Max was sitting on the sofa, clutching a bottle of Acid Rain and looking as white as the three-legged cat with the tiara, currently licking her own ass beside a stack of old Hello! magazines near the fireplace.
‘You OK?’ I said, sitting down beside him.
‘Don’t know what I expected.’ He sniffed. ‘I fain
ted when we watched Twilight.’
‘Oh, yeah. I forgot.’ I smiled.
‘I think… No, forget it.’
‘What? No, what were you going to say?’
He took a deep breath. ‘I think about it sometimes. What Jess looked like. That night on the seafront.’
‘Oh God, do you?’
He nodded. ‘Can’t help it. I remember the judge at the inquest, saying about all the blood on the front of the bus. And I can see it in my head, even though I wasn’t there.’
‘You shouldn’t think about it. It doesn’t help you.’
‘Sometimes in the night, I’ll be dreaming about something else and then I’ll see the bus coming and I’ll see it hitting her and… there’s blood all over the place.’ He looked at me. ‘I saw them washing down the road the next day, Ells. She couldn’t have meant that to happen, could she?’
‘No, of course not. Don’t think about it,’ I said, lying back on the sofa, cuddling his head against mine. ‘It was an accident.’
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘She’s never really gone, not to me. I haven’t felt her leave. Do you know what I mean? I still feel like she’s here sometimes. Is that weird?’
‘No, it’s not weird at all.’ It was the drink talking now. Definitely the drink.
‘But at night, all I can think about is the blood and the screeching of the brakes and the dent in that bus. It’s a nightmare, Ells. It haunts me.’
It sounds sick, but that’s what gave me the idea. The idea for the revenge on the Shaws. And as I sat there, holding Max against me, my brain went into overdrive, and a messy little snowball began to roll.
‘So what did you do?’
10
A Horrid Shock
The lean-to door rattled first at 10.36 p.m. The sky was dark outside the farmhouse windows. A thrill ran right through me like a hot snake.
‘OK, this is them now. Go go go!’ I whispered, as each of us scattered to our positions. Fallon went to answer the door, but before she could get there, it rattled again. I watched from my spot behind the birdcage, coiling the string around my hand. The door creaked open.
‘Oh. Hi,’ said Fallon. I peeked around the side of the cage and caught my second glimpse of the four Shaw kids, standing in the glow of the security light. Straddling their bikes, they stood in the lane outside the farmhouse, threatening, like a dog-pack.
‘All right, Fallon?’ said the oldest, a chubby boy with zits marching down the length of both his cheeks and white flip-flops on. He had piggy blue eyes, and a blond buzz cut that could have grated cheese. I knew his name was Luke. ‘Sorry we’re late. We went over to the Harvest Home. How come you weren’t there?’
‘I didn’t want to go,’ said Fallon meekly, scuffing her boot on the floor behind her. Her right hand was trembling behind her back.
‘She was afraid to see us,’ laughed the little blonde girl on the smallest bike. This was Luke’s sister, Radclyffe; the most evil of the lot, apparently. Lighter of matches, thrower of bricks. She couldn’t have been more than seven. Her two front teeth were missing, and she wore a white strappy sun dress and patent black Doc Martens. Her face looked sharp enough to slice Fallon in two. I could see why she was scared of them, though they didn’t scare me.
‘Let’s have it, then.’ The other boy, Alfie, lanky and black-haired, with a Mohican haircut, yawned.
His sister, Clem, who had a red bob, was on the bike just behind him, wearing a minty-green T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘Butter Wouldn’t Melt’, with some cartoon character winking beside it. She didn’t say a word, but her scowl was focused squarely on Fallon.
‘I haven’t got it,’ said Fallon, a wobble in her voice. ‘The money.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Luke, folding his arms. ‘Well, that won’t do at all, will it? You said you’d have it.’
‘I mean, I do have it, but I don’t have change. I’ve only got fifty pound notes.’
The four of them looked at one another like they’d just found pirate treasure. Alfie whooped manically, like a hyena, and Luke did some stupid hand-dance thing with him. God, did I hate bullies.
‘That’ll just have to do, won’t it?’ spat Radclyffe. She held out her hand flat, expecting her payment right that instant. Then they all did the same. Four outstretched palms.
‘Come on,’ said Clem. ‘I’m tired. Hurry up and give us our money.’
‘OK,’ said Fallon, ‘but you’ll have to come in and get it.’
‘No, we’ll wait here, thanks,’ said Luke with a laugh as he looked at Alfie. ‘You don’t give us orders, Hayes.’
‘Are you afraid of my house or something?’ asked Fallon.
Luke laughed again. ‘Yeah right, I’m sooooo afraid of your weirdo farmhouse.’
‘And your weirdo mum,’ Clem added.
‘Come in then,’ she said, stepping aside.
Luke looked back at the others. No way were they going in. And no way was he going to look like some baby in front of them. He gave a long, dramatic sigh and threw his bike down. ‘I’ll do it then. You lot wait out here.’
‘I wanna come, I wanna come,’ said Radclyffe, dropping her bike and clinging on to her brother’s hand.
‘Christ’s sake, come on then,’ he snarled.
Fallon stood aside and allowed him to step over the threshold of the lean-to, closely followed by his little sister. They moved about the place like they were in a haunted house, staring at the cages, smelling the air, looking above them in case anything should fall from the plastic roof.
‘Is Roadkill Rosie here?’ asked Radclyffe, in a smaller voice.
‘No, don’t worry. She won’t be back for ages. Uh, it’s just through there,’ said Fallon, allowing them to step in front of her towards the Skin Room. ‘In our basement. It’s through that door, just down the steps. After you.’
I thought we were home and dry then. But Luke stopped and looked at her. ‘You go down and get it. We’ll wait up here.’
‘I can’t,’ said Fallon. ‘I’ve hurt my ankle, so I can’t make the stairs. Honestly, it won’t take a moment. Just go on down the stairs and you’ll find it in a pile on the table. There’s a fifty pound note for each of you. I’ll put the light on and wait here.’
That was amazingly quick thinking, I thought. And with that, Luke started towards the door, his sister following after him, like they were navigating through the rooms of some house of horrors. I guess, in their minds, that’s exactly what it was. They’d heard all the stories. The rumours about Rosie. That was exactly why they picked on Fallon; it made her different. Vulnerable.
So, really, you could say we were giving them what they wanted. We were just illustrating the stories for them in black and white.
Or, rather, red.
Down the steps they went, creak, creak, creak, wobble.
‘Where’s the light?’ called Luke.
Once Luke and his sister were both clear of the door, Fallon flicked up the light switch as I yanked on the string and…
SLAM!
Fallon lunged forwards and turned the key, trapping the Shaws inside the Skin Room. One of them – Luke – started banging and kicking on the door at once, shouting all sorts of things, too muffled to translate through the thickness of the wood. The other one – Radclyffe – just screamed and screamed and screamed.
‘They’re going to be traumatised for life if we leave them in there too long,’ said Fallon, chewing on her thumbnail and looking across at me.
‘Not nearly long enough yet. Give it a couple of minutes. Let that blinking light do its thing. Let them see that bath full of blood.’
‘I wonder if the boys are ready?’
As if in answer, there came an enormous SPLASH from outside in the road, followed by two sets of shouts and another prolonged scream. I ran to the lean-to door and yanked it open to find the two other Shaw siblings lying in the road beside their bikes, soaked through with bright red blood.
‘ARGH! AARGH! AARGH!’ sc
reeched Clem, over and over again. ‘WHAT IS IT? ALFIE! ALFIEEEEE!’
Alfie shuddered and slipped as he tried to get to his feet, wiping his eyes on his sopping T-shirt. ‘Oh my God, it’s…’
He couldn’t finish his sentence – he ran towards the hedge on the opposite side of the road and blew chunks of everything he’d eaten at Harvest Home into the dark ditch.
Clem was still a bloody mess, wailing like her bike had just given birth to her.
We looked up to the window above where Corey and Max were high-fiving and grinning like lunatics, their empty blood buckets dangling from their free hands.
I folded my arms and walked out into the blood-drenched road, towering over Clem. ‘Now, that wasn’t a very nice surprise, was it?’
‘Who are you?’ she whimpered, shivering in the cool night air.
Her brother returned from the hedge, pulling his bike up onto its wheels. ‘You’ll pay for that,’ he threatened shakily, stabbing a finger at Fallon. ‘Who’s she?’
‘Just a friend,’ I said. ‘And she won’t pay for it, you’re wrong about that.’ I pushed him back down into the ditch, with his vomit. ‘If you EVER come back here again, it’ll be YOUR blood we’re pouring from those buckets. Got it?’
Alfie scrabbled to his feet, but said nothing.
Clem rolled her bike to an upright position. ‘I w-w-w-want to go home, Alfie.’
Her brother looked back at us. ‘Where’s Luke? Where’s Raddy?’
Fallon looked at me, clearly not knowing what to say. This was my plan.
‘They’re inside. In the Skin Room,’ I told them.
‘What’s that?’ asked Clem.
‘Where Roadkill Rosie skins her hides, of course. The ones she collects on the trucks. No one comes out of there alive. Sorry. Well, best be running along now then. Nighty night.’
‘No, wait!’ Alfie cried, grabbing my arm. I turned and looked at him, glaring like he’d just made the biggest mistake of his life. ‘Please. We’re sorry. Please, let them go.’
