by Tom Becker
Something hit him, hard, on the back of the head.
“Ow!”
He whirled round. The street was under attack from a barrage of hailstones, white pellets thudding down from the sky on to the cobbles. Another stone bit into Jamie’s cheek, stinging his skin. He ran blindly towards the nearest shop and ducked inside, a bell above the door tinkling as he entered.
It took his eyes several seconds to adjust to the gloom inside. As Jamie brushed the hail from his coat, he saw that he was in a narrow room filled with books. The walls were covered in shelves that reached from the floor to the ceiling, stuffed with fat leather volumes. Every available surface was taken up with piles of books, precarious towers rising into the air. Somewhere amongst the debris a heater whirred drowsily, and a pair of incense burners on the shelf behind the counter filled the air with cloying perfume.
A curtain twitched in the doorway at the back of the shop and a man appeared. He was completely bald, his head a smooth dome, and dressed in a tweed waistcoat over a patterned shirt with the sleeves rolled up. A pair of spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose.
“Good morning,” he said politely. “What can I do for you?”
“Nothing,” Jamie replied quickly. “I just … It’s hailing and…” He trailed off apologetically.
“Ah.” The man’s face broke into a smile. He was younger than Jamie had first thought – around thirty, although his clothes made him look a lot older. “You’re still welcome in Withershins anyway, even if you are only here to shelter from the storm. My name is Lawrence.” He waited expectantly. “And you are… ?”
Jamie hesitated. Sarge didn’t like him telling strangers a single thing more than he had to, but he reckoned he could trust a bookshop owner.
“Jamie,” he said finally.
“Nice to meet you, Jamie,” said Lawrence. “Feel free to have a look around until the weather eases.”
With the hail still hammering its fists upon the window, Jamie didn’t really have any choice. As he politely scanned the shelves, he realized that Withershins was different to the other bookshops he had been in. The books were older, for one thing, and stacked higgledy-piggledy under handwritten cardboard signs with strange titles like “Theosophy” and “Wicca”. In a bookcase against the far wall Jamie found a stash of books about Alderston and other towns in the area. He could feel Lawrence’s eyes following him as he wandered around the shop. Probably trying to check he wasn’t stealing anything. Or maybe he was just bored.
“Is it always this quiet?” Jamie asked him.
“No, not always…” Lawrence paused, scratching the back of his neck. Then he smiled wryly and nodded. “Yes, most of the time it’s just me in here. As you can see, we’re not like other bookshops, and it turns out that the good people of Alderston aren’t that interested in the world of the occult.”
“Don’t know why they would be,” said Jamie. “Everything seems quiet and normal round here.”
“That a fact?” Lawrence’s eyes twinkled. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you not to judge a book by its cover? It might not look like it, but if you dig beneath Alderston’s surface you’ll unearth a pretty dark past. It started with the Vikings, who terrorized the local coastlines for three hundred years, sailing their longships down the Irish Sea and coming ashore to murder and pillage. Ironically it was one of the most brutal raiders – a chieftain called Aldus – who eventually came to Alderston’s rescue. He decided to settle in the town in 1150 and the raids came to an end. It was Aldus who built the church on the hill.”
“Hang on a minute,” said Jamie. “You’re telling me that church was built by a Viking?”
“Soon after settling in the town Aldus converted to Christianity and never bloodied his famous spear again. He became so powerful that the town took its name from him: Aldus’s town. We think he was buried in the churchyard but we don’t know for sure. A year after Aldus’s death, a terrible fire swept through the church graveyard, destroying all the graves that lay there. A monk who lived in the next town wrote that the fire was so fierce that burning corpses clawed their way out of the ground to escape it.”
“Huh?”
“I told you this town has a dark past. And that’s just the start of it. In the early 1600s, Alderston was at the centre of the Lancashire Witch Trials. Five local women, a coven led by a seventy-year-old known as Black Maggie, were found guilty of holding a Black Mass and were executed. The Witchfinder General himself came to Alderston to watch Black Maggie drown on the ducking stool.” Lawrence’s voice was rising with excitement. “Fast forward two hundred years – to the early Victorian period – and you find grave robbers known as Resurrection Men roaming the churchyards, looking for corpses to dig up.”
“Why?”
“At the time medical schools were desperate for a way to teach their students about anatomy and the human body. They were willing to pay good money for dead bodies, no questions asked. It made for a thriving black market.”
Sounded like the kind of trade Sarge would be interested in, Jamie thought glumly.
“But then the body of a girl called Kitty Hawkins was taken from her grave by a gang led by a local criminal called George Rathbone. The town rose up in anger and chased Rathbone and his men from their homes. To make sure the Resurrection Men couldn’t strike again, the church built a watch house in the cemetery, and protected the graves with giant iron cages called mortsafes.”
“Iron cages? I think I saw some in the watch house,” said Jamie, thinking back to the feverish night he had met Keeley.
“Impressive, aren’t they? Imagine trying to break through one of them. You won’t get very far.”
“What about the girl’s body?” asked Jamie. “Did they ever get it back?”
Lawrence shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Lost souls are something of a recurring motif in this town’s history. During the First World War, a group of young men from the town signed up and formed their own battalion, the Alderston Pals. They were slaughtered almost to a man at the battle of Somme – hundreds of men mown down in the blink of an eye. Only a handful of soldiers saw the end of that day. There wasn’t a family in Alderston who didn’t lose a father, a son or a brother. For years afterwards it was said that the town was haunted by the spirits of the Pals, trudging home one by one from the battlefield…”
Lawrence’s voice trailed off theatrically. In the silence that followed, Jamie realized that the rattling on the bookshop window had ceased. It had stopped hailing.
“Not bad,” he said. “And all that really happened round here?”
Lawrence nodded. “Not that anyone cares,” he sighed, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “The only history people want to hear about these days is Hitler and the Nazis.”
There was a fizzing sound as one of the incense sticks burned out in the pot behind the counter. When he saw Jamie looking at them, Lawrence gave an embarrassed shrug.
“It’s a bit hokey, I know,” he confessed. “But some of my customers expect a certain atmosphere when they come in. And I need every customer I can get. You’ve just moved into the Lodge, haven’t you?”
“How did you know that?”
“Small town grapevine. Nothing here stays a secret for long. Are you going to join the school?”
“I’m homeschooled,” Jamie replied. The lie slipped out with practised ease. The truth was that he hadn’t been to a lesson in over a year, but Sarge didn’t want anyone letting the social services know. “My dad, Sarge, teaches me.”
“Army man, I’m guessing?”
“His dad was.”
“Well, tell him to come to me if he needs any textbooks ordering. I’ll give him the local’s discount.”
Through the ceiling Jamie heard a phone begin to ring. Lawrence nodded back towards the curtain over the doorway.
“That’s the flat phone,” he said. “I’d bett
er get that. Come back some time and I’ll see if I can dig out a good book on Alderston for you.”
“OK,” said Jamie. “Thanks.”
He walked out of the shop. The hailstorm had left the streets littered in sugary-white marbles, as though a sweetshop had exploded. Outside the gloomy bookshop and its shroud of incense, Lawrence’s talk of Vikings, witches and ghosts seemed a bit unbelievable. Maybe he had exaggerated to impress Jamie. After all, he had said he needed every customer he could get.
Jamie trudged back to the Lodge to find the van pulling out of the driveway, its engine growling impatiently. Spotting Jamie, Sarge rolled down the window and gestured at him to hurry up.
“Where’ve you been, lad?” he yelled. “We’re going! Get in!”
Jamie dashed up to the passenger side of the van and squeezed breathlessly in alongside Liam.
“What is it?” he asked. “Something happened?”
“Nothing,” replied Sarge. “That’s the problem. I’m not sitting around on my backside whilst some mystery man decides whether or not to get in touch. You’re back on your feet, the clock’s ticking and there’s money to be made. I’ve packed our stuff – we’re good to go.”
Jamie glanced at his brother but Liam said nothing, his arms folded as he stared out of the window. The van pulled away down Church Lane and turned right at the bottom of the hill, heading up past the church and along the road towards the Moss. Looking up into the rear-view mirror as Alderston’s roofs slipped out of sight, Jamie was struck by a mixture of sadness and inexplicable relief. Sarge turned on the radio and fiddled with the dial, filling the van with snatches of static and pop songs. Usually Liam would needle his dad about the choice of station but this time he stayed wrapped up in a cloud of surly silence.
As the removal van edged towards the small wood that marked the beginning of the Moss, the sound of a powerful engine roaring grew louder behind them.
“Hello, hello,” Sarge murmured, looking into his rear-view mirror. “Who are these idiots?”
Twisting round to peer into Liam’s rear-view mirror, Jamie saw a bright blob of red hurtling along the narrow lane behind them. It was Greg Metcalfe’s sports car. The teenager zoomed up on the van’s shoulder and slingshot past them, music blaring through the windows. Jamie caught a glimpse of long blonde hair in the passenger seat, and guessed it belonged to Donna, Roxanne’s daughter.
“Thirty miles an hour!” bellowed Sarge, thumping his palm on the van’s horn. “That’s the limit here, not sixty! Are you insane?”
The sports car sped away without reply.
“Honestly,” Sarge said. “It’s as if these idiots want to get themselves killed.”
Liam muttered something under his breath.
“Mind repeating that, son?”
“All I’m saying is,” said Liam, “if you cared as much about our health we’d be back in that house, not on the road again.”
“We discussed this back in Alderston,” Sarge said firmly. “I won’t tell you again.”
Liam’s reply was interrupted by a screech of tyres from within the wood, and a loud bang. Sarge exchanged a glance with his eldest son and jammed his foot down on the accelerator. The van hurried into the trees, darkness folding in overhead. When they cornered the bend Jamie’s mouth ran dry. Up ahead, where the road curved to the right, the red sports car had carried straight on, ploughing head first into a drystone wall. The force of the impact had concertinaed the front of the car, and the door by the driver’s seat had exploded open. But all Jamie had eyes for was the arm hanging lifelessly down from the driver’s side, the first drops of blood pooling on the ground beneath it.
Afterwards, when he tried to unscramble the accident’s aftermath in his head, Jamie was surprised how little he actually remembered. Only jagged scraps remained, as though they had been torn out of his memory like pages from a notebook: Liam on his mobile, urging the ambulance to hurry; Sarge crouching down by the sports car, murmuring reassuring words through the passenger seat window; hearing the sound of distant sirens, aware that they were heading straight for them; tree bark turning blue in the flashing emergency lights. Jamie recalled Liam’s arm around his shoulder, and being led away to the other side of the van so he couldn’t see the ambulance crew freeing the bodies from the mangled wreckage. Fragments of Sarge’s conversation with the police returned to him: “I knew when they shot past me that they were going too quick, but you know what kids are like…”
Two ambulances left the scene of the accident, moving at very different speeds. One hurtled away to the nearest hospital within minutes of arriving, with Donna, the car’s passenger, inside. The second ambulance crept away later with its lights off. There was no rush, no need to break the speed limit. Greg was dead.
It was then that Sarge finally relented, agreeing to turn the van around and head back for Alderston.
“But only for one night,” he said. “You hear? We’re off first thing in the morning.”
No one argued with him. No one said anything. They returned to Alderston to find the house as they had left it – cold and cheerless, condensation streaming down the inside of the windows. There was no food left in the fridge, but then no one was hungry. Instead they slumped down in front of the TV, each lost in their own world. When Sarge went to the toilet during an advert break, Liam looked over at Jamie.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Yeah. Why?”
“Rough day, little bro. It’s OK to be upset, you know.”
They were interrupted by a shrill bleeping from the kitchen. The house phone was ringing. It had been so quiet during their stay that Jamie had almost forgotten it was there. He stared at Liam, who made no movement to get up. As the ringing echoed round the house Sarge’s voice bellowed out through the downstairs toilet door.
“Someone bloody answer that, will you – and tell ’em whatever it is they’re selling, we don’t want it!”
Jamie hurried through to the kitchen and picked up the phone. The plastic receiver was cool against his cheek, the mouthpiece stale with the echoes of a thousand previous conversations.
“Hello?”
There was a loud, slow exhalation down the phone line, and then a gravelly voice said: “Hello, Jamie.”
A prickle of unease ran down Jamie’s spine. “Who’s this?” he asked.
“All in good time, Jamie. Be a good lad and get Sarge for me, eh? And better put the speakerphone on. I want you all to hear this.”
Jamie pressed the speakerphone button, fighting a sudden urge to put down the receiver. The toilet door slammed in the hallway, and Sarge appeared in the kitchen doorway.
“Why are you still on that phone?” he demanded. “You’re supposed to tell them to hop it, not chat about the weather.” He stopped at the look on Jamie’s face. “What is it? Who is that?”
The speakerphone let off a loud crackle – a gust of wind through a mausoleum – and then the kitchen was filled with a mocking song.
“Any old iron, any old iron, any, any, any old iron…” The voice broke into rasping laughter. “Hello there, Sarge. How’s business?”
“Can’t complain,” Sarge said cautiously. “Who am I speaking to?”
“I would say a friend, but it’s a little more complicated than that.”
“Why don’t you explain it to me, then? It’s been a long day and I’m a little old for guessing games.”
Liam walked into the kitchen and pointed questioningly at the phone. Sarge shook his head irritably and waved him away.
“Do you know what I heard today?” the voice asked mildly. “A little bird told me that you tried to make a run for it.”
“Then you heard wrong,” replied Sarge. “I don’t run anywhere.”
“You’re lying, Sarge. If it hadn’t been for those kids driving head first into a wall, you’d be halfway to Cornwall by now. Don
’t bother lying to me, it’s a waste of time. Leaving town wasn’t part of the deal. I said that you could stay in the Lodge but only if you did a job for me. Have you done a job for me?”
“We waited a week, but no one—”
“Have you done a job for me?”
“No,” said Sarge.
“Then you owe me,” the voice said forcefully, “and so you’d better do a job for me, or you’ll force me to collect on your debt. Believe me, you don’t want that.”
“This might be easier if we knew who we were dealing with,” said Sarge, playing for time. “Who you are?”
There was a long pause. “My name is Mr Redgrave.”
Sarge sank down on to a chair and put his head in his hands. Liam went pale. For several seconds the kitchen was shrouded in disbelieving silence, and then the phone rattled into life again.
“I take it that you’ve heard of me,” Mr Redgrave said. “Good. That should save us some time.”
“Heard of you?” Sarge smiled grimly. “A man with your kind of reputation tends to acquire a certain amount of notoriety. You should have told us from the start. What can we do for you?”
“What do you think? Old iron, of course. Alderston’s got a little treasure trove of iron that I want you to get your hands on.”
“Where?”
“Where?” Mr Redgrave barked with laughter. “You’re losing your touch, Sarge! Why do you think I put you in this house? It’s right in front of you.”
As Sarge and Liam exchanged baffled glances, in his mind’s eye Jamie looked out through his bedroom window: over the fallen soldiers of gravestones strewn about the graveyard, the looming shadow of the church behind them, and then, tucked away by the far wall, the watch house, with its store of gleaming metal cages…
“The mortsafes!” he exclaimed.
Sarge glared at him.
“They’re locked up in the watch house in the churchyard,” Jamie said quickly. “Big metal cages. They must be worth a fortune.”
