Afterwalkers

by Tom Becker

  “I don’t know,” Keeley said slowly. “The dead have a funny way of coming back to haunt Alderston. Why d’you think I brought you here to see the memorial? Best off keeping your mouth shut, though. If word gets out an outsider’s been seeing the ghost of Kitty Hawkins, people might get nervous.”

  “I can talk to you though, right?”

  “Of course,” said Keely, offhand. “Isn’t that what friends are for?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jamie. “I’ve never had one.”

  Keeley grinned. “Me neither.”

  Jamie hadn’t seen her smile before – it changed her face, softened it. Before he could say anything Keeley had turned away, picking up her bag from behind the memorial.

  “Come on,” she said, slinging her bag over her shoulder. “Let’s go to the graveyard. I’ll show you Kitty Hawkins’s grave. They left her headstone there in case anyone ever recovered her remains.”

  “No!” Jamie said quickly.

  Keeley stopped, surprised by the urgency in his voice. “Why not?”

  “I want to stay here. I don’t like that graveyard.”

  “You big baby!” scoffed Keeley. “It’s all right, I’ll be there to protect you from the ghosts and ghouls.”

  “I’m not scared! I just don’t want to go!”

  “Suit yourself. You can do what you like, but I’m going to the churchyard.”

  “Wait!”

  He grabbed her hand. The amusement faded from Keeley’s face, and her eyes became serious. “What is it, Jamie? Why don’t you want me to go there?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Yes, you can. I told you, I’m your friend.”

  Jamie slumped down on the steps, his shoulders sagging. “My dad and my brother will be there. In the watch house.”

  “Why? There’s nothing there but—” Realization dawned on Keeley’s face. “It’s the mortsafes, isn’t it? You were looking at them when I first met you.”

  “You don’t understand! I didn’t know then!”

  “Didn’t know what?”

  “That we were going to have to steal them,” Jamie said miserably.

  Keeley’s eyes widened. “You are criminals!” she breathed. “I should have known!”

  “We didn’t have any choice!” Jamie protested. “This crazy guy let us stay in the Lodge, but now if we don’t do what he wants he says he’s going to kill us.”

  Keeley was pacing up and down in front of the memorial, her face creased in thought.

  “That’s why you texted me, wasn’t it?” she said softly. “That’s why you met up with me – to keep me away from the graveyard. So your family could get on with stealing without being interrupted.”

  “No! I mean, it wasn’t just that…”

  As he trailed off, Keeley nodded, biting her lip. Then she stalked away without another word, crossing the wasteland and slipping through the gap in the hedgerow. Jamie picked himself up from the memorial steps and hurried after her. Already he knew that there was no way he could talk her out of going back to the church – Keeley was too stubborn, too angry with him to listen. His only hope was that the mortsafes were already safely stored away in the removal van and Sarge and Liam were back in front of the TV. If they saw Jamie and Keeley while they were still working – it was too awful to even think about. Jamie would have failed Sarge, again.

  The two of them walked moodily through the empty town, a solitary car roaring past them on the main road, its headlights piercing through the darkness. They reached the church to find the front gate unlocked, and skirted round the side of the building towards the graveyard. When the watch house came into view Jamie could barely dare to look, but then his heart gave a little skip of relief. The door remained closed, the padlock still clasped tightly around the chain. Pressing his face against the grille over the window, Jamie saw the silent ranks of the mortsafes still standing to attention against the wall.

  “O–Kayyy,” said Keeley. “Nothing to see here.”

  But as Jamie looked around the graveyard, his initial relief was replaced by a growing sense of unease. In all the years he had spent following Sarge around the country, he had never seen his dad walk away from a job. Once he had given them the green light that was it – there was no turning back. If Sarge and Liam had been caught in the act then there would be people here, the police even. Noise and flashing lights. But instead the graveyard was empty.

  “Tell me something, Jamie,” said Keeley. “Was all this some weird attempt to impress me, or are you actually delusional?”

  Jamie turned and stared at the surrounding headstones. The wind rustled conspiratorially through the branches of the oak tree behind the watch house.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said quietly.

  “You got that right,” retorted Keeley, tapping her temple. “Something’s wrong up there, if you ask me.”

  Jamie ignored her. He turned his back on the watch house and walked away through the graves, his mind occupied by a sudden terrible possibility. As he continued uphill, to where the most recent graves had been dug, Keeley followed behind him complaining.

  “Hellooooo? Earth to Jamie? Where are you going now? Look, if you think this is going to scare me it’s not going to—”

  Keeley paled.

  They were standing in front of Greg’s grave, the boy’s name etched on a dark marble headstone. The ground in front of the headstone had been the subject of a violent disturbance, a coffin rising into the air as though it had been coughed up from the earth in a shower of loose earth. The lid of the coffin had been wrenched open, revealing its pale white innards. Greg’s body was nowhere to be seen.

  Jamie and Keeley fled the graveyard together, their footsteps stumbling and stuttering away through the darkness. At the church gate Keeley slipped away without a word, and when she glanced back over her shoulder at Jamie he saw fear and uncertainty etched across her face. He couldn’t blame her. What had Sarge and Liam done?

  He ran all the way home, the soles of his trainers pounding on the pavement and his head churning with unanswered questions. The Lodge was shrouded in darkness, its front windows dormant. Jamie didn’t even bother trying the front door; instead he slipped around the side of the house, trying to catch his breath as he pressed himself against the icy stonework. Lights shone through the kitchen window; raised voices were floating out into the night.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Liam shouted.

  “How should I know?” Sarge yelled back. “You think that I had anything to do with this? Eh?”

  Jamie flinched at the sound of a sharp bang, a fist slamming into a fridge or a cupboard door. When Liam spoke again, his voice was calmer.

  “Course not, Sarge,” he said. “But since we’ve set foot in this place everything seems to have gone wrong.”

  “Tell me about it. I’ve seen some things in my time I wish I hadn’t, but nothing like this. Grave-robbing? What kind of freak goes around digging up coffins?”

  “I don’t know … kids?”

  “Kids?” Sarge’s voice with thick with incredulous sarcasm. “The same kids who threw that bloody great rock at our windscreen? Or the kids who made that boy’s car crash? Or the kids who killed Mathers’s dog and buried it in our back garden?”

  “You got a better explanation?”

  “The way I see it, there are only two,” said Sarge. “Either Mr Redgrave didn’t care about the mortsafes and was deliberately trying to set us up…”

  “…or this is just a coincidence, he does care about the mortsafes and we haven’t got them.”

  “That’s about the long and short of it. Either way we’re in trouble.”

  “What do we do, then?”

  “Nothing.” Sarge’s voice was hard. “We do absolutely nothing until I’m sure what it is we’re actually dealing with. We keep this betw
een ourselves, understand?”

  There was a long pause.

  “I wish we’d never stepped foot in this bloody town,” said Liam.

  “That makes two of us, son.”

  The light in the window flicked off, and Jamie heard his father and brother leave the kitchen. He waited until he was breathing normally before walking back round to the front door and entering the Lodge. Liam and Sarge were in the front room, still dressed for work in their all-black uniforms, Sarge’s bolt-cutters propped up against the side of one of the armchairs.

  “All right, Jamie?” asked Liam. He was trying to sound upbeat, like everything was fine. “How did it go with Keeley?”

  “OK.”

  “Get a kiss out of her?”

  “No.” Jamie refused to rise to his brother. “How did the job go?”

  Liam and Sarge exchanged glances.

  “We had to call it off,” Sarge said finally. “There was a problem when we got to the watch house – a civilian out walking his dog. I don’t think he saw us but the dog was raising all kinds of hell so we thought it best to come back to the Lodge.”

  “What about the mortsafes?” asked Jamie. “It sounded like Mr Redgrave wanted them pretty badly.”

  “And Mr Redgrave’s going to get them,” Sarge said smoothly. “But he’s a professional too. The last thing he wants is a botched job and the police crawling over the place. We’ll give it a couple of days and then we’ll try again.”

  “Things went all right with Keeley?” checked Liam. “She didn’t suspect anything?”

  Jamie shook his head. “We just hung out at the war memorial for a bit and then went home. It was a bit boring, really.”

  Liam nodded, apparently satisfied. Jamie didn’t like deceiving his brother but if Sarge and Liam were going to lie to him, then he was going to lie right back. The family went to their separate rooms soon after, each wrapped up in their own thoughts. Even as he shivered beneath his blankets, Jamie felt hot with indignation, too angry to sleep. He was sick of being treated like a little kid. It might be dark now but did Sarge think he somehow wouldn’t notice there had been a grave robbery? Jamie’s bedroom looked out on the cemetery! By morning there would be blue-and-white police cordons fluttering in the breeze around the remnants of Greg’s grave, men in white overalls combing the area for clues. The whole town would be alive with the news.

  Jamie wasn’t the only one having trouble sleeping that night. A burst of movie gunfire erupted from the TV downstairs, where Sarge was supposed to be sleeping. In the next room, Liam’s bedsprings creaked as he shifted restlessly in bed.

  When morning did finally arrive, it had a surprise for all of them. Jamie opened his bedroom curtains to find there were no policemen examining the graveyard. There was no one there at all. What was more, where only hours earlier a coffin had jutted out from the earth like the hull of a shipwrecked liner, now the soil was smooth and serene. Even from this distance, Jamie could make out the yellow glow of a fresh bunch of flowers laid at Greg’s headstone.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me!” Liam’s muffled voice, rising up through the grating into Jamie’s bedroom. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “If it is, I’m not laughing,” Sarge replied grimly.

  It felt like a long time since anyone had laughed or even smiled in the Lodge. The temperature had dropped even further, turning each room in the house into a frozen cell. Sarge took his frustration out on the broken boiler, disappearing into the cupboard under the stairs with a toolbox he had found in the shed. Judging by the loud bangs and oaths emanating out through the door, he wasn’t having any luck fixing it. Liam took the removal van over to Caxton to use the gym, leaving Jamie on his own. He had thought about borrowing Liam’s phone to text Keeley, but he had no idea what he could say to her. What with nightmarish visions and coffins rising up and sinking back into the ground, it was getting harder and harder for him to believe his own eyes. What kind of freak goes around digging up coffins? Sarge had asked disbelievingly. If only he had learned about Alderston’s history like Jamie had, he could have answered his own question. But George Rathbone and his men had been run out of town nearly two hundred years ago. And if some modern Resurrection Man had decided to pick up his shovel, why was there no sign of their crime? None of it made any sense to Jamie.

  He left Sarge hammering angrily in the cupboard and drifted into town. The sky was a barren white landscape above his head. It was market day in Alderston’s main square, rows of stalls creating a narrow warren filled with clothing and second-hand CDs and DVDs around the clock tower. A white van was parked in front of a charity shop, a chalkboard propped up on the serving hatch advertising fish caught fresh from the sea that morning.

  As Jamie threaded his way through the stalls, hands plunged in his pockets, he detected an uneasy edge to the bustling atmosphere. A young woman was arguing with a trader in a woolly hat over the price of a dressing gown, jabbing her finger into his chest. An old man glanced up warily at the swollen white clouds piling in overhead and spat on the ground, muttering darkly to himself. One trader had already started to pack his goods away, even through it was barely midday. When the man at the neighbouring stall pointed this out, he merely shook his head and continued ferrying boxes back to his van. Roxanne’s warning came whistling back to Jamie on the breeze: Winter’s coming. They like it when it’s cold.

  “Oi, lad!”

  Jamie turned round to see a trader in a wax jacket eyeing him thoughtfully. He was in his twenties, broad-shouldered and shaven-headed. There was something vaguely familiar about him.

  “Know you from somewhere, don’t I?” the trader asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Jamie said hesitantly. “I’m not from around here.”

  “Maybe so, but I’ve definitely seen you somewhere before.” The man grinned. “Don’t look so frightened, lad, I’m not taking you in for questioning. You’re Keeley Marshall’s new friend, aren’t you? I saw you talking to her at the funeral.”

  Suddenly Jamie realized where he had seen the man before – he had been the one giving Keeley a black look outside the church. Jamie nodded, feeling suddenly uneasy.

  “I thought so,” the trader said. “Well, listen, lad, since you’re new in town, let me give you some advice: stay the hell away from her.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. There’s hatred running in that one’s veins. I heard her bad-mouthing our Greg at the funeral, the little cow.”

  Jamie backed away, stumbling over an upturned crate. The trader leaned over his counter, his voice dropping to a threatening murmur. “So you tell Black Maggie to watch her step, right? Tell her Richie Metcalfe knows where she lives.”

  Jamie nodded and quickly walked off, trying not to look scared even though he was desperate to get away. He cut between two stalls and hurried down a narrow alleyway that ran down the side of the bank, not caring where he was going. It was only when he reached the end of the alley that he realized he had come out on to the small car park behind Roxanne’s taxi firm. A couple of cars sat idly in the spaces by the back door to the office.

  A dark green 4×4 was parked next to them.

  Jamie pulled sharply back from the alleyway’s entrance, his heart thumping against his ribcage. His head rang with the echoes of a dog snapping and biting as it fought against its chain, and a giant man’s mocking laughter. The last time Jamie had seen that vehicle it had been parked in front of the Portakabin in Mathers’s rain-swept scrapyard. What on earth was it doing here?

  Peering around the corner, Jamie’s heart sank when he saw the scrap dealer leaning against the side of his 4×4. Mathers had ditched his high-vis vest but apart from that he was dressed as usual, in a pair of blotchy grey overalls and wellington boots. His face, too, was as before; set in an idly mocking sneer. Mathers’s companion was obscured behind the 4×4 – when they stepped forward to sh
ake the scrap dealer’s hand, Jamie realized how much trouble they were in. It was Don, Roxanne’s right-hand man. If Mathers was looking for Sarge, then Don could tell him exactly where to find him.

  Laughing obligingly at a parting crack from Mathers, Don stood back as the scrap dealer got into his 4×4 and the engine rumbled into life. Jamie was halfway up the alleyway before the vehicle had swept powerfully out of the car park. He raced through the market, the stalls blurring into one as the traders barked out their offers – three for a fiver, cheapest in town, get your bargains here. By the time Jamie had left the market behind and reached the bottom of the hill, where the road forked beneath the shadow of Alderston church, he had given himself a stitch. He stopped to catch his breath, clutching at his sore side, his eyes alert for a glimpse of a green vehicle amongst the traffic. Up on top of the hill, the church stood resolute in the face of the cold wind: Aldus’s fortress, unbowed by fire and ice, and the crushing weight of passing centuries.

  Sarge and Liam wouldn’t be happy when they heard the news that Jamie was rushing home to bring them. It didn’t matter – he had to tell them. There was no telling what kind of danger they were in, but it felt as though the walls of the town were closing in around them, cutting off their escape routes. As he stumbled down the lane towards the Lodge, Jamie felt a soft, cold kiss upon his cheek. Looking up into the sky, he saw large white flakes spiralling lazily down towards the ground.

  It had started to snow.

  All of a sudden the air was alive with white flakes, a thick flurry descending upon the roofs and roads of Alderston. There was none of the noisy drama, the crash and crackle that accompanied thunder and lightning, or the rain’s slippery patter. The snow fell in stealthy whirls, landing on the ground as silent as a feather. By the time Jamie reached the house at the end of the road, the pavement was already covered in a fine white dusting. The bumper of the removal van was poking out through the driveway gates, and through the front-room window Jamie could see the flicker of the TV screen.