Afterwalkers

by Tom Becker

  “You all right?” asked Jamie.

  “Fine.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Nothing,” said Keeley, briskly adjusting her hat. “Just … watch your step, OK?”

  It was too late for Jamie to ask her what she meant – Keeley had already plunged into the gloom. He hurried after her, the shadows enveloping him. Although Jamie had been driven through the wood twice before, he soon realized that entering it on foot was a different matter entirely. Wedged in the front seat of the van, with his father and brother on either side, he had been safe, protected. But inside these trees, the outside world didn’t seem to matter any more. They could have been walking through the wood a thousand years ago, or another thousand years in the future. In here, the trees seemed to whisper, nothing would ever change.

  With Keeley hurriedly tramping through the snow ahead of him, Jamie had to concentrate on keeping up. The crisp tread of their footprints were the only sounds – no birds sang in the bare, skeletal branches; no animals scurried through the frosted undergrowth. There was a hollow absence of life in the wood that seemed due to more than just the changing of the seasons. Instinctively, Jamie was certain that Mathers wasn’t here. He found himself wishing that they had kept the road in sight – then he remembered the twisted wreckage of Greg’s car, and thought better of it. Maybe this hadn’t been such a clever idea after all.

  Almost as if she could hear his thoughts, Keeley stopped.

  “Woods,” she said bluntly, gesturing at the trees. “Happy now?”

  Jamie shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Great. Let’s get out of here.”

  As they ploughed on through the snow, the ground to their left began to rise, forming a steep bank. Keeley, Jamie noticed, kept her eyes fixed straight in front of her. If anything, she seemed to have picked up her pace.

  “What’s the big hurry?” he asked her.

  Keeley nodded ahead. “If we keep going this way we’ll soon come out the other side,” she told him. “We can walk back to town around the edge of the fields – hey, where are you going?”

  Jamie was already scrambling up the bank.

  “I’ll be back in a second!” he called out.

  “Jamie! Don’t!”

  He crested the bank, and looked out breathlessly over the scene on the other side. The ground fell away in front of him, sloping down towards a large pond – a dark gem set into the snowy ground. The surface of the water was a still, inky mirror. On the far edge of the pond the outline of a large rock was visible beneath the snow. The silence was total, deafening; the cold somehow more bitter and intense.

  As Jamie stood and stared, he heard the reluctant crunch of Keeley’s boots as she followed him up the bank and stood beside him.

  “Well, now you’ve seen it,” she sighed. “Welcome to Black Maggie’s pond.”

  “Lawrence told me about her,” said Jamie. “She was a witch, wasn’t she?”

  Keeley gave him a cold stare. “Of course she wasn’t a witch, dummy.”

  “But … I mean, that’s what everyone thought, wasn’t it?”

  “Just because everyone thinks something, it doesn’t mean it’s true, Jamie,” Keeley said, exasperated. “OK, Maggie had a sharp tongue and wouldn’t keep her mouth shut, and she argued with everyone in Alderston at one point or another. So people didn’t like her, and for years people had been accusing her of silly stuff, like making the cows dry up so they couldn’t produce any milk. But then one day her oldest enemy was found dead in her bed, her bones all broken. Maggie was arrested and accused of making a pact with the Devil. At her trial it was said she brought the dead back to life and sent them out to kill people in the town who had crossed her.”

  “What happened?”

  “They found her guilty, of course. Maggie was sentenced to the ducking stool as punishment. The next morning a crowd of people dragged her from her cell and brought her here. It was winter, just like now. An old woman, in her bare feet. She would have been so cold.”

  As Keeley spoke, Jamie could hear the echoes of the crowd – the jeers and the taunts, the mocking laughter as Black Maggie stumbled, her bony frame shivering, through the snow.

  “When they reached this pond they strapped her into a chair on the end of a long beam and plunged her into the water.”

  Jamie stared at the blank surface of the pond.

  “I can’t imagine what that must have felt like,” Keeley said softly. “The shock of it. Freezing cold water streaming into your nose and mouth. Fighting to breathe but being unable to break free. Five times they lifted her out, five times they stuck her back in again. Maggie stopped screaming after the third time. By the time they were done with her she was dead.”

  Jamie shuddered. “That’s horrible.”

  “That’s Alderston for you. They have their own way of taking care of things here. Black Maggie had the last laugh, though. The day after she died the town mayor was found dead in his bedroom, his neck broken and his ribcage shattered. People have stayed away from the pond ever since.”

  “Apart from Kitty Hawkins,” said Jamie.

  “She did.” Keeley gave him a meaningful look. “And look what happened to her.”

  “You think Black Maggie had something to do with Kitty’s accident?”

  “Course not! I think ‘Black’ Maggie was just a harmless old woman who was picked on and murdered by a cruel mob. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think that there aren’t monsters in this town, and I don’t come here more than I have to.”

  “You seem to know an awful lot about her.”

  Keeley blew out her cheeks. “It’s a family thing. I’m Maggie’s great-great-great-whatever-granddaughter.”

  “Hang on,” Jamie said incredulously. “That’s why people think you’re a witch? But that’s crazy! Who cares what happened hundreds of years ago?”

  “In this town?” Keeley laughed. “Everyone. Don’t you see, Jamie? The past doesn’t go away here. It’s like the snow, trapping us all – only this snow won’t ever thaw, and it won’t ever go away. I won’t ever be free from it.”

  “You could always leave. Go somewhere else.”

  “It’s not as simple as that. We don’t live like you, Jamie. We can’t just hop in a van and leave every time we feel like it. They’re making cutbacks at the hospital and Mum’s fighting for her job. I can’t ask her to run away because some idiots are being mean to me.”

  “I guess not,” said Jamie. “Well, I’m not from around here and I don’t care what anyone else says. I don’t think you’re a witch.”

  “Great,” Keeley said gloomily. “You’re weirder than I am.”

  Jamie smiled, and after a second, so did she. Suddenly he was aware that it was just the two of them by the side of the pond and that they were standing close together, their breath clouds brushing against each other. As Jamie gazed at Keeley the blush of colour in her cheeks seemed to deepen, and there was a look in her eyes that he couldn’t quite decipher.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Keeley said quickly.

  “What?”

  “You know.”

  “I don’t!” But Jamie could feel his own face reddening, and his voice squeaked with indignation.

  “Was that why you wanted to come here?” Keeley demanded. “So we’d be ‘alone’?”

  “No, I wanted to see the wood!”

  But it was too late – Keeley had already marched away down the bank and was stomping off through the snow. As he stumbled after her Jamie wasn’t sure whether she was actually angry with him or just embarrassed, or whether in fact she was just desperate for a reason to get out of the wood – to leave the glassy pond behind them and return to the bright white world beyond the trees’ edge.

  On the way back to Alderston Jamie trailed after Keeley like an embarrassed shadow. He knew she was waiting for him
to apologize but he wasn’t entirely sure what for – whatever Keeley might have thought, he hadn’t been planning on trying to kiss her. Jamie had never kissed a girl before; he had never even had the chance, although he would never have admitted it. So they walked home in silence, before sharing an awkward goodbye in front of the church. The wind ruffled Keeley’s fringe as she reached into her bag and handed Jamie an old cassette tape.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “I said I’d give you this back at the war memorial, remember? I found it in a box up in the attic. Take care of it – it’s my mum’s, and she’ll go spare if she finds I’ve taken it.”

  Jamie shrugged. “OK,” he said. Keeley had already started walking around down the hill. He called out after her: “Will I see you again?”

  “Maybe!” Keeley called back, without turning around. “Listen to the tape, Jamie-Not-From-Around-Here!”

  He watched her disappear down the road towards the town centre before walking home to the Lodge. There was no sign of Sarge, but Liam was lounging on the sofa in front of the TV, buried beneath several layers of blankets. He grinned at the sight of Jamie.

  “Welcome home, lover boy! How did your date go?”

  “It wasn’t a date!”

  “Oh aye?” Liam’s eyes twinkled. “Give you the knock-back, did she?”

  “No, I didn’t…!” Jamie shook his head. There was no use talking to his brother when he was like this. Liam enjoyed tormenting him too much. “Can I have the keys to the van?”

  “Course you can,” Liam said breezily. “Drive her carefully, though, and fill up the tank before you bring her back.”

  “Ha ha,” said Jamie. “I’m not driving anywhere. I just need to listen to this.”

  He passed his brother the cassette tape. Liam turned it over in his hands. “This is old school,” he murmured. “What’s on it?”

  “Don’t know yet, do I?” Jamie said impatiently. “But the van’s the only thing old enough to have a cassette player I can use. Go on, give us the keys!”

  “I tell you what,” said Liam, tapping the cassette against his cheek. “How about I keep the keys, and we’ll listen to it together?”

  Jamie shrugged, defeated. “Whatever.”

  Liam climbed out from beneath his blankets and pulled on a jacket, playfully rebuffing his brother’s attempts to snatch the cassette tape back. They went out into the driveway, where the van was sitting idly in the snow, and climbed up into the front seat, brushing crumbs from the worn leather on to the floor. The view through the windscreen was dominated by the crumbling graveyard wall on the other side of the lane. Blowing into his hands, Liam turned the key in the ignition and inserted the tape into the cassette player. For a few seconds there was silence, and then a loud click signalled the beginning of a recording. Murmuring voices; a television blaring in the background. Someone wheezing close to the microphone, exhausted breaths like a tyre slowly deflating.

  “Are you sure you’re all right to do this, Granddad Frank?” a girl’s voice asked. Keeley’s mum, Jamie guessed. “I can always come back tomorrow, you know.”

  “I’m fine, Jennifer,” an old man insisted, in a voice like crackling parchment. “Fire away, my girl.”

  “OK, if you’re sure. Like I said on the phone, our history teacher Mr Roberts wants us to do a project on the First World War. Seeing as you were actually in the trenches, I thought if I could come to the nursing home and ask you a few questions that would be much more interesting than just reading a load of books.”

  “Well, this is going to be fascinating,” Liam said sourly. “You made me come out here to listen to some girl’s homework project?”

  “Shhh!” said Jamie. “I’m trying to listen!”

  “Sooooo…” There was a rustle of paper as Jennifer looked through her notes. “Dad told me you went to France as a member of the … Fourteenth Lancashire Battalion.”

  “The Pals,” the old man said proudly. “Everyone called us the Alderston Pals. We came from all around the area – from Caxton and Wellesby too, and the surrounding villages – but it was Alderston lads at the heart of it. Everyone knew not to mess with the people from our town. Now it was time to show the Germans a thing or two. We were looking forward to it. What silly boys we were.”

  “So you went with your friends?”

  “Aye, there were the Illingworth brothers, Charlie and Christopher; Dick Stevens; Harold, the fishmonger’s lad. And my best friend Jack came too, on the toss of a coin would you believe. As a lad he had found the coin in the woods near his house at Lark Farm, and swore blind it was lucky. Well, it couldn’t have been that lucky: he called heads for the Front, and tails to stay home, and heads it came up.”

  “What was it like when you got there?” asked Jennifer. “In the trenches, I mean?”

  The old man wheezed painfully. “Boiling in summer, freezing cold in winter,” he said. “Knee-deep with churned-up mud; rats scurrying everywhere. Exploding shells, dead bodies. They weren’t trenches, Jennifer, they were the tunnels of Hell. We were there six months before the order came to go over the top into No Man’s Land – it felt like a lifetime.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “Scared? I was petrified – we all were! The order was a death sentence. We were sitting ducks out in No Man’s Land; target practice for the Germans. Shells were exploding all around me, earth flying up into the air and bodies tumbling to the ground, but I kept walking. We all kept walking. What else could we do? In the blink of an eye over three hundred Pals died, including most of the boys from Alderston. Somehow I survived. I don’t know why I didn’t get hit – whether it was just plain old good luck, or something else. You’d have to ask Him Upstairs, and I’ll be seeing him long before you will.”

  “What about your friend Jack?”

  “He took a piece of shrapnel in the head,” Frank told her. “A lesser man would have died right there, in a churned-up field in France, but my pal Jack was a fighter. The medics found him bleeding in a ditch and managed to patch him up enough to bring him away from the Front. Jack survived the journey back to England, but his injuries were too severe for even him to overcome. He died in Caxton Hospital three months after coming back from France, still clutching his lucky coin.”

  “That’s so sad!” Jennifer said sympathetically. “You must have been devastated.”

  “We all were. But that was the Great War for you. There wasn’t a family in Alderston who hadn’t lost a loved one: a son or a husband or a brother. When I eventually came home two years later the town was still in mourning.”

  “In 1918? After the war had ended, you mean?”

  There was a long pause on the tape. “The war didn’t end in 1918.”

  “I’m pretty sure it did, Granddad,” Jennifer told him gently. “Look, it’s here in my notes: ‘The First World War ended when the Germans signed an Armistice on 11 November, 1918.’”

  “Not for us, it didn’t,” the old man said obstinately.

  “I don’t understand—”

  “You’re an Alderston girl!” he snapped, suddenly angry. “I shouldn’t have to tell you! People can’t just leave out the bits of history they don’t like!”

  “You’re not making any sense, Granddad! What are you talking about?”

  The old man erupted into a hacking cough that crackled over the speakers. When he spoke again it was more slowly, each breath an audible struggle.

  “I’m talking about what happened when the Pals came back to Alderston,” he said quietly. “The living and the dead.”

  “My auntie used to tell me stories about ghosts of some of the dead soldiers haunting the town. Is that what you mean?”

  “Ghosts!” The old man’s voice was thick with contempt. “Ghosts are nothing to be frightened of. They can’t lay on a finger on you. I thought I had seen the worst the world was capable of i
n the trenches, but I came home to Alderston to find a killer on the loose who was meaner and stronger than ten German soldiers. A creature of pure evil.”

  “A killer? Granddad, I’ve never heard anything about this!”

  “Of course you haven’t! That’s the problem with this town – it’s obsessed with keeping secrets. It was the same in those months after 1918. No one wanted to face up to the fact that people were disappearing and not coming back. It was left to the handful of boys who had survived the Front to band together and hunt down the killer. We finally cornered it in a barn on the edge of the town. It was so strong; it took all eight of us to bring it down. We had to chop its head off to keep from getting up again.”

  “Granddad!” Shock echoed in Jennifer’s voice. “You didn’t!”

  “We didn’t have a choice. If we hadn’t, it would have carried on killing.”

  “I don’t understand this,” Jennifer said desperately. “What are you talking about? Who was this killer?”

  “It was Jack,” Frank replied miserably. “My poor pal Jack…”

  The old man became choked up, and he started to cry. There was an awkward pause, and then a nurse’s voice interrupted the tape.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to stop whatever it is you’re doing,” she said sternly. “Frank’s clearly not well enough for this.”

  Jennifer stammered an apology and the recording hurriedly clicked off, leaving a soft hiss echoing around the van as the tape continued to play. Jamie pressed eject and turned to Liam.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “I think Frank forgot to take his medication that day.”

  “Be serious!”

  “I am! Haven’t you heard Sarge talking about soldiers coming back from wars? Half of them are a complete mess. They end up with Gulf War Syndrome or something like that. Your man Frank there sounds like he was suffering from shell shock. He came back to Alderston and found his dead friend was going around killing people, so he chopped his head off ?” Liam tapped his the side of his head. “Yeah, right.”