by Tom Becker
“If none of it happened, why did Keeley give me the tape?”
“How should I know? The inner workings of the teenage goth mind …” Seeing Jamie’s serious expression, Liam punched his brother lightly on the arm. “Don’t let all this local mumbo jumbo get to you, little bro. Alderston’s a funny old place but it’s not—”
Liam paused, looking up through the van’s windscreen. Following his brother’s gaze, Jamie saw a procession of figures walking in single file through the graveyard towards the watch house.
“Hello, hello,” Liam muttered. “What’s going on here, then?”
Jamie recognized the grey-haired vicar at the head of the procession. Don was also there, along with Richie Metcalfe and the paunchy landlord of the Royal Oak – and a couple of other men Jamie didn’t know. At the watch-house door the vicar produced a set of keys and unlocked the building. Don and Richie went inside, and reappeared carrying a mortsafe between them. Even at this distance Jamie could see that they were struggling with the weight of the iron cage.
“They’re taking the mortsafes,” said Liam. “Sarge isn’t going to like this.”
But as Jamie watched, he realized that they weren’t going far. Slipping and sliding in the snow, their faces reddening with the effort, Don and Richie manoeuvred the mortsafes over one of the graves and lowered it into place. The other men followed suit, carrying the cages out of the watch house and securing them over the tops of the graves.
“What are they doing?” murmured Liam.
“Protecting the graves,” Jamie told him. “I guess they’re expecting the grave robber to strike again. They did the same to stop George Rathbone and the Resurrection Men.”
“And when was that, then?”
Jamie nodded. “About two hundred years ago. Why?”
Liam pointed at the gleaming iron cages. “Because those mortsafes aren’t two hundred years old. They look pretty new to me – five, ten years old at the most. So it’s a bit convenient that they just happened to have some on site. Unless they were expecting this.”
Jamie glanced across at his brother, and back at the cassette tape.
Liam shook his head. “I’m getting as bad as you,” he muttered. “Come on, lad, let’s go inside.”
Jamie lay back in the bath and let out a long sigh of satisfaction. Steam was rising up from the water in great clouds, wreathing the bathroom in humid fog. Droplets of condensation were running down the white tiles, and the mirror had misted up. Peering over the edge of the tub, Jamie could barely see his pile of clothes in the corner through the steam. The wind buffeting the house only made the bathroom feel more like a sanctuary.
The Lodge’s shower might still be working but the bath was connected to the broken boiler, and it had taken Jamie the best part of half an hour and several trips upstairs to fill the tub with water he had boiled in the kettle. It had been worth every second. Ever since his family’s arrival in Alderston he had felt besieged by the cold, and it was glorious to lie stewing in the bath’s warm embrace, to feel the heat passing all the way down from his head to his toes. Jamie felt like he could have stayed there for ever, until his skin was wrinkled like an old man’s and he was too weak to clamber out of the tub.
His dad and his brother had headed out to the Royal Oak an hour earlier, continuing their careful search for information on Mathers’s whereabouts. Liam had looked uneasy at the prospect of leaving Jamie on his own, but there was no way Jamie was going to ask him to stay. Sarge waited impatiently in the doorway as Liam wrote his mobile number down on a piece of paper in the kitchen, telling Jamie to call him if there was any trouble. Secretly Jamie was grateful for the prospect of an evening to himself. And if Mathers was stalking the streets of Alderston, Jamie didn’t want Sarge walking alone through the town at night.
Wherever the scrap dealer was hiding, it wasn’t in the woods – Jamie’s trip with Keeley had convinced him of that. Perhaps he should have felt reassured, but if anything the opposite was true. Hours after he returned home, Jamie had had the uneasy feeling that he had brought something back with him, like a stone wedged in the soles of his trainers. Added to the unsettling tape of Keeley’s grandfather and the sight of the townspeople breaking out the mortsafes, and Jamie was left with more questions than ever.
The wind had picked up outside, rattling the windowpanes in their settings. Jamie was resting his head against the tub when a loud thud on the roof made him sit up. It sounded as though something had fallen out of the sky and crashed into the Lodge. He sat very still, until the ripples in his bathwater had died away and the water was a glassy sheen. Must have been the wind, Jamie told himself.
There was another thud on the roof, and a painful crunch of tiles. The bathwater winced and quivered. Jamie held his breath.
Crunch. Crunch. Another jarring thud, louder than before.
It wasn’t the wind. There was someone on the roof.
Jamie stood up in the bath, water dripping from his body, and pulled a towel off the handrail. He dried himself quickly, his skin still damp as he slipped into his clothes. The thuds and crunches above his head had stopped, plunging the house into an ominous silence, a snatched breath between screams. Jamie slowly opened the bathroom door, tendrils of steam curling around his legs and snaking out into the cold corridor as he peered into the darkness.
“Hello?” he called out softly, hoping to hear Sarge’s gruff bark from downstairs, or Liam’s laughter. But there was no reply. Jamie was half tempted to lock himself in the bathroom and wait until the noise died away, but if there was a problem and he needed to call for help, the phone was downstairs. He couldn’t spend the whole night trembling in the bathroom.
Jamie crept along the landing, leaving the drowsy warmth behind him. Floorboards creaked uneasily beneath his feet. Shadows clutched long-held secrets. The house seemed larger in the darkness, older and steeped in a sullen air – no longer Jamie’s home but the solitary lair of George Rathbone. In his mind’s eye Jamie could hear the echo of the Resurrection Man’s footsteps as he paced through the lonely halls, readying himself for another midnight trip to the graveyard. A swig of spirits to warm the chest and steady the nerves; a muttered oath for courage; the spit and crackle of wood as the fire burned low in the grate…
There was a loud bang on the front door. Jamie froze.
Tiptoeing to the top of the stairs, he peered down the hallway. The noise had been pregnant with threat – less of a knock than a slammed fist. Could someone really have scrambled down from the roof to the door so quickly? Or was there more than one person outside? Jamie didn’t want to think about that possibility. He racked his brains, trying to remember whether Sarge had locked the front door before he had left.
There was nothing for it – he had to check. Jamie tiptoed down the staircase and along the hallway, each footstep as soft as a breath. Reaching out a trembling hand, he tried the door handle. It was locked. He let out a sigh of relief. The window by the front door was made of frosted glass, preventing Jamie from seeing outside clearly, but he couldn’t make out any silhouettes on the doorstep.
He walked into the kitchen, resisting the urge to turn the lights on as he went. If it looked like there was nobody home, perhaps whoever was outside would get bored and go away. Moonlight was pouring in through the kitchen blinds, collecting in a pool in the sink. The fridge let out a dull hum as it ticked over. The back door was also locked. For the time being, at least, he was safe.
It was then that the house phone started ringing. Jamie stood and stared at it. Something about the timing of the call gave it a sinister, insistent edge. Each ring was a separate taunt, daring him to pick it up. Jamie watched the phone for a whole minute, and then another, silently praying in vain for it to stop. Whoever was calling seemed happy to wait for him to pick up. Maybe they knew he was there. Maybe Liam was calling on his mobile with an urgent message. Finally Jamie’s nerve broke. He
ran over and snatched up the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Jamie, Jamie, Jamie,” a voice rasped. Jamie’s heart sank. It was Mr Redgrave. “Bad time, is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“It took you a long time to answer the phone. You kept me waiting.”
“I was in the bath.”
“What about Sarge and Liam – they in there with you?”
“They’re not in,” said Jamie, instantly regretting it.
“You’re home alone?” Mr Redgrave tutted slowly. “Parents these day.”
“They’re coming back any minute now,” lied Jamie.
“No they’re not, you little whelp,” Mr Redgrave said viciously. “Sarge is propping up the bar in the Royal Oak and he and your brother will be there until last orders. There’s no one there to help you, son. Not a living soul.”
Goosebumps broke out across Jamie’s skin. “What do you want?” he asked.
“You know what I want. We had a deal. If you stayed in the house, you did a job for me.”
“I know, but—”
“We had a deal!” A voice like a snakebite. Venom dripped from the receiver. “I don’t care about excuses. I want my mortsafes!”
“We tried to get them, honest!” pleaded Jamie. “But someone got there before us. They dug up Greg’s body and took it. We couldn’t stick around after that!”
There was a strange, strangled noise down the phone line. It took Jamie a few seconds to realize that Mr Redgrave was chuckling.
“So it was grave robbers who stopped you, was it?”
“Yes!”
“You’ve spent too much time listening to local ghost stories, Jamie. It’s been two hundred years since the Resurrection Men were last abroad in Alderston. You don’t have to worry about grave robbers, or the police, or anybody else. You only have to worry about me. Tell Sarge that I want my mortsafes by the end of the week. Or there’ll be penalties.”
Jamie nervously ran his tongue over dry lips. “Penalties?”
“It’s nothing personal, son,” Mr Redgrave told him. “It was nothing personal with Mathers, either. But in our business, you have to have penalties. Else people think they can get away with murder.”
“It’s not fair!” said Jamie. “Why us? What did we ever do to you?”
“You stole from me,” Mr Redgrave told him sharply. “You and your dad and Liam took a whole load of copper wire from the railway – from my railway. You and Mathers had been making a pretty penny dipping into my pocket, so I thought it was time you did something for me in return.”
Jamie thought back to the rainy morning in the scrapyard, and Mathers’ warning that the railways were off limits: There are some serious characters in the scrap metal business these days…
“We didn’t know, I swear!” Jamie told Mr Redgrave. “Not until afterwards!”
“What difference does that make? The word was out – that’s all that matters. So tell Sarge that he either brings me what I want, or next time it’ll be one of his sons he’s digging up in the garden.”
“He doesn’t like it when people threaten him.”
“It’s not a threat. It’s a promise. Tell me this, son: are you sure you’re home alone?”
The line went dead before Jamie could reply. He put down the receiver and looked around the empty kitchen, his blood turning to ice. The moon withdrew its pale fingers behind a cloud, returning the kitchen to darkness. Where was Liam’s phone number? Jamie began rifling through the scraps of paper by the phone, tossing aside old shopping lists and takeaway menus until he located the piece of paper with Liam’s number on it. He picked up the phone.
The kitchen door creaked, and a large shadow detached itself from the gloom. A hand flew out of the darkness, knocking the receiver from Jamie’s grasp.
Stumbling backwards, Jamie took a shuddering blow to the temple and collapsed to the floor. The world reeled and buckled around him. His nostrils were flooded with the smell of outdoors; of earth and moss and frozen rain. A hand grabbed him around the throat, cutting off his cry for help before it could escape his mouth. His attacker knelt down, driving a knee into his chest. The pressure was unbearable; it felt as though Jamie’s ribcage would snap like a handful of dead twigs. He clutched feebly at the man’s arm as he throttled him, but it was no use. The grip was total, absolute.
Darkness was falling across Jamie’s vision when he heard the sound of the front door opening, and then the house was filled with voices – Liam and Sarge, calling out his name. Jamie’s attacker paused and then lurched up into a standing position, releasing the terrible pressure from Jamie’s throat and chest. Air flooded back into his lungs, overwhelming him. There was a loud crash as the back door flew open and then Jamie was alone in the kitchen, coughing and sprawled across the kitchen floor like a drowning man washed up on a linoleum shore.
“Jamie? You all right?”
Slowly, grudgingly, the world began to swim back into focus. Jamie was lying on the sofa in the front room, his head propped up on something soft. His chest and his throat were aching and there was a deep thudding inside his skull where he had been hit, but he was alive. Two familiar faces were hovering over him like concerned clouds.
“You’re back,” Jamie murmured.
“And not a moment too soon, by the looks of things,” Sarge said grimly. “Liam rang to check you were all right, and when he couldn’t get through we figured something was up. Came back to find you on the kitchen floor.”
“There was a man,” Jamie said haltingly. “In the dark … I didn’t see him. He ran away … the back door…”
Liam nodded. “We saw, little bro.”
“The footprints were headed across the fields,” Sarge told him. “There’s no point trying to follow them in the dark. Mathers won’t be coming back tonight, at any rate.”
“I’d love it if he did,” Liam said darkly. “I’d wipe that smirk off his face once and for all. Was it him you were talking to on the phone?”
Jamie shook his head. “Mr Redgrave.”
“This gets better and better,” said Sarge. “What did he want?”
“The mortsafes. He says if he doesn’t get them by the end of the week he’ll kill me or Liam. The copper we took from the railway was his – that’s why he dragged us all into this.”
Sarge rubbed his face wearily. The lines around his eyes seemed to have deepened over the previous week – for the first time that Jamie could remember, his dad looked old.
“I’m sorry,” said Jamie. He blinked back the tears threatening his eyes. “I wanted to fight him off, but he was so strong!”
“Hey, hey, hey, it’s all right, son!” Sarge’s grizzled face crinkled into a smile as he patted Jamie’s arm. “This was my fault – I should never have left you on your own with Mathers around. There’s a line I thought he’d never cross, but I was wrong. But I’ll take care of everything, don’t you worry about it. You rest now. I’ll take care of everything.”
The last thing Jamie heard before he slipped gratefully into unconsciousness was Sarge’s voice, whispering a hoarse lullaby:
“No one lays a hand on one of my boys and gets away with it. No one.”
The next morning Jamie woke to find himself smothered in blankets, warm waves from the portable heater on the floor lapping over him. Gingerly he pushed himself up into a sitting position, wincing at his sore ribcage. Sarge was sitting in the armchair opposite, watching him calmly.
“How are you feeling?”
“OK.”
“Well enough to come out with me and Liam? We’ve got to take care of some things but I’m not leaving you on your own until this … situation is resolved.”
Jamie nodded.
“Good lad,” said Sarge. “We’ll wait for you while you get ready.”
In the bathroom Jamie gingerl
y inspected his battered body in the mirror as the shower thundered down behind him. There were purple bruises on his chest where his attacker had driven his knee into his ribs, and his throat was covered in fingermarks. Closing his eyes, Jamie could see Mathers lurching out of the gloom towards him. He might not have been able to make out his face in the darkness, but it had to have been the scrap dealer, dancing to Mr Redgrave’s macabre tune like a vicious puppet. One thing was certain – if they didn’t find a way to stop Mathers, he would return sooner rather than later.
Jamie felt better for a hot shower and some breakfast. As he spooned cereal into his mouth, Liam sat across from him at the kitchen table, idly surfing the net on his phone. Sarge stood with his back to them, leaning against the sink and staring out of the window. He was frozen in an icy, deliberate rage. Usually Jamie would have been frightened by the palpable threat of violence in the air, but this time it gave him a small, guilty thrill. The truth was, this was the closest Sarge had come to showing Jamie that he cared about him for a long time.
They left the house soon afterwards, slipping past the stranded removal van in the gateway and tramping through the snow towards the town centre. The hillside, which yesterday had been dotted with children playing, was quiet. It seemed to Jamie that every time he stepped out of doors he saw fewer and fewer people. But when he walked past Withershins he was surprised to see a couple of people browsing the shelves. The rest of the town may have closed down, but for once Lawrence had customers.
As they left the town centre behind them the white snow lost its lustre until it became mottled and grey, flecked with stones. Outside Roxanne’s Cabs Liam peeled off without a word, heading around the side of the building. His heart quickening in his chest, Jamie followed Sarge inside. The chairs in the reception were empty as usual, the stack of local newspapers left unread on the table. Behind the glass partition Don was tucking into a hot bacon and egg sandwich. At the sight of Sarge he hastily wiped the runny yolk from his mouth with the back of his hand and put the rest of the sandwich down on the counter.
