by Tom Becker
Jamie lay wheezing on the ground, his lungs burning as air poured back into them. The lane was suddenly eerily quiet, the only sound the indignant hiss of steam as it rose from the engine. Although the van hadn’t had time to reach top speed, it had been moving fast enough to embed the front bumper into the brickwork. There was no sign of Mr Redgrave amid the debris. As Jamie crawled away from the van its passenger door banged open, and Liam stumbled clear of the vehicle. Blood was pouring from an ugly gash on his forehead and his arm was hanging by his side but he was alive.
As Liam walked away, he looked down at the black liquid oozing out from beneath the van across the tarmac. A strange look passed across his face – a flicker of amusement. Reaching into his pocket, Liam flicked open the silver lighter and struck up a flame. Then he tossed it casually into the dark liquid pooling beneath the van’s engine.
“Get down, Jamie!” he shouted.
The oil caught immediately, a sheet of flame following a deadly trail back to the van. For a while the flames seemed content to gnaw away at the van’s chassis, but then the fire reached the engine and the removal van exploded in a thunderous ball of fire, enveloping the graveyard railings and clawing at the nearest gravestones. Amid the billowing smoke, a burning figure tore itself away from the flames, and Jamie caught a horrified glance of Mr Redgrave as the draugr staggered away from the van towards him, arms outstretched. He managed a handful of agonized paces in Jamie’s direction before collapsing in a charred heap in the middle of the road.
Every joint in Jamie’s body was aching, and his skull was pounding. He sat back against the base of the cemetery wall, resting his head on the cool brickwork. The air was thick with the smell of smoke and burnt flesh. Keeley was watching from the driveway, her face bathed in the red shadow of the flames. As Liam hobbled over towards him, Jamie saw, to his amazement, that his brother was laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” said Liam, with a shake of his head. “Everything. I don’t know. This town.” There was a catch in his voice, as though any second his laughter could topple over into tears. He sat down next to Jamie. “This bloody town.”
In the aftermath of the battle in the churchyard, the cold hurriedly withdrew its spindly fingers from around Alderston’s throat, as though scalded by the flames that had engulfed the removal van. The destruction of the draugr had lifted the pall that had hung over the town like a bleak fog, the sun reappearing for the first time in days to burn through the maddening grey blanket of sky.
With the lifting of winter’s icy siege, the roads around Alderston became passable once more. The first vehicle to make it over the Moss was an ambulance, urged into the still-treacherous journey by a phone call from Jennifer Marshall. Liam and Jamie looked on as Sarge was strapped on to a trolley and lifted carefully into the back of the ambulance. The patient made no sound, only the occasional blinking of his eyelids indicating that there was any life in him at all. At Caxton General, Sarge was wheeled away for a battery of tests.
Reassured by the doctors that their dad’s life wasn’t in immediate danger, Jamie and Liam returned to the Lodge later that afternoon. Jamie had been reluctant to return to the scene of their desperate fight against the draugr, but as Liam had pointed out, they were tired and dirty and running low on money. Where else could they go? As the taxi pulled up outside the Lodge, Jamie’s heart had sunk at the sight of a police car parked on Church Lane, and two officers inspecting the burnt wreckage of the van. Liam immediately bundled Jamie inside the house, and they raced up to the bedroom to watch through the window. The police were not alone – the vicar was standing with them, with Don at his side. After a few minutes the men all shook hands and the policemen headed back to their car.
Liam laughed incredulously.
“What is it?” Jamie asked his brother.
“Call me crazy,” said Liam, a note of wonder in his voice, “but I think we’ve just seen the end of the police investigation.”
“But what about all the bodies?”
“What bodies?” said Liam. “When we left here Redgrave’s remains were in the middle of the road. You see them now?”
Puzzled, Jamie looked in vain down the empty lane for the draugr’s corpse. “It can’t have just disappeared,” he said. “Someone had to move it.”
“Someone did,” Liam replied. “Are you really that surprised? You know how people here feel about outsiders, especially the police. I’m guessing Don and his pals have cleaned up for us. All that’s left is a wrecked van, and they can talk their way out of that.”
“But what about Lawrence?” said Jamie, struck by an urgent thought. “He was killed by a draugr, remember? That means he’ll turn into one too!”
“I wouldn’t worry about that either,” his brother said, turning away from the window. “I think we can trust the locals to take it from here.”
Jamie wasn’t so sure, and that night he lay shivering in bed, listening out for the tread of a draugr on the stairs. But when the police didn’t ring at their house the next day, or the day after that, he began to realize that Liam was right. Jamie never did learn for certain what had happened to the bodies they had left littering the churchyard, but that weekend he saw a procession of 4×4s rattle out across the fields behind the Lodge, and as dusk fell he could have sworn he heard a distant crackle of flames, and caught a faint tang of burnt flesh upon the breeze.
The next morning, Jamie opened the door to find a small metal object lying on the doorstep for him. He picked up Aldus’s spearhead and carefully added it to the rest of the Viking treasures stashed in Liam’s rucksack in the shed.
Though Alderston’s residents had stayed in their houses during the night of the draugr, their curtains drawn and doors locked shut, it soon became clear that everyone knew what had happened. No one spoke about it, of course – Alderston guarded its secrets jealously. But when Jamie walked down the street he was aware of eyes swivelling in his direction, nudges and respectful nods singling him out. Shopkeepers refused to take Liam’s money, pressing groceries into their hands with a smile or a wink. Even Keeley claimed that people had stopped talking about her behind her back – though whether or not she was happy about that wasn’t entirely clear.
“I’m not going to fall for it,” she warned Jamie, as they perched on the steps by the war memorial. “Just because a couple of people have been nice to me, don’t think I’m going to start wearing pink dresses and dreaming about getting a boyfriend.”
“I wouldn’t dare,” Jamie said hastily.
“Good.”
No matter what happened to Keeley, he knew, a little part of her would always be Black Maggie. You couldn’t escape the past that easily – Jamie had learned that the hard way. He was reminded of it every time he passed the whitewashed windows of Withershins. The bookshop had been closed down, its collection of occult books shipped out of Alderston like a consignment of toxic waste. No one ever mentioned its owner; Lawrence had become a ghost in his own right.
One morning Jamie was walking along the main road into town when a black Mini tooted its horn and pulled up alongside him. Jennifer Marshall wound down her window.
“I’m going to the hospital to drop something off,” she told him. “Do you want to come with me?”
Jamie nodded and climbed into the passenger seat. He took every opportunity he could to see Sarge, as getting back and forth from the hospital was becoming a bit of a problem. The charred wreck of the removal van had been towed away the day after Sarge had been taken to Caxton General and neither of them felt comfortable calling Roxanne’s Cabs – even if a guilty and apologetic Don had told Liam they could use their cars for free.
It was warm inside the Mini, the car’s heater purring smoothly. A jangly pop song was playing on the radio. Jennifer Marshall smiled at him as she drove away.
“It’s a good job this snow is starting to clear,” she s
aid chattily. “At one point I thought I was going to have to try and ski to get to work!”
“Yeah.”
Adults amazed Jamie sometimes. After all they had been through, all Keeley’s mum could think about was the weather! She said nothing about the night Mathers’s draugr had attacked Sarge, and the fiery destruction that had ensued afterwards. But it hung in the air between them, like the dusting of ashy snow still covering the rooftops.
As they left Alderston behind in the rear-view mirror and the Mini entered the wood on the Moss, Jamie suppressed a shiver. Even the passing of the draugr couldn’t completely strip the trees of their menace. There remained something about the place that had hold of him – a tangle of tree roots and damp pondweeds around Jamie’s heart that he didn’t think he’d ever be able to shake off. He was glad when the car passed through the other side and out on to the Moss. The road was covered in grit, snow piled up on either side. Keeley’s mum drove slowly, waiting in the lay-bys to let the vehicles heading in the other direction pass first.
“I heard that they’ve put the deeds to the Lodge in your dad’s name,” she said to Jamie. “After what your family’s done for this town, it’s the least they can do.”
Jamie shrugged. “I guess.”
“Do you think you’ll be stopping in Alderston for long?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“Keeley will be pleased.”
“Really?”
Jennifer laughed. “She’s not very good at showing at it, but Keeley likes you a lot. She’d be devastated if you left. Though for God’s sake don’t tell her I said that,” she added hurriedly. “She’ll kill me.”
Jamie sat quietly as Keeley’s mum chatted away, looking out through the window over the Moss. It was funny how quickly things changed. Sitting in the passenger seat used to be second nature to Jamie, but after his time in Alderston, snowbound and shipwrecked, it felt odd being in a moving vehicle again. All those years in the removal van, the thousands of miles they had travelled up and down the country, the endless service stations and scrapyards, the ever-present fear of being caught: it all felt like a lifetime ago. The van was wreckage now. Scrap metal.
It took another twenty minutes of driving along gritted roads to reach the hospital, a large complex of buildings on the outskirts of Caxton. A plastic bag danced in the wind blowing across the car park. Jamie followed Keeley’s mum as she hurried up to the automatic doors and through into reception. He was already familiar with the route up the staircase and through the long corridors to Sarge’s ward. When they reached the double doors outside the ward, Keeley’s mum squeezed Jamie’s arm and left him alone, heading off towards the nurses’ station.
Sarge was lying in a bed at the end of the ward, surrounded by bleeping machines. He didn’t turn his head when Jamie approached, his blue eyes dim and blank. A catatonic state, the doctors called it. Something to do with post-traumatic stress disorder. There had been a lot of long words when they’d explained it to Jamie and Liam, and Jamie hadn’t been able to follow it all. He got all he needed to know from Liam’s grim expression.
“Will he come out of it?” Liam had asked the doctor.
“It’s hard to say,” the doctor had replied. “The brain is a remarkably complex piece of machinery, and has its own methods of coping with sudden shock or trauma. Your father might be like this for years, or he could wake up tomorrow. We can’t make any promises.”
Liam had nodded slowly. There wasn’t much else he could do. Now Jamie pulled up a chair beside Sarge’s bed and sat down. He stared at the floor.
“Um, hi, Sarge,” he said awkwardly. The doctor had told them it was important to keep talking to Sarge, but Jamie couldn’t help feeling self-conscious mumbling away with no hope of a reply. “Things are all right, I guess. I think we’re going to hang around Alderston for a while. The van’s a wreck but we can stay in the Lodge for as long as we like, and Liam’s got some work at that gym in Caxton. We thought his arm was broken but it’s not too bad and healing pretty quickly. So that’s good.”
He trailed off guiltily. Of course it wasn’t good. How could anything be good, how could he be happy, with his dad like this? Throughout his life Sarge had sworn to stay out of prison, only to find himself trapped in a cell of even smaller dimensions. Inside his mind was he furiously pacing up and down, banging on the bars and raging for someone to free him? Jamie shook his head, banishing the thought from his mind. He got up and gave his dad a fierce hug. Sarge’s cheek bristled like the striking surface of a matchbox against his face.
“We’ll be waiting for you when you come back,” Jamie whispered. “I promise.”
He talked for another ten minutes or so, until he had run out of things to say. As he walked away from his dad’s bedside he saw Keeley’s mum waiting for him in the ward doorway.
“Ready to go?” she asked brightly.
Jamie nodded.
“Come on, then,” she said. “Let’s get you home before your brother starts wondering where you are.”
She put her arm around Jamie’s shoulder and gave him a little hug. He was surprised how comforting he found it. As they walked out of the ward into the corridor, a door opened and a nurse with a blonde ponytail popped her head around it.
“Ooo, Jen, I was hoping I’d catch you,” she said. “Have you got a sec?”
“Of course, Rachel.” Keeley’s mum glanced down at Jamie. “Stay here, love. I won’t be long.”
She disappeared inside the room, leaving Jamie alone in the corridor. He walked over to the window, his trainers squeaking loudly on the floor. The afternoon was melting away before his eyes, the streetlights in the car park already shining brightly in the gloom. Visitors hurried back to their vehicles, struggling against the growing wind. Jamie leaned his forehead against the window, feeling the cool kiss of glass on his skin.
“Leave me alone!”
Jamie jumped at the shout, a girl’s cry that had erupted from one of the private rooms down the corridor. A low voice murmured something in reply, only for the girl to let out a loud, choked sob. Jamie pulled away from the window and began walking along the corridor towards the room. The door had been left ajar, allowing him a glimpse inside. The blinds had been drawn over the windows, plunging the room into darkness. A blonde-haired girl in a hospital gown was sitting bolt upright in bed, being comforted by an older, heavyset woman. With a jolt Jamie recognized her: it was Roxanne.
“It’s all right, Donna!” she said soothingly, stroking the girl’s cheek. “Nothing can hurt you now, I promise.”
“You don’t understand!” Donna retorted, through clenched teeth. “Every time I close my eyes I keep seeing it, over and over again. I can’t stop seeing it!”
“Give it time, sweetheart,” said Roxanne. “You’ll get better.”
“I’m just so tired!” Donna told her, with a catch in her throat. “At night I lie there trying to think about anything but the accident, but just as I’m about to fall asleep, I’m back in Greg’s car on the Moss. The radio’s on loud and he’s laughing. There’s a van up ahead and he swerves past it … I tell him he’s driving too fast but all he does is grin and push down harder on the accelerator. Then we’re in the woods.”
“Hush now, Donna,” Roxanne told her. “Don’t go back there again.”
“Go back?” Donna let out a bitter laugh. “I haven’t left. I’m still in that car, Mum – don’t you get it?”
Her eyes glazed over, and Jamie knew that she was back in the front seat of Greg’s car.
“Look out, Greg!” screamed Donna. “You’re going to hit her!”
She threw her hands over her face, and collapsed sobbing into her mum’s arms. As they hugged each other Jamie felt a hand on his shoulder gently pulling him away from the door.
“Come on, love,” said Jennifer Marshall, closing the door softly. “Let them have their pr
ivacy.”
“Sorry.”
Jamie walked away down the corridor, the sound of Donna’s sobs echoing in his ears. Outside, tall trees bent and sashayed in the wind. The sky darkened.
When he returned home, Jamie was greeted by an unexpected sensation as he walked through the front door – warm air, enveloping him in a soft hug. The radiator in the hallway was ticking happily, and when Jamie pressed his hand against the surface it was gloriously hot to the touch. The stale tang that had soured the air inside the Lodge had melted away, and there was an unexpected waft of cooking smells coming from the kitchen. As Jamie unzipped his coat and kicked off his shoes Liam came padding barefoot into the hallway.
“Warm enough for you?” he asked.
“You fixed the heating!” Jamie exclaimed.
Liam’s eyes crinkled with amusement. “I can’t take all the credit,” he said. “A guy came round this afternoon and sorted out the boiler. Wouldn’t even take any money for it – said it had all been taken care of.”
“By who?”
“Who knows?” Liam shrugged. “Thanks to you, everyone in this town is trying to give us free stuff. Make the most of while you can – you earned it.” He beckoned him into the kitchen. “Come and have a look at this.”
Jamie followed his brother through the doorway to find the worktop strewn with half-opened tins and vegetable peelings, and dirty saucepans piled up in the sink. A murky stew was bubbling fiercely on the stove.
“Thought I’d have a go at this home-cooking lark,” Liam said, stirring the stew with a wooden spoon. “Here, try a bit.”
Jamie cautiously tasted a drop of stew from the end of the spoon.
“Well?” said Liam. “What’s the verdict?”
Jamie pulled a face.
