Alive

by Sharon Bolton

  As Dwane left the churchyard, Stephen and Sugs climbed into it. Making sure Dwane was nowhere in sight, they ran to the grave. Jimmy and Craig arrived a second later. Grinning, the four boys took hold of the box of earth and lifted it. It was heavy, but they managed to tilt it just far enough for the earth it contained to start trickling back into the grave. As the box lightened, the boys could push it further and more earth fell. By the time they heard the yell of outrage from the churchyard gate, the box was almost empty.

  ‘Run!’ yelled Sugs, which he shouldn’t have done. Only Stephen was supposed to give orders, but the others were so keyed up by this stage they didn’t notice. They set off, letting the box fall. Stephen followed a second behind, hearing the pounding footsteps of the sexton drawing closer. The others reached the wall and clambered over. Stephen was about to bound up after them when his left foot landed in a rabbit hole. It threw him off balance, he stumbled, went down on one knee, and Dwane had him.

  The small man was incredibly strong. He dragged Stephen to his feet, holding him by his shirt collar and pulling him back towards the grave. When they reached its edge, he dangled Stephen above it.

  ‘How about I drop you in?’ he yelled into the frightened boy’s face.

  The grave was hardly a hole at all now that the earth had been returned to it, but Stephen didn’t feel inclined to point this out.

  ‘Sorry,’ he stammered. ‘Only a joke. My dad’ll have you if you hurt me.’

  ‘Don’t fancy a grave, do you?’ Dwane leaned further, until Stephen thought gravity must surely step in and say, ‘Enough’s enough – you two are going in.’

  ‘Don’t think you’d enjoy being left underground for the worms to eat? Eh?’ Dwane shook him.

  Any second now, thought Stephen, I’m going and he’s going to land on top of me.

  ‘N-no,’ he stammered, wondering if he should use the dad threat again. His dad would probably wallop him for throwing stones near a church.

  Dwane appeared to make a decision. He turned away from the grave and, dragging Stephen with him, made for the church. When they reached it, he stopped, considered and then lifted Stephen bodily.

  Stephen was yelling loudly by this time, but Dwane took no notice. Stephen felt himself being pinned against the stone with one hand, while the other fiddled with his clothes. Then he heard his shirt tearing and felt something cold and hard pressing against the bare skin of his back. Dwane let him go, but instead of falling to the ground, Stephen found himself hanging in mid-air. The neck of his shirt and anorak felt very tight round his throat.

  ‘Can you breathe?’ Dwane asked him.

  ‘Let me down!’ Stephen yelled. ‘You lot, get help!’

  There was no answer. His friends had fled.

  ‘Pity,’ Dwane said, before turning back to the grave.

  * * *

  Stephen hung from the stone gargoyle for thirty minutes before he remembered that he could unzip his anorak. The buttons on his shirt held him for another five before they broke and he fell to the ground. Dwane didn’t even stop digging as Stephen picked himself up and ran. His mum would kill him for ripping his shirt. His eyes were full of tears, so he didn’t see the man on the pavement, just outside the church gate, until he was grabbed, a second time that hour, by the collar of his shirt.

  ‘Hold on, young fella. Where d’you think you’re going?’

  Stephen ran a sleeve over his eyes and squirmed to face the man holding him. His dad’s age, maybe a few years older, but with short, sandy hair. He wore a smart suit, but he smelled the way his dad did when he came back from the pub.

  ‘None of your bloody business. Get off me, pervert.’ Stephen pulled at the hand that gripped his collar. He was silenced by a short slap on his left cheek.

  ‘Less of your lip. Answer me.’

  Stephen was more outraged than hurt. Parents could hit you, and teachers – that was only to be expected – not strangers in the street. Even if they were wearing fancy suits and driving posh cars. Somehow he just knew the dark blue Rover P6 parked at the side of the road belonged to this man. ‘You can’t touch me. I’ll have the bloody police on you.’

  The man slapped him again. ‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong, sonny. I am the police. Now, why don’t you come with me and we’ll have a little chat?’

  * * *

  Stephen’s friends went back for him, eventually, but the churchyard at St Andrew’s was deserted. A tarpaulin had been stretched across the open grave, hammered into the ground with tent pegs at four corners. The box of earth had been pushed a little further from the grave, and on top of it lay the sheet of plywood and the removed turf.

  The sun was getting lower in the sky by this time and the boys knew their parents would be wondering where they were. Late arrival home invariably spelled trouble and none of them was inclined to risk a backhander. Also, they were all hungry.

  ‘He’s gone home,’ said Sugs.

  ‘What if that dwarf’s taken him?’ said Roger.

  ‘Nowt we can do. My mam’ll leather me if I’m late again,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘He’s in that grave.’ Craig, out of all of them, was the most inclined towards the dramatic.

  The five boys stared over the wall at the tarpaulin, which was old and weathered from a hundred or more rainstorms. It sagged in the middle. As they watched, it seemed to billow a little, as though someone were blowing it from below.

  ‘Do you think Danny Earnshaw will let us have a go on his Chopper?’ Jimmy said.

  ‘That psycho’ll chop your dick off for asking,’ Sugs told him.

  ‘That dwarf’s a psycho,’ said Craig. ‘He’s killed Steve and left him in that grave.’

  ‘I’m going home,’ said Jimmy. He didn’t move.

  ‘We have to check,’ said Duffy, who’d been a prefect at school, briefly, before he’d had his badge taken away for keeping a ferret in his desk. ‘Remember that girl who disappeared a few weeks ago? They still haven’t found her.’

  ‘The fat one?’ Sugs said.

  ‘Yeah, Susan Duxbury,’ said Craig. ‘She was in my class. Couldn’t stand her.’

  ‘We can’t leave Stephen,’ Duffy insisted.

  ‘I’m not looking in a grave,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Duffy. ‘Keep an eye out.’

  Duffy swung himself over the wall and set off towards the grave. After a few paces, he was joined by Roger and Sugs. The three boys approached the tarpaulin cautiously.

  ‘Steve?’ said Duffy, in a tremulous voice that he was instantly ashamed of.

  No reply from the grave.

  Duffy said, ‘We have to unpeg it and look underneath.’

  Neither of the boys argued. Neither moved.

  ‘Get on with it,’ called Jimmy, brave behind the wall.

  As though by unspoken agreement, the three boys stepped to three corners of the grave.

  ‘It only needs one,’ pointed out Sugs. None of the boys moved to become the one.

  ‘Steve!’ called Sugs sharply.

  No reply.

  Duffy crouched down and grasped the tent peg closest to him. He looked at Roger, who did the same. ‘Both at once,’ he said.

  The two boys pulled up the pegs and lifted the tarpaulin. Sugs cried out, but with tension, not the shock of discovery. The grave was empty.

  Of course it was empty. Stephen was destined for another grave entirely, one that might never be discovered. But even carefully laid plans can go wrong. Twelve hours after his disappearance, Stephen was dead.

  When he realised the boy was never going to wake up and plead for mercy again, the Craftsman wasn’t sure he could contain his fury. He lay flat on the rain-soaked earth, oblivious to the chill soaking his clothes, and he screamed loud enough to be heard in hell. When he finally got to his feet, he was conscious of a sense of despair. Summer was a smile and a song away. His last chance might have gone.

  3

  Patsy

  A dark moon is rising.


  The Craftsman knows his time is coming round at last. He can feel it in the hot, smoke-particle-filled air, smell it on the wind, see its portents in the glimmering night sky.

  The month is June, and the weathermen are predicting an unprecedented heatwave in the north-west of England, one that will cause tarmac to blister on the roads and pregnant women to faint on factory floors. By the time of the full moon, known traditionally as the Strawberry Moon, on the last but one day, the local authority will be talking about drought, and water rationing, and whether standpipes will be necessary on street corners.

  All that is to come, though, and as the old moon wanes and vanishes, the weather is cold and cloudy. The days are damp, the nights thick with cloud, so that when the dead moon rises in the middle of the month, few are aware of it.

  At least, not consciously aware. The more sensitive types perhaps get the shivers a little more than usual. ‘Someone just walked over my grave,’ they joke, to ward off the vague sense of unease that is creeping over them. The dead moons that go unnoticed are sometimes the most dangerous of all.

  The second Saturday in June is dull and overcast, a low layer of cloud obscuring the sky. The Craftsman spends all day and evening watching for his chance. It doesn’t come. On Sunday, he knows it is now or never.

  Sunday, 15 June 1969

  In spite of its arboreal-sounding name, the Pendle Forest in Lancashire has never been densely wooded. The land is too high, the winds too strong, the hills too exposed for trees of any size to thrive. Sunnyhurst Park was one of the very few exceptions. Determined Victorians put acorns, conkers and beechnuts into the ground and, on a whim perhaps, the tough clay soil chose to indulge them. It sent up shoots, the rains poured down to feed them, and the winds decided to go easy. In 1969, the trees of Sunnyhurst Park had reached their full maturity and the wide, walled area was tenebrous, thickly wooded and dark.

  Possibly because they were so unused to trees and the claustrophobic feel of forests, the people of Sabden avoided the park, so that by the time the end of the 1960s came around, few people came here but older children, and their games weren’t always wholesome. It was said that most of the town’s teenage pregnancies began in Sunnyhurst Park, and quite a few ended here too, with newborn infants being left to the vagaries of the cold and the wild animals.

  It was said that the kiosk, the cramped, thatched cottage at the heart of the park that served weak tea, cold coffee and stale cakes to the few who had money to pay for them, had traditionally been the home of witches, that cats had been bricked up alive in its stone walls and that the rune-like markings along the stone lintel of the front door were a vain attempt to keep out evil spirits. Some said they were there to welcome evil spirits.

  It was also said that the nearby bandstand hadn’t heard music played in decades, other than the drumbeats of the devil worshippers who met at midnight to celebrate the black mass.

  * * *

  Fourteen-year-old Patsy Wood had hated Sunnyhurst Park since the day she’d been lost in it as a toddler. Her mother swore it was for less than ten minutes, but in Patsy’s young mind, she’d been abandoned in the scariest place imaginable. Ordinarily, nothing would have tempted Patsy to be alone in Sunnyhurst Park, especially at the daylight gate, the Lancashire name for the twilight. But John, Luna and Tammy had asked her to come with them, and every child in the fourth form wanted to be in their gang. Of course she’d agreed.

  They hadn’t mentioned they wanted to play hide-and-seek. They hadn’t warned her that she’d have to leave the gang and hide by herself in the middle of the woods. She’d been lying in a sort of cave formed by two fallen trees for what felt like ages. She didn’t own a watch, but it seemed like a long time since she’d heard any of the others.

  They’d left her. No sooner had the thought occurred than it was impossible to shut it out. It had all been a trick. They’d sneaked out of the park and were halfway home by now, or they were hiding in the street to see how long it took before she realised. Patsy could almost hear the sniggers as she walked past their hiding place and the jeers of her classmates the next day. Her face started to glow, sweat breaking out between her shoulder blades. She moved, to push herself up, and heard something. Hoping the beating of her heart wouldn’t be audible, she lay still and listened.

  Footsteps, slow and soft. Someone creeping up on her. Hope burned for a second before she realised the footsteps were heavy, the steps of an adult. Every dark story Patsy had heard about the park came flooding back as she shrank even further beneath the trees. She wanted to close her eyes, and didn’t quite dare. Then she saw the boots. A large size, man’s boots, old and scuffed, heading her way. She watched, transfixed, until they moved out of her sightline. The sound ceased at the same time and Patsy froze in horror. Where had he gone? She had a sudden vision of being pulled from her hiding place by her ankles. For the first time, she thought of Susan Duxbury and Stephen Shorrock, two kids from her year at school who’d vanished in recent months. They’d been nowhere near the park, but— She squealed as a face appeared not two feet from her own.

  ‘Caught you,’ said John Donnelly, the gang leader, who of course wore boots as big as an adult’s. She should have thought of that. ‘Budge up,’ he urged.

  He was crawling in beside her. The space beneath the fallen trunks was barely wide enough for the two of them. She could smell his skin, his hair. His face reached level with hers and he grinned at her.

  ‘You’re not “it”,’ she managed. Dale Atherton, another gang member, was it.

  ‘I know. Shush.’ He put a finger on her lips and pointed. In the distance, she could just about see Dale, strolling through the trees. He was armed with a stick and was thrashing it against trees, poking it into undergrowth. She watched until he moved out of sight and then turned to the boy at her side.

  John’s arm was around her. How had that happened? They were lying face to face. Like lovers. She could smell his sweat, and the trace of shampoo on his hair.

  ‘You ever been with someone?’ he whispered, and she realised his fingers were gently pulling at her dress, inching it up. She could feel the cool air on her bare thighs as the cotton fabric slid upwards.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ She tried to sound bored, but darts of excitement were shooting into her groin. John was the best-looking boy in the year. Everyone knew that.

  ‘Want to go with me?’ His fingers continued their pull and slide. They touched her bare skin and felt like ice.

  Patsy had no idea what to say. Did he mean now? Would he just pull down her knickers and shove it in her? She didn’t want that, did she? She wanted him to kiss her. Yes, definitely. Kiss her first, and then they’d see.

  ‘I thought you were going with Luna,’ she managed.

  ‘Just a friend,’ he said. ‘Not really my type. Want to meet up later?’

  ‘Where?’ Even as she said it, she knew her mother would never give her permission. She’d be in trouble already for not telling her where she was going.

  ‘I know a place,’ John said.

  His fingers were stroking the curve of her bum now. They were on top of the cotton of her knickers, but Patsy was shocked by how much she wanted him to slip them inside and touch her bare skin again. ‘OK,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll have to walk Luna home. I promised her mum. But then I can meet you at the bottom of Snape Street.’

  No, she really couldn’t. ‘My mum’ll kill me.’

  ‘I’ll look after you.’ His hand left her bum then and came up to cup the back of her neck. His head moved forward and his lips, warm and wet, were pressing against hers. She only remembered that you were supposed to open your mouth to kiss when he broke away.

  ‘Dale’s never going to find us. I’ll see you later.’ He wriggled out, leaving her breathless. Before he disappeared, he bent down to face her. ‘I really like you, Patsy,’ he said, turning and running away.

  * * *

  The children walked home together, John and Luna leading the w
ay, his arm around her shoulders. Patsy could almost think she’d imagined the scene beneath the fallen trees, but once, when Luna turned to say something to Tammy, John looked directly at Patsy and gave her a quiet, secret smile.

  I really like you, Patsy.

  At the corner of Argyle Street, the children went their separate ways.

  ‘Bye, Patsy,’ said Luna, barely giving her a glance. ‘See you tomorrow.’

  ‘See you,’ said John. Not See you tomorrow. See you.

  Patsy carried on alone, past the corner shop, and the White Lion pub, the bookmaker’s and the hairdresser’s. Just before she turned into the ginnel that ran between her street and the one adjacent, she took one look towards John and Luna, but they’d gone. In the ginnel, she ducked beneath a bed sheet that had been hanging out to dry in the evening air, then another one, and another, until she was at her own house. The door to the backyard was open.

  ‘That you, Pats?’ said a voice from the outdoor lavvy. Her mum. ‘Yeah,’ Patsy replied, her heart sinking.

  ‘I’m popping round to Janet’s,’ her mum said, in a strained voice. ‘Can you get yourself to bed?’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose.’

  ‘See you in the morning, love,’ her mother said.

  Yes, yes, yes! Her mum was going out. She wouldn’t know that Patsy wasn’t upstairs. By the time she got back, Patsy would have returned anyway.

  She let the yard door close quietly and made her way down the ginnel, away from the house, towards Snape Street. A nearby church clock began to strike as she drew close. Nine o’clock. There was an hour of daylight left at most and even with John for company, Patsy didn’t think she wanted to be out after dark. Not in Sabden. Not while kids were disappearing. She turned the corner and froze.