by C. J. Skuse
‘Well, it kind of is my business, cos you were breaking into my dad’s business,’ he said. ‘Trying to steal . . . I don’t know what.’
‘I can’t tell you anything. I just can’t. But no one is being hurt and I’m fine. That’s all you need to know.’
‘Damian said you wouldn’t let on what you were doing,’ he sighed.
‘What does Damian know?’ I cried.
‘Only as much as I do. Which isn’t much. He said if . . . if we could prove you two were doing something criminal or just something kinky you didn’t want people knowing about, he could blackmail Zoe into going out with him.’
‘What? Why?’
Louis shrugged. ‘He really fancies her.’
‘Damian fancies everyone,’ I said. Pee Wee wanted to get down so I let him and he scampered off. ‘Why do you have to be drunk at all hours of the day?’
‘I don’t. And stop changing the subject . . .’
‘Then why are you always drinking? You’re drinking now,’ I said, looking down at the can in his hand. ‘Is it to make you look cool? Because if so it really doesn’t.’ A fly flew into my open mouth and I coughed.
‘I’m not drunk,’ he said. ‘This is just an energy drink.’
‘Yeah, right,’ I said.
‘I’m not.’
‘You were that night on the Pier when you . . .’
‘Yeah maybe I’d had a couple then but . . .’
‘So why do you do it?’
‘Why does anyone drink?’ he said. ‘To feel better about themselves. To have the courage to do or say things they wouldn’t normally.’
‘What, act like a total idiot?’ I snorted.
‘None of that matters anyway,’ he said. ‘So are you going to tell me what you’ve been doing with Zoe Lutwyche or not?’
Pee Wee was going nuts, trying to dig up one of the graves. Behind him, near the top of the churchyard, I saw lights. Coloured lights, beaming up into the sky.
‘What’s that?’ I said, pointing to the haze of pinks and greens and blues.
‘What’s what?’ he sighed, looking to where my finger was pointing. I ran up the path towards it, stopping when I came to the kissing gate. And all at once I saw the most beautiful sight: lots of graves literally glowing in the dark.
‘Oh my goodness! This is amazing!’ I cried, squeezing through the kissing gate to get a closer look at them.
There was a metal squeaking behind me as Louis followed me through the gate, closely followed by Pee Wee.
‘Yeah, pretty weird, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Glow-in-the-dark graves. It’s one of our new lines at the funeral parlour. It’s these stones.’ He bent down and picked up a handful of yellow ones from a plot. ‘People buy them thinking they’re magical. That somehow they are the person’s soul going up to heaven. Stupid really.’
‘I think that’s a nice thing to believe,’ I said.
‘You do?’
We walked further up the path. It was a bit like that scene in that film about the blue things when the girl blue thing is walking with the boy blue thing through that little glow-in-the-dark forest and all those little jellyfish things are coming down and it all looks so pretty. We didn’t have little jellyfish things around us, we just had lighty-up graves but it was still quite pretty to walk through.
Louis binned his so-not-an energy drink as we passed a bin. ‘It’s a cynical money-making scheme if you ask me. My dad jumps on every afterlife bandwagon. He’s now thinking about selling these phones which you can bury your loved one with. They’re programmed to text you from beyond the grave, with things like Wish you were here or Happy birthday, son. How sick is that?’
‘Yeah, that’s creepy,’ I said. ‘I like the stones though. They make the churchyard look pretty.’
‘They’re warm too,’ said Louis. ‘Lie down on some.’
‘What?’
‘Lie down on some. They soak up the sun during the day, which makes them glow at night and when they glow, they’re warm. I always lie on Edward Kendall Sheridan. You can lie on his wife, Edwina.’
‘Isn’t that a bit disrespectful?’ I was one to talk about disrespect, especially since a few days ago I’d been to a dead boy’s foot chopping ceremony.
‘Not really,’ said Louis. ‘They’ve been dead about five years. I remember when Dad did the funerals. They died within hours of each other. She had a heart attack. And Dad said his heart just broke. They’d been together for like sixty years. Isn’t that amazing?’
My own heart did a little pulse thing when I heard that. ‘Aw yeah. Like in that film where they’re in the nursing home and the man’s telling his wife the story of their life together but she keeps forgetting and he says he’ll never leave her and then they die in each other’s arms.’
‘Well, it wasn’t quite like that but yeah, they’d been together for a long time.’
‘You talk more when Damian’s not around,’ I said. ‘You’re different, actually.’
‘Am I?’ he said, sitting down first on Edward. I followed him, lying on Edwina. The stones were warm, just like he’d said they would be.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘You don’t talk in History either.’
He sort of laughed and lay back. ‘The glow only lasts a couple of years. Some relatives have paid us to come up here and refresh them every now and again, so they always glow.’
Louis was so nice without Damian around. We were having a nice time, even though we were lying on graves, talking about old people dying of broken hearts and his dad making money out of the bereaved. I liked him. I really liked him.
‘Do you know what you’re going to do after college?’ I asked the stars.
Louis answered me. ‘Nope. I thought about doing something with fish. Or basketball. Or maybe I could write horror movies or something. I’ll probably end up just staying at the funeral parlour until I know. You?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘I thought I was the only one who didn’t know. Like, everyone else I know knows, you know?’
‘I know,’ he said, scratching his wrist beneath his friendship bracelets and then putting his arms behind his head. I couldn’t help noticing how soft his armpit hair looked. ‘Damian wants to direct porn films and race Ferraris. He’s wanted to do that since he was about twelve.’
‘You’d be better off without Damian,’ I said. ‘He’s a bad influence.’
‘He’s my mate. I’d rather him than that psychopath you hang out with,’ he scoffed.
‘Don’t call her that,’ I said. ‘Zoe’s my friend.’
‘She’s a psycho.’
I harrumphed. ‘And what evidence are you basing your opinion on?’
‘On her face?’ Louis sniggered. ‘That and the stories.’ He turned on his grave and leant his head on his hand to look at me. ‘That’s why I need to know what Zoe’s up to. Why she’s got you stealing medical equipment, cos if she’s doing what her dad used to do . . . you must have heard about her dad.’
‘I’ve heard things. But they’re just stories.’
His eyebrows rose. ‘You heard how he died?’
‘He’s not dead. He’s in some asylum somewhere, being looked after. Or . . . possibly living in the woods by their house.’
‘No, he’s definitely dead,’ said Louis. ‘We did his funeral. It was just before college started. She’s supposed to be organising a headstone.’
‘Prof Lutwyche . . . died? In the asylum?’ I asked him. ‘Are you sure?’
‘My dad picked up the body. I didn’t see it but I’ve heard all sorts.’
‘Yeah, so have I.’
‘He was only there a few weeks. Do you want to see where he’s buried?’
I nodded and we both stood up. He started walking across the glowing blue red green and yellow churchyard, and led me to the exact spot under the willow tree where I’d seen Zoe digging on freshers’ night. When she was just Digging Girl.
There was the mound she had been digging. The long, body-shaped mound of earth, stamped
down flat.
‘Right here,’ said Louis. ‘There’s no headstone because the council were afraid of people coming to the site to chip pieces off it. People do that, you know, when someone infamous has died.’
Why hadn’t Zoe told me her dad had died? And so recently?
‘Professor Lutwyche is buried here? Right on this spot?’ I said.
‘Professor Lunatic, more like,’ said Louis, folding his arms. ‘I’ve heard some truly nuts stuff about him. Running around the hills naked and cutting off his own head and, yeah, major lunatic.’
I didn’t like hearing him talk about Zoe’s dad like that. ‘You don’t know if any of that stuff’s true. And lunatics don’t invent stuff that brings animals back to life, do they? That’s what he did though. You inject a dead thing with this blue stuff and then you electrocute it and it comes back to life.’
‘No, it’s all lies. That didn’t happen.’
‘It did happen!’ I shouted. Pee Wee trotted over from the pet cemetery with a little pink plastic poodle ornament dangling from his jaws. ‘I’ve seen it, Louis! I watched fifteen dead hamsters come back to life. Fifteen hamsters that had been gutted ten minutes earlier! Zoe did it, with the serum. The serum that he invented.’
Louis shook his head. ‘Your teacher didn’t chloroform them properly,’ he said. ‘That’s what our Geography teacher said. Dead things can’t come back to life.’
‘But Zoe can do it. I’ve seen it! I’m telling you the truth about this. Where do you think Pee Wee came from?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I thought he was yours.’
‘No, Zoe reanimated him. He was cut in two pieces last week and now look at him. You wouldn’t have known any different, would you?’
Pee Wee sat down between us, chewing his poodle.
‘Camille, I’ve seen hundreds of dead bodies. Hundreds. There is no life in them whatsoever. No chance of it. Dead is dead, trust me.’
‘Do you know for a fact that Professor Lutwyche cut off his own head? Or that he lived in the woods or have you seen any of his reanimations?’
‘No, but . . .’
‘Right, well I know one thing for sure. I saw Pee Wee come back to life. I saw Zoe inject the serum into his veins. And now she’s going to do it on a . . . bigger animal and I’m going to help her.’
His eyes went starey, like Michael Jackson’s in the Thriller video. ‘What do you mean, a bigger animal? What is she doing?’
‘A . . . sheep. She’s going to do it on a sheep. And I’m going to help her.’
‘A sheep?’ he said. I could see he wasn’t convinced. ‘I don’t buy it.’
‘Well, it’s true’ I said.
‘If I were you I’d steer well clear of Zoe Lutwyche,’ he warned me.
‘No, I won’t,’ I told him. ‘And do you know why I’m not going to steer clear of her? Cos she’s the only friend I’ve got, so excuse me if I completely ignore you.’
I walked off. ‘Pee Wee!’ I called back and within seconds I felt him by my side. Pee Wee that is, not Louis. Louis was still in the same spot as when I’d left him, probably laughing at me, like everyone else did.
Everyone but Zoe.
Nerves
I was way too antsy and emotional and sleep-deprived to go into college the next day and I really didn’t want to see Louis in double History so I got my dad to call in sick for me. I tried to ignore what Louis had said, I really did. But somehow it had gotten into my brain, like a little worm, and met up with the little worm of doubt I had put there myself and they had made lots of babies and filled my head with worry worms.
She’s a psycho. Zoe is a psycho.
The worry worms niggled all the next day. I Googled the word psychopath.
So when I first met Zoe, she was digging in her father’s grave. Digging him up? Putting him back? Borrowing something? Burying something? What part of Professor Lutwyche had she stolen for the project? Maybe that’s where the hands had come from? Maybe it had been his organs she had taken.
There were lots of different types of psychopath on the Internet and all sorts of mega-complicated detail about them. Primary psychopaths. Secondary psychopaths. Distempered psychopaths. Charismatic psychopaths. And then there were sociopaths, a whole other bag of bunnies. I didn’t understand any of it and there were all these quotes from scientists and psychologists, and footnotes and references that I couldn’t force my brain to read. However, some words jumped out at me and left the rest to rot:
Psychopaths convey no emotions.
They are very intelligent.
They are good liars.
They are antisocial.
They are insane.
And they have something called ‘parasitic tendencies’. I almost ignored this one until I read the line describing it. ‘A reliance on others to do things for them.’
That was me! That was the reason she wanted me involved! I was Herbert West’s assistant in that story! And Zoe was Herbert West. She was a psychopath who got me to do all her donkey-work for her. And if we did get caught, she would blame it all on me and I’d go to prison and it would probably kill my mum and dad off altogether. They couldn’t take stress at the best of times. My dad went into shock if the postman was late.
I played ball with Pee Wee in my room. I taught him to roll over and stay. I gave him treats when he did it right. It took my mind off what was in my mind, for a while. But taking your mind off your own mind isn’t easy. Thoughts kept knocking. One thought was this: I had to stop her. Zoe Lutwyche, my best friend, was a bed-wetting, mother-abandoned, head-chopping psychopath. Louis was right. Who was next on her hit list? I couldn’t let her finish making me a boyfriend, not if he was made out of people I knew. That just wasn’t right. I had to go to the police and tell them everything and put an end to it.
But more thoughts started knocking: if Zoe did finish Sexy Dead Boy, I’d have a date. And I’d have a friend again. And maybe Splodge and Poppy really were at a festival in Wales and they would be back soon. And maybe if you stayed on the right side of a psychopath, it would be okay. Maybe I’d be okay.
At lunchtime, I went downstairs. Mum was in the sitting room, reading one of her crime novels with a bar of chocolate between her knees. The TV was on mute in the corner. Prime Minister’s Questions. My mum fancied the prime minister. Apparently he’d been in some pop group when Mum was my age and she used to follow them around the country and write rude things in the dirt on the back of their tour bus.
‘Mum?’ I said, coming in quietly, because she’d jump about a foot in the air if I disturbed her reading.
‘All right, love? Feeling any better?’
I nodded.
‘You going to be all right for Biology this afternoon?’
I shook my head and sat down next to her. ‘No, I’m still a bit hot.’
‘Do you want some chocolate?’
‘No, thanks. Mum, can I ask you something?’
‘Hang on,’ she said, reaching for the remote and turning the volume back up. ‘He’s getting all angry, look. He’s ever so dishy when he’s being heckled.’
‘And I ask my learned friend to remember who it is who WON two elections in a row and whose job it is to clean up the mess left behind by the previous government.’
‘Hear, hear,’ said my mum, then muted it again and went back to her book.
‘Mum, I need to ask you something,’ I said again, now I had at least half her attention.
Her face fell. ‘It’s not that dog of yours, is it? He’s not done a whoopsie on the new hallway carpet, has he? Because if he has, Camille, I’m telling you . . .’
‘No, Pee Wee’s fine. He’s having his lunch in the back yard. I just wanted to ask you if you know anything about psychopaths, that was all.’
She laughed, obviously relieved. ‘There’s one of them in here, funnily enough.’ She folded her book over. ‘Serial killer he is. Right vicious swine he is too but he still wets the bed. You might like it. There’s lots of dead bo
dies in it.’
‘No, I’ve kind of gone off dead bodies a little bit,’ I said, trying to smile.
‘It’s a good story,’ said Mum. ‘He’s got this vicar’s daughter tied to a radiator and he beats her with this big wet fish.’
‘A vicar’s daughter?’ I cried, thinking immediately of Poppy tied to a radiator and being beaten with a big wet fish. ‘Oh shizz!’
‘It’s not real, love. Clever though, because then he cooks and eats the murder weapon. The psychologist is trying to pin it all on his mother who abandoned him at birth, cos he only kills women called Yvonne, and that was her name. I’ll lend it to you after . . .’
‘NO, I don’t want it! Thanks.’
‘All right, calm down,’ she said, laughing.
I came and sat down next to her, doing the same face I used to do as a toddler so she’d twiddle with my hair. She didn’t though, just carried on reading her book. I leaned my cheek against her shoulder.
‘Mind your make-up on my top, love. This is clean on,’ she said, checking her sleeve.
‘Sorry,’ I said, moving away.
Dad came in with his coffee and set it down on a mat on the coffee table.
‘All right, duck?’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘Those bin men still haven’t come, Francine,’ he said, picking up the remote and finding the news on one of the Sky channels. He sat down next to me and Mum so I was squashed in comfortably between them.
Police are asking for help in locating a young male model from South London who was last seen at an Underground station yesterday lunchtime. Eighteen-year-old Alex Rathbone . . .
I finally felt safe. I went to sleep on Dad’s arm.
I had my dream again about the horse on the beach, the wind blowing through my endless blonde crinkly hair. Holding tight to a strong man as the stallion thundered on. Crashing through the dazzling waters, his hair blowing behind him in the wind, his strong hands on the reins.
‘Hya hya!’ he shouted. But every time he yelled ‘Hya!’ something fell off: a clump of hair, an arm, an eye. All I could do was watch it bounce along behind me on the sand. Piece by piece, he disappeared before my eyes and soon I was riding along with just a set of teeth on the saddle in front of me. And every tooth was rotten.
