by Ryan Casey
Despite our plans, Gran and Granddad had other intentions for us the next morning—we were going to Bareslow village.
‘Do we have to?’ Adam asked, scrunching up his nose.
‘It would be nice if we went. You can get Emily to come along too if you want. Come on, kids, Carla’s just got back. I thought you’d be happier?’ Gran looked deflated. She expected us to be more excited.
I looked down at Carla, who tilted her head to the side, begging for food.
‘Go on then,’ I said. Adam looked round to face me and raised his eyebrows. ‘We’ll go call on Emily, yeah?’
We picked Emily up, who was enthusiastic about coming along, and set off shortly after. When we got to Bareslow, Adam pulled me back as Emily fussed over Carla.
‘Do we tell her?’ he whispered, ice-cream splattered across his face. Emily walked on ahead of us.
We hadn’t hung with around Emily as much lately, and there was a strange distance between us. I was shocked that her parents had allowed her to actually come out for a day trip with us. Granted, we were only a few miles down the road, but it was nice to be able to spend some time together. The sea smelt fresh, and although it was cloudy and actually rather cold, it suited the little seaside town. One of the little brown houses smelt of fish and chips. Despite only just finishing my vanilla cornet, all I could think about was dinner. I licked my lips and imagined the taste explosion as vinegar hit the roof of my mouth.
I shrugged. ‘I dunno. I thought we’d decided. We don’t want to scare her.’
Emily turned to face us. Her eyes moved from me to Adam and back to me. ‘Scare who?’
Adam ran at Emily and jumped on her back. She screamed as he wrestled her to the floor, laughing away. I tried to smile.
I hadn’t lied to Adam when I said I didn’t want to scare Emily. But there was another reason I didn’t want to tell her yet.
The bruises.
We walked down the promenade, her smile as radiant as ever, when she dropped her ice-cream on the ground. It was a good job Carla wasn’t near us, or she’d have scoffed it in an instant.
‘You daft cow,’ Adam said, laughing at her misfortune.
She frowned at Adam and bent over to pick up what she could of the cone. It was still intact and pointing upright, as if it were attached to the sky by a piece of string.
A single red bruise on the back of her arm caught my eye. Looking closer, I noticed the back of her neck had a green lump on it. It looked as if someone had been painting her body and she’d forgotten to wash a spot off. It was about the size of a fist.
‘Nasty bruise you’ve got, Emily,’ I said, trying to sound as casual as I could. I didn’t like bruises. They made me cringe.
Emily shot up, cone in her hand. Most of the ice-cream was painted across the pavement beneath. ‘Oh you know me,’ she said, messing with her hair. ‘I’m always falling over. I think I got it in the shower. Don’t worry.’
She went on to lick the edge of the cone, scooping the surviving ice-cream onto her tongue. I nodded, and she giggled back at me.
I thought I saw the corner of her mouth tremble.
Hoping Carla’s return and the boardwalk would open her up a bit, I decided to ask my gran if she’d heard from my mum.
She smiled at Granddad, looking for help. He carried on walking onwards. ‘She’s sorry she hasn’t called much lately,’ Gran said. ‘You’re a big lad though, eh? She’ll be back in touch soon.’
I didn’t like being called a ‘big lad.’ It sounded tacky and childish.
‘When do you think she’ll ring?’ I asked, rubbing at the back of my neck.
Gran sighed and continued to smile. ‘Soon, Liam. Soon. You’ve got to give her a little bit of space. It’s been a tough time for all of us, right?’
My hands went limp and I walked back towards Adam and Emily. I miss chatting to Mum.
*
Later that day, after Gran had picked up her vanilla slice and Granddad had bought something else second-hand from the car boot that he’d probably never use, the three of us went to our den.
Emily perched on the seat Donald had made and shook her head at Adam. They bickered about something or another.
Adam stood with his shoulders wide, leaning against a tree, smirking. ‘But at least I can actually run.’
‘Yeah, but you run like an idiot. He has a weird run, doesn’t he, Liam?’ Emily said, looking round at me.
I grinned, and prepared to keep the joke going, but I noticed the change in Adam’s face. His frown grew across his forehead. I wondered how he could be so sensitive. He wasn’t usually.
‘It’s only a joke, Ad,’ I said, but he carried on frowning. I realised he wasn’t frowning at me but at something behind me.
I heard the rustling of the bush and smelt that familiar soapy smell.
‘Hello, boys. And hello, Emily—I’ve not seen you in a while!’ Donald said.
I felt my leg muscles tighten as I turned round to face him. His eyes looked kind and his smile wide as ever. He looked genuinely pleased to see us. I knew that the only way for us to progress with our investigation was to act as if everything was as normal. I gripped my hands into a fist and gulped.
‘Hello, Donald, how are things?’ I said, looking right into his eyes. I managed to smile, too. It could only help.
‘Things are wonderful indeed, my friend,’ he said, grinning away.
My heart raced. I felt a little bit giddy as I tried to think of something else to say to him.
‘Listen, I was wondering if you three fancied a trip into the woods sometime this evening?’ Donald said. ‘I won’t be going as far as the caves, but I left something behind the other day when I was out there. Wondered if you fancied giving me a hand finding it?’
I tried to hold my smile, but it gave way at the sides, jiggling like uncooked jelly cubes. We’d planned to spend a day with Donald, but surely going into the woods with him was too much of a risk? Especially when he had something weird to show us? We couldn’t be sure whether this was a perfect opportunity to take advantage of the fact that he was being okay with us or whether it was a threat. I was about to step in and make an excuse when Adam decided to do the talking for me.
‘We’d love to.’
I bolted round robotically and fixed my gaze on Adam. His frown had disappeared, an innocent smile now in its place. He took a glance at me then looked straight back at Donald.
‘But haven’t we got, you know, swimming tonight?’ I protested. My mouth felt dry. We couldn’t spend time alone with Donald. Adam was being ridiculous. My knees began to wobble.
‘Nah, swimming can wait. It gets kinda boring. It’d be more of a laugh if we went out with Donald,’ he said. I felt like I was on a train carriage that’d detached from the rest of the vehicle.
Donald smirked at me. ‘Looks like you’ve been outvoted, son.’ He scratched his chin. ‘And, besides, I had a word with your granddad before, and he said you should come along with me. Emily, what d’you say to a trip into the woods later? It won’t be too late. I promise I’ll have you back in time for tea.’
He’d asked Granddad. This was it. He was working his way into our lives and there was nothing we could do about it. I waited in silence for the usual excuse. It would be better if she didn’t come.
‘I dunno, I’ll ask my parents. Thanks.’ A momentary smile crept across her face, as she looked towards Adam and me for approval.
After Donald left, Adam and I stared at each other. Adam’s cheeks went paler than they were already.
Emily looked at her watch. ‘I should probably get going now, you two,’ she said. ‘Don’t want to be late back.’
I pulled away from Adam’s gaze and nodded at Emily. ‘Sure. We’ll see you sometime soon.’
As Emily crept away from the den, she turned round and poked her head back inside. ‘I, uhm—I dunno if I can come out to the woods tonight. Think I’ve got something else planned.’
Adam looked at Emily and
nodded. ‘That’s alright, Emily,’ he said. ‘We’ll let you know how it goes.’
Emily’s eyes expanded, and she looked at me. ‘That’s—okay, that’s cool,’ she said. ‘See you tomorrow, I guess.’
As she vanished down the street, Adam and I stared into each other’s eyes again. I took a deep breath, my chest tight. Adam waited for me to speak.
‘Are we gonna do this or what?’ I asked.
Adam nodded. It was on.
Chapter Fourteen
‘We need to be safe, Liam,’ Adam said, shaking his head. He clenched Granddad’s penknife in his hand, holding it out of my reach. He’d had the idea in his head since we’d got back from the den a couple of hours ago.
‘But if Granddad sees it missing, he’ll go mental like last time,’ I said, trying to reason with him.
‘Better that way than us having nothing to protect ourselves with. We’ll be easy targets.’
‘No, Adam, just no. It’s too risky. We need to play it cool. Gran and Granddad know where we’re going. Come on—it’s getting late. Are we going or what?’
Adam rolled his eyes and dropped the penknife on the worktop.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Now come on, let’s go.’
We put our shoes on and headed out of the door.
‘Say hello to Donald for me,’ Gran shouted. His name made my stomach turn.
I slammed the caravan door shut. ‘You ready for this, Ad?’ I tried to add an element of fun to the question, as if we were just getting on a roller-coaster or going down a water-slide instead of hanging around with a potentially dangerous serial killer who may or may not have seen us witness his attempts to cover his tracks.
The sun was still in the sky when we set off to meet Donald, barely peeking through the clouds in its last stance of the day. Adam walked with his hands in the pockets of his navy tracksuit bottoms, his trainers scuffed at the sides from his excessive bouts of football and kicking stones. He didn’t look like he was in the mood for talking. Neither of us were. I felt sick.
I wished I could talk to my mum and tell her all my problems, but I knew she had much greater problems of her own to deal with, or so Gran said. We’d have to do this alone, together. Not even Emily could be a part of it.
As we cut through the wasteland, I noticed the steel bit of fencing that we’d been throwing stones at had finally been moved, leaving a bare patch on the side of the wall. It was like the mark where your shorts were after the rest of your body was sunburnt. Adam picked up a rock and tossed it towards the patch anyway, as if the action were engraved in his mind. It didn’t matter that there wasn’t anything there—he just needed to do it.
The two of us reached Donald’s cabin soon after passing by Emily’s. Her curtains were all shut, but the cars were there, so we knew they were in. I noticed her peep round the curtain as we walked by, her eyes meeting mine for a moment, then nothing. The curtains shifted back into place. We were on our own again.
Donald stood tall at the door of his cabin, hands behind his back, wearing a body warmer above his checkered jacket. He had shaved his beard off and looked quite well-groomed for a change. He had taken care of his appearance. I wondered if it was for a special occasion.
Maybe we were the special occasion.
His next victims.
‘Ah, boys!’ he said, waving towards us. ‘Glad you could make it. We all set?’
Adam turned to me and raised his eyebrows. I understood his look. He looked back to Donald and smiled. ‘Sure are, Donald.’
I stared at the entrance of the woods. Not so long ago, we’d seen the body inside. Now we were here again with the same man. What on Earth were we thinking? I tried to breathe slowly, keeping my cool, before taking a step and following Donald into the unknown.
Donald marched ahead of both of us, leading the way, walking stick at his side. I wondered for a moment whether he was going to bludgeon our skulls with it after taking us deep into the heart of the woods, where it didn’t matter how much we struggled because the nearest life forms were deer and squirrels.
Donald turned round, looking at us with bemusement. ‘You lads are lagging behind a bit tonight, eh? Someone not eat their porridge for breakfast?’ He grinned at us both. His teeth looked unusually white.
We both caught him up, reluctantly. What was the worst that could happen? If he was planning to hurt us, he was going to hurt us whether we were a few feet behind him or right next to him; it didn’t matter. Still, we marched slightly behind him, his proud neck standing tall like a giraffe’s.
‘What is it you’re looking for?’ Adam asked, after we’d been walking for quite some time. The birds weren’t singing quite as triumphantly this deep in the woods, so it was a relief for the silence to be broken. It was a necessary question too, one that one of us had to ask. We were both clearly finding it increasingly difficult to fish any sort of information from Donald. Our game needed to improve.
‘Ah, well, that would ruin the surprise now, wouldn’t it?’ Donald said, keeping his gaze directly ahead. Was he toying with us? I couldn’t tell. I felt my stomach churn a few times and worried that my legs would turn to jelly at any moment. The sheer madness of us accompanying this man. We should’ve gone to the police. We should’ve told our grandparents. We should’ve opened up about it straight away. But now, here we were, letting this man take us deep into the woods, promising to show us something ‘secret.’
The three of us walked deeper into the woods. The treetops swallowed the sky above as Donald’s heavy feet stomped against the ground. How could two feet make so much noise? I wish he’d say something. Anything. He was quiet and not even making small talk or telling us stories of something strange he’d come across. It wasn’t like Donald. But still, he marched on with a smile on his face, proud.
After what seemed like hours of walking, Donald stopped and looked up at the trees and at the ground, as if he were trying to orientate himself with his surroundings. He turned to face Adam and me and put his hands on his hips. ‘We’re here.’
I felt a rock sink to the bottom of my stomach as I looked around for some sort of grave he’d dug for the two of us, some hole in the ground he was about to kick us into. But there was nothing. Just trees and fallen twigs. ‘Where’s ‘here’ exactly?’ My voice sounded crackly.
Donald’s smile grew when he heard my voice. He looked like a kid at the candy floss stall. ‘Here, my boys, is a very special place to me.’
Adam had his hands in his hoodie pockets, looking around at the trees. He looked over his shoulder and back down the path we’d come down. ‘It’s just the path, Donald,’ he said. I wondered if Adam was still nervous. My hands began to burn as I dangled them at my sides.
Donald laughed and looked towards the ground, kicking at the snapped branches at his feet. ‘Oh I know it’s the path, clever clogs. But it’s not just the path. It’s a very special part of the woods to me.’
I waited for his walking stick to meet my skull and wondered how hard I’d be to drag into a ditch. I was lanky, so it wouldn’t be too difficult. The soil wouldn’t have much of a struggle crushing me. There would be nothing left of me to find.
‘How come?’ I asked. My mind raced with thoughts. I needed to know what was going on.
Donald stared into space, to his left, looking up and down, into the woods. He didn’t seem like a man who was about to kill someone. Not in the films I’d seen, anyway. ‘It just… it means a lot to me.’
I realised he wasn’t staring into the woods, directionless, but actually looking at the tree next to us. It stood tall above the other trees, and its skinny branch reached across the top of us like an arm. It was quite bare, which made me wonder if it was dying.
Donald spent a few more minutes staring at the tree, his eyes rolling up and down the trunk. I spotted a smile break across his face before vanishing. He blinked and shook his head from side to side. It was as if he wasn’t sure which face to pull. I remembered his eyes that day, burying the girl, the
venom behind them. It was hard to believe that this was the same person, getting emotional over a tree.
I looked at Adam, who shrugged his shoulders and shook his head, sticking his bottom lip out. We didn’t want to speak or break the silence. We were wary of Donald. We couldn’t let our guard down for a moment. I felt my hands burn even warmer. I wish he’d hurry up and tell us what’s going on. The longer he stared at the tree, admiring it and chuckling to himself, the more my mind spun about what he was doing out here. My heartbeat had raced earlier; now, it knocked gently at my ribcage, baffled by the weirdness of the situation. I took this opportunity to take a few deep breaths to prepare myself in case I did have to run. Better to be safe.
Then, as if he were awakening from a deep sleep, Donald raised his eyebrows, shook his head, and looked right towards us. ‘Sorry, boys. It’s—I got a little carried away there. Just strange being here, sharing this place with someone else.’
I didn’t say anything. I waited for him to carry on. I figured Adam was doing the same, his hands in his pockets. I noticed the hole in his ear; he must have been nervous before we left. He rarely ever sneaked out without putting his ear-stud in beforehand.
‘I guess this seems pretty weird, eh? Sorry, sorry. I should, erm—I should explain. You guys will probably want to know what you’re doing out here, but have a little faith. I promise it’ll be worth it when we’ve dug it up.’
My heart raced again with the words ‘dug up.’ Donald hadn’t buried another body somewhere, had he? Or perhaps he was planning to dig up a nice hole in the ground for us before sending us to sleep with the worms and the soil and the dead animal bits filling our lungs. My palms began to sweat. I felt myself breathing faster, getting myself worked up. Heat invaded my cheeks.
‘You okay, Liam?’ Donald asked. ‘You look a bit out of sorts. Want some water?’ He pulled a blue metallic flask out of the side pocket of his green rucksack and gestured it in my direction. I flinched as he waved it at me, his eyes puzzled. Shit. I couldn’t lose my cool now. I couldn’t let him realise we were on to him. I shook my head, taking a deep breath and looking at the ground. I noticed Adam turn towards me, his eyes stern. I could tell he was begging me not to freak out.
