by Alex North
Hague and his friends were a little way ahead, and Hague kept glancing back at us. The effect of what Charlie had said had faded by now, and he had regained his usual angry swagger.
Charlie seemed indifferent to the attention.
“I wonder,” he said idly, “how many times Mr. Goodbold will come into the changing rooms on the pretense of making sure we all shower.”
I checked quickly behind to make sure Goodbold was out of hearing range. It wasn’t clear that he was.
I turned back. “At least we’re not too muddy.”
Billy kicked at the hard ground. “Only good thing about winter.”
“It’s not winter yet,” Charlie said.
Billy looked a bit hurt. “It feels like it, though. It’s as cold as winter.”
“Yes,” Charlie conceded. “That’s true.”
“I don’t want to hear about you dreaming about me, you fucking gayboy.”
Up ahead, Hague had turned around and was walking backward now, staring at Charlie. He was talking a lot more loudly than Charlie had been, so this time I was convinced Goodbold could hear. But, of course, he wasn’t going to intervene.
Hague made kissing noises. “I know you can’t help it, though.”
Charlie smiled at him. “Who says I can’t help it?”
“What?”
“Who says I can’t help it?” Charlie repeated. “Maybe I choose to dream about you dying, with your eye burst and your brain hanging out of your head. I mean, who wouldn’t choose to dream that? It was a wonderful sight.”
Despite the recovered bravado, a little of the color drained from Hague’s face.
“You’re a fucking freak, Crabtree.”
“Yes.” Charlie laughed. “Yes, I am.”
Hague pulled a disgusted expression, then turned back around. I could see James was still riveted by Charlie. He was staring at him, as though he were a question he’d never encountered before and needed an answer to.
“A fucking freak,” Charlie said.
It was loud enough for Hague to hear, deliberately provocative. And as we reached the sidewalk, Hague turned around and started walking backward again, furious at being goaded. But whatever his response was going to be, I never heard it, because, as he stepped thoughtlessly into the road, a van smashed into him, and he disappeared.
There was a screech of brakes. I looked numbly to the left and saw the vehicle skewing across the road, spinning now, leaving smoke in the air and a swirl of tire prints on the road. It came to rest about a hundred feet down the street, a spread of blood smeared up its cracked windshield like an enormous handprint on the glass.
Everything was silent for a moment.
Then people started screaming.
“Out of the way!”
As Goodbold barged past us, I looked at Charlie. I was still too shocked to blink, never mind process what had just happened, but I remember that Charlie seemed entirely calm. He had that same smile on his lips.
James was staring at him, his mouth open in horror and something a little like awe.
Your skull was smashed open, I thought.
I could see your brain pulsing.
And I remember Charlie looked back at James and winked.
FIVE
“I really liked it.”
I looked up. The lunchtime creative writing club had finished, and I was busy cramming stuff back into my backpack. I’d thought that everyone else had already left, but a girl had hung back and was standing by the classroom doorway now.
“Your story,” she said more slowly. “I really liked it.”
“Oh—thanks.”
The compliment made me feel awkward, not least because it came from a girl. She was small, with jet-black hair that looked like it had been cropped short with scissors in a kitchen, and she was wearing a T-shirt under her school blouse.
Jenny … Chambers?
Her name was all I really knew about her. To the extent I’d noticed her at all, it seemed she existed on the periphery of the school the same way James and I did.
“Thanks.” I finished stuffing my bag. “I thought it was shit.”
“That’s a nice way to respond to a compliment.”
She seemed more amused than insulted.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s nice of you to say. You know what it’s like, though. You’re never happy with what you do.”
“It’s the only way to get better.”
“I suppose so. I liked yours a lot too.”
“Really?”
She looked slightly skeptical. It must have been obvious I’d said it out of politeness and couldn’t actually remember her story. Our English teacher, Ms. Horobin, ran a creative writing club for half an hour one lunchtime a week. We’d write stories in advance, and two of us would read them out each session. It had been Jenny’s turn last week. Or had it been the week before?
Her story came back to me just in time.
“The one about the man and his dog,” I said. “I loved it.”
“Thanks. Although it was more about the dog and his man.”
“That’s true.”
Her story had been about a man who mistreated his dog. Dragging it around everywhere; hitting it; forgetting to feed it. But the dog, being a dog, had loved the guy anyway. Then the man died of a heart attack at home, and because he had no friends, nobody found the body for ages. So the dog—almost apologetically—was forced to eat the corpse. Jenny had written it from the point of view of the dog and called it “Good Boy.”
There had been a couple of seconds of silence when she finished reading, and then Ms. Horobin had coughed and described the story as evocative.
“I don’t think Ms. Horobin was quite expecting it,” I said.
Jenny laughed.
“Yeah, but those are the best kind of stories, right? I like ones that take you by surprise.”
“Me too.”
“And it was based on a true story.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. It happened not far from here. Obviously, I wasn’t there. So I made a lot of it up. But the police really did find what was left of the guy when they went to his house.”
“Wow. I didn’t hear about that.”
“A friend told me.” Jenny nodded at the door. “You heading out?”
“Yeah.”
I zipped my bag shut and we left together.
“Where did you get the idea for your story?” she said.
And again, I felt embarrassed. My story was about a man walking through the town he’d grown up in, making his way back to his childhood home. In my head, he was being hunted for something, and wanted to revisit the past one last time—go back to a place where the world had still felt open and full of possibilities. It wasn’t clear whether he made it home or not; I ended it just as he was arriving at his old street, with sirens in the distance. I’d pretended to myself that it was clever and literary to be ambiguous like that, but in truth, I hadn’t been able to think of a better way to finish it.
“Have you read The Stand?” I said.
I wasn’t expecting her to have, but her eyes widened.
“Oh God, yeah. I love Stephen King! And I get it now. The Walkin’ Dude, right?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Her enthusiasm fired my own a little. “That guy really stuck with me … even though, you know, he turns out to be the Devil or whatever. But at the beginning, when he’s just walking, and you don’t really know why? I liked that a lot.”
“I did too.”
“Have you read any other Stephen King books?”
“All of them.”
“All of them?”
“Yeah, of course.” She looked at me as if the idea of not reading all of them was insane. “He’s my favorite author. I’ve read most of them two or three times. At least, I mean.”
“Wow.”
Later, I would learn how true this was. Jenny was a voracious reader. Partly that was because her family was poor and books were a cheap form of escapism, but i
t was also just the way she was. Right then, I was just amazed that she’d read more King than I had.
“I’ve read most of them,” I said. “Some of them more than once.”
“Favorite?”
“The Shining.” I thought about it. “Maybe.”
“Yeah, it’s difficult to pick, isn’t it? They’re all so good.”
“What about you?”
“Pet Sematary.”
“Oh God, that one’s horrible.”
“I know—I love it.” She grinned. “The ending! Bleak. As. Fuck.”
“And you like that?”
“Sure. They’re meant to be horror stories, right? And obviously they are, but look at The Stand. Lots of bad things happen, but in the end the good guys basically win. And in The Shining, yeah, it’s sad and everything what happens to the dad, but the kid’s okay. Pet Sematary, though. There’s just no hope there at all.”
I nodded, but also recognized the sad resignation in the way she said it. A part of me wanted to tell her that not all endings had to be hopeless. But then we walked out into the main playground, and faced the sea of children and the gray landscape around us, and the words wouldn’t come. On good days, it was possible to believe I was going to escape Gritten when I grew up, but the truth was that very few people around here were going to have anything but difficult, miserable lives. There was no reason to think Jenny or I were special, or that our endings would be any happier than most were.
I looked to the right. James was waiting for me at the far end of the gymnasiums.
I hitched my bag up on my shoulder. “I’m off this way.”
“And I’m off the other. That’s the way it works.”
Which seemed an odd thing to say. But then I remembered how I never saw her at breaks and lunchtimes—how she seemed to disappear in the same way as James and I did. I wondered where she went: what forgotten part of the school she had made her own, and what she did there.
“Have you read ‘The Monkey’s Paw’?” she said.
“I don’t think so. That’s not Stephen King, is it?”
“No. It’s a short story—an older one. It’s quite similar to Pet Sematary, though. You might like it.”
“It sounds good.”
“It is. I’ve got it at home. I could bring it in for you to borrow? I mean, only if you like.”
Some people might have added the qualification at the end to avoid the embarrassment of being turned down, but Jenny sounded relaxed about it—like it genuinely didn’t matter to her one way or the other. She’d come across as a loner before now, but it was remarkable from talking to her how self-assured and at ease in her own skin she seemed. It was as though the world were something she could take or leave, and it felt like some weird kind of privilege that she’d chosen to connect with me.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’d really like that.”
Then I went to meet James.
And Charlie and Billy, of course.
* * *
In the weeks and months that followed Hague’s accident, the four of us had started hanging out together.
I was never sure how it happened. It was a little like how we’d found ourselves walking back from the field together that day—as though it only appeared to be accidental. But I know it was mostly because of James. He became fascinated by Charlie after what happened that day, Charlie encouraged the attention, and it was the attraction between the two of them that gradually brought the four of us into closer orbit. We began spending more of our time together. On weekends, Charlie would take us on treks into the woods talking about ghosts, and at school we spent our lunchtimes in Room C5b.
The room was in the basement of the school, down a secluded flight of stairs at the end of the main corridor. I remember there was a dark alcove at the bottom, with an ancient elevator that looked like the doors would screech if they ever opened. As far as I could work out, there were no corresponding doors above, so I assumed it must run to a floor below even the basement. A boiler room, perhaps. Some dank, wet place full of rusted, clanking pipes.
The only other door down there was to Room C5b, which I imagined had been a classroom once. There were skewed rows of dusty desks at the front, but also comfy chairs at the back of the room, giving it a ramshackle, piecemeal feel, as though the furniture had been gathered from different secondhand shops over a period of years. The room was like a part of the school that had been forgotten, and I suppose on that level it was an appropriate place for the four of us. We would meet there and lounge around. Eat lunch. Chat. Sometimes we’d use the old stubs of chalk to write song lyrics on the blackboard at the front. Nirvana. Pearl Jam. Faith No More. Whatever we wrote stayed there until we rubbed the words off and wrote something else.
Charlie and Billy were already there when James and I arrived one day. Billy was slouched in an armchair, reading one of the guns-and-ammo magazines he was obsessed with. He looked up briefly, to make sure we weren’t a teacher finally coming to evict us all, then continued reading. Charlie was in his usual seat at the far end of the room, high up behind a solitary oak desk. He didn’t acknowledge us at all. His attention was focused on a notebook on the desk in front of him. He was holding a pen above the page, as though poised to make a decisive mark.
I led the way through the maze of furniture.
“Hey, guys. What’s up?”
Billy shrugged, a sullen look on his face, as though he’d been told off for something. Since he often looked that way, it was impossible to say for sure. Charlie still didn’t respond. But as we reached the back of the room, he frowned to himself, and then carefully wrote something in the notebook.
I sat down in one of the armchairs across from Billy, got out the packed lunch I’d made for myself that morning, and ignored Charlie right back. I’d become accustomed to this sort of behavior. Every now and then, we’d arrive to find Charlie very conspicuously doing something mysterious. As I ate, I noticed the curiosity in James’s expression, and had to suppress the irritation it brought. He had become a little too impressed with Charlie for my liking. While I was prepared to entertain Charlie’s eccentricities, I made sure there was always a little mental eye roll there, whereas it was obvious James often thought Charlie was exactly as important as Charlie did himself. For reasons I found hard to articulate, that annoyed me.
“What are you doing, Charlie?” James said eventually.
“I already asked him that.” Billy pulled a face but didn’t look up from his magazine. “It’s a secret, apparently.”
Charlie sighed, then put his pen down on the desk.
“It’s not a secret,” he said. “I was concentrating. When you’re thinking about something important, you want to carry on without being interrupted.”
“Jesus,” Billy muttered. “Sorry.”
“The same way you wouldn’t want me to interrupt … whatever it is you’re reading.”
Billy glanced down at the magazine. He closed it.
Charlie smiled at James.
“I was writing in my dream diary.”
“What’s a dream diary?”
Charlie held up the notebook.
“Every morning, I write down what I dreamed the night before.”
I took a mouthful of sandwich. “It’s not the morning.”
“I didn’t say that’s what I was doing right now.”
I swallowed. Annoyingly true.
“I never remember my dreams,” James said.
“Most people can’t.” Charlie put the notebook down. “I used to be the same. Dreams are stored in the short-term memory, which is why it’s important to write them down as soon as you wake up, before you forget. If you don’t, they vanish forever.”
I resisted the urge to do an actual eye roll. I had become used to Charlie’s fascination with arcane bullshit. He’d bring books on magic and demonology in to school, but I always thought it was more to be seen reading them than out of any genuine interest—that it was part of a persona he liked to cultivate. Charli
e would have been more than happy for people to believe he spent his evenings cross-legged in a chalk pentagram surrounded by candles. But he usually liked his reputation to have more of an edge to it than talking about dreams.
“So what were you doing?” I said.
“Searching for patterns.” He looked at me. “Making notes on what I’ve discovered. Once you start doing that, you begin to notice the same dreams crop up time and time again. The same themes. The same places. The same people.”
“And so what?”
“It helps with incubation.” Charlie smiled.
And I hesitated for a moment, the sandwich halfway to my mouth. It felt a little like when he had spoken to Hague on the day of the accident—saying something unexpected and odd enough to pull you up.
Incubation.
I didn’t like the word. It made me think of something awful being cultivated in a jar. And, of course, I realized I had been wrong just then—after what had happened to Hague, dreams actually did have an edge when it came to Charlie.
James seemed uneasy too.
“What does incubation mean?”
“Influencing what you dream about,” Charlie told him. “Which helps to waken lucidity. Do you know what a lucid dream is?”
James shook his head.
“It’s when you become aware that you’re dreaming while you’re in a dream. Almost as if you’re waking up inside your dream but staying asleep. Once you do that, you’re in control of what happens. You can do anything you want, live any experience you want, make your dream world exactly how you want it to be. Anything you can think of can be real.”
I looked at James and I could see he was considering that, and I wondered what he would choose to do if he could do anything at all. Get back at the bullies who tormented him? Envision a happier home life? Escape from Gritten altogether? I imagined the idea must appeal to him, and I didn’t like the way he was staring at Charlie as though he’d just been offered something magical.
