by Alex North
SIXTEEN
Jesus, Amanda thought as she arrived in Gritten.
The world around her seemed to have completely changed in the space of twenty minutes. Not long ago, she had been driving along tranquil country lanes, surrounded by sunny idyllic fields, thinking: This isn’t such a bad place. Whereas now there were just empty industrial estates and shabby houses and shops on all sides, and what she was thinking was: This is a fucking shithole.
Which was admittedly harsh. In her experience, places were just places. What mattered most were the people who lived in them, and an upmarket zip code was no guarantee of anything; you found good and bad everywhere. And yet there was something especially beaten-down about Gritten. Despite the sunlight, the air seemed drab and gray, like an old wet cloth half wrung out. As she looked at the dilapidated neighborhoods she drove through, it was difficult to shake the sensation that the place was cursed in some way—that there was something poisonous in the ground here, rooted in the history of the place, that kept the land barren and the people dead inside.
Her phone was in a dock on the dashboard, the navigation showing her the route. About half a mile to go.
She slowed the car slightly as a tight bend approached, then passed a series of newly built houses on the left. The folly of hope over experience right there, she thought. It was hard to imagine someone moving to Gritten who had the option of being anywhere else instead.
Of course, some people had no choice.
A few minutes later, she parked up a little way past the address registered to Billy Roberts. The house was small and stood off by itself between two stretches of bedraggled, overgrown grass. The brickwork was crumbling away below the old windowsills, and the paint on the front door was peeling so badly it looked like something had been clawing at it. The remains of an old garage were half attached to the left-hand side, with sheets of corrugated iron scattered on the ground and a few rusted struts still poking out of the house, like a body with an arm torn off and the ripped tendons hanging loose.
Amanda’s first thought was that the place had seen better days. But then she remembered the implied details she’d read about Roberts’s childhood—the neglect; the extreme poverty; the allegations of abuse—and she wondered if maybe it hadn’t.
She killed the engine and sent a curt message to Lyons, informing him she’d arrived. When she’d gone to his office yesterday, he’d turned out to be more than amenable to her suggestion of traveling to Gritten to talk to Billy Roberts. In itself, that had not been much of a surprise. With the possible involvement of a third party online, the murder of Michael Price had started to sprawl at the edges, and Lyons always had his eye on the prize. If Roberts turned out to be implicated or—even better—Charlie Crabtree really was still alive and they could find something that led to him, there would be gold stars all around.
But Lyons needed the rest of the day to clear her visit with the Gritten Police Department. What she hadn’t expected was that, in the course of tracing other individuals connected to the original crime, she would learn from the college he worked at that Paul Adams was also back in Gritten right now. Lyons had loved that, of course: two birds with one stone. And so what she’d initially imagined as a day trip had ended with her booking a shitty local hotel and hastily packing a suitcase that was presently stuffed in the trunk of her car.
Roberts first.
She took out her phone as she approached the house and called Roberts’s number again. The street was so deathly quiet that, after the call connected, she could hear the phone ringing inside the house. No answer, though. She killed the call and the house fell quiet until she knocked on the door.
She waited.
Was there movement inside?
There was a small fish-eye lens on the door, and a few seconds later Amanda had the crawling sensation that there was someone on the other side of it staring out at her. Impatiently, she looked behind her at the run-down surroundings. The house was opposite a row of closed shops, the metal shutters daubed with simple graffiti. A little way along the road was a fenced-off yard filled with piles of old car tires, an illegible wooden sign tied to the wire mesh.
She turned back to the house and knocked again.
No answer.
She took a step back.
According to the records, Billy Roberts had been unemployed for a number of years, but obviously that didn’t exclude the possibility of him being out of the house somewhere. Which was fine, of course; she could come back. But she looked at the fish-eye lens again. It had felt like someone had been there, and, given Roberts’s reluctance to answer the phone, she wasn’t entirely convinced his attitude toward the door would be any different. She knelt down on the doorstep and poked the mail slot open.
“Mr. Roberts?”
Nothing.
She peered in as best she could, and was rewarded by a thin view of the hallway. It led down to a door that was open onto the kitchen, the broken slat on the window at the far end hanging at an angle like a guillotine. Everything she could see looked old-fashioned: the patterned wallpaper; the dust on the picture frames hanging in the hall. It was as though Roberts had changed nothing after moving back here. The beige carpet was patchy and threadbare, and there were …
Footprints on it.
Amanda stared for a moment.
Red footprints.
Her heart began to beat a little faster. She allowed the mail slot to close slowly, then stood up and tried the door handle. It turned easily, the door opening slowly inward on creaking hinges.
She took a step inside.
“Mr. Roberts?”
The house was completely silent.
Check your exits.
She scanned her surroundings. There was a door directly to her left, secured by a rusty padlock; presumably that had once led into the garage. Stairs led up, but there was nobody in the gloomy hallway above. The old hallway directly ahead of her was empty, and narrow enough for only one person at a time. Nobody was visible in what she could see of the kitchen—although she guessed there was probably a back door out of sight there.
She looked to her right. The open doorway there led into what appeared to be a front room. She couldn’t see any furniture, and the bases of the walls were lined with empty cans and bottles. Nobody visible there. But that was her immediate flash point. The place she wouldn’t see anyone coming from.
She stepped away from it for a moment.
Now that she was inside, the footprints leading away down the hall looked even more like blood than before. From what she could discern from the pattern, it looked like someone had walked out of the front room to the door, and then headed off down the hallway into the kitchen.
Amanda listened.
Silence.
She slipped her phone out of her pocket and keyed in the number for the police, her thumb poised over the CALL icon as she steadied herself. Then she stepped sideways into the front room.
Immediately she pressed CALL.
It was out of instinct more than anything else, because it took a second for her mind to process what she was seeing. Her attention was drawn to the dark red couch to her left, its back against the wall to the hallway. And then the still figure sitting on it. She didn’t immediately recognize it as a person, only as something that was close to human but also horrifically wrong. The head had no discernible features and was far too large, and it was only after staring at it that she realized the man’s face had been rendered unrecognizable, the skin swollen to almost impossible proportions by the bruises and cuts that had been inflicted upon it.
Amanda held the ringing phone to her ear.
Answer, answer, answer.
“Gritten Police Department, how—”
“Officer requesting assistance. Eighteen Gable Street. I need police and ambulance on scene as a matter of urgency. A man appears to be dead. Suspicious circumstances. Whereabouts of perpetrator unknown.”
She stepped carefully toward the body as she was speaking,
taking in the details. The man’s hands were in his lap, every finger broken into a twisted nest. Another step, and her foot squelched slightly. She looked down. The couch wasn’t red at all, she realized. It was just drenched with blood that had soaked into the carpet below it.
She looked up.
A little way past the couch, a door hung open. From the length of the room, it could only lead into the kitchen.
Whereabouts of perpetrator unknown.
“Ma’am, can I take your name, please?”
“Detective Amanda Beck,” she said. “Just get here now.”
The man on the other end of the phone said something else, but Amanda lowered her phone, her heart thudding in her ears and her attention entirely focused on the open door a little way in front of her. She was thinking about the footprints in the hall. They disappeared into the kitchen, but the most obvious route there from here was this door at the far end of the room. And yet whoever had made them had gone out into the hall to the front door instead.
She remembered the sensation she’d had after knocking. The feeling that someone had been staring out at her.
Keep calm.
With her gaze locked on the door into the kitchen, Amanda slipped her phone into her jacket pocket and took out her keys, bunching them between her knuckles. Then she moved carefully across to the far side of the room, giving her more distance, more time, a better angle. Not that, armed as poorly as this, she would stand a chance against anyone capable of the ferocious violence that sat motionless across the room from her.
The kitchen revealed itself by increments. She could see the end of the counter, loaded with dirty plates, and then the edge of the sink. The window.
She hesitated, caught between the fear of what she might encounter in the kitchen and of the ruined, crimson thing sitting behind her now.
Panic was setting in.
I can’t do this.
And for a few seconds, she was eight years old again. Terrified, and yet too frightened to call out because she knew there was nobody in the house who would come.
Then:
You can do this, she imagined her father saying. I raised you better.
She took another step sideways.
The kitchen was empty. She could see the length of it now, all the way to the alcove at the far end, where the black eye of an old washing machine was staring back at her, and she saw the pebbled glass of the back door that was hanging open against the boiler on the wall, desultory sunlight streaming in beside it.
You’re okay.
Relief flooded through her, and she moved more quickly now, treading around the bloodstained footprints leading in from the hall. Despite the heat of the day, when she reached the door and breathed in the air, it was somehow cooler and fresher than the tortured atmosphere throbbing behind her. Out back, there was a disheveled paved area, grass springing up in the cracks between the dirty slabs, and then an expanse of trees at the far end.
Nobody in sight.
She looked down.
The bloody footprints headed across the paving stones toward the trees at the end of the yard. But they faded as they went, as though the person who had left them were disappearing as they ran. And by the time they reached the tree line, they had vanished entirely.
SEVENTEEN
BEFORE
I remember the last time I went into the Shadows with the others.
It was the weekend after the knocks at James’s door in the night, and as usual, the four of us met in the town playground and then walked up to his house. There were numerous routes we could take, but for some reason Charlie always liked to go in from there. As we wandered down James’s backyard that day, I found myself lagging a little way behind the others. The trees in front of me seemed darker and more inhospitable than usual, gradually filling the sky as we approached the fence, and my skin felt chilly in the shade of them.
I glanced behind me. There was a figure in the upstairs window of the house. Carl was standing there watching us, a reflection of the clouds slightly occluding the expression on his face. I raised my hand to acknowledge him, and for a moment he didn’t respond. Then his own hand moved tentatively to the glass.
Turning back, I spread the thin wires of the back fence and ducked underneath, stepping through into the woods, and then followed the others into the tree line. The volume dropped a notch, the quiet rush of the real world fading away behind us. The silence in the woods was eerie, and not for the first time I found myself glancing around as I trailed behind, my heart humming with that strange sensation you have when it feels like you’re being watched.
Which was stupid, of course. There was nobody out here apart from us. But the woods always made me nervous. My mother had warned me it wasn’t safe out here. There was little in the way of pathways, which made it easy to lose your bearings, and even if you didn’t, the land itself was treacherous and unsafe. There were abandoned mines out here, and places where the ground had collapsed, leaving the trees leaning at angles, forming shattered crosses above crumbling pits. These were not friendly woods. Not a welcoming place for children to play.
And, of course, there were all Charlie’s stories about the woods being haunted. The idea of that had wormed its way into my head. It was always Charlie who insisted we come out here, and always him leading the way, taking us along different routes through the trees. I had the sensation he was searching for something here, and frequently found myself peering off to the side or checking behind. It got so dark and quiet among the trees that it was easy to imagine something stalking us out here.
We walked for about half an hour that day. Then Charlie hitched his bag off his shoulder and dropped it in the dirt.
“Here,” he said. “It’s not right, but it’ll do.”
“Where would be right?” I said.
I didn’t expect a reply, and I didn’t get one. I’d become more openly belligerent toward Charlie over the previous weeks, and in return he had begun to act as though I weren’t there or hadn’t spoken.
I looked around at where he’d brought us.
Much of the woods were impenetrable, but Charlie had taken us off-path today and still managed to find what amounted to a clearing. The ground was black and scorched, as though there had been a fire and the land had never quite recovered. The charred trees pointed arrow-straight from the dark soil, the branches high above spreading out like splayed fingers. There was an odd crackle of energy to the place too. I turned in a circle, breathing in the atmosphere, thinking of fairies and monsters. If anything like that had lived in the woods, this felt like a place where they would congregate. There was a sense of expectation to the air, as though the place were waiting for something to appear.
Billy had brought his own bag: an old, stained drawstring sack. He pulled a knife and a Black Widow slingshot out of it, then handed the slingshot to Charlie, but kept the knife for himself, turning it around in his hand and examining the blade. I’d seen the slingshot before, but the knife made me nervous. It was about six inches long, with a serrated edge and a wicked curve at the tip, and the little light that caught the metal revealed numerous scratches on the blade. I pictured Billy in his father’s workshop, following instructions from one of his magazines to sharpen the blade.
The ground chuffed as Charlie kicked at it, searching for a suitable rock to fit the slingshot. When he found one, he hooked the brace of the Black Widow over his forearm, squeezed the stone into the pouch, and pulled the tubing back to its fullest extent.
I heard the creak of the rubber stretching.
He closed one eye for accuracy, and then turned and aimed at my face.
“Fuck.”
I reacted out of instinct, closing my eyes and throwing up a hand. He’d moved so quickly that my mind filled in the rest of the action, and I imagined the explosion of pain in my eye. It didn’t come. When I lowered my hand and looked again, Charlie was smiling at me, aiming down at the ground now.
“Got you,” he said.
&nbs
p; “Jesus, man.” My heart was beating so quickly that it was hard to speak. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Just messing around.”
But the nonchalance in his voice didn’t reach his eyes. He turned and took aim at one of the trees. I swallowed, trying to calm myself down.
If his hand had slipped then, he’d probably have killed me.
So do something.
The urge was there. But he still had the slingshot. And Billy had moved closer to me now. He was prodding the point of the knife into one of the trees. Not stabbing it, exactly, more like torturing it out of idle curiosity, a blank look on his face.
The realization came to me suddenly.
I don’t know these people anymore.
“Goodbold,” Charlie said.
He fired. The trajectory of the shot was too quick for me to follow, but there was an awful crack to one side, and when I looked across I actually saw Goodbold standing there for a moment, one eye punched red, splinters of his skull dusting the air beside his ear. Then it was just a tree again. Charlie’s shot had shattered away a chunk of bark at head height.
“Dead center,” he said.
I shook my head, whether in disagreement or just to clear the vision he’d prompted.
“Not dead center,” I said. “More like an eye.”
“An eye, then. Still straight into his brain—or what passes for it. Your turn, James.”
Charlie held the slingshot out, and James took it hesitantly, scanning the ground for a stone to use. When he found one, he loaded it into the pouch and stood with his feet apart, aiming awkwardly at the same tree Charlie had shot.
“A little to the left,” Charlie said.
Handling a weapon didn’t come naturally to James. I could tell he was already setting himself up for failure, the exact same way he did on the sports field. As he adjusted his aim, Charlie touched his upper arm, gently guiding him.
