by Will Maclean
The third room, a large space that was formerly some sort of boardroom, was dominated by a childlike painting of a tree, which covered one wall like ivy. One corner of the room was blackened from a fire having been set there: the filthy stain reached to the ceiling and warped the corner into a black hole, devouring all light.
The rest of the rooms we had been unable to penetrate, as the double doors guarding them were too securely chained to pry open. But today, as we stood before them, Tony – dogged as always in his pursuit of the forbidden – unshouldered his holdall and produced a pair of bolt cutters. With a matter-of-factness that indicated that this wasn’t the first time he’d done something like this, he cut through one of the links of the heavy chain. On the second cut, the link came apart, and the chain and lock thundered to the floor.
Tony smiled at me, and pushed the door open.
We were in a short, dark corridor. The walls were painted cream, the floor covered in grey rubber tile. There was a door on the left-hand side, and one on the right, both unlocked. We each took a torch from Tony’s holdall. Tony took the right-hand room, and I the left.
My room turned out to be a small office, still with a desk in it, although two of the legs were gone, so it looked as if the desk was trying in vain to get up after having sustained an injury. There was a door to another room and I saw that it was heavily padlocked, in the same way the double doors had been. I was about to give this mystery a closer look when Tony called my name.
I left the shattered office and ducked back into the corridor, then the room Tony was exploring. Tony grinned when he saw me.
‘Look,’ he said. On the desk in front of him, I saw a small stack of faded pornographic magazines.
My stomach tightened involuntarily. I had never seen a photograph of a naked woman before, and I found it almost impossible to believe this situation – desired, dreamed of, wondered about – was happening now, here, in this place, of all places. I picked up the first one and, without ceremony, it fell open, revealing a spread of a smiling, red-haired woman reclining on a yellow divan. And there were her breasts, her upturned, conical nipples brazen and hard. And there, between her legs, surrounded by a mass of red hair, was her vagina. Her actual vagina. In the same picture as her smiling face, so that you, the viewer, had no choice but to consider the two things as part of the same person. There was so much hair. I didn’t know women had that much pubic hair. My mouth was dry and I felt I had no clear way to react.
‘Wow,’ I said, which sounded pathetic even to me. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so repeated myself. ‘Wow.’
Tony Finch flipped through one of the other magazines, and the two of us stood for a while, unable to stop looking. I felt cold and hot and exhilarated. I was too stunned to find the situation arousing.
‘Wow,’ I said again.
Tony sneered, and that broke the spell. ‘These are old,’ he said, with the practical dismissiveness of the connoisseur. ‘I can get newer ones.’ Nevertheless, he put the magazines into his holdall, and then held his hand out and grinned, as he saw from my body language that I involuntarily didn’t want to hand the magazine to him.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll give it back later.’ I gave him the magazine. I felt light-headed, intoxicated. Several questions had been answered, but a million more had sprung up in their place.
‘What was in yours?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Oh – another door, with a chain on it.’
‘Great,’ said Tony, and hoisted the bolt cutter onto his shoulder, like a rifle.
The chain gave way as easily as the earlier one, slithering to the floor in a heap. Only, this time, the wooden door opened to reveal another door, made of metal, painted dark green. The wheel of a combination lock stood out halfway down. I rapped on the door with my knuckles; the surface returned barely any sound at all, and the bones in my fingers hurt.
‘Locked,’ Tony said with a shrug, in case I hadn’t grasped the fact.
‘Yeah.’ I rubbed my fingers. ‘But why padlock the outer door? What’s the point?’
Tony shrugged again. Idly, he turned the dial on the combination lock. It clicked smoothly.
‘We’ll never open it,’ I said. ‘There must be a million combinations.’
‘Hold up,’ said Tony. His torch beam played over the ruined shelves. Then a thought struck him. He reached upwards, to the wooden architrave above the door. Incredibly, his hand came down holding a thin strip of paper.
Tony smiled in triumph. ‘Three, oh, oh, seven, six, six. Try that.’
‘How did you know it would be up there?’
‘My brother worked in a builder’s merchant, and they had a safe. No one ever remembers the combination, ’specially if loads of people use it. Go on, open her up.’
I turned the heavy dial. Under my hand, it moved with monstrous certainty. Three. Zero. Zero. Seven. Six. Six. Instantly, cleanly, I felt the colossal bolts release.
I peered around the door. I just had time to glimpse a row of empty, dented shelves before I was shoved inside.
The door closed, and the blackness and silence were absolute. ‘Tony,’ my voice whimpered, and I knew he couldn’t hear me. I heard the bolts slide back into place.
‘Tony!’ My voice was a scream now, but all noises were small in this place. He would leave me here. He would go home and leave me here, and I would suffocate and rot, and nobody would know.
No grave could be this dark.
My fear became absolute, like the blackness, like the silence. This, I knew, was what had happened to Abi.
The lock clunked heavily, as before. Torchlight flooded in. Tony Finch’s face was crumpled with laughter.
‘You rotten prick!’
‘Your face!’ said Tony.
‘I could have died in there!’ My voice sounded high-pitched and childish. This statement seemed to amplify Tony’s mirth still further. I told him to stop, but found that I was also smirking, despite myself.
‘Ah, bollocks,’ said Tony at last, wiping his eyes. ‘Let’s go outside and look at some tits.’
Later, I let myself into the house and started to head upstairs to my bedroom. The hallway smelled of cigarette smoke, as it always did now, and the house echoed dully when there was noise. I was halfway across the hallway when a frail voice called to me from the living room.
I walked to the threshold but did not enter. There she sat, her back to me, staring out of the window at the lifeless tangle of the garden, smoking a cigarette. In front of her on the coffee table were a packet of Player’s No. 6, a box of matches and an ashtray, half-filled with ground-out filters.
‘Mum.’
She inclined her head very slightly to acknowledge she’d heard me. I sat down next to her.
Once more, I was forced to consider that time might be passing more slowly for my mother than for the rest of us. The almost-grief that was her sole emotional diet was corroding her; her skin was visibly more coarse and wrinkled, and grey strands predominated in hair that had been glossy black just over a year ago. As if to underline this process, she had taken up chain-smoking in earnest, and a soft layer of blue smoke hung just above head height at all times throughout the house. The place smelled like the school staff room.
‘Where have you been?’ said Mum, not turning to look at me.
‘Out,’ I said. ‘With Tony.’
‘He’s a bad influence,’ said Mum, but this was a mere gesture towards parental responsibility. Tony Finch was one of the few things my mum actually showed any enthusiasm for in her new life, the life that had been forced upon her, grey and featureless as fog. Even as she looked at me I saw her interest in me, and the present moment, wane.
‘Where’s Dad?’ I asked.
‘Doing his DIY,’ said Mum. ‘Not sure where. I heard him banging around earlier.’ One hand brushed a strand of grey-black hair behind her ear. Her hand looked terribly frail.
‘Have you eaten? Can I get you anything?’
&
nbsp; ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ said Mum, without emotion. Her gaze returned to the window.
‘You can’t just sit here like this,’ I said. I got up and turned the television on, punching the button for BBC One. Even the television was better than the awful silence, surely; even banal noise was a reminder that the world carried on, and that out there, somewhere, was a place that glittered and shone, and wasn’t macabre and desolate, a place where somebody was having fun.
The set warmed up and the image grew to fill the screen. Clunk Click was just starting, with Jimmy Savile.
Mum sank into the sofa and lit a fresh cigarette with the old one.
I climbed the ladder to the attic, as I had done every day since Abi had vanished. As ever, a second of hope gave way instantly to disappointment; our Book of Fates, in which Abi and I had detailed every outcome we could think of after death, was still securely tucked away on the bookshelf, in complete accordance with the laws of everything. I was almost angry; I had expected the first anniversary of Abi’s disappearance might yield a concrete result.
A thought occurred, not entirely rational: maybe the attic was the wrong place for the book to be. Maybe it needed to be somewhere more saturated in Abi’s presence. I eased the book from the shelf and carried it with solemn ceremony down the ladder.
No one had been in Abi’s room for months. The air was cold and stale; everything in there remained just as I remembered it.
I pushed the notebook onto her bookshelf, between A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of The Four.
I did not glance behind me as I left, but I half-expected to hear the notebook fall.
14
In February, I turned seventeen, alone. No one wanted to celebrate a birthday where someone was so obviously absent, but I did find a card and a postal order from my parents on my bed that day. It was the second birthday Abi had missed. She had vanished three weeks shy of our sixteenth.
Time passed, somehow, until it was, I realised with a strange, charged suddenness, the second spring since Abi had gone. Very soon it would be summer; we were already halfway through May. Whilst for my mother the time since Abi vanished had crawled, for me it had accelerated, a situation that seemed to have worsened since I had been given leave from school. And here I was staring through Mr Henshaw’s windows again, and here he was smiling at me with the same benign calm Mr Henshaw extended to all things equally. It was a filthy day, windy and raining, and the trees clashed and writhed in their great and private agonies at the bottom of Mr Henshaw’s garden. The sky was so dark and threatening that Mr Henshaw had put the lights on, even though it was only 2.30 p.m.
I had just arrived and was gearing myself up for another afternoon of lying and evasion, when I was all of a sudden conscious of the inescapable fact that I was running from. Abi – to me, the only completely worthwhile person I had ever known, and my twin sister – was gone, and my way of coping with this fact had been to bury it, ignore it, hope it would go away or change. I had taken my energy and put it into breaking and burning things, as if the sadness of all those accumulated acts might somehow equal the unconquerable sadness it was now my fate to dwell in. And what sadness it was, now that I was forced to look at it. I recalled the cube of absolute blackness that had enclosed me when Tony had locked me in the walk-in safe. The sadness was the same, but without limit.
I became conscious that Mr Henshaw was calling my name at the same time I became aware that I was crying. I was hugging my knees, seeking to make myself smaller, subatomic; to vanish entirely, to meet Abi on whatever plane she had been removed to.
Mr Henshaw was offering a tissue. I took it and wiped my eyes.
‘Tim,’ he said tenderly. ‘It’s OK.’
‘There’s just so much of it,’ I said. My voice was warped by the effort of not breaking down completely.
‘I know.’
‘She’s dead, Mr Henshaw.’
Mr Henshaw said nothing.
‘I know she’s dead,’ I whispered. And it was strange, to hear myself say it out loud.
‘You can’t know that, Tim. No one does. Or rather, only one person does and that’s whoever—’
‘I do.’ And there it was. Against all of my stalling, my changing the subject and pretend silences, we were getting to the heart of things.
‘How, Tim?’
‘Abi and I took a photo,’ I said. It sounded stupid immediately, but I pressed on. ‘We faked a ghost photograph. Years ago. We drew a figure in chalk on the wall and took pictures of it.’
Mr Henshaw smiled. ‘Your parents said you were always doing stuff like that.’
‘This was different.’ I was back in control of my voice now. ‘It was – unpleasant. We took the most convincing one to school and we showed it to one of the other kids. A girl.’
Mr Henshaw said nothing, but listened.
‘She was really upset by it, more than we expected. In class later that afternoon, she fainted and had to be taken home.’ I paused. It was odd to be telling someone all of this after so long.
‘Abi and I thought we’d get into trouble, so we decided to nip the whole thing in the bud. We invited Janice over to our house – that was the girl’s name, Janice – and showed her how we’d done it, with just chalk and a camera. And then—’
How to describe what happened next?
‘She had some kind of – fit. Not like a proper fit, but … she started saying things. Weird things. Like she was …’
‘Like she was …?’
I groped for the word.
‘Foretelling.’
Mr Henshaw inhaled, very slowly. Outwardly, he retained his usual air of peaceful equanimity, but something flickered in his eyes, and I couldn’t determine what it meant.
‘I know how it sounds. We thought she was just being stupid, play-acting. Saying stuff that sounded scary to put the wind up us. Abi actually slapped her, she thought she was being hysterical. Anyway, we wrote down everything she said.’
I sighed. Even if it sounded mad, I had to tell the whole story now. So I did; the smashed doll’s house and the broken disfigured dolls, everything.
‘Some of the other stuff Janice said to Abi … She said someone was coming for her, that she’d end up somewhere grinning away. What does that mean if it doesn’t mean she’s—’ I choked back a sob.
Mr Henshaw’s expression was neutral. ‘Tim, this is extremely morbid speculation. And very vague.’
‘But that’s just it. She said he’s coming for you, he has eyes but no face. And – Abi didn’t write this bit down, but I remember clearly – Janice made a hissing sound at the end, Esssss, like that, and I thought that was just more play-acting. But—’
Mr Henshaw’s brows furrowed underneath the thick lenses of his glasses. I persevered. I wanted to make him understand.
‘Later, when Abi had – gone – I saw the article in the paper. There was that woman who saw Abi in the shop, talking to a man. Next to a picture of Abi was the police sketch of this man.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Henshaw. ‘I recall seeing it.’
‘Do you? Do you remember what it looked like? That sketch?’
Mr Henshaw remained silent.
‘The woman in the shop couldn’t remember anything about him, except his hair and his eyes. So the police sketch was just his hair, the collar of his jacket, and his eyes. Eyes, but no face. And the woman said the man’s van had a name on the side and she couldn’t remember it but knew it began with an “S”. “Mr S”, they called him, in the paper. So Janice wasn’t hissing, she was saying “S, S”, over again, do you see?’
Mr Henshaw’s expression was unreadable.
‘What she said, all of it, it all happened! It’s all true! And if it’s all true then Abi is dead, somewhere, and pretending she isn’t is … stupid!’
I was properly crying now. ‘She’s dead, Mr Henshaw! She’s dead!’ I was standing up. My hands were balled into fists at my side, my fingernails digging into my palms.
Mr Henshaw looked up at m
e. His face was perfectly calm.
‘Tim, you’re a very bright young man, with very eclectic interests, so I assume you’re familiar with a phenomenon called pareidolia?’
Of course I was.
‘Pareidolia is the phenomenon of seeing a pattern in random data,’ said Mr Henshaw, before I could answer. ‘Faces in tree trunks, figures in wallpaper, stuff like that. Those things aren’t really there, but that’s how the brain chooses to interpret them.’
‘I’d take issue with the word choose,’ I said. ‘Evolution has conditioned us to look for patterns, because they confer a huge survival advantage.’
Mr Henshaw smiled. ‘I’m sorry, I forget how bright you are. Yes, you’re entirely correct.’
I suddenly felt foolish standing up, and sat down.
‘So you think that’s what I’m doing?’
‘Undoubtedly, Tim. I’m sorry. Your parents already told me this story, but I was waiting to hear it from you. It was the reason they called me in the first place. Your insistence that Abi was dead, and the – manner – in which you arrived at that conclusion, upset them greatly.’
Bitter anger flashed through me. ‘Oh, it upset them, did it? I’m her twin brother! No one was closer to her than I was!’
‘I’m not sure anyone can be closer to a child than a parent, Tim. And your suspicion that she is … dead, terrible and tragic though that is, is something your parents have to face every second of every day.’
I folded my arms tight around myself. Outside, the day was getting darker, the clouds a deeper and more ominous blue.
‘So what’s the bloody problem, then?’ I said. ‘If we all agree?’
‘Tim.’ Mr Henshaw steepled his fingers. ‘I know it’s hard being a teenager in today’s world. There are so many distractions. Pop music. Television. Violent films. Plus your own emotions, which are all over the place.’
‘What’s your point?’
