by Luca Veste
Also by Luca Veste
The Bone Keeper
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2020 by Luca Veste
Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks
Cover design by Ervin Serrano
Cover image © Reilika Landen/Arcangel, VolodymyrSanych/Shutterstock
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.
Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher.
Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
1992
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
1994
Sixteen
Seventeen
1996
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
1997
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
1999
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
2002
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
1993
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Later
Now
Reading Group Guide
A Conversation with the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
For Steve Cavanagh—my PodBro, my shaky idea fixer, my guide, my confidante, but above all else, my friend.
When it was over, there was silence.
It wasn’t a calm type of quiet. Peaceful or tranquil. It was a suffocating stillness as reality settled over us all.
On me.
No turning back now. No changing our minds. No fixing our mistake.
I can still feel the mud under my fingernails. The blood that didn’t belong to me on my skin. The smell of sweat and fear.
I could scrub myself clean over and over, and it would never be enough.
It would still be there. Ground down, seeping into my skin. Turning my blood black and cold.
The dirt.
The pain.
The evil.
This was my mistake. My fault.
In the beginning, there was a boy. A small, anonymous young boy, who you wouldn’t look at twice. Quiet and thoughtful.
He would become a killer, but that happened later. For now, while he was a child, there was only the song.
Oranges and lemons
Say the bells of Saint Clements.
You owe me five farthings,
Say the bells of Saint Martin’s.
When will you pay me?
Say the bells at Old Bailey.
When I grow rich
Say the bells at Shoreditch.
When will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney.
I do not know
Says the great bell at Bow.
Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!
Chip chop chip chop the last man is dead.
The children would sing that song and play their game—never including him.
That’s how it began.
That’s where he learned how to use it. The words meaning so much. Giving him something he never had.
He started with dolls. Removing their heads, lighting his candles.
Then, later, they didn’t provide what he had needed.
It had to be something more real.
Chip chop. Red candles, lighting them to death. Endless sleep.
It gave him power. Revenge.
Relief.
Finally.
One
Our phones had pinged at the same time. A smile on our faces as we read the latest message in the group chat, turned to each other, and both agreed without saying a word. That’s how we live our lives now. A series of moments, interspersed with cell phones vibrating or dinging away to let us know what is happening around the world. We’re instantly contactable. When the world ends, we’ll find out from a breaking news notification, I imagine.
There’s a point when you know age has finally caught up with you. That you’re not young anymore and time is marching on. Life is happening, and you have to make a decision to catch up with it or try to stop it somehow. That you are no longer in your teens or your twenties, that forty isn’t that far away and you have to start growing up.
For me, it was when I bought my own house and went to a nineties-themed music festival.
The two were unrelated but happened in the same week.
The blurred line between nostalgia and my unfolding future. An invisible line, drawing the former to a close and starting the latter.
The music festival had come up as a link in that group chat. Chris had sent it; Michelle had replied with some emojis; Stuart took a day to respond with a thumbs-up and a list of bands he hoped would be there. Alexandra and I were already discussing whether it was too close to our move-in date, deciding within a few minutes it would be fine.
We had saved and saved, scrimping together every last penny for the deposit. The monthly payments were more than manageable, less than we had been paying in rent, strangely enough.
Now, it was ours. The very first place we could properly call home.
This belonged to us. It was only bricks and mortar, but when Alexandra and I had picked up the keys and let ourselves inside for the first
time, there was a definite feeling of arrival. Into adulthood, home ownership, being.
It’s bizarre the way inanimate objects can suddenly become the catalyst for relief.
The boxes were inside the house but remained firmly unpacked. All clearly marked and not by my hand. I’d come back to the rented flat we shared one day to find a load of boxes with different rooms noted on them.
That had always been Alexandra. I had no issues with organization, but when she was excited about something, I didn’t stand a chance. I took a breath, and she’d already done it.
“Matt, have you seen the roll mat?”
I wondered for a second or two what the hell a roll mat was, then remembered just in time. I didn’t want another lesson in camping if I could help it. I looked around the room, wondering how we’d manage to find anything and then spotted it wedged between two boxes marked LIVING ROOM. I shouted up a confirmation to Alexandra and continued making a playlist for the car.
Each song was a reminder of another time.
“Rhythm Is a Dancer,” Snap! That one was from 1992—year six in primary school. First dance I remember in school. I danced for the first time in front of people. I’d tried to avoid doing the same thing ever since. Same year as “End of the Road” by Boyz II Men and “Stay” by Shakespears Sister. Also “I Will Always Love You,” but I’d rather forget that song and the film Alexandra watched on a yearly basis for some unknown reason.
1993. First and second year in high school. The year of Wet Wet Wet and that song that seemed to be Number 1 for the entire year. I wasn’t a fan but stuck it on the playlist anyway. Also added Mariah Carey’s version of “Without You,” Pato Banton, D:Ream, and East 17.
1997. Year ten and eleven in high school. Puff Daddy missing Notorious B.I.G. Will Smith with “Men in Black.” No Doubt, Natalie Imbruglia, and the Verve all got added. I stuck Hanson in for the laughs it would surely generate.
And the mass sing-along.
1998 and 1999. GCSE’s and the start of A-Levels. The year the pickings in music became slimmer. Steps and S Club 7 had arrived. “Tragedy” had to go on there. As did Shania Twain. Then, it was the greatest pop song of all time—in my humble opinion—“…Baby One More Time” and the ridiculously young Britney Spears.
I smiled to myself, each song coming to mind instantly and vividly. The soundtrack of my youth. I threw some Cast and Space tracks on the list because they were ace and local to us. And they would annoy our mate from Manchester, Stuart, too.
The weekend was going to be filled with reminiscing and sore throats from singing songs we somehow still knew by heart.
“We’ve just bought a house, and now we’re swapping that for a tent in a field,” I said as Alexandra walked into the room. I stopped updating the playlist, looking up at her from the sofa that wouldn’t stay in the position we’d dropped it in the day before. “I don’t understand how this happened. We’ve got a proper bed here. And walls.”
“Stop moaning,” she replied, shaking her head and smiling to herself. “Where’s your sense of adventure? We’re not too old to be going camping, you know.”
“I’m just saying, surely we’ve gotten to the point where we can afford to have proper walls now. Walls, Alexandra. They’re this new invention that stops us from freezing to death at night.”
“Sarcasm is your least attractive trait. And where’s the fun in that? This whole weekend is about recapturing our youth, right? Well, that means we’re going to be in a field with thousands of other people.”
I took a breath, ready to argue my point further, but could see it was pointless. Truth was, I was just as excited about it. Still, it was October, and my feet never felt warm at the best of times.
“Did you put that thing under the car?”
I frowned, then remembered what she was talking about from the roll of her eyes. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea. I don’t like the thought of leaving a spare key fixed to the car. Seems to be asking for trouble, isn’t it?”
“It’s totally safe. And anyway, it’s just a precaution. If you lose the car keys in some field near Bath, you’ll be complaining for weeks after about the cost.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll do it when we get there.” The little black box was on my desk. A combination lock and a spare car key inside. You could affix it in the wheel arch, and it was unbreakable apparently. I wasn’t so sure. I used our anniversary as a memorable date to unlock it. Our newest anniversary date.
“Are you ready to go?” Alexandra asked, adding yet another thing to backpack three—the other two were already in the trunk. “We’ve got to meet the others in fifteen minutes.”
“Yeah, just finishing off now. Just trying to remember that song Michelle used to sing in science in year ten.”
“‘Saturday Night’ by Whigfield.”
“That’s the one,” I said, typing it into the search bar. Over two hundred songs on the playlist now. Mostly nineties-era music, with a few eighties power ballads thrown in for good measure.
“Well, hurry up,” I said, then smiled when Alexandra came over to me and wrapped her arms around my shoulders as I sat in my desk chair. I leaned back and rested my head against her body. “You know how they get if we’re late.”
“I know. I’m just thinking though…we haven’t christened this room yet.”
I was grinning as I stood up, and like giggling teenagers, we closed the curtains.
We were late.
An hour or so later, we were making our way down the M6, singing along to Aerosmith at the top of our lungs. Michelle and Stuart in the back seat, Chris and Nicola in another car behind ours.
Michelle had always been the singer in the group. Now, she was blaring tunes from the back seat as if it were karaoke time at Coopers pub in town. Loud and almost never in tune. She’d cut her hair into a bob a week or so earlier, and it bounced around her face as she moved. I kept glancing in the rearview mirror and smiling through my own monotone delivery.
It had been Chris’s idea to do this. Almost as if he knew that it was something we all needed—a way of drawing a line under our youth and accepting the fact that we were all now in our midthirties and it was time to move on with the next stage of our lives. Stuart and Michelle hadn’t needed much convincing. For them, it was simply an opportunity to reunite and continue the longest on-again, off-again relationship since Ross and Rachel.
It was a music festival with a difference—every band booked had been either genuinely half-famous twenty years earlier or were tribute acts for the bigger names. No Way Sis for Oasis. Blurred for Blur. Slice Girls for… Well, I got the point quick enough.
As a group of friends, I suppose we all had a little arrested development. In our thirties and only just buying our own house. None of us were parents yet. We’d traveled the world instead, lived in rented accommodations, had jobs instead of careers.
We were the people tabloids liked to castigate with the term millennials.
None of us enjoyed avocado on toast, so we had that going for us at least.
Alexandra placed a hand on my thigh as I tapped the wheel in time to the music blaring from the car speakers. The GPS on my phone told me we still had a few hours traveling ahead of us. I looked across at her and grinned. She responded by placing her other hand over her heart and matching Celine Dion’s voice echoing around the car.
If I’d believed in perfect moments—another nineties song—that would have been one. I wanted to capture it in a bubble and live in it forever.
Even as clouds drifted across the sky and darkened the day enough for me to prop my sunglasses on my head. Even when spots of rain splashed against the windshield. Even when Michelle and Stuart began bickering in the back seat…I kept smiling.
As if nothing bad could ever happen to us.
Two
Stuart and his thinning blond mop of hair calmed down a little, una
ble to match Michelle’s stamina beside him in the back of the car. I looked up in the rearview mirror and saw the approach of middle age written in the lines creasing his face. Around the eyes, mostly. His skin was still the color of bronze sand, the stubble perfectly sculptured on his face not graying as yet. I tried to imagine him as someone in their forties or fifties and failed. Simply accepting he was the same age as me was difficult enough, given he still looked like he was in his twenties.
The journey continued, carried along on a wind of nostalgia. “Here Comes the Hotstepper” and “It’s Oh So Quiet” particularly loud highlights. Every hour or so, we’d stop at a gas station, and people would swap cars. Managed to turn a three- or four-hour journey into one closer to six and a half hours.
Not one of us stopped smiling the whole time.
On one of the stops, I stood with Chris, sipping on coffees in the October sunshine. Alexandra was passing a can of Carlsberg over to Nicola from a cooler bag. They’d be wasted by the time we arrived, I guessed. It wouldn’t take long for Chris and me to catch up to them.
On the wall outside the entrance, there was a missing person’s poster. A young man, late teens. The picture looked like a mug shot, and I wondered if he really was missing or had simply forgotten to tell his family he had been sent to prison for something. Someone had scrawled the words Candle Man’s got him! across the picture.
“Candle Man?” I said, raising an eyebrow in Chris’s direction.
He glanced at the poster and rolled his eyes. “You’ve not heard that story?” Chris replied, shaking his head with a snort of derision. His hair flopped over as he moved, becoming less copious by the day. There would be a time when his previous nickname of the Liverpudlian Hugh Grant wouldn’t fit any longer. “That’s that serial killer who is supposedly responsible for every missing person in the country. Someone went missing up our way a few months back, and the police actually had to come out and release a statement to try to stop the rumors spreading about it online. You work in computers; you should know about it.”
“I don’t know everything that happens on the internet because I work with computers, Chris.”
“I know, I know. I just thought you might have come across it.”
