The Silence

by Luca Veste

  Mutual.

  That wasn’t true. When we’d started talking, I’d just gone along with it, too scared to fight for us. Too worried about how I looked or being even more hurt.

  I had simply accepted it and tried to move on.

  “You made the right call at the right time,” Nicola continued, laying a hand on my shoulder and giving me a small squeeze. “Both of you. Who knows what will happen in the future?”

  She smiled and walked away before I had the chance to respond. I didn’t see her again until a minute after midnight. We had collapsed into the street en masse, counting down the seconds before the clock struck, and once I’d checked the skies for any planes coming down, I began shouting and cheering with the rest of the party. Chris grabbed me and pulled me into a bear hug, quickly joined by Stuart, who jumped on top and almost brought us down onto the ground.

  We staggered across the pavement, trying to keep our balance, before knocking the back of another small group of people.

  I could sense the mood change instantly. The cry of shock and alarm, quickly changing to recrimination. I lifted my head just as the first lad squared up to Chris. I moved toward him, putting a hand on his shoulder, as the stranger in a bomber jacket moved his head in Chris’s direction. Pulled him backward as Nicola appeared as if from nowhere and began screaming in the group’s general direction. A woman standing with them was quickly in her face, towering over her and pointing a finger toward Nicola. I must have made some kind of noise, as the woman was distracted and looked toward me. Nicola grabbed her finger and twisted it. I was dragging Chris back as bomber jacket aimed a headbutt toward him when it happened.

  The guy was suddenly on the ground.

  A sound had stopped us all in our tracks and a silence fell over us in an instant. A loud crack, as the guy’s head had bounced off the pavement.

  Stuart stood over the guy in the bomber jacket, shaking his hand out, as blood began to seep out of the man’s head and pool around our feet.

  Twenty-Five

  On the screen of Alexandra’s laptop, she had Google Maps open and was zooming in and out on an area I was familiar with.

  “Brock Hope,” I said, waiting for her to explain what this had to do with anything. “The forest where the music festival was. I’m not sure…”

  “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time,” Alexandra replied, sitting back and leaning her head against the sofa. “When Mark Welsh’s body disappeared and wasn’t found, I started thinking about the reasons for it. We have the so-called mythological serial killer—”

  “The Candle Man.”

  “Yes, but I wonder if he’s not so much a myth, but rather a generic thing that’s been made up to explain some missing persons, that’s all. Anyway, there’re whole forums dedicated to the story. All coming back to the red candle aspect.”

  “You think you know who the man was. The one we killed?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Alexandra replied, her expression changing, darkness entering it again. “With all these stories happening across the country, it’s difficult to pin down any kind of location. So I started at the end instead of trying to work all of that out.”

  “The music festival?”

  “More specifically, the surrounding area. What do you remember about the place?”

  I blew out a breath. “Not much really. Kinda concentrated on events more than the views. Woods, tiny country roads, big field where we watched the bands.”

  “Farms,” Alexandra said, reaching across and scanning the map on the laptop screen. “The whole area is surrounded by farmland. Old places, some of which have been in families for generations. Bits and pieces sold off over the years, but this is countryside proper. That’s what I’ve found. I’ve struggled to get anywhere with this information, but I’m onto something, I think.”

  “You think the Candle Man was a farmer?”

  “I think he lived on one of the farms close by,” Alexandra said, ignoring my sarcasm and continuing on. “Look, I know I’ve not got enough yet, but what if some of these stories are true? Red candles in storm lanterns are probably a popular item, but when you add in missing persons, it makes it a bit more coincidental. What if he was clever? What if the other murders happened in other parts of the country, just so he wasn’t discovered, but this is where his main place was?”

  “Great, so we just speak to all the people who live in these farms and see if they’re alive or not. We’ll find out who hasn’t been seen for a year and might have a brother or something that likes revenge.”

  “Well, you never know,” Alexandra said, rubbing the back of her neck with one hand, as if she was trying to massage the stress out of herself. “It’s something we should really look into though. I don’t really fancy traveling all the way down there and knocking on random farmhouses. What the hell would I say? I don’t even know if it’s one or fifty-one different farms.”

  “We might have to.”

  “That’s if you believe there’s someone out there hunting us down for what we did. And if that’s the case, they saw us in those woods.”

  “Alexandra, there’s no doubt someone was there. The body went missing.”

  “About that…” Alexandra replied, shifting on the sofa and turning her body toward me. “What’s to say there’s not some other explanation for that? A coincidence of some sort? It’s not like we checked him over properly. He might have still been alive.”

  “Are you kidding me? Can you not remember the state he was in?”

  “Believe me,” Alexandra said, her tone suddenly becoming cold and harsh. “I remember every detail about that night. I think about it all the time. I’m just saying, you never know. People can survive all kinds of things. We didn’t know what we were doing. We just saw his body and lost our minds. We were scared; we were exhausted. Do you remember anyone checking for a pulse? Because I don’t. What if he was still alive, barely, drags himself onto the road, a car hits him and that driver panics? It’s early in the morning, no one else is around, and they hide the body somewhere else?”

  I began to answer, then stopped myself. It was something I had never considered. Mainly because it was so ridiculous. I stifled a yawn and rubbed some life into my face briefly. “It sounds like something that would happen in some crappy TV show. Not in real life. I think I prefer to go with Occam’s razor on this one.”

  “I’m just saying, it’s not out of the realms of possibility. This whole thing has been like a horrible nightmare from the beginning. If there’s a chance that there is something deeper to this whole Stuart and now Michelle story though, then it’s probably best if we have some sort of plan.”

  “I do. It’s called going to the police and telling them what happened.”

  “We’re not giving up just like that,” Alexandra said, smacking the arm of the sofa in frustration and getting to her feet. “Again, I’m not prepared to give up everything I have because of this. I won’t let it beat us. Whatever is going on, we can still come out the other side. We just need to stay calm.”

  “Calm? Calm is what got us into this mess in the first place. We calmly made a decision to cover up a murder—”

  “It was self-defense—”

  “We calmly dug a hole,” I continued, following Alexandra’s movements as she walked over to the living room door and paused with her hand on the doorknob. “We threw a body in there and then panicked when we found another one. No decision we’ve made since the moment we stepped in those woods was a good one. Simple as that. If confessing doesn’t feel like the right thing to do, maybe that’s because it’ll finally be the right call. We screwed up. Made the wrong choices, and now we have to face up to that.”

  “You’ll ruin all our lives.”

  “They’re already ruined,” I said, getting up and moving toward Alexandra.

  She was facing away from me, her head droppe
d to her chest and shoulders moving up and down slowly.

  I reached out and put a hand on one of them, but she shook it away. I breathed in and tried to keep talking. “None of us can live with this anymore. No matter what way we look at things, this is it. This is our last chance to do right by everyone involved. It’ll be hard, but nothing worth doing is easy.”

  “You speak for yourself,” Alexandra replied, moving away from me, grabbing her laptop from the coffee table and shoving it back in her bag. “You’ve not considered the fact that there’s not just you who was there that night and doesn’t want to say a word to anybody about it. You’re only thinking about your own selfish reasons.”

  It was the same argument we’d had when we’d arrived back home a year earlier. Only, we had been in opposite roles back then. Alexandra was the one who wanted to go to the police, and I was trying to pretend it had never happened at all. The fear of that knock at the door had driven us into two disparate corners that eventually drove us apart. Now, we were back in that time.

  Only this time, Alexandra was leaving before it could get any worse.

  “Listen, I’m sorry,” I tried, but she was pushing past me and out of the living room. I followed her into the hallway, still talking. Pleading. “We can sort this out. You don’t have to go. Please.”

  It was no use though. Like the previous time she’d left, I was powerless to stop her going. Even this time, with me at least speaking a little more than I had back then, she was opening the door and on the front path within seconds.

  “Matt, get some sleep,” Alexandra said, turning around but still walking backward slowly toward the gate. “I’ll speak to you soon, when you’re more clear-minded.”

  “Alexandra…” I tried again, but she was through the gate and into her car before I could leave the house. I looked at the blinds in my neighbor’s windows twitching as my voice echoed around the street. I ignored them and went back inside.

  Twenty-Six

  I called Michelle as soon as I was back in the house, cradling my phone with my shoulder as I went through sparse cupboards trying to find something to eat. She answered just before I imagined an answer machine would kick in.

  “You okay?”

  “What do you think?” Michelle replied and tiredness and pressure was dripping from every syllable. “I haven’t slept and can’t stop checking the locks on my doors and windows. I feel like I’m living in a nightmare. Or a horror film.”

  “It’s going to be okay. You should come here and stay. Or I could come to you?”

  “No, it’s fine. Why should I drag someone else into this? If it’s me first, best they don’t get two of us at the same time. If something is going to happen, it’s better if it’s only me. That way, someone is left behind to stop whoever it is from picking us off one by one.”

  “Michelle…”

  “Did you speak to Chris?” she said before I had the chance to continue. “Did you tell him what we should do?”

  “I spoke to him. I think you can probably guess his reaction. Nicola will agree with him, I guess.”

  “I should just go to the police myself…”

  “We can’t do that,” I said, but I wondered why that was the case. Michelle was living with the threat of something happening to her, to the point she couldn’t even sleep in her own house. Surely that meant more?

  “I know,” Michelle replied, but I could hear the lack of conviction in her voice. “They’re not the ones with a red candle in their bin that won’t go away though.”

  “You threw it out?”

  “I had to. I couldn’t have it in the house anymore. I don’t care if it’s got evidence on it—although I can bet there’s not a fingerprint on the damn thing—I just don’t want to be around it. I don’t want it near me.”

  “You have to get out of there, Michelle,” I said more forcefully now. She couldn’t stay there any longer, and even if I had to park outside her house that night, I wasn’t going to let it happen. “Come and stay here, or ring Alexandra?”

  “I spoke to her earlier. She doesn’t want to go to the police. She thinks we can deal with this ourselves. I’m not sure if she really believes it’s as bad as I’m saying. Makes me feel like I’m going crazy or something.”

  “You’re not crazy,” I replied, then steered the conversation back again. “I’m serious, Michelle. You have to leave that house. You’re sitting there just waiting for him to come back right now. There’s no point. We can get past this. I can convince the others that we need to confess; I just need a little more time.”

  There was silence on the line that pricked the hairs on the back of my neck. Then, a sigh and Michelle’s voice.

  “I don’t know. I thought this would be easier.”

  “If you’re right, then you’re just waiting for someone to come. It’s giving up. Right?”

  “I know I shouldn’t be here. It’s just…it’s like I’ve seen a way out of this nightmare. Maybe this is what we deserve. You understand?”

  I did, but I wasn’t about to say that. “This isn’t the end, Michelle. We can beat this. We don’t deserve any of this. We only did what we had to.”

  “I need to get out of this house. It’s driving me even crazier than I already was.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “You can come here, if you like?”

  “No, it’s okay,” Michelle replied, something approaching calm entering her tone now. “I’ll go to my mum’s house. She’s always on me to visit more. She won’t ask any questions either, if I tell her I’m staying.”

  “No problem. If you need anything, just let me know. I’ll be right there.”

  “You’re a good friend, Matt.”

  I didn’t feel like much of one as I hung up the phone after saying goodbye and laid my cell on the kitchen counter. I thought about Stuart then, something I had purposely tried not to do since his funeral. Since before that, really.

  Since the moment I’d been told what happened to him and this all started up again.

  I looked again at the empty cupboards and closed the door on all of them. I couldn’t stay there, sitting around doing nothing, simply waiting for the next bit of horror to unleash itself at my door. I needed to become more proactive. Not that I knew where to start.

  In my office, I switched on my computer and searched for the forums Alexandra had mentioned. Putting The Candle Man into Google had given me so many results, it made sense to start at a smaller point.

  I pulled a notepad from a pile and found a pen quicker than usual. Began making notes. The first thing I did was find the forum on Reddit that listed all the possible cases involving the Candle Man. It was an extensive list. Reports were from all over the UK and seemed to have spread from there. Most, you could tell, were simply apocryphal tales. Ghost stories being shared around.

  I started making a list of names.

  Outside, it became darker, until the only light in the room was the static glow emanating from the screen in front of me. I barely noticed. My stomach growled and grumbled, but I ignored it, along with the pain behind my eyes. The tired headaches were becoming more and more frequent, but that only served to make them easier to ignore. At least, that was what I told myself.

  The forum was comprehensive, if nothing else. Numerous disappearances that were then cross-checked, and various theories being put forward. Most of the threads talked about annoyance they felt that no one was taking them seriously. The most prevalent theory was that the Candle Man was a police officer and that was why it wasn’t looked into properly. Some thought it was someone in the royal family. Others blamed high-ranking business types. The theories grew and grew, until it was an international conspiracy, it seemed.

  I lost an hour to reading through all of these and more. Then two. I checked the time and saw it was approaching eight o’clock

  I went back to the beginning and lo
oked at the list of names I’d made. All of them UK based. Those who had families reporting the existence of red candles after their loved one had gone missing. There were a few newspaper reports about the Candle Man, but they seemed to have dried up pretty quickly years earlier.

  I spotted something quickly.

  The storm lantern.

  This hadn’t gone unnoticed by the people on the forum either. In fact, it had also generated much discussion. People arguing back and forth about its significance. With the prior knowledge I had though, it made it much easier.

  It did have significance.

  I began whittling down the list of names. Searched online again for media reports about the disappearances. Found a couple of pieces that mentioned the red candles and the ones that also had pictures, including a storm lantern.

  I then went through a whole ream of people who were either eventually found alive or, more infrequently, who had died and were clearly not victims of the supposed serial killer. There were many who had simply turned up after a few days. That fact seemed to be largely ignored for some, however.

  I was left with a number.

  Twelve.

  Twelve people who were missing, who had stories in local newspapers, on social media, which mentioned red candles and storm lanterns. Who had police involvement but a denial of it being linked to a serial killer called the Candle Man.

  Mark Welsh wasn’t on the list.

  I opened Google Maps and began plotting out the areas where the twelve were. Places in Scotland, three in Wales, two near Brock Hope forest. One in Liverpool. Two in Manchester. Peak District. Random places, scattered around the counties.