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“Young Wombles take your partners!” Miller sang as he and Tommo came waltzing in. “If you Minuetto Allegretto, you will live to be old.”
“You two won’t if you don’t stop dicking about,” Jezza warned them.
The men ceased and Tommo pointed to the mouldy chair.
“That’s what your fetid innards look like,” he muttered at Miller.
“You’re obsessed by my bowels,” the man answered with a bemused shake of the head.
“That’s because I can’t escape them! You keep making me breathe them in all the time!”
“You love it!”
Any further bickering was quelled by a fierce glance from Jezza. Then his eyes darted back to the girl. She was kneeling and rustling paper.
“What you got there?” he demanded.
“Kids’ magazine,” she answered, not looking up. “All yellow now and crinkly – look at those flares and the dodgy hair! There’s some old cans and sweet wrappers here too, Fresca and Aztec bars. Been a long time since this break-in.”
“Is it a girly mag?” Tommo asked brightly.
“For kids?” she snorted. “It looks like it’s all about the telly, besides – you’ve got enough of them mags already, Tommo.”
“He could open a library,” Miller agreed.
The girl looked at the magazine’s faded cover. Bold chunky type declared it was called Look–in, but there was also a name written on the corner in biro by a long retired newsagent:
Runecliffe.
She let the magazine fall to the floor.
Jezza stared about the room, his face twitching. “I don’t get it,” he said. “How come no one comes here? How come this place hasn’t been knocked down or tarted up by some rich knob with three cars and a split-level wife and an illegal immigrant nanny for their spoilt Siobhans and Zacharys? Prime, this place is, prime and begging for the developers.”
“The location, location, location’s no good,” Miller said, “We’re in the middle of nowhere here, and it was a long drive down that track full of potholes. We wouldn’t have guessed this place was here if we didn’t know about it and were looking.”
“Dirty big places like this don’t vanish off maps or land registries,” Jezza answered. “It don’t make sense. It must belong to someone.”
“If it does, they can’t care about it,” Tommo said. “Look at the state of it. Mr Muscle, where are you now?”
“We could squat in it,” Miller announced. “Get everyone over and fix it up a bit. Be a palace this would.”
“No!” the girl interrupted, rubbing her arms. “This is a sad house. It’s sad and depressing and I don’t like it.”
“All the more reason to pull it to pieces,” Jezza stated. “Nice, sellable, chopped-up pieces, and who’s going to complain? Perfect job this one, couldn’t be tastier!”
“I’ll start unloading the van,” Tommo said. “Come with me, Gasguts.”
“There you go again!” Miller cried. “You’re obsessed!”
“Wait!” Jezza barked suddenly. “Leave the tools for now.”
He was looking at the girl. She had risen and was staring into space, the expression drained from her features.
“Shee,” he said. “Shee!”
The girl started.
“How did you know about this place?” he asked.
The question nettled her and she moved towards the door.
“I just did,” she answered evasively. “I need a smoke and my lighter’s in the van.”
She hurried from the room, through the hall and out into the bright sunlight. The large, forbidding bulk of the house reared high behind her and she shivered as she fled back to the shabby camper van, parked up the overgrown drive. It was a horrible house. She hated it. She couldn’t wait to get out of it.
The VW’s familiar orange and cream colours reassured her and she let out a great breath of relief as she leaned against the dented passenger door.
“Stupid beggar,” she rebuked herself, pulling a cigarette out of her pocket and letting it hang in her lips as she lifted her eyes to gaze back at the imposing building.
It was a drab, ugly edifice, built of dull, grey stone in the heavy-handed, Victorian Gothic style, with a corner tower and too many gables. Planks and boards obscured the ground-floor windows, but higher up they were mostly uncovered and shaped like they belonged in a church.
Shiela hissed through her teeth at it. “Don’t you look at me like that,” she whispered.
Tall, misshapen trees crowded around it; there was even a tree growing in the middle of the drive, which was why they had to park the van so far away.
A rook or a crow cawed somewhere above and the lonely, unpleasant croaking made her shiver.
“Like a graveyard,” she murmured. “A graveyard for dead houses. There’s no life in that place, no life and never no love.”
Then a jangling rattle dragged her attention back to the front porch, where Jezza was standing, shaking the van keys.
“What freaked you out in there?” he asked as he sauntered over.
“I wasn’t freaked out. The air was bad. Stuffy and stale.”
“You put up with worse, with Miller in the back seat.”
“OK, I just don’t like that place. Give me them keys, I’m gasping.”
He snatched his hand away from her, dangling them just out of reach.
“That’s two questions you’ve avoided now,” he said, beginning to sound irritated. “Do you want me to force the answers out of you?”
“No, Jezza!” she said. “Just let me light up – for God’s sake!”
He threw the keys at her and a minute later she was dragging on the cigarette. Her fingers were trembling.
“It’s just a place I’ve heard about,” she explained, blowing out a stream of pale blue smoke. “Every town has one – the deserted old house. A place other kids dare you to go to, knock on the door, break in and spend the night.”
“What is this?” Jezza sounded annoyed. “Scooby sodding Doo? Don’t give me that crap.”
“It’s bloody true!” Shiela swore. “If you were from round here, you’d know, you’d have heard about it. Only in this case it’s not made up. That’s a… I dunno – a sick place. Not even kids dare each other to come here any more.”
“They’re too busy stuck in front of their Xboxes or glued to the Net to do anything real these days,” the man said.
“Good for them,” she muttered.
“The Web’s for rejects,” he pronounced. “All them misfits hiding in their rooms yakking away to other people they’ll never meet, using fake pictures and pretending to be someone else. No one knows who they are any more and those who do aren’t satisfied with it. You never know who you’re really talking to on there.”
She understood it was no use arguing with him. Jezza liked to make sweeping, preaching statements and wouldn’t listen to anyone who disagreed with him. He certainly hadn’t listened to her for a long time now. As for “misfits”, what else were they?
“It’s good for finding out stuff,” she said half-heartedly.
Jezza smirked sarcastically. “Yeah,” he said. “All that information, branching out from here and there. It’s the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Shee – and how mad is it that people are accessing it via their Apples! Ha – it’s Genesis all over again and we’re cocking it up a second time.”
“I wouldn’t call this Eden,” Shiela said.
“And you’re not Eve,” he told her bluntly, before considering the house again. “And you’re not blonde enough to be Yvette ruddy Fielding either. Got ghosts, has it?”
She shrugged and flicked some ash on the ground.
“No such thing,” he stated. “Only real things matter in this life, and there’s enough nasty realness to keep you worried and scared without inventing other mad stuff. The things to be frightened of in this world are just round the corner, hiding in your beans-on-toast existence. That’s where true evil breeds best. Under your noses, in plain sight: it’s the domestic abuse of the terrified wife three doors down and her neighbours who turn the telly up to drown out the noise; it’s the nurse in the care home who hates herself and takes it out on the patients; it’s the kids too scared to speak out; it’s the man kicking his dog in the ribs because it doesn’t bite back… it’s everywhere around us. Society, that’s the Petri dish where evil flourishes, not in empty old houses like this beauty.”
Shiela looked at him, at the sharp features that she had once found attractive: the sly, crafty shape of his narrow eyes and the unhealthy pallor that had marked him out as different and interesting. Then, unexpectedly, he turned his crooked smile on her and she was surprised to find that she still fancied him. She was always surprised. Jezza possessed a mesmeric charm, a way of making her overlook his bullying ego and ruthless self-interest. He exerted it over the others in the group too. He was, without question, their leader, and gathered waifs and strays to him like some kind of street prophet, and in their own inept, confused way, they were his disciples.
Taking the cigarette, he leaned beside her and stared intently up at the great, unlovely house.
“We could live off this dump for a year or more,” he said. “Must be all sorts in there. Might even be stuff left in the attics – or the cellars, and the odd stick of furniture too. You did good, Shee.”
“Wish I’d never said anything about it,” she said softly.
“I might just keep you around a while longer,” he chuckled with a wink, but she knew he probably meant that veiled threat.
Suddenly, inside the house, a man’s voice screamed.
Jezza sprang forward like a cat and rushed back to the porch. Shiela lit another cigarette and waited.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_b51439a3-05b6-5b00-a145-2634e390c6b4)
Bonded to the Ismus, though by no means his only dalliance, is the fair Labella, the High Priestess. She outranks the other damsels of the Court, yea — even the proud queens of the four Under Kings and see how their eyes flash at her when she parades by. Coeval with her are the Harlequin Priests — that silent pair arrayed so bright and yet so grim and grave of face. Let not they point to the dark colours of their motley — dance on and dance by quick, my sprightly love.
RICHARD MILLER WAS sitting on the stairs. He was sweating and shaken and seemed to have shrunken into his shabby camouflage jacket, like a tortoise in its shell. Tommo stood in front of him, looking completely bemused and wondering if he could risk laughing and not receive a thump or a kick in return.
“What’s gone on?” demanded Jezza when he came rushing in.
Tommo put one hand over his heart. “Nothing to do with me!” he explained hurriedly. “Pongo here had a fit going up the stairs.”
“Sounded like you’d fell through them!” Jezza said.
Miller lifted his face and looked warily over his shoulder. “There was something up there,” he said in a hoarse whisper.
“What?” Jezza snapped.
“Dunno… just something.”
“Like what?”
“Like nothing I ever felt before,” the big man answered slowly.
“Where?”
It was Tommo who answered that one. “Just up on that little landing there,” he said, with a definite chuckle in his voice. “Stopped dead in his tracks he did and then, wham – he bawls his head off and leaps about, like he had jump leads clamped to his bits.”
Jezza looked up to where the staircase turned at a right angle to the wall before continuing to the first floor. There was nothing to see in the gloom, except a tall, boarded window and a particularly large patch of black mould that seemed to bleed down from the upper shadows.
“Go on then,” Jezza said impatiently. “What was it, a floating face or a demonic monkey or something?”
“Nah,” Tommo sniggered. “Evil monkeys live in closets.”
“I’m sick of this ghost garbage, man,” Jezza said. “First Shee, now you.”
Miller wasn’t listening. He was tentatively sniffing the back of one hand. Then he pushed his sleeve up to the elbow to inspect his heavily tattooed forearm.
“What you doing?” Tommo hooted. “You madpot!”
Miller looked up at them. “There was a terrible stink,” he said.
“Always is with you!” Tommo agreed.
Miller shook his head. “A stink of damp!” he said. “Terrible stink of damp – like rotting leaves – or worse. Decayed and rotten and rank and death, cold death.”
“Just normal damp and wet rot,” Jezza told him. “What d’you expect in a rancid dump like this, Chanel No 5 potpourri?”
Miller wiped his hand on his clothes. “No,” he breathed. “No, it wasn’t normal. There was something else. When I touched…”
He jumped up, almost knocking Tommo over, and glared back at the staircase.
“That wall!” he cried. “When I put my hand on it. The bloody stuff moved! Ran over my bloody hand and up my arm! I had to shake it off!”
“What stuff?” asked Jezza sternly.
Miller turned a bewildered, fearful face to him. “The mould!” he said. “The black bloody mould! I felt it on my skin – it’s alive!”
He gave the stairs one last look, then blundered towards the front door, only to find Shiela standing there.
“Jezza,” she called. “Let’s ditch this place. I want to go – right now.”
The man looked at her and placed his hand on the banister. “Just cos Miller puts his great mitt in a web and feels a spider run over him?” he said. “Don’t be a stupider cow than normal, Shee.”
