Dark Screams, Volume 1 (9 page)

Tonight's burger was stouter than ever. He managed to finish it and some of his salad and chips before hiding his nervousness in his room. How could he leave his grandmother on her own downstairs, closer to any danger? He'd lost his parents—he mustn't lose her as well. “Leave my nan alone,” he muttered. “She never did you any harm. Remember who did.”

He had to see if his words achieved anything. As he parted the curtains he braced himself for the sight of a head glistening in the dark. There was certainly movement, but it was closer than the hide; it was in the water. Something like a lumpy sack was drifting across the canal. No, it wasn't simply drifting; despite the current, it was advancing inexorably towards the house. For the moment it was facedown, but Jimmy was terrified that it might raise its waterlogged head. He snatched the curtains together so clumsily that he nearly ripped them from their hooks, and stumbled backwards, recalling words he'd heard: “You didn't see me.” Just now they felt like a prayer, and he wanted them to apply to him as well.

He was wondering if he should be with his grandmother, for her protection or his—he was afraid there wouldn't be much of either—when he heard noises beside the canal. A heavy object was being dragged, or rather it was slithering, towards the house. Jimmy couldn't help thinking that it sounded determined to be solid, if not to hold itself together. He held his breath until his head throbbed, and then he managed to distinguish that the sluggish dragging had passed his house. Surely his grandmother couldn't hear it from the front room. He was holding his breath once more when he heard the knock.

It was the secret sign, with two long pauses followed by a short one. He hadn't heard it previously tonight, and now it was at the back door. Perhaps Mrs. Dibbin failed to notice how soft it sounded—sodden, even—because as Jimmy pressed his ear against the wall he heard her grumble, “Is that the mad old bitch again?”

“What's the nosy cow want now?” Mr. Dibbin complained. “Go and sort her out, Dez.”

Jimmy flattened his ear against the wall and clenched his clammy fists. His pulse was beating so hard that he thought it might deafen him. He didn't hear Dez Dibbin go to the back door, but Dez's voice came from that direction—his outburst of disgust and worse. “I'm tripping,” he cried. “You're not here.”

In a few moments his parents added their own protests, consisting largely of a couple of the words Jimmy's grandmother deplored. The sounds fled in some confusion out of the front of the house, and Jimmy heard car doors slamming. In the midst of the screech of tyres, did he hear a fresh outburst of cries? The car raced away into the night, and then there was silence until Jimmy went downstairs. His grandmother came out of the front room to meet him. “I don't know what just happened next door,” she said. “I'll do as Mrs. Dibbin told me and mind my own business.”

She said nothing further while they watched television. When Jimmy returned to his room he was able to go straight to his window. There was no activity in the hide or the canal. Sleep took him by surprise almost as soon as he went to bed, and his grandmother had to waken him. The silence next door revived his appetite for breakfast, and the desertion of the hide nerved him to use the canal path to school, where he managed to concentrate on his work despite all the clamour around him. He'd had to ignore worse at home, and now he could dare to think that was over.

When his grandmother came to the back door it was evident that she had news. “Well, they've gone,” she said, and gave the Dibbin house a disapproving look. “Don't you ever get mixed up with anything like that.”

“What happened, Nan?”

“The men next door heard they went in the canal. Whoever was driving, they must have been on some of their drugs.”

Jimmy didn't want to ascertain how much she'd known without admitting that she did, but he felt he ought to learn “Who was in the car?”

“All of them. All dead now.”

He tried not to think that one already had been. “How many, though?”

“All.”

She looked worried for him—presumably she found his insistence odd—and it seemed best to let the subject die. “Time we went shopping,” she said.

The journey to the supermarket was even slower than last week's. Jimmy wanted to think she was driving that way so as not to be like their late neighbours, but he suspected it had more to do with her age. When he unloaded the groceries at home she realised she'd forgotten to buy apples. “Do you mind going back?” she pleaded. “They're good for your health.”

Jimmy didn't want to mind or to dwell on her forgetfulness. He walked back to the supermarket and loaded a carrier bag with enough apples for a fortnight. The burden wasn't too cumbersome, and in any case he didn't need it as an excuse to dodge into the hide when he saw lights in the Dibbin house. The police were inside—the real police. No doubt they were searching for drugs. Everything Blundell could have wanted had come to pass, and so why should Jimmy still feel nervous? All at once he recalled what he'd said last night for the watcher to hear. He hadn't just declared that his grandmother had done Blundell no harm; he'd said, “Remember who did,” and it made him clap a hand over his mouth.

At least for an instant he was able to believe this was the case. Certainly a hand was covering his mouth, and now his nose as well. It smelled of stale water and of what was left of itself. It was as cold as he imagined the mud at the bottom of the canal must feel, and in other ways it felt far too much like mud, as if some of it might be capable of oozing up his nose and between his lips. He didn't know what he would have swallowed if he'd tried to scream, but his captor didn't seem to have much strength, and Jimmy managed to struggle free. He reeled out of the hide without looking back as words repeated themselves in his head. “You didn't see me”—he was desperate for that to stay true. All the way to the bridge the bag of apples thumped his chest as if that could bring him back to his ordinary mundane life. He almost dropped the bag, because he was desperate to keep a hand free. He thought he might never stop wiping his mouth.