Hide and Seek

Hide and Seek

By P.S. Brown

Cover artwork provided by Dave Kincla

Copyright © 2012 Paul Brown

All rights reserved.

THE EXCELLENT EIGHT

Gavin Blair

Laura Cahill (nee O’Connor)

Colin Clark

Michelle Clark (nee Heron)

Steven Jenkins

Peter Perkins (Cas)

Peter Stevenson

Cheryl Stimson

CHAPTER 1

Gavin Blair sat on the armchair in his living room, hands gripped tightly on the armrests. Tears streamed down his cheeks. A flurry of images from the television played across his face and lit the room; the sound was muted. Beside him on the coffee table stood two tall glasses of cloudy water and a handwritten letter. His chest heaved as he fought back the tears. He felt the cold muzzle of a gun pressed against the back of his neck.

‘It’s time Gavin.’

‘Please just let me go,’ Gavin sobbed.

‘I’m sorry. This is how it has to be done.’

‘But why? I don’t understand.’

‘You’re the starting point for the game.’

Gavin sniffed, choking back tears. He took a deep breath and summoned the last of his resolve.

‘I won’t do it
. You’ll just have to shoot me.’

He heard the gun being cocked ready to fire.

‘This is your choice Gavin. But you’re not saving anyone by doing it this way. The game will start regardless. You, Emma, Ben and Amy will have died for nothing.’

Gavin’s lungs emptied of air in a huge rush as
the tears came again.

‘Please don’t hurt them,’ he said pitifully.

‘This is your chance to save them Gavin. If you do what I ask I promise they will not be harmed in any way.’

‘How can I trust you?’

‘I don’t need them to die Gavin, just you. You’re the first domino that has to fall.’

‘But why me first? Why not one of the others?’

‘Because I know the ones who left town will come back for your funeral.’

Gavin shook his head. ‘But why are you doing this now? After all these years?’

‘Because something bad has happened again, and I never did get any justice for what the Excellent Eight did to start all of this.’

‘I don’t understand. You’re one of the Excellent Eight.’

‘But am I really?’

Gavin looked puzzled. He started to turn his head around but felt the muzzle of the gun push harder into the back of his neck. He tensed, expecting the worst.

‘No more questions. You have ten seconds to drink up or I will shoot you right here. And then I’ll wait until your wife and children come home and kill them too. 10......9......8.’

Gavin’s hand shakily reached out and gripped the first glass. The countdown continued.

‘7......6.......5.......’

Panic flowed throughout his body. He let out
a final plea for mercy.

‘
Please
, don’t do this.’

The gun pressed even harder into the back of his neck, giving Gavin his answer as the countdown continued.

‘4........3........’

Gavin knew it was futile. Images of his beautiful wife Emma and
their two children flashed through his head. He held the glass to his lips. A few drops splashed into his mouth and left a bitter taste on his tongue.

‘2.........1........’

Gavin tipped up the glass and the cloudy liquid flowed into his mouth. The taste was horrible and lingered in his mouth. He dry retched, his body shuddering uncontrollably. He placed the glass down on the table.

‘Just one more and then you can go to sleep with the knowledge that you
’ve saved your wife and children.’

Gavin picked up the second glass and held it in front of him. His panicked mind was
jumbled with images and ideas, inhibiting him from forming a cohesive escape plan. For a second he thought he’d throw the glass at the far wall. He looked over to the mantelpiece which was adorned with family pictures. Tears continued to roll down his face. If he got rid of the glass what would that achieve? He’d already drunk one. Would one glass of crushed sleeping tablets kill him? Hell, he didn’t even know if they
were
sleeping tablets. Still, he had heard all sorts of stories about people being found in time and having their stomachs pumped. But that wasn’t going to happen here. He was going to die, if it wasn’t the tablets it’d be a bullet to the head. The only difference was that if he didn’t drink the second glass then his wife and children would be killed as well.

‘Come on Gavin. You’re half way there.
No point in stopping now. ’

H
is head hung resignedly. He looked down into the glass and noticed for the first time that the water was still fizzing slightly. It looked like a tiny geyser rising up from the middle of the glass, hitting the surface and causing ripples outwards to the edge where tiny lumps of the pills gathered together to form a ring.

‘Gavin, do you really need another theatrical countdown?’

He took a deep breath, held the glass to his lips and started to glug the contents down. He dry retched again.

‘Well done Gavin.’

He placed the glass back onto the coffee table.

‘What happens now?’

‘Move over to the couch and lie down. I’ll stay with you until you fall asleep.’

Gavin rose heavily from the chair and immediately felt woozy
, swaying a little on the spot. He couldn’t tell whether it was the result of the emotional outpourings he had gone through or the pills starting to take effect. He stumbled forward and collapsed face first into the couch, turning over onto his side with difficulty. His eyes began watering and he blinked constantly. Through the blur he could see a pair of leather gloves picking up the letter from the coffee table.

‘
It might be my handwriting, but no one is going to believe I’d actually kill myself,’ Gavin said.

‘You’d be amazed what people will believe.’

‘What are you going to do to the others? Are you going to kill them too?’

‘We’re all going to play a
nice game of Hide and Seek, just like we did when we were kids.’

The words
seemed slurred by the time they reached Gavin’s brain, but he felt strangely comfortable lying on the couch. The nauseating panic he had felt earlier was ebbing away and he felt a little drunk. He didn’t believe he was going to die. He was going to sleep and this was nothing but a bad dream. He tucked his hands under his armpits, nestled his head into the cushion and closed his eyes. He tried to speak but found that he was muttering incoherently.

‘Sshhhh, go to sleep Gavin.’

They were the last words Gavin Blair ever heard.

CHAPTER 2

Sunday 25
th
November

11:58am

Peter Stevenson stood with his head bowed, arms clasped together in front of him as he watched the coffin
being lowered into the ground.

His eyes roamed around the grounds of the cemetery, across the
sea of tombstones and overgrown grass. He was surprised to see a gobstopper nestled on the dry mud of another recent grave. Peter looked up and away from the cemetery to a block of flats looming in the grey skies. He couldn’t suppress a small smile. When he was a boy he, and the other members of the Excellent Eight, used to play a game where they would take it in turns to fire a gobstopper from the top floor of the flats to see who could get it the furthest. They would each cock the catapult to fire it up into the air and follow the downward trajectory as it fell into the grounds of the cemetery. Due to the appearance of this gobstopper, more than twenty years later, he wondered if a new generation of children were playing the same game.

Peter became conscious that he was smiling and guiltily looked around him at the crowd gathered around the grave but no one was looking at him. Each person stood the same way; hands clasped in front, heads bowed. Everything was quiet.
He could only just make out the gentle hum of traffic. It was a stark reminder that people were getting on with their lives.

The priest stood at the top of the grave
, like a father at the head of a table. He began his sermon, breaking the silence. Peter looked over at Gavin Blair’s widow. Emma stood with her head bowed, her shoulders shuddering as she wept silently, her hands gripped tightly onto the shoulders of her two children. Ben and Amy stood solemnly by their mother. He was surprised that they were so well behaved, they were only six and four respectively but they seemed to know what was going on.

Peter continued to look around the crowd and his eyes met with Laura who was looking directly at him. She smiled shyly in acknowledgement and he returned the compassionate smile. He had spoken to his childhood sweetheart briefly before the funeral but it had only been small talk. If he was honest, it had been slightly awkward given the years that had passed without contact. In his communications with Gavin over the years, Peter hadn’t asked much about Laura. Mainly because, like him, Laura had also moved away from the town, albeit a number of years after he did. Plus, he hadn’t wanted to enquire about the first woman he had gone out with because it seemed a little obvious. However, she had stayed in touch with Michelle, and so Gavin had heard she got married six years ago, roughly around the same time
Peter had married his wife Janine. Earlier today during their small talk he’d established that she had two children, six and four, the same age as Gavin’s children. Peter remembered working out that she got married the same year as her first child was born and wondered if she only got married because she became pregnant. He felt annoyed at himself for creating his own gossip. They’d have more time to get reacquainted after the funeral. Perhaps he’d get the real story then.

Interrupting his train of thought, Peter heard a noise like someone knocking on a door.
It seemed to be coming from inside the grave. Peter stared into the yawning gap in the grass. He could barely see the shape of the coffin in the low light of the overcast day. The priest continued to speak but his words became muffled like he was submerged in water. Peter focused on the knocking sound as it became louder and louder. He felt unable to breathe as he realised the sound was coming from inside the coffin.

Peter looked around the crowd for some acknowledgement that someone
else could hear what he was hearing … but nobody stirred. The knocking became more frantic and the muffled screams of his wife and son instantly made his heart jump. Peter instinctively ran forward and jumped into the grave landing on the coffin lid. He started trying to claw at the hinges but his fingers fumbled and slipped across the polished surface.

‘Somebody help me
!’

He stared up at the crowd gathered
by the edge of the grave.

‘Help me
!’ he shouted again but nobody moved.

His wife let out another terrified
, muffled scream, ‘Peter, help us.’

He continued to claw at the
lid, aware that his fingers were scratched and dripping with blood. The bells of the church started to ring.

‘Why won’t anybody help me?’ He screa
med as the bells chimed louder.

The coffin lurched
, moving away from him, disappearing further into the ground, yet he stayed in the same place. He strained with outstretched fingers as the coffin was swallowed into the darkness, out of his reach, beyond his grasp. He had lost them.

The sound of the bells
was nearer now but they were no longer church bells.

Peter jolted awake and breathed a sigh of relief. He was hugging a pillow and lying sideways on a mattress, his legs spread like scissor blades. The sound of the alarm clock made him wince as he turned onto his back.

‘Janine, turn off the alarm.’

His throat was dry and the words rasped out. He coughed to clear his throat, trying to find some saliva to wet his mouth. He heard no groaning response from his wife and the alarm continued to whine. He swung his left hand down to shake her shoulder but his hand clattered against a wooden panel instead. He groaned and rolled onto his side, searching for the soft warm body of his wife, but she was not there.

Peter lifted himself up in bed in a cumbersome manner. He massaged his forehead and rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hand
s. He surveyed the room as his eyes adjusted to the sparse light. He knew where he was supposed to be now, at Colin’s house, sleeping in his spare room, but this wasn’t Colin’s house. He instantly felt anxious.

The annoying echo of the alarm clock reverberated in his brain intensifying his headache. He realised he was very low down and his right hand scrambled away from the mattress and touched the cold wooden floor. The walls around him were made of wood. He was in some kind of log cabin. He threw back the thin duvet cover and found that he was still wearing his suit from the funeral
, including his shoes which were caked in mud. He stumbled onto his feet too quickly and felt dizzy. Groggily he fell forward managing to catch and steady himself on a bedside cabinet. His hands brushed along the surface eventually coming across the source of the incessant ringing. He fumbled with the small square travel clock in his hands like it was a Rubik’s cube until he finally found and pushed the off switch and the beeping stopped.

Peter exhaled in relief as he was greeted with the wonderful sound of silence. Next to the cabinet was a window with the curtains closed. He grabbed
them and threw them open. He squinted as the bright afternoon light streamed into his eyes. The sun was shining through rows of trees that stretched back as far as he could see.

‘Where the hell am I?’