Holes for Faces (28 page)

As his cousin followed him into the Frugoplex lobby Tom saw two girls from school. Out of uniform and in startlingly short skirts they looked several years older. He hoped his leather jacket performed that trick for him, in contrast to the duffle coat Lucas was wearing. Since the girls were giggling at the cinema staff dressed as Halloween characters, he let them see him laugh too. “Hey, Lezly,” he said in his deepest voice. “Hey, Dianne.”

“Don’t come near us if you’ve got a cold,” Lezly protested, waving a hand that was bony with rings in front of her face.

“It’s just how boys his age talk,” Dianne said far too much like a sympathetic adult and blinked her sparkly purple eyelids. “Who’s your friend, Tom?”

“It’s my cousin Lucas.”

“Hey, Luke.”

Lezly said it too and held out her skull-ringed hand, at which Lucas stared as if it were an inappropriate present. “He’s like that,” Tom mumbled but refrained from pointing at his own head. “Don’t mind him.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to give you his germs, Lezly.” To the boys Dianne said “What are you going to see?”

“
Vampire Dating Agency
,” Lucas said before Tom could make a choice.

“That’s for kids,” Lezly objected. “We’re not seeing any films with them.”

“We don’t have to either, do we, Lucas?” Tom said in a bid to stop his face from growing hotter. “What are you two seeing?”

“
Cheerleaders with Guts
,” Dianne said with another quick glittery blink.

“We can’t,” Lucas informed everyone. “Nobody under fifteen’s allowed.”

Tom glared at him as the girls did. At least none of the staff dealing with the noisy queues appeared to have heard the remark. Until that moment Tom had been able to prefer visiting the cinema to any of the other activities their parents had arranged for the boys over the years—begging for sweets at neighbours’ houses, ducking for apples and a noseful of water, carving pumpkins when Lucas’s received most of the praise despite being so grotesque only out of clumsiness. Now that the parents had reluctantly let them outgrow all this Tom seemed to be expected to take even more care of his cousin. Perhaps Lucas sensed his resentment for once, because he said “We don’t have to go to a film.”

“Who doesn’t?” said Dianne.

Tom wanted to say her and Lezly too, but first he had to learn “Where, then?”

“The haunted place.” When nobody admitted to recognising it Lucas said “Grinfields.”

“Where the boy and girl killed themselves together, you mean,” Lezly said.

“No, he did first,” Dianne said, “and she couldn’t live without him.”

It was clear that Lucas wasn’t interested in these details, and he barely let her finish. “My mum and dad say they did it because they watched films you aren’t supposed to watch.”

“My parents heard they were always shopping,” Tom made haste to contribute. “Them and their families spent lots of money they didn’t have and all it did was leave them thinking nothing was worth anything.”

That was his father’s version. Perhaps it sounded more like a gibe at the girls than he was afraid Lucas’s comment had. “Why do you want us to go there, Luke?” Dianne said.

“Who’s Luke?”

“I told you,” Tom said in some desperation, “he’s like that.”

“No I’m not, I’m like Lucas.”

At such times Tom understood all too well why his cousin was bullied at school. There was also the way Lucas stared at anybody unfamiliar as if they had to wait for him to make up his mind about them, and just now his pasty face—far spottier than Tom’s and topped with unruly red hair—was a further drawback. Nevertheless Dianne said “Are you sure you don’t want to see our film?”

She was speaking to Tom, but Lucas responded. “We can’t. We’ve been told.”

“I haven’t,” Tom muttered. He watched the girls join the queue for the ticket desk manned by a tastefully drooling vampire in a cloak, and then he turned on Lucas. “We need to switch our phones off. We’re in the cinema.”

Accuracy mattered most to Lucas. Once he’d done as he was told Tom said “Let’s go, and not to the kids’ film either.”

A frown creased Lucas’s pudgy forehead. “Which one, then?”

“None of them. We’ll go where you wanted,” Tom said, leading the way out into the Frugall retail park.
            More vehicles than he thought he could count in a weekend were lined up beneath towering lamps as white as the moon. In that light people’s faces looked as pallid as Lucas’s, but took on colour once they reached the shops, half a mile of which surrounded the perimeter. As Tom came abreast of a Frugelectric store he said “We’ll need a light.”

Lucas peered at the lanky lamps, and yet again Tom wondered what went on inside his cousin’s head. “A torch,” he resented having to elucidate.

“There’s one at home.”

“That’s too far.” Before Lucas could suspect he didn’t want their parents learning where the boys would be Tom said “You’ll have to buy one.”

He was determined his cousin would pay, not least for putting the girls off. He watched Lucas select the cheapest flashlight and load it with batteries, then drop a ten-pound note beside the till so as to avoid touching the checkout girl’s hand. He made her place his change there for him to scoop up while Tom took the flashlight wrapped in a flimsy plastic bag. “That’s mine. I bought it,” Lucas said at once.

“You hold it then, baby.” Tom stopped just short of uttering the last word, though his face was hot again. “Look after it,” he said and stalked out of the shop.

They were on the far side of Frugall from their houses and the school. An alley between a Frugranary baker’s and a Frugolé tapas bar led to a path around the perimeter. A twelve-foot wall behind the shops and restaurants cut off most of the light and the blurred vague clamour of the retail park. The path was deserted apart from a few misshapen skeletal loiterers nuzzling the wall or propped against the chain-link fence alongside Grinfields Woods. They were abandoned shopping trolleys, and the only sound apart from the boys’ padded footsteps was the rustle of the plastic bag.

Tom thought they might have to follow the path all the way to the housing estate between Grinfields and the retail park, but soon they came to a gap in the fence. Lucas dodged through it so fast that he might have forgotten he wasn’t alone. As Tom followed he saw his own shadow emerge from a block of darkness fringed with outlines of wire mesh. The elongated shadows of trees were reaching for the larger dark. By the time the boys found the official path through the woods they were almost beyond the glare from the retail park, and Lucas switched on the flashlight. “That isn’t scary,” he declared as Tom’s shadow brandished its arms.

Tom was simply frustrated that Lucas hadn’t bothered to remove the flashlight from the bag. He watched his cousin peer both ways along the dim path like a child showing how much care he took about crossing a road, and then head along the stretch that vanished into darkness. The sight of Lucas swaggering off as though he didn’t care whether he was followed did away with any qualms Tom might have over scaring him more than he would like. He tramped after Lucas through the woods that looked as if the dark had formed itself into a cage, and almost collided with him as the blurred jerky light swerved off the path to flutter across the trees to the left. “What’s pulling something along?” Lucas seemed to feel entitled to be told.

“It’s got a rope,” Tom said, but didn’t want to scare Lucas too much too soon. “No, it’s only water.”

He’d located it in the dried-up channel out of sight below the slope beyond the trees. It must be a lingering trickle of rain, which had stopped before dark, unless it was an animal or bird among the fallen leaves. “Make your mind up,” Lucas complained and swung the light back to the path.

The noise ceased as Tom tramped after him. Perhaps it had gone underground through the abandoned irrigation channel. Without warning—certainly with none from Lucas—the flashlight beam sprang off the ragged stony path and flew into the treetops. “Is it laughing at us?” Lucas said.

Tom gave the harsh shrill sound somewhere ahead time to make itself heard. “What do you think?”

“Of course it’s not,” Lucas said as if his cousin needed to be put right. “Birds can’t laugh.”

Once more Tom suspected Lucas wasn’t quite as odd as he liked everyone to think, although that was odd in itself. When the darkness creaked again he said “That’s not a bird, it’s a tree.”

Lucas might have been challenging someone by striding up the path to jab the beam at the treetops. As he disappeared over a ridge the creaking of the solitary branch fell silent. Though he’d taken the light with him, Tom wasn’t about to be driven to chase it. He hadn’t quite reached the top of the path when he said “No wonder aunt and uncle say you can’t make any friends.”

He hadn’t necessarily intended his cousin to hear, but Lucas retorted “I’ve got one.”

Tom was tempted to suggest that Lucas should have brought this unlikely person instead of him. His cousin was taking the light away as though to punish Tom for his remark. Having left the path, he halted under an outstretched branch. “You can see where they did it,” he said.

The flashlight beam plunged into the earth—into a circular shaft that led down to the middle of the irrigation tunnel. At some point the entrance had been boarded over, but now the rotten wood was strewn among the trees. Tom peered into the opening, from which a rusty ladder descended into utter darkness. “You can’t see if you don’t take the bag off.”

As darkness raced up the ladder, chasing the light out of the shaft, Lucas said “What do you think is laughing now?”

“Maybe you should go down and find out.”

Another hollow liquid giggle rose out of the unlit depths, and Tom thought of convincing his cousin it wasn’t water they were hearing. Lucas crumpled the bag in his hand and sent the light down the shaft again. The beam just reached the foot of the ladder, below which Tom seemed to glimpse a dim sinuous movement before Lucas snatched the beam out of the shaft and aimed it at the branch overhead. “He hung himself on that, didn’t he, and then she threw herself down there.”

He sounded little more than distantly interested, which wasn’t enough for Tom. “Aren’t you going down, then? I thought you wanted a Halloween adventure.”

The glowing leafless branch went out as Lucas swung the light back to the path. “All right,” he said and made for the opposite side of the ridge.

Did he really need absolute precision or just demand it? As Tom trudged after him he heard a rustling somewhere near the open shaft. “I thought you never left litter,” he called. “How about that bag?”

“It’s here,” Lucas said and tugged it half out of his trouser pocket before stuffing it back in.

When Tom glanced behind him the Frugall floodlights glared in his eyes, and he couldn’t locate what he’d heard—perhaps leaves stirring in a wind, although he hadn’t felt one. Of course there must be wildlife in the woods, even if he’d yet to see any. He followed Lucas down the increasingly steep path and saw the flashlight beam snag on the curve of a stone arch protruding from the earth beside the track. It was the end of the tunnel, which had once helped irrigate the fields beyond the ridge. Now the fields were overgrown and the tunnel was barricaded, or rather it had been until somebody tore the boards down. As Lucas poked the flashlight beam into the entrance he said “Where’s the bell?”

Tom thought the slow dull metallic notes came from a car radio in the distance, but said “Is it in the tunnel?”

Lucas stooped under the arch, which wasn’t quite as tall as either of the boys. “Listen,” he said. “That’s where.”

Tom heard a last reverberation as he stepped off the path. Surely it was just his cousin’s gaze that made him wonder if the noise had indeed come from the tunnel, unless someone was playing a Halloween joke. Suppose the girls had followed them from the cinema and were sending the sound down from the ridge? In his hopelessly limited experience this didn’t seem the kind of thing girls did, especially while keeping quiet as well. The thought of them revived his discontent, and he said “Better go and see.”

Lucas advanced into the tunnel at once. His silhouette blotted out most of the way ahead, the stone floor scattered with sodden leaves, the walls and curved roof glistening with moss, a few weeds drooping out of cracks. The low passage was barely wider than his elbows as he held them at his sides—so narrow that the flashlight bumped against one wall with a soft moist thud as he turned to point the beam at Tom. “What are you doing?”

“Get that out of my face, can you?” As the light sank into the cramped space between them Tom said “I’m coming too.”

“I don’t want you to.”

Tom backed out, almost scraping his scalp on the arch. “Now you’ve got what you want as usual. Just you remember you did.”

“It won’t be scary if we both go in.” This might have been an effort to placate his cousin—as much of one as Lucas was likely to make—but Tom suspected it was just a stubborn statement of fact. “I’m not scared yet,” Lucas complained. “It’s Halloween.”

“Want me to make sure?”

“I know it is.” Before Tom could explain, if simply out of frustration, Lucas said “You’ve got nothing to do.”

He sounded intolerably like a teacher rebuking an idle pupil. As Tom vowed to prove him wrong in ways his cousin wouldn’t care for, Lucas ducked out of the tunnel and thrust the flashlight at him. “You can hold this while I’m in there.”