The Taken (16 page)

Paul shook his head. “No, she couldn’t have let go of that log if she tried. It was Joe. He spat on the ground at my feet and dived in. It took him ten minutes of gentle coaxing to get her to put her arms round his neck and let him swim her back to the bank. I don’t know how long we’d have been there if he hadn’t. And I don’t really know what would have happened. It was like the minute he got in the water, the spell was broken. I was young, and it only took that few minutes before she got out of the water to convince myself that I had been only seconds away from doing the same, and it was just a silly joke, and no one would really have let her drown, but looking back I’m not so sure. Something dark happened that afternoon. Something dark that Melanie let out from inside us.

“When she was a little calmer and warmer, Joe took Kay home, and me and Tom and Melanie wandered back in silence. I think Tom was trying to figure out what had just gone on, the same as I was. Only Melanie didn’t seem to care. She’d just enjoyed the game.

“I thought that would be the end of Melanie being in our gang. I mean Kay was hardly going to want her around after that, but I underestimated Melanie. I think that afternoon was almost like a little test she set us, and we all passed. Except for Joe. You see, the next day, it was me that Kay wasn’t talking to. Melanie had told her that it was all my idea, it was my idea to scare her and Melanie had just been a pawn in my game, with her innocent face and angel-blond hair, and she felt so bad

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about it, but that she knew how Kay could get me back, and Kay was too mad to really think about what she was hearing, and Melanie said why didn’t they go into my house and steal my mothers purse, take the money and leave the purse in my bedroom, and wouldn’t that be fun as well as revenge? It was so easy for them; no one locks their doors around here now, let alone then, and they did it bold as brass while we were all in the garden relaxing. They just snuck into the house and did it.

“My father was still alive then, and I got the belt like I’d never had it before. I couldn’t sit down for nearly a week. Couldn’t stop crying, either. My dad just wasn’t like that; he wasn’t the violent type. I think it hurt him as much as it hurt me, but it didn’t hurt either of us as much as it hurt my mother to think I’d done something like that to her. And how could I explain that I hadn’t?

“And then Melanie came to see me, and told me that Kay had done it, she knew because Kay had told her, and she’d seen the lucky trinket silver horse my mum kept in the small key ring of her purse in Kay’s bedroom, and why didn’t we go and have a look?”

Paul let out a small sad laugh. “Can you see where this is going? So, of course, I did go with her and take a look, sneaking around someone else’s house without a care, as if I did it every day of the week, even though I’d never have dreamed of doing it before that, not without Melanie there, and lo and behold, there was my mother’s charm, sitting on Kay’s bedside table. And of course, Melanie had a way that I could get right back at Kay.” He stopped walking and leaned against a tree, taking a deep breath.

Despite his eagerness to get to the other side of the woods, Simon was pleased to pause for a moment,

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needing to rest his legs too. He didn’t speak, not wanting to interrupt Paul’s flow. “She really played us well. I don’t know how many of us kids she got like that, but it wasn’t only me that couldn’t look people in the eye during that time. She loved making us hurt each other, and then she loved our guilt. Christ knows what she would have become if she hadn’t disappeared.

“The only kid I know she didn’t get to was Joe Barnes. Joe was a city kid too, and his family hadn’t been here long before Melanie and her mum arrived. They lived out past Venn cross, a few miles up the road, but Joe always came down to play with the Watterrow kids. Joe’s dad had just bought the old petrol station up there. It had been a local family business, and some of the older generations were a bit put out by it. Didn’t really like the idea of Londoners coming in and making a killing out of selling vital supplies.

“Of course, that wasn’t what was happening. Joe’s family barely made a living, let alone a fortune, but the bare facts never win over xenophobia, and a lot of people boycotted them. Still, the Barnes’s persevered, knowing that people would come round in the end, and in the main they were right.

“Anyway,” he continued, his breathing was becoming more labored now as they approached the top of the muddy slope, “one day after school, about four months into all this craziness, Joe came to see me. He said Kay had been talking to him, crying in fact, and saying how she felt bad about the purse and the stuff she’d done to some of the other kids with Melanie and that it was beginning to really frighten her, and did I know anything more? Had Melanie made me do anything to anyone?

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“At first I didn’t know what to say. What did he mean Melanie had been there when Kay stole my mother’s purse? That couldn’t be right. But then it all started to make sense. After all, Melanie had been there when I’d defaced Kay’s sister’s doll collection and left the marker pens tucked in Kay’s favorite bag, where I knew her parents would look. In fact, it had been Melanie’s idea. And then I thought of all the other things I’d done with her over the past few months, to people I knew and didn’t know. They’d all been Melanie’s ideas. Heat crept up through me from my toes, a shaky, scared kind of heat.

“Suddenly, I felt dirty. Dirty and ashamed, because I’d enjoyed a lot of what I’d done. Despite my vague fear of Melanie, she hadn’t really made me do those things—she’d just made me want to do them. She’d made me feel it was okay to do them, and then I’d enjoyed it. Sneaking into people’s houses and causing havoc.

Leaving a trail of blame. There was something exciting about the whole thing.

“I remember Joe asked me two or three times if I knew anything about it, standing there on the playground, all serious, because he was going to tell his parents about it because something should be done about her because she wasn’t right. She just wasn’t right. Those were his words. She just wasn’t right. He tapped the side of his head while he said it.

“I stood there and watched him for two or three minutes, my head cataloging all the awful things I’d done over the past few months, some just pranks, and some bad enough to make me hang my head with shame even all these years later, and fear rose in my stomach, a bad fear, the fear of all those things coming out, the fear of the look on my parents’ faces. I couldn’t get 159

found out. I couldn’t. And what could I say? I’d done things in his house and around the garage that I’d let other people take the blame for. Sprayed things.

Nasty things on the wall. I think they’d probably made Mrs. Barnes cry. How could those things become known? Nothing could be worse than that. Not to me.

Not then. So I did the stupidest thing I’ve ever done—I shook my head as if I didn’t know what he was talking about, and then I walked away.

“I told Melanie what he was planning. I had to. I couldn’t deal with it. She just nodded, and then she went to Kay’s house. I don’t know what she said to her, I never found out, but it was enough for Kay to go to Joe’s and persuade him not to tell his parents. It was the day before his ninth birthday. We were all invited to a party at his house on the Saturday. It never happened.

Simon could see trees bending in the wind up ahead of them. God, it seemed the storm was getting stronger with each step. How much farther did they have to go?

“So what did happen?” He raised his voice slightly, battling the weather.

“Joe had a cat. It was an old moggy thing. I think the Barnes had it from before he was born. It must have been about fifteen. And God, it was huge. All day it slept while the family were out. Slept and ate, and saved its energy for when Joe was home. Joe made out as if he didn’t really care about the cat one way or another, but we all knew that was just a fat lie. He loved that cat. What kid doesn’t love their pet? Anyway, the night that Kay persuaded him not to tell about the Melanie stuff, Joe’s cat didn’t come home. Poor kid probably stayed up half the night waiting for it to come in. Cats that old don’t normally like spending the

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nights hunting, not when they can be curled up on a nice warm bed, and I don’t think that lazy old moggy was any different.

“The next morning, Joe didn’t turn up at school. I figured that it was just that his family had let him have the day off school for his birthday and didn’t think anything of it, but when I got home, my mother and Aunt Alicia were in the kitchen, both as white as a sheet. My father was cursing, slamming down his whisky glass, still in his work clothes from the dairy farm, saying it was about time people got over their prejudices and if they could do something like this to a nice family like that then what the hell would happen if a Negro ever dared to want to live a nice quiet life in the country? What the hell would happen then?

“It took him a couple of minutes before he realized I was there. I asked what had happened and my mum said that something bad had happened at the Barnes’s garage and Joe and his mum had left. His dad was going to stay on until the garage was sold. I remember that my heart started beating very, very fast and asking what, what had happened that was so bad that Joe would leave without saying goodbye. My mother and aunt tried to stop my father from telling me, but he said I needed to know, I needed to know what people were capable of, and then he told me what had happened to Joe’s cat.

“When Joe had got up on his ninth birthday, the first thing he’d done was go outside to see if he could call the cat in, worried about the daft thing, his head probably full of fox attacks. According to my father, Joe had noticed something odd about the wooden sandwich board down in the drive that declared the garage

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closed every evening. And, when he got there, he found he was right. There was something odd about it. Something horribly odd about it.

“His mother’s scream joined her son’s when she ran outside to find out what on earth was making him yell like that, and it was only the arrival of his father that got them both away, having to literally drag the crying Joe inside. You see, the cat had been nailed by each paw to the wood, its head lolling backward, betraying its broken neck. But the worst part of that unnatural tilt of the head, and the bit that probably made Mrs. Barnes scream so terribly loudly, was that the cat’s eyes were gone. Cut out of its head, only dark bloody sockets where they should have been. And underneath the dead cat someone had written in the cats own blood, two simple words—Go home. Finger writing. Just like the message left for me in Kay’s window. Anyway, those two words were enough. The Barnes decided to follow those instructions. They left.”

Paul leaned forward against the wind and Simon did the same. The ground was soaking, and they both sunk two or three inches into the mud, the cold creeping into their shoes. Pushing himself forward, Simon listened to Paul’s almost monotone voice, as if he were spitting this story out from somewhere it had been locked away inside him and he just wanted to be rid of it.

“I stood there in that kitchen and didn’t know what to say. I don’t think I’ve felt anything like that since. Not until this, anyway. I remember thinking that I was going to pass out right there on the floor and that it was really going to hurt if I landed on my face. I remember trying to speak, desperately trying to push the words out, but they

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were trapped inside. I can’t explain how frustrating that is. Only stutterers know just how mad that makes you when your throat and mouth seize up on you like that, and everyone looks at you with pity and impatience, waiting for you to make some kind of sound so they can at least have a go at finishing your words for you.

“Of course, it probably wouldn’t have been so bad if I had known what I was trying to say, but I didn’t. There were too many things going round in my head—Joe, Melanie, all of us, all of the crazy things we’d been doing, and how Joe had gone without even saying goodbye. That was like someone had punched me.

I think that down in my subconscious I was hoping that Joe would be the one to get me out of this mess. And now he was gone.”

Simon kept his eyes on the row of trees that bobbed up and down with each of his labored steps. “Did you ever hear from him?”

“No. I used to think about him a lot, though. Especially after Melanie vanished.

I think he knew it was her that had done that awful thing to his cat. He was bright enough to figure it out, especially since he thought she was crazy anyway. I guess he just decided that enough was enough. Just like his family did. Anyway, standing there in that kitchen, with the family staring at me, probably wondering what the fuck I was trying to say, and why was it affecting me that badly, all I could see was Melanie’s name almost painted in red behind my eyes. I turned and ran out of the house and didn’t stop running until I’d got to the cottage Mrs. Parr was renting right out on the edge of the woods.

“I went round to the back and through the door and straight up to Melanie’s bedroom. Sweat was pouring

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down my face, my skin throbbing with the exertion, and as I burst through the room, there she was, sitting cross-legged and still on her mattress, surrounded by her claustrophobic collection of golden-haired dolls that looked like china versions of herself. And she wasn’t alone. Kay was there, and Tom and James Rose and a couple of smaller kids who were too young to hang out with us, I think they were old Alice Moore’s nephews come to stay for a while. And they all were staring at Melanie, all changed from when we first met. Kay’s eyes were lost in the dark circles that surrounded them, and Tom’s bottom lip was raw from where he’d been chewing it nervously, a habit his mother had worked so hard to get him out of when we were five or six.

“I didn’t say anything, nobody did, and then Melanie grinned, and reached beneath the largest doll and pulled out a plastic sandwich bag and held it up.

The cat’s eyes were in it, all shiny and slithery and round, with long cords—I suppose they must have been optic nerves or something, attached to the back, bloody and pink. Melanie just smiled and said, Anyone want to feel them?’ Jesus, I’ve never got out of anywhere so fast in my entire life. I could hear the others right behind me, Kay already crying, but I didn’t wait for them. I didn’t even stop when I got outside, but ran the opposite way from the village and into the woods, eventually crouching behind a tree, throwing up, and then sobbing my heart out.”