Robin Jarvis-Jax 01 Dancing Jax (21 page)

“Remember the Pokémon thing years ago?” the geography teacher said. “Those trading and collecting games just aren’t nice. They encourage bullying and cheating and the younger ones get ripped off by the bigger kids.”

“But this isn’t a swapsy game, is it?” asked Miss Smyth. “As far as I can tell, it’s some sort of house identity.”

“Then there were those Crazy Bones,” Mr Roy continued. “These things get out of control.”

“The kids seem a lot quieter if you ask me,” Miss Smyth added.

“Wait till this week is over,” Barry Milligan told everyone. “Let them do this if they want. It’s not offending anyone, is it? No one’s fighting, for a change. Like I said this morning, once the funerals and the service are out of the way, we can get back to normal.”

And so the playing cards remained pinned to the children’s clothes.

Later that afternoon, when the last double period of the day commenced, Anthea Clucas watched the small group of children from Paul’s class file into the music room and sit on the chairs that were arranged in a semi-circle before her. None of them were wearing playing cards. She smiled at them, as they looked at her expectantly. Then she raised the book she held in her hands and began to read from Dancing Jacks.

The children fidgeted uncomfortably for several minutes – until the power of the words drew them in and all five of them were lost.

At exactly the same moment, Paul Thornbury was several miles away, walking down Hamilton Road in the middle of town. He had decided to bunk off and avoid seeing the totally unnecessary counsellor. There was someone else he wanted to speak to, far more urgently. His truancy that afternoon saved him.

It did not take him long to reach the estate agent’s. He glanced at the photographs of the houses in the window, peering between them to the desks within. There were three of them and at once he spotted the person he was looking for. With a determined look on his face, he pushed the door open and went inside.

Trudy Bishop was tapping placidly at her keyboard. She was surfing the Net while waiting for a call about a property in nearby Trimley St Mary. A shadow fell across her desk and she immediately clicked off the ABBA appreciation forum and glanced up. A young boy stood before her.

“Hello?” she said, looking past him to see if there was an accompanying parent.

The boy took a breath as if summoning up courage to speak. “I’m Paul,” he introduced himself.

“Trudy,” she replied with a practised, but questioning smile. She was a short, plump woman with spectacles. Her desk was not the tidiest, and there was a half-eaten packet of Monster Munch and a custard doughnut in her drawer.

“How can I help?” she asked.

The boy stared at her intently. “I sent you an email,” he said in a low, important whisper like a secret agent as he waggled his eyebrows at her.

Trudy’s professional mask slipped for an instant as she thought about the dating site she had joined recently and the odd messages she had received from some of its members. But none of them could possibly be this kid, could they? You just didn’t know who was who on the Web.

“Well, you can’t be the Capricorn with a four-wheel drive and a boa constrictor,” she said dryly.

“Eh?”

“What can I do for you?” she asked.

Paul glanced around cautiously. “Last night,” he said. “The one about Austerly Fellows and your ghost hunting. You replied this morning and…”

The woman’s face changed immediately. “You sent me that?” she asked in a rush of shock and surprise. That email had come from a child? “I told you not to contact me. How dare you come here! What do you think you’re playing at?”

“But I have to talk to you about him! You have to listen to me. No one else will and I’m getting really scared! It’s important – really important!”

Trudy could see he was telling the truth. Out of the corner of her eye she saw her colleagues looking over to check what was going on. She waved at them to get on with their work.

“I’ll give you five minutes,” she told Paul in a hushed voice. “But not in here.” She rose and the boy followed her outside.

“Bit young for you, Trudy!” one of the other estate agents heckled as they passed. She was too preoccupied to even hear him.

“Five minutes, kid,” she repeated when they were standing on the pavement. “And that is more than you deserve for doorstepping me like this. You’ve got a ruddy nerve.”

“I couldn’t think what else to do. I had to know what happened when you went to that house.”

“Why? What’s it to you?”

“Because something is happening right now, something wrong and freaky, and it’s all because of Austerly Fellows.”

Trudy closed her eyes for a moment. “Anything to do with that man would be,” she said. “Whatever it is you’re involved in, stop it. If you’re thinking of going to that house, don’t. What are you, twelve?”

“Eleven.”

“Oh, give me strength! I’ve got underwear older than you. Listen, you stay away from that place, do you hear me?”

“No danger of me going anywhere near it, even if I knew where it was!” Paul assured her. “I just want to find out more about this Fellows bloke. There isn’t much on the Net.”

“The less you know, the safer you’ll be,” Trudy said firmly. “He was a dangerous man when he was alive and an even more dangerous one after he died – if he ever did die. You know what he was, don’t you?”

“Wikipedia said he was some kind of devil worshipper.”

“Do you even understand what that is? It’s not like a computer game with red cartoon demons running about with pitchforks. It’s not a Hallowe’en fancy-dress party. It’s serious and nasty and dangerous.”

Paul nodded. “I know,” he said. “I’ve seen that already.”

“Then keep away from it,” she warned. “Where on earth are your parents? Why are they letting you get mixed up in this?”

“I’ve tried telling them, but no one will believe me!” he replied impatiently. “No one – not one.”

Trudy ran a hand through her bobbed hair. “I wouldn’t have either,” she said. “Not before that night.”

“You think Fellows is still alive?” the boy asked. “Wiki said he’d disappeared. He couldn’t still be around, not after all this time.”

“Something is,” she answered, lowering her voice as a shopper ambled by. “Something is alive and in that house. Guarding whatever’s in there.”

“Tell me what happened to you, please. It might help.”

Trudy rubbed her eyes beneath her glasses. “You’ve seen the website,” she began. “You know we went there looking for… I don’t know – a spooky time. We had no idea how stupid we were: me, Geoff with the camera, Reg, Keith and Reg’s Auntie Doreen. She’s always said she was a bit psychic. She can predict the weather better than John Kettley and is good at finding lost watches and car keys, but nothing big league – just the odd feeling, cold spots and the like. Anyway, soon as we got to the end of that drive, she started to panic. She didn’t want to go any further. She said the house was ‘full and waiting’, her exact words, ‘full and waiting’. She said ‘he’ was in there, ‘he had never left’. She was going on and on about blackness, about mould and blackness. Geoff even filmed her and we were laughing. Oh, good God, we laughed at her…”

Trudy’s mouth was dry and she tried to moisten her lips with a rasping tongue.

“She made such a fuss that we left the car right there, with her still throwing a wobbly in it. She begged us not to go, but we took no notice. We were so stupid. We had no idea what we were doing, like toddlers putting their hands in a fire to see what it feels like. We walked up that drive, giggling and acting the goat. So bloody clueless.”

A bus rumbled by and Trudy waited till it had gone before continuing. “So we get to the front door. It’s a big place. You’ve seen the photo?”

“On your site, yes.”

“Then you know it’s run-down and boarded up. We take some pics, mess about like teenagers. We have a drink. Geoff films us being daft. We were only having a bit of silly fun – that’s all it was ever meant to be. When you get to my age, divorced with two grown-up kids, you’ll understand. And then… then I suggest we break in and have a seance. That was my brilliant idea. I egged them on. Well done, Trudy.”

She broke off and gazed down the street. It was a quiet afternoon. Only a few cars were moving along the road. The school run was yet to start and the shops were having a sluggish day. Trudy rubbed her eyes again. An orange and cream camper van drove slowly by.

Paul leaned forward. “And did you?” he asked. “Did you have a seance?”

“We couldn’t get in. Reg tried the front door, but it wouldn’t budge. Geoff hands me the camera and tells me to film him going round the back to find another way in. So Reg, Keith and me are stood there, watching him stride manfully down the path at the side of the property. He disappears around the far corner and we wait, wait for him to find a way in and come open the front door from the inside. And then…”

“Then?”

Trudy’s eyes were watering. “There’s a scream,” she said softly. “We hear Geoff scream. But it doesn’t stop. It just goes on and on. He’s screaming and screaming and screaming. We run to find him and there he is, staggering down the path, screaming and stinking of damp and decay – as though he’s crawled out of a grave.”

“What happened?”

“We left that place as fast as we could, that’s what happened!”

“But what was it? What frightened him?”

Trudy blinked and shook her head. “We don’t know,” she answered. “Geoff hasn’t stopped screaming long enough to tell anyone. It’s been almost six months now. We took him to hospital straight away and they sectioned him. Whatever he saw in that house broke his mind. He’s been in a secure ward ever since. The doctors don’t understand it and can’t help him. All they can do is keep him sedated and feed him through tubes. But, even if he recovered, he’d never be able to speak again. His screaming shredded his vocal cords. So you see that’s why I don’t want to talk about Austerly Fellows. Whatever is in his filthy house did that to Geoff.”

“What did the police do?”

“I’m an estate agent!” she hissed, nodding at the office behind them. “We don’t break into houses. We didn’t tell them. Besides, what could I say? They wouldn’t believe me. But they might have made me go back there, and there’s no way I’d ever do that. That fire burned me and I learned the lesson.”

“So nobody went and found out? There wasn’t an investigation?”

“You can’t fight what’s in that place!” Trudy insisted. “Not with the law of the land. There are older, stronger laws than that. The boys in blue wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“You definitely believe there’s something evil in there then?”

“Oh, I know it – absolutely.”

Paul breathed a sigh of relief. At last here was someone he could talk to, someone who wouldn’t think he was being ridiculous.

“Did you know Austerly Fellows wrote a book?” he said solemnly. “A kids’ book?”

Trudy stared at him through the thick lenses of her spectacles. “He did what?”

“A kids’ book. Some strange guy was selling them down the boot fair last Sunday.”

“A kids’ book?” she uttered in disbelief. “That vile man, that satanist, wrote a kids’ book? I can’t…”

“It’s true! Loads at my school have been reading it and it’s done something to them, turned them weird or possessed them. It’s like – like it takes you over. The one I had tried to make me read it, but I wouldn’t. No word of a lie, it tried to make me read it. But I burned it instead and this… thing – it came flying out of the flames. It was a… a shape with horns. It flew up into the sky. I’m the only one who saw it and I can’t make anyone listen and more and more kids are being taken over. It’s getting worse and worse.”

The woman regarded him with a look of frozen horror on her face.

“You do believe me, don’t you?” Paul asked. “It’s true – every word.”

Trudy glanced anxiously left and right. “Yes,” she said.

Paul almost hugged her. “Thank you!” he cried gratefully. “Thank you so much!”

“I believe you,” she said again. “But I don’t know why you came here telling me this. There’s nothing I can do.”

“You can have a word with my mum and Martin!” the boy told her eagerly. “They’d have to listen then. We could go to the papers and get those books banned and destroyed before it’s too late.”

The woman backed away from him as if he was a ticking bomb.

“No,” she uttered, in a panicky voice. “Go away! You’ve had more than five minutes. Now go away, little boy. I don’t want to get involved. I’ve been burned, didn’t you hear? I’m not going to get mixed up with that again.”

“But—”

“Go away!”

“You must help me!”

“And end up in the room next to Geoff, screaming my head off with a tube up my nose, my arms and feet strapped to the bed? Not on your life.”

“Please! I can’t do anything on my own!”

“You want my help? Not a hope in hell, kid. I won’t do anything and never want to see you again. But I will say this – forget what you know, stop asking questions and you might, just might, get away without getting burned yourself. Austerly Fellows didn’t die. Somehow he’s still in that house. The place is full of him so don’t hack him off! Don’t do anything to draw attention to yourself. Don’t let him become aware of you. You don’t want that monster to take an interest in you or your family. But most of all – and I’ve never been more serious in my life – do not drag me into it. We never had this conversation, do you hear?”

“But the books…?”

“Are none of my business,” Trudy said brusquely as she stepped back to the door. “If you don’t want to suffer, don’t make it any of yours either. You can’t fight against that and you’ll certainly never, ever win.”

She was breathing hard, the fear sapping her round face of colour. What could she say to get rid of him? Why hadn’t she deleted that stupid website?

“It’ll probably blow over anyway,” she said, suddenly trying to sound casual and unconcerned, but failing. “I’m sure it isn’t as serious as you make out.”

“It is! I’m begging you!”

Trudy shook her head. “Don’t come here again,” she told him. “Leave me alone!”

She couldn’t get away fast enough. She re-entered the office and almost ran to her desk. She turned to her computer screen and refused to look back at the window, where the boy was staring in at her, his forehead pressed against the glass.