‘Laryngitis,’ said the doctor breezily, stuffing the tentacles of a stethoscope into his battered leather bag. Sam lay in bed with his eyes closed while the doctor spoke to Connie. ‘He’s got laryngitis. That’s why his throat is so inflamed and his voice is hoarse. Try to get him to drink as much as possible. Don’t worry if he starts babbling. He’s slightly delirious, but the antibiotics will eventually bring down his temperature.’ The doctor had been in the house under a minute, and now he was gone, leaving Connie and Nev looking at each other. ‘I suppose they don’t like being called out on a Sunday,’ said Connie.
Sam spent the rest of the day slithering helplessly between sleeping and waking. Each time he came to consciousness he pressed his tongue to the new cavity in his mouth, waiting for the police to knock on the door. He was tormented by images of himself and the other boys interrogated by the book-end detectives, dragged through the courts and dispatched to a juvenile detention centre. Now it was impossible to reach either Terry or Clive before the police arrived. It was only a matter of time. He surrendered to the inevitable.
Monday passed, and nothing happened. Sam spent Tuesday in bed waiting, waiting for the knock on the door. But it was not until early Wednesday evening that anybody came.
Sam heard voices downstairs, and though he strained to hear, he couldn’t determine who it was or what was being said.
Then the bedroom door opened slowly and the moon-like faces of Clive and Terry appeared. They looked ghastly; stiff and uncomfortable. Escorted by Connie, the boys crept into the room. ‘Your friends have come to see you,’ she said. ‘I told them they could just say hello, even though you’re not well enough to have visitors yet.’
Terry’s eyes bulged. Clive’s eyes burned. Connie stood over them as they stood by the bed, shifting their weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other. ‘How are you?’ said Terry.
‘Yeah,’ said Clive. ‘How are you?’
Sam desperately tried to read the frantic codes and signals and messages behind their unblinking eyes. He looked at his mother standing over them with her hands on her hips. She showed no sign of moving. ‘Not too good.’
‘Not too good. It looks bad,’ said Clive.
‘Oh,’ said Connie. ‘It’s not that bad. He’ll be up and about in a day or two.’
‘You’ll be
out of the woods in no time
.’ Terry hitched up an eyebrow.
Clive agreed.
‘Out of the woods.’
Sam seemed to shrink.
‘We’d best leave him,’ said Connie. ‘You’ll come again in a day or two, won’t you, boys?’
‘Yeah,’ said Clive. ‘Best not talk with laryngitis. Best say nothing.’
‘Best say nothing at all,’ said Terry. ‘Not a word.’
‘Gosh! You make it sound worse than it is.’ Connie laughed, shepherding them out of the room. ‘He’s not dying, you know.’
Sam heard the front door close and lay staring at the ceiling.
Out of the woods. Best say nothing. Out of the woods.
The words echoed down a dark shaft.
Out of the woods.
He
felt himself riding soft, black earth, itself shifting and tumbling beneath him into the steep-sided shaft, a pit reeking of strangely comforting leaf-mould and tree root, until the bottom of the world blew outwards in a slow, silent explosion and he was falling, falling through space, amid stars, stars that looked upon him with interest, but with cold energy.
By Thursday Sam was recovering. His high temperature had disappeared, his voice was back to normal and he was sitting up in bed. A get-well card had been delivered by hand, and Connie left it, unopened, by his bedside. Sam waited until Connie had returned downstairs before tearing open the envelope.
It was from Terry and Clive. Terry had written, ‘Don’t Worry,’ and had printed his name. Clive had written, ‘Everything Will be All Right,’ signatured with a flourish. Then there were messages from people with bogus names like Tom Chum and Billy Wellbeing, along with slogans such as ‘One Hundred Per Cent’ and ‘Happy Days’. Sam winced at the Martian code. His eyes strayed to the dreadful rhyme printed in italic script and wondered if it had been composed by Alice’s mother.
Late on Friday afternoon Clive and Terry visited again. Sam was up and about, and Connie let them go up to Sam’s bedroom to talk. Terry closed the door as Clive switched on a transistor radio.
‘What’s been happening?’ asked Sam.
‘They found a body in the woods,’ said Clive.
‘I know. I heard on Saturday. I tried to tell you before I got ill.’
‘Someone said they saw you trying to break into our house. One of the neighbours.’
‘I was trying to leave a message.’
‘Anyway, neither me nor Terry heard anything about it until Sunday night. We tried to get to you, but your mum wouldn’t let us near you. That day we came round, we were trying to warn you, to tell you just to deny all knowledge. To say nothing. We were going out of our minds. By then they still hadn’t identified the body.’
‘There was a police statement,’ put in Terry. ‘The body had decomposed.’
Sam remembered stalking through the snow-covered woods and seeing the fox chewing on something in the hollow stump.
‘We had it all planned out,’ said Clive. ‘We’d played the Wide Game until we’d got bored, and then we’d made our own way home. The simplest stories are the best and the easiest to stick to. Then there was another police statement.’
‘The body they found,’ said Terry, ‘had been there for seven or eight years.’
‘You mean it wasn’t . . . ?’
‘No,’ said Clive. ‘It wasn’t
our
body.’
Sam tilted his head at the implication. ‘Who was it?’
‘They still don’t know.’
‘God! Jesus! What a relief !’ The other two nodded. Then something else dawned on Sam. ‘But that means . . . it means—’
‘It means our body is still there,’ Clive cut in.
‘Waiting to be found.’
‘I’ve thought about that too. But I figure we should just carry on, say nothing, know nothing Even if it did get found, there’s nothing to link us with it. We just got bored the night of the Wide Games and we went home. Only us three know any different.’
Sam looked at the wall.
‘That’s true, isn’t it?’ said Clive. ‘Only we three?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Pretty much? What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I might have mentioned it to Alice.’
‘
Mentioned it?
You might have
mentioned
it?’
‘Keep your voice down,’ Terry hissed.
‘You
told
that stupid tart? You fucking idiot fucking weasel-faced fucking toe-rag—’
‘She told me about the body. I was so shocked, it just came out!’
‘Moron! Brain of a fucking blowfly! Why are we sticking up for you? You’re the one who did it!’
‘He was helping you, Clive!’ Terry protested. ‘Or would you have preferred Tooley to—’
‘Maggots for fucking brains! Worms! You intestinal piece of dog-shit!’
The door burst open. It was Connie, and she was livid. ‘What’s all this shouting? I’ve never heard such language in my life! I’ll not have it in my house! You hear? Not in my house!’
Clive pushed past Connie and went thumping down the stairs. The front door slammed.
‘What’s going on? What’s got into that boy?’
‘He’s upset,’ Terry tried. ‘He had an important exam this week and he messed up. Then Sam said the wrong thing and Clive got upset.’
‘No excuse!’ Connie turned and followed Clive down the stairs. ‘I’m not having language in this house!’
They could hear Connie downstairs, still talking to herself five minutes later.
‘Was that true about Clive’s exam?’ said Sam.
‘Yer. He had to do this poxy Oxford thing, remember? Well, it was on the Monday after we heard about the body being found. Something weird happened. He went into the exam and wrote his name over and over and over for the entire duration of the exam and handed it in.’
‘He cracked up,’ said Sam.
‘He said he had this voice talking in his ear the whole time he was sitting the exam.’
The Tooth Fairy popped into Sam’s mind.
It’s spilling over
, he thought, it’s
spilling over
.
‘He said,’ Terry continued, ‘there was this weird, scruffy girl with metal teeth sitting behind him, whispering, telling him what to write.’
‘He’ll be all right. We’ve just got to keep our heads.’
‘That’s great. The Heads-Looked-At Boys have got to keep their heads.’
Terry swivelled the telescope on its tripod. It was possible to train it on Wistman’s Woods in the distance. He squinted into the eyepiece, trying to focus on the trees. ‘He’s right though, Sam. It was a pretty stupid thing, telling Alice.’
‘I know. But I don’t think she believed me.’
‘Let’s hope not. How does this work?’
‘Especially now they found that other body. She’ll think I was just making up stories to impress her.’
Terry was still fiddling with the focusing ring. ‘Is that what you do to impress her? Hey! What’s that?’ Terry focused on a black dot at the edge of the woods; something high in the branches of a tree. The black dot resolved into a white face. The face was smiling, looking back across the half-mile distance directly into the telescope. The face grew larger, smiling malevolently at Terry. He made out a head of sooty, corkscrew curls and a grinning mouth, exposing what appeared to be a set of teeth sharpened to vicious needle points. Suddenly the face ballooned massively and came speeding towards the telescope.
‘Look out!’ Terry flung himself back from the impending impact. There was a tiny splitting sound.
‘What is it?’ shouted Sam.
Terry dropped into a crouch, hands held up to protect his face. Recovering only when the anticipated crash failed to arrive, he looked nervously across the top of the telescope.
There was nothing. ‘I saw something,’ he breathed, ‘something coming at me.’
Sam put his eye to the viewer. All he could see was a milky cloud. He fiddled with the focusing ring, but the milky cloud failed to resolve or clear. Swinging the telescope round, he peered at the master lens. It was shattered, without having fallen apart, into a thousand tiny points of glass. ‘It’s broken,’ he murmured.
‘What’s going on?’ Terry said unhappily. ‘What’s going on?’
Sam suddenly had another friend to sit with on the bus to and from school. Clive’s transfer from the Epstein Foundation to the more democratic Thomas Aquinas Grammar School was effected with extraordinary swiftness. Eric Rogers had been emphatic. The Epstein Foundation, he opined after being informed of Clive’s disastrous exam performance, had done nothing but turn his ordinary little boy into an opinionated brat who knew better than everyone about all things under the sun and who employed fantastical language to tell them so.
He was as modest about Clive’s intellectual abilities as he was about his own. ‘You can’t pour a quart into a pint pot,’ he told everyone. ‘Look what happens.’ And though Clive didn’t particularly like to think of himself as a pint pot (some of the elitist froth of the Epstein Foundation was still clinging to the lip of the vessel) when his father demanded he be returned to a ‘normal school for normal boys’, he didn’t object. He even believed, in his overcrowded thoughts, that the change might cure his terrible acne.
When Clive appeared in a pristine Thomas Aquinas black blazer for his first morning at his new school, it presented Sam with a dilemma. Should he sit with his old childhood pal, to whom he was loyal even to the point of murdering another human being, or with the sexually precocious, incitingly fragrant, heart-squeezing Alice? On the way into school that morning, he could do nothing other than lower
himself into the seat next to Clive, even though, when Alice climbed aboard the bus one stop further down the road, he saw her falter very slightly on seeing Clive. It was like experiencing a heart skipping half a beat, or perhaps a quarter-beat. But he felt he solved the problem by slipping in beside Alice for the return journey, leaving Clive to take the seat in front of them. While Alice talked happily, Clive gazed sullenly out of the window all the way home. This arrangement became the daily pattern; it never varied, nor was it ever commented upon.
It was bluebell time when the police became interested in Wistman’s Woods all over again. Sam, Alice and Clive sat up by the pond one Sunday afternoon, enjoying some fine spring weather. Terry was waiting to play football in the field behind them. Already outstripping his contemporaries in schoolboy football, he’d made the subs’ bench for the Redstone Village B team, the youngest player ever to put on the Redstone claret and blue. The sky was cloudless, and mayflies were skimming the surface of the pond. With the shouts of the footballers volleying behind them, Alice explained what she’d heard.
‘They’re going to make a new search of the woods. It said so in last night’s
Telegraph.
’
The police had made no progress in identifying the corpse unearthed in the woods. Appeals for information had yielded nothing. A new search was to be made in the hope that it would provide further clues.