~2,600 word | ~10 minute read
Before I can get from the car to the house, Lee waves hello and asks me to look at something inside his garage.
He’s insistent. “It’ll only take a couple of minutes. You won’t get your little suit dirty. Don’t be a ponce.”
“OK, OK.”
“What do you think of that, you big streak of piss?” he says, opening his arms.
I’m almost laughing. It’s so cliché. “Not what I was expecting,” I admit.
“What were you expecting?” he asks.
“I dunno. A 3D printer maybe. Some new 40k terrain. Where is the game board?”
“It’s in the shed for now. I just wanted to do something different, you know?”
“I didn’t even know you had a licence.”
“I don’t,” he says. “I just bought it. I just thought, if I spent the money I would get the lessons. I just had to do something, you know? With everything happening.”
“What happened to the HYROX?”
“Gay,” he says. “I’m powerlifting now. I’m ordering a bench and a bar and plates too. Gonna put it here.”
“Well, that’s a lot.”
“Carpe diem, mate.” He looks at it for a while. “You should get one.”
I laugh but it sounds a little too judgemental. I try to pull it back into a snort. “She calls them organ donors.”
“The ball and chain?”
“I’d never say that.”
“Nah, yours is alright. But you should get one,” he beams at me. “If they do leathers in lanky sizes. I’m not sure.”
“Must’ve cost you a fortune. I thought you just cut down your hours.”
He nods for a long time. Smiling, biting his lip, looking at it and not me. “She earns more, remember. She has to pay maintenance to me.”
And that reminds me, “Don’t you have Maddie this weekend?”
“Yeah. She’s out with your lad. What’s his name? I can never remember unusual names.”
“Sam,” I say, raising my eyebrows. “Where did they go?”
“Over the fields they said. They should be here any minute. I told them back before dark.” He finally turns away from it and says, “Go on mate, get one.”
“It’s not exactly a box of Space Marines.”
He laughs.
Then I can hear sniffling and restrained sobbing, bikes collapsing onto our shared driveway. It’s Maddie and Sam. Sam has a bust lip. Maddie’s clothes are dirty and her hair is dishevelled. Both of their bikes have flat tyres.
“What happened, Sam?” I ask.
“Fuck’s sake, what’s this?” asks Lee, raising his voice.
I take Sam in my arms. Lee is questioning Maddie, asking what happened to her bike, his voice still raised, “I’ve only got two spare sets of clothes for the weekend Maddie. Jesus Christ,” he says.
“It wasn’t me,” she shouts.
“Don’t you raise your voice at me!”
Maddie runs inside and leaves her bike on the drive.
“What happened, Sam?” I ask quietly, while checking his face. I am not sure what I’m checking for.
“We went up to the old abattoir to have a look around. Look for the ghost.”
“What ghost?”
“The ghost you told us about.”
Shit.
“What happened?” I press a little firmer.
“There was someone in there. We thought it was the ghost but it wasn’t. It was… a person.”
“What did they do?”
“Just… he was mad we were there. He took our bikes and popped the tyres. Then hit me in the face and pulled Maddie by the hair.”
Lee growls and heads inside.
“How did he pop the tyres?” I ask.
“A knife, like we have at school in art.”
“A box knife? With a short blade?” I hold my fingers a couple of centimetres apart.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Then what happened?”
“We ran away.”
“Did he touch you or Maddie?”
“I just told you he hit me and pulled Maddie’s hair.”
“Any other touching?”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. It’s all right.” I give him a long hug and think.
I take him inside and explain it all to Zoe who asks me questions that I can’t answer until eventually I raise my voice and tell her, “I’m sorting it.”
Then there is a banging at the door. It’s Lee, he’s riled. He’s telling me, “We have to do something.”
“Should we call the police?”
He swings his head around in a big no. “What are they gonna do?”
“Are you calling the police?” asks Zoe from the kitchen.
“Yes,” I shout. Then quieter to Lee, “What then?”
“We shake him up.”
“Shake him up?” I ask. Lee nods and widens his eyes. “Scare him?” I ask.
“If you wanna say it that way.”
“You think we can do it?”
“Two of us, easy.”
“Just scare him, right?”
Lee shrugs.
“OK, give me a minute.”
I go back inside and tell Zoe I’m going up to the abattoir. She asks what the police said. I say I’ll call them on the way. She’s exasperated, and she’s making a bigger deal of the bust lip than she needs to, but I tell her I’m sorting it.
“You shouldn’t have told them about that place,” she says.
“What?”
“The stupid ghost stories that you were telling, they were bound to go up there.”
“I didn’t know there was gonna be some sort of freak in the old abattoir. You can’t expect that.”
“It was an obvious risk.”
“Fine. After this we can keep him locked inside all day.”
Sam breaks away from his mum to hug me. He is ashen. “Don’t go up there, Dad.”
“Why?” I mumble into his ear.
“He didn’t have a knife.”
“How did he slash your tyres?”
“With his hands.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
He’s quiet for a few seconds. “Anything else?” I whisper.
“There was a dead cow.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was bleeding all over the floor.”
“Are you sure?”
He grips me hard. “I don’t know.” He pauses, “Dad, he was really strong and fast.”
“He just seems that way to you. I will be alright. I’ll just see what’s there. I won’t do anything.”
“I don’t think you’ll be able to scare him, Dad.”
“We’ll see.”
Outside, Lee has a baseball bat. I don’t have anything. But two of us should be enough. We just need to scare him.
“Did Maddie say anything about the guy having a knife?” I ask Lee.
“No. Why?”
“The tyres,” I say.
“Oh yeah, shit.”
“Sam said he had a knife just after you went in. Then just now said he didn’t. He said he slashed the tyres with his hands. And he didn’t know how.”
“He’s probably just scared shitless, mate. He probably doesn’t know what he’s saying. If the guy has a little knife, so what?”
I try to look at Lee’s eyes but I can’t see them. He keeps turning away. He’s riled, he wants to go.
“Did Maddie say anything else?” I ask.
“No.”
“I’m gonna ask something, Lee. Don’t be offended, just answer me. If Maddie saw something very dangerous, would she tell you?”
“Of course she would tell me, I’m her dad,” he says, indignant.
I am quiet for a moment while he moves his weight from one foot to the other.
The old farm road is just a few minutes from our houses. But by the time we get there, the adrenaline is starting to drop out of me. It’s a cold autumn evening. The clocks went back last week and the night has been tucked tighter into the day.
We’re talking less now. I can’t look at Lee in case we’re thinking different things.
The old farm road is mud-covered cobbles. Neither of us are ready for this. I’m ruining my Oxfords and getting mud on the hem of my suit trousers. He’s wrecking his white, flat gym shoes. The thin gilet and shorts he’s wearing aren’t enough for the sudden night.
Naturally, the farm road isn’t lit. We turn on our phone torches. I have a real torch hanging by my front door, exactly for something like this. Zoe hates that I keep it there. I was ready and I still forgot.
Maybe we should’ve called the police.
“The police wouldn’t have done anything,” Lee says, without prompt, as if I said it out loud. Maybe I did.
“I know,” I say.
We almost miss the hole in the dry stone wall that allows a short cut across the field to the abattoir. When I was a child I could navigate these fields in pitch black. But the memory was in my body, not my head. The proportions feel different. I’m too big now, I have to find everything.
By the time we get to the building, both of us are struggling for grip because our shoes are caked in mud.
We catch our breath just before we enter. The abattoir is a simple thing. A thing for a small holding. There are large double doors on either side. Inside it there was once a holding pen, the main killing floor and a rail of S-hooks to transport the carcasses to the packing area. Most of the internal walls and gates had already disintegrated or been nicked when I was a kid, leaving one large open space, the rail and a few hooks too rusted to remove.
“So what are we doing?” I ask.
Lee pats the baseball bat into his palm but he sounds like he’s freezing. “We go in and if that weirdo is there we give him a piece of our mind.”
“Just scare him, yeah?”
“Yeah,” he pants. “Just shit him up and get out of here.”
“OK.”
One side of the large double door is half off its hinges. We step through the gap. It’s a debilitating type of dark inside. Our eyes aren’t ready. Our phone torches dribble out a thin puddle of light onto the floor.
“The fuck is that smell?” whispers Lee, while our eyes are adjusting.
“Blood,” I say.
“Makes sense.”
“No. Fresh blood. Can you hear that?” I whisper.
“Breathing.”
“Yeah.”
Our eyes catch up enough that we can see the shape of the place. We can see the rails. We can see the base of the gates that separated the holding pen. We can see the killing floor and the silhouette of an enormous body lying on the concrete slab. Its chest slowly rises and falls.
“What is that?” whispers Lee.
“A cow,” I whisper.
“It’s still alive.”
For a few seconds we are frozen.
“What the hell happened to it?” whispers Lee. “You reckon it fell?”
“There haven’t been any cows in these fields for years. The nearest livestock is the other side of New Acacia Road.”
“Where is this cunt?” whisper-shouts Lee. He’s talking too fast now.
“We need to get a picture, Lee. We need to get the police involved. This is more than some homeless guy roughing up the kids.”
“Where is this cunt?” he repeats and I realise the baseball bat is trembling.
I move over to the cow. The smell gets worse — as if the air is filled with metal shavings. I shine the torch around the cow — it’s exhausted, I presume from blood loss. There are fresh blood stains around the neck area. There is a large wound on its throat, but it’s been crudely stitched up. It’s seeping all sorts of stuff that I can’t identify with my phone torch.
When the light passes over the cow’s eye, it moans lightly, as if begging.
“What is…” starts Lee. But the hair on my arms and neck prickles.
“Shh.” I stop him. Then at a normal volume I say, “There’s someone in here with us.”
“Where?” Lee’s voice cracks. “Where the fuck is he?” he’s shouting now, his voice is a higher, unnatural register. He looks around adjusting his grip on the baseball bat.
Then I see it, in my peripheral vision, in the top corner of the space. It’s balanced where the brick wall meets the wooden beams.
“There.” I shine my phone torch at it, the light is so fuzzy it hardly touches it. But I can see a figure, thin and tall. In plain, scruffy clothes. Long dark hair and a pale face. Between the hair and the deep sockets, I cannot make out its eyes.
It doesn’t move at all, it just waits, on its haunches.
We wait.
And then it says, in a deep hiss, “You smell the same as them.”
“Fuck this,” says Lee. “Let’s go. Let’s go, now.”
And then he’s pulling on me and before I know it we’re outside, sprinting and falling and clambering back up to sprint again. Hot and cold air colliding in my throat. Heartburn and sweat. Cold, muddy fingers.
Soon we’re back on the drive and neither of us knows what to do. Neither of us can speak. I can see Sam looking through a crack in his curtains. We make eye contact. I can’t even put a face on for him. He sees that I’ve seen it.
“I didn’t get the picture,” I say.
“Shit,” says Lee.
I think Lee and I agree to sleep on it and then I’m in the house, checking the locks, checking the windows. I don’t sleep on it. I can’t even take a shower. I keep the blinds open in all the downstairs rooms and the lights off. When I’ve checked the locks for the seventh time I sit in the lounge in the dark in my muddy suit, looking out of the window with the kitchen knife in my hand. Without saying anything, Sam sits watch in the kitchen. We keep the doors open between us.
At some point in the night I make tea for myself and a hot chocolate for Sam.
“When will we be able to sleep again, Dad?”
“We are safe, son.” He looks at me then back at the window. I take the hot chocolate to him. “We are safe here.”
“Then why have you got the knife, Dad? Why won’t you tell Mum?”
I don’t have an answer. I go back to my watch with the tea.
As soon as dawn breaks and before Zoe is up I’m banging on Lee’s door, full of insomniac adrenaline.
He hasn’t slept on it either but he looks ill and docile.
I jump straight into my plan. “We siphon the fuel out of your bike and make Molotov cocktails. Right now. We go up and burn the abattoir down right now.”
He’s shaking his head.
“Give me the keys and I’ll do it on my own,” I say. And he doesn’t like that.
Then we’re cutting down a hosepipe and pulling beer bottles out of the recycling bin. We’re discussing whether we should take our phones or not. Whether we should take weapons. The answer is no, then yes. I don’t tell him but I have my old christening bible in my inside pocket.
In the light the old farm road is picturesque, quaint. Everything is where it should be. The earth is firm. The autumn sun warms our skin, tickling tired eyes as it peeks through the stripped trees.
The abattoir is there, as it always has been. But inside there’s nothing. No cow. No blood. No figure in the rafters.
Among all the stains on the concrete floor there is a darker, newer stain. I touch it. It feels damp. But it could be the cold.
“We scared him off,” whispers Lee.
“Yeah.”
He offers a handshake. I notice his arm is trembling. When I take his hand, I notice mine is too.
END
