What Came Before He Shot Her

straddled the top and looked down into the well of darkness below. He could see dim shapes only, one of them looking like a ghostly body under a pall of decomposing leaves. He felt a tremor at the sight of this and he glanced back at Cal, who was watching him, silent. Joel drew a deep breath, closed his eyes, and with a shudder dropped into the tomb.

            He landed on leaves. One of his shoes sank through to a sodden depression and the cold rose around him as his foot hit water. He cried out and jumped back, half expecting a skeletal hand to reach up, begging for rescue from a liquid grave. He could see virtually nothing inside the rectangular chamber, and he only hoped his eyes would adjust quickly from the muted light of the graveyard to the darkness in here so that he might know with whom—or with what—he would be spending his time.

            Cal’s voice came like a whisper from the distance. “All right, bred?

            You in?”

            “S’okay,” Joel said, although he hardly felt that way.

            “You hang till I come.” Then Cal was gone, in a rustle of branches that indicated he was making his way back through the Italian cypresses. Joel smothered the protest that he wanted to give. This was nothing, he told himself. This was just proving to the Blade that he had the bottle to gut something out.

            His hands felt clammy, so he rubbed them along the sides of his trousers. He remembered what he’d made out from the wall of the tomb just before he dropped down to its interior base. He steeled himself to the sight of a body, telling himself it was dead, long gone, and improperly buried, and that was all. But he’d never really seen a body before, not one that was out in the open, exposed to the elements, decomposing, with rotting flesh, grinning teeth, and worms eating out its eyeballs.

            The thought of that body just behind him somewhere made Joel’s lips quiver. He became aware that his own body was shivering from head to toe, and he understood that in this place the cold of the night intensified because of the damp stone walls around him. Like Dorothy in Oz, he thought of home. He thought of his aunt, his brother, his sister, his bed, eating dinner around the table in the kitchen and watching a cartoon video with Toby afterwards. But then he made himself stop such thoughts because his eyes were filling. He was acting like someone who couldn’t bloody even cope, he thought. He remembered how easily Cal had appeared to climb out of the tomb and he understood that he wasn’t trapped in this place. He didn’t have to do something for which he might get into trouble with the law. All he had to do was wait, and he surely had the bottle to do that.

            Thus reassured, he made himself take an action. Since he couldn’t exactly stand there forever with his face to the wall simply because he shared space with a body, he forced himself to turn and confront it. He pivoted with his eyes squeezed shut. He balled his fists and slowly raised his eyelids.

            Adjusted to the darkness, his eyes picked out what they hadn’t been able to see earlier. The body was missing a nose; part of its cheek was caved in. The rest of it was dressed in some sort of flowing gown whose folds surged through the fallen leaves. All of it was white: the body itself, the head of hair upon it, the hands folded on the abdomen, the gown that clothed it. It was merely stone, Joel realised, an internal effigy that decorated the tomb.

            At one end of this, he saw that a tartan blanket was folded over the effigy’s feet. It bore no leaves, which meant it had been placed there recently, and probably for him. He picked it up and beneath it found two bottles of water and two packaged sandwiches. He’d be there for a while.

            He unfolded the blanket and wound it around his shoulders. He boosted himself up to the legs of the effigy and settled in for a lengthy stay.

            CAL DIDN’T RETURN for Joel that night. Nor did he return the next day. The hours crawled by and the low winter sun never once warmed the inside of Joel’s place of waiting. Still, he remained. He was invested at this point. While it was true that he was cold and—despite the sandwiches—growing hungrier by the minute, that more than once he’d had to relieve himself in a corner beneath a pile of rotting leaves, that he’d barely dozed off during the night and every sound had startled him into wakefulness, he told himself that a payoff was coming and the payoff would make this waiting worthwhile.

            He started to doubt this on the second night. He began to think that the Blade meant him to die in Kensal Green Cemetery. He understood how easily that could happen: He was in a tomb already; it hadn’t been opened in years and probably wouldn’t  be opened again. He and Cal had come to the spot in near darkness, and if anyone had seen them sauntering along in the direction of the entrance to the cemetery, what would they have thought of it? There were many places they could have been heading: the underground station, a superstore across the canal, even all the way to Wormwood Scrubs.

            He considered climbing out at this point. When he examined the interior walls of the tomb, he saw that it would be easy enough for him to scale the ten feet. But the list of what-ifs that accompanied the idea of departure stopped him. What if he climbed out just at the moment Cal was coming for him? What if the Blade was nearby, watching and waiting, and saw his disgrace? What if he was seen by a groundsman or a security man? What if he was collared and hauled into the Harrow Road police station again?

            As to his family and the what-ifs they were conjuring up as this second night approached, he did not think of that. His aunt, his brother, and his sister were merely blips on the screen of his consciousness.

The second night passed slowly. It was terribly cold, and a soft rain fell. It became a long and windy rain that soaked his blanket, which in turn soaked his school trousers. He had only his anorak left as protection from the weather, but it would be useless by morning if the rain did not cease, and Joel knew that.

            The sky was turning light when he finally heard the sounds he’d been waiting for: the swooshing of cypress branches and the sucking noise of trainers falling on saturated ground. Then Cal’s voice came softly, “You there, blood?”

            Joel, crouching in the inadequate shelter of the damaged slate roof, got to his feet with a grunt. “Here, bred,” he said.

            “Have it knocked good, den. You make it out okay?”

            Joel wasn’t sure, but he said that he could. Hunger made him dizzy, and cold made him clumsy. It would, he thought, be a sodding hell of a thing if he broke his neck trying to get out of this place.

He tried several times. He had success on his fourth attempt. By that time, Cal had climbed the wall and was straddling the top, extending a hand to him. But Joel wouldn’t take it, so close was he to passing the Blade’s test completely. He wanted Cal Hancock to carry a message back to Mr. Stanley Hynds: He did it all, and he did it by himself.

            He lifted his leg over the wall and straddled it, mimicking Cal’s posture there although, unlike Cal, he was forced to cling to the stones like a shipwreck survivor. He said, “You tell him, mon,” before he was out of strength. He toppled from the top of the wall to the ground.

            Cal hopped down and helped him to his feet. “Okay?” he asked earnestly. “Noise goin down ’bout where you been.”

            Joel squinted at Cal, with his head feeling weak. He said, “You rampin, mon?”

            “Hell no. I been by your drum and there’s been cops wiv your aunt. I ’spect you in for it when you get home.”

            “Shit.” Of all things, Joel hadn’t thought of this. He said, “I got to get home. When c’n I talk to the Blade, den?”

            “He ain’t takin your part wiv the cops. On your own f’r dat, blood.”

            “’S not what I meant. I got to talk to him ’bout dis bloke needs sorting.”

            “He’ll sort him when he’s ready,” Cal said.

            “Hey!” Joel protested. “Di’n’t I just—”

            “Don’t work like dat.” Cal led Joel through the cypresses then, and along the muddy path towards the cemetery’s central lane. There, he took a moment to clean the bottom of his trainers on a spot in the tarmac where the fallen leaves had blown away during the night. He looked around—in the manner of a man searching for eavesdroppers— and said in a low voice and without looking up from his shoes, “You c’n stop dis, bred. You got dat power.”

            “Stop what?” Joel asked.

            “Blood, he mean you harm. Y’unnerstan?”

            “Who? The Blade? Cal, I gave him the flick knife. And you weren’t there when we talked. We got