She described that sight as ‘something out of hell’, which at first sounded a little dramatic to Matt, until he remembered how high the blood had sprayed. Steph’s eyes had been open, apparently. Staring up at the top corner of the room. And what felt to her like the final insult. ‘Last thing she saw was a ceiling tile. Not her son, Josh. Not her husband, Greg. Just a fluorescent bloody light and a piece of polystyrene.’ As she shivered and sobbed through it, it was impossible not to keep thinking of his own mother, slashed and stabbed at the hands of a schizo, one sunny Sunday afternoon. And how he had thought an incredibly similar thing when he had found her. That his mum’s last image was a plate of Sunday’s dinner. That shop-bought food was pressed into her face as she breathed her last gasps into … into fucking gravy.
Never leaves you, that stuff. That mocking, indignity stuff. It wriggles into the nightmare cortex of your brain and makes a sturdy hole.
He blinked. Joyce’s hand was on his shoulder, squeezing it. Not speaking, just smiling softly at him and sniffing his pain.
He zoned back in, embarrassed. Joyce let go. They all sat.
The bottom line of all this was that Jo Finch was thoroughly traumatised by it all and she hugged Joyce a fair bit, but mostly … mostly she kept turning to the hipster-looking one, Rachel Wasson. She’d clamp those arms around Rachel like the breeze might whisk her up at any minute. Carry her right across the park and over the hill.
Rachel Wasson, by contrast, didn’t cry.
She just stood there being polite and quiet, responding to hugs but never offering them. She answered polite catch-up questions from Bob because apparently she was the only one of the girls to have moved away. How’s things? (I’m doing great thanks, really, really great); where are you living now? (I’m up in Manchester, got a little flat) and what are you doing with your life? (I work in sound). Whatever the heck that meant. Through it all he noticed something that he wasn’t sure anybody else had. Though Joyce may have. She seemed to notice everything.
Rachel scratched her wrist, a lot.
She’d shove her fingers right up the sleeve of her jacket and scrape it repeatedly, like she wasn’t even aware she was doing it. Maybe she had eczema, but he doubted it. Something told him this was psychology, not dermatology. A nervous, repeated twinge. And who could blame her? She said it was her first time back in Menham in a decade.
He noticed how she was yet to turn round and look at the place. At her sister’s bedroom window.
He caught her face and the curve of her profile and wondered how those features must have contorted on the morning they witnessed Holly swinging. He wondered what tiny mocking details haunted her?
For ever nine, Matt thought, and immediately pictured his own little girl, Amelia, as a bizarre whisper in his mind said … or for ever seven.
Don’t you dare, he thought, and ordered his brain to scrap the image of her climbing a table with a cord in her hand. The subconscious could be a cruel little factory sometimes, making its desperate connections.
Bob introduced Matt to everybody as a ‘fellow researcher’, then added he was from a London university, with an interest in the paranormal. ‘He’ll be an asset in this,’ Bob said.
It was after ten minutes of catching up, peppered with the groans of poor, poor Steph from Jo, that they finally settled down onto the benches. Bob pulled a cool bag out filled with sandwiches. He offered some to Matt and he took a bite of chicken tikka, knowing that he was risking being late for the charity event, back at the uni. He took another chomp and thought: what the hell am I doing here?
But then Joyce looked at the two girls and said, ‘Let’s talk about the bad thing. Let’s talk about the black rabbit.’
‘The what?’ he said, and then he knew exactly why he was here. A little boy had asked him to kill the bad thing that had stalked his mum after all. And besides …
It’s the strange stuff that grabs you, Matt. It’s the gods … and the monsters.
The word ‘rabbit’ did something to Rachel Wasson. She stiffened on the bench next to him. The creak of the wood sounded like each nodule of her spine was locking into place. She even stopped scraping her wrist, which was just as well. Any more and she’d be filing shards off bone.
‘I thought Kassy was coming?’ she suddenly said. A stall.
Jo nodded. ‘Since when was Kassy West ever on time?’
‘Since never.’ Rachel smiled as if welcoming the feel of it on her face. Then she glanced at Joyce, who was eyeing her and her mouth became a line again. ‘I don’t like talking about this. You do know that.’
‘But the deeper we bury these entities, the more they root.’
Nice fusion of pop psychology and whacked-out demonism there, Matt thought.
Joyce leant over and gave her hand a squeeze. Cracked skin against smooth white. ‘Matt knows about the poltergeist, and about Holly.’
‘Oh … okay.’ She looked away from him. Embarrassed.
‘So what I really need you to tell him about is the manifestation,’ Joyce said. ‘Can you tell him what you and your friends saw?’
She said nothing for a moment. Sucked her lips in a little and caught Jo’s nervous gaze.
Matt turned to her. ‘You don’t have to talk about this. Must be intense enough being back here.’
She smiled at him for that. She held his gaze too, but then the
