‘It’s good to say it,’ Joyce suddenly said. ‘It’s better.’
So Rachel turned back to Matt.
‘I think you need to get this out,’ he said.
She swallowed, then an entire minute later, she spoke.
‘It was Halloween. 2001. September the 11th had just happened the month before so people kept talking like the world was going to end. We still went out trick-or-treating and we let Holly come with us. To be honest we were all being really nice to her for a change. Me and the girls had this talk about how crappy we were being. People in the world were crashing aeroplanes into buildings and for some reason it was making everyone a bit nicer. Including us. And back then, if you were a kid on Halloween, you’d go to the vaults on Kirchin Road.’
Joyce gave a little gasp.
‘Matthew might not know exactly what the vaults are,’ Bob said.
Larry flicked his hand. ‘He knows. Carry on.’
She nodded. ‘So we took Holly to the vaults. She’d never been there before.’
‘Why did you take her?’ Matt said. ‘To scare her?’
‘Yes, but not in a bad way. Like, it was to help her grow up a bit. We were all planning on scaring ourselves, not just her. That’s what Halloween’s about. We just wanted to include Holly for a change.’
‘We invited her,’ Kassy said. ‘Told her it was a night of being afraid and she was up for it.’
‘She was nervous, but I think she was more excited we let her in on something. We were all dressed up in these tacky witches’ hats and plastic brooms that we bought from the market. Apart from Holly—’
‘Who of course wanted to be an angel,’ Kassy added, with a tut.
‘She wore this little white dress and some white wings she’d made from some feathers she’d picked up in the park. Took her all week – cost her money too. It was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen …’ Rachel looked down at her lap. ‘That night was a big deal to her, because we let her into the group.’
Kassy turned and stared out of the window.
‘Anyway, we all had torches and chocolate and we were laughing. We had drink too: cider, mostly. Holly even tried a bit but she almost choked on it. She seemed really happy that night. Happiest I remember seeing her. God we were all laughing a lot.’
Kassy nodded, silently.
‘Those vaults …’ Rachel said. ‘They’re fenced off now, but back then it was just chicken wire, so people got through. But they’re still all locked up with metal hatches. They look like manhole covers in the ground. You can’t actually get inside and climb down so most kids just hover around the top, listening out for ghosts, looking through the cracks in the hatches and doing Ouija boards till the police move you on. Stuff like that. When we got there nobody was around, but we went late, like ten or something. Only we noticed one of the hatches actually looked loose …’ Rachel stopped talking suddenly, as if the air was growing thinner and she didn’t have enough to get her words out. She started scratching the inside of her arm.
Kassy turned back from the window. ‘Some kids must have prised it open earlier and ran off. So we thought what the hell, and we all yanked it open. It took some doing but there were a bunch of us. When we flipped it up we saw this metal ladder going down, bolted to the wall.’
‘Tell me you didn’t go down …’ Bob suddenly said.
Kassy frowned. ‘’Course we did.’
‘On a powerful night like that? To a place like that?’ Joyce started shaking her head. ‘This is madness.’
‘Yeah, anyway …’ Kassy brushed Joyce away with her hand. ‘We were having a laugh. Holly was too. But when we all clambered down to the bottom it was like pitch-black, and to be honest, even I got freaked out. We had a look around the place but it’s pretty much just a hole in the ground, with old brick walls that don’t look safe.’
‘The vaults are condemned,’ Bob said. ‘For Pete’s sake, there are signs all over them.’
‘I know that,’ Kassy said. ‘Place looks like you could kick it and it’d crumble. It’s bigger than we thought but there’s sod all to see down there. A few locked metal doors, which we tried but not much else. Great for a ghost story, though. We had our lighters out but to be honest it didn’t take long before we all started to spaz out a bit. Like it wasn’t that fun any more, once we were down the ladder. People started talking about what happened there, in the past.’
Matt said, ‘And Holly?’
‘Oh, she was fine. She loved being down there, which is pretty weird when you—’
‘God, Kassy, it wasn’t the place. You know it wasn’t the place. She was happy cos she was with us …’ Rachel almost smiled. ‘She was just playing along with the Halloween vibe. She started slapping a few of us on the back, to scare us, which wasn’t funny at all, but she thought she was doing the right thing. Only it was just too scary down there, knowing the history. I think she thought we were pretending to be scared, like it was all part of the fun. Anyway, she started making ghost noises and stuff. Said some strange things.’
‘Such as?’ Larry asked.
‘She said animals spoke to her sometimes. Said they told her things that were going to happen, before they happened.’
‘The mood sort of changed,’ Rachel said.
‘Steph climbed up the ladder first,’ Kassy said. ‘She was going to wet her pants, she was so petrified. To be honest, I wasn’t as bothered about it but then Jo climbed up so
