“He wasn’t what I expected. But what do you expect? I don’t know. People like Fred West—he looks like he’s crawled out from under some bridge somewhere. Ian Brady has the most amazingly punchable face. Or he did. Jeffrey Dahmer looks like he has creep written through him like a stick of rock. But Michael Reave was like … I don’t know. A pub landlord from up north who looks after himself. Or,” she snorted with sour amusement. “Or the dubious love interest in a Mills and Boon. He broods.”
“You think those people look evil or unpleasant because you know what they did,” pointed out Nikki. She was sitting on the sofa with her feet tucked under her. She had changed out of her shirt into a big purple jumper, but was still wearing her work tights. There was a ladder in the knee. “Look at Bundy, or Harold Shipman. They looked normal. Shipman looked like a kindly old man, and he’s our most prolific serial killer.”
“Hmm.” Over the last couple of hours, both she and Nikki had taken a crash course in serial killer research. “Bundy. What a cunt.”
“My mum would murder you herself if she heard the language you’re using in front of my porcelain figures. That story though …”
“I know, right?” Heather snatched up one of the remaining prawn crackers and munched on it. “What a weird thing to come out with. And he reckons my mum was a huge fan of these things.” She paused, wondering whether to tell Nikki about the book, then decided against it.
“It’s hard to imagine your mum having much time for grisly fairy tales, I have to admit.”
“Huh. Yeah. And the thing is, it’s a real story. As in, it’s a fairy tale that exists. More or less.”
Nikki paused with a prawn cracker on its way to her mouth.
“It is? How do you know?”
Heather pursed her lips. “I’ve been reading up on the subject—there are a lot of people on the Internet who spend their time analyzing these things. Anyway, the Grimm’s tales have mostly been Disneyfied these days, covered over with sugar and lace and made more palatable, but it seems that once they were every bit as unpleasant as the story Michael Reave told me. The thing is, the Brother and Sister story exists, except he’s changed the ending. In the real story, at the third stream the brother is turned into a deer. And then there’s a lot of quite complicated stuff about kings and princesses, and eventually the witch herself is torn apart by wild beasts. His version was a lot snappier, it has to be said.’
“Oh.” Nikki dipped another prawn cracker into the little plastic container of sweet and sour sauce. “Why do you think he changed it?”
“Lots of these stories got changed, like I said, although not many were changed to be even more violent. Maybe he remembered it wrong, or maybe he was trying to tell me something.” Catching Nikki’s raised eyebrows, Heather shrugged. “He said he’d told me that story to demonstrate that I don’t know everything about my mum. But maybe there was another message, too.”
“That message might well just be ‘I want to freak you out.’ Are you going to go back?”
Heather nodded.
“He knows something, Nikki. He wasn’t surprised at all when I told him what happened to Mum. Maybe they had a pact or something, maybe they were writing in code in the letters.” She trailed off, looking at the darkness outside the windows. “Whatever it is, I need to bloody know.”
Walking back to her mother’s house later, Heather found herself thinking of Michael Reave’s unpleasant fairy story again. It was true that her mother had been strict over her television and reading habits, to the point where Heather had often stayed late round friend’s houses, watching all sorts of horrors on VHS tape—the fact that her mum had banned them only made her more determined, obviously—and there had been an entire box in her wardrobe, carefully hidden under old shoes, containing books and comics her mum definitely wouldn’t have approved of. The idea that she had once collected especially ghastly stories, sharing them with a future serial killer, seemed impossible; a piece of a puzzle that would not fit together. Yet … there was something familiar about the story, even so.
It’s just Red Riding Hood, she told herself. Whether you had an overprotective mum or not, all children become familiar with stories about little kids being eaten by wolves, and maybe you never really forget that first little thrill of horror you felt when you realized that the Big Bad Wolf has eaten Grandma and, ghoulishly, is wearing her nightie. That feeling of wolfishness, that creeping fear of the beast, sinks its teeth into all the old tales.
“It’s all one story,” she muttered to herself. “Fear the beast, for the beast is hungry.”
Inside the gate, Heather stopped. She had left the living room light on so it wouldn’t seem so spooky when she came back, but somehow that blazing square of yellow light, fuzzy and indistinct through the net curtains, only made her feel worse, like it was a portal onto something she didn’t want to look at. The pieces of one of Michael Reave’s victims scattered on the grass of a remote field perhaps, or her mum sitting at the kitchen table with her head all crushed in by rocks, dutifully scratching out another letter to a murderer while bits of her brain dripped onto the paper.
Shaking her head at herself, Heather went to the door and let herself in. The house was quiet and still, and she made a note to leave the radio on when she went out next time; the silence was too expectant somehow, too eager for her
