What We Saw (18 page)

Adam turned away. ‘Well, back to finding ghosts and other shit. Pity we can’t go to…’ He stopped himself.

‘Donald’s… I know,’ I said. ‘A part of me wishes we hadn’t seen any of this stuff.’

‘But it’s been fun,’ Adam interrupted. ‘Messed up, but like… you’re pretty cool really, cuz. For a wuss.’

I felt my legs wobble and battled to find something to say in response. ‘Well, erm—you’re alright too, for a shortie.’

Adam rolled his eyes and held his arms out at either side. ‘Whatever.’

The caravan site looked rather pretty in the orange glow of the setting sun as we headed down past the site repairman’s caravan. We noticed a severe lack of sheep in the field, which was strange considering there were at least eleven there the day before. I pulled out my notebook and wrote: ‘
Sheep-stealer? Look into it.
’ Adam seemed more interested in the phone box, now painted a strange shade of blue. He contemplated the chances that it was some sort of Tardis and briefly pressed the idea that Donald was an alien before I slapped him on the leg and told him not to say ‘the D word.’

‘We can’t rule him out of everything though, Liam,’ he said, desperate.

‘Yeah, but not today. Today is about new mysteries and new adventures. We’ve gotta try and keep our mind off what happened for a day, remember?’ I felt myself getting closer to telling him everything, about Emily’s dad and the threats. I was almost bursting.

Adam kicked at a bunch of stones in front of him. They pelted through the air like missiles towards one of the resident’s cars. ‘It all seems so false.’

We slowed down and sat on the old rocky fence.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

Adam rested his chin in his hands, swinging his legs as they dangled above the ground. ‘I mean, us, giving up. Should we not at least tell somebody? It just annoys me.’

I sighed and looked around the caravan site. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see this place in the same way again. ‘We leave it to someone else now. We’ve no choice.’

Adam grunted.

‘What?’

He shook his head and hopped off the wall.

‘What are you grunting about?’ I asked.

He turned round and faced me. His eyes were bloodshot as he scratched at his forearms. ‘It’s easy for you to say. You’ll be off home soon. I’ve got to stay here. You get the easy way out.’

He headed off in front. I suppose he was right. The truth was I didn’t really care much about anyone but myself right now. I wanted all this over with.

We approached our den. Something caught my eye in the distance. ‘Adam, I think there’s an intruder.’

Adam turned to me for a second and scanned the den before it clicked, his eyes widening. The leaves stuck out on our door when it hadn’t been closed properly. Unless we’d forgotten to close it last time, which was very unlikely, someone had been in there. He began to sprint towards the den. I grabbed him and held him back.

‘Stop it, you idiot, we could be onto something,’ I said, holding him by his jumper.

‘What the fuck you on about, cuz? We’ve gotta get them out of our den!’ He shook me off.

‘Think about it for a second,’ I pleaded. ‘Maybe someone’s out to get us. Or spying on us. We need to sneak up on them, be stealthy, y’know?’

I grabbed hold of Adam’s jumper again, stopping him from going on. He didn’t look impressed at my resistance, at my reluctance to follow his lead, but I stood tall above him. He shook his head, and brushed my arm from his shirt. It felt strange being the one in control.

‘So, what do we do?’ he asked.

I still wasn’t quite used to this sort of question. ‘We… we go and see who’s in there. Have a peek inside. But only from a distance, okay?’ Emily’s dad’s words flickered in my mind. ‘
Stay away from us.’
We had to be careful.

Adam rolled his eyes. ‘Okay.’

I walked ahead of Adam, holding my arm out to stop him whenever he tried to sneak in front of me like an overtaking car on a motorway.

As the two of us closed in on the entrance, I heard a rustling like a trapped animal. I saw a thick, brown creature holding onto something in its mouth. My heart erupted at the thought of a live animal catching its prey in our den and bringing it here to feast upon. I kept my arm in front of Adam as I pondered how we would deal with our new pet, trying to make sense of its long body and its white head behind the fence of twigs and leaves.

The more I focused, the less sense the creature made. It nudged backwards and forwards, letting go of whatever was in its mouth, before vanishing and reappearing. I edged closer, my knees wobbling as I tried to stay crouched down, like one of those presenters on nature programmes.

I realised the thing I’d been staring at for the best part of a minute was no animal.

When the thing closed in for a third time, I spotted the claw of a hand. A human hand. All of a sudden, it all came together: the brown, snakelike skin of the coat on the arm, the clutches of the hand, and the prey. Someone else was in there.

I turned to Adam, who stared into the distance, his eyes frozen on whatever it was. The memories began to fly back—it was like when we’d seen the body being buried. Adam’s eyes were the same. He put his finger to his lips and pointed towards the side of the den entrance. His mouth was expressionless, his eyes burning holes in whatever was in front of him. I turned my head towards where he pointed. Nothing, nothing but leaves, branches, and…

When I saw it, without a moment’s hesitation, the pair of us ran. Sprinted back in the direction we’d come from, cutting through caravan gardens and charging through private hedges before ending up on the lower road, parallel to where we’d been. My heart thudded against my chest as I battled for breath. Adam stood with his hands on his knees, that same lack of expression still sprayed across his face.

‘What the hell do we do now?’ Adam asked, looking up towards me, his voice shaky.

I tried to catch my breath, but a thousand thoughts crawled through my mind. The arm and how it clutched on to the other arm. It all started to make sense; a sick, twisted sort of sense.
What was he doing?
Adam and I had been so tied up with our own little mystery that we hadn’t even noticed that anything had been happening. I don’t know what he was doing, but all I could think about was Donald’s walking stick, perched outside the entrance of our den, camouflaged against the leaves and the branches.

‘We need to know for sure, Adam,’ I said.

Adam jolted up, red in the cheeks. ‘What more proof do we need, Liam?’ His bottom lip quivered. ‘We’ve just seen him in there with someone. In our den. Who knows what he’s been doing to them. You trying to say he has a new friend we don’t know about?’

Adam was right. I think he was thinking the same thing as me. Maybe he’d seen it too. I was trying not to believe it, but there was no denying it. Her brown hair was unmistakable as Donald’s arm pulled away from her.

‘You don’t think…’ I started, before Adam interrupted.

‘No. Don’t say it. We have to find out for ourselves. We can’t run away from this mystery now, cuz. We’re in too deep. We’ve seen too much, and we can stop this.’

I slumped, defeated. He was right. We were in too deep, and it was our own fault. This was everything we’d wanted—a real, solid mystery. We’d asked for it, and we’d gotten it. I felt sick. I wished we could go back to ghost-hunting and fossil searching.

‘We go back, and we wait,’ Adam said, looking at me straight in the eyes.

I nodded my head, as he checked to see I was following him.

Adam stopped, and I froze behind him. She walked out of our den, skinny and broken. Her eyes were dark underneath, and her sweaty hair gripped to her head like an octopus. Bruises coloured what flesh she still had on her arms. Donald walked out behind her, frowning and saying things to her. He reached down to hug her and she let him, before he turned to pick up his walking stick.

‘Liam,’ Adam said, his jaw drooping. ‘I—I think we need to talk about the mystery again.’

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

Emily walked back to her caravan as Donald watched her every step.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Adam and I didn’t eat very well that night. Even by Adam’s standards, a bite of ham was pretty ridiculous. Gran fussed and asked him what was wrong, but his mind was elsewhere. I tried my best to eat the fish and chips Granddad had brought back from Bareslow for us, but it was more out of respect than anything else. I wasn’t hungry. In fact, I was the exact opposite—sick to the bottom of my stomach. And anyway, how could I just sit here and eat while Emily suffered at the hands of Donald? Who knows what he could be doing to her right at this moment.

Maybe he was the one kissing her now. I clenched my eyes together. I couldn’t let myself think about that. We had to tell someone before it was too late. But wouldn’t that mean that we were the ones to blame? We knew he was in the wrong and that he’d done something, and we hadn’t reported it. The back of my throat felt warm and my eyes stung.

There was a sombre atmosphere in the caravan in general. Granddad pulled me aside when I’d got in to tell me that I’d be here for another few weeks. Something to do with my mum and dad. I didn’t really care; nothing could take me away from Emily and Donald right now anyway. This was my home for now, and the people I cared about were in trouble. Mum and Dad could argue all they wanted and sort out their own problems; it was probably better with me out of their way. But Adam couldn’t fight this battle on his own and neither could Emily. We needed a plan of action.

Carla was probably the only happy member of the caravan that evening. I scraped my leftover chips into her bowl. Granddad peeked over the top of his copy of the Telegraph. He went to open his mouth before sighing and looking back down.

‘Are you coming swimming tonight or what, boys?’ he asked from behind his newspaper.

‘Nah, I think we’ll give it a—’

He slammed the pages together and pulled his reading glasses from the edge of his nose. His face was red. ‘Right, what is going on?’ he shouted. ‘Whatever it is, it ends, right here.’

My heart began to thump.
He’d sussed us.
I looked at Adam, who turned back to me, biting his lip.

‘It’s— it’s nothing, Granddad—’ I started.

‘Oh, don’t give me that,’ he said, throwing his hand in our direction. ‘I get you’ve got stuff going on in your heads. You never open up, either of you. That’s your problem.’

Gran walked through and saw Granddad ranting.

‘Come on, Dean,’ she said. ‘Leave the boys be.’

He took a deep breath and picked up his paper again. ‘I’m fine,’ he said, smiling. ‘Sorry, lads. Just… just remember you don’t have to bottle anything, ‘cause it’s good to talk, okay?’ The ‘okay’ stuck in his throat. I looked up at Gran, who simply raised her eyebrows and wandered back towards the bedroom.

‘Everything’s fine, Granddad,’ Adam said. ‘I promise.’

Granddad didn’t hear him, or at least, he pretended not to.

*

That night, I told Adam about my confrontation with Emily’s dad. He scrunched his nose and eyebrows in confusion.

‘Why are you only telling me this now? This could be important, cuz. Maybe he was worried about something.’

Adam made a good point. I slid my teeth across my lip and wished I’d mentioned something to him earlier. ‘What d’you think he was worried about?’ I asked.

‘Well I mean, you were seeing her. And she started looking a bit sick and everything. Maybe her dad thought you were the one behind it all, you know? Maybe he saw you two together and went crazy, I dunno.’

‘Or…’

‘Or what?’

I stopped mid speech because a niggling thought had been scratching away at me for some time now. I looked down and took a deep breath. ‘Maybe her dad knows more than he is letting on about all of this. Maybe… maybe he hurts Emily. I’m worried about her, Ad.’

Adam stared at me, right into my eyes. I saw his face go slightly paler. ‘You reckon Emily’s dad is helping Donald?’ he asked.

I scratched my leg. ‘Maybe. And if he is, I think Emily’s in trouble. We saw her with Donald. And her dad can be mean to her.’

Adam shook his head, fast. ‘I dunno. Why would her dad hurt her?’ He scanned my eyes for signs of an answer.

I paused. ‘I don’t know, Adam. It’s just, I dunno. The way he looked at me… he was so angry. He looked as if he could do anything to anyone.’

Adam and I stared at each other for some time. Adam looked like his brain had gone into overload. I knew I’d thrown him into the deep end, but it was probably the right thing to do.

Adam coughed and cleared the way for his voice to come out, but he still struggled to find his words. ‘We—we go and talk to Emily tomorrow. Ask her about things. We find out what’s been going on with her and Donald first,’ he said. ‘Then we move in on her dad.’

I knew he was right. I mean, no matter what Emily’s dad had done to me, the way he’d stared at me and the way he’d probably smashed our window, nothing replaced the fact that Donald was the man we’d seen burying the body of the girl. Donald was the one who had turned up with Carla. Donald was the one who showed us a buried ring, and Donald was the one having secret conversations with Emily in our den. Emily’s dad had just gotten mad. We needed to focus.

‘First thing tomorrow?’ I said.

Adam nodded. ‘First thing.’ He turned over and switched his little light off. He didn’t say another word. I laid back and flicked my light off and wished I hadn’t said anything about Emily’s dad.

That night, I dreamt I was chased down the beach in the pitch black by a man who panted and spat like a dog. I couldn’t see his face; he was moving too fast, and whenever I turned round, my feet slowed down and the oncoming beast sped up. Somehow I recognised him.

The eyes.

Red, bloodshot eyes, pinning me against the wall, staring into my soul and screaming at me.

Donald’s eyes?

Or maybe Emily’s dad’s?

‘
STAY THE FUCK AWAY
.’

Or maybe my dad’s?

I tried to scream back but I couldn’t. Nothing came out. I looked down and realised my body had gone. I was just a head. The eyes lifted me and tossed me towards the sea, my stomach spinning like I was on a never-ending rollercoaster.