Belinda Bauer - The Facts of Life and Death

‘KELLY! Brian! Call the police! BRIAN! Kelly, baby – wait! Who’s there? Who’s with you?’

The girl tilted the phone towards the man and he grinned and waved.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m going to kill your little girl now, while you watch.’

‘NO!’ she shrieked. ‘No! Wait! Wait! Stop! Brian! BRIAN! Someone’s got Kelly! BRIAN!’

He started to laugh. Her hysteria was so tinny and tiny; it was like watching a sea-monkey throw a tantrum in a little glass bowl.

The woman babbled, ‘Don’t hurt her. Please don’t hurt her. What do you want? I’ll give you anything. What do you want? Money? Please just talk to me and tell me what you want. Anything you want. PLEASE!’

He didn’t want anything else, but he couldn’t answer, he was laughing so hard. He doubled over, choked with mirth.

The girl saw her chance; she got up and ran away.

Away from the pile of clothes and towards Westward Ho! Back to the slipway, the bingo hall and the Hocking’s ice-cream van.

The man straightened up and ran a few loose paces after her, but then stopped and just watched her go – arse jiggling, phone waving, and a high, reedy ‘Help!’ squirting from her every few strides.

It was one of the funniest things he’d ever seen.

He pulled off the balaclava and laughed until he finally wound down into long sighs of amusement – then he wiped his eyes and looked across the flat brown sand, where he was the tallest thing for miles. It made him think of Gulliver’s Travels. He’d had the book as a child and had never read it – but he’d looked at the pictures again and again and again.

Now he felt like Gulliver, stomping all over those little people, flicking them off cliffs and picking them up by their heels between his giant thumb and forefinger.

Making them do whatever he wanted them to.

It made him feel mighty.

IT WAS SATURDAY, so Ruby lay on the floor and watched the sea as it swirled far below the overhanging room in the haunted house. The water was slate-grey with white veins, and when it withdrew it hissed and made a deep clicking sound as the big round stones rolled about the beach under the waves.

It was hypnotic.

She didn’t know how long she’d been here. Maybe an hour. It was getting dark and she was getting cold, but she kept waiting for one more wave, one more retreat.

One more.

One more.

Ruby shifted a little against the musty floor. Her chest hurt.

Again.

She’d first noticed the pain when she’d been reading Pony & Rider on the old rug that was the same colour as the big spiders that marched into The Retreat in the first week of every September, as if they’d booked a room. It was a sharp ache, like lying on a hair bobble. But when she looked there was nothing there.

Now, as then, Ruby drew her forearms under her sides a bit, to relieve the pressure on her chest.

Just one more wave.

‘Can I look?’

Ruby took her face from the hole in the floor to see Adam Braund standing beside her.

He laughed. ‘You have a red ring round your whole eye.’

She blushed and touched her face, but felt nothing.

‘It’s not bad,’ he said. ‘It’ll go.’

She shifted over, and Adam lay down and put his eye to the hole. Ruby was on her tummy beside him, propped on her elbows, staring at the wall. There had been paper on it once – yellow daffodils and purple crocuses. Now the flowers were faded to brown, just like real ones, and speckled with black damp.

‘We should make another hole,’ said Adam. His voice was muffled, because he was speaking into the floorboards. ‘Then we can both watch.’

‘OK,’ said Ruby.

He got to his feet and Ruby trailed around the house behind him, while he picked up scraps and tested window frames. There wasn’t much left that the children hadn’t already dropped into the ocean.

‘Shit!’ Adam sucked his thumb, and when he took it out of his mouth blood welled quickly, then leaked away through the tiny canals of his skin. It made Ruby feel a bit sick to see it.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘No,’ said Adam. He wiped the blood on his jeans, and started to tug at a banister spindle. It came free with a surprising jerk, and they both laughed. Then Ruby followed him back through to the overhanging room.

Adam chose a place twelve inches from the knothole, where two floorboards were parting and daylight already showed through. He inserted the spindle and twisted and levered until the rotting board split and opened into a new hole a few inches wide, then he picked at the edges until the worst of the splinters were gone.

‘There,’ he said, and lowered the spindle through the new hole. ‘Let’s watch this.’

They both got on to their tummies again – their elbows tucked in and their hands in fists next to their ears – and counted down together.

‘Three.

‘Two.

‘One!’

Adam let go of the spindle and it speared the next wave and disappeared. Then they saw it again, briefly, tumbled in the froth, before it was sucked out to sea for ever.

‘Cool,’ said Ruby.

‘Yeah,’ said Adam. He shifted to get more comfortable and his leg nudged Ruby’s. She nudged back, and he held firm. Without taking their eyes from their spy-holes, they giggled as they pressed their calves and ankles against each other in a fake tussle, then gave up and subsided into silence.

They watched the sea for another five minutes, then Ruby remembered how cold she was. She was about to get up and go home when Adam spoke. His lips were so close to the floor that Ruby had to ask him to repeat it, so he lifted his head and looked at her.

‘Do you know why this house is haunted?’

‘No.’

He turned his head and looked at her. ‘Do you want to know?’

Ruby pursed her lips and thought about it. She’d thought Haunted House was just a name they called the dilapidated old building. Sure, it was run-down and creepy and had cobwebs and draughts and drips and weird noises, but until this moment she had never truly considered that it might actually be haunted by real ghosts. That idea was both awful and thrilling. She could already feel the back of her neck prickling just at the thought of it, and it was on the tip of her tongue to say no, when she realized that Adam Braund wanted to tell her, so she said yes instead.

He rolled on to his side to face her, with his elbow under his ear, so Ruby did the same. Their knees touched, but this time they both ignored it.

‘My dad told me this,’ Adam started, thus establishing the truth of it right up front. ‘It was a hundred years ago and there was this pedlar—’

‘What’s a pedlar?’ said Ruby.

‘Like a sales rep. But in the olden days. He came down the hill with all his stuff that he was selling on the back of a donkey.’

‘He can’t have had much stuff.’

‘Nobody did in those days,’ said Adam, and Ruby nodded because that was true.

‘What kind of stuff?’ she asked.

‘I dunno,’ said Adam. ‘Toilet roll and Pledge and things. Just stuff for the house.’

‘OK.’

‘So he came down the hill to sell stuff and there were these two old sisters who lived in this house, and they offered to let him stay over for the night.’

‘In this house?’

‘Yes,’ said Adam.

‘Why?’

‘ ’Cos it was night and it was raining outside.’

‘OK.’

Ruby wanted to glance around the room, but was starting to feel too nervous to do that, in case she saw something frightening. This was nowhere near a ghost story yet, but she was primed…

‘So he tied his donkey up on the cobbles and spent the night here.’