Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

“That’s for kids,” Lezly objected. “We’re not seeing any films with them.”

“We don’t have to either, do we, Lucas?” Tom said in a bid to stop his face from growing hotter. “What are you two seeing?”

“ Cheerleaders with Guts ,” Dianne said with another quick glittery blink.

“We can’t,” Lucas informed everyone. “Nobody under fifteen’s allowed.”

Tom glared at him as the girls did. At least none of the staff dealing with the noisy queues appeared to have heard the remark. Until that moment Tom had been able to prefer visiting the cinema to any of the other activities their parents had arranged for the boys over the years — begging for sweets at neighbours’ houses, ducking for apples and a noseful of water, carving pumpkins when Lucas’s received most of the praise despite being so grotesque only out of clumsiness. Now that the parents had reluctantly let them outgrow all this Tom seemed to be expected to take even more care of his cousin. Perhaps Lucas sensed his resentment for once, because he said “We don’t have to go to a film.”

“Who doesn’t?” said Dianne.

Tom wanted to say her and Lezly too, but first he had to learn “Where, then?”

“The haunted place.” When nobody admitted to recognising it Lucas said “Grinfields.”

“Where the boy and girl killed themselves together, you mean,” Lezly said.

“No, he did first,” Dianne said, “and she couldn’t live without him.”

It was clear that Lucas wasn’t interested in these details, and he barely let her finish. “My mum and dad say they did it because they watched films you aren’t supposed to watch.”

“My parents heard they were always shopping,” Tom made haste to contribute. “Them and their families spent lots of money they didn’t have and all it did was leave them thinking nothing was worth anything.”

That was his father’s version. Perhaps it sounded more like a gibe at the girls than he was afraid Lucas’s comment had. “Why do you want us to go there, Luke?” Dianne said.

“Who’s Luke?”

“I told you,” Tom said in some desperation, “he’s like that.”

“No I’m not, I’m like Lucas.”

At such times Tom understood all too well why his cousin was bullied at school. There was also the way Lucas stared at anybody unfamiliar as if they had to wait for him to make up his mind about them, and just now his pasty face — far spottier than Tom’s and topped with unruly red hair — was a further drawback. Nevertheless Dianne said “Are you sure you don’t want to see our film?”

She was speaking to Tom, but Lucas responded. “We can’t. We’ve been told.”

“I haven’t,” Tom muttered. He watched the girls join the queue for the ticket desk manned by a tastefully drooling vampire in a cloak, and then he turned on Lucas. “We need to switch our phones off. We’re in the cinema.”

Accuracy mattered most to Lucas. Once he’d done as he was told Tom said “Let’s go, and not to the kids’ film either.”

A frown creased Lucas’s pudgy forehead. “Which one, then?”

“None of them. We’ll go where you wanted,” Tom said, leading the way out into the Frugall retail park.

More vehicles than he thought he could count in a weekend were lined up beneath towering lamps as white as the moon. In that light people’s faces looked as pallid as Lucas’s, but took on colour once they reached the shops, half a mile of which surrounded the perimeter. As Tom came abreast of a Frugelectric store he said “We’ll need a light.”

Lucas peered at the lanky lamps, and yet again Tom wondered what went on inside his cousin’s head. “A torch,” he resented having to elucidate.

“There’s one at home.”

“That’s too far.” Before Lucas could suspect he didn’t want their parents learning where the boys would be Tom said “You’ll have to buy one.”

He was determined his cousin would pay, not least for putting the girls off. He watched Lucas select the cheapest flashlight and load it with batteries, then drop a ten-pound note beside the till so as to avoid touching the checkout girl’s hand. He made her place his change there for him to scoop up while Tom took the flashlight wrapped in a flimsy plastic bag. “That’s mine. I bought it,” Lucas said at once.

“You hold it then, baby.” Tom stopped just short of uttering the last word, though his face was hot again. “Look after it,” he said and stalked out of the shop.

They were on the far side of Frugall from their houses and the school. An alley between a Frugranary baker’s and a Frugolé tapas bar led to a path around the perimeter. A twelve-foot wall behind the shops and restaurants cut off most of the light and the blurred vague clamour of the retail park. The path was deserted apart from a few misshapen skeletal loiterers nuzzling the wall or propped against the chain-link fence alongside Grinfields Woods. They were abandoned shopping trolleys, and the only sound apart from the boys’ padded footsteps was the rustle of the plastic bag.

Tom thought they might have to follow the path all the way to the housing estate between Grinfields and the retail park, but soon they came to a gap in the fence. Lucas dodged through it so fast that he might have forgotten he wasn’t alone. As Tom followed he saw his own shadow emerge from a block of darkness fringed with outlines of wire mesh. The elongated shadows of trees were reaching for the larger dark. By the time the boys found the official path through the woods they were almost beyond the glare from the retail park, and Lucas switched on the flashlight. “That isn’t scary,” he declared as Tom’s shadow brandished its arms.

Tom was simply frustrated that Lucas hadn’t bothered to remove the flashlight from the bag. He watched his cousin peer both ways along the dim path like a child showing how much care he took about crossing a road, and then head along the stretch that vanished into darkness. The sight of Lucas swaggering off as though he didn’t care whether he was followed did away with any qualms Tom might have over scaring him more than he would like. He tramped after Lucas through the woods that looked as if the dark had formed itself into a cage, and almost collided with him as the blurred jerky light swerved off the path to flutter across the trees to the left. “What’s pulling something along?” Lucas seemed to feel entitled to be told.

“It’s got a rope,” Tom said, but didn’t want to scare Lucas too much too soon. “No, it’s only water.”

He’d located it in the dried-up channel out of sight below the slope beyond the trees. It must be a lingering trickle of rain, which had stopped before dark, unless it was an animal or bird among the fallen leaves. “Make your mind up,” Lucas complained and swung the light back to the path.

The noise ceased as Tom tramped after him. Perhaps it had gone underground through the abandoned irrigation channel. Without warning — certainly with none from Lucas — the flashlight beam sprang off the ragged stony path and flew into the treetops. “Is it laughing at us?” Lucas said.

Tom gave the harsh shrill sound somewhere ahead time to make itself heard. “What do you think?”

“Of course it’s not,” Lucas said as if his cousin needed to be put right. “Birds can’t laugh.”

Once more Tom suspected Lucas wasn’t quite as odd as he liked everyone to think, although that was odd in itself. When the darkness creaked again he said “That’s not a bird, it’s a tree.”

Lucas might have been challenging someone by striding up the path to jab the beam at the treetops. As he disappeared over a ridge the creaking of the solitary branch fell silent. Though he’d taken the light with him, Tom wasn’t about to be driven to chase it. He hadn’t quite reached the top of the path when he said “No wonder aunt and uncle say you can’t make any friends.”