I took the first box down and sat on the floor.
It was sealed with tape, and I used one of my keys to cut it open along the seam. Inside, I saw a pile of weathered newspapers. I pulled the top one out. It was an old copy of the Gritten Valley Times, which had been the area’s local paper when I was a child. I laid it out on the beams now and took in the stark headline across the middle of the yellowing front page.
GRITTEN ROCKED BY TEEN SLAYING
The printed text below the headline had been smudged by thumbprints and faded by time, but the grainy photographs there were still visible. There was Billy, age fifteen, glowering sullenly at the camera. His thick brown hair was parted in the center and there was a smattering of acne on his cheeks. Below that photo was one of Charlie. He was smirking absently, his dyed black hair swept back, his eyes as empty and alien as a shark’s.
I knew both of these photographs well. They had been taken from the class portrait we’d all posed for, early on in the year of the murder, and I knew the rest of us were there somewhere, outside of the frame. These were zoomed in, which explained the low quality of the images. There had been other, better photographs of Charlie and Billy, but these were the ones the media had generally run with at the time. I hadn’t understood why back then, but I realized now they seemed to fit the story best—capturing not only the killers themselves but their roles in what unfolded.
Charlie, the leader.
Billy, the led.
I hadn’t seen a photograph of either of them in years, and the sight of them now left me numb inside. I should have been feeling something, I thought, but for a moment nothing would come. I stared down at the blurry image of Charlie for a few empty seconds. And then—finally—something snapped inside me, as though a tendon in my mind had given way beneath a sudden strain, and the emotion came tumbling out, angry and sickening.
I hate you.
I fucking hate you.
My hands trembled as I took more newspapers out of the box. There were other copies of the Gritten Valley Times, but there were national papers as well, all of the stories about the murder here in Gritten and the subsequent investigation. There was coverage of Billy’s arrest and trial. The search for Charlie. The grief of a community in shock at the pitch-black evil that had flowered in its midst.
My mother had kept it all.
But why? I remembered she had encouraged me not to follow the media at the time, trying to protect me from it. I had ignored her, of course, and each report I scanned now brought with it a jolt of memory. Here was a photograph of the playground, sealed away behind crime scene tape, a policeman standing guard by the bushes. There, yet another lurid sidebar detailing Charlie and Billy’s obsession with lucid dreaming.
I turned one page to find a photograph of a knife, the blood on the blade dried to rusty-looking crumbs, and read the caption below.
The weapon that Charles Crabtree and William Roberts used to stab their classmate to death. A total of fifty-seven wounds were recorded on the body, leaving the victim’s head all but severed.
I put it quickly aside.
I felt hollow inside now: my whole body slightly stunned, as though the impact of seeing all this again were physical rather than mental. And the whole time, the red hands flickered at the edges of my vision.
What was in the other boxes?
There was a sudden urgency to the question. I took the second box down and opened it. There were newspapers inside this one too, but these appeared to be more recent. The first I pulled out was dated only four years ago.
And yet the headline was horribly familiar.
BOY, 14, MURDERED BY CLASSMATES
Next to that, there was a photograph of a boy. He had a mop of unruly blond hair and a scattering of freckles, and the collar of his school uniform was visible at the bottom of the frame. He was smiling sweetly for the camera. The caption told me his name had been Andrew Brook. He looked far younger than fourteen, and for a moment he reminded me so much of James at that age that it took my breath away.
As I worked my way through the newspapers, everything felt strange and off-kilter around me, as though the attic had rotated a few degrees and the world was now resting at an odd, disorientating angle. The story of what had happened to Andrew Brook emerged piecemeal through headlines.
TWO ARRESTED IN MURDER PROBE
“OUTSIDERS” CHARGED WITH BRUTAL KILLING
OCCULT CONNECTION “ONE LINE OF INQUIRY,” CLAIM POLICE
The murderers weren’t named in the reports, but it was clear from skimming the articles that Andrew Brook had been attacked by two boys from his school—boys he thought had been his friends—and that police believed they had killed him as part of some form of ritual. There was mention of diaries and other material being taken from their homes for analysis.
I pulled the third box across to me and opened it. Newspapers again. These were from only two years ago, and the reports were about another killing, this time of a fifteen-year-old boy named Ben Halsall. Two fellow students had been arrested and charged with his murder.
DREAM CULT CONNECTION IN LOCAL MURDER
As with the previous box, the reports remained vague in terms of exact detail, but if you knew what you were looking for the link was even more overt here. There were references to the two suspects being withdrawn and isolated, and obsessed with dreams and internet mythology. The influence of the murder in Gritten was obvious. I knew exactly what I was looking at.
Copycat killings.
For twenty-five years, I’d done my best not to think about what Charlie and Billy had done, or my own role in the events leading up to it. Any guilt had been parceled away, and when I left for college I’d imagined the train I boarded that day had taken me away from it. To the extent I’d ever considered it, I’d assumed the rest of the world had done the same as I had, and that Charlie had been forgotten.
But he hadn’t.
And my mother had known.
Why did you keep all this, Mom?
But of course there was no answer to that question here. I sat back on my heels and closed my eyes. The silence was ringing. And in the darkness around me, I felt a hundred blood-red hands slipping quietly over the eaves.
* * *
An hour later, I parked up outside the hospice. The surroundings were as tranquil as ever, with the day’s hot sunshine filtering through the trees, but the world felt darker than it had before. It was as though a shadow were gradually falling over everything, and my chest was tight with nerves as I made my way inside to my mother’s room.
She was sleeping. For the first time since arriving in Gritten, I wished that she wasn’t. She looked smaller than ever today, the slow breaths her body was taking barely there. The machine that was monitoring her heart gave a soft beat every few seconds, and even that sound seemed quieter than usual.
“What are you dreaming?” I asked softly.
And then I sat in the chair beside the bed for a time, rubbing my hands together slowly. The window was open, and I could smell the trees and the cut grass out there, and hear a slight rush of breeze.
But although my body was here in the hospice, my mind kept returning to the attic and what I’d found there. And while I waited for my mother to wake up, I took out my phone and began searching online.
There were thousands of hits. It would have taken me hours to read it all, but I clicked onto a large forum devoted to the murder in Gritten, and then scanned through the hundreds of posts there. The amount of information surprised me; every aspect of the case was being discussed in detail. But what I found most fascinating were the threads devoted to Charlie’s disappearance. The speculation there went on and on.