About someone online pretending to be him.
Do you think it’s possible they were telling the truth?
Right then, I wished I felt anything like as sure as I’d tried to sound in the pub, but the reality was that I could still feel him everywhere. As I started the engine again and drove away, I was frightened by the thought of it. If Charlie was still alive, then what was happening here?
Billy is dead.
The words came again as I drove. And despite what Amanda had said about it being unrelated and suspects having already been identified, the dread rose up inside me. Because red handprints were once again being pressed onto the world and I couldn’t escape the feeling that something awful was going to happen again. And most of all, there were my mother’s words.
You shouldn’t be here.
* * *
When I parked outside the house, I took a few seconds to calm myself. I was almost scared to go inside, and that wouldn’t do. Coming back here to Gritten had scrambled me; that was all. And while there were difficult moments still to come, the important thing was this would all be over before too much longer. When my business here was done, I could go back to my life and forget about it all again. In the meantime, it was understandable that I was seeing spirits in the shadows. It didn’t mean they were really there.
The past is the past.
And it couldn’t hurt me now.
The house was dark and gloomy as I unlocked the front door and turned the handle. The door jammed on something for a second, then opened more slowly than it should. There was something stuck beneath the bottom of the wood. I opened the door wide enough to squeeze my body inside, then closed it behind me. Whatever had been trapped beneath it came loose.
I flicked the light switch beside me.
And then froze.
What is that?
Except I already knew. I forced myself to crouch down by the mat, and fought back the revulsion that came as I touched the thing that had been pushed through my mother’s mail slot. The fabric was dusty and old. It had come away in places, revealing gummy patches of glue beneath. And when I turned the doll around and looked into its pitch-black face, the red string fingers tickled against the back of my hand.
What was it?
The answer that came brought a shiver as I imagined the vast, dark expanse of the woods behind me right then.
Incubation.
TWENTY-TWO
BEFORE
The morning after the nightmare with Red Hands, I remember feeling scared as I walked through the town to James’s house. I knew that the dream I’d had—the experience of being outside the room in the basement of the school, and what happened there with Red Hands—had only been a dream: one that might have felt lucid at the time, but which couldn’t have been, really. I hadn’t been able to breathe simply because it had been a nightmare and I had never been in control of what was happening at all. But no matter how hard I tried to rationalize it to myself, the awful residue of it had stayed with me. The knowledge that Charlie had somehow got so far into my head was frightening.
James looked tired and apprehensive. As we walked to the bus stop together, it was obvious that whatever he’d dreamed the night before was on his mind as well. Neither of us mentioned it until the bus left the main road.
“So … how did it go?” James said.
“How did what go?”
“Last night. The experiment. What did you dream?”
I forced myself to shrug as though it were nothing. At the same time, I had dutifully written a basic account of the dream in my diary that morning, and if I was going to end up reading it out at lunchtime there didn’t seem much point in lying now about what had happened.
“I did dream about the room,” I admitted.
“I did too. What happened in yours?”
“Nothing happened.”
“But you just said it was about the room?”
“Yeah.”
I would have been happy to leave it at that, but he was waiting for me to carry on, unwilling to let it go. He looked scared by whatever his own dream had been about. So I sighed, and told him a little bit about being outside the room and seeing him floating behind the glass. But I played down how scary the whole thing had been, and I certainly didn’t mention what had happened at the end.
“And nobody else was there,” I said. “Honestly, I’m not even sure it was you. It was just a stupid dream.”
James looked away, out of the window.
“What about you?” I said.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why?”
“Because it was horrible.” He shook his head. “I’m worried about what we’ve done, Paul. I think we might have done something really bad.”
Something ridiculous, more like it.
And yet I didn’t say that. There was something in his tone of voice that bothered me. The day before, I hadn’t believed for one second that Charlie would dare repeat his door-knocking trick and try to do anything to Goodbold. This morning, though, I no longer felt quite so sure.
“Everything will be fine,” I said. “We’ll get to school, and it will just be the usual. Goodbold will be there, trust me. And he’ll be the same bastard he always is.”
James didn’t reply.
The bus juddered and rattled.
“You’ll see,” I said.
* * *
But Goodbold was not in school that morning.
After we trudged to the changing rooms to get ready for soccer, a different sports teacher, Mr. Dewhurst, arrived to take us down to the field. Under normal circumstances that would have been a good sign. Dewhurst ran a far tighter ship than Goodbold, and there would be less violence on the field as a result. But it might have been the first day since starting at Gritten that I’d have been glad to see Goodbold instead, and as we set out into the streets and I saw Charlie smiling to himself, the unease I’d felt since waking up that morning intensified.
Something had happened.
I’m worried about what we’ve done, Paul.
By lunchtime, the nerves were humming inside me. James and I walked down to room C5b, our footsteps echoing in the empty stairwell, and it was clear that whatever had been weighing on James first thing that morning had become heavier over the last few hours. As he pushed open the door, I felt an urge to reassure him again. To tell him not to worry. That everything was going to be all right.
Except I couldn’t find the words.
Charlie and Billy were in their usual seats, but the rest of the room seemed darker today. It took me a second to realize why. The lights closest to the door had been turned off, which left the two of them illuminated at the back, drawing you toward them from out of the shadows. Was that by design? I thought it probably was. Charlie stage-managed everything so carefully.
As James and I made our way between the seats, I decided I wasn’t prepared to be manipulated by him any longer. We weren’t alone in the woods right now, miles from anyone; there was no danger here. So I allowed a little of the anger I’d suppressed yesterday to surface now. Wherever this experiment was heading, I decided it had to stop.
“So,” I said. “What the fuck is going on?”
“Sit down.”
I ignored Charlie—but of course James did as he was told. His hands were trembling as he took his dream diary out of his bag.