out at him occasionally from behind thick glasses. They were kind enough, in a remote sort of way, but they weren’t really tuned in to his world at all, and Oliver was lonely.
As he walked past Number Five he stopped to look at a black Porsche parked outside. It belonged to a young couple who had moved in last week. He smiled to himself. A car like that would mean parties, and doors banging in the middle of the night – another thing for his mother to complain about. He was just bending down to have a look through the window when a sudden noise at the end of the street jerked him upright again. It was a man’s voice, shouting hysterically, then other voices and someone yelling “Hang on mate, for Gawd’s sake, wait can’t you!” Then, round the corner and running along past the graveyard, came somebody he knew quite well. Ted Hoskins, who worked on the demolition site.
Ted was over six feet tall, and beefy, and he wore very heavy boots, but he came tearing down past Oliver like a bat out of hell. His eyeballs were rolled up, right back into his head, horribly, like something dead, and there was an awful noise coming out of his mouth, half a groan, half a scream.
“Ted?” Oliver shouted, stepping into the street as two men from the site pelted past him, then “Ted!” He was always nice to Oliver, and he sometimes gave him things they found on the site. But now it was as if he’d gone both blind and deaf. He ran on, struggling to shake off the arms that clutched at him as the two younger men caught up, only stopping when he was brought down to his knees by a flying rugby tackle.
As Ted collapsed, and the two workmen bent over him, three more came hurtling along the pavement. Oliver crouched behind the Porsche, listening hard. He could hear the noise Ted was making quite clearly, and it chilled him. It was a moaning, sobbing noise, more like the helpless crying of a child than the voice of a grown man. He crept out from the car, stole along the pavement, and peered through a jungle of blue-denimed legs at the man lying in the middle of the road.
Ted Hoskins looked dead. His eyes were still open and staring, and his mouth had flopped open too, but the noises had stopped now and it was uncannily quiet. All Oliver could hear were the gulls mewing over the muddy river and, somewhere in the City, a muffled bell was ringing.
“Give him air,” someone shouted. “The man needs air. Don’t crowd him.” Oliver recognized the voice at once. It was Rick, the bad-tempered foreman. He’d told him off several times for hanging round the site. “I’m getting the boss,” he said. “Throw a coat over him, somebody, and leave him where he is. We need a doctor for this. I’ll go and phone.”
As he turned round he almost fell over Oliver who was crowding round with the others, unable to take his eyes from Ted’s face. “Clear off, can’t you!” Rick yelled. “Can’t you see the poor bloke’s ill? Make yourself scarce, and quick, or you’ll be in trouble. Now get!”
Oliver stood upright, and opened his mouth, but no words came out. He wanted to say he could help, that his mother was a trained nurse and that Rick could use their phone, but he couldn’t speak. It was Ted’s face. The look in those awful, rolled-up eyes had struck terror into him. Whatever had frightened the big kindly workman, down at the site, had stretched out a hand and was touching him too. Not just touching either, but plunging right down, down to the dark buried deep inside him, to the place where his worst fears were.
Everyone at school knew that Oliver Wright was a bit of a weirdo, always borrowing other people’s horror comics and taking them home to read in secret, always taking the creepiest books out of the library; and he’d never denied that he liked grisly things. What he felt now though was of a different order from all that. As he stared into Ted’s face, he found himself remembering the worst moments of his life.
He remembered the day one of his mother’s old ladies had died in her bedsitter, and how he’d seen the shiny coffin being carried down the stairs. He’d been told to stay in the flat that morning but he’d peeped, through the banisters, and he’d thought he’d heard the body, rolling about inside. Then he saw the damp cellar under the house, mouldy and reeking, where he was sometimes sent to look for jam jars, and he remembered the terrible day when his father had switched the light off, not knowing he was there, and how he’d been left all alone in the pitch dark, crawling about and unable to find the steps.
The look on Ted’s face was about the darkness. As he stared at him, Oliver felt he’d been snatched away from the dull familiar street, with the rain falling and the knot of men still huddled in the road, plucked out of the dreary present and swept back, to the secret horrors and fears he struggled with at night, when the rest of the house slept. A deep silence enveloped him now, broken only by the curious, muffled tolling of that single bell. The very sound lapped him in darkness, and Oliver felt suffocated. Whatever had sent Ted Hoskins screaming down the street was here too, inside him. It was like a physical weight, dragging him down. “Did you hear me?” Rick was saying, and he shook him hard. “Do you want this boot in your backside?” But Oliver was already running, running away from the blackness, down the dingy street, not stopping till he was safe on his own doorstep, with the thin, cold rain dripping down his neck.
He woke next morning to the sound of water drumming on the roof. He got out of bed and lifted up a corner of one curtain; the sky was the colour of pea soup. There’d been thunder in the night, followed by rain, the kind that set in with a vengeance then fell steadily, hour after hour. The demolition site would certainly be deserted this morning but it would also be a sea of mud. His mother might ask awkward questions if she saw him sliding off down the street, so he decided to postpone his visit to the site for a bit. It had been a bad night, full of horrible dreams about cellars and coffins. He didn’t really feel up to tackling his mother.
On his way down to the kitchen, two floors below, he stopped on the narrow half-landing and looked through a front window. The sky looked several shades darker now, and it was still pouring down, but someone was out there, standing quite still on the opposite pavement, staring up at Number Nine.
Oliver pressed his nose to the glass and stared back. All the houses in Thames Terrace had tiny front gardens where nothing much grew, but theirs was special. Right in the middle was a massive oak tree, so wide that the front railings actually bulged out, over the pavement. It was supposed to be nearly four hundred years old, an “historic tree”, according to Oliver’s father, and there was a little bronze plaque on the trunk, telling you all about it.
Perhaps the person in the road was a tree expert. Oliver couldn’t think of anything else interesting about their house. He stayed at the window, his pale cheeks flattened against the cold glass, and watched the figure move a few steps along the pavement. He could see it properly now.
It was an old man, very tall and spindly, with a lot of white hair blowing out from under a large black hat. He wore a very long black coat, black trousers and black shoes, and he was carrying a stick.
A funny cold feeling began to creep down Oliver’s spine, and his dark dreams of the previous night started coming back again. This old man didn’t belong to Thames Terrace at all; perhaps he was a ghost.
He shut his eyes tight and counted slowly to ten. When he opened them the tall black figure would have disappeared, flitted back to the world of make-believe, where it belonged. But when Oliver looked again the man was still there, pacing up and down the pavement, still looking up at the house, then down towards the little graveyard where the old people sometimes sat out on green benches.
Oliver watched him. Looking carefully both ways, and leaning on his stick, the gangly black figure crossed the road cautiously and disappeared into a green fuzz of leaves and branches. Seconds later there was a loud banging at the
