Scared to Death--Ten Sinister Stories by the Master of the Macabre Page 15

  “So what will happen to him?” Arthur Reed asked. He could see the way this was going and there was a certain dread in his voice.

  “Well, in normal circumstances, Craig would have to go into an orphanage,” the solicitor replied. “But you are his uncle and his aunt. So we wondered if you might be interested in taking him in.”

  There was a long silence. Both the Reeds were thinking of many things, but mainly they were thinking of each other. They had lived together for a very long time and they had become used to being alone.

  “Do you have a picture of Craig?” Elizabeth asked at length.

  “As a matter of fact I do,” Mr Norris replied. He opened his briefcase and took out a colour photograph about the size of a postcard. It showed a dark-haired boy in school uniform with a round face. He was rather plump and he had a crooked tie. Craig Carter wasn’t smiling. In fact he wasn’t even looking at the camera. Something appeared to have caught his attention at the edge of the frame and he seemed almost annoyed to be having his photograph taken.

  “I won’t pretend that Craig is an easy boy,” Mr Norris said. “He hasn’t done very well at school and his reports don’t make entirely pleasant reading. But that said, he is only a boy. He has lost his mother in the most terrible circumstances and I feel certain that a complete change of scene is exactly what he needs. I’m sure you’d agree that anything would be better than an orphanage. On the other hand, the decision is entirely yours. You’ve obviously never met him and he doesn’t know you exist. Everybody would understand if you chose to walk away.”

  But the truth was that Elizabeth and Arthur already knew what they had to do. How could they possibly walk away? It didn’t matter that they knew nothing about this boy. He was family. He needed their help. There was really nothing more to be said.

  That evening they discussed the entire business over a supper of cheese on toast and hot chocolate, which Elizabeth Reed carried in on a tray. Arthur noticed that she sat down a little more heavily than usual, resting her walking-stick against her chair. He could see that she was unhappy and guessed what she was going to say.

  “Arthur,” she said. “You and I have been together for many years and we never had children of our own. I suppose we didn’t really want any. We were happy the way things were. And now, suddenly, this boy – this teenager – is being offered to us. If you don’t want to take him in, I’ll quite understand…”

  “Of course we must take him in, old girl,” Arthur replied. He had called her “old girl” even when Elizabeth had been young. “Flesh and blood and all that.”

  Elizabeth sighed. “He may not find it easy to adapt to our way of life,” she said. “We’re very quiet down here. This house is very small. You’re too old to kick a football round and I’m too tired. He’ll probably think we’re a couple of old fossils.”

  “Still better than an orphanage,” Arthur said. “And Instow is a lovely place. Maybe he’ll enjoy it. Make friends. A new start.”

  “Poor Janice.” Elizabeth shook her head. “What a terrible thing.”

  She telephoned Mr Norris the next day, and a week later the postman brought a stack of documents which they had to sign and return to the council offices. The next three weeks were spent preparing the house. Fortunately there was a spare bedroom on the second floor, and Arthur Reed got a local man in to redecorate. He had no real idea what a teenager would like, but guessed that it wouldn’t be floral wallpaper and antique furniture. The room was painted white. A high bunk bed was brought in with a desk underneath. The curtains were replaced by blinds. At the end of it, the room looked very modern and new.

  Craig Carter arrived a week later with a scowling social worker who introduced herself as Ms Naseby. Apparently, she hadn’t enjoyed the train journey down from Manchester and needed two Anadin tablets with her cup of tea. Craig himself sat there with a blank expression on his face. Elizabeth and Arthur didn’t have a chance to say anything to each other but their first impressions were not entirely favourable. It seemed unfair to judge the new arrival too quickly and yet…

  Craig wasn’t fat, exactly, but he was certainly out of shape. It was obvious that he had never taken much exercise and had eaten all the wrong food. He had poor skin and his hair, unbrushed, looked dull and limp. There was a triangular scar under one of his eyes and Ms Naseby explained that one of the other boys at his school had hit him with a brick. Craig shrugged when he heard this but didn’t speak. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, both of which needed either washing or (Elizabeth thought) burning as they were dirty and full of holes. He didn’t seem to have much interest in his new home or the people in it. His eyes, a muddy shade of brown, were utterly lifeless.

  Ms Naseby was in a hurry to get back home. She gave the Reeds two telephone numbers – her own mobile and a general helpline – and left as soon as she could. She had come by taxi from the station and had asked the driver to wait outside. She ate two sandwiches, drank half a cup of tea and left – without, the Reeds noticed, saying goodbye to Craig.

  The Reeds may have been old and old-fashioned, but they were not stupid people. They hadn’t expected things to be easy, nor had they fooled themselves that Craig would accept them as his new foster parents just like that. But they were both pleasantly surprised by the way things went in the following weeks. Craig appeared to like his new room with its view over the sand dunes. He had never actually been to the seaside before and soon his room was full of shells and oddly shaped pieces of shingle that he had found on the beach. He was introduced to a new school in nearby Barnstaple, and although the teachers reported that he was way behind with his studies, they had every expectation that he would catch up. He enjoyed Elizabeth’s cooking – she had, after all, spent years working in a bakery – and to begin with he even helped wash up.

  Arthur Reed watched the new arrival warily. In fact, for the first time in their marriage there was a certain tension between him and Elizabeth. But it was a tension they both shared, a bit like sailors sensing a coming storm. The sun might still be shining, but they both knew that what had begun as a pleasant cruise might, at any time, become a howling nightmare with both of them forced to abandon ship.

  Things went wrong one step at a time. It was as if Craig had been testing the ground, checking out the opposition before he showed himself in his true colours. And once he had the measure of the Reeds, the school, the neighbourhood … then it could begin.

  He stopped making his bed. That was the first thing. Elizabeth had asked him to make his bed because she had a bad back and found it difficult to lift the mattress. But after two weeks, each day the bed remained unmade, the sheets crumpled, the pillows on the floor. Indeed, the whole room became increasingly untidy, with a strange, sour smell and clothes everywhere. Soon it no longer seemed to belong to the rest of the house.

  Arthur and Elizabeth said nothing. After all, Craig was a teenager and all teenage bedrooms are a mess. Arthur had borrowed a copy of Proper Parenting from the library and the author advised him not to make an issue of it. “Young people need their own space,” the book explained. “If they wish to live in conditions close to squalor, then they must be allowed to make that choice.”

  Then it was a question of food. Meals became increasingly difficult, as there were all sorts of things that Craig suddenly refused to eat – mainly vegetables and fruit. Elizabeth had thought he liked her home cooking, but at dinner-time he would push his plate away and slouch with his elbows on the table and a sullen look on his face. As a result, he began to lose weight. He didn’t get thin. He just looked sick and lopsided. Once again, Arthur sought advice in Proper Parenting. “Many teenagers shy away from fresh food,” it explained. “And the more you try to force it on them, the more they will resist. In extreme cases, it may be necessary to seek medical advice.”

  But this wasn’t needed in Craig’s case because quite soon he began putting on weight again. Even a place like Barnstaple had fast-food outlets and he had taken to visiting them after
school, filling himself up on fish and chips, kebabs, burgers and take-away Chinese. The house was soon strewn with wrappers from chocolate biscuits, crisps and ice-creams.

  And how had he got the money to pay for them? That was another worry. Arthur had given Craig a small allowance from the day he had arrived, but one Friday afternoon, he and Elizabeth were shocked to get a telephone call from the head teacher at St Edmund’s in Barnstaple. It seemed that Craig had been bullying several of the smaller children, forcing them to give him their loose change or, even worse, to steal money from their parents and bring it to him at school.

  That weekend, Arthur and Elizabeth sat Craig down in the living room and talked to him seriously about their life in Instow and how they had hoped he would make the effort to fit in. It was a mistake. For that was the weekend that war was declared.

  “I know life hasn’t been easy for you,” Arthur was saying. “But your aunt and I were really hoping that this would be a new start…”

  “I hate it here!” Craig cut in, and the awful emphasis that he put on the word “hate”, the way he almost spat it out, shattered any remaining illusions the elderly couple might have had. “This is a poxy little house in a poxy little place and I wish I was back in Manchester.”

  “But if you were in Manchester, you’d be in an orphanage,” Elizabeth faltered.

  “At least I wouldn’t be living with two wrinklies. There’s nobody here my age. There’s nobody to hang out or have fun with.”

  This wasn’t actually true. There were plenty of teenagers in Instow, which, apart from anything else, had a fine sailing club. But by now they had decided to give Craig a wide berth.

  “I’m doing the best I can,” Elizabeth said.

  “I don’t like you,” Craig replied. “And you smell.”

  “I really don’t think you should talk to your aunt like that,” Arthur muttered. Two pinpricks of deep red had appeared on his cheeks.

  “I’ll talk to her any way I like. What are you going to do about it?”

  What Arthur Reed did was call Ms Naseby that same afternoon. And again the following Monday. In fact, he called her, and her helpline, several times before his call was finally answered. He was then passed from department to department, from social worker to social worker, but it seemed the bottom line was this: he and his wife had agreed to take Craig. It had been made perfectly clear to them that the child might take a while to adapt. But so far he hadn’t set fire to the house or committed any serious criminal act. So like it or not, they were stuck with him. The council had taken Craig off their books and they didn’t want him back.

  Arthur and Elizabeth had been happily married for more than thirty years. But now, for the first time, they found themselves torn apart.

  Elizabeth felt dreadfully guilty. It was she who had opened their door to Craig Carter. She was the one who was related to him. And so all this worry and unhappiness had to be her fault. When Craig was arrested and cautioned for shoplifting, she blamed herself. When he was faced with expulsion from St Edmund’s for threatening a teacher, she actually fell ill. She hadn’t been exactly young when Craig arrived, but soon she was looking positively old. One night she slipped on a trainer that Craig had left on the stairs, fell down and fractured her hip. The neighbours wondered whether she would even survive.

  Meanwhile, Arthur Reed retreated into himself. Once or twice he tried to have it out with his adopted nephew, but Craig simply sneered at him and walked out of the room without speaking. Arthur had noticed that a great many of his personal possessions had begun to vanish. In particular there was a handsome pair of silver cufflinks that Elizabeth had bought him for his fortieth birthday. One day, walking in Barnstaple, he noticed them in the window of a second-hand jewellery shop. A few days before, Craig had bought himself a new leather jacket. It didn’t take very much to put two and two together. But there was nothing very much Arthur could do. A week later, thirty pounds disappeared from his wallet. Then his wallet went too. By this time, Craig had taken up smoking and the smell of burning tobacco wafted down from his bedroom, filling the entire house.

  Not many people came to visit Arthur and Elizabeth any more. Once, they had been surrounded by friends, often giving lunches and tea parties. But more recently there had been several incidents. The sandwiches that had been found to contain a whole bottle of diarrhea tablets. The dog poo in the pockets of coats left hanging in the hall. The nails resting against the front tyres of cars parked outside. The lady who had brought her pet poodle and had gone into the kitchen only to find it shaved bald.

  What were the Reeds to do?

  They couldn’t get rid of Craig. The authorities didn’t want to know. Nor could they reason with him, for any attempt at discussion now ended with a barrage of foul language. Elizabeth was back from hospital but her limp was worse than ever and Arthur could only sit in pained silence, angry with himself, angry that he had so little control over his own life.

  So they tried a new tactic. They couldn’t fight with Craig, but perhaps they could win him over. If they tried to understand him, if they gave him what he wanted, he might even now turn a corner and accept his place as part of their family.

  For his fourteenth birthday, they bought him designer jeans, a skateboard, an iPhone and two new computer games. In fact they gave him everything he had asked for, and for just a couple of days he seemed genuinely happy. But that all ended when Elizabeth made the mistake of serving cauliflower cheese for dinner. Craig hated cauliflower cheese, and by the end of the evening he was back to the scowling, swearing, bullying hulk they had so unfortunately inherited.

  The next day was a Sunday. As usual, Arthur and Elizabeth went to church and then, because the weather was nice, for a walk along the beach. Returning home, as they approached the house they were surprised to see Craig sitting on a sand dune. His fingers were very stained and they could smell the smoke on his breath, so they guessed that he must have just stubbed out a cigarette. Even so, it was rare to find him out in the fresh air.

  “Is everything all right?” Elizabeth asked. Whenever she spoke to Craig, she flinched, wondering what the answer would be.

  “I want one of those,” Craig replied.

  Elizabeth turned and saw what he was looking at. Out on the sand was a man in his early twenties, with a power kite. The kite itself was huge, a brightly coloured, curving strip of silk or nylon, like a parachute cut in half, connected to two handles by a series of cables. It wasn’t just the man flying the kite. The kite was flying him. He was running across the beach and leaping into the air, rising ten or twenty metres above the sand like a superhero. Elizabeth could see the muscles on his bare arms bulging as he fought to keep the kite under control. One moment he would be on the sand, the next his legs would be pedalling high above. When he came back down, he had to dig his heels in to stop himself being pulled away. He was fighting with the wind. His hair was streaming around him. He reminded Elizabeth of a cowboy trying to bring a rearing horse under control.

  “It looks fun,” Craig said.

  “It certainly looks exciting,” Elizabeth agreed. “But you’ve just had your birthday, Craig. And we got you everything you asked for.”

  “But I want a power kite,” Craig whined.

  “When I was a boy, ‘I want’ never got anything,” Arthur remarked.

  “When you were a boy, there were still dinosaurs,” Craig responded. He looked at Elizabeth and there was a gleam of menace in his eyes, and not for the first time Elizabeth thought about her sister’s death and began to understand perhaps why she had thrown herself off a bridge. “I want a kite,” Craig said. “And if you don’t get me one, you’ll be sorry.”

  Elizabeth ignored the threat. She had noticed in the local toyshop earlier that week that even a small power kite would cost over a hundred pounds. More to the point, she had no doubt that even if she went out and bought the wretched kite, Craig would fly it a couple of times and then lose interest. After all, he hadn’t even unwrapped the
skateboard they had given him, even though he had nagged them just as much to buy one.

  So she was very surprised when, lying next to her in bed that evening, Arthur disagreed with her.

  “I think, all in all, it’s a good idea,” he said.

  For a moment, Elizabeth didn’t reply. Arthur didn’t speak much these days. Since Craig had arrived, he seemed to have shrunk into himself to the extent that often she had no idea what he was thinking.

  “The boy wants a kite. Let’s get him one.”

  “But the money…” Elizabeth muttered.

  “It might be worth it. Get him out in the fresh air…”

  “It seems very wrong,” Elizabeth countered. “We bought him all those presents for his birthday and he didn’t so much as even thank us.”

  “We have to do the best we can for him,” Arthur said. “After all, we said we’d look after him. I’ll look into it tomorrow.”

  Elizabeth looked at her husband, lying in his pyjamas with his soft, blue-grey eyes and his white hair. There were hollows in his cheeks that she hadn’t noticed before, and she realized that it had been a long time since she had seen him smile. She thought he was wrong about the power kite, but decided not to argue. After all, power was what this was all about. Craig had been living with them for only nine months but he had usurped all the power in the house. He was the one in control. Somehow, Arthur had been knocked off his perch. Arguing with him now would only make him feel all the worse.

  Sadly, the decision to buy a kite only led to further argument. Craig had already found a website that sold boards, kites and all sorts of accessories. It was as if he had known that Arthur and Elizabeth would cave in. But, as they soon discovered, power kites came in many shapes and sizes with prices that rose steeply to many hundreds of pounds. Craig had settled on a range called Laserblade. But the question was whether to go for the Laserblade 1.8 (“an ideal moderate-to-strong-wind buggy kite, perfect for those new to the sport”) or the Laserblade 6.0 (“awesome power and brilliant rate of turn … for experienced kite flyers only”).