When I drove back to Gritten Wood later, I didn’t go straight to my mother’s house.
As I turned off the main road, I could see the wall of the Shadows in the distance: a black and solid presence at the base of the sky. Soon it would be night, and I felt nervous about sleeping in my old room after everything that had happened today. With everything I’d learned churning in my head. With the house ticking and creaking around me, and the trees at the end of the yard full of darkness and ghosts.
Of course, there were ghosts everywhere here.
I parked in front of a different property and stared out of the car window. The yard was enormously overgrown, with brambles arching over the lawn like rolls of barbed wire. The undergrowth closest to the house rose high enough to reach the dirty black glass of the ground-floor windows. The place was little more than a shell. I had the sense that the woods behind had spread their fingers down the backyard and were slowly clenching their fist, reclaiming the building for the wilds.
James’s old house.
I had a dim memory of my mother telling me Carl and Eileen had moved away years ago. Perhaps they had tried to sell this place beforehand, but who was going to buy a home in Gritten Wood? The town was slowly dying, the houses like lights going off one by one, the old bulbs never replaced. The building beside me now had clearly been abandoned for years, and the heart had gone out of it long before.
Billy is dead, I thought.
The words signified something clear, but still didn’t seem to map onto the world in a way that I could grasp. It seemed like it should be important to me—that I should be feeling something. Perhaps I should be glad. Pleased that, after what he did, the bastard had finally gotten what he deserved. That would be the natural reaction to have, wouldn’t it? But every time I searched inside myself for a reaction to the news, I couldn’t find it.
The truth was that, in every way that mattered, Billy had been dead to me for twenty-five years. He was just an old photograph I had long since stopped looking at. Back then I would have been happy to kill him myself for what he’d done, but the time since had tempered that. Looking back, I could see that Billy had always been easily manipulated. He’d had a difficult childhood, and I could only imagine his adult life had been hard too. The only emotion his death raised in me now was an odd kind of sadness. A sense of how many lives had been ruined by what happened here, and what a waste it had all been.
And now another boy had been killed.
Charlie’s dead.
That was what I’d said to Amanda, but the words had come out of instinct. It was what I’d told myself over the years, because I had to. I looked past the house now, toward the woods. The most likely explanation for Charlie’s disappearance remained that he was out there in the Shadows somewhere—that after what he and Billy did, he’d woken up and wandered off, and that his bones were moldering away somewhere deep between the trees, pulled apart by tangles of grass and lost in the undergrowth.
And yet my skin was crawling.
As the evening darkened around me, I thought about knocks in the night, and figures in the woods, and what my mother had said about seeing Charlie flickering in the trees.
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.