window was faint. Add a few reflections of objects inside, plus your own trouser-filling fear, and bingo, one terrifying apparition.”
“Whoever snatched the dog away wasn’t drunk,” I said.
“OK, maybe someone’s just a vicious bastard, and gave the dog a kicking when it chewed up a pair of slippers. Either way, Emma’s mum might want to hush it up, right?”
“I dunno,” I muttered. “You weren’t there. You didn’t hear that scream.”
Liam did an exaggerated flop on to the nearest desk. “Saaaam. Look, you said yourself you were scared, right? What if half of what you saw, or heard, didn’t actually happen as you think it did? Like when they say eye witnesses at a violent crime scene all give different accounts of what they saw.Stress causes people to remember stuff in totally different ways. I bet if we went and asked the kids who saw that dead body in the park to describe it in detail today, you’d end up with a dozen different descriptions, not one of them matching another. Bet you.”
I thought about it. “Yes, I suppose that’s true,” I said. I thought about it some more. “But surely I’m not so stressed I’d misremember a scream or that face?”
Liam threw his arms wide. “Moving house, new school, tum-de-tum! Doctor Liam will see you now! Sam is a psycho-criminal maaaadman, it’s official!” He boggled his eyes and lolled out his tongue.
Is Liam right?
I thought. Were there other, simpler possibilities? Could I have just heard the howl of a fox, for example? Or a night-time yell from the Daltons’ toddler? The squeals a toddler makes can be ear-splitting. Could the sound have morphed, in my sleep-filled mind, into a piercing scream? If so, then was what I saw at the Priory even connected to the sound? Was it simply a coincidence? Had I merely been in the right place at the right time to witness the kind of nasty but commonplace scenarioLiam was talking about? And couldn’t my own fear have changed an ordinary face, looking out into the night – or an illusion of shadows and lines – into something sinister and frightening?
Liam’s off-the-cuff explanation seemed perfectly plausible. Something had happened to the dog. The scream was either the dog, or someone’s reaction to it. Emma’s mum didn’t want to admit to the truth. The face, if there’d been a face at all, was someone woken by the disturbance.
At the end of all this tortuous theorizing, I was still left with the same uncomfortable suspicion. No matter what the correct explanation of what had happened the previous night, it seemed to be the case that Emma Greenhill lived in a house where there was at least one unpleasant secret. And where there was one unpleasant secret, there would almost certainly be others.
At that moment, Miss Marlo came bustling in. Then it was registration, and then it was geography, and then it was English, and then it was break.
I met up with Liam again. He was sitting on the low wall outside the science block. It was a general meeting spot, with kids from various year groupssquashed together all the way along the length of the wall, the older ones dominating the sunny spots.
Jo was with him, nibbling at one of those oatmeal bars that taste of cardboard. She announced, blushing, that she’d uploaded her latest comic book art to the blog she kept. We took a quick look on my phone: it was the third chapter of a detective story called
Bullet-train
.
It was pretty good. The artwork was quite sparse, but it didn’t have that uncertain look about it, that slight distortion that shouts out that it’s been done by a kid.
“The story’s just basic,” she said. “It’s only meant as a showcase for the pictures, really.”
“Well, it’s very impressive,” I said, and meant it.
“Don’t you have a blog yourself?” said Jo. “If you’re an aspiring journalist?”
The true answer to that question was that I’d started one many months before. I’d been too hesitant and too
“Whoever snatched the dog away wasn’t drunk,” I said.
“OK, maybe someone’s just a vicious bastard, and gave the dog a kicking when it chewed up a pair of slippers. Either way, Emma’s mum might want to hush it up, right?”
“I dunno,” I muttered. “You weren’t there. You didn’t hear that scream.”
Liam did an exaggerated flop on to the nearest desk. “Saaaam. Look, you said yourself you were scared, right? What if half of what you saw, or heard, didn’t actually happen as you think it did? Like when they say eye witnesses at a violent crime scene all give different accounts of what they saw.Stress causes people to remember stuff in totally different ways. I bet if we went and asked the kids who saw that dead body in the park to describe it in detail today, you’d end up with a dozen different descriptions, not one of them matching another. Bet you.”
I thought about it. “Yes, I suppose that’s true,” I said. I thought about it some more. “But surely I’m not so stressed I’d misremember a scream or that face?”
Liam threw his arms wide. “Moving house, new school, tum-de-tum! Doctor Liam will see you now! Sam is a psycho-criminal maaaadman, it’s official!” He boggled his eyes and lolled out his tongue.
Is Liam right?
I thought. Were there other, simpler possibilities? Could I have just heard the howl of a fox, for example? Or a night-time yell from the Daltons’ toddler? The squeals a toddler makes can be ear-splitting. Could the sound have morphed, in my sleep-filled mind, into a piercing scream? If so, then was what I saw at the Priory even connected to the sound? Was it simply a coincidence? Had I merely been in the right place at the right time to witness the kind of nasty but commonplace scenarioLiam was talking about? And couldn’t my own fear have changed an ordinary face, looking out into the night – or an illusion of shadows and lines – into something sinister and frightening?
Liam’s off-the-cuff explanation seemed perfectly plausible. Something had happened to the dog. The scream was either the dog, or someone’s reaction to it. Emma’s mum didn’t want to admit to the truth. The face, if there’d been a face at all, was someone woken by the disturbance.
At the end of all this tortuous theorizing, I was still left with the same uncomfortable suspicion. No matter what the correct explanation of what had happened the previous night, it seemed to be the case that Emma Greenhill lived in a house where there was at least one unpleasant secret. And where there was one unpleasant secret, there would almost certainly be others.
At that moment, Miss Marlo came bustling in. Then it was registration, and then it was geography, and then it was English, and then it was break.
I met up with Liam again. He was sitting on the low wall outside the science block. It was a general meeting spot, with kids from various year groupssquashed together all the way along the length of the wall, the older ones dominating the sunny spots.
Jo was with him, nibbling at one of those oatmeal bars that taste of cardboard. She announced, blushing, that she’d uploaded her latest comic book art to the blog she kept. We took a quick look on my phone: it was the third chapter of a detective story called
Bullet-train
.
It was pretty good. The artwork was quite sparse, but it didn’t have that uncertain look about it, that slight distortion that shouts out that it’s been done by a kid.
“The story’s just basic,” she said. “It’s only meant as a showcase for the pictures, really.”
“Well, it’s very impressive,” I said, and meant it.
“Don’t you have a blog yourself?” said Jo. “If you’re an aspiring journalist?”
The true answer to that question was that I’d started one many months before. I’d been too hesitant and too
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