5

August 1. 9am......

"Here come the teardrops," Phil Corcoran sneered and Campbell Galt and Pony McGill sniggered. "Snivel, sniffle and bawl." He winked at his two pals then turned back to his young brother. "And who said you could take my tent anyway?"

"Your tent?" Corky retorted. "You stole it from the scouts."

Phil had been sitting on the gate at the end of the road where the tarmac petered out when it met the hawthorn barrier of the farm track. In a couple of years all of the hedge would be gone and the road would continue in a wide arc past the cemetery and down to the main road and the greenery would be replaced by nearly three hundred council houses. It was all a time of change.

Phil stopped working the blade of his knife into the top gate spar where he'd been carving his initials. "Are you calling me a thief? Eh? You little shit that you are."

Being called a thief was a sore point with Phil. Old man Corcoran was banging the Drum, as they said hereabouts, banged up for six months up in Drumbain Jail. He was just half-way through his time for hoisting three hundred in used notes from the pigeon club's cashbox, which had been set aside for taking of all of the club's best birds to a race from Cherbourg in France. Everybody wondered why Paddy Corcoran had ever been voted in as club treasurer. Everybody knew that he hadn't done a day's work since before the war and hadn't had a drink-free day since it ended, even if he was good with the homing birds. Of his three sons, Phil would see the inside of Drumbain in four years time after several visits to approved school in his later teens for a rampage with a broken bottle along River Street in a drunken frenzy. Pat Junior was already in an army jail for head-butting a colour-sergeant to his severe injury. Both were cast in the same mould, and it looked to everyone like an odds-on certainty that John, the youngest of them (Corky to his friends) would be unable to avoid the consequences of his natural inheritance. He'd no doubt end up banging the Drum too.

"Are you calling me a thief?" Phil wanted to know, and he wanted to know now. They'd called his old man a thief and put him inside over what had to have been a misunderstanding, and according to Phil that was a slur against the whole clan. He came down off the gate and as he did so, his left hand casually hauled at the black lock-knife he had been digging into the wood. Behind Corky, Billy and Doug saw the glint of metal.

"Let's get out of here," Doug muttered. He took a couple of steps backwards, pulling at the tent slung between himself and Corky. Billy agreed.

"Yeah. Let's skeedaddle." Corky turned slightly and they could see the freckles standing out like sepia ink-blots on his cheeks. Billy took up the weight of the old green tent.

"Are you? Huh? Calling me a thief?" Phil came strolling forward, all langorous and slow, arrogance on two feet. He had the same colour of hair as his young brother, the same cow's lick all the Corcorans had, but where Corky was stocky and looked small for his age, Phil was tall and thin as a stick. He threw the knife, spinning it with studied casualness to catch it by the handle again.

"Just saying it isn't yours." Corky said. "Everybody knows that."

"Just put it back where you found it. Right this minute."

"No chance. We're going with the scouts."

"Over my dead body," Phil said slowly. He put both hands on his hips.

"Suits me," Corky said. Campbell Galt snorted, dribbling beer-foam down his chin. Pony snickered like his namesake. Corky turned to the two of them, and while he was pretty sturdy for his size, he was completely dwarfed by his brother's friends.

"What are you laughing at plook-face," Corky snapped. The sunny day went suddenly quiet.

"Oh shit," Billy muttered. He and Doug were edging away and were half-way through the narrow gap in the hedge where the old blasted oak had come down. A blackbird chirped and clucked its liquid panic as they startled it among the nettles. A wasp flew right up against Doug's ear and he almost dropped the tent while batting it away. Corky stood there and Pony McGill's ravaged face looked as if it would erupt from within in to even greater devastation..

Pony was taller even than Campbell Galt, who himself would end up nearly six foot and he had shoulders that could have shored up a house. He was strong as an ox and would have been a good-looking big man but for the havoc his teenage acne had wreaked upon his face. His skin was angry and livid, rough as pebble-dash.

Face full of plooks and a head full of broken bottles. That was how Danny Gillan had described him after he'd kicked their football down into the stream where it had burst among the thorns. Corky had convulsed into manic laughter while thinking that Danny must have some kind of death-wish. That remark had almost cost Danny an arm after Pony had swing his big toe-tector boot again and clipped the smaller boy on the elbow so hard it had gone numb for the day. The phrase had come back to Corky just them and it had slipped out.

"Plook-face?" An instant surge of blood suffused the big broad face, reddening in the clear spots but purpling among the acne scars. Very deliberately, he put down the beercan onto the flat top of the gatepost. "What the fuck did you call me?"

"Come on Doug," Billy said, dragging the tent through the thorns and onto the farm track while they were out of the immediate focus. "Let's go." Doug didn't need a second telling. The pair of them scooted up the path.

Pony came lunging forward just as Tom and Danny came out from the lee of the end house in the gap where the fence had broken. Tom saw Corky, but the other big lads were hidden by the hawthorn hedge.

"Hey Corks," Tom called. "Did you forget the tent?"

Corky turned, taken by surprise and a big meaty hand came whooping out from the side in a wide arc. Corky must have caught the motion out of the side of his eye and ducked quickly, not quite fast enough to escape, but sharp enough to diminish most of the force of the swipe. His head was moving back and down, so instead of catching the knuckles on his temple, a blow which would have felled him like a bullock in the slaughterhouse, or at least knocked him arse over tit right into the sharp thorns of the hedge, he went with it. Pony McGill caught him by the underside of his big hand and sent him reeling backwards.

"What's happening...?" Tom started. Corky went stumbling back, whirling as he went, trying to catch his balance. It was then that Danny saw Pony McGill and Corky's big brother, along with Campbell Galt.

"Hey, leave him alone," Danny bawled before he had a chance to get a rein on his tongue. He'd had run-ins with all of them before - in fact there was no-one in the nearest five streets who hadn't - but the words just blurted when he saw Corky staggering back..

Phil Corcoran spun around. He was walking away from the fence and the two boys saw the sunlight spangle on the blade of the knife in his hand.

"Oops," Tom said, and then, quite unaccountably, especially for Tom, he giggled.

"Another couple of teardrops," Phil said. "We've got the complete crying match here."

"Bastard," Pony grunted. He'd expected his haymaker to connect squarely with Phil's cheeky shit of a brother and the force of it had almost thrown him off balance. He spun, moving much slower than the smaller boy. The two others had turned to face the new arrivals.

"They will insist on butting in," Phil went on, shaking his head with exaggerated regret.

"Leave him alone," Danny blurted again. Corky ducked another hooking punch, quite easily this time and as he did so, he snatched up a dried piece of hawthorn root from the demolished hedge which still had a hard sod of earth around it. He swung it against Pony's shin and the big fellow let out another grunt.

"Want to join the party?" Phil asked, smiling that creepy grin of his that made him look somehow like a weasel. He held up the knife and turned it slowly in his hand, the way knife fighters did in films, making sure it caught the light. As he did so he let out a beery belch.

"What, play with you three stooges?" Danny's tongue was off and running again, like the day he'd made the remark about Pony's acne. "Tweedle dumb, tweedle dumber and Crater-mess with the pits."

Big Pony was spinning around on one leg, lifting his shin up to cradle it in both hands. Campbell Galt, another big fellow whose blonde hair was slicked back into what the younger boys called an old fashioned teddy-boy quiff, took his eye off the action and whipped round. Phil Corcoran's grin froze solid.

"Hells bells, Danny, " Tom said. "I don't think he liked that."

"What did you say?" Phil's voice was as icy as his grin. For an instant his eyes seemed to flicker as if a sudden charge of emotion had sizzled behind them, which it most probably had and in that instant Danny and Tom saw the little craziness that lived inside Phil Corcoran's head. "What the fuck did you call me?"

Both boys stopped still. Big Pony was still hopping about, unable to keep his balance. He backed into the five-bar gate at Aitkenbar farm track and slammed it against the post with a sound like a gunshot.

"Bastard," he grunted. "Just wait 'til I get you."

Corky danced away from him, swinging the heavy root, unconsciously imitating Pony's hopping jig. "You and which chorus line, you big Jessie," Corky jeered, his mouth even more of a runaway now than Danny Gillan's ever was. Pony roared like a bull. Phil Corcoran didn't even look, his eyes were fixed right on Danny Gillan.

"Stop horsing around," he said. "This fuck-mouth needs shutting up." He favoured Danny with a wider grin this time and his eyes gleamed. "Maybe we'll have to make sure he gives us less of his lip." Phil held the knife up again, and flicked it forward.

Danny didn't wait. He turned on his heel and ran, not before Tom who was one split second ahead of him. Corky jinked back , swung the root again but this time it snapped in his hand and the heavy club of root and dirt went spinning away. It caught Campbell Galt just under his ribs and pushed him forward, sending him crashing against Phil whose hand came slashing down even as he went spinning sideways and the knife went flashing through the air.

Danny and Tom were scooting up between an old wooden garden shed and the side of the hedge, with Tom leading by three clear yards. Danny reached the corner, stuck a hand out to whirl himself around a fence-post when the knife hit him right behind the ear.

Corky saw it all, virtually in slow motion. The knife heliographed the sunlight as it spun black and silver, black and silver, through the air. Then it hit.

It made a small bonk sound and bounced off into the bush.

"Jesus, Phil," Campbell bawled.

"Jesus, Danny," Corky yelled.

"Bastard," Pony grunted again.

A hot pain blossomed behind Danny's ear and a sound like a gong vibrated right through his head. For a second he thought he'd been hit by a half-brick, but then he realised it wasn't sore enough for that. He didn't miss a step as he whirled round the corner.

Corky watched his pals disappear from view. Then Pony's meaty hand clamped on his shoulder. Without thinking, Corky turned and bit the big man's finger, not hard enough to draw blood, but enough to make Pony think he had. The big fellow grunted again, let go. Corky didn't hang around. He ran for the gate, clambered up the bars and threw himself over into the lane.

Campbell Galt swore comprehensively at Phil and he swore unintelligibly and explosively at everything. It took him nearly half a minute to gather himself and set off running in thundering pursuit. Danny and Tom heard their approach and took off like rabbits. They got to the far end of the field where the bulldozers hadn't yet churned everything to mud and angled for the corner where the two thorn hedges met at right angles. Here, generations of youngsters had broken and worn a crawl-way through to the far pasture. Both boys, panting with the effort, unslung their haversacks as they ran. Tom slung his along the ground at root-level, followed it and Danny and his bag rolled in behind him. They came out of the other side, covered in dead leaves and spiked here and there by hawthorns, but otherwise unhurt. Behind Danny's ear, a hot glow of pain pulsed. He reached there, expecting to find blood, but there was none.

They ran down the hill and onto the farm track angling across to the gully. Ahead of them, Billy and Doug were lumbering along with the green tent between them. Over the far side of the bushes, curses exploded. Danny and Tom reached the cross-roads where two farm roads intersected. A figure came hurtling out towards them and they pulled up in dismay.

"Only me," Corky said breathlessly. He grinned widely. "I don't think they're too happy with us." He giggled and the other two couldn't help but laugh, despite the fact that Crazy Phil and his crew would come crashing after them in a matter of seconds.

"He's a flippin' nutcase," Danny managed to say. They were running hard up the hill and he was getting a stitch in his side.

"You're telling me. I got to live with him."

"What will he do when you get home?"

"Hell knows. You can come to the funeral. No flowers please. And no priests." Corky laughed again, almost sadly as if death was a distinct possibility, then he turned, grinning. "He's not too bright, so he might have forgotten by the time we get back."

The boys caught up with the other two and with hardly a fumble, Tom and Danny each grabbed an end of the tent. They breasted the low hill just as Phil and the others came hammering round the corner. The younger boys went over the brow and down the lee and then, without a word, when they reached the corner, out of sight of the others, they slung the tent and the rucksacks over the three-strand barbed wire fence into a field of yellowing corn. They crawled underneath the lowest strand, Corky still laughing almost hysterically, and then doubled back for about twenty yards. Here there was a line of saplings which framed the drainage ditch leading down to the Ladyburn Stream. They followed this for a hundred yards, came to the brook and followed it up to where they could shelter under the footbridge. For a while, the sounds of the chase had disappeared, but Phil or Pony had figured out that they must have gone into the cornfield and in a few minutes, the pursuit had trailed them along the line of the ditch.

Under the low bridge, there was a niche, hardly more than a foot wide, where some of the masonry had crumbled. They crawled through into the small service duct where the waterworks engineers had built the valves for the reservoir up on the hill. Billy dragged the tent through and they all sat in the darkness, trying to slow their breathing, listening for the others. This had been their place last summer since Corky and Tom had found the hole in the wall while fishing for trout in the stream.

Two minutes later, footsteps came thudding on the bridge. Danny put his ear to an arrow-slit vent in the wall. Above the sounds of running water, he could hear voices.

"Must be here someplace," Phil said, breathless and wheezing. "Little bastard called me a thief. And Gillan, I'm going to wring his scrawny neck."

"You nearly stuck him like a pig. Jeez Phil. If that knife had hit blade-first it would have pinned him. You could swing for that."

Overhead, the footsteps came louder then faded as the others crossed the bridge. Down in the dark, they heard Pony shout something and then came a pop and the sound of shattering glass. One of them had thrown a bottle into the stream.

"That's really great," Tom said. "Some kid's going to go paddling and get cut to pieces."

"They should be locked up," Doug said, he looked quickly across at Corky, whose face was just a pale oval in the dim light of the narrow vent. "Sorry Corks. I didn't mean anything..."

Corky shrugged. "You can't pick your family. I sure didn't. And anyway, everybody knows about the old man. Sometimes I wish he was still at home. At least Phil wouldn't be acting so big. He's really off his head."

He looked at Danny who was sitting beside the opposite arrow-slit. "Flamin' hell Dan, I thought that blade was going to nail you."

Danny rubbed the tender spot behind his ear. "I thought it had." The others looked from on me to the other, unaware of what had happened.

"Phil threw it at Danny. You should have heard the noise. Just like that xylophone in the school band. The Glockenspiel thing." Corky let out a low laugh that threatened to get louder. He clamped his hand over his mouth until it subsided. Outside the others had moved to the other side of the bridge and then come back, their footsteps echoing down to the dark hollow - doom doom doom - as they passed overhead. After a few moments they were gone.

"I tell you Danny boy. You shouldn't have run. Phil's been trying that knife thrower's trick all summer. Wants to be just like that knife-fighter in the Magnificent Seven. He says if he comes across ol' Twitchy Eyes he'll give it to him right in the eyeball. I've been watching him try to stick it in the old man's pigeon hut. Jeez-oh, I've never seen him hit the flamin hut yet, never mind stick it in."

He went off into another convulsion and it was a moment or two before he could speak again. "Must be your lucky day Danny. Must be your lucky year."

They all giggled at that, but the laughter stopped soon enough

It had not been a lucky year, not for any of them. It had not been a lucky year, not since the spring, since the day that Paulie Degman had gone down into the river and Neil Hopkirk had clambered in through the window on the old surgery at the back of the house on River Street. Corky had just touched upon it when talking about Phil's lack of expertise with the knife which had bounced off Danny's skull.

Twitchy Eyes.

There was a moment of silence, broken only by the hushed sound of running water from the Ladyburn Stream, running low and slow at the end of a dry summer.

Twitchy Eyes. The mad stranger who had slipped into town in the spring.

The silence ran on for a moment longer. Danny rubbed the hot spot behind his ear, feeling gingerly for the signs of swelling, but there was none. Billy leaned back against the wall, his face the dimmest of all in the shadows.

"They found her in the other bridge," Doug said after a while.

"No, the next one down from this," Tom contradicted. "It's got a bigger access tunnel. They think he was staying there a while, camping out."

"God a'mighty. We had a ganghut there last year before we found this place," Billy said. "Imagine we'd come crawling in there and found him."

"As long as we had Phil with us he could have used his knife," Corky said, trying to lighten it a little. "Then we'd all have been up shit creek without a paddle." They all had a laugh, though a subdued one.

It had only been a matter of luck.

"They say she was cut to bits," Billy said. "They found her in a puddle of her own piss."

"Don't," Tom barked, and they all jumped, startled.

"Wha...?" Billy started to say.

"Don't talk about her," Tom said quickly. His curly fair hair framed him like a dim halo. "Jeez, she's dead, isn't she? It wasn't her fault."

Billy looked at him then as quickly looked away. He didn't say anything. Corky stuck his hand out and clapped Tom on the shoulder, the way boys do when they're on the way to becoming men and still have a way to go. Too old to put their arms around each other, still young enough to touch.

"Hey Tom," That was all he said.

"It's just that she was just a kid," Tom said and his voice cracked just a little, a hint of the pressure that was building up behind whatever dam he'd built. Everybody knew he was thinking about his little sister and what had happened in the winter.

"Sorry man," Billy said finally, reaching out a hand in the darkness. He took a hold of Tom's narrow wrist and gave it a squeeze. "I didn't mean anything, you know?"

Tom gave a little snort, like he was sniffing back hard. "Yeah. It's just..." He sniffed again then hawked and spat out, letting them know he was just clearing the dust from his throat. "It's just sometimes it looks like the whole place is going crazy."

"And Phil's leading the parade," Corky said, doing his best, easing them off this threatening track. He made an effort. "He's the craziest loony still walking outside Dalmoak. Crazier even than old Annie Monkton and she's so far round the bend she can see herself coming back."

"But not as crazy as old Twitchy Eyes."

"Yeah, but he's long gone, and Phil still lives at my house," Corky said, finally getting a laugh. In the gloom, Danny was the only one who saw that he wasn't smiling.

Twitchy Eyes.

He'd haunted the town for almost the whole of the summer, haunted the hearts of mothers, the dreams of children. He was the bogey-man, the Bad Man, the ogre under every bridge (he'd been under the bridge with little Lucy Saunders, hadn't he now?) and the shadow outside the window in the night-time.

"I reckon the cops caught him and hung him," Billy said. "They do that with some of the really bad ones. Just take them away where they can't be found again and do them in." He crept over to the hole they'd clambered through and began to crawl back out again. "I'll just see where they are."

"And made sure they don't see you or we'll be stuck in here with no way out."

"They'd brick us up and we'd never get out," Danny said, "like in the House of Usher."

"Jees, don't say that Dan. It gives me the creeps," Doug said. Already he was edging towards the hole in the wall, towards daylight. In an instant, Tom was clambering after him as the idea of being walled up inside the inspection chamber struck him.

Corky and Danny followed them out, neither of them just as panicked, but each unwilling to stay alone in the dark after what had been said. Corky started moving and as he did, his foot kicked against a loose stone which rolled into the corner of the small chamber. It hit something which rustled dryly and almost simultaneously, a clodden smell of rotting shit came wafting up accompanied by a frenzied buzzing of flies.

"Oh for God's sake," Corky said, gagging at the smell. At the same time, he realised that the five of them were not the only ones to have discovered the inspection pit under the arch of the bridge. Somebody else had been there too. They had all scurried in through the niche in the masonry and crouched in the first chamber, but there was a narrow crawl-way to the sump trap which they had explored weeks ago, using candles to reach the narrow space. It had been dry and dusty and festooned with spider's webs which showed it hadn't been touched for a long time. If somebody had found their way in to the first hollow, then they could get through to the back chamber.

They could be sitting quiet in the dark of the back chamber right now.

The same thought had struck Danny, but worse, the buzzing of the flies had brought back a powerful memory, an image from late spring, before the real impact of the stranger had hit the town.

There had been flies in the window of the house on River Street, and that's where Mole Hopkirk had been found dead, with his hair and his fingernails still growing. The flies had pattered against the windowpane like black rain, hundreds of them. Thousands.

Suddenly the smell and the buzzing and the dark all gelled into one enormous powerful threat.

"Move it," Corky hissed in a voice that said he really wanted to shout but didn't dare. He shoved at Danny who was halfway through the hole and right at that instant Corky felt the creepy eyes on his back and sensed the long crooked fingers reaching out to grab him and drag him back into the darkness. That was enough to send him crashing into his friend who stumbled out, rolled off balance and landed with both feet in the stream.

"Bloody hell," Danny yelled. Billy and Doug turned round, right on cue.

"Shhhhh!" they both said, holding their hands up, miming the need for hush.

Tom was up on the bridge, peering over the parapet. Far along the road, the three others were sauntering away, almost out of sight round a slow bend.

"We're safe," Tom said.

"Good," Corky said. You can go back in and get the tent."

He was thinking of what Tom had said. We're safe. But he wasn't prepared, right at that moment, to go back into the dark and put it to the test.

Safe. He hadn't felt safe for a long time. Had anybody?