Blood
Chapter One
Fiction from me as we head toward Halloween. I’ll post one chapter every Friday at 9pm.
If you followed this substack in 2023 you may have read this before. I took it down from the archive a while later, as I’ve done with other serialized stories. Since then the number of people who receive these emails has almost doubled, so I’ve decided to send it out again.
Take care,
RS
Blood
I.
It was a Saturday in November, and the flat was freezing. The boiler was dead again, and Jake’s mother had been on the telephone trying to get it fixed every free moment from Wednesday to Friday. There had been tears. The last calls she made, on Saturday morning, were one to her half-sister, asking if they could stay, just for the weekend, and another, to Matthew’s parents, asking if Jake could stay with them until Monday. In between those calls had been a small crisis, caused deliberately by Jake, in which he had complained relentlessly that he didn’t want to go to his auntie’s; he wanted instead to stay at home, alone. There was absolutely no way he was old enough for that, and his proposed alternative was treated — with a profane reminder of the lack of hot water and heating — as it deserved to be treated. In the end a compromise was reached, and so his mother called Matthew’s parents. They were more than happy for Jake to stay. Jake’s mother was more than happy for a little time off from him, though she berated herself for thinking that.
Jake also felt glum; he regretted the trouble he had caused, and what it had led to, because at least, at his auntie’s, his mother would have been there. Really he had just been protesting because he despised his auntie’s mean little cat, and he despised too the fact that the vegetables were always slimy. What he had done now was consigned himself to a whole weekend without his mother, in an environment where he felt uncomfortable. Jake liked Matthew, but he didn’t know him very well, and it had been a while since they had seen each other. He was a friend from Jake’s previous school.
So, late morning on Saturday, right in the middle of more stress and whinnying from Jake, Matthew’s parents pulled up in their shiny family estate. The handover was easier than expected: Jake’s mother told him to behave, told him that she loved him, and he got in the car without a fuss. His mother waved at him and ducked back inside their freezing ground-floor flat, as the tyres crackled on the ground, and Jim drove them into town for lunch.
Jake and his mother did not tend to go to restaurants, and he was a bit daunted by much of what went on, but he enjoyed his pizza, and he loved the slice of pie covered in ice cream that followed it. Despite this, he already wanted to go home.
At some bellyaching from Matthew, there followed a little shopping. To Jake’s delight, Matthew’s parents had no problem with spending a bit of money on him, and both boys were given the thrilling, improbable limit of twenty pounds each. Jake was still irrationally annoyed with his mother, and deliberately buried the idea that she probably would be happy to spend such sums, if only she could. Matthew’s parents were quite surprised to see, when both boys joined them at the queue for the till in HMV, that each was holding his own copy of SPICE by the Spice Girls. Their questions were: Isn’t that for girls? and Aren’t you going to buy something different?; and even though neither question was serious, the boys both thought to themselves that these were nevertheless stupid things to say. On the drive back to their house, Matthew tore the plastic wrapping off and investigated every part of his purchase thoroughly. Jake kept his pristine; he meant to open it only when he got back home.
Jake did like being in a car, especially on journeys like this one. He could stare out across landscapes which changed slowly in layers, from his smooth-moving vantage, like in Looney Tunes cartoons set in the Wild West. He would choose a bush, or a sheep, or a wooden post, and depending on how far away it was, judge how quickly it would seem to go past.
Matthew said they were somewhere called ‘Pevensey Levels’. Certainly it was a strange, rather lonely-looking place they were crossing, the sky almost oppressive with the horizon everywhere being so flat. It was somewhere Jake had only ever been when on the way to somewhere else, never outside of a car — and this time, as he watched the slant landscape slide past, his eye was caught. Things seemed unexpectedly to line up. It might have been the vegetation along a river, although he got the feeling that wasn’t the case. He looked across the car and out of the other side. This distinctive edge, whatever it was, was there too, stretching toward the horizon in the opposite direction.
As they got slowly closer to what he had seen, Jake became a little nervous, realising of course that if the patterns on either side met up, forming a line, the road they were on was sure to go through it. He had accidentally created for himself something to anticipate, and he imagined that what the car was due to cross very soon indeed was some sort of ancient ditch, or ridge — was something that they would all feel like a speedbump. He did not feel anticipation, however; what he felt was anxiety, or even fear.
Matthew and his parents were so oblivious to what Jake had seen that he wondered if he had seen nothing at all. The car went without a jolt across whatever it was, whether ancient or imaginary, and suddenly Jake sneezed. It had come from nowhere. The dog started barking.
‘Shut your face!’ shouted Matthew’s father, loudly and unreasonably. The dog continued barking.
‘Leave him alone, Jim’, said Matthew’s mother. ‘It made me jump. Bless you, Jacob.’
Both boys had recognized that the dog — whose name was Stitch — had actually begun to bark simultaneous with Jake’s sneezing, rather than because he was startled by it, but neither was in the mood to say anything. Jake empathized with the dog barking, he felt alarm too. As they had crossed whatever that boundary was, he had been flooded quickly with the sense not only that he had received appallingly bad news, but that the bad news was all his fault. He had no idea why, or what he had done, but he was in terrible, terrible trouble. His skin felt the way it felt on the bus to swimming, which he hated. He wanted to go home.
Matthew and his parents lived in what seemed to Jake to be a farmhouse, but they did not to his knowledge run a farm. It was old, but it was not pretty. They all scurried in quickly, cowering ineffectually from light rain. Matthew glanced at Jake’s bag and made a face which somehow clearly indicated he felt it was too big for one weekend. He accidentally got in the way of Jake’s attempt to dash to the downstairs toilet, and made it there first. Jim rolled his eyes a little, and pointed Jake to the upstairs bathroom, so Jake cantered upstairs and went for the wee he’d needed the whole drive long. He washed his hands, saw his big green eyes in the mirror, stuck his tongue out at himself, dried his hands, and emerged onto an empty, quiet landing, where he waited until he heard the downstairs flush go and the door open. He did not know where it was that Matthew went, and neither right now did he want to know. The sound of the television downstairs told him that someone had been into the living room, and probably was still there.
Jake passed the door of Matthew’s parents’ bedroom, on his way toward the stairs. He readily gave in to an instinct to be nosey, and looked in, quickly; it was empty, and a bit of a mess. He continued along the landing, to the top of the staircase. He froze, as he came down the first few steps, at the sight of Matthew’s mother, below; she was hurrying from the kitchen through the hallway into the room where the TV was. Jake listened to her as she inhaled, and yawned, somehow briskly — bent it into a happy yelp of relief as soon as she noticed it happening — before flopping herself down onto what sounded like a very comfortable chair. He heard a magazine slide off and land on the floor.
Matthew’s house was not only a big old house, which shared no walls with any other houses, but had two, maybe three toilets, and the downstairs of these was Jake’s favourite. It was a comforting room, largely because it felt a little isolated. It did not have a working lock, but was still quite a safe place for spending long periods of time. Jake had made a mental note the last time he was here that someone opening that door, thinking the room was empty, would hear you before they saw you, if you reacted in time. Given the right conditions, Jake could easily be someone who reacted in time, he thought. The conditions in this case were anyway very pressing: he did not want to be caught sat on a toilet, with his trousers up, hiding, in his friend’s house. Hiding for no reason that he would be able to give, if pressed (and he would be, if he was found, he was sure of it); hiding for no reason that he could even come up with for himself. He wasn’t reading, he wasn’t crying, he didn’t have a Game Boy, he just needed a lot of time on his own. He felt sometimes that he ran on different batteries.
In order to make his way to this clattery sanctuary — its corners comfortingly dotted with spider webs, dusty pipes, and bright plastic bottles of cleaning product — all he had to do was descend the remaining stairs and make his way down the hallway undetected, which, thanks to the soft rug in the hall, and the loud television, would be easy, he hoped. Except that right away, a stair creaked loudly.
Stitch heard him, and looked up, but didn’t bark. He’d got away with it. He crept, ever more confidently. Soon enough, he was on solid ground. Yet just as he was passing the doorway of their large living room, suddenly Jim was visible, lunging in the direction of a side-table — directly towards the door — to grab a newspaper. Jake did not stand a chance: he was spotted immediately.
‘Ah! It’s yourself!’
Jim sometimes liked to do voices. This one was a cartoon, a generic Irish accent. Doing silly voices was a harmless and often successful habit of his for appearing to be humorous, when that was a mode he thought would be appropriate or helpful, but for which he felt otherwise ill-equipped. Jake certainly enjoyed it — without his silly voices, Matthew’s father could seem imposing, and taciturn — and without really meaning to, he beamed back into the room, genuinely relaxing for a moment.
Jim seemed to waddle a little further toward the door, such that Jake didn’t know whether he was supposed to be going in or waiting where he was; so, he hovered at the doorway.
‘Joining us are you, young Jake?’
Jake’s face, without his meaning it to, became suddenly both worried and confused, and Jim shot him a broad, sincere grin, almost a laugh, but certainly not at anyone’s expense. ‘I’m joking, Jacob. You two can make your own entertainment for a while. I, for one, am going to sit on my arse.’
What had been the sound of Countdown became the sound of adverts, and Matthew’s mother muted the TV. She turned round to Jake, who hadn’t moved from the doorway. ‘We’ll be eating around half seven though, Jacob, if that’s alright with you.’
He wondered, quickly, what it would be like to be someone who could respond that, actually, that wasn’t okay. To be a house guest ready to demand, even to request, that your hosts change their schedule. It wasn’t that he thought it rude or unreasonable; he just couldn’t imagine being someone who could do it. He smiled and nodded, unsure what to say.
Fortunately, Jim interrupted. ‘In the meantime…’ he said, ‘How about…’ — and he winced a little in pain as he reached to grab a large, matt, golden-cardboard box of chocolates from the other end of the side-table — ‘How... about… one of these? Don’t tell her, though.’
Jake’s face let loose another ungainly, honest smile, which revealed more about his immediate response to this proposition than he’d have liked. Matthew’s mother shot Jim an affectionate glance, which he knew well, implying that it was all very funny to paint her as the authoritarian of the house, but she only had so much patience for it. Jake gathered himself, walked fully into the living room, and spoke for some reason as if a boy several years his junior: ‘Yes please, Mr. Coleman.’
Jim took care to lift the lid off rather grandly, if a little falteringly, and the pantomime of wondrous revelation was surprisingly effective. He enjoyed it himself more than he had been expecting, though it was, to an extent, done out of familiar desperation. They never did know what to do with Jake, and he only got more and more like himself as he got older.
The box was now open, magnificently. Jim pulled from it a soft, corrugated brown sheet, briefly frowning at the implication that an upper layer of chocolates must already have been finished. The inside of the lid immediately panicked Jake, as it offered gorgeous drawings and long, two-line descriptions of every one of the chocolates before him: it promised an assortment of treasures from which he would have to choose, while Jim waited for him to choose, and he’d want to choose properly, but would feel pressured to do so quickly, and what if he would regret his choice, what if he… — but suddenly, relief. He would not have to choose. It was fine. The first one he read in the lid was almost certainly what would turn out to be his favourite choice, even if he could have read all of them in time. He couldn’t be sure, but it was likely enough that it meant some awful awkward pause could be avoided.
In his relief, his right arm sprang up, faster than he had expected, to the matching chocolate.
‘N-n-nuh! Not that one!’ Jim said, abruptly pulling the box a few inches back toward him. It so happened that he forgot to do a silly voice.
Jake flinched. Maybe he had been too quick to grab at his treat. No, it wasn’t that — Jim said ‘not that one’. So it had been a bad choice. Why had it been a bad choice? Immediately as he looked up at Jim’s face, he heard himself draw a short gasp — which meant Jim, and Matthew’s mother, had probably heard it too — he felt his upper-arm muscles clench; he felt — and hated — how wide his eyes suddenly were, how far up his face he could tell his eyebrows were. Most of him in this way was immediately rendered tight, and tense; and in the same instant he became aware too that — yes — Jim had been joking. He had forgotten to do the voice, but still had delivered his line with a big grin, one which Jake had noticed a second too late.
Why did adults always do this, though? Jake genuinely thought he had done something wrong: Jim had deliberately made him think he had done something wrong. He had not, of course he had not, but he had been startled anyway, and this was how grown-ups played, he supposed. Though, actually, he now recalled: his friends were beginning to realise they could do this to him too. He did not like it. He could not seem to be suspicious by instinct; not in time, anyway. Invariably, he was too slow to remember to distrust anyone, let alone to discover what would happen if he did: people were always too quick to wrong-foot him. Perhaps if people took their games more slowly, he would find them a little less mean-spirited, he sometimes thought; he would be able to join in — and this is what he was asking himself yet again now: why his mind should go so quickly in some ways, and so slowly in others. Distracted by the sound of a kettle from the kitchen, he looked at the sofa, and realised Matthew’s mother had left the room without him noticing.
He had an overwhelming sense of being locked into the tension in his own arms and face, as if this particular grown-up joke had been lowered onto the front of him like the padded safety-cage on a roller-coaster. He returned his gaze to the array of chocolates, not sure where else to direct it. As his eyebrows floated back down and the tautness across his face subsided, he became aware of the fact — found it briefly a very strange fact — that he had two eyes.
Jim had seen this brief moment of worry flicker onto Jake’s face, seen it bolt down through the rest of him, and as those beseeching eyes had widened up at him he had felt a small cringe of guilt. He said, ‘Whichever you like, Jake’, and held the box of chocolates forward again, smiling kindly downwards. But the edges of his face were tense with a mixture of pity and tired disappointment. Jake recognized both, and felt a familiar tug — threatening to become that lapping, rainy misery by which he discovered in greater and greater detail that he had, once again, as so often, made someone feel bad about themselves without meaning to — it might have emerged as a sob, had he not still been quite rigid, had he not been wondering which part of his ears could be so cavernous as to echo a heartbeat the way they were now. Perhaps it was the same hidden chamber onto which they seemed to open when he yawned.
This interaction didn’t take nearly as long as either of them felt it took. A few seconds later, Jake — as if his first choice really had been inappropriate — had selected a different chocolate. It would have been his second choice in any case, probably. Jim pushed the lid back onto the box, and was relieved to see that this strange, slightly pathetic little boy’s spirit seemed not to have been crushed after all. Jake gratefully noticed the gentle hiss of air escaping from the lid, as he was himself still trying not to breathe too loudly, and was for distraction looking down at the chocolate which he now held between two fingers and the thumb of his left hand. Although the back was flat, the front of the chocolate was moulded in the shape of a barrel. The lid of the box had mentioned that it had brandy in it, but Jake had chosen it because he liked the picture of the barrel. It reminded him of Saint Bernards, and of a game he used to have, one that had got lost in the move, called Pop-Up Pirate. Could this really have brandy in it? His mother’s rare-enough but almost ritual enjoyment of the brandy which lived on the high shelf in the cupboard at home had led Jake to believe it was immensely precious.
Matthew bounded into the living room, and clambering onto it from behind flung himself down heavily on the sofa, just where his mother had sat. Jim told him off for climbing but handed him the box of chocolates. He went for a dark sphere covered in brown dust and ate it straight away. Jake, never one to wolf anything down when observed, especially not a treat, raised his little moulded barrel to his mouth, just as it was becoming sticky on his fingers and thumb, and tried to bite off an upper half. Immediately a pungent flare flickered up through his nostrils, and a slick of thin liquid bolted out of the tiny barrel, toward the lavish carpet: it wasn’t ‘brandy flavour’, the solid chocolate he had concluded it must be; it was really was like a barrel, a hollow shell with a trove of liqueur inside. This was the moment Jake learned that such things existed, and learned as well that you ought really to eat them either very carefully or in one go.
As he tensed, again, trying not to spill any more, and the vapours slightly stung inside his nose, there was an incredibly loud bang elsewhere. Something slamming. He lost a nascent sneeze with the surprise of it. Everyone else jumped, too, and Stitch tore to the end of the hallway and locked himself rigid by the door of the downstairs toilet, barking at it like a sentry. Matthew’s mother, still in the kitchen and audibly flustered, shouted to nobody in particular whether they would mind not doing that so loudly, please. Jim and the boys just looked at each other uselessly.
As Jim got up to investigate, Jake furtively looked down. The brandy, or whatever it was, had narrowly missed his white T-shirt, and on the carpet was now a tiny damp patch. Luckily, the colour at that point in the pattern was dark, and the precious liquid would not become a visible stain.
Love this story so much! 🩸
Glad to see this returning!