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Deceased Four

COOPER, Samuel DOB 17/04/05 2 MEADOW ROAD LOWER BROCK LANSTON LA179HW

IC1 MALE F406 slim build, mid length brown hair, brown eyes, wearing a white, short sleeved t-shirt and navy blue gym shorts with blue gym socks and shin pads and silver football boots.

School: LANSTON PRIMARY SCHOOL 1 CALDER ROAD LANSTON LR172JU

Next of kin Father: COOPER, John DOB 27/03/81 FLAT 32 KING’S ROAD ANCOATS MANCHESTER M40 5DH

Mother: ETHERIDGE, Sally DOB 08/11/81 2 MEADOW ROAD LOWER BROCK LANSTON LA179HW

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Sat at the breakfast table, Alec Monroe clenched the folded paper in his left hand whilst holding a half-eaten piece of buttered toast in his right. He had forgotten to chew. He would have struggled to swallow in any event because of the sickly lump in the back of his throat. For the past week Monroe had tried to avoid reading or watching anything to do with the incident and, rather naively, he hadn’t expected to see an article on it now, let alone find his name still being mentioned. After all, as far as anyone seemed aware his presence on the bridge was totally incidental; to the outside world his actions had been both minimal and futile. But he knew that wasn’t the case. Monroe had provided his witness statement the following afternoon as arranged despite having had very little sleep the night before. His genuine shock at what had happened proved a plausible excuse for the lack of conviction behind his account and he’d almost convinced himself that what he told the police contained only a few white lies. Since then, Monroe had largely kept himself to himself and had declined all interviews with the local and national journalists, each desperate for an exclusive. Billy had pleaded daily for him to reconsider of course. Think of the shit tonne of free publicity, he’d said. Still no. That was the publicist’s job and Monroe was happy to leave him to it. As a consequence, Monroe had for the most part managed to avoid the furore in which he had been unjustly characterised as a sort of hero. Heroes don’t lie awake at night, he reckoned. What sort of hero has nightmares? A hero doesn’t need to fix themselves a Chivas Regal before bed. They don’t lose their appetites, their sex drive. And a hero certainly doesn’t clam up when he reads his name in the paper.

Monroe continued to read the accepted facts of the tragedy which had come to light in the days since. The driver, Wayne Garside, was a troubled and callous monster. The paper stated that Garside was a forty-one-year-old married man with no children, serious mounting debts and, most crucially, a history of depression. It claimed that on the morning of the incident, Garside had sent his wife, Linda, a text message telling her that he’d been struggling to cope, that he was ashamed but didn’t know how to tell her, and finally that he was sorry. Sorry indeed, Monroe thought. Linda, forty, of course had no knowledge of their money problems. Evidently, Garside had become trapped by payday loans and held a grudge against his employers. Unhinged and seeing only one way out of his predicament, Garside had planned to take as many people with him on his way out. All of the evidence, circumstantial though it was, painted an ugly picture and was more than enough for the authorities and the press to put two and two together. The damning witness statements Monroe and the stranger had made were seemingly academic.

Continuing to scan the Gazette, Monroe read how Linda Garside had never believed in a million years that her husband, a man who had always adored children but could never provide her any, was the same man who had committed such a heinous and unthinkable act. All those lives lost because of one monster. Mrs Garside had sent her heartfelt condolences to the whole community before leaving town to stay with relatives, seemingly conceding that her former husband must have indeed been a monster. The dog faeces she had twice had posted through her letterbox and the abuse that was hurled towards her windows may have also been a deciding factor in her leaving town. Unfortunately, the police had no resources to investigate her allegations of anti-social behaviour.

Monroe gazed at the article until his formerly warm toast fell from his grip. It caught him off guard and he jolted back, choking on the mush in his mouth and knocking over the black coffee in front of him with the single sugar in it. His heart skipped and danced as he focused solely on the piece of toast, as if he had just been tossed a hand grenade and couldn’t find the pin.

‘What was that Alec? You ok?’ a voice called from the other room. The toast, buttered side down, lay on the table cloth holding his gaze. He swallowed back hard as a dark stain spread towards the bread from his periphery, steadily getting larger and larger. It called out to him, ‘Alec?’ he heard it say, before he was suddenly back in the room.

‘Christ sake!’ he said, rising from his chair and instinctively checking for coffee stains on his trousers.

‘What happened?’ asked Vicky entering the room and seeing the state of the table, ‘How have you managed that?’

Monroe had no reasonable explanation to give and this made him irritable. He resented Vicky for asking such a direct question. ‘It was a - a spider! A bloody huge spider. The thing just darted across the table out of nowhere.’

‘A spider?’

‘Yes a spider!’ he snapped, ‘Christ, shall I draw you a picture? An eight-legged fucking spider.’

‘Ok! Calm yourself down!’ Vicky said, scurrying to mop up the coffee and simultaneously move Monroe’s flashing phone to safety. ‘Look at this, what a mess! I don’t see the spider anywhere. Did you kill it?’ Monroe, seeing that his suit was unmarked, watched Vicky fixing his mug upright and her hand extend towards the toast. He suddenly stretched out and snatched it from her reach and saw how the butter and crumbs had formed a dark lumpy paste on the white cloth. ‘Alec?’

‘What?’ he snapped again.

Vicky paused for a second and looked at her husband, ‘I said, did you get the spider?’

Alec Monroe looked blankly at his wife having instantly forgotten the imaginary spider he had conjured up. His head was full of the newspaper left lying on the corner of the table. It was open, displaying the article. He tossed his breakfast onto a side plate and picked up the paper, which was only slightly soiled. He felt his knees going weak and his arms soon followed.

‘No,’ he said, gruffly, ‘Boody thing got away.’ Folding the paper over to the back page and swallowing back once more, Monroe gathered his jacket from the back of his chair and picked up his phone from the middle of the table. It was wet but went straight into his pocket unchecked.

Vicky studied her pale partner with concern. ‘You look awful. You sure got a spook, didn’t you? You sure you’re ok?’

‘Fine,’ said Monroe, ‘I’m going to shoot off. Can you square this shit up?’

‘Yeah, I will do. I’ll let you know if I find the spider.’

‘Ok,’ Monroe hadn’t waited for a reply; he had already headed for the door, swapping the paper from hand to hand as he put his arms through the sleeves of his jacket.

‘Oh, I think you had a message on your phone, Alec.’

‘I know,’ he said, as he walked out of the house and closed the door behind him, leaving his wife to hunt for a spider she would never find.

As he got behind the wheel of his car for the first time since the crash, Monroe tossed the paper onto the passenger seat and inhaled, deeply. He turned the key and left his foot hovering above the clutch for a while. Just breathe, he thought. He had purposely avoided driving altogether. If he and Vicky had had to go anywhere then Vicky had been the designated driver; this had been very rare however. Monroe strapped himself in and, putting the car in gear, he felt his heart punching at his ribcage. His hands were clammy and shaking. Is this going to happen every time, he wondered? He pulled out of the driveway, looking both ways twice, and accelerated away down Broughton Lane. Glancing in the rear view mirror, Monroe suddenly slammed on his brakes. Impossible, he thought, I must have imagined it! He leaned forwards to the mirror to make sure before hastily looking over his shoulder. Nothing there. Monroe could have sworn he saw a small figure standing perfectly still in the middle of the road. He checked the rear view mirror again and to his horror there it was, standing in the middle of the road. This time he saw it with absolute clarity. It was a boy, unmistakably, about nine or ten years old. He saw its white t-shirt and navy blue shorts, all off colour and it appeared to be drenched, utterly, from head to shoeless toe. Of course it couldn’t actually be there, Monroe knew. It was just his mind playing tricks. It wasn’t stood motionless facing his car. Squeezing his eyes shut, he put the car back into gear, opened his eyes and focused solely on the road in front of him, driving off towards town. As he approached the junction at the bottom of the road he checked the rear mirror one more time. Still there. Despite the increased distance, Monroe could see the boy’s face almost as clearly as he could read the speedometer in front of him. Possibly because he knew the face. He had studied that face just about a week ago when he’d looked intently into its lifeless, grey eyes. He had seen the face again just moments earlier, in a two-inch colour photo in the Lanston Gazette. ‘Pull yourself together, Alec,’ he said aloud, signalling onto Weston Street and driving away from the spectre.

                                                                ***

Pulling into the carpark in the town centre, Monroe remembered the two pound seventy charge and, having neglected to collect his wallet before leaving the house, decided to park up on the street adjacent to the library. It was less distance to walk anyway! Stepping out of his car the cool air hit his pale, blue shirt which was now sticking to this body and instantly caused him to shiver. He threw on his tweed jacket but still felt uncomfortable as he bulldozed his way through the entrance.

Quickly finding a seat facing away from the high windows, Monroe pulled out a ledger of notes from his inexpensive laptop case and tried to settle. He began skimming through what he had written as he powered up his computer. The library seemed to be whirring with activity although of course it was not. Being as it was a not even midday on a Thursday, the four or five people lurking around was unusual however. Whilst he tried to get his papers and notebook and laptop in some semblance of order, Monroe was all at once distracted by a low, droning sound. It overrode all other sounds and became more irritating with each passing second. Monroe stood up and traced the noise back to a maintenance man, chit chatting unnecessarily loudly to the library receptionist as he fiddled with a ceiling fan or lightbulb or some such inane thing. His harsh northern twang carried throughout the building and flew at Monroe like a homing pigeon. This will not do. Monroe marched over to the front desk and stood just a few meters from the pair. The middle aged man was, to Monroe, grossly overweight with a shockingly receding grey hairline. The hair on his head had clearly aged quicker than his moustache which was almost black and appeared comical. Monroe watched for a few moments as the offensive sounding globule perched on a ladder flirting with the similarly aged woman, herself a larger lady. What a pair they’d make, Monroe thought. He stood, steely eyed and incredulous, as the two began to raucously laugh at something.

‘Do you have a quiet section in this library?’ Monroe finally snapped. The lady behind the reception stopped laughing abruptly. The repair man did not.

Looking squarely at Monroe, he said, ‘You’re in a library lad, how much more quiet do you want?’ and with that he let out another laugh, directed at his female counterpart. Gritting his teeth, Monroe noticed that the man’s paint splattered, knitted jumper jiggled as much as his jowly, blotched face. He felt his fists clench; his cheeks and forehead throb. Monroe opened his mouth and shifted his weight forward a step to give the man what for.

Just then the receptionist said, ‘There’s a room at the back in the far left side corner; down the corridor, through the double doors.’ As he turned to collect his stuff, Monroe heard the woman subtly whisper, ‘Do you know who that is? That’s that Paul Francis author. You know, from the crash.’

Monroe finally settled down in silence to go over his research notes from his ledger. He had lifted whole chapters and verses from the King James Bible - The Book of Revelation - and Dante’s Inferno, along with obscure cult scriptures he had found online, extracts from Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible, various mythological texts as well as a few scarce passages gleaned from Abdul Alhazred’s Necronomicon which were sent to Monroe by a professor at Miskatonic University in Massachusetts. As with all of his work, Monroe’s preparation had been thorough and ranged from the very beginning of lore to the very end; anything he could find from God creating Lucifer right up until Armageddon. His headers included, although were not limited to, Lucifer the Cherub, Satan’s Rebellion, Michael’s Victory, The Fall from Heaven, Hell, The Temptation of Christ, The Prince of Lies: Collector of Souls, Loftus Hall and, of course, The Devil’s Bridge.

After several hours of reading and paraphrasing and marking down his backstory, Monroe had sketched out his first few chapters of his novel but found himself starting to wane. He could feel the sun through the window beating down on the back of his neck. He was pleased with his afternoon’s work however, and figured he had a lot to go on. So far, Francis had answered a letter for help and arrived in town to investigate the change in some of the townsfolk; one by one they were turning into empty husks. They suspected that Satan had resurfaced after a hundred years to steal souls from the townsfolk and Francis will have to use all of his smarts to outwit the Devil, Monroe smiled. Of course, the ending must be left open, he thought, so that Francis would have a recurring enemy for the another book down the line. But for now everything was falling into place and Monroe would have something to go back to Manser with.

After packing away his things, Monroe walked across the room and checked his mobile for messages. There were four. He could see that one message was from Vicky on his lock screen which read, “What time will you be home? Xx”. Two kisses meant she couldn’t have been too annoyed with him over the morning. He looked to his side and slipped his phone into his pocket, reaching out with his other hand to push open the frosted glass doors. When his fingers connected with the cold turquoise panel in front of him, Monroe heard a faint tap and felt an unexpected resistance which made him stop in his tracks. Momentum had carried his palm forward so that it was now pressing against the glass but as Monroe looked up he saw a shadow on the other side. It was the shadow of a hand, mirroring his own, and it was pushing back against door. Startled, Alec Monroe recoiled his arm but saw the shadowy hand linger. It struck him as being thin with bony fingers splaying from the palm but it was altogether firm and dark. A chill ran through him. As the shock subsided he realised the door wasn’t opening to reveal who the hand belonged to. Neither could he see any outline of a person on the other side. Monroe took a step back and could feel beads of sweat trickle down his back once again. Trying to regroup, he quickly said, ‘Come through,’ but there was no reply. Suddenly the print disappeared from the glass leaving a faint trace behind which soon dissipated. What the hell is going on, Monroe pondered, as he readjusted the laptop strap on his shoulder. ‘Hello?’ he called out, reaching down for the handle and swinging the door inwards towards him. Monroe was met by an empty corridor.

After a moment, Monroe hurried through the corridor to the other end and raced back through to the reception where the Weebles were sipping tea. They were startled by the speed at which he approached. ‘Did anyone come by just now?’ Monroe asked. They replied with dumbfounded faces. He pressed again, ‘Just now, from the far annex, has anyone else come through?’

The woman stuttered and replied, ‘Well, I don’t know. A few people have been in and out but we’ve been busy.’

Monroe stared at the two, incredulous, and decided that he’d be better off leaving the simple creatures to themselves. As he turned to walk out, he heard the woman say, ‘We’re all very appreciative of what you did, Mr Monroe.’ He paused by a council notice board displaying several small fliers, with one much more prominent than the others. He glanced a date in the not too distant future and saw a mention of St Thomas Aquinas Church but nothing more. The woman continued, ‘It must have been just awful!’

Monroe felt a dizzying flush come over him and he struggled to breathe. Hastily, he made for the exit as the repair man uttered something under his moustache. Bursting out of the door and into the street, Monroe inhaled deeply through his nose and grabbed at his shirt collar. The smell of cut grass filled his nostrils as he tugged the cotton aside from his neck, freeing up his oesophagus. Monroe spun on his heels to head towards his car and abruptly clattered into a slender frame, at which he immediately cried, ‘I’m so sorry!’

Two hands firmly gripped his shoulders and steadied him as Alec Monroe heard a familiar voice say, ‘Hello my friend, fancy bumping into you again.’