One Word Kill (Impossible Times Book 1) Read online

  John looked again. ‘It’s just some guy.’ He sounded uneasy, though, bravado gone.

  ‘We should go.’ Mia pinched out the joint, serious. She knew something was wrong.

  ‘Sure.’ John led us off, eager now. Not back the way we came, but along the path that tracked the river. I followed, last, and the cold night seemed to echo around me. From the corner of my eye I saw phantoms, couples walking arm in arm, boys chasing each other, a woman with a dog, as if ghostly impressions of the park’s visitors had returned to repeat their day’s walks. None of them lasted if I turned to look at them, breaking apart like John’s clouds of smoke. My head felt too heavy and the world kept rotating when I stopped moving. One drag on a joint and I was high already?

  ‘He’s coming!’ Mia, her voice tight. I glanced back and saw the man advance, one black shape detaching from another, and the faintest gleam from a bald skull.

  ‘Run!’ John broke into a sprint.

  It’s a free country. The phrase whispered itself around me as I tried to run, too, brushing away the ghosts of a mother and child ambling down the path.

  After that a panic took hold and we were all three fleeing with the focused urgency that is the gift of real fear and is stolen away when fear grows into terror. A swift nightmare of bushes, clawing branches, and blind corners followed.

  ‘Jesus!’ John leaned against the brick gatepost, hauling in his breath. ‘What were we even running for?’ He tried to laugh but started choking.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I looked back into the blackness behind us. ‘Got spooked, I guess. Probably some sad old flasher.’

  ‘Well, that was fun.’ Mia looked pale, any aura of coolness dispelled. ‘Must do it again next year.’

  ‘Hah.’ John managed his laugh. ‘We settled one thing.’

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘You can’t be that sick, Hayes. You beat us both to the gate!’

  And it was true; the pains that had seen me hobble to the river were gone, though whether it was the fear, the cannabis, or the strangeness of the night that had driven them away, I didn’t know.

  CHAPTER 3

  ‘You’re still going?’

  ‘Yes, I told you.’ I carried on buttoning my coat.

  ‘You didn’t have any breakfast.’ Mother was wearing that tight, accusing look of hers.

  ‘I’ll get something at Simon’s.’ I snatched up my bag and reached for the door.

  ‘Nicholas.’ The full name. That always meant a lecture incoming.

  ‘I’m fine.’ A touch too harsh; I saw the hurt on her face. ‘If I don’t feel well, I’ll come home.’

  ‘I’ll come and get you if you ring—’

  I closed the door on her and hurried out into the day, a cold one, brittle with frost. The pain was back, shooting along my limbs, grinding in my hips. I bit down and kept to a brisk walk. Aggressive. That’s how they described the worst cancer. Maybe I needed some aggression myself if I were going to win the fight.

  It was a shock to find out how quickly I could be reduced to a shambling old man, moving cautiously around the set of aches and pains that now defined me. I wanted last month back. I wanted to marvel in the unappreciated joy of a pain-free body, to stride without a twinge or even the worry that there might be one. A month ago, I’d thought myself invincible. A few weeks on, a treacherous body I couldn’t trust or command, and it felt as if my youth had run from me. Milk from a toppled bottle.

  I walked the streets of Richmond wrapped in my own thoughts, puffing frosty breaths before me. Last night’s smoke came to mind. The phantoms must have been the drug’s work. Who knew what shit got into the resin Mia’s ‘guy’ had supplied. The stalker? Well, he was just that. Or some old bloke out walking his dog. And why not? It was, after all, a free country.

  I would be early to Simon’s, but I’d woken early, too, and had been unable to lie in.

  On the corner of Broad Street I saw Michael Devis, just leaning there, against the wall, fag in his hand. I went round by Foss Way to avoid him. Devis was my almost-bully, always testing, not quite sure enough of himself to do the job the way you saw it in the films, but enough to make me miserable. Sometimes I imagined what it would be like to just punch the bastard in the face, full out. But I didn’t think I ever would. I’d tremble and stutter, and turn away like I always did, and it would be a toss-up whether I hated him or myself more. You would think that having cancer would override all those lesser fears; that I could stride up to Devis and poke him in the eye; that I could talk to Mia like she was a human being rather than some alien beamed down from the mothership. But life didn’t seem to work like that. Which was a bummer, really.

  Devis had started to get on my case about two years earlier. It had been when I’d taken up Dungeons & Dragons with Simon and a couple of others. Devis had smelled weakness. Difference. It hadn’t been hard. I don’t want to attribute some sort of superpower to the git. Playing games at our age might have been enough on its own. Boards and dice are the accessories of childhood: Monopoly at Christmas; Cluedo with your parents; popping the dice bubble to take your turn at Sorry. Bring that into school as a teenager and you’re asking for trouble.

  Lost in my thoughts, I almost walked right into Ian Rust. Maylert gets its pupils from all over London. I had to take the tube and change at Hammersmith. So, by rights, I could expect to walk down a street in Richmond without seeing any Maylert’s boys. Seeing one was unusual. Turning off one road to avoid the biggest bully in your year, to then run into the school psychopath was the worst kind of luck. Well. Not cancer-bad, but cancer is quiet, hidden, slow. A monster in your face, on the other hand, is more immediately terrifying.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Ian Rust was in the year two above mine. The fact he hadn’t been expelled yet spoke volumes about his ability to manipulate both authority and victims.

  ‘Sorry.’ I hadn’t bumped into him, but I’d been on course to. Now I tried to step around, but he blocked me, moving to the left, then the right, arms spread.

  ‘Where you going?’ A cruel smile. It was hard to imagine he had any other kind.

  Ian Rust wasn’t big. I was taller. He was scrawny. He didn’t look a threat. Not until you looked him in the eye. They say he set an old homeless man on fire. That’s probably a lie. I didn’t see anything like that in the gazette. But you only had to spend a short time in his presence to believe that he would do something like that, just for fun. ‘Where you off to?’

  ‘Friend.’ My mouth had gone too dry for words. I kept swallowing. I wanted to piss. I was every rabbit in every headlight, waiting to be road kill.

  ‘You have friends?’

  I don’t think Rust knew my name even, but he knew me by sight, knew I went to the school and was therefore part of the herd he preyed on. People think you need to be big to be scary. They see boxers, big muscles, long arms, huge guys, and think that’s what matters on the streets. What really matters in real life, though, is how far you’re prepared to go and how quickly. Most disputes work to a strict choreography of display and threat. The escalation proceeds through a series of steps agreed by silent tradition. Everyone knows what they’re getting into and both the exit and the stakes are clear.

  What made Rust frightening was that he didn’t seem to understand those rules. Being strong is all well and good, but if one of the rugby team got in Ian Rust’s way, he would probably end up with a ballpoint pen in his eye before he’d even got to the shoving stage.

  ‘I . . .’ I could barely get a word out. Nausea bit deep, creating the real possibility I might vomit on him.

  Rust simply watched me, delighted by my distress, and then, as if a light had been turned off, his smile vanished. He snatched the sports bag from my hand and unzipped it. A sneer. He tipped the contents onto the pavement: map and notes from the last game, my character sheet, dice, an apple that Mother had snuck in there last week, all bouncing on the paving slabs now, fluttering down into dirty puddles.

  ‘Piss
off.’ He dropped the empty bag and carried on his way, kicking the apple ahead of him. Quite possibly he was off to meet with Devis on his corner in Broad Street. Devis was supposedly with Rust when he burned the tramp. A minion rather than a partner in crime.

  I stood there, dismissed, full of fight-or-flight adrenaline, hating Rust and the way he’d made me feel. Angry, I knelt to gather my stuff. By the time I’d recovered all the pages and tried to wipe them down, he was long gone. I walked on, trying to shake away that mix of rage and terror, gripping my bag as if it might be Rust’s throat.

  Before reaching Simon’s house I’d imagined half a dozen scenarios for how my encounter with Rust might have played out, all complex, visceral, and almost as scary as the real thing. And that’s what united the four weirdos who were about to settle around Simon’s gaming table and play out stories of magic and monsters. That’s the common thread running through all the diverse hordes of nerds and geeks who turned up to the conventions and gatherings, who queued outside Games Workshop for the latest rulebook. We were all of us consumed by our own imagination, victims of it, haunted by impossibles, set alight by our own visions, and by other people’s. We weren’t the flamboyant artsy creatives, the darlings who would walk the boards beneath the hot eye of the spotlight, or dance, or paint, or even write novels. We were a tribe who had always felt as if we were locked into a box that we couldn’t see. And when D&D came along, suddenly we saw both the box and the key.

  ‘Got some new orcs to show you.’

  Simon left the door half open and headed for the stairs. He never once said hello when he opened the door. You’d knock, and he’d pull it back like he’d been stood there staring at it for an hour. Even when you were early. Half the time he would just pitch in with the next line in the last conversation you’d had, as if a day or a week hadn’t passed.

  ‘Hello, Nick, how’s it hanging?’ Simon’s mum called from the kitchen without showing her face. She had been a hippy in the sixties and didn’t seem to have ever let go of it entirely. I liked her a lot and had no idea what to say to her.

  ‘Er . . . Hi.’ How she had come to produce a child like Simon I had no idea. Part of me wished my mother were more like Simon’s, but for that to work, I would have to be, too. We were neither of us people persons. But you’d have to uncoil our DNA to fix that.

  ‘Hey.’ Simon’s sister emerged from the kitchen, pursued by their cat, an enormous honey-coloured tom called Baggage. Sian was her mother’s child for sure: long hair, flower-patterned hippy dress, easy smile, twelve going on twenty, zero interest in her brother or his strange collection of friends.

  Stair-rods held the carpet on the stairs in Simon’s house, and stylised tree patterns grew up the wallpaper, rising with you as you climbed. The place always had the same smell, a mix of lavender and sandalwood. I’d been coming there since I was four. We’d been in the same kindergarten, then the same primary school before both passing the exam for Maylert.

  In the same period my parents had moved four times. Simon’s house felt more constant than my own. More like my home than my home did.

  ‘Here!’ Simon held up an inch-high painted figure, a warrior with a war-hammer. I was to look, not touch.

  ‘Sweet.’ He had shown me how to do the magic he did with the brush. I couldn’t do it.

  On the table in his room half a dozen more figures stood ready for inspection beside a stack of rulebooks. A bright scattering of polyhedral dice and several incomplete map sheets completed the ensemble. People saw all that paraphernalia and their brains would dial in what they knew about games, board games with dice. Only this had monsters thrown in. Judgement made. But Dungeons & Dragons was never a board game. The figures and maps were just props. The rules weren’t even called rules; they were guidebooks, handbooks, manuals. It was all there to give just enough structure to our shared imagination that we could vanish into it for hours, unwinding a story as we went. A story unique to us, filled with our own wonders, ingenuity, and proxy bravery. And it was something that carried on week after week, building over years even, creating a shared history, bonds that weren’t ever going to appear across a Monopoly board or game of cards.

  I went to my chair, finding for a moment that the room had grown distant, Simon’s voice faint. Déjà vu gripped me. My encounter with Ian Rust had managed to push out the thoughts that had been spiralling through my sleepless mind. The hand that reached forward to lift the gaming mat didn’t seem to be my own. The table before me became overlaid with my own hospital-vision of that same table the week before. My fingers remembered gripping the pen, grinding its point through the varnish, sending a message to myself . . . ‘Nothing!’ The wood lay smooth, undamaged.

  ‘What?’ Simon looked up from his monologue and blinked.

  ‘Did . . . Was there something written here? Did you turn the table around?’

  Another blink. ‘No. What are you on about?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I let the mat flop back down. ‘Just . . . Nothing.’ It had seemed so real, but I guess that’s the point about hallucinations. William of Ockham wasn’t the first to point out, centuries ago, that the simplest answer is probably the right one, but he’s the most famous. I was in hospital being poisoned. Which was more likely, some weird kind of time travel, or drug-induced hallucination? I snorted at myself.

  ‘We miss something?’ John pushed the door open.

  Elton followed in, already pulling his books from his bag. ‘I hope you guys were prayin’, cos I’m bringing the pain today!’ As the game master he was nominally in charge, designing the world we adventured in, but how we met those challenges was down to us.

  Mia came in a second later, dark eyes ringed with black eyeliner, shooting me a look from beneath a black fringe. I blinked my surprise. One visit to the D&D table was unusual for any girl. Coming back for seconds was unheard of in my limited experience.

  Elton arranged himself on the far side of the table, arraying his books as a shield for the notes and maps we weren’t to see. He set out his dice, hands thick-knuckled from years of karate punches. The game master has to be the main creative force, something of an actor to portray those who populate his world, and an authoritative judge to settle player squabbles and end objections.

  John sat to my right, annoyingly blonde and chiselled. Money, charm, and looks. Two out of three might be forgivable, but the whole set is bound to breed a little resentment. He ignored the character sheet before him and sat smiling at Mia. She ignored him, poring over her character sheet instead. She seemed to have rewritten the character Elton gave her the last time.

  Simon’s mum breezed in with a tray of orange juice and biscuits, followed by Baggage. She opened the window a crack.

  ‘Mum!’ Simon frowned at her. ‘It’s arctic out there.’

  ‘A little fresh air is good for you.’ She walked to the door. ‘And I’m thinking of Mia. After a few hours with four boys in it, this room’s a health hazard. Light a match and . . . boom!’ She mimed the explosion with her hands, grinned, and walked off, the cat trailing in her wake.

  ‘You feeling better?’ Mia looked my way, but I still took a moment to understand that she was talking to me.

  ‘Uh, yeah,’ I lied.

  ‘Better?’ Simon shot me a dark look as if I’d betrayed him by consorting with the enemy.

  ‘Nicodemus ate something that disagreed with him.’ John mimed an exaggerated vomit. ‘Or disagreed with something and then ate it.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ Nicodemus was my character’s name. So perhaps I wasn’t that imaginative after all.

  ‘You better be.’ Elton scowled over his defensive wall of books. He might be fearless in a fight and ready to punch out any number of Michael Devises, but when it came to illness he was as paranoid as they come.

  ‘Well, if you start feeling sick, let me know.’ Mia grinned. She pointed to her character sheet. ‘It says here I have a “cure disease” spell. One size fits all, apparently. From little sniffles to leprosy.’


  That would be nice. I muttered something about being fine. Mia had been given a cleric to play. Every newbie gets to play a cleric. They’re the holy men, the priests, and they’re stuck with the healing magic, which means they’re always in demand after the battles but rarely during them. Mia had made hers a woman, a priestess of the Man Jesus, close enough to Catholic to make me think she had a grudge against them. Elton had mentioned something about her escaping a church school at some point, pursued by nuns.

  It turns out that a shared imaginary crisis is a great icebreaker. By lunchtime, Elton had us running in panic from a collapsing cave system, and Mia and I were bickering like old friends over the relative merits of our survival plans. Even Simon found his voice, urging us to shut up and run!

  An hour later, our small group of adventurers was advancing along a narrow forest path as the sun sank in the west.

  ‘I’ll climb a tree. A tall one. Maybe I can see an edge.’ Simon gathered his dice. He played a thief with considerable acrobatic skills. When he said things like ‘I’ll climb a tree’, imagination had to kick into a higher gear. In real life Simon had trouble climbing stairs.

  ‘The tallest are smooth elms,’ Elton said. ‘Super hard to climb. Three skill checks. Roll seventeen or under.’

  ‘So, a sixty-one per cent chance of making the top.’ Simon gathered the dice.

  ‘Woah!’ Mia looked up. ‘You just worked that out. Just like that?’

  ‘He’s a human calculator,’ John said. ‘Watch. Six hundred and eight times two hundred and thirty-seven?’

  ‘A hundred and forty-four thousand and ninety-six,’ Simon said without pausing, and rolled the dice.

  ‘That’s incredible!’ Mia blinked.

  ‘Not really. I was more likely to reach the top than fall,’ Simon said.

  ‘I mean the maths!’

  Simon shrugged. ‘Any pocket calculator can do the same.’ He glanced my way. ‘Nick’s the genius. I’m going to read mathematics at Cambridge. Nick knows that stuff already from his dad’s books. I’m just good with numbers. Nick’s off the scale.’