LITMIR.BIZ

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as she lifted her eyes to gaze back at the imposing building.

      It was a drab, ugly edifice, built of dull, grey stone in the heavy-handed, Victorian Gothic style, with a corner tower and too many gables. Planks and boards obscured the ground-floor windows, but higher up they were mostly uncovered and shaped like they belonged in a church.

      Shiela hissed through her teeth at it. “Don’t you look at me like that,” she whispered.

      Tall, misshapen trees crowded around it; there was even a tree growing in the middle of the drive, which was why they had to park the van so far away.

      A rook or a crow cawed somewhere above and the lonely, unpleasant croaking made her shiver.

      “Like a graveyard,” she murmured. “A graveyard for dead houses. There’s no life in that place, no life and never no love.”

      Then a jangling rattle dragged her attention back to the front porch, where Jezza was standing, shaking the van keys.

      “What freaked you out in there?” he asked as he sauntered over.

      “I wasn’t freaked out. The air was bad. Stuffy and stale.”

      “You put up with worse, with Miller in the back seat.”

      “OK, I just don’t like that place. Give me them keys, I’m gasping.”

      He snatched his hand away from her, dangling them just out of reach.

      “That’s two questions you’ve avoided now,” he said, beginning to sound irritated. “Do you want me to force the answers out of you?”

      “No, Jezza!” she said. “Just let me light up – for God’s sake!”

      He threw the keys at her and a minute later she was dragging on the cigarette. Her fingers were trembling.

      “It’s just a place I’ve heard about,” she explained, blowing out a stream of pale blue smoke. “Every town has one – the deserted old house. A place other kids dare you to go to, knock on the door, break in and spend the night.”

      “What is this?” Jezza sounded annoyed. “Scooby sodding Doo? Don’t give me that crap.”

      “It’s bloody true!” Shiela swore. “If you were from round here, you’d know, you’d have heard about it. Only in this case it’s not made up. That’s a… I dunno – a sick place. Not even kids dare each other to come here any more.”

      “They’re too busy stuck in front of their Xboxes or glued to the Net to do anything real these days,” the man said.

      “Good for them,” she muttered.

      “The Web’s for rejects,” he pronounced. “All them misfits hiding in their rooms yakking away to other people they’ll never meet, using fake pictures and pretending to be someone else. No one knows who they are any more and those who do aren’t satisfied with it. You never know who you’re really talking to on there.”

      She understood it was no use arguing with him. Jezza liked to make sweeping, preaching statements and wouldn’t listen to anyone who disagreed with him. He certainly hadn’t listened to her for a long time now. As for “misfits”, what else were they?

      “It’s good for finding out stuff,” she said half-heartedly.

      Jezza smirked sarcastically. “Yeah,” he said. “All that information, branching out from here and there. It’s the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Shee – and how mad is it that people are accessing it via their Apples! Ha – it’s Genesis all over again and we’re cocking it up a second time.”

      “I wouldn’t call this Eden,” Shiela said.

      “And you’re not Eve,” he told her bluntly, before considering the house again. “And you’re not blonde enough to be Yvette ruddy Fielding either. Got ghosts, has it?”

      She shrugged and flicked some ash on the ground.

      “No such thing,” he stated. “Only real things matter in this life, and there’s enough nasty realness to keep you worried and scared without inventing other mad stuff. The things to be frightened of in this world are just round the corner, hiding in your beans-on-toast existence. That’s where true evil breeds best. Under your noses, in plain sight: it’s the domestic abuse of the terrified wife three doors down and her neighbours who turn the telly up to drown out the noise; it’s the nurse in the care home who hates herself and takes it out on the patients; it’s the kids too scared to speak out; it’s the man kicking his dog in the ribs because it doesn’t bite back… it’s everywhere around us. Society, that’s the Petri dish where evil flourishes, not in empty old houses like this beauty.”

      Shiela looked at him, at the sharp features that she had once found attractive: the sly, crafty shape of his narrow eyes and the unhealthy pallor that had marked him out as different and interesting. Then, unexpectedly, he turned his crooked smile on her and she was surprised to find that she still fancied him. She was always surprised. Jezza possessed a mesmeric charm, a way of making her overlook his bullying ego and ruthless self-interest. He exerted it over the others in the group too. He was, without question, their leader, and gathered waifs and strays to him like some kind of street prophet, and in their own inept, confused way, they were his disciples.

      Taking the cigarette, he leaned beside her and stared intently up at the great, unlovely house.

      “We could live off this dump for a year or more,” he said. “Must be all sorts in there. Might even be stuff left in the attics – or the cellars, and the odd stick of furniture too. You did good, Shee.”

      “Wish I’d never said anything about it,” she said softly.

      “I might just keep you around a while longer,” he chuckled with a wink, but she knew he probably meant that veiled threat.

      Suddenly, inside the house, a man’s voice screamed.

      Jezza sprang forward like a cat and rushed back to the porch. Shiela lit another cigarette and waited.

       Chapter 2

      Bonded to the Ismus, though by no means his only dalliance, is the fair Labella, the High Priestess. She outranks the other damsels of the Court, yea — even the proud queens of the four Under Kings and see how their eyes flash at her when she parades by. Coeval with her are the Harlequin Priests — that silent pair arrayed so bright and yet so grim and grave of face. Let not they point to the dark colours of their motley — dance on and dance by quick, my sprightly love.

      RICHARD MILLER WAS sitting on the stairs. He was sweating and shaken and seemed to have shrunken into his shabby camouflage jacket, like a tortoise in its shell. Tommo stood in front of him, looking completely bemused and wondering if he could risk laughing and not receive a thump or a kick in return.

      “What’s gone on?” demanded Jezza when he came rushing in.

      Tommo put one hand over his heart. “Nothing to do with me!” he explained hurriedly. “Pongo here had a fit going up the stairs.”

      “Sounded like you’d fell through them!” Jezza said.

      Miller lifted his face and looked warily over his shoulder. “There was something up there,” he said in a hoarse whisper.

      “What?” Jezza snapped.

      “Dunno… just something.”

      “Like what?”

      “Like nothing I ever felt before,” the big man answered slowly.

      “Where?”

      It was Tommo who answered that one. “Just up on that little landing there,” he said, with a definite chuckle in his voice. “Stopped dead in his tracks he did and then, wham – he bawls his head off and leaps about, like he had jump leads clamped to his bits.”

      Jezza looked

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