Like This, for Ever

everyone but him. The man in the familiar blue and yellow sweatshirt who’d scared Hatty away. It hadn’t been a mistake, a cruel trick of the light. The man on the boat was his father.
    ‘Barney, come on!’
    The others had run in the wrong direction, not back to the large yard gates, but towards the very tip of the Creek’s backwater. They were huddled in the shelter of the massive steel pilings that supported the A2009. Jorge, unusually protective, had his arm round his younger brother. They were very close to the water and the tide was coming in fast now.
    Had anyone else seen his dad?
    Barney reached the group and turned back to the boats. The men who’d come up to investigate had gone back below. The yellow yacht was in darkness once more.
    ‘What happened, Harvey?’ asked Lloyd.
    ‘There was someone in the water.’
    The children pressed closer together, turning instinctively to face the black river.
    ‘I think we should go home now,’ said Jorge.
    ‘What sort of someone?’ asked Sam.
    Harvey shook his head. ‘Too dark,’ he said. ‘I just saw, like, an arm coming out of the water.’ He raised his right arm in a swimming motion. ‘You know, like when you’re doing the crawl. And then I saw eyes looking at me. Big eyes like a fish, only a massive fish.’
    ‘I’m out of here,’ said Sam, not moving.
    ‘Harvey, it was probably just an animal,’ said Lloyd. ‘An otter or something.’
    ‘A bloody otter,’ said Jorge. ‘Since when did you get otters in the middle of London?’
    Barney had never seen Jorge scared before. He was trying hard to hide it, but couldn’t quite keep his eyes from staring, his mouth from clenching up tight. The hand still round his younger brother’s shoulders was trembling.
    ‘I’m just saying,’ said Lloyd.
    They couldn’t have recognized, even noticed, his dad. One of them would have said something. ‘It could have been someone swimming,’ said Barney. ‘People do, in summer. My dad won’t let me, he says it’s too dirty, but some people do.’
    Just talking about his dad felt wrong, as though the others might make the connection between the words coming out of his mouth and the man on the boat.
    ‘It’s nearly ten o’clock at night,’ said Lloyd. ‘Who’d be swimming at ten o’clock? In February?’
    ‘In the rain,’ added Hatty. ‘I’d really like to get away from the river.’
    Barney only had to look at everyone’s faces to know they all agreed with Hatty.
    ‘I’m going to ring my dad,’ said Sam.
    ‘If you ring your dad, we’ll all get murdered,’ said Jorge. ‘Come on. Lloyd was probably right, it probably was just an otter. Or a badger. Or a walrus.’
    ‘Or a hippo,’ said Hatty, who was starting to smile again.
    The group made their way back to the yard, heading for the gates.
    ‘A hippo called Hatty.’ Jorge gave Hatty a tiny nudge on the shoulder.
    ‘What you sayin’?’ She pushed him back, a bit harder.
    ‘Or a crocodile,’ said Lloyd.
    ‘Or a mermaid,’ said Hatty.
    Splash, splash.
    ‘Oh God, no,’ whimpered Sam, as the children stopped in their tracks. Jorge raised his torch and directed it on to the river. Oily blackness, the slow flow of water coming in from the Thames, gentle ripples, as though something had disturbed the surface not seconds earlier. Then, just out of reach of the torch beam, movement that they all saw.
    ‘There!’
    ‘Jorge, there!’
    Four torch beams fixed on one point. Nothing in the black water. Stillness. Tension that Barney thought would make one of them scream any second. Then all five screamed as the creature hurled itself out of the water at them. A child, like them, but nothing like them. This child was dead. This child was covered in a waxy, sticky substance that looked as though it had leaked out of him. His body had been half eaten by river creatures. His eye sockets stared black and empty and his tongue-less mouth gaped open as if he was screaming too. He rose out of the river, lurched towards them and then collapsed face-down on the bank.
    Barney didn’t think he would ever stop running.

30
    With his long sharp nails he opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound so that I must either suffocate or swallow … some of the … Oh my god … my god. What have I done?
    LACEY CLOSED HER Kindle. Jesus, she’d forgotten what a creepy