The Magpies A Psychological Thriller - By Mark Edwards Page 0,60
his dreams. He had woken up and jumped out of bed in a state of shocked disbelief and stared at the floorboards. When he was eight or nine, his parents used to play this album late at night after he’d gone to bed. And as a little boy with a large imagination, he had lain awake, convinced that the Martians were coming for him. The album came with a booklet of paintings, in which men and women ran screaming through the Victorian streets, pursued by a Martian death machine; red alien liquid bubbled between once-glorious buildings; a priest held up a cross before an unimpressed Martian who fired off a death ray to obliterate him. All these images of horror and destruction floated before his eyes, along with a few original ones, conjured up by his pre-adolescent mind. In the end, after a week of nightmares, he reluctantly told his mum why he had been so tired and unhappy recently and, filled with remorse, she had binned the album, making him promise that he would tell her if anything scared him in the future. He shouldn’t be ashamed, even if he was a big boy now.
Maybe I should phone her now, he thought. Tell her I’m afraid. Afraid because I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.
How on earth had Lucy and Chris known? They had managed to pinpoint how the Newtons knew about Kirsty’s arachnophobia – they’d mentioned it at the dinner party – but how did they know about Jamie’s old fear? He racked his brains. Had he mentioned his fear of that music to them? No; no he hadn’t. He’d never mentioned it to anyone. Not even Kirsty. In fact, he had practically forgotten that album existed. In the early nineties, someone had released a dance mix of the War of the Worlds music, and he found that it didn’t scare him any more – not in the sweaty centre of a heaving, lively nightclub, anyway. But at three a.m., in the dark, the music coming up from beneath the floorboards brought back all those childhood terrors. He could almost see the alien tripods outside the window. He thought harder, tried to work it out – but there was no way they could have known about his fear. No way.
But he had to put a stop to it. Kirsty buried her head beneath the pillow while he dressed hurriedly, pulling on his jeans and a T-shirt without bothering with his underwear. He went outside and ran down the steps. It was freezing and, apart from the music coming from the basement flat, utterly silent.
He banged on the door and on the window pane. Unsurprisingly, there was no answer. He lifted the letterbox and shouted through it, ‘I’m going to call the police.’ But he knew he wouldn’t. He would be too embarrassed. The music scares me, officer. How pathetic did he want to look? He went back upstairs and got back in bed, and at that very moment the music stopped. He lay absolutely still, dreading that it might start up again. Eventually, he tried to get back to sleep. But he was too angry; his heart was beating too fast. And it would be time to get up in a couple of hours anyway. So he got out of bed again and plugged the Playstation in. He played Call of Duty, imagining that every enemy soldier he mowed down was Lucy or Chris. Kirsty got up too and sat beside him, watching. She barely spoke.
Weeks had gone by since the spider incident. For the first week, Kirsty had made Jamie check the bed before he got in it; the bath before she would turn the taps on; the front room before she would enter it. She was convinced that it was going to happen again: another spider invasion. But when it didn’t, she relaxed, and then crossed to a state beyond relaxed. She took on an air of calmness and serenity. She walked around with her hands on her belly a lot, even though she was far from showing. She bought parenthood magazines and looked up baby sites on the internet. She was imagining herself in a perfect future, a future in which she would have her child and everything would be alright. She seemed to forget all about the problems with Lucy and Chris. She stopped mentioning the spiders, although one evening a spider made an appearance on television and she shouted at