“You’re sure, Annora?” Jessa implored. “You’re sure you haven’t seen anything weird? Nobody’s followed you, or spoken to you?”
“I told you, I haven’t seen anything strange!” Annora sighed.
“Jessa, chill out, you’re going to scare her,” Maggie said.
“I just don’t understand why someone would want to kidnap me,” Annora said.
“I don’t think he’s putting that much thought into it,” said Jessa. “It looked to me like he’s taking people randomly.”
“Jessa,” Maggie glared. “What did I just say?”
“It is a bit scary,” Annora mused. “But I feel better knowing that people are looking out for me. I mean, it’s always better when we can predict bad things, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” Maggie conceded, but kept the scowl on her face. “I would feel better if I heard something positive from Mr Fletcher, though.”
“Yeah right,” Tonia scoffed. “He barely even looked at us in PSE this morning.”
The five friends munched away on their lunch sandwiches.
“Mr Fletcher has a lot of pressure on him, remember?” said Flynn.
“Speak of the devil…” Maggie uttered quietly.
Mr Fletcher strode over to their table. He pulled up a chair and sat down. “Hey,” he spoke quietly. “In your, uh, research sessions, have you come across the name Francis Jackson?”
They all shook their heads.
“Are you positive? You haven’t seen or heard that name before?”
“Positive,” said Jessa. “Never heard of him. Why?”
Mr Fletcher sighed. “Well, I guess…” he trailed off reluctantly. “I guess you may have been right about Lynch being alive. I did some research myself, and there’s still a lot to look into, but maybe.”
A flash of adrenaline shot through Jessa’s brain. “I knew it,” she whispered.
“What did you find?” Flynn asked.
“Mostly the same things you did, but a couple of results have turned up this name.”
“So who is it?” Jessa questioned urgently.
“He was a neighbour of the Lynch family. I’m going to visit him after school today. He still lives in Woburn Vale, so he’s pretty easy to get to.”
“Can we come?” Jessa asked immediately.
“Absolutely not,” Mr Fletcher answered without a split-second of hesitation.
“Why!” they all whined.
“Because I don’t know what we’re dealing with here! But I promise I’ll check in with you tomorrow and let you know what I find out. Is that fair?”
“Fine.”
“Great, I’ll get back to you tomorrow morning.” He left the table.
Jessa waited until he had completely exited the cafeteria before proceeding.
“Who wants to go to Woburn Vale after school, then?”
#
The five students followed a safe distance behind the teacher, travelling on the Underground all the way to Euston Station. A sea of commuters conveniently provided cover for them to remain unseen, and the teenagers held onto each other’s hands to keep from being separated by the flow of foot traffic.
“I see him. He’s going to the ticket machine,” Annora noted. Jessa approached a different ticket machine on the opposite side of the concourse.
“I’ll keep watch,” Maggie said. “But hurry. These ticket booths are all so exposed. If he turns around, he’ll see us.”
“I have enough money for three tickets,” Jessa said quickly. “Does anyone else have enough for two more?”
“I do,” Tonia rummaged in her tote for a purse and thrust it into Jessa’s hand to take the cash.
“All right, here you go,” Jessa handed out a ticket to each of them.
“The next train to Woburn Vale leaves in seven minutes,” Flynn announced, pointing to the departures board that dominated an entire wall of the station. “Mr Fletcher’s going through the barrier now.”
They watched from afar to see which carriage he entered, then chose seats in the carriage down from his.
The five of them spread out over two tables on either side of the train aisle, and took the opportunity to do some homework. Jessa opened her physics books but kept looking up and out the window, distracted by the blur of suburban London as it whizzed past them at ninety miles per hour. The moving landscape view transformed from suburbia to the quiet English countryside, dreary under a gloaming sky.
The train stopped periodically at curiously named places, letting off a few people here and there in villages like Wobbly Lake, Little Hambly, and Valley Crows. Jessa remained dissolved in her own thoughts, staring blankly out the window at the places and people, until something suddenly grabbed her attention.
“Wait!” She pressed her face against the glass to look at someone who had just exited the train. “There!”
“What is it?” Maggie craned her neck to see. “Oh my goodness, is that Mr Fletcher?!” She pointed toward the back of a young man in dark khakis and a brown jacket who looked an awful lot like Mr Fletcher.
“What?!” Annora, Tonia and Flynn looked over in concern. “He got off already?” said Flynn. “Where are we?”
“We’re not in Woburn Vale,” Maggie said, “but that really looks like him.”
“Shit. Should we get off now?” Tonia said, quickly stuffing her books into her bag.
“Too late. Damn,” Jessa said as the train began to pull away from the station. “Maybe we can get off at the next stop and get the next train back.”
“Before we panic too much, we should check that he’s definitely not here,” Flynn suggested.
They walked up the aisle of the train in single file, holding the backs of seats to keep their balance on the carriage as it swayed in motion.
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Jessa halted the group at the glass door at the carriage entry. “I can’t see him, but there are a few people with their backs to us. What should we do?”
“I think we should go in,” Annora said.
“What if he is in there, though?” Maggie said. “He’ll see us.”
“He had to find out sometime that we were going to Woburn Vale with him,” said Tonia. “So if he’s there and he sees us, well, it was going to happen at some point.”
“Tonia’s right,” said Flynn.
“Here we go, then.” Jessa waved her hand in front of the motion sensor at the door slid open.
They made their way cautiously through the carriage, checking every seat until they ended up at the other end of the car, next to the little WC cubicle in the vestibule between the carriages. Mr Fletcher was nowhere to be seen. Just to be sure, Jessa peered through the glass, checking the next carriage.
She shook her head.
“Damn!” Tonia exclaimed.
“Why would he get off the train back there! Where was that?!” Maggie remarked.
“It’s fine,” said Jessa. “We’ll just get off at the next stop and go back.”
They were waiting by the door when the airy hum of a hand-dryer sounded from inside the cubicle. The door slid open, and a young, blond man in dark khakis and a brown jacket stepped out.
“You have to be kidding me…”
“Oh, hi, Mr Fletcher,” they all mumbled sheepishly.
One hand braced himself on a rail, and the other ran through his hair. He shook his head slowly. “Unbelievable. What did I tell you?!”
They said nothing.
“I promised I’d keep you updated. You deliberately disobeyed me.”
“Technically it’s after school hours, so you’re not in charge of us anymore.”
“Jessa, don’t be smart with me. You’re in big trouble.”
“Ugh, you sound like my sister.”
He scrunched his hair. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.”
“You can’t do anything, Mr Fletch,” Tonia smirked. “We’re here now, aren’t we?”
“I did not sign up for this,” he said under his breath. “Fine, you can come with me, but you are never to call me Mr Fletch again.”
“How about just Fletch?”
He blinked. “Definitely not. Now shut up and sit down.”
#
“Here it is,” Mr Fletcher said as they reached 10 Lowe Road. He looked over the hedge at the old detached house, already locked up for the evening, curtains closed with artificial light shining out. “Please behave yourselves. I don’t want this poor old man calling the police on us for harassing him.”
The others nodded their approval, but Jessa was distracted. She walked out across the quiet road to the opposite side, gazing into the space between two houses where another once stood.
“This is where he lived, wasn’t it,” she said absentmindedly. “I can feel it.”
“What can you feel, Jessa?” Mr Fletcher moved to stand right behind her.
The space was unkempt. Grass had clearly grown and died there many times, and the ground was dry from winter.
“It feels…” she drifted into quietness, and crouched to place her hands on the ground. “Warm. Warm and sad.”
“It feels warm to you? Physically?”
“Yes. Why, is that strange?”
“No,” he smiled kindly, though Jessa suspected his response was not completely truthful. “Come on, let’s go.”
Knock, knock, knock.
No answer.
Harder, knock, knock. They could hear the sound of a television blasting from inside.
Harder still, knock kno—
“Quit your yammering, I’m coming!” a wavering voice rattled from the other side of a door. Eventually, it opened, slowly, and still with the chain lock across. A wrinkled man peeked his head into the ajar space and peeped out through his bifocals.
“Good evening, Mr Jackson, my name’s Hugo Fletch—”
“No thank you! No cold-calling!” He began to close the door on them, but Jessa stepped forward.
“Wait! Mr Jackson?”
Hearing the young girl, the man opened the door again curiously and peered again over the tense chain.
“My name’s Jessa. This is Maggie, and Flynn, and Tonia, Annora and Hugo. We just came here from London. We were hoping to talk to you about the Lynch family. You knew them, didn’t you? You knew Silas Lynch?”
The door closed. A few seconds and some jangling sounds later, it reopened wider.
“Wipe your feet.” Francis Jackson hobbled back to his armchair, allowing his visitors to see themselves in.
Francis Jackson’s living room walls were cluttered with a lifetime of photographs. Upon the walls were shelves that bowed under too many books and tchotchkes, vases and figurines, mismatched and dusty. The wallpaper, probably once a vibrant marigold, had faded to a dry wheatsheaf brown.
Francis pointed his clunky remote control at the even-clunkier television, silencing the soap opera shenanigans that were left dancing across the screen soundlessly.
“Get on with it then, I don’t have all night,” he urged his visitors, who perched themselves on the sofa across from his chair.
“You knew Silas Lynch, didn’t you?” Jessa began.
The old man nodded gravely in return.
“What can you tell us about him?”
“You’ll have to be more specific, missy. I knew the Lynch family well. Such a tragedy.”
“Well…” Jessa spoke slowly, figuring out her own line of questioning as she spoke. “Did… did you always know… no, let me start again. Did Silas always seem… well… different?”
“He was always a strange child, but he wasn’t the monster that the newspapers made him out to be. They wrote some horrible things about him.” Francis’ voice rose in volume. “It was disrespectful to his family, may they rest in peace, to say those things about him.”
“But Sir,” Maggie chirped gently, “the newspapers were just reporting his activities, weren’t they? He did some terrible things.”
“Pah!” he exclaimed. “Silas was the product of a society that couldn’t care less about him. He lost his whole family in that fire, for cripes’ sake. Then he was shipped off to the orphanage like some sort of throwaway. I’m not defending the things he did, but the boy needed mental help. Help that nobody wanted to give him. In those days nobody cared about that sort of thing. Labelled him crazy and never gave him a chance.”
“What was he like as a child?” Jessa asked.
“He was a good boy—very intelligent, and an excellent parapsych. I always thought he was destined for greatness. I remember when he was very young, my wife and I would babysit Silas and his sisters from time to time. Those girls were the loveliest children, very playful, and they’d always want to be outside playing in the garden, picking flowers and whatnot. But Silas was always an old soul; he preferred to stay inside and read. And then, after the accident, he became a mute. Never spoke at all. He even lost his parapsychism for a while; the boy was in such shock.”
“Mr Jackson, if you don’t mind my asking, why didn’t you take Silas in after the fire?” Hugo Fletcher asked.
“Well,” the older man spoke quietly, looking down at his wavering hand as it gripped a mug of weak tea. “I asked myself that for a long time. Silas even asked if he could live here, but we were already getting on a bit, and my wife had some health problems, so we thought it would be better for him to be placed into a real family. At that point, we couldn’t have foreseen that no family would take him. Nobody wanted to adopt such a forlorn child, and especially one with such disfigurement… the fire took so much from him, in so many ways.”
“Then what happened to him?” Jessa enquired further.
“Once he was old enough to leave the children’s home, he did just that. He simply walked out and then the next time I heard from him was when he started his campaigning.”
“And you had no idea he had those beliefs?” Jessa pushed.
Mr Jackson paused, staring into space. He let out a long ‘hmmm’ and pushed his glasses higher onto the bridge of his nose.
“There were signs,” he admitted. “Even at his young age, he said he didn’t like school because it wasn’t doing right by his abilities. His older sister was in high school, and he heard tales from her that made him think the school wasn’t teaching children how to really use their abilities.”
“That’s some serious talk,” Mr Fletcher raised his eyebrows.
“Silas Lynch was a serious child,” Mr Jackson offered in response. “What’s made you so curious about Silas all of a sudden, anyway?”
“No particular reason,” Mr Fletcher smiled. “We were just trying to fill in some blanks. Mr Jackson, do you know anything about a book at the Parapsychological Museum?”
“You mean my book?”
“Your book, yes. Did you ask for it back?”
Francis Jackson’s eyes narrowed. “Why yes, I did.”
“What made you ask for it back, Mr Jackson?”
“Someone wanted it.”
“Who?”
“Men came and took it away. Two of them.”
Two men. Jessa’s mind flashed back to her intuition. The two men she saw taking Annora. It’s him.
“I don’t know why they wanted it,” the old man continued. “But anyway, it was in London, so I had to phone the big museum and ask for it back, and then the men came to collect it.”
“Mr Jackson, do you recall the names of those men?” Mr Fletcher implored.
“Gosh, no, I don’t believe I do. Come to think of it, I don’t think they told me their names.”
“Do you remember what they looked like?” Jessa asked.
“Very normal, hard to say.”
“Do you remember anything distinctive? Anything at all? What were they wearing?” Mr Fletcher pressed him.
“They were most unremarkable, I’d say. Just two normal-looking men in normal-looking coats.”
Jessa opened her mouth as if to speak but Mr Fletcher’s look told her not to. He pulled back the sleeve of his jacket to check the time. “I’m afraid we have to go.”
“All righty then,” Mr Jackson said, almost sounding disappointed to lose the company. “I hope you don’t mind to see yourselves out. It’s awfully difficult to get up and down from this chair, you see.”
“Oh, Mr Jackson, before I go, I have one more question,” Mr Fletcher said. “Why were you the one to register Silas’ death? In the database the record has your name attached.”
“It just felt like the right thing to do. I knew nobody else would, and when I read in the paper about the night his so-called followers turned on him, well, I thought I owed it to the boy to put him to rest in the only way I could. I would have wanted to hold a funeral, but as you can imagine, there was no way to recover a body from that mess. Tragic. Poor boy.”