Pike Read online

  First published in 2015 in Great Britain by

  Barrington Stoke Ltd

  18 Walker Street, Edinburgh, EH3 7LP

  This ebook edition first published in 2019

  www.barringtonstoke.co.uk

  Text © 2015 Anthony McGowan

  The moral right of Anthony McGowan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in any part in any form without the written permission of the publisher

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library upon request

  ISBN: 978-1-78112-886-2

  To Barry Hines, who showed us how this might be done

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Acknowledgements

  One

  Deep in the green murk, something stirred. It eased up from the weed and sludge at the bottom of the lake so slowly you’d think it was just drifting in the current. Only there was no current, and the lake water was as still as death. And if you looked closer, you could see the tiny ripples made by the fins, and the shimmer of energy that passed through the solid body under the scales.

  Just enough light filtered through the water for the pike to see her prey. It was a minnow, dappled green and brown to conceal it as it darted among the weeds. But the minnow had abandoned the safety of the bottom, drawn by a new and unexpected object in the water. Something that linked the dark lower and the bright upper layers of the lake.

  And now the minnow was a sharp outline against the morning light.

  Close. Closer. It was time.

  But perhaps the minnow had sensed danger, for he had swum into the cover of the strange new presence in the lake. One long branch of it reached up, almost to the surface, and that’s where the minnow lurked now. He swam in and out of the five white bare twigs at the end of the branch, where bark frayed from the wood – or bone – beneath.

  There the minnow made his fatal mistake. He nibbled once, twice, at the flakes of bark – or skin, perhaps – and as he pulled at the pale shreds, he ignored the coming darkness below.

  And so the pike struck. There was simply nothing between the point at which she began her surge and the point at which she stopped. The minnow was gone, engulfed, swallowed. And with it, the tip of a little finger, severed by the teeth of the pike.

  Two

  Even in my sleep I knew I was being watched. And because I knew someone was there, I was alert and tense and ready to spring as soon as my eyes were open. I must have been in the middle of some sort of horror dream, because I was kind of expecting zombies or vampires when I opened my eyes.

  It was worse.

  There was a black shape looming above me, dark against the light streaming in the window. The shape gave out a faint noise, like a hum or a moan.

  “What the hell are you doing, Kenny?” I said.

  Kenny was my brother. He was a year older than me, but his brain was starved of oxygen when he was getting born, so I had to look after him. There was a big drooling grin all over his face. The moaning sound was because he was trying his hardest to keep quiet, and that was the best he could do.

  “You said I wasn’t allowed to wake you up any more,” he said, “so I was waiting.”

  “What time is it?” I said. It was the end of the summer holidays, and I was trying to make the most of the few lie-ins I had left before term started.

  Kenny picked up the alarm clock. The ringer bit had been broken for years, but that didn’t matter with Kenny around. He touched the glowing numbers on the clock, his face dark with effort.

  “Seven o’clock. A.M.,” he announced, and grinned again. “Fishing time!”

  I’d promised Kenny I’d take him fishing, and Kenny never forgot a promise.

  “OK, I’m up,” I said. “But don’t wake Dad.”

  “He’s not home yet. He’s on nights.”

  “OK, make a racket, then.”

  Three

  Ten minutes later we were off down the road with our Jack Russell terrier, Tina, yapping and scampering around our feet. The toaster was bust, so we just munched on slices of white bread as we walked along. I carried the fishing rod, and Kenny had the rest of the gear – the hooks and floats and maggots – in an old ice-cream carton. I didn’t let him carry the rod because you never knew what he was going to do with it, and it was the one thing we couldn’t afford to replace. It was my dad’s old one from when he was a kid. Dad didn’t make a big fuss about it, but I knew it was special for him.

  We were going to the Bacon Pond. It’s a funny name for a pond, I know. It’s called that because it’s right next to the Bacon Factory, where they used to make all sorts of meat pies and stuff, as well as bacon. It’s closed down now – the Bacon Factory, I mean. Everything’s closed down round here except the pound shops and the pubs and the Spar. I’ve heard people say they’re going to turn the Bacon Factory into flats for rich people, but I’ll believe that when I see the Ferraris parked outside.

  “Tell me about the pike again,” Kenny said as we walked.

  One of the things about Kenny is that he likes to hear the same story over and over again. In fact, he never likes a story until he’s heard it about ten times, and then he loves it, even if it’s actually a rubbish story.

  But the story about the pike wasn’t rubbish.

  “So you know about the Bacon Factory?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, they used to make pies and ham and that.”

  “And you know what they did with the old meat that had gone rotten and manky?” I asked.

  “They used to throw it in the pond.”

  “That’s right. And you know what used to live in the Bacon Pond?”

  “Ginormous pikes!” Kenny said. “But stop asking questions and tell it properly.”

  I laughed. The truth is I liked telling stories to Kenny, because he really, really listened. He listened with every bit of him, as if he could hear you with his legs and his hands as well as his ears.

  Four

  “Back when the Bacon Factory was still open,” I told Kenny, “they used to dump the rotten meat into the deep, black waters of the Bacon Pond. The pond was jam-packed with fish. There were clever carp and lazy tench in the still, deep water, and silver roach darting in the shallows. And there were perch, like underwater tigers, prowling in and out of the weed.”

  “Tigers!” Kenny said, and his eyes were as wide as if he was seeing a real tiger, and not just a little fish with stripy sides.

  “But most of all there were the pike,” I said. “You’d sometimes see a fisherman pull one out of the water, small ones, not much longer than a pencil, and not that much thicker. But sometimes there’d be one as long as a man’s arm, and you could see the power in it, and the evil, because a pike’ll eat anything it can.

  “And there was talk of real giants in the deep, like this—” I stretched out my arms to show Kenny. “They were so fat and bloated that if you tried to hug one round the middle your hands would barely meet. But the real giants had l
ived a long time, and they were canny, and no one could ever catch them.”

  Kenny put his arms around an imaginary pike.

  “And it’s not just that they get big,” I went on. “There’s something about the look of a pike, the way its jaws seem to go on for ever … You know the rest of it is just a machine for getting its mouth to the right place at the right time. It looks like a dinosaur, or an alien, or a monster.”

  “Monster,” said Kenny.

  Even Tina seemed to be listening, looking up at me as she trotted along.

  “I knew a kid once who said he was feeding the ducks,” I told them, “and this swan came floating over, like a white queen. But before it reached the bread it was gone, just like that. The kid swore that he’d seen the huge mouth come up under it, and grab the beautiful head, and pull it down, and it never came back up again, not even a feather of it.”

  “Feather,” Kenny said, in a whisper.

  “There would never be enough food in the pond to feed monster pike like that, if it wasn’t for the spoiled meat they dumped in there from the factory. And so the pike grew fat on that – on the old pork-pie meat and rotten sausages and green bacon.

  “And sometimes a fisherman would hook something huge in the water, but they never had the strength to pull it in. Or the line would snap, or the rod would break like a toothpick.”

  Kenny made a dry cracking sound with his mouth.

  “So that was the pond and the pike,” I said. “But there were also kids, and kids like to do dares. One of the dares was to swim across the Bacon Pond. Even without the pike, it was a stupid thing to do. In places it was so deep that if you tried to dive down to the bottom you’d come up, spluttering, before you reached it. Deep enough to drown, easy.”

  “I’d never swim it, no way,” Kenny said.

  And I came out of the story for a minute and said to him, “Aye, Kenny, you’re right not to.”

  Kenny could swim, but just a scrappy sort of doggy-paddle, with his head held high in the water.

  “But the deep bits weren’t the real danger,” I told him. “There were places where waterweeds could tangle you. And people used to dump all kinds of crap in there – dead dogs and cats, shopping trolleys and buggies. There was even a car or two, burned out by joyriders, then pushed out with the flames still melting the insides of it, to fizz in the deeper water.”

  Kenny went, “Pssssssshhhhhhiiiiiiiiiiisssssssshhhhhhhh,” and waved his arms around like the billowing blue-black smoke from a burning car.

  “The shells of the dead cars and the wire from the trolleys could snare you and hold you there until you got tired and sank down,” I told him. “Then, when you were dead, the eels would chew up your eyeballs and eat your brain, and the pike would tear the flesh off you, until all that was left was your bare bones and your teeth and your hair.”

  That was the bit that Kenny liked the best, and he didn’t make any noises or do any actions.

  No, not quite the best. The second best. We weren’t at the best bit, yet.

  “So, the dare was stupid,” I said. “But kids are stupid. And there was one very stupid kid called Vinnie Tuck. Vinnie Tuck was the terror of the town. He used to steal from the shops and break windows and run up to girls and grab them where they didn’t want to be grabbed. He was always in trouble with the police, but not bad trouble, because his dad had loads of money and he always smoothed things over for Vinnie, the way you can when you’re rich.

  “Vinnie used to boast that he could swim across the pond as easy as he could piss across a puddle. And he said he was going to do it skinny – with no clothes on.

  “So, a load of Vinnie’s thick mates were there egging him on. He takes his clothes off, down to his undies, and then off they come, and all his mates give a cheer. It was spring time, March or April, and early in the morning so it was pretty cold, and so his thingy looked like a little blue acorn.

  “Then with a roar Vinnie Tuck splashed into the pond. He ran at first, where it was shallow, then slower when the water came up to his waist, and then he went into a crawl. And he was a pretty good swimmer, Vinnie, I’ll give him that. Fast and steady, and he put his head right in, even though he didn’t have any goggles.

  “But it was chilly, like I said. And the chill meant that soon his body started to go numb. And then he got the fear – that sense that things were just … wrong. His stroke became less steady. The voices of his mates were fainter, as he got further away, and as his ears filled with the slimy water.

  “And then he felt it – something long, moving past his leg. That first time it might not even have touched him – it could just have been the water, moved by whatever it was. But it was enough to make Vinnie stop dead and tread water, so he could look around.

  “Nothing.

  “He started again, trying to get back up to speed. But now his strokes were frantic and out of control. The next time it really did touch him. He was numb with the cold, but still he felt it – felt it the way you do when the dentist gives you a filling, and it shouldn’t hurt, but it does, it does.

  “The touch of it was both smooth and rough. Smooth because all fish have that coating of slime. Rough from the scales. It passed right under his belly, and it took seconds, he felt, to shift its great length from one side of him to the other, like when you slide your belt slowly out of your belt loops.

  “This time Vinnie didn’t stop. This time he thrashed with more and more frantic strokes. But he did look down, and he forced his eyes to stay open in the stinging, oily water. And he saw them. Not just one monster, but dozens of them. Pike of all sizes, making lazy turns in the water, keeping up with him with no effort at all. Vinnie screamed now, choked, coughed, screamed again. His friends had begun to run around the side of the pond so they could meet him at the far bank, and they sensed that something was horribly wrong.

  “Now Vinnie wished he’d kept his pants on. Even in his panic he never thought – never really thought – that the pike would pull him down and eat him, the way a shark would. But now he imagined the pike, the big one, spotting his thingy flapping in the water like a maggot or a worm. He imagined the pike opening its mouth, with its hundred needle-sharp teeth. He imagined the teeth closing around …

  “Vinnie was almost there. He tried to reach down with his toes, and he could just scrape the bottom, greasy with rotting weeds. Two more strokes and he’d be safe. At last his style came back to him. He reached forward into the water like an Olympic swimmer, going for gold. Then he pulled his hand back, to send his body surging forward like a torpedo. And then.

  “AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

  “The agony, the terrible agony.

  “Fire.

  “Ice.

  “Fire.

  “It was his thing. It’d got it. Teeth sliced, cut, crunched. The great jaws were twisting it free, the way a croc spins underwater to dismember the body of a drowned zebra.

  “At last Vinnie’s feet found the bottom again and he stood, staggered, fell, staggered again, splashed forward. He was screaming all the time, and his voice was going from a deep bellow to a high-pitched wail. He couldn’t look, couldn’t stand the thought of what was there.

  “And then he saw the faces of his mates. They were laughing. They were pointing. They were doubled up, out of control. One actually fell in the mud and rolled around.

  “At last Vinnie looked down. There it was, attached to his thing, holding on for dear life. A tiny pike, the size of a snapped pencil. It held on with teeth so thin you could almost see through them, and trickles of blood ran down Vinnie’s legs to mingle with the green water and the mud and the duckweed that were stuck to him.

  “If the sight of the tiny fish made his friends laugh fit to burst, it had a different effect on Vinnie. He lost his wits completely, running up and down the bank, too scared to even touch the fish. The last his friends saw of him was hi
s bare arse as he ran back along the lane towards the town, still screaming out his banshee wail.

  “In the town, people saw him running naked through the streets, and some thought they were imagining it, and some thought that they must be drunk. Most thought that it was Vinnie who was drunk or on drugs, but none of them saw the little fish. Maybe it had dropped off by then, or maybe it was just so much like his thing that they didn’t notice it. And Vinnie kept on running till he was out of the town, and the last the town saw of him was that bare white arse.”

  “And what happened to him next?” asked Kenny. His wild laughter had suddenly gone, like a summer shower.

  “Nobody knows,” I said. “Some say he lives in the woods around here and still has the little pike attached to him. I even heard that it’s still alive, the pike. It’s bigger now, and it lives like a vampire fish, sucking his blood, and it controls him. But I also heard he went to live with his mum in Leeds.”

  And by that time we’d reached the Bacon Pond itself – the real one, and not the one in the story.

  Five

  In winter, when the cold rain whipped across the water and the trees stood naked and alone like black skeletons, the Bacon Pond was a miserable sight. But now, at the end of summer, the weeping willows leaned over the banks, and reeds and rushes whispered, and swallows swooped so low down to catch flies that sometimes their wing-tips would make a tiny splash, and it was a good place to be.

  Tina thought so anyway. She sprinted up and down the bank on her little legs and snapped and growled at invisible enemies.

  “Keep that bloody dog under control.”

  The voice came from a bit further down the bank. It wasn’t loud, but it had a menace in it that made it carry. I looked and saw a man hunched over his fishing rod – one of those enormous ones that seem to stretch out for ever over the water. I couldn’t see the man’s face because the hood of his green anorak covered his head. He didn’t look at us as he spoke, but just kept staring out over Bacon Pond.