It’s late, I’ve had a few, and I can’t sleep.
Tomorrow’s the inquest into the death of my best mates son. My god child and all round great kid…
I’ve got to be there to give a character statement on Carl - A friend of mine since the first day of school – and his wife, on whether there might have been ‘foul play’ involved in Noah’s death.
And honestly…I don’t know.
I can’t stop thinking about it, replaying the story as Carl told it to me…Mostly, I can’t stop thinking about the shoes.
Everything I know, I know second hand from Carl, so I’ll tell you what he told me…and maybe you could let me know what you make of it because…I just don’t know.
Carl was a guy I’d have trusted with my life.
Last year he bought a new house with his wife Sooz. It was never in a million years the kind of house I’d imagine Carl buying; an old tumble down little thing with a thatch roof in the ass end of nowhere Devon. A beautiful house no mistaking, with wooden beams, buckets of character, acres of garden to get lost in, in a village where everyone knows everyone…nice, just not very Carl.
I can see what drew them though, they needed the space. Noah was fast approaching 8 and his younger brother Archie was a five year old wrecking ball. Add a heavily pregnant Sooz and a cat into the mix and London just wasn’t an option any more.
I went to visit in their first week after moving. Everywhere was still a mess of boxes but you could see how happy they all were about the potential for the place. It wasn’t without it’s drawbacks. The floorboards were uneven and groaned under the slightest pressure. The layout was maze like and some times it felt like there was no knowing where a corridor was leading you before you’d somehow been turned back on yourself. The thick walls made wifi a nightmare and the house didn’t warm evenly…in fact some areas were downright freezing. It was the tail end of a balmy summer and I’d gone to get some more beers from their garage when I noticed that first ‘cold patch’. Hits-you-in-the-bones cold.
I’d mentioned it to Carl and he laughed. “Yeah we’ve noticed them…never in the same place twice though. You can be walking the house, any time of day or night and it’s like you’ve walked into the bloody Baltic.” Sooz nodded in agreement but she didn’t laugh.
“The weirdest one was the other night. I was the last one up watching Match of the Day…hadn’t shifted from the armchair in a fair few hours and it was like…the cold spot walked into me!”
With hindsight…I don’t know if any of that is relevant. It was just my first recollection of that old house. The first really strange thing happened about 2 days after that.
I was helping Carl returf the garden while his boys raced around playing a game involving pirates. We’d been working for a few hours when we both noticed the kids game had stopped and they were both stood perfectly still, starring down at one of the flower beds.
Carl shrugged and we both went over to see what had paused their game.
What struck me first was how oddly still they had both become…they didn’t seem to notice the first time Carl asked “Whose shoes are those?”
Noah still had the trowel in his hand. The two of them had been digging in the flower bed and now in front of us was a hole that was nearly a 3 feet wide and 1 deep, and filled with shoes.
Carl stooped down to pick one up.
“This isn’t yours is it?” He asked Noah, brandishing a old black leather shoe with an enormous buckle. Noah shook his head. Of course it wasn’t his shoe; it was perhaps the right size for an 8 yr olds foot but it was far too old to belong to any of them.
Carl lifted out another one, shaking out the earth that filled it. Another shoe that belonged to a different time. I’m no expert but it wouldn’t have surprised me to find that either of those shoes was more than 100yrs old.
Carl sent the kids inside and together we excavated the rest of the flower bed. We found twenty pairs of shoes that day. All of them made for children’s feet, each a different style and shape, some poor and beaten, some expensive and finessed, and all of them for children.
Carl was clearly alarmed and I can see his eyes start to roam around the rest of the garden wondering what else might be buried out there.
Whatever Carl said about the shoes to Sooz was a conversation behind closed doors. That night we went out to the pub and spent most of the evening reading what google had to say about ‘children’s shoes buried in the garden’.
The suggestions ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous: dodgy landfill, serial killer calling cards, plague cleansing, Victorian wards to keep spirits away, fertility rituals.
We took turns reading them out while we drank…
It had been a good night and we’d laughed, but maybe we should have paid more attention.
After that the shoes were kept inside. They made a small little display of them, tasselled together on old bits of rope around the fire place. Sooz thought they were quirky.
In the months that followed there were other strange things that Carl would text me about.
He said he’d got up around 4am one night needing the toilet and smelt smoke on the way back to the bedroom. He did a once over of the house and became convinced that the smell was coming from a free standing pot plant in the kitchen. It was a little shrub that they’d had for longer than they’d had Noah.
After a lot of sniffing Carl said there was no question it was coming from the plant and when he pulled it out of the pot saw that the entire root system was ablaze. “Like the soil was full of fluorescent worms”.
Neither of them had any idea how that could have happened but were relieved they caught it in time given how flammable all the old timber and thatching was.
A week or so later they found the wasp nest. Sooz was cleaning in the lounge, trying to sponge out a mark on the wall when she heard the buzzing. The spot she was sponging gave way completely revealing a throbbing wasps nest.
Carl sent me a voice message: “maddest thing man, don’t know if you’ve ever seen a wasp nest. They’re a bit like beavers apparently in that they’ll carry back all sorts of material to make it, but the nest was bright red and pulsing. Sooz thought she’d found like…some kind of organs pulsing in the walls at first and wouldn’t stop screaming that the house was alive…it’s fucked up. All good though. Exterminators yesterday and they reckon they’ve got them all…just need to keep an eye on it. Weird that nothing came up in the surveys about this though…not like the solicitors were cheap!”
Then the cat went missing. First day that Noah went to try out his new school, he came home calling for George and ran around the whole house but the cat was nowhere to be seen. Big fat old thing, not prone to long adventures, or leaving the house at all really, a London cat that liked its creature comforts – just gone. They put signs up around the village and Noah requested that there was some kind of reward for the finder but it stayed gone.
On Halloween Carl and Sooz took the kids trick or treating around the village. They were starting to really settle into village life and getting involved in things that they had never done in London. They come home, swagbags bulging with little chocolates, to find a cat sat on the doorstep outside their house.
Not George…nothing like George. This cat was sleek, lithe and ‘mean looking’ as Sooz put it. But Noah had burst into tears and immediately started hugging and kissing ‘new George’ insisting that it had to come inside and that ‘the cat had chosen them!’.
“What are you going to do?” I’d laughed down the phone. I’d never had kids of my own and with the state of my love life it’s doubtful I ever will.
“Well fuck man, I don’t know! Obviously that is someone’s cat isn’t it! We can’t just HAVE it. I tried to explain this to Noah and he said that the person can have the cat back when they come for it! And that was a week ago now…I’m just worried no one will come and we’ll be stuck with this new cat who…really is a bit of a bastard.”
We’d laughed. And that was the last time I heard Carl laugh. Maybe will ever hear Carl laugh…because the next strange thing that happened was that Noah died.
Carl said that he’d been sleeping when it happened, but Sooz woke him in a blind panic not knowing exactly what was wrong but that ‘something had happened’.
They went to Noah’s room first and saw that he was sound asleep in bed, and then went downstairs because they’d heard a bang.
The door to the garden was wide open and the strange black cat was prowling around near the flower beds. Carl said they never noticed this at the time…probably not until a few days later, but all the shoes were around the fire place were gone…All of Noah’s shoes were missing as well.
Then they heard a little giggle coming from upstairs and ran back up to find little Archie sat on the toilet with his trousers around his ankles.
“What are you doing Arch” Sooz had asked.
Apparently happy little Archie pointed down the hallway behind them and said that he “wanted to join the daisy line” because it looked fun.
Neither Carl or Sooz understood what this meant.
“All the kids were arm in arm like a daisy chain and they went dancing down the corridor. They went in and out of all the rooms and I missed it because I was in here and I was laughing because they went into Noah’s room and out he came…he got to join the daisy line…didn’t look like he was having fun though.”
Carl told me that this was when his heart really started to race. He said that a cold patch had settled over them…over the whole corridor.
“Maybe it was because the leader was so mean. He had such a mean face even though the dance was fun…and he made sure that all the children kept dancing and dancing and dancing and if they stopped he whacked their little toes with his sharp stick.”
Out of all the questions that Carl had wanted to ask…what children, what leader, what one earth are you talking about!…All he had actually said was “Noah!” before spring off down the corridor back to his first child’s room!
“Maybe we can catch up with them all in the garden?” Was the last thing Sooz remembers Archie saying from the toilet.
Carl tore into Noah’s room and the boy was still lying in bed, just as they’d seen him the first time they’d check…but this time Carl went right to his bedside. Sure enough Noah had no pulse, his little chest no longer rising and falling…a cold patch had settled into the room and his cold dead little body.
Cot death…or infant death is what people keep calling it. Noah was really too old for that but according to the doctors ‘sometimes these things happen’. According to the doctors this can also be exacerbated by neglect, abuse or trauma from the care providers… so tomorrow is Carl’s inquest to see if either him or Sooz had a hand in this.
And…
I don’t know.
They both tell anyone who will listen these stories. These strange happenings in the house and what Archie had said about the dancing children that night.
And everyone smiles and nods at these poor broken parents and wonders exactly what I’m wondering right now.
Was there something else going on?
And around this whole shit show I’m trying to help organise Noah’s funeral. Sooz said that if I looked up in the attic I’d find his little black suit that they bought him for a wedding a while back and a little box with some smart black shoes.
I found the suit but the box was empty.
And the most fucked up thing…is I think I know exactly where those shoes are and I cannot bring myself to look.