The Ghost Page A

Subsidence had failed in its effort to topple the dividing wall and was now redirecting its energies towards the foundations. Barefoot, Cook tiptoe-surfed the undulating stonework and hitched himself up onto the rubber lid of the dustbin propped against the gate. Here, in one of the planet’s least salubrious sun-traps, Cook raised his face to the mild morning beams, eyes closed, gnawing through the cereal. As the sun’s position shifted, casting him in the chilly shadow of the outside-toilet roof, he abandoned his bowl and crouched down to investigate the surrounding mound of heavy house-bricks which Uncle Russell used to hold the bin in place. He heaved up the largest rock and flipped it over, scattering a crowd of woodlice. Most of the creatures made it into the safety of the paving cracks, but one had been tipped onto its back and was scurrying and thrashing its legs in an attempt to correct itself. Cook captured it with a gentle pinch, slowly lifted himself upright, and studied the brickwork of the leaning wall. He found a recently re-spun spider-web, hung horizontally like a hammock, spanning the interior of a crevice. He reached in and precisely – almost tenderly – positioned the woodlouse in the sagging centre of the structure, where it immediately intensified its wriggling. The movement only ensnared it more deeply, and it gradually mummified itself inside a ball of gummy webbing which restricted its struggle to sporadic spasms.
    Cook turned his head to the side – he knew his breathing could cause unnatural vibration. And then –
there!
– in the web’s darkest corner, four sharp and spindly protrusions appeared instantly
,
as if by materialisation. Within seconds, a burly spider emerged, gripping the woodlouse and biting it into submission. Next door, Mr Smith launched into a deathly-dry coughing fit, but Cook could not be distracted. He gaped as the spider detached its prey – his offering – from the surface of the web and dragged it deep into its lightless lair.
    Mr Smith coughed and coughed and coughed, and Cook heard him stumble into the kitchen, run a tap and, after a pause, burst into a more lubricated splutter which quickly degraded back to its arid origin. He grabbed the cereal bowl and skimmed across the jagged ground, back into the house, through the kitchen and into the living room. Rusty twitched at the commotion, but stayed low and bundled, greeting him with a limp tail-flap. Cook lunged at the TV and cranked the volume on an episode of the cartoon serial
Arabian Knights
. Still, Mr Smith coughed and coughed, but now his distress was at least dampened by cheap incidental music and regular waves of canned laughter.
    â€œSize of a buffalo!”
    Cook was breathing heavily. He thought of the spider, deep in the dilapidated wall – undisturbed, enjoying his breakfast in the dark, injecting liquidising venom, feasting on the nutritious mush.
    Later that morning, Cook dragged his kick-scooter through the parlour and out of the front door onto the hot pavement. As he fiddled with the door-lock, the scooter slowly keeled over, as if wilting in the staring sun. He snatched it up and clattered off to Lisa Goldstraw’s house. Esther had still not yielded to his regular bicycle request, and he felt conspicuous and overgrown on the rusty red device – particularly in the solar spotlight.
    He trundled past the abandoned butcher’s shop (still not looking) with both legs on the scooter platform, side-on. He turned the corner and scraped his way up the steeper, scrub-lined lower avenue which peeled off to the right, up to Lowther Street – Brereton’s road – and beyond, to the forbidden jumble of industrial waste known as the marl-hole. He veered left, up past the newsagent at the corner of Denbigh Street, hiding his scooter shame by clattering up the cobbled entries that separated the brown and grey terraces. He soon emerged at the edge of the