Isaac could feel a big, grey weight pressing down on him, but he could ignore it if he kept moving.  It was worst in the mornings, he’d found.  He’d have a few peaceful seconds and then then his wardrobe and the deodorant on his bedside table would come into focus and his heart would sink.  Oh.  I’m still here, then, and my face is still going to ache all day.  That was no way to start the morning.  Isaac wasn’t going to give those thoughts any more headspace than he had to.

Anyway, he had something else to think about now.  They’d found Fabric City.  They’d walked past it two or three times because the sign and display window were so unobtrusive, but they’d found it.  It was still there.

“We just need to be straightforward,” said Rosalyn, in that hushed, croaky voice of hers, as they stepped through the doors, “Let’s just go up to her and ask.”  She nodded towards the cashier, a tall, thin woman with long black hair.  She only looked a few years older than them.  Isaac didn’t know how she’d react to being asked for a list of every customer the shop had had in a particular year when she’d still been in school.

Luckily for them, there wasn’t a queue.  There were two or three customers knocking about, but they’d all gone off to opposite corners (dusty, cramped corners) of the shop, half-hidden behind aisles of material.  That gave Isaac and Rosalyn a straight line to the counter, and the woman behind it looked up and smiled as she saw them coming.

Rosalyn cleared her throat.  “So… bit of a weird question…”

“Hm?” said the cashier, but it was more of a polite squeak than anything.  The kind of noise that a pleasant customer-services mouse would make in a Disney film.

“I found this note in a book in the university library.  It’s written on the back of a Fabric City receipt.”  Rosalyn took the note out of the zip-up section in her bag, and handed it to the cashier.  “I know it’s a long shot, but do you think…?”

The cashier’s eyes lit up as soon as she saw the writing.  “Kelpie and Silkie!” she gasped.

Isaac gave a start.  He had not seen that coming.

“Do you know who wrote it?” asked Rosalyn, with the kind of smile that could blind you if you looked at it directly.  She hadn’t seen it coming, either.  According to all reasonable expectations, the cashier should have spent the next few minutes repeatedly explaining that, no, she had no resources with which to match a twelve-year-old receipt with a specific customer, and she wasn’t being paid enough to try.  She shouldn’t have instantly known what was going on before Rosalyn had even finished her question.

“I’m afraid not, but…”  The cashier put the receipt gently down on the counter, as if she was being extra careful not to rip it.  “Oh, this is so interesting.  There’s some graffiti on the wall around the back of the shop, and it’s signed ‘Kelpie and Silkie’ too.”

“Really?”  Rosalyn leaned a little way across the counter.  “What does it say?”

“I can show you!  If you just wait two minutes…”  She glanced up at the clock.  “My break starts soon.  Would you like me to take you to see it?”

For a moment, Isaac wondered if it was really a good idea to go into a back alley near a grubby little shop with a complete stranger.  Just because someone seemed enthusiastic and friendly didn’t mean they weren’t planning to knock you out and steal your organs.  But it would have taken a stronger man than him to look at Rosalyn’s expression right now and say anything negative.  “Yeah,” he said with a smile, “Sounds great, thanks.”

*

“I’d never have screwed it up like that if I’d known she was still looking,” Natalie told Mariam.  They were in the kitchen at Pallas House, comparing notes.  Apparently, they’d both encountered the Oakmen, and at more or less the same time, as well.  They must have covered every corner of campus with those flyers.  “But I don’t know why she was still looking!  She must have known that not everyone would keep the leaflets after she gave them out, right?”

Mariam shrugged.  “Who can say?  I had to pretty much talk the guy into giving me mine.”  There were three of them in the kitchen this afternoon- Natalie at the table, reading a book for her course, Alex pouring Mr Muscle down the sink so that it might actually start draining again, and Mariam at the cupboard, trying to remember what ingredients you needed for a flapjack.  In the midst of it all, in practically the exact centre of the room, Mariam’s mauve leaflet sat on the table.

“What did you say his name was?” asked Alex, “Shane something?”

“Shaun.  Er, Mandeville, he said.”  Mariam didn’t think she’d heard that name before.  It sounded nice- kind of fancy and distinctive.

Alex pressed his lips together and shook his head.  “Mm.  Doesn’t ring a bell,” he said, as if he expected to know the name of every single student at the university when Mariam didn’t even know everyone on her course.  “What about the other guy?  Do you think you’d know him if you saw him again?”

“Dunno.  Maybe.”  She wasn’t particularly confident about that.  There must have been a couple of thousand short guys with brown hair coming through the student union every day.  “Why would I want to, anyway?”

“So you can ask him why he assumed that a girl with scratches on her arms must have put them there herself.”  Alex’s mouth was fixed in a grim half-smile.  “It must have been an interesting set of experiences that led him to that conclusion.”

“Nah,” said Natalie, “He just sounds like one of those guys who’s convinced that everyone else is stupider than him.”  She tutted.  “Girls especially.  And that’s why they won’t go out with him…”

Mariam laughed.  “Anyway,” he said, picking up the leaflet again, “It says here the next meeting’s on Friday.”

“You thinking of going?” asked Natalie.

“Why not?  They seem nice enough.”

Natalie’ mouth curled into a smile.  “But they might make you talk about your favourite spoon…”

Mariam grinned, and looked over at the washing-up waiting to be done on the counter.  “Whichever one’s clean and not covered with those weird rust spots, that’s my favourite.”

*

The cashier, whose name had turned out to be Judith, led them around the corner and into an alley, which did nothing for Isaac’s fears of organ-harvesting.  She turned her head and beckoned them to follow her with an eager smile and a fluttery hand motion, which allowed him to comfort himself with the thought that at least he’d be murdered by a cheerful serial killer.  At the end of the alley was a tall wooden gate, and Judith took a set of keys out of her pocket to unlock it.  “I don’t know how long it’s been there,” she told them, looking over her shoulder as she fiddled with the lock, “It could be older than the receipt you found, for all I know.  Nobody I work with’s been here for more than five years, so…  Ah, here we are.”  She opened the gate and led them through.  “And there it is.”

They were in a small, miserable triangle of concrete bordered by wooden walls on two sides and the back of Fabric City on the third.  But there, on the wall, there was a message in black spray-paint.  If only the strong survive, nobody will- Kelpie and Silkie.

Isaac heard a little gasping noise to his left.  When he looked over, he saw that Rosalyn was staring at the wall with tears in her eyes.

*

Denny kept thinking about Mr Rivers, his old English teacher, and what had happened when Denny had corrected somebody else without putting his hand up in one of his lessons.  Mr Rivers hadn’t been the sort of teacher who started yelling at you straight away.  He’d gone silent and tight-lipped for about twenty seconds, and then let everything out in a steady stream of venom.  “Bad enough that you disrupted the class, but you did it for the worst possible reason.  You thought that everyone needed to take a break from their learning to appreciate how clever you are.  Do you think people care that much about what you have to say?  Do you honestly think anyone’s impressed?”

It had felt like a knife between his ribs, but he still hadn’t learned.  The more Denny thought about it, the more certain he was that most of the problems in his life stemmed from him wanting to show other people how clever he was.  And he was never quite as clever as he thought he was, was he?

Today wasn’t one of those days when Jonathan or Tavia made him go out somewhere, so Denny stayed in his room, looking up at the ceiling.  If Jonathan and Tavia had any sense, they’d have made it so the door locked from the outside and then never let him out.  Instead, they just came upstairs and checked he was alright every hour.  Denny tried to be OK with that.  If he got one of those blackouts, there would be plenty of people between him and the front door.  It would be fine.

If Alex was here, he’d tell him not to worry about that.  Denny knew Alex meant well- of course he did- but he’d given up trying to talk to him about the blackouts and anything like them, because Alex had an excuse for everything.  Either it had been understandable under the circumstances, or it hadn’t happened how Denny remembered it, or it was OK because no-one had actually got hurt.  As if it was possible for Denny to never have done anything wrong in his life.  As if he was some kind of perfect saint.  Ridiculous.

He remembered Pinder, years ago, giving him a cool, disappointed look and saying, “I hope this is just a one-off and not you finally showing us who you really are.”  Denny had tried to make it a one-off, really he had, but it was just a part of who he was.  It was stuck fast and long since gone rotten.