Isaac’s first lecture on Tuesdays was at ten.  He didn’t know if the man had found that out somehow and made sure to be standing behind his front gate at twenty to, or if he’d have been prepared to stand there all morning on the off-chance that he’d come by.  Either way, when Isaac passed by the house on the corner with the green blinds, there was a man out front, staring right at him.

“Been meaning to talk to you,” said the man.  It was hard to tell how old he was.  He had grey hair and the kind of thick, square glasses that Isaac associated with Seventies comedians, but you could see his muscles right through his T-shirt.

Isaac stopped where he was.  Five months him and his friends had lived here, and they’d never once seen any of the people who lived in the house with the green blinds.  Just heard their arguments and seen their rubbish on the lawn.  For all they’d known, there weren’t any people living in the house, and it was just haunted by a particularly messy poltergeist.  “…Yeah?”

The man leaned on the gate.  “The other night, I was coming home late, and I saw some suspicious types hanging around yours.  Looked as if they were trying to get over the fence into the garden.”  He smacked his lips as he thought.  “About half past midnight, this would have been.”

“Right,”  Isaac glanced at the end of the road, wondering how late he was going to be.  “When you say ‘suspicious’…”

“All dressed in black.  A couple of those black knit caps on.”  His lips smacked again.  “Twitchy, too.  Jumped about a mile in the air when they saw I was looking their way.”

“Then what happened?”

“They made themselves scarce, pretty quick.”  At a guess, the man was probably about sixty.  Maybe a bit younger, if you assumed he just had one of those faces that gets lines early on.  “Just wanted to talk to you about it.  It didn’t seem right for you not to know.  Not with all those girls in the house.”

“Right,” said Isaac.  In the front garden, behind the man, there were still little scraps of rubbish left over from the big pile a few weeks ago.

“Your mums and dads would want someone keeping an eye on you,” said the man, “Making sure you’re safe.”

And now he was really getting on Isaac’s nerves.  “Right…  Well, thanks,” he said, and began to walk away.

The man didn’t seem to notice.  “Got to look out for yourself, in this world.  Only way to survive is to be the scariest thing in the jungle.”

“Right,” said Isaac, taking another few steps away.

“Mark my words.  Only way to survive.”  The man turned round and began to wander back to the house.  Isaac made sure to get away quickly in case he decided to come back.

*

Rosalyn had got in touch with Judith and told her about Ben Sugar’s news.  The old railway bridge, somewhere in the woods, somewhere near Croydon.  When Judith suggested picking a random bit of woodland and seeing if they could find it, she’d probably just meant it as a joke.  But to Rosalyn, it sounded like a fantastic idea.

“So, what’s the plan?” asked Rosalyn, as they passed through the gate that separated the wood from the pavement, “Just wander about until we find something?”

Judith made an odd face, pressing her lips together and sticking them out like a duck.  “Hm…  The ‘finding something’ part isn’t actually necessary.”

Until tomorrow, it was still February, which meant that it was still cold.  But that didn’t stop it from being the sunniest day since October.  As Rosalyn and Judith got further into the woods, the light shadows cast by the branches cast ever more intricate patterns on the ground.  Spring was getting ready to come.

“I don’t know the names of any of these trees,” said Rosalyn, by way of small talk.

Judith hummed again.  “Well, that one’s a hawthorn.  They’re supposed to keep away ghosts.”

Rosalyn looked over at the spindly tree she’d pointed at.  It looked a little shabby without its leaves.  “Just ghosts?  Does it work on anything else?”

Judith shrugged.  “I don’t think anyone’s ever tested it.”  Judith had told Rosalyn that she was twenty-one.  She didn’t look it.  Or maybe she did, and Rosalyn was just really bad at judging people’s ages.  Both were possible.

There was something about her- maybe her smile, maybe her athletic build, maybe just the fact that she was wearing a skirt outside in February- that made Rosalyn think of characters in Enid Blyton books.  There was something about her that made you wonder if she was about to whip out a bottle of ginger beer and ask you to play hockey or solve a mystery.  She was the sort of person it was good to wander round the woods with. 

“What are we going to do if it rains?” asked Rosalyn, “Other than get wet, I mean.”

“Well, if we’ve found the railway bridge by then, we can hide under it til it stops.”

“That’s another thing I’ve been wondering about.”  They’d come to a sort of mini-hill, more of a rocky slope than anything else, and Rosalyn had to watch her footing so that she didn’t over-balance.  “If it’s a railway bridge, then what’s it doing in the woods?  Wouldn’t they have cut the trees back to let the railway through?”

“I don’t know,” said Judith.  They reached the bottom of the slope, and relaxed a little.  “We’re sort of going on third-hand information, aren’t we?  What Isaac said about what Ben Sugar said.”

“Yeah,” said Rosalyn.  She sighed.  “I still feel a bit guilty doing this without Isaac.  After he was the one who got all that information for us.”  She’d asked him to come, but he’d said he had lectures, and he’d come along some other time.  With that in mind, Rosalyn almost hoped they didn’t find the railway bridge today.  It felt like Isaac should be a part of that.  “But you mean there might have been a miscommunication, right?  Like, maybe it’s not really a railway bridge, but Ben Sugar picked the wrong word to describe it.”

“Maybe.  Or maybe it’s just a disused bit of railway that’s had all this grow up around it.  I’ve seen things like that before.”

“Me too.  There’s one near my grandma’s house in Oxford, an old wooden one.  Me and my brother used to walk along it and scare ourselves by pretending the train was about to come through.”  Rosalyn remembered staring into the distance, imagining that a random set of shapes on the horizon was an old steam engine, seventy or eighty years late.

Judith laughed, in a way that made her duck her head and show her front teeth.  “Did you ever see Stand By Me?  With the scene on the…”

“…railway bridge!  I can’t watch that bit!”

“Because how would you escape?  There’s a fifty-foot drop into the water…”

“You’d just have to decide whether or not that was worse than being squashed by a train.”  Rosalyn pantomimed a shiver. 

Up ahead of them were a row of bushes, a lighter green than the trees around them, and behind that was a row of fields.  It was just a few yards into the first field that Rosalyn saw the signpost.

It was about knee-high (the perfect height to trip over if you weren’t watching where you were going), and covered in chipped red paint.  In faded gold letters, it said, Chimps’ Tea Party 100 Yds.  An arrow pointed right, towards a nearby hill.

Rosalyn and Judith looked up from the sign and exchanged a glance.  Judith was the first one to speak.  “D’you think it’s still there?”

“The chimps’ tea party?”  Rosalyn looked back at the sign.  It was old- you could tell.  Of course, it would have looked pretty weathered even if it had only been outside for two weeks, but this sign had the look of something that had swollen and cracked every time it had rained in the last ten years.  Rosalyn found herself wondering how long chimps actually lived.  “It can’t be a real chimps’ tea party, can it?”

Judith shrugged.  “Probably not.”

“Do you think somebody stole it from a zoo and then put it where it would point right at their friend’s house?”

Judith laughed.

They began to follow the path, towards the hill and then up its side.  As they got closer, they saw that there was a small black building at the top, all canopies and verandas.  “Is that a pagoda?” asked Rosalyn.

“I think so,” said Judith, “It looks like it’s hexagon-shaped, doesn’t it?”

Rosalyn didn’t know if that was a requirement for something to be a pagoda, so she just said, “Hmm.”

Under the veranda, the building itself was covered in full-length windows, making it look like a cage at the zoo.  And inside the building…

“Do you think it’s taxidermy?” asked Judith in a whisper, as if she was worried about waking the chimps up.

“It definitely looks like it,” said Rosalyn, remembering the animals at the museum last week.  These chimps weren’t as well-put together as those ones, though.  Their mouths gaped.  Their eyes were at different heights.  The teacups hung from their hands at strange angles.  “It looks like something from a horror movie,” she said, “Isaac would have loved this.”

They looked around for a plaque or a sign on the wall that would tell them who’d put this together, but they couldn’t find one.  It was anonymous, just like Kelpie and Silkie.

Later, as they were walking back, Justine asked, “Does your university have a newspaper?”

Your university, Rosalyn noticed.  “Yeah, ‘The Bell’.  Why?”

“Well, you could apply to start a weekly column.  All the strange things you’ve seen on the trail of Kelpie and Silkie.”

Rosalyn grinned.  “I think that might just convince everyone that I was a bit nuts.”

“Go on.  I bet there isn’t anything half as interesting in it at the moment.”

“Mm.”  Rosalyn looked sideways at Judith, and asked the question that had been on her mind for a while.  “You never went to Berrylands, did you?”

“I never went to any university.  Couldn’t sit still for long enough.”  She laughed.  “I think I just naturally took to the working world.  Going out and making your fortune.”

“But that’s my idea of hell, having to stand behind a desk all day and talk to people.”

“Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.”  They’d come to the edge of the woods, where the pavement started again.

“Yeah… some people’s idea of hell might be to walk through the woods for hours and run into a bunch of taxidermied monkeys.”

Judith laughed again.  Rosalyn didn’t remember the last time she’d made someone laugh so much.  “You know they’re apes.  Not monkeys.”

“I don’t think that’s the point.”

“And I meant it about the newspaper, you know.  They’re probably crying out for decent content.  You’d be doing them a favour.”

Rosalyn smiled.  “We’ll see.”

*

It was two hours before Mariam got to clock off, and she wasn’t sure how she’d get through it without killing somebody.  She was concentrating firmly on sorting out the till, while Claire stood behind her, droning on in that way that made her sound as if her nostrils had been glued shut.  “It was supposed to be about Bertolt Brecht, right?  But all he did was try and relate it back to George W Bush.”

“Sounds annoying,” said Mariam.

“I mean, if it was up to me, I’d place an embargo on any more George W Bush jokes.  They’ve all been told already.  But Edwin actually got really angry.”  She pronounced it an-graaay.  “He said he was sick of only ever hearing one side of the story.  You know, talking about a left-wing bias.”

“He got that from a few George Bush jokes?”

“At the time, I was like, ‘Oh, come on,’ but I thought about it, and, you know what, he’s actually right.  You only ever hear one side of the story.”  Claire waved a hand at the nearest wall.  “I mean, look at these posters.  They’re all about freeing political prisoners and marching against the government, but if a Christian group tried to put a poster up in here…”

“They’d be fine,” said Mariam, trying not to sound surly, “There are loads of Christian groups on campus.”

“Yeah, but none of them ever put up posters in here.  Because they know how they’d be treated if they did.”

“I’m pretty sure they’d be fine.”

“I just don’t like it when they use lectures to push an agenda.  We’re paying to learn, not to have the lecturers’ opinions shoved down our throats.”

Mariam didn’t think that a couple of George W Bush jokes constituted throat-shoving.  You didn’t even have to be left-wing to think the man was an idiot- you just had to be observant.

Adrian came in from the kitchen, and instantly snorted in disgust.  “Look at that,” he said, nodding towards a group of girls sitting near the pool table, “Corpse Bride Barbie.”

The girls (who made up approximately thirty per cent of the customers in the Student Union this afternoon) all had dyed hair, heavy eye makeup, and bags and sweaters covered in the names of weird metal bands Mariam had only vaguely heard of.  They seemed to be minding their own business.

Robin, who’d been restocking the glasses under the bar, let out one of his honky-donkey laughs.

“Guarantee you, this time last week they were listening to Girls Aloud,” Adrian continued, “It’s all just a trend.”  He grimaced.  “And they actually think that’s how the world works.  Deluded children.”

Robin grunted in agreement.  “Hate stuff like that.  They’ll be sitting there talking about My Chemical Romance, and I’ll be like, stop now, before you embarrass yourself.”

Claire tutted.  “Yeah.  I mean, for some of us, it’s actually about the music?  Not just the pretty men?”

 “Nothing but unreflected fangirl wank,” concluded Adrian.  He wasn’t even bothering to keep his voice down.  The Weird Metal Band girls couldn’t have been more than three or four yards away.

It took Mariam a moment to decide what she was actually going to say.  Adrian, I actually like having customers.  Adrian, are you trying to get us fired?  In the end, she went with, “Adrian, if that lot put in a complaint, I’m not going to defend you.”

Adrian spluttered in outrage. “Suit yourself,” he said, with an air of great dignity.

“What’s the matter with you today?” Robin asked her.

Mariam made a split-second decision, and stepped out from behind the bar so that she could go up to the Weird Metal Band girls and clear away their empty glasses.  She told herself that she just wanted to subtly check that they hadn’t heard what Adrian had said and felt hurt, but she knew, deep down, that she also wanted to terrify him a little bit. 

“Everything alright?” she asked, transferring the glasses to her little black tray.

“Yeah, thanks,” said one of the girls.  Her friends variously nodded and held up their half-full glasses in a toast.

Out of the corner of her eye, Mariam could see Adrian shitting bricks.  She decided to linger for a few seconds longer.  “Oh, I can’t remember if you were told or not- you get a free refill on any non-alcoholic drinks.”

“Yeah, they did say.”  The girl smiled.

“Cool.  Good to know.”  Mariam turned around and went back to the bar, enjoying the scandalised gawp on Adrian’s stupid face.

“What did you do?” he whispered.

Claire was gawping too, in sympathy.  “Mariam!  You didn’t…”

Mariam walked past them into the kitchen, aiming to clear out the dishwasher now that things were quiet.  Adrian followed her in.  “Mariam, I swear to God, if you said anything to them…”

Mariam turned round and looked him in the eye.  They never expected you to do that.  “What?”

No reply.  Adrian, frozen mid-threat, shuffled a little awkwardly.  “So you didn’t, then?”

“Just let me do my job.”  Mariam turned her back on him and opened the dishwasher.

*

Rosalyn knocked on Isaac’s door. “I’m taking my laundry down. Do you have anything that needs to go in?”

Isaac’s voice came through the wood. “No, that’s ok.”

“Alright.” Rosalyn shifted the basket in her arms and walked on. She was a bit worried about Isaac at the moment. He never wanted to talk for long, and when he did talk, it always seemed to be with a weird, falsely-happy sheen over everything he said. Once again, Rosalyn wished he’d been able to come with her and Judith today. It might have cheered him up a bit.

The laundry room (if you could call it that) was in between Isaac’s room and the kitchen. It had a paved floor, bare plaster on the walls, and no heating. It felt like an afterthought. Apart from the washing machine, the only things in it were two doors- one for the downstairs toilet and the other for the garden. It was the one room in the house where you always had to wear shoes.

Rosalyn crouched down and started loading her clothes into the machine. She thought about what Judith had said earlier. Maybe the paper really would take her on as a writer. Natalie was always complaining about the articles in it. There had been one last month that had blamed Theodore from The Chipmunks for the child obesity epidemic, and Natalie hadn’t stopped grinding her teeth for days. Rosalyn was pretty confident she could do better than that.

She pressed the button to start it, and spotted something on the wall. It was grey, half-hidden behind the machine, and exactly at Rosalyn’s eyeline when she was crouched down like this.

She moved closer, and saw that it was a message written in pencil. If you have trouble with the Oakmen, go to Isaac’s boss – Kelpie and Silkie.