Halloween short story exclusive: The Last Boy to Leave by Sophie Hannah

This story comes from 'The Visitors Book: And Other Ghost Stories'

Illustration by Matt Murphy

We always have Max's birthday party at our house, and the parents of his friends always tell us, as they drop off their children at the appointed time, how brave we are. Not brave at all, I say – simply not in favour of fun barns and soft-play centres and all other soulless party venues of that ilk, so what choice do we have? I'm not old- fashioned about many things, but I like the idea of my son celebrating his birthday in his home, surrounded by family and friends.

"We're going to have to go through it all again, you know," I warned Greg an hour before the party was due to start.

He looked up from his newspaper. "What?"

"The whole rather-you-than-me, aren't-you-brave rigmarole. People will think we're only doing it to show off our house."

"But this is the first year we've had a big house," said Greg. "We did it when we lived in a two-bedroom flat."

"Yes, but this lot won't know that. All the people coming are from Max's school – they've only known us since we moved here."

My husband sighed. "What do you want me to say, Jen? It's an insoluble problem. Why don't you hand out the phone numbers of some of our friends from Manchester? That way anyone who wants to can ring up and request proof that we hosted parties even when we were poor."

He was right: what did it matter what people thought? It was wonderful to be able to do it properly this year. Instead of being crammed in and chaotic, we had all the rooms we needed. The magician – uninspiringly named Magical Steve – would be in the TV den with the boys. The girls would be in the dining room with Michelle, the beautician, having intricate patterns painted on their fingernails and toenails. I had laid out wine and snacks in the lounge for any grown-ups who wanted to stay, and Greg's and my bedroom had been designated the coat room. The playroom would be the venue for the children's party tea, and any presents people brought could pile up in the kitchen, where the goody bags were already waiting in neat rows. All you need for a successful party, I thought to myself proudly, is a big enough house and good organisational skills.

The doorbell rang. I looked at my watch. Ten past three. The party wasn't supposed to start until four. Greg went to answer the door. He reappeared a few seconds later looking alarmed. "Magical Steve's here," he hissed. "What should I tell him?"

"He can set up in the TV den," I said. "It's fine. Offer him a cup of tea."

Greg didn't seem to agree that it was fine. He groaned when the doorbell rang again at three fifteen. "No one's supposed to arrive till four. This is going to be a nightmare. Can't you feel it slipping out of our grasp already? Party hasn't even started yet."

I caught a glimpse of Magical Steve behind him, dragging a folded black-topped table into the hall, scratching the wallpaper. "Don't exaggerate," I said, determinedly smiling. What did Greg expect? That we'd open our front door on the dot of four o'clock and find all Max's classmates waiting in silence in jackets and bow ties?

The doorbell rang again at twenty past three and again at half past. I wasn't sure of the names of the early arrivals – Alex and Caleb were my best guesses; Max had only been at the school for a month – but they immediately began to run around the house emitting loud whoops. Max, at any rate, was pleased to see them, and immediately transformed himself into a savage in accordance with the time-honoured imitation-flattery model. Greg shouted, "No need to make so much noise, boys!" Max had the grace to look sheepish but maybe-Alex and maybe-Caleb paid no attention. Their parents had vanished into the darkening winter afternoon. "Did you invite them in?" I interrogated Greg. "Did you tell them there was a buffet for parents upstairs?"

"No. They were gone before I had a chance to say anything."

I stuck my head into the TV den to check on Magical Steve. He'd taken off his coat and was putting on a waistcoat: sparkly gold stars on shiny red fabric. There were large sweat stains on the armpits of his white shirt. I was about to offer him a drink when I heard a loud crash that sounded as if it had come from Max's bedroom. Two children's coats lay on the hall floor. I picked them up and threw them at Greg. "Take these to the coat room. I'll go and persuade the boys to calm down." My voice, I noticed, had taken on a desperate tone – the kind you hear in submarine disaster movies when the protagonists realise that water is pouring into the cabin.

Getting to the front door was out of the question. I was too far away and my son was still screaming

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The doorbell rang again. "And while we're doing those things, who's going to answer the door?" asked Greg. "This is going to be a –"

"Stop prophesying doom," I cut him off before he could say "nightmare". "Answer the door, then take the coats." I was still kidding myself that we were in control – a pretence which, 10 minutes later, I was forced to abandon. By quarter to four, everybody had arrived. The noise was unbearable. The house shook hard as twenty-five children ran up and down three staircases. Coats were strewn everywhere, as were crisps and sandwich contents; there had evidently been a raid on the party tea before it had been declared officially open. I had no idea how many parents, if any, were in the lounge helping themselves to wine. Every time I tried to go up there and have a look, I was sidetracked by one or other of the children I hardly recognised grabbing me and wailing, "The boys tried to throw me off the bunk bed!" or "Dominic bit me!" Who was Dominic? Was he the one with ADHD? Most of the party guests I'd encountered so far seemed to have ADHD or some other equally worrying condition.

I ran from floor to floor, hoping to catch a glimpse of Greg so that I could charge him with seizing control. I stopped every few seconds to hang a painting back on the wall, or scrape an embedded crisp off the carpet with my fingernails. How had crisps got up here, to the second floor? The noise was getting worse; my house sounded like a packed football stadium. Over the general din, I heard Max howl: "Mummee-eeee! Rufus is breaking my toys!" The doorbell rang. Michelle, the nail woman, I thought. Getting to the front door was out of the question. I was too far away and my son was still screaming. Magical Steve would have to let her in.

The rest of the party was a blur. I tried not to notice anything that happened, but a few highlights stood out, hard to miss: Greg running past me carrying a girl who was threatening to be sick under his arm, yelling, "This will end, won't it? One day?"; a precocious girl called Arabella Hemming-Newman, whose name I did remember, sidling up to me as I wiped chocolate smears off the dining room wall and saying, "Your house cost one million, one hundred and fifty pounds". Shocked, I asked if Greg had told her that. "No," she said. "Mummy looked it up on nethouseprices.com."

Another girl asked why I'd arranged a magician for the boys and a beautician for the girls. "I like magic and I'm a girl," she said. I explained that Max had insisted: the girls had demanded professional nail action or else they wouldn't come to the party. Not this girl, apparently. She listened, nodding, then said: "When I told my mummy, she said you're a throwback. What's a throwback?"

At ten to six, I started to carve up the cake, throwing pieces wrapped in napkins into goody bags. Parents began to ring the doorbell again. When they asked if I knew where their particular child was, I forced myself not to say, "Oh, just take any. There are no individuals here. They've merged to form a rabble." Two mothers contrived to devise a particularly exquisite form of torture; they left, with their children, then came back five minutes later. One had forgotten a grey hooded top, one a black scarf. "Tell them to take whatever they want and go," Greg muttered. "The telly, the DVD player, our wallets – anything, as long as they leave." The woman who had described me as a throwback insisted on being given a visitor parking permit, even though she intended to leave her car outside my house for less than a minute while she collected her daughter. Finally, after the last stragglers had left, after we'd paid Magical Steve and Nails Michelle in cash and dispatched them into the night, I closed the front door and burst into tears. Max ran into the kitchen and started to rip the wrapping paper off his presents.

Greg, infuriatingly, seemed fine. "It's over," he yawned. "Pour yourself a glass of wine and forget about it."

I took him up on the first part of his suggestion. Armed with a drink, I made my way to the dining room, where I could sit and weep in peace.

"Mrs Rhodes?" said a quiet voice behind me.

I turned. A small dark-haired boy stood in the dining room doorway, goody bag in hand. "When are my mummy and daddy going to come?" he asked.

Illustration by Matt Murphy

I remembered him – not from school, but from earlier in the afternoon. He'd helped me to reassemble a broken Lego dinosaur in Max's bedroom. Later, I'd found him picking up flakes of tuna in the guest room, collecting them in his hand to take to the bin. I didn't know his name, only that he was the one guest I hadn't at any point wanted to beat to a bloody pulp. "Don't worry," I said. "I'm sure they'll be here soon." How odd, I thought. I clearly remembered this boy and how helpful he'd been; I remembered rushing past the TV den and seeing him laughing uncontrollably at one of Magical Steve's tricks, and then thinking later, I'm glad we put ourselves through this, if only for the sake of that one nice boy who seemed to enjoy the party so much.

And yet, at the same time, my mind was full of memories that directly contradicted all of that: me dragging Greg into the loo on the ground floor and snarling at him, "These children are vile – every single one of them. First thing tomorrow I'm looking into moving Max to a different school." The nice helpful boy didn't seem to be part of that memory, or, rather, my awareness and appreciation of him wasn't. How could that be? And when I cut up the cake and considered spitting on each slice, why didn't I think to myself, But I'd better put aside a clean piece for the helpful boy?

I shivered. This was the weirdest feeling I'd ever had. It was as if I'd been two different women, at two different parties.

"Mrs Rhodes?" The boy's voice pulled me out of my trance. He was staring up at me, looking worried.

"Shall we go outside and look for your mummy?" I wiped my eyes and took him by the hand. "What's her name?"

"Julia. My daddy's name is Tony. You've never met him, but Max's daddy knows him."

"Do you know your home phone number?" As I asked the question, I heard ringing coming from the hall. "Aha! I bet that's your parents," I said to the boy. "Come on. Let's go and see."

Greg got to the phone before me. He looked worried as he listened. "I see," he said. "That's ... terrible."

Oh, no, I thought. Please not the nice boy's parents. But … where was he? I couldn't see him anywhere. Where had he gone? I ran out on to the street and nearly wept with relief when I saw the boy with a man and a woman. Each of them was holding one of his hands. "Go back inside and find Mrs Rhodes, darling," the woman said. "Don't worry, there's nothing to be scared of. She's nice, isn't she?"

"Yes. Very," said the boy. God, I liked this child. He could so easily have said, "No, she's an irate harpy covered in crushed crisps". I wasn't so happy about the "go back inside" part. Then I realised that of course the boy's parents would insist he thanked me formally; these were people who knew how to raise a nice, non-repulsive child – the only ones in town, apparently.

But why "go back inside" when I was outside standing right next to them on the pavement? No, I wasn't. I was in the hall with Greg. How could that be? And the boy, once again, was nowhere in evidence. I heard his voice say, "Mummy and daddy have gone."

"Jen." Greg's voice sounded funny. I turned, saw tears in his eyes. "That was Anne Garner on the phone. Anthony's mother."

I had to think for a second. At first I thought he was talking about a mother belonging to one of our party guests, for those were the mothers I'd encountered most recently. Then I set myself straight. I'd never met Anthony Garner, but I knew the name well. He had been Greg's best friend all the way through school. He'd had an extensive collection of Tintin books, over which the two of them had bonded.

"Anthony and his wife Julia were killed two days ago. In South Africa. They've got a young kid Max's age – Oliver. I've never even met him." Greg shook his head, angry suddenly. "He wasn't with them, thank God. But … Christ, what's going to happen to him?"

Anthony Garner. Hadn't the boy told me his parents were Tony and Julia?

Oliver Garner. That was the boy's name. I felt … no, it was impossible. It couldn't be love. Whatever I felt for him, it couldn't be that.

"He must come here," I said.

He's already been, I didn't say. He's here now.

This story comes from 'The Visitors Book: And Other Ghost Stories' by Sophie Hannah (Sort of Books, £8.99), out now