Gothic flash sheet with skulls, skeleton and creature

By ten the function room smells of crisps and damp coats. Gary arrives late in a leather jacket, grey at the temples, carrying a carrier bag. Inside is the sheet itself, soft as cloth and gone the colour of weak tea, though the pink still shows where the drips fall. 'Kept it dry,' he says. 'Mostly.' He lays it on a trestle table between the sausage rolls and the raffle tickets, and people crowd round to find the knife they used to fight over and the eye that followed them down the corridor. Dennis tries to touch the little creature and comes away with a smear of red on his thumb.

You leave early, because you always do. In the car park the rain has started, the fine kind that hangs under the sodium lamps. You open the boot to fetch your coat and find an old satchel you never threw out, and folded in quarters inside it is a second sheet you have never seen. It is the same drawing, except the hand at the bottom wears a ring, and the raven perches on a headstone with your surname cut into it. Beneath the coffin, in the neat capitals Mrs Ashdown used to mark our homework, someone has written: NOT YET.