[Accept Quest?]
[YES]|[NO]
I stood alone in the dark for another three minutes, the wind biting through my fleece.
What if this was a brain tumour? What if I was going completely mad? And what if... what if it was actually real? Which option was worse?
If I went to a doctor and told him I was seeing video game boxes floating over dogs and my brother’s head, he’d lock me in a ward on Park Avenue and throw away the key. If I accepted the quest... the worst thing that could happen was that I’d look like an idiot in front of Lommo.
Yes.
I didn’t say it out loud. I thought it hard and clear, focusing on the green brackets the same way I had willed the drawer open.
The glowing box folded in on itself with a silent visual snap, dissolving into tiny green sparks that vanished into the night air. The close was just the close again dark, quiet, and smelling of damp brick.
I didn’t sleep a wink.
I lay on my back on the sofa until five in the morning, watching the crack across the ceiling turn from dark grey to pale blue as the sun came up over the valley.
Every ten minutes I stared at my hands or looked at the coffee table, waiting for another menu to pop up. Nothing happened.
At eight o’clock on Sunday morning, I couldn’t take it anymore.
I sat on the edge of the cushions, picked up my phone, and opened a new text message to Craig Lomax. Josh had told me to ring.
I couldn’t bring myself to dial the number. After seven years of complete radio silence, hearing Lommo’s voice down a crackling phone line felt like stepping onto a pitch without shin pads.
Lommo. It’s Matt Kershaw. Josh gave me your number. Is the offer still on?
I hit send and stared at the screen until my eyes burned.
He took two hours to reply. Two full hours of me pacing up and down my tiny front room, boiling the kettle three times and letting the tea go stone cold on the counter.
At 10:14 AM, the phone buzzed on the kitchen worktop. Bzzt.
6:30 tonight. Come down.
That was it. Four words. No exclamation marks, no welcome back, and no explanation of where "down" actually was.
I read the message four times. He didn’t specify a venue, which meant he assumed I knew where Ellerby Bridge Town FC trained. Where else would a Northern Premier League team be on a Sunday night? The ground, obviously.
On a weekday, the valley bus from Hallowfield to Ellerby Bridge took thirty minutes. On a Sunday, the 502 service ran once every hour, groaning up through the old industrial villages and taking nearly fifty minutes to rattle its way up the valley.
I caught the 5:10 PM bus from Beck Road.
The single-deck vehicle was almost completely empty. An old woman sat near the front, coughing into a handkerchief every three miles, while a teenager in a rain-jacket sat on the back seat with drill music blaring out of his phone speakers without headphones.
The bus ground its way up the steep valley road, passing old Victorian textile mills with dark, brick chimneys that hadn’t blown smoke in forty years.
We passed a rusted lay-by cafe with a hand-painted wooden sign that read FULL ENGLISH BREAKFAST ￡5.00, and every time the driver changed down gears to take a hill, the floorboards vibrated under my boots grrrrr, grrrrr.
I kept staring at the back of people’s heads. I stared at the coughing old woman. I stared at the driver’s reflected skull in his rearview mirror. I stared at the teenager on the back row.
Nothing. Not a single digit. Not a floating line of text.
By the time the bus pulled up at the Mill Lane stop on the outskirts of Ellerby Bridge, I had convinced myself that Saturday night had been a brief, bizarre stress-induced hallucination. The lager had dried on my jeans.
My knee was throbbing under my trousers where the cut had scabbed over. I was a thirty-year-old former cheat riding a Sunday bus to a Tier 7 football ground because I was lonely and desperate.
The bus doors hissed open pssht and I stepped down onto the wet pavement.
It was 6:00 PM. I was thirty minutes early. In four seasons at Hallowfield Town, I had never been thirty minutes early for a training session in my life.
Mill Lane was a narrow, cobbled road lined with stone terrace houses that backed straight onto the steep green valley wall. At the end of the lane stood the rusted wrought-iron turnstiles of Ellerby Bridge Town FC. The main gates were propped open with a broken wooden pallet.
I walked through the entrance, my boots crunching on the loose gravel.
The ground was dead quiet.
The main stand was a modest steel structure with four rows of wooden bench seating, painted in faded yellow and green.
The pitch in front of it was dark, soaked with autumn rain, and completely empty except for an old man in a flat cap pushing a heavy hand-roller near the corner flag.
He stopped rolling when he heard my boots on the gravel. He leant his weight against the iron handle and wiped his nose with the back of a muddy garden glove.
"If you’re looking for the boardroom, lad, it’s shut," he called out, his voice sharp and raspy from forty years of cold weather. "Bar doesn’t open on Sundays unless the darts team is playing."
"I’m looking for Craig Lomax," I said, stopping by the pitch perimeter fence. "He told me six-thirty."
The old man stared at me for three long seconds, taking in my height, my worn trainers, and my faded black fleece.
"Lommo?" The groundsman let out a short, dry bark of a laugh. "Lommo’s not here, lad. Youth team don’t train at the ground. They’re up at St Wilfrid’s pitch at the top of the hill."
I stood there, feeling like an absolute idiot. "St Wilfrid’s?"
"Aye. School pitch. They’ve got the floodlights on till eight." The old man picked up a stack of red plastic training cones from the grass, the plastic clicking as he slotted them together, clack, clack.
"Didn’t he tell you?"
"No," I admitted. "He just said come down."
"That’s Lommo for you," the old bloke grunted, carrying his cones toward the home dugout. "A time and no place. Not my problem, lad. Be glad it’s not a match day, or I’d have charged you eight quid just to walk through the gate."
"Sorry," I said, turning back toward the exit. "I’m Matt, by the way."
"Stan," he grunted without turning around. "I do the grass." He paused at the dugout entrance and looked me up and down one last time. "You play?"
"Used to."
"Thought so," Stan spat on the cinder track. "You walk like a centre-half. All you lot walk like you’re carrying a fridge up a flight of stairs."
He vanished inside the dugout to stack his cones out of the rain.
I walked back out through the iron gates and started the long trek up the hill toward St Wilfrid’s.
Ellerby Bridge was built straight into the side of the valley, every street tilting at a thirty-degree angle. I passed a charity shop with a yellowed wedding dress displayed in the window.
I passed a pub called The Fleece, walked another three hundred yards up the steep cobbled incline, and passed a second pub called The Fleece.
I stopped under a streetlamp and looked back over my shoulder, completely baffled as to how a town with a population of nine thousand people had ended up with two pubs with the exact same name on the same street.
Then I saw the lights.
Four massive, lattice-steel floodlight towers towered over the slate rooftops at the crest of the hill, pouring brilliant white halogen light down into the dark valley sky.
The clouds over the hills had gone the colour of dirty dishwater, and those four gantries were the brightest thing in the entire borough.
I paused on the pavement, catching my breath as my lungs burned from the climb.
Ellerby Bridge Town were in Tier 7 of the English football pyramid four full divisions below where Hallowfield had been when I was playing.
Their main stand was a second-hand tin shed, and their head groundsman was a seventy-year-old bloke with arthritic knees who charged eight quid at the gate.
And yet, here they were, paying for high-powered floodlights on a Sunday night so twenty local kids could train on a quality artificial surface. Somebody in this town cared enough to raise the money, pay the electricity bill, and organize the session.
I felt a sudden, unexpected hit of respect for the place.
I reached the top of the hill where St Wilfrid’s Catholic High School stood behind a tall, green perimeter fence. The main school building was dark for the weekend, but the 3G facility round the back was buzzing with energy.
The sounds came over the high chain-link fence first the sharp, echoing crack of a leather ball hitting plastic grass, the high-pitched shouts of teenagers calling for the ball, the shrill blast of a referee’s whistle phweet! and the heavy clack-clack of plastic studs running up the tarmac path as a late trialist sprinted past me through the open gate, pulling his green training bib over his head as he ran.
I stepped through the double gates onto the perimeter path surrounding the pitch.
The glare of the floodlights hit me right in the eyes; they were crisp, blinding, and white.
And the very second my right boot stepped off the asphalt path and onto the green rubber crumb of the 3G surface...
A sudden, sharp CLICK sounded behind my left ear.
The air in front of my face burst into a brilliant cascade of emerald-green light.
UI boxes didn’t just appear; they exploded across my vision, locking onto every single player running under the floodlights in crisp, high-definition game cards!
***
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