The Clique

by Jay Mason

  Alex knew she was losing them. Any minute and the girls would break free and run. Only there was no way to outrun what was coming.

  “Spirits of the lost,” she cried again. “Help us. Defy this man. Move out from here. Escape his darkness.”

  “You killed him in life,” said Rusty suddenly. “You can take him in death. You may have forgotten but you overwhelmed him once. You brought him down. You killed him and that is why he holds you here in vengeance. Do not let him win!”

  The wind roared. It pulled at their hair, their clothes, their very bones. Alex closed her eyes. She continued to plead with the spirits both out loud and inside her head. “Come together. Free yourselves.” The howls outside grew nearer and nearer. She heard the door burst open.

  Another howl came, blasting her with heat. She heard Tiffany cry out in fear. “No,” came Bethany’s voice loud above the storm, “you will not have my friends you horrible, dirty, nasty, untidy, evil little man.”

  Despite the battle around her, Alex felt a bubble of amusement that to a cheerleader dirty and untidy were as bad an epithet as evil. She heard real anger in Bethany’s voice.

  The world tipped upside down. Alex held on to the table, praying the others were doing the same. She heard the howling, the roaring of voices young and old. Around her the air blazed with heat, then dropped to freezing. She lost all sense of which way was up as the wind tugged and pulled at her. “Go away,” she thought. “You have no power over me. You are nothing but a nasty, untidy man with a lamp!”

  Alex heard glass smashing. The wind dropped. They heard Bethany whisper, “Good bye”. Then there was stillness. Alex opened her eyes. In the middle of the table lay the lantern, extinguished and smashed to pieces.

  No one talked as they left. They broke up and went their separate ways. Alex turned on her computer as soon as she got home and recorded everything that she remembered. Then she sent a copy to c0nundrum. Her subject line was ‘Case Closed’.

  It was a week later that Rusty arrived at her door with a picnic basket. “I thought it might be nice to do something normal together,” he said.

  “Anything to get away from my mother’s cooking,” said Alex taking her cue from him. “It’s fish quiche today!”

  Rusty took her to a grassy river bank and they sat eating in silence and admiring the day. Eventually Rusty said, “I was going to break up with Bethany. Before she died.”

  “Oh,” said Alex. She waited for what he would say next.

  “I realized she wasn’t as nice as she — well, as nice as she looked.”

  “That’s cheerleaders for you,” said Alex, trying to joke about it. She lowered her gaze, but watched him intently from beneath her lashes.

  “Then she died and I felt awful.” he sighed. “I can’t remember what happened in that room. I don’t want to. Some kind of mass hysteria I suppose. That’s why Savannah got that rash. Whatever you did convinced them it was all over and that’s good.”

  “Oh,” said Alex again.

  “Mind you, the things you get yourself involved with are — are interesting. So if there was ever anything else …”

  “You’d like me to tell you?” asked Alex.

  “Yeah. If you wanted to,” said Rusty. “Especially if it has to do with Dr. Straker or the Center.”

  “Oh, I definitely want to find out more about those,” said Alex.

  “But it’s not like we were going out or anything. Just friends,” said Rusty quickly.

  “Friends investigating stuff?” said Alex.

  “Yeah,” said Rusty, “Friends.”

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