The Last Witness

by Claire McFall

Doubt is written across the lawyer’s face. Dougie doesn’t react to the derision in his eyes but shrugs his shoulders at the question. “Don’t know, I couldn’t see. He stayed too far away. All I could see was his outline. He wore dark clothes. I know that.”

  “And you saw this man the day Martin disappeared?”

  “Yeah.” Dougie jerks his head in a short, sharp nod.

  “Did you see him after that? Did you see him the day you say Darren went missing?”

  Dougie makes a face.

  “I’m not sure. Heather and I hiked up to the road, and I thought I saw a van parked far off, but by the time we’d walked higher, it was gone.”

  “Can you remember any details about the van, Douglas?” the judge asks.

  “It was far away,” Dougie reminds him.

  “Color?” The judge pushes gently. “Size?”

  Dougie opens his mouth, but Dr. Petersen jumps in before he can answer.

  “Heather has never mentioned a man. Not once, in all our sessions together.”

  And everyone looks at me.

  My parents: expressions carefully blank. The judge: curious. I can’t read the lawyer, and Petersen is wearing his typical look of disdain. I focus on Dougie, my port in a storm. He is looking at me expectantly. Waiting for something.

  I don’t know what.

  I do the only thing I can think of: I burst into tears.

  They’re impressive. Loud and wet, my breath hiccupping. It takes no effort. I am so strung out, I’ve been fighting tears anyway.

  “I w-was scared,” I babble, swiping at my nose, which has already started to run. “M-Martin and Darren and Emma were gone, and then Dougie—” I break off, choke on a sob. “He was hurt and the fire was out and I couldn’t see what had happened to him. I…I tried to light it again, but I was shaking and the lighter fluid got all over me, and when I struck the match—”

  My body’s shaking so hard that it’s tough to lift my hand, but I do. I hold it up and see the judge’s eyes take in the deformed claw, the hideously scarred skin. He winces.

  “Heather.” Petersen tries to command my attention, but it’s easy to ignore him, crying louder, huddling into myself. Now that I’ve started weeping I can’t seem to stop. “Heather, you’ve never talked about this man. You told me about the wraith, remember? The spirit at the cairn.”

  “I—I—” Thoughts whirl around my head. Sudden inspiration hits. “I thought he’d come after me too!”

  I dare to glance up and see that one corner of Dougie’s mouth is hitched up in the smallest semblance of a smile.

  If the tables had been turned and I’d been the one to fall, the one to slip into a coma, and Dougie had been left to save us, I know for a fact that he would not have been as foolish as me, that he would have been waiting for me to come around, free and living his life. He would have done what I was too slow to understand: made it a story, made it a lie. Left a hole and trusted the police to fill it with a monster they could understand. A serial killer, a local madman. If I had not screamed quite so loudly about things that no one in their right mind would believe in, who would have suspected me?

  But I am a year too late for my epiphany. All I can hope is that my situation is salvageable. Finally, I tear my gaze away from Dougie’s face and look to Judge McDowell.

  He’s the one who will decide my fate.

  Twenty-Six

  It feels wrong to be standing in the sunshine, but there’s not a cloud in the sky. It almost adds cheer to the place, picking out the vibrant green of each blade of grass, the dots of color from every bouquet of flowers. But there is just too much gray. Row upon row upon row of forbidding slabs of stone. The three in front of me are shinier than most.

  Martin. Emma. Darren.

  Names on a tombstone. And beneath that, dates that to me feel like yesterday.

  Beside me, Dougie coughs, trying to clear his throat, looking away so that I won’t see his face. His friends were buried almost exactly a year ago, but like me, this is the first time he’s stood in front of their graves. His parents wanted to take him, to be there for him—to keep him in sight like they have almost every moment since he opened his eyes—but he refused. Refused because I wouldn’t have been welcome. No matter what Dougie said in court—or the judge said as he signed my release form—to them, I am guilty. To them, I am the reason they lost a year of the life of their son. I can’t blame them; even my own parents treat me with suspicion.

  I sigh heavily, and out of the corner of my eye, I see Dougie turn in my direction.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  I nod my head, knowing he’ll see, because I’m not altogether sure I can talk. Standing here, looking at their names etched deep into the flecked granite, makes their deaths real. I mean, I knew that; I knew they were gone. But there’s a difference between knowing it and feeling it. Today I feel it.

  Dougie reaches up, rubs my back. I smile briefly at the warmth of his hand through the thin cotton of my T-shirt, still keeping my gaze straight ahead. His touch is mostly friendly, I know, but there’s still a thrill attached to the gesture. Half and half. Like us; after everything we’ve been through together, we’re more than friends. But not more than that. That’s okay though. Right now, with Dr. Petersen’s voice still rattling around my head and open spaces feeling too wide, too free, it’s about all I can handle.

  I am grateful to have a friend at all.

  Besides, there’s plenty of time. In just a week, we are going to college together to pursue the archaeology major we were supposed to start last summer. As if the last twelve months never happened.

  “Are you ready to go?” I ask quietly. I am hoping he’ll say yes. I don’t like being here. It’s empty, dead. I can’t feel any connection to the three people beneath my feet. Wherever they are, it isn’t here.

  “Yeah,” he says, and we turn in tandem, begin to wind our way down the rows, heading for the exit.

  There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to Dougie but haven’t. But I know I really should. I know it needs to be said, and better now than later. Without it, I’ll never really be able to put all this behind me.

  I walk slightly closer to him so that our shoulders bump. “Thank you,” I say.

  Dougie looks at me quizzically, and I make myself meet his gaze. Our footsteps slow.

  “For what?” he finally replies. I take a deep breath.

  “For standing up for me. For backing me up. You could have…” I trailed off, then make myself continue. “You could have left me in that place.”

  Dougie’s puzzled smile freezes on his face. We have purposely avoided talking about the camping trip, and I can see he’s in no rush to do so now.

  “You didn’t have to help me,” I say. Because he didn’t. With the dark cloud of suspicion hanging over me, with everyone else already having condemned me to the gallows. He didn’t have to do that.

  The smile is back, and this time it’s untroubled. “What else was I going to do, abandon you?”

  That had been my fear. I should have had faith, but after a year in that hellhole, a hopeless year, faith had been hard to come by.

  “We were in it together,” he says. “You and me.”

  “Yeah,” I whisper. “Together.”

  There is a lull in the conversation as we once again begin the morose trip out of the cemetery. Chitchat seems disrespectful in this place. Dougie frowns and stares down at the ground as we walk.

  “There is just one thing that bothers me,” he finally says as we meander out through the gates of the cemetery. “You said that we went swimming together—” I look at him curiously as we walk, nodding slowly. Where is he going with this? “But you went after Martin. The two of you took the back path up to the road. You watched him flag down that car, get a ride from that old couple. That’s what we agreed.” He pierces me with his eyes, an
d I stop dead in my tracks.

  “I—” I start to speak, but words escape me. Dougie reaches out a hand and grips me firmly by the upper arm. I don’t try to get away; I couldn’t even if I wanted to.

  “It didn’t exactly go according to plan,” I remind him.

  * * *

  The book Dougie dropped in front of me was obviously really old. The spine was cracked, and the writing inlaid on the leather front was so faded I could hardly read it.

  “Blood and Dust,” I read. “The Dark Rites of Human Sacrifice.” I looked up from where I was lying sprawled across his double bed. Dougie sat at the desk, spinning the chair around so that he could face me, a feverish light in his eyes. “Where did you get this?” I asked.

  “Bought it off some guy on the internet. He’s got a shop down in London, specializes in druid stuff.”

  “Wow.” I flipped the book open, wrinkling my nose at the dusty smell that wafted up from the pages. “The writing’s funny, looks almost like Macbeth.” We’d been reading the Scottish play in English, plowing through the Shakespearean language. “Can you read it?”

  “Most of it,” Dougie replied.

  I pulled my gaze away from the scrunched lines of tiny writing. “Enough?”

  “Enough.” He nodded.

  The half smile on my face widened until it was a grin, then I giggled.

  “Are we really going to—?” I cut off the rest of my question, too overcome with the idea.

  “We’re going to,” Dougie confirmed.

  “Can you imagine?” A delicious shiver ran down my spine, excitement making my nerves shiver.

  “We won’t have to,” Dougie promised. “It’s my birthday soon…”

  * * *

  I saw it.

  Saw the very moment. The instant. The second the light drained out of his eyes.

  Saw it, and savored it.

  I felt power rush through me, adrenaline flood my veins. With hands ghostly pale, I reached out and closed his eyes.

  The bruises were already beginning to bloom on Martin’s neck. No, not Martin’s neck. He wasn’t here anymore. On the body. That’s all this thing was now. A lifeless body. It was just like Dougie had said.

  We’d hiked with Martin to the cairn—it seemed fitting. A burial mound. A tomb. Ancient, sacrificial.

  “Now, remember,” Dougie murmured. “Remember what we agreed.”

  “He hitched a ride,” I replied. “I saw him go.”

  * * *

  “Darren knows.” His voice was soft and came out of nowhere, slithering from the darkness behind me.

  I jumped, whirled around to see Dougie’s face lit by the light of the flashlight, his expression grim.

  “What?” I asked faintly, though I’d heard him.

  “Darren. He knows.”

  My heart stopped for an instant, then began to beat again in double time.

  “How?” I whispered.

  “He found Martin’s stuff, the book at the bottom of my bag. He went up to the cairn.”

  Fear zinged through me, but it was quickly replaced by outrage.

  “What was he doing raking through your bags?”

  “I don’t know. Acting on suspicions?” Dougie shrugged. “I’ve just overheard him telling Emma what he’s found. They’re going to hike out tomorrow and call the police.”

  “What are we going to do?” A much more important question.

  “What we have to,” Dougie answered. “You deal with Emma. I’ll take care of Darren.”

  There was steel in his eyes. Steel, and excitement.

  * * *

  Dougie lifts a finger to my lips. “It worked out in the end.” The finger leaves my mouth, and he runs a hand through my hair, pinning it back behind my ear. “You did well.”

  Did I?

  “But you got hurt,” I blurt out. “If I’d handled Emma correctly—”

  “You did well,” he says again, disregarding my words. He flashes me a grin. “We did. It was just like we’d talked about, wasn’t it?”

  Well, not exactly. I hate to bring up the names, but… “Darren…and Emma.” My best friend. Her boyfriend. We haven’t talked about that.

  “They should have left it alone,” he tells me, no hint of recrimination or regret in his words.

  “They should have,” I say. “If they’d stayed wrapped up in each other like they were supposed to…”

  I reach up, cup my hands around his jaw, and he grins at me. Then suddenly we’re kissing, and it’s all tongues and gasping and clashing teeth. Right there in the cemetery. I go up on my tiptoes, desperate to be closer.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” I whisper, breaking away. “We did it.”

  The light in his eyes is devilish and full of excitement, matching mine. “We did it,” he agrees.

  About the Author

  Claire McFall is a writer and English teacher who lives and works in the Scottish Borders. Her first book, Ferryman, is a love story that retells the ancient Greek myth of Charon, the ferryman of Hades who transported souls to the Underworld. Ferryman was short-listed for the Scottish Children’s Book Awards and the Grampian Children’s Book Awards and long-listed for the Branford Boase Award and the UKLA (UK Literary Association) Book Awards, as well as being nominated for the Carnegie Medal.

  Her second novel, Bombmaker, is a young adult dystopian thriller in which the main character Lizzie struggles to survive in a London dominated by gangs and plagued by terrorism.

  You can find out more about Claire at clairemcfall.co.uk and on Twitter: @mcfall_claire.

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