by Luca Veste
‘What did you do?’
It was Nicola’s voice. No fear there. It was anger instead. I was faintly aware of Stuart rising to his feet, a hand on my arm. A weight that was there and then gone in an instant. I looked back at the floor. At the man lying prone and not breathing.
‘He was going to kill me,’ Stuart said, the final nail in the coffin. That was when the shouting began. Nicola was suddenly upon us, words escaping her mouth, accusations and vocal blows flowing from her mouth.
‘This is your fault. You’ve done this. What were you even doing out here? I always knew you’d ruin our lives. You couldn’t just be normal, could you? Couldn’t just let us be. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you. I didn’t want to come. Chris didn’t either, but that wasn’t good enough for you. You made us come here and now look what you’ve turned us into.’
‘I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean for this to happen.’
I listened as it continued on and on – Nicola’s voice bouncing around the trees surrounding us and settling over us all. I was confused by her lie about it being Stuart’s idea to be there, but it was gone in another second of chaos. I wiped a sleeve across my face and moved slowly away and towards Alexandra. I wanted . . . needed her to see me.
Michelle was kneeling down on the floor, arms wrapped around her body, rocking back and forth. She was muttering to herself, saying words I didn’t understand.
‘We have to stop this,’ Chris said, as I began to see a little clearer now. ‘We need to do something.’
‘Like what?’ Stuart replied, almost laughing as he spoke. ‘It’s a bit late to do anything, isn’t it? He’s dead. What can we do?’
‘Ring for an ambulance?’
‘It’s too late for that,’ Stuart said, rubbing at the back of his head. He looked at the palm of his hand when he took it away and then rubbed it down his leg. ‘It’s over. It’s all over.’
‘What happened?’ Alexandra said, before I could reach her. She walked past me as if I wasn’t there and moved towards Stuart and Chris. ‘Why was he attacking you?’
Stuart looked away and wiped his hands on the front of the top he was wearing. Looked at Chris and shrugged. ‘I came out to go for a piss, that’s all. Then I just felt someone on my back. I thought it was one of them two trying to scare me, but the smell of him . . . I knew it wasn’t Chris or Matt. It’s all a blur after that. I just remember him on top of me, trying to wrap his hands around my throat, punching me in the head, so I shouted for help. Tried to stay alive. He cut me a few times . . . Then you were all here.’
‘Who is he?’
‘How am I supposed to know? Some freak in the forest who kills people just going for a slash. That’s my best bet.’
‘He wouldn’t just attack you for no reason,’ Alexandra said, moving away from us now. ‘It doesn’t make any sense.’
‘We should call someone,’ Chris said quietly, rubbing one arm as if to warm himself up. ‘They can come and help us. I’m sure they’ll understand . . .’
‘No,’ I said, speaking for the first time. I wasn’t even sure I’d actually spoken aloud, but the way everyone turned to look at me suggested I had. I shook my head, thinking of everything that would follow. ‘Look at us. There’s six of us and only one of him. Are they really going to believe what we say? We killed him . . .’
‘We just tell them the truth,’ Chris said, coming up to me and placing his hands on my upper arms. He was shaking. ‘He attacked us and we were defending ourselves, that’s all. It was dark and he was trying to kill Stuart.’
‘Chris, I hit him . . .’
‘We all did. This wasn’t just you.’ He picked up the blade the man had been holding and held it up to us all. ‘Look what he had. A bloody machete. He was going to kill Stuart. Me. You. We were just defending ourselves . . .’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I screamed, and heard my own voice echoing back from the trees around us. The shout was loud enough to shock even Michelle into silence. She continued rocking back and forth, but she was no longer whispering to herself. ‘All they will see is a bunch of people, alcohol in their system, drugs in their tent. That’s all they’ll need. We’ll be screwed. Three on one. No, six on one. That’s what they’ll say. There’s nothing to say that machete isn’t ours. It’ll have our DNA on it.’
I wasn’t sure if that was true, but it felt like it would be. The drugs were the main thing. It was only a bit of weed, but that wouldn’t matter. I didn’t smoke myself, but Stuart’s eyes began to widen as soon as I mentioned it.
‘What do we do then?’
‘We do nothing.’ I said, wondering where this was coming from. I wasn’t sure myself. This sudden conviction not to do the right thing. The normal thing. To call someone to help us. Yet, I knew what this would look like. What it would mean for us all. It would become something we were synonymous with forever. We would never be allowed to forget what we’d done.
No one would believe us.
‘There’s no reason for anyone to suspect us,’ I continued, as I became more convinced I was right. ‘These woods are massive. Our camp is close by, but that doesn’t matter. We have no reason for being here.’
‘What if someone saw us all coming out here?’ Stuart said, but I could see I already had him onside. He wasn’t saying no.
‘It’s four in the morning. It’s pitch-black. No one can say anything for certain. We could just move him further in. Make it look like some kind of accident.’
‘At the bottom of a tree or something,’ Nicola said, walking over to us now. Her voice was calmer, but I could see her eyes were dancing wildly. A sheen of sweat on her forehead. ‘Things like that happen all the time.’
‘It’s not just a head wound,’ Chris said, moving his arm towards Nicola’s shoulders, then seemingly deciding against it. ‘I had my . . . arm around his neck. Stuart . . . Stuart was punching him in his chest. There’ll be bruises.’
I risked another look at the man on the floor, seeing him properly for the first time. The colour of his skin was like none I’d ever seen before. A mixed palette of blues, greys and whites. I didn’t check, but I thought about the marks on his neck – an autopsy would show he’d been asphyxiated. As well as a bunch of skull fractures, unexplained bruising, and who knows what else.
‘I don’t know what else we can do,’ I said, choking on the last word as more of the real world snuck into my consciousness. Adrenaline was slipping away from me now. ‘We can’t just leave him to be found. We can’t tell anyone.’
‘We bury him,’ Stuart said, staring at the lifeless body at our feet. ‘That’s the answer. By the time anyone finds him, we’ll be long gone. No one will ever know.’
‘Are we seriously talking about this?’ Chris ran a hand through his hair and I could see blood drying on his knuckles. ‘There’s no coming back from it if we bury him.’
‘What do you suggest,’ Stuart said, closing the distance between him and Chris. He was inches from his face, his voice more threatening than I’d ever heard it. ‘Do you want people out there thinking you’re a murderer? Is that what you want? Everyone at your job, in your family, all judging you? Wondering if you killed a man in cold blood, because that’s what they’ll do. They’ll never believe that six people came into these woods and defended themselves from a stranger. It’ll be six people, pissed and high, killed someone because they wanted to. It’s as simple as that.’
I looked around the clearing, my heart threatening to beat its way out of my chest and try to make a bid for freedom. I wanted to be anywhere else. Not having to make these decisions. Already, I could feel myself changing. As if something was crawling from the tips of my fingers, up my arms, and into my chest. A darkness. An evil.
We should be calling someone. We needed help.
I spoke, sealing the deal we were going to make.
‘We’re going to need a shovel.’
Seven
Stuart went off in search of something to use. So we could dig. N
icola told me the time was 4.30 a.m. and I was still unsure whether this entire thing was real or a lucid nightmare of some sort. I kept pinching myself to check, but it didn’t seem to do anything but give me a dull pain for a second or two.
‘We need to make sure he doesn’t have anything on him.’
I turned to Chris who was becoming more ashen-faced by the second. His voice was shaking and quiet. ‘What do you mean?’
‘What if he was watching us?’ Chris replied, looking at me and then averting his eyes. ‘If he was after Stuart or one of the girls . . . or us, even? If he’s ever found, they’ll come looking for us.’
I thought it over and wondered if there was any reason I could give for not rifling through a dead man’s pockets. Nothing seemed worse than what we’d already done, so I turned my back and said, ‘Go ahead.’
I couldn’t touch him. Not then.
Breeze rippled through the trees, the sound like whispers of the dead. I wasn’t religious, but I had the feeling of being watched and judged. By all those who knew us. My grandparents, great uncles and aunts, my dad. All gone. Now, they could be sitting atop some cloud, looking down on what they had created and what I had done.
My eyes closed to it all. The feelings, the thoughts, the guilt that was already rising to the surface. I wanted to wake up and see it was all a dream.
When I opened them again, nothing had changed. Alexandra was still pacing around the clearing. Nicola had gone with Stuart, leaving Michelle still on the floor, arms wrapped her legs, still rocking slightly. She was the tallest of the three women, but she seemed as if diminished in size. Her carefully styled bob haircut was now wild.
I approached and laid a hand on her shoulder. She flinched at the touch and didn’t look up at me. I could feel cold skin and bone through the thin T-shirt she was wearing.
‘Michelle . . .’
‘Leave me alone. Please.’
I moved away, hands palm out and in the air. Walked back over to where Chris was kneeling over the body, but stopped a few feet away. ‘Anything?’
‘Only a couple of weird things. No phone or anything like that. A fishing thing – a bait hook, is it called? A lighter. And some birthday candles. Look.’
I risked another step closer and saw what he had in his hands. ‘Weird,’ I said, wondering why anyone would be walking around the woods with candles in their pockets. A spark of memory flashed in my mind, but disappeared before I had the chance to consider it more.
‘Nothing to say why he’s here or where he’s come from?’
Chris shook his head and got to his feet. Brushed down his trousers and then wiped his hands against the black T-shirt he was wearing. ‘Nothing at all. Maybe it’s as Stuart said – he was just out here looking to hurt someone and Stuart was in the wrong place at the wrong time. If he’s from around here, maybe he saw Stuart as a threat to his farm or something. Mistook him for a burglar, I don’t know. It’s that kind of place. Which means, of course, that they’ll have plenty of people to back them that they’re good people. That Stuart and the rest of us were pissed up, drugged up, and set upon him.’
‘I don’t need to be convinced anymore, Chris. I just want to get this over and done with.’
‘Me too.’
‘I can’t lose everything,’ I said, then faltered as I tried to speak again. ‘This is . . .’
‘It’s okay, mate. Everything will be okay. I promise. We just have to get through it. Then we can go back to our normal lives.’
‘Nothing’s ever going to feel normal again.’
I waited for a response from Chris – a protestation, a disagreement. Nothing came. The smell from the dead man seemed less strong now, as if my senses had been heightened earlier and were now returning to normal. It wasn’t as bad as before, but I doubted he looked after himself all that well. I wondered if he had a family. Living on some farm in this damn countryside. Waiting for him to return home. Maybe they’d wake up in a few hours and wonder where he was. What had happened to him. He could be a father, a husband, a brother, a son. He was all of those things in my head now. Part of a loving family, who would forever be waiting for him to come home.
Then I saw the blade on the ground and I wondered what kind of man walked around with something like that late at night. Who tried to harm people with it.
I started moving soil away using the machete Chris had left on the ground. It would take me days to make a hole big enough, but I had to do something. The black ground grew blurry, as my eyes filled up again. I blinked them away. Alexandra came to stand near me for a time, but stayed silent. I looked up at her at one point, but she turned away from me.
I could feel it all slipping away there and then. Everything that I’d been working towards. Our future. There was no big moment that I could see, simply a soft fading as the seconds and minutes passed in that silent forest.
Sometime later, Stuart and Nicola came through the tree line – Stuart holding what looked like a shovel in one hand. I stepped back from the rectangular-shaped marked grave I’d carved into the ground and watched as Stuart wordlessly began to dig.
We took turns. None of us speaking. We all seemed to know that there were no words that could be said.
I wanted to talk. I wanted to stop this. It seemed like insanity had taken over the group and we weren’t thinking clearly. There was some other way out of this, but we weren’t seeing it right then. Instead, we were making a decision we couldn’t come back from. One I had been at the forefront of, I thought. It would come to define us forever.
Maybe that was only fair.
Even in self-defence, we’d ended another person’s life. There was never going to be a way out.
The only person who didn’t watch as we moved the body into the grave was Michelle. She was still sitting in the same position. It seemed we had collectively decided to ignore her. No one tried to comfort her again, once she’d warned me off. Instead, we moved the soil and mud back over the body and watched it disappear.
‘We can never talk about this,’ Stuart said, when it was over. When all that remained was a mound of earth that had been disturbed, but would soon return to nature. ‘We can never tell anyone what happened. No one will ever understand what we’ve done.’
‘How do we ignore what happened here?’
Stuart turned to me and I expected to see a flash of anger in his eyes. Instead, they were filmy and pleading. ‘We don’t. We can’t. We . . . we just have to try and get on with our lives, or someone will know. Matt, we didn’t have any choice. It was do what we did or someone was digging a hole for us. That’s all it comes down to in the end. Kill or be killed. It’s not our fault we were put in this position . . .’
‘Not all of our fault . . .’
‘I didn’t do anything wrong, Nicola,’ Stuart snapped, turning on her. There was anger there in his eyes now. ‘I didn’t ask to be attacked. I didn’t ask to be almost killed. Would you rather he killed me than the other way around?’
Nicola stared him out, as Stuart waited for an answer that was never going to come. I walked across and stood in between them.
‘This isn’t going to help anything,’ I said, as Nicola moved away finally and laid a hand on Chris’s arm. He reached across his body and held onto it. ‘We can’t turn on each other now. Stuart is right. This ends here, now, tonight. We don’t talk about it. We don’t tell anyone. We did what we had to do – what anyone else would have done in the same position. I don’t know who he was, but it doesn’t matter. He wanted to hurt us. That’s enough for me. We all have to agree on this and anything moving forward. All six of us. No one does anything without the say so of everyone involved. That’s the only fair way of doing this.’
‘A pact,’ Chris said quietly, looking at the mound of earth.
‘Yes,’ I replied, my voice stronger than it had been in the previous hour. Wishing I was anywhere else at that moment but there. ‘We’re in this together.’
They all soundlessly agreed.
‘We have to go home. Act as normal as we can.’
I knew it wasn’t going to be as easy as that. We would all carry the weight of what we had done forever. That was the type of people we were. We didn’t get into trouble; we didn’t have arguments with strangers. We kept ourselves to ourselves. The only thing I knew about the police and law came from watching television dramas.
We didn’t know that world. Now, we were forever going to be connected with it.
I also didn’t believe a word I’d said. Or Stuart’s words, or Chris’s. We had done wrong. And we would be judged for it. Not by some higher power, but by ourselves.
There was no way back.
I looked around the group as they stared at the ground. Nicola was whispering something to herself that sounded like the Lord’s Prayer. Stuart fiddled with the hem of his T-shirt and I could see the marks on his arms. They would need to be cleaned up.
My eyes narrowed, ignoring the broken form of Michelle, still kneeling on the floor. Span on the spot, looking all around us.
‘Where’s Alexandra?’ I said, but I was already moving as I said the words.
Eight
I was running, not thinking about where I was going or what I was doing. Not the movement, the direction, the course. It was Alexandra’s face in the darkness that was running through my mind as I drove my body through the woodland. I could feel the pain from the rocks and undergrowth as they passed beneath my socked feet, but it was dull and easily ignored.
‘Alexandra!’
Breathless, as I jogged through the trees, taking turns and following paths that I couldn’t see. I was running in circles, without knowing. Over and over, I called her name.
‘Alexandra?’
I was gasping for breath as the world closed in around me. I had no sense of direction and all I could see were trees and bushes and soil and blood.
There was a sound from behind me and my name being shouted. It was Stuart, trying to find me, trying to find Alexandra. I kept moving, slowing down and scanning my surroundings. The clearing where we had . . . we had done what we had done was over to my right. I moved forward and tried to think clearly.