by Kirsty McKay
No one answers.
‘Hey!’ a voice shouts, and I jump out of my skin. ‘Cate?’
Back up the path towards the studios, Alex, Carl and Cynthia are walking towards me. I meet them halfway.
‘Are you OK, Cate?’ Alex looks down at my knife. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be in sickbay?’
‘Yeah,’ I mutter. ‘Did you see anyone pass you, up there?’
Carl shakes his head. ‘No. Why?’
I look at Alex. ‘What are you doing down here?’
He frowns at me. ‘Collecting some of Marcia’s stuff from the office. What, you haven’t been in touch with her? She says she’s not coming back to school.’
That hurts; the fact that she’s gone for good, and the fact she didn’t tell me.
‘Hey, were those policemen looking for you?’ Cynthia says. ‘Up by Main House?’
‘Yeah,’ I answer. ‘Probably. Do me a favour. If they ask, tell them you saw me running north, OK?’
The boys nod. Cynthia looks at me. ‘Where are you going?’
I start off up the path, past them. ‘To Mr Flynn’s cottage. To get his help. Before someone else gets hurt.’
I don’t bother looking back, and when I pass the studios, I disappear again into the woods and retrace my steps back towards the sickbay, only this time I keep on running past it, heading to Mr Flynn’s quarters, one of a cluster of staff cottages at the south-east tip of Skola. It’s a trek, on foot. The last few minutes I have to run across a field, out in the open, but I don’t see anyone apart from a few sheep and the ever-present sea birds. When I reach Mr Flynn’s door, I bash on it with my fist.
No one comes. Oh, please be here! Please! I shove my modelling knife in my parka pocket, hurriedly. Don’t want him to think I’ve come to attack him.
I think I hear a thump from within, and so I bash the door again. ‘Mr Flynn!’
The door opens a crack, and a dishevelled head appears. The face frowns at me.
‘Cate?’ Mr Flynn says. ‘What on earth—?’
‘Let me in!’ I push the door, and it swings open, and I hurry inside, making my way into the small sitting room on the left.
Ms Lasillo is standing there. In an oversized, stripy dressing gown. A dressing gown presumably belonging to Mr Flynn.
Oh!’ I gasp. ‘Oh!’ I have literally never felt so embarrassed in all my life. My arms go sort of limp, my tablet falls, and the modelling knife tumbles its way out of my pocket and on to the floor in front of Ms Lasillo, who makes a strangled yelp and jumps backwards. ‘Oh God, oh God!’ I say uselessly.
‘Cate, now let’s just be calm here.’ Mr Flynn is coming towards me, hand outstretched. At least he’s fully dressed. No socks, and he’s sporting the messiest of bed heads, but at least he has on jeans and a T-shirt. ‘I’m sorry you walked in on this, it’s really, very unfortunate.’ He’s struggling for words, and at first I think it’s just because he’s embarrassed, but then I realize . . . he’s scared. Of me.
‘Call the police, James,’ Ms Lasillo says quietly.
‘What? No!’ I shake my head. ‘I’m not here to do anything bad, I’m here for help!’
‘And we’ll help you,’ Mr Flynn says, nodding slowly. ‘But I’m sure everyone is looking for you, and we should tell them where you are.’
‘No! Please. Just hear me out . . .’ I think for a couple of seconds, then roll my eyes. ‘OK, so I’m guessing that they’re looking for me because I said I had some information about the killer.’ I grimace. ‘In retrospect, it might have sounded a little like I was going to make some major confession, but I didn’t mean it that way, I just had to get rid of the stupid policeman who was watching me in the sickbay.’
‘I see,’ Mr Flynn says, nodding sympathetically. ‘And why did you have to do that?’
‘Because,’ I bend down slowly, to pick up the tablet, and Mr Flynn makes a dash for the knife, snatching it up from the floor. ‘James, chill.’ I give him a look. ‘I am not going to stab you, or your girlfriend.’ I glance at Ms Lasillo.
‘Cate!’ Mr Flynn barks at me.
‘Well, I’m not. Just crouching down, getting my tablet.’ I wave it at him. ‘Anyway, to answer your question, I had to escape the sickbay because I got a message from Vaughan.’
Suddenly, they’re listening.
‘Explain,’ Mr Flynn says.
‘An instant message,’ I say. ‘And I came to you because I think I’m still in danger, and I was hoping that you can help us without instantly freaking out and calling the police on Vaughan.’
Mr Flynn nods. ‘Fair enough. Of course I’ll help you, Cate.’ He puts the knife on a sideboard in some kind of show of trust. Well out of my reach, though, I note.
‘And if it’s anything to do with technology, I can help too,’ Ms Lasillo says.
‘Sure,’ I say, evenly. ‘You can help me. Get your clothes on and make me a cup of tea.’
‘Cate!’ Mr Flynn roars.
‘Sorry, I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist. It’s been a long day.’ I move to sit at the dining table, and they both follow, slowly. I set up my tablet. ‘I took screenshots, because I knew no one would believe me. Vaughan is alive, and he’s messaging me.’
‘What is this?’ Mr Flynn sits down beside me, looking at the screen.
‘Crypt,’ says Ms Lasillo, looking over my shoulder. ‘It is, isn’t it? The social network connected to your assassin game? I’ve been looking for this for the last two days.’ She bends down to examine the screenshots more closely. It’s slightly embarrassing, because of the whole ‘I love you’ thing from Vaughan, but considering what I’ve just caught these two up to, I can live with them seeing my soppy messages. Ms Lasillo frowns. ‘But the time stamp is from today, that’s impossible.’
I shake my head. ‘Yeah, that’s the point. I can still log in. Let me show you.’
Mr Flynn gives me his Wi-Fi password, and I connect to the school intranet. I hover over the school crest, press the right buttons, and the prompt box comes up.
‘Every player gave me their username and password, and none of them worked,’ Ms Lasillo says. ‘We couldn’t get any further than this.’
‘Vaughan left the door open for me.’ I type my password. Crypt springs up. I take them for a tour.
‘This is incredible, the clever little toad.’ Ms Lasillo shakes her head. ‘Excuse me!’ she says, catching herself. ‘Totally inappropriate, especially given the fact Vaughan has, er, passed.’
‘Vaughan is a clever little toad, and guess what? He didn’t croak,’ I say, firmly. ‘I believe he blocked everyone from Crypt after he went missing, at least everyone apart from me, and another user called Skulk. Skulk has been making threats against me all through the Game.’ I rub my face. ‘Even twenty minutes ago. I was down at the art studio, looking for you,’ I nod at Mr Flynn, ‘and Skulk started messaging me, threatening me. At the last minute Vaughan came online, and then they both disappeared.’
‘May I?’ Ms Lasillo gestures to the tablet.
‘Kill it.’ I lean back and push it her way.
She gives me a look. ‘I’ll be very careful.’
I laugh. ‘No, k1ll1t is my password. All one word, lowercase, ones instead of i. You’ll need it, Crypt logs you out every sixty seconds if you’re inactive.’
Mr Flynn puts his hand on my shoulder.
‘Come into the kitchen. Let’s have that cup of tea.’
I nod, and follow him; he fills a black kettle and flicks a switch on the side.
‘Thing is, Cate,’ he gets three mugs out of the cupboard, and places a teabag in each. ‘The police seem very convinced of Vaughan’s guilt. They discovered parts consistent with the construction of the spider robot in his study, hidden in the back of a piece of computer hardware, I believe.’
‘No!’ I say. ‘We found those spider pieces, together – after you stomped on it!’
‘All right, you can certainly tell the police that.’ Flynn nods. ‘But you should know, Cate, there was a
lso the poison; they found some kind of container in his study that had traces of belladonna in it.’
‘Belladonna?’
‘“Beautiful woman”, quite literally.’ He adds sugar to his mug. ‘Heard of deadly nightshade? The plant?’
I nod. ‘But I thought it was made up, like a triffid.’
Mr Flynn puts sugar in Ms Lasillo’s mug; he obviously knows her well enough. He holds the sugar bowl up and looks at me. I shake my head. Hate that he never remembers that.
‘Deadly nightshade is real, and relatively common. Even grows here, on the island. Every part of it is poisonous, apparently. A couple of berries is enough to kill an adult. And they found some in Vaughan’s study.’
He waits until the water is boiled, and pours it into each mug. ‘Milk?’
I nod, and try to put poison out of my mind. The tea feels good; reassuringly hot in my hands, and warming to drink.
‘Vaughan wouldn’t hurt anyone. Someone must have planted that evidence,’ I say. ‘The police told me he’d had some trouble at Cambridge, but there’ll be a reason behind it, and it doesn’t make him a killer.’
‘James!’ Ms Lasillo calls from the sitting room. ‘There’s something here!’
Mr Flynn puts his cup down, and shoots me a look.
‘Told you,’ I say, smiling. ‘He’s out there.’
CHAPTER 26
We go through to the living room. Ms Lasillo is sitting in front of a laptop, my tablet beside her.
‘I grabbed my machine from my bag,’ she says. ‘And now I’m inside the site I can unbutton a little of the code. Just a little, he’s got it sewn up pretty tight. It’s extremely early days, but I’d hazard a guess that Crypt has some kind of automatic system that drops messages when you log in.’
I frown at her. ‘Meaning?’
‘Sit down,’ she sighs. ‘Cate, my guess is that Vaughan planned all of this well in advance. I think that what you read as responses to your messages are actually things that he wrote some time ago.’ When I don’t speak, she continues. ‘Vaughan isn’t talking to you, Crypt is. He programmed it to respond to anything you say.’ She shakes her head, looking through lines of code on her laptop. ‘It’s hard to specify, at this point, but it’s possible that he programmed Crypt to pick up certain key words in your messages and “answer” you with pre-scripted responses.’ She scrolls through some of my screenshots on the tablet. ‘Most of these responses he’s written are terribly vague. They would have to be, to make them fit a number of possible conversations.’
I swallow. ‘When I was at the art studio, it wasn’t just Vaughan who was online, like I said, it was Skulk too. And Vaughan responded to Skulk. By name.’
Ms Lasillo purses her lips. ‘Cate, ever think that Skulk might be Vaughan?’
Mr Flynn sits down beside me. ‘The police asked Sophia – er, I mean Ms Lasillo – to go through a list of Guild members and try all of their passwords in the prompt box, to see if anything would work. Most of the Guild members mentioned this whole Skulk business, and no one would come forward to admit to being Skulk. So perhaps Vaughan created Skulk to juice things up a little? To scare everyone. And now he’s trying to carry that on – posthumously, I suppose, as crazy as it seems – to continue the deception.’
I grip my fingers into my hands, and say what I really never wanted to say out loud. ‘Daniel.’
Mr Flynn leans towards me. ‘What about him?’ ‘Daniel is Skulk. I think I’ve known it all along, at the back of my mind, but I kept trying to deny it, because he’s supposed to be my friend. This morning I realized. I realized just how screwed up he is, and I ripped that big sticker he has on his precious violin case, the one with the red cat, and I realized for the first time that it’s a fox, not a cat, and what’s the – what do you call it again? – the collective noun, for a group of foxes?’
‘A skulk,’ Ms Lasillo says.
‘Exactly.’ I slap the table. ‘It’s him, I’m sure of it. The things he said . . . there were notes too. Creepy. And some other stuff.’ I look at Mr Flynn. ‘I hate it, but it just makes sense.’
‘OK,’ Ms Lasillo says. ‘Maybe you’re right, Daniel was posting as Skulk. But it doesn’t mean that’s him posting now. This could still all be stuff that Vaughan has pre-programmed.’
I rub my hands over my head and smooth down my hair. ‘All right. Let’s try it, then.’
‘Huh?’ Ms Lasillo says.
‘Let’s talk to the ghost in the machine,’ I say. I look at the clock. ‘In a short while, I’m supposed to be meeting Vaughan at the caves. So let’s send him a message about that. See what he says back.’
Mr Flynn nods. ‘OK. But Cate, after that, I’m driving you back to the sickbay and we’re letting the police know you’re safe. We can’t put it off for ever.’
‘Fine.’ I move in front of Ms Lasillo’s laptop, and my fingers dangle over the keyboard. ‘Here goes.’ I type.
Clouseau
Vaughan, are you OK?
Come on, Vaughan. Come through. Show them you’re real, not some computer program.
We wait. I refresh the screen after a minute to keep us logged in. And again, after another minute.
‘Try something else,’ Mr Flynn urges. I type again.
Clouseau
Vaughan, what happened with Skulk, at the studios?
We all sit there, watching. I refresh the page a few times, but nothing happens. I glance outside at the darkening skies, then look at the time in the corner of the screen.
Clouseau
Vee, I’m not going to make it to the cave by 6 p.m. And the police are looking for me. What shall I do?
I hold my breath.
And then, suddenly, a little red skull pops up on the map above the caves.
‘There!’ Ms Lasillo cries, tapping on the screen, lightly. I hardly dare move. Then it comes, the ping.
DeadMcTavish
Meet me at the causeway. Come now.
‘You see?’ I whisper, triumphant, turning to both of them. ‘It is him!’
Mr Flynn shakes his head. ‘Not necessarily, Cate.’
‘It’s vague. It’s the program,’ Ms Lasillo says.
I type some more.
Clouseau
They don’t believe that you’re alive, Vaughan. They think that you’re a machine, that you’ve programmed Crypt to reply to me! How can I convince them?
We all wait. And then the ping comes.
DeadMcTavish
Come now.
My heart sinks. Ms Lasillo holds her hands open as if to say, I told you so. Mr Flynn puts his hand on my arm.
‘Sorry, Cate,’ he says.
Ping.
DeadMcTavish
Get Flynny to drive you in the car. And tell Ms Lasillo that if she gets her sticky fingers out of my code, when I’ve got a second I’ll show her the backdoor in her intranet. Chop, chop! Xxx
I laugh out loud. Long, and hard. It’s difficult to stop.
Mr Flynn says, ‘Car’s in the garage. I’ll get the keys.’
‘We need to hurry!’ I can’t stop smiling.
Pacing up and down in the living room, I call to them again; Flynn is fetching his coat, Ms Lasillo is upstairs getting dressed. Finally. Thank God. Don’t want to think too much about that, because, you know, gross. But maybe she’ll be a bit nicer to me now.
‘The causeway.’ Mr Flynn reappears and grabs a couple of torches from a shelf. ‘Why on earth does he want to meet us there, do you know?’ He opens a drawer and starts to rifle through things. ‘Tide timetable. Where is it?’
‘On the intranet.’ I bring up the page on the Umfraville site. ‘Oh.’ I read down the list of times for early October. ‘Interesting. Tide comes in soon.’ I check the time. ‘Like, very soon.’
‘Of course it does,’ Mr Flynn says. ‘Sophia, let’s go!’ He goes to the hall and shouts up the stairs, before turning to me again. ‘We’ll get in the car, come on.’ He leads the way out of the front door and round the cottage to
the little alley that runs between the house and the garage. We enter the cramped garage by a side door, he opens the car and flings the torches into the back seat. ‘Get that, will you?’ He gestures to the garage door, one of those big up-and-over types. I nod, and move around the car as he starts the engine. I turn the handle on the middle of the garage door, and try to lift it up. It won’t budge.
‘Stuck?’ Mr Flynn opens the car window and shouts over the engine noise.
I try it again, not wanting to seem completely hopeless, but it’s like something is caught in the mechanism up on the roof.
Mr Flynn swears. ‘It does this sometimes. Hang on.’ He cranks the window closed, gets out, the car still running, and starts to search around on the wall for something. ‘I keep a screwdriver handy to give the pulley a poke – can you see it anywhere?’
I shake my head, point to a crowbar. ‘This do it?’
‘No, needs to be smaller. OK,’ he smacks his forehead, ‘screwdriver’s in the kitchen. Get in the car, I’ll grab it and be right back.’
I do as he asks, and he leaves the garage, shutting the side door behind him. The car’s engine is running, keys in the ignition, and as I sit in the passenger seat I toy with the idea of sliding over to the driver’s side, flooring the pedal, breaking the door down and driving to the causeway myself. But then I can wave bye-bye to any kind of support from Mr Flynn. I look at my watch. How long since Vaughan messaged us? Ten minutes? Fifteen? That would be just enough time for him to get there, if he ran all the way from the caves. I glance towards the side door leading to the house; Mr Flynn and Ms Lasillo are taking their time. I feel a surge of impatience. Come on! Time is a-wasting.
I check my tablet. No skulls, no messages. Another couple of minutes go by. Right, I’m going to give them a shout.
When I open the car door, the fumes from the exhaust burn my throat on the first breath. Yuk. I skip quickly to the side door to the alleyway, and turn the handle. It doesn’t move. I give it a shove; did Mr Flynn lock it, for some reason? He doesn’t want me skipping out on them? I feel a rush of panic, as the fumes from the car make me start to cough. Bloody stupid of him to leave the engine running. I pull my parka over my nose, give up on the door, and go back to the car, but to the driver’s door this time. I’ll just turn off the engine and hope this stuff dissipates quickly.