Seconds later, Mum’s face appeared round the door. ‘What are you doing, hon?’ she asked. ‘I thought you and Lilith had finished packing.’
‘Few last things,’ I said, trying to look as innocent as I could.
Mum stared at my face. ‘You OK? You look a bit flushed.’ She came over and put her palm on my forehead. ‘You’re not coming down with anything?’
I shook my head, got up and sat on the bed. ‘Nope, fine.’
And then Lilith appeared. ‘Hey. What happened to my hot chocolate?’
‘Oh yeah! I … er … remembered something I had to pack. I’ll do it now.’
Lilith sighed heavily. ‘There’s nothing on telly this evening. Adam’s gone out to get a DVD so I’m going to read for a bit.’
Gibber my gimlets, I thought as she switched her bedside light on then settled down on her bed, that was a narrow escape! When I stood up and went to make Lilith’s drink, my mind was reeling with questions. What was in the packages? Who had put them there? And, worst of all, had they read any of my poems and discovered one of my awful dark secrets?
Chapter Four
Spook Night
‘Eve, stop biting your nails. I can hear you even above the movie soundtrack,’ said Lilith without even looking at me.
Adam swivelled round, stuck his fingers in his mouth and started making slurpy noises. ‘Yum yum,’ he mocked as he sucked on his nails. ‘I like to eat leetle girls’ fingers. I chew them right down to the bone and then I crunch them to a paste and use it as a facial cream to keep my ski-in silky smooth. Isn’t that right, Eve? You are secretly a blood-sucking vampire and your favourite type of blood is your own? Woo hoo HOOOOO.’
‘Yeah, ha ha, most amusing,’ I said, but I did take my fingers away from my mouth as the credits of the movie began to play on the telly in the corner of the room. We had just watched the DVD that he’d got from the rental store. Of course it had been a horror movie. Headless Zombies Hit Miami, it had been called. One of these days, very, very soon, I thought, I have to tell them my secrets. I have to because I can’t go on like this, plus I’m running out of nails to chew on. In fact, if someone were to market stick-on edible nails that nail-biters like me could buy, they’d make a fortune.
Adam reached for the remote and was about to turn the TV off when a commercial for a house makeover programme began to play.
‘Don’t turn it off just yet,’ said Lilith. ‘I love the guest presenter who’s been on the last few weeks. He’s a goth prince. We both love him, don’t we, Eve?’
I nodded as an image of the guest presenter appeared. Every few months, a new interior designer was invited to come on to the show with their ideas, plus they had to pick a celebrity name for the duration. The new guy’s choice was the Transformer and he was Lilith’s pin-up; she had a poster of him on the wall above her bed. Tall with shoulder-length dark hair that he wore tied back in a ponytail, he was every goth girl’s dream.
‘He’s old enough to be your father,’ said Adam. ‘How can you have him as your pin-up?’
‘Better than some skinny boy-band oik with spots,’ said Lilith. ‘The Transformer is so charismatic, like he’s a wise old soul and knows stuff.’
‘Pff,’ said Adam. ‘He looks more like he’s been dug up from somewhere. He needs a bit of sun, he does.’
The trailer for the programme played with images of the Transformer holding various model poses in front of the buildings where he’d done his makeovers. Standing behind him in all the shots were his two strange-looking assistants, a severe-looking blonde girl and a stocky man with a shaved head. They looked intense. Then the screen images changed and went on to the usual commercials for washing powder, breakfast cereal and baby wipes.
‘OK, you can turn it off now,’ Lilith ordered.
‘Thank you, Your Majesty,’ said Adam, and he clicked the TV off then sprang to his feet. ‘So, my leetle seesters, how about, seeing as we move on Sunday, we go next door for one last time?’
Oh noooo, I thought as panic gripped me. I was about to blurt out one of my secrets right there and then, but Lilith was also up on her feet.
‘Oh yes, let’s. We have to for old time’s sake, yeah, Eve? And we might not get a chance tomorrow night when most of the work has been done and Mum and Dad are ready to go. Let’s get our coats and, Adam, you make sure Mum and Dad are out of the way. Come on, Eve.’
‘Yeah, but we’re not moving that far away. I mean, we could go any time.’
‘Nah,’ said Lilith. ‘Won’t be the same. We won’t be able to sneak back through our secret way through the trees in our garden ever again. I think we should go tonight and do a goodbye ritual.’
‘Me too,’ said Adam. ‘You scared, ickle Eve? Did the scare-wee movie fwighten woo?’
‘Pff, that wasn’t scary at all. Takes more than a few headless bodies to frighten me. So, yeah, let’s go, for old time’s sake. But, er … what about Mum and Dad? They might hear us.’
Adam quickly snuck upstairs then returned moments later. ‘Sleeping like babies,’ he said. ‘Or, should I say, a very loud snoring baby in Dad’s case.’
We found our coats and headed for the back porch.
‘Where’s the torch?’ asked Lilith as she looked around. ‘Someone’s moved it.’
I felt it in my pocket from when I’d been out earlier.
‘Maybe Dad packed it,’ said Adam. ‘We don’t need it. Be more fun if it’s totally dark.’ He looked up out of the porch window at the sky. ‘And there are loads of clouds so it will be pitch black out there.’
There was no way that I was going next door without the torch. No way. I turned round and as Adam unlocked the back door I pretended that I had seen it on a shelf to my right.
‘Nope, there it is,’ I said, and quickly pulled it out of my pocket so they could see it in my hand.
‘I don’t think we need it,’ said Adam.
‘Just in case,’ I said, and Lilith nodded in agreement.
‘Although if we’re going to do a goodbye ritual, it would be better if we had a candle,’ she said. ‘I’ll just get one from under the kitchen sink unless they’ve been packed up.’ She went to rummage around in the cupboard then emerged with a candle and a box of matches she shoved into her pocket.
We crept along the garden path, over to the right behind the privet bush, then Adam climbed over the knee-high picket fence and through a gap between the row of conifers. It was easy to do because we’d been this way so many times.
Moments later, we were next door. Next door in the cemetery. A slender moonbeam shone out from behind the clouds and briefly illuminated rows of silent graves. Our eyes soon adjusted to the near darkness. Angels stood out against the night, their wings spread as if protecting whoever lay beneath the ground. At the top of other graves were simple headstones with engravings telling who they belonged to. A few vases with flowers could be seen, some fresh as if newly laid, others dried up, having been left unattended for weeks. In the background, the skeletons of trees, some stripped of their autumn leaves, were silhouetted against the dark sky. I shuddered with the cold.
‘OK, Evebud?’ asked Lilith.
I nodded. ‘Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be? And don’t call me Evebud.’ My family called me ‘Evebud’ and even ‘Evepud’ or ‘Evepuddle’ sometimes which I found very annoying. No one ever messed around with their names.
‘Just asking,’ said Lilith. ‘No need to be sniffy.’
‘I wasn’t being sniffy. And I’m fine.’ Actually I wasn’t. And that was one of my secrets. I was terrified as I had been on pretty much each and every occasion that we’d ever been to the cemetery, starting with the first time when we were eight. It was Lilith and Adam’s favourite place and their best thing to do was to sit on a grave and tell ghost stories. Sometimes to even dress up as ghosts and ghouls, especially at Halloween.
All our friends had been invited at various times when they’d be staying for sleepovers – seemed most people liked to be spooked –
and it soon became the Palumbo party trick: scaring the living daylights out of our friends. I’d never liked it. Not once. All I’d got out of it was a nail-biting habit and a bunch of neuroses. Of course, I had realized very fast that I could never let on how scared I was or how I truly hated going there. I’d have been left out of everything. And I’d have been laughed at. As time went on, Lilith had used her experiences there to feed her poetry and her image as teen queen goth, and Adam had used his time there to win new friends by demonstrating how brave he was, how spine-chillingly scary he could be and how there wasn’t a dare he wouldn’t do or scary place he wouldn’t venture into – apart from the crypt at the far end of the cemetery. Even Adam wasn’t stupid enough to go in there. It was rumoured that six children in the eighteenth century had got locked in there on Halloween and the next morning all that had been found were their clothes and scratches on the door where they’d tried to get out. Their remains were never found. The story now told was that if anyone was in there on Halloween at the stroke of midnight their bones would be turned to dust and scattered over the graveyard. There were six graves next to the crypt that were said to have been put there as a reminder of them. It gave me the shivers walking past in the daytime, never mind at night.
Suddenly Adam leaped out from behind a tree. Lilith shrieked and laughed while I fell back against a gravestone and grazed my arm. I so wished that he wouldn’t do that. I found my balance and took a deep breath. Maybe now was the time to tell them of my secret fear as part of our goodbye-to-the-cemetery ritual. To tell them that our visits to the cemetery had left me with a fear of the dark, a hatred of horror films, an aversion to cemeteries and had given me nightmares.
I was so glad that we were moving to a place with houses on either side. Houses that Lilith and Adam hoped were haunted. Houses I hoped hosted only living souls. But the move brought for me a fresh fear: my own room. Seeing as I was scared of the dark, the idea held little to look forward to. It had been OK as long as I shared with Lilith – like her presence would protect me and make me feel brave. In the new house, I’d be on my own and I was dreading it. It was time to come out of the closet and admit that I, second-in-command to Lilith the Goth Queen, actually hated the dark. I took a deep breath to summon up the nerve.
‘Actually, guys, I have something to tell you,’ I started.
‘Great. A new ghost story,’ said Adam, and he stood next to a statue of an angel that hovered above the grave of one Eric Barrington, who died in his sleep in 1986.
For the second time that night, my courage failed me and I blurted out a joke that Mary had told me yesterday. ‘What kind of ghost haunts a hen house?’
‘Don’t know,’ chorused Adam and Lilith.
‘A poultry geist.’
Lilith and Adam groaned.
‘That’s not even funny,’ said Lilith.
‘Haven’t you got anything scary to tell us?’ said Adam. ‘It’s always Lilith and I who come up with the good mysteries.’
‘Only that she’s a … what was it, Eve? Oh yeah, a Zodiac Girl,’ said Lilith.
‘What’s this?’ asked Adam.
‘Oh, nothing,’ I said. ‘Just some stupid pop-up on the computer.’
Just at that moment, I saw something move behind Adam’s shoulder, something in the trees. I looked over. Not something. Someone. A figure in a black cloak. ‘Ohmigod!’ I screamed, and pointed. ‘Over there. There’s someone there.’
Lilith and Adam almost jumped out of their skin.
‘What? Who? What did you see, Eve?’ asked Adam.
I felt like I could hardly breath. ‘A … a figure, a tall … I think it was a man. Adam, no.’
Adam had raced over in the direction of the trees. ‘Come out, come out, whoever you are,’ he called, then looked around. ‘No one here.’
Lilith linked my arm in hers. ‘Nice one, Eve. You really had us going for a moment then. That scream sounded totally genuine.’
‘But I did see someone, I did.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ she said as Adam came back to join us.
‘No one there, kiddo,’ he said.
My heart was beating like mad. ‘But you have to believe me. I know what I saw and I didn’t imagine it. Let’s go home.’ I set off towards the gap in the conifers, but Adam pulled me back.
‘You can drop the act now,’ said Adam. ‘You had us going for a while with that five-star scream and we know what you were playing at – trying to make up for the lack of a good story. See, what we’d really like from you is a good scary story like the ones that Lilith and I come up with, my little – what was it you called her Lilith? – Zodiac … ’
‘Zodiac Girl,’ said Lilith. ‘And apparently we both have different rising signs or whatever. Eve has been looking at astrological sites again.’
I glanced back over at the trees, but all was still. Not a sound, not a movement. All the same, I felt anxious to get home. Adam crossed his eyes and put the torch under his chin so that his face lit up like a ghoul. ‘Eve Palumbo. Astrology is for morons, for people with no brains, so that must mean that you have no brain, which means that someone has eaten it. Someone came in through the window one night and scooped your brain out through your ear.’
‘Or maybe they sucked it out with a straw,’ added Lilith. ‘Through your eyeball.’
‘Ergh,’ I said. ‘Will you cut it out? That is so disgusting, and astrology isn’t for morons. Loads of people with brains use it.’
Adam flashed the torch on and off so that his scary face appeared then disappeared. ‘Give me one good argument to convince me about something to do with astrology.’
‘OK. I … ’ I looked up at the sky where the moonlight was struggling to come through the clouds. A cloud drifted over and suddenly I could see the clear crescent moon. ‘OK, look at the moon.’ Lilith and Adam looked up. ‘We all know the moon affects the sea, affects the tides, yeah?’
‘Yeah,’ said Adam. ‘Everybody knows that.’
‘And we know the sun affects our planet in loads of ways: gives us light, heat, affects the plants,—’
‘Etc., etc.,’ said Lilith as if she was bored.
‘OK, so that’s just two planets that we know are affecting us. In astrology there are ten. I don’t know exactly what they do, but they’re all in different positions in the sky, yeah? Some closer to Earth, some further away. And if the moon can affect the sea and the sun can affect the plants, then why can’t they affect human beings too?’
‘What are you trying to say, Evepud?’ asked Adam. ‘Because I can tell you that so far I’m not convinced.’
‘I’m trying to say that there might be elements out in the sky that affect us too, seeing as we are living things on this planet. It’s like one giant computer programmer up there – all the different elements around when you are born determine certain things about you. Where the ten planets are in the sky and what angle the Earth is on its axis create something totally unique in you.’
Lilith nodded. ‘I think I’m with you.’
‘Which is why by the time I was born twenty minutes later than Lilith, the alignment of the planets up in the sky was very slightly different to when Lilith was born. Because the Earth had rotated a bit so the planets were all at very slightly different angles.’
Adam nodded. ‘Maybe you have something there. It might explain why she’s such a bossy git and you’re not.’ Then he laughed. ‘But, then again, you might be talking total rubbish.’
To Lilith’s right, I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye. I glanced over behind her and I swear I saw a shadow moving through the trees. It was so dark it was hard to see exactly.
‘Behind you, Adam,’ I gasped. ‘In the trees! I’m sure there’s someone there.’
Adam didn’t even bother turning around. ‘Yeah, yeah, you got us the first time. At least try something new.’
‘But I—’
‘Yeah,’ said Lilith. ‘Like, bo-oring.’
‘Lilith, you know when I am telling
the truth; you know that you do.’
Lilith looked deep into my eyes for a few seconds. ‘OK. I think you are, but Adam says there’s no one there and I think he’s telling the truth too and, well, you know how you start imagining that you’re seeing things when you’re tired. I think you’re just tired. It’s late … ’
I’d had enough. I wanted to get out of that cemetery as fast as possible. ‘OK,’ I said, and I tugged on Lilith to go back to the gap in the conifers. ‘OK, maybe that’s it. And, fine, so I can’t come up with a good scary story tonight and I can’t explain astrology either, but there’s something else I can’t explain. A real mystery –’ I made my voice go into a scary whisper – ‘and it’s at home under my bed at this very minute.’
‘What? An old sock and a smelly trainer?’ asked Adam. ‘No mystery there.’
‘No really. I –’ I hesitated for a moment while I asked myself how I was going to explain the tin with my secret things in it and the place that I’d hidden it for years. Then I realized that it didn’t matter if they knew the hiding place because we were moving and I wouldn’t need it any more. If I could get up to the room fast enough, I could pull the secret papers out and hide them under my mattress and only show them the mystery packages.
‘So what’s under your bed, then?’ asked Lilith. ‘A body?’
‘Course not. Right, I wasn’t ever going to tell you this, but I had a place in the garden where I used to hide things. An old tin box … ’
Double Trouble (Zodiac Girls) Page 3