Three Strikes

by Lucy Christopher

  Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  About the authors

  Three Strikes

  The Darkness

  The Twins of Blackfin

  The Twins of Blackfin Chapter One

  The Twins of Blackfin Chapter Two

  The Twins of Blackfin Chapter Three

  The Twins of Blackfin Chapter Four

  The Twins of Blackfin Chapter Five

  The Twins of Blackfin Chapter Six

  The Twins of Blackfin Chapter Seven

  The Twins of Blackfin Chapter Eight

  The Twins of Blackfin Chapter Nine

  The Twins of Blackfin Chapter Ten

  The Twins of Blackfin Chapter Eleven

  The Twins of Blackfin Chapter Twelve

  The Twins of Blackfin Chapter Thirteen

  The Twins of Blackfin Epilogue

  Mathchgirl

  Matchgirl Chapter One

  Matchgirl Chapter Two

  Matchgirl Chapter Three

  Matchgirl Chapter Four

  Matchgirl Chapter Five

  Matchgirl Chapter Six

  Matchgirl Chapter Seven

  Matchgirl Chapter Eight

  Matchgirl Chapter Nine

  Matchgirl Chapter Ten

  Matchgirl Chapter Eleven

  Matchgirl Chapter Twelve

  Matchgirl Chapter Thirteen

  Matchgirl Chapter Fourteen

  Matchgirl Chapter Fifteen

  Matchgirl Chapter Sixteen

  Matchgirl Chapter Seventeen

  Matchgirl Chapter Eighteen

  Matchgirl Chapter Nineteen

  Matchgirl Chapter Twenty

  Matchgirl Chapter Twenty-One

  Matchgirl Chapter Twenty-Two

  Copyright

  ‘Three unsettling but thoroughly compelling new stories from the Grand High Witches of thrilling YA. This is a veritable bubbling cauldron of mystery, mischievousness and mayhem. YA as it should be – dangerous, dark and daring. I loved it.’

  C.J. Skuse

  ‘Three deeply compelling dark tales that twist and snare the imagination. Three tales of love, loss, heartache and page-turning mystery.’

  Jenn, www.jenniely.com

  ‘“Matchgirl”: what a tingling, winter storm of a story! Nia and Sol, ice and sunlight, loss and finding, the fragile flame of matchlight hope, and the music that holds them all … it’s magical.’

  Hilary McKay

  ‘Mysterious, intriguing and chilling. This is a fab collection for anyone who likes their tales just a little bit twisted… Three Strikes is perfect reading for long winter-evenings.’

  Elen Caldecott

  ‘“The Darkness”: A raw tale, reminiscent of Black Mirror, with compelling characters stranded in a stark landscape, all bound together in gritty, gripping writing.’

  Joanna Nadin

  Three Strikes

  Dark and Chilling Tales

  Lucy Christopher is the British/ Australian author of Stolen, which won the Branford Boase Award, the Gold Inky, and a Printz Honor Award. Her other books include Flyaway, The Killing Woods and Storm-wake. Lucy is senior lecturer in creative writing at Bath Spa University where she received her PhD in Creative Writing.

  Kat Ellis is the author of Blackfin Sky (Firefly, 2014)and Purge (Firefly, 2016)in the UK and Blackfin Sky and Breaker in the US (Running Press Kids). She lives in Rhyl in North Wales.

  Rhian Ivory is the author of four YA titles with Bloomsbury, The Boy Who Drew the Future (Firefly, 2015), which was nominated for the Carnegie Medal, and Hope (Firefly, 2017).

  Three Strikes

  The Darkness

  Lucy Christopher

  The Twins of Blackfin

  Kat Ellis

  Matchgirl

  Rhian Ivory

  There! I stuck it in. The advert. Kept it, see? Found it folded up in a back pocket. Not that long ago, I read it every day.

  For a while, it was the only note I wanted to read.

  For a while, it was a good thing.

  Mum left a note for me too, the night everything happened. I found it later, after the police had gone and I was alone at the kitchen table waiting for Dieter. Back when it was dark as killers’ eyes outside.

  Tonight I’m catching the black cat.

  All she wrote.

  Mum was odd like that. You’ll see.

  But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

  So…

  The first thing I remember about being here? That’s something Lily wanted me to write about.

  I guess it was the heat, slamming into me with a force that took my breath. People talk about walls of heat, but this felt like a whole mountain. It stopped me moving, made me unwilling to ever move again. I was sweating instantly, standing at the top of those rickety plane steps and staring out at the darkness. Long, black, endless darkness. That seemed appropriate, at least.

  After the bright lights of the plane, the black was impenetrable, like there was nothing else beyond the end of the runway: the lights stopped and the world stopped too. There could’ve been a gigantic cliff there and we’d never have known it. They could’ve marched us straight towards it. That darkness was alive, too – full of screeching creatures, rustling movement. But there was no sound of water. No beach.

  ‘Some island,’ I said.

  Sam was pushing me. ‘Come on, the rest of us want to see too.’

  The steps wiggled, so I grabbed hard onto the flimsy banister until I found the tarmac below. Heat seeped up through my trainers. If my feet had been bare, I’d have been hopping. I thought it was crazy that tarmac could be so hot when it was night-time – how boiling did it get during the day? Could that tarmac melt and become a sticky river?

  I turned to say this to Sam, but he was no longer right behind me. Instead, he was walking away from the plane with Nyall. They were chatting about one of the films that’d been on, something cheery about earthquakes and the end of the world. Nyall nodded seriously, not smiling at all, while Sam laughed and joked. Maybe Nyall was just bricking it to finally be here, like I was.

  When Pete came over, I bet he was bricking it too, under his tough-guy look. But he slapped Nyall and Sam on the back like they were all comrades – a team about to embark on a dangerous mission.

  Wanker.

  I turned away and found the other girl, Annie, at my shoulder, pressing me to keep going. I stepped away from the plane. The camera was there, even then: George in front of our faces with a little hand-held, asking us leading questions about ourselves and how we were feeling.

  ‘What’s it all like? First impressions? What can you hear and taste and smell…?’

  I can remember the smell: the shock of it. It was sweet, sort of, and wet. Like a mixture of damp school jumpers and the cheap flowery perfume one of my therapists had worn. I’d been expecting the sea. Something like salt-and-vinegary chips, maybe. I’d thought there’d be a breeze.

  ‘It smells like a slug,’ I said.

  Sam was too busy chatting with his new best friend to hear me. Annie was still there, though, with her face screwed up, smelling it too.

  ‘It smells like hot knickers,’ she said, right to the camera.

  I laughed. I didn’t think she could be funny. The camera caught it all.

  Where’s that footage now?

  Annie moved away from me then, away from the camera and George and out across the tarmac. I followed, still watching the darkness. Was it all just trees? Maybe it was like the woods on the mountain back home. And maybe the smell was a bit like bracken and moss, like the stuff Mum and I collected one autumn for one of her art projects. We had spent days doing that; I’d had dirt under my fingernails for weeks. I closed my eyes to stop thinking about it, but the
noise of the place jolted them open again: the shrieks and rustles and calls. It was like we were stepping out into a zoo. When I caught up with Sam his cheeks were hot, red as cherries and almost bitable.

  ‘I told you this would be good,’ he said. He was looking at Annie, at her long blonde hair. He was breathing in the night.

  ‘We haven’t even got there yet, not properly,’ I said.

  There was a gnawing feeling in my stomach, the one that had started the very first day I’d agreed to do this thing with him, that’d been eating away at me ever since. The one I still have now.

  But it wasn’t the day when I said yes to The Tribe that really started that feeling, not if I truly think about it. And this is what Lily actually wants me to write about – the beginning, my journey to being here. What started my own personal tip to the dark.

  So maybe it starts here: when Sam asked me out.

  I liked that. A lot. At the time.

  I liked how Sam didn’t even care that he was in the middle of our English classroom and there were people all around us. I liked how he kept holding my gaze. I liked how his cheeks went marshmallow pink, too. And he was grinning at me, knowing my answer. I liked that best of all.

  ‘Tonight, after dark, we’ll take her car,’ he said. ‘I know how.’

  He’d been talking about doing it for ages. Just me, him and Mum’s old banger at the end of the street. I’d thought it was all a joke, one of Sam’s crazy ideas that never happened.

  He scrunched his fingers into a fist, flicked his eyes from where Brandon was eavesdropping, and back to me. ‘What do you think?’

  And I looked at how wide and brown his eyes were, how cute his lips looked when he chewed them at the corner, and I said,

  ‘Yes.’

  …even though I had something else to do that night. Even though I knew what he was planning was unbelievably stupid and probably illegal. Even though Mum would hate it.

  Sam punched the air, then immediately looked around the classroom to check who’d seen. I almost started to laugh. Sam was so rubbish at trying to play cool. He shrugged it off.

  ‘’bout ten? Earlier?’

  I shrugged back, looked out the window to the playground.

  ‘Sure, whatever.’

  Unlike him, I could do nonchalant. It was a skill I’d perfected being round Mum. She could get so excited over nothing, she needed nonchalant to bring her down to earth. Needed me to bring her down, too. (Needed that more than I care to think about.)

  I need nonchalant outhere as well; it gives me a mask. Sam and the others, they don’t seem to need anything.

  But none of them

  ! NONE OF THEM !

  But

   none of them

       killed

  There. I wrote it.

  Happy?

  I didn’t write all of it though. Not

  quite.

  Not the whole story.

  Not yet.

  (And, actually, I don’t know for sure that none of them have killed. Pete’s probably done over a few.)

  Since I wrote that stuff above, I’ve watched a flock of parrots zigzag across the sky. They stopped in a tree opposite our huts and made the branches shake. I didn’t look at this page the whole time they were there. Little distractions. I’m good at them.

  I feel funny. I’m not sure writing this is a good idea. I don’t want to do it, even though a part of me thinks I should.

  But waiting like the others are – just sitting around and talking about nothing and pretending – that’s the worst thing ever. And Sam thinks writing this might be worth it.

  ‘Lily will like it,’ he said. ‘And that’s good, right?’

  But I’m not sure I give a fuck about what Lily likes (and if you’re reading this, Lily, you might as well know it), I just want to get us out of here.

  And this was a Task after all. My task.

  Keep a Group Journal of everything that brought you to this point.

  Lily’s words. She even talked about burning the journal afterwards in some elaborate Letting Go ceremony, probably complete with joss sticks and hippy dancing around a fire.

  I don’t see Sam writing. He’s sitting with the others. Perhaps he just told me to do this so I’d be out of the way. I don’t think so though. I know if I go over there, he’ll try and hug me and expect me to be a part of things. I’d rather be by myself. Even if it means thinking about why we’re here … how it started. That day.

  ‘Start with the day everything changed,’ Lily told me when she gave this out.

  Did she give anything to the other guys, or just this journal to me? My mind is already starting to forget things. It’s the air of this place, the smell. It’s the drugs I’m sure Lily and George are smoking, seeping into me too.

  So…

  It’s a long while ago now, but out here I have a lot of time to count things like this. For example, there are 12 parrots flitting between the trees in front of me – 12 I can see, anyway. I am 5,804 days old. Sam is 5,821. We’ve been here 15 days, but I’ve been here, on the steps of this hut writing this, for 1.

  The other important numbers are these:

  It’s 390 days since Sam asked me out.

  And 389 days since Mum died.

  There.

  I wrote it again.

  Most days I try not to think about this last set of numbers … that there are only a few hours between the two. But today, sitting here in the heat and the dirt, I dunno…

  Sam thinks it will get us out, writing this stuff. I’m not sure about that, but writing this gives me A REASON not to sit with the others.

  Until we find out what’s happening.

  Until we find out when they’re coming back.

  That’s another number I can write down, actually.

  29

  29 hours since we saw Lily and George. Since they disappeared.

  I don’t know how many numbers until they return.

  If they do.

  Maybe they just want to freak us out. Make us think we’re alone. Fuck with our minds. I can’t be the only one of us who’s thinking it. Perhaps it’ll go all Lord of the Flies, or Hunger Games, and we’ll start killing each other. Perhaps they’re watching for it right now. Waiting for us to crack. It’s what makes good telly after all. Good psychological drama.

  Are we living up to their expectations?

  Experiential psychology

  Immersive healing

  The Tribe

  What a joke! How did I ever think that a month with these nut jobs would cure anything?

  But I did, didn’t I? I chose to come and begged the money off Dieter to do it. I shouldn’t forget that. I told him that if he gave it to me, he could go off with Cynthia, or whatever she’s called, to Corfu, or Crete, or wherever. I told him it would help.

  Take some responsibility – isn’t that what we’re always being told?

  I just gave a hard stare (as Mum would call it) to the trees. I still see the red lights in there, blinking.

  Sometimes I think they’re eyes. Sometimes cameras. Sometimes, when I go looking for either, I find nothing.

  But they’re watching, aren’t they?

  (You’re watching aren’t you, Lily?)

  I feel it. The eyes. The stare.

  Something’s tracking us. Some … one.

  Maybe.

  I want to draw a cat.

  Paw prints.

  I want those paw prints to cover this page. These words.

  I want scratch marks in my arm.

            Claws.

  Paw prints in my skin.

  Claws could rip up a page like this.

  Sam’s wrong if he thinks I’m writing down everyone’s stories. I don’t care about them. They can write their own; they can stay here forever and I won’t care. Anyway, I don’t want to know anything about them. But me and, yes, even Sam … I want us to get out. That’s why I’m starting with that day, because it’s not just the be
ginning of my story; it’s Sam’s too.

  There are 200 pages in this notebook. Too thick. My story’s not big enough to fill that. But I’ll write what I can. Though I’d rather have a knife in my hand. I bet I could find one too. In the main cabin, there’s all sorts of things that hurt.

  A pen is less useful than a knife but maybe it just stabs differently. And every scratch I make in this paper is an effort. Maybe both require a kind of courage to use.

  The pages of this thing are damp and soft, a little bit like skin … like they’ve sweated, too. When I run my fingers over them, it’s like touching the soft insides of my elbows, the places the sun doesn’t hit. When I think about it like that, I want to mark these pages. Perhaps these words can be the new marks I make.

  Yeah.

  I like that.

  Claw-marked words.

  Lily would be happy with my poetic philosophising, at least.

  Thinking about her smiling at me, all satisfied-like, makes me want to stab this paper with my pen and a knife and pretend that it’s her skin I’m digging into.

     ◆◆◆

  There. Can you see them, Lily? Stab marks?

  It doesn’t make me feel any better though.

  ◆◆◆◆ ◆◆◆◆◆

  OK.

     Maybe a little.

  ◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆

     ◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆

  The night Lily gave me this journal seems ages ago now: the jolty four-wheel drive with us all crammed inside, going through the dark for hours, the feel of Sam’s hot arm juddering against mine.

  So many bumps.

  Ruts.

  Smells.

  And then, spinning this notebook through the hot air. The pages fluttering in the wind like wings: a paper dove. I watched it flip away and almost wanted to flip out of the window after it.