Three Strikes

by Lucy Christopher

  ‘I know what you mean,’ he said, and they fell silent, each hiding their misty eyes behind the steam pluming from their mugs.

  Chapter Seven

  The sky was beginning to darken when Bo arrived home, though it was just after four. It was only when the silence of the house hit her that Bo remembered her mother was out of town for the night.

  Bo shook off her coat and kicked her shoes into the pile by the back door. She’d never imagined she would miss the near-constant bellowing of her little brothers marauding through the house, but at that moment she did. It was too quiet. There was too much space for her to dwell on things. And it had been a … a trying day.

  ‘You’ve got it on you, haven’t you?’

  Bo almost leapt out of her skin at the sound of a man’s voice coming from the darkened living room. In one swift motion, she grabbed a knife from the block on the kitchen counter, turned on the living-room lights, and slashed the knife in the likeliest direction.

  ‘Watch out!’ Jared squeaked. ‘You almost got me!’

  Bo took another step into the room and swung again, though her heart wasn’t truly in it now that she saw who she was slashing at.

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘If you didn’t want to be stabbed, you wouldn’t be hiding in the dark in my house,’ Bo said, reasonably. She stopped swiping at Jared, but held the knife pointed steadily in his direction.

  ‘I wasn’t hiding!’ Jared spluttered, eyeing the blade. ‘I came over to get the diary back, but you weren’t in, so I decided to wait.’

  ‘Inside the house?’

  ‘No. Well, I mean, not at first, but it’s bloody cold outside, and you were gone ages, so I just thought I’d try the back door. It was open, so I came in and made myself a cup of tea.’

  ‘Because that’s a completely normal thing to do? Jesus Christ, you don’t let yourself into a stranger’s house and help yourself to a cuppa, you idiot!’

  Jared at least had the sense to grimace sheepishly. ‘I didn’t think you’d catch me in here, to be honest. I only meant to warm my hands for ten minutes, but I must’ve fallen asleep, because it wasn’t dark when I got here.’ Jared rubbed his eye with the heel of one hand. ‘So, where’s the journal, then? I couldn’t find it anywhere.’

  A hideous understanding dawned on Bo, and her hand tightened on the knife handle again. When she spoke, it was through gritted teeth. ‘Have you been snooping in my room?’

  Jared shrugged. ‘Seemed only fair, after you stole itfrom me.’

  ‘Only after you kidnapped me!’ Bo snapped. ‘Besides, the journal isn’t yours, so technically I didn’t steal it.’

  Jared shrugged. ‘Whatever. Where is it?’

  Without meaning to, Bo had wrapped her free arm tight across her midriff, where the old book nestled somewhere between her many layers of knitwear. ‘I’m not finished reading it yet.’

  ‘Neither am I.’

  ‘Well, I need it more,’ Bo said.

  Jared raised one pierced eyebrow. ‘Need it for what?’

  ‘None of your bloody business!’ The words were out before Bo could remind herself that she had been looking for Jared only a few hours earlier to ask for his help. Shouting and waving a knife at him was probably not the best way to get his cooperation … at least, not unless she wanted to end up in the cell next to her father’s. But then Jared could hardly complain after he’d let himself into her home and rifled through Bo’s belongings.

  He folded his arms and smirked at whatever he saw in her expression. ‘Still chasing your midnight voices, then?’

  ‘It’s only one voice,’ Bo muttered, and folded her own arms rather more peevishly. ‘And yes, I am.’

  Jared sighed. ‘You think that old book I found in the woods is going to help you somehow?’

  Bo paused in her sulking. ‘You found it in the woods?’

  ‘Yeah, in an old shell of a church. It was wedged under a rock…’

  ‘There’s never been a church in Blackfin,’ Bo said.

  Jared laughed. ‘You might want to tell that to Reverend Silas Peale. That’s whose journal you’ve got swaddled in your clothes.’

  ‘Reverend… Wait, Silas? As in Silas Silas? The one who haunts the old weathervane on the school roof?’

  ‘Yup, that’s the one. His name was on a plaque above the church door – or what’s left of it. And it’s mentioned in one of the entries toward the back… Look, keep hold of the journal for a bit if you need to, but give it back when you’re done, yeah? He talks about something that happened here sixteen years ago that I’m kind of looking into, and I haven’t finished reading the whole thing.’

  ‘What kind of something?’ Bo asked.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with the voice you keep hearing.’ Jared sniffed and looked away. It was the sort of sniff a liar would do, Bo thought.

  ‘Fine, keep your secrets,’ she sighed, then narrowed her eyes at him. ‘It really has nothing to do with what’s going on now…?’

  Jared shook his head firmly. Less liar-ly.

  ‘Okay. I’ll give the book back when I’m finished. But you might want to bugger off now – Gui was about to lock up the garage when I left, and I’m pretty sure I saw your van keys still on the hook in his office.’

  Jared’s eyes widened. ‘Damn it!’

  Bo might have laughed as he tore out of the back door, but it seemed like rather a waste of energy when he was running too fast to hear it.

  The girl’s power is amplified by some talisman her father carries, it seems, but … theory that distance or other substances might mute her … Bruno’s is more of a mystery, as he has yet to demonstrate it … perhaps weaker? Or perhaps even more powerful … both ungodly, and must be purged from this place … if it falls to me, then so be it … find a way. I swear.

  The hour had grown late by the time Bo finished reading the diary. Not late enough for that eerie voice to come snaking in through whatever cracks it crept through to reach Bo’s ears – and those of the other youths in Blackfin – but late enough that Bo helped herself to a double-strength cup of coffee to keep her eyelids from sliding shut.

  The diary ended abruptly. Silas’ tone in the final entry had been as irritated and unpleasant as all his others, but there had been a note of excitement there, too, at some plan to rid his precious town of the twins.

  His plan hadn’t worked, if Edita’s nightly singing was anything to go by. But what exactly was Edita now? A girl, trapped somewhere for sixteen years and broadcasting her voice across town each night? Or was she something a little more … ghostly?

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Bo murmured.

  Why had Silas stopped writing his journal? And why had Edita’s spirit, if that’s what it was, woken up now? It didn’t seem likely the sleepwalking thing had been going on for the past sixteen years without anyone noticing, so it was probably a recent phenomenon. What had happened that might’ve woken a ghost? Surely … surely it wasn’t Sky’s death?

  Bo frowned, turning it over in her head, but she couldn’t come up with any connection between Sky dying and Edita’s ghost waking up, other than the timing.

  Ugh. This whole thing was like a giant ball of spun sugar, with all the threads sticking together and getting messier the more Bo tried to pull them apart.

  She shoved aside her notebook. If problem-solving and logic weren’t going to help her, then she’d have to try something else. But what? Her gaze settled on the patterned cover of her notebook, the design a series of letters in different fonts and colours.

  Perhaps the thing to do when dealing with a mystery involving a ghost was not so illogical after all: she should ask the ghost for help.

  Chapter Eight

  A good twist with two of her father’s lock picks, and the padlock on the door of the fortune-teller’s hut went spinning away across the boards of the pier.

  The wind howled in Bo’s ears, bitter and accusing. It whipped the sea against the struts of the pier below her and bellowed mournfully as it rattled
the boardwalk. Had it sounded this way when Sky drowned? Had this been the last sound she heard? Bo couldn’t remember if it had been windy that night. There were so many details she could remember: the way Sky’s lips had turned a shade of blue that matched her dress; her one bare foot where the shoe had been stolen by the sea; the streaks of black mascara on Sky’s face, as though she had been crying … how could she not remember if it had been windy? Even now, she could feel the clammy chill of Sky’s skin. It had shocked Bo when she touched her friend’s hand. The water must have been painfully cold; it always was.

  This wasn’t the first time Bo had set foot on the pier since seeing her best friend’s lifeless body being hauled onto it, but it still brought back that lead-weight feeling in her limbs she’d first felt watching Sean try to revive Sky. It was as though Bo had turned to stone right there on the promenade. Her heart had been the only part of her seemingly still awake, hammering away the seconds until Sky would open her eyes and heave in a breath… But that had not happened. Sky had remained stubbornly dead.

  Bo knocked briskly on the door of the fortune-teller’s hut and waited for a response. There was none. At just after 11pm, the hut was of course unoccupied, though now that Bo thought about it, she hadn’t seen Madame Curio in weeks. But perhaps the fortune-teller felt the need to avoid the pier since Sky’s drowning. Perhaps she, too, felt the deep sadness that had settled over the town these past weeks.

  Bo narrowed her eyes. No, Madame Curio wasn’t the sentimental sort. In fact, she was one of the few people in Blackfin who hadn’t openly adored Sky. Remembering that lessened Bo’s twinge of guilt at breaking into her place of work.

  She reached for the door handle, turning her back to the seaward view, and stepped inside. The air in the hut was cold and tinged with incense, but not musty. It was a familiar smell to Bo; she visited Madame Curio whenever she had a spare couple of pounds to pay the old woman for a reading, though she would never admit that to anyone, not even her friends – and especially not her mother, who was extremely superstitious when it came to fortune-telling.

  Bo wasn’t entirely sure why she came to have her fortune told as often as she did. She didn’t believe that what Madame Curio told her would help her in any way, and indeed it never had. But she couldn’t deny the accuracy of the fortune-teller’s predictions: an A in her next maths exam (not unexpected, but quite pleasant to hear); that Bo’s misplaced sunglasses had not actually been misplaced, but instead broken by her little brothers and buried in the garden; a warning to steer clear of the Penny Well, to which Bo had lost more than a few coins over the years and not been granted a single wish. These titbits she found neither useful nor particularly surprising, yet Bo kept coming back in the hope that some important truth might slip out and make it all worthwhile. She had a feeling Madame Curio knew this, and would quite possibly withhold such a truth should it speak to her through her gnarled deck of cards. The woman had practically said as much on Bo’s last visit.

  ‘Not everything in Blackfin can be explained, my dear. Better to just take in what this town offers, and not poke and prod at its secrets too much.’

  Isn’t that exactly what I’m doing now? Poking and prodding at things that should be left well alone?

  But Bo had good reason this time. Even setting aside the gut-churning thought of some outside force compelling her to act every night in ways she couldn’t control, Bo was worried about her little brothers. Coming home covered in mud was bad enough; what if they got hurt? There were plenty of places where they could cut themselves or fall or…

  Wait. Wait. Was it possible that Sky had been sleepwalking the night she fell from the pier? That leaden, heart-thumping feeling came over Bo again, but it only took a moment for her to see she was wrong. Sky had drowned well before midnight, and seeing as everyone else was looking for her at the time, they couldn’t have been under Edita’s control. No, Sky’s death had been an accident. Just an accident.

  Still, it wasn’t safe for Levi and Scout to be out wandering at night. It really wasn’t.

  Knowing there was no electricity in the hut, Bo took out her lighter and used its flickering light to find one of the tealight lanterns Madame Curio generally left littered about the place. She lit the first one she found, but no others. Unlikely though it was, Bo didn’t want anyone who happened to be out walking at this time of night to see the hut lit up like a beacon and wander over.

  Candlelight dappled the small space. Though dusty and faded with time, the velvet wall hangings made the hut feel cosy. Tucked away in a corner sat a foldaway table laden with a gas camping stove, a kettle, and a mug, but that was as far as practicalities went. Madame Curio’s little round reading table sat as always beneath the lone shuttered window, the crystal ball on it draped in a black cloth. The old lady’s worn and well-used tarot cards had been put away somewhere, but Bo wasn’t looking for the cards. There was something else here that she needed.

  Bo’s mother had always expressed a shuddering dislike for spirit boards, which was why Bo had never actually used one, despite being rather curious about the prospect of chatting to the dead. It didn’t escape her now that chatting to the dead was exactly what she’d been doing at Sky’s graveside for the past couple of weeks. But that had been rather one-sided, and not exactly useful to her now.

  Bo was sure she had seen a spirit board laid out in Madame Curio’s hut on one of her many visits. And she’d seen enough horror films to give her a pretty good idea how to use one. A pointer called a planchette was used to spell out words, delivering messages from beyond the grave. The board wasn’t lying around anywhere obvious now, though. Feeling like a massive hypocrite after snapping at Jared for poking through her things, Bo started poking through Madame Curio’s things.

  Bo found the spirit board tucked behind one of the velvet hangings, its surface scuffed with use, but polished so its dark eye seemed to gleam up at her. For the first time since setting foot on the pier, she hesitated. Could what she was about to do actually be dangerous? From the safety of her kitchen with a strong cup of coffee in hand, the idea of talking to Edita’s ghost – or spirit, or whatever Edita was – and finding a way to convince her to shut up had seemed both harmless and reasonable. Now, with the eye of the spirit board blinking up at her, Bo wasn’t so sure.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she muttered aloud to herself, and pulled the board out from behind the velvet curtain. A red pouch hanging from one corner of the board held the planchette. She carefully took it out and placed both the board and the pointer on the table.

  Sitting in Madame Curio’s cushioned seat, Bo drew in a deep breath, then placed her fingertips on the planchette. Now came the part she would have to ad lib; she knew there were always specific incantations and such in Hollywood representations of what she was doing, but Bo felt a more direct approach was probably best. Not only that, but she wanted to get this over with and be back home before midnight.

  She had quite deliberately chosen the hour before the voice seemed to have an effect on the town: 11pm being close enough to it that Edita should be … well, stirring; but not so near that Bo would fall into a trance mid-summoning.

  ‘Edita?’ she said. ‘Are you there? Please move the planchette to YES if you are.’

  Bo closed her eyes, waiting to feel some tug at the pointer. And waited. None came.

  ‘EDITA,’ she said more loudly. ‘The girl whose voice I’ve been hearing after midnight … you said something about being trapped. Does that have anything to do with why you’re making everyone sleepwalk at night?’

  Again she waited. Again there was no movement from the planchette.

  Bo opened her eyes and peered around the hut, perhaps expecting to see a misty apparition hovering in front of the velvet drapery, but all was as it had been before. The only movement came from the candle flickering on the table.

  Well. That had been a big waste of time.

  Bo slumped back in the chair, letting her hands slide from the pointer. Th
en, as though propelled by a swift flick, the planchette whipped across the spirit board and hit the crystal ball sitting at the edge of the table with a ping. On instinct, Bo bolted up and reached for it, worried it would fall and smash. But a split second before Bo’s hand made contact with the ball, the black cloth slid away from it, and a light emanating from deep inside the crystal hit Bo squarely in the eyes.

  The ping of the planchette’s collision seemed to vibrate from within the crystal, making its smooth surface shiver beneath Bo’s palm. Its sound undulated, twisting into a whisper that had become familiar to Bo. It was so faint she barely heard it: low and mournful.

  ‘He trapped me…’ Edita said. ‘He left me here to die alone, without my brother, in the dark…’

  Bo forced herself to swallow against the tightness in her throat before answering. ‘Who did?’

  The glow from the crystal swirled, light motes spiralling faster and faster at its core. Even as Bo fought against its intoxicating pull, she felt herself leaning closer. The voice whispered again.

  ‘Can’t get out … the air is so stale in here…’

  ‘Where are you?’ Bo tried again.

  ‘Bruno? Bruno, can you hear me? I need you to get me out… The main entrance is blocked, you must find the east door…’

  Bo took a shaking breath. She wasn’t sure if Edita could actually hear her or was just stuck in some nightmarish bubble, but whatever was happening, Bo at least seemed to be hearing the spirit without falling under her control. Bo intended to keep it that way.