I am grateful to have a friend at all.
Besides, there’s plenty of time. In just a week we are going to university together, to do the archaeology course we were supposed to start last summer. As if the last twelve months never happened.
‘Are you ready to go?’ I ask quietly. I am hoping he’ll say yes. I don’t like being here. It’s empty, dead. I can’t feel any connection to the three people beneath my feet. Wherever they are, it isn’t here.
‘Yeah,’ he says, and we turn in tandem, begin to wind our way down the rows, heading for the exit.
There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to Dougie but haven’t. But I know I really should. I know it needs to be said, and better now than later. Without it, I’ll never really be able to put all this behind me.
I walk slightly closer to him so that our shoulders bump.
‘Thank you,’ I say.
Dougie looks at me quizzically and I make myself meet his gaze. Our footsteps slow.
‘For what?’ he finally replies.
I take a deep breath.
‘For standing up for me. For backing me up. You could have …’ I tail off, then make myself continue, ‘… you could have left me in that place.’
Dougie’s puzzled smile freezes on his face. We have purposely avoided talking about the camping trip and I can see he’s in no rush to do so now.
‘You didn’t have to help me,’ I say. Because he didn’t. With the dark cloud of suspicion hanging over me, with everyone else already having condemned me to the gallows. He didn’t have to do that.
The smile is back, and this time it’s untroubled. ‘What else was I going to do, abandon you?’
That had been my fear. I should have had faith, but after a year in that hellhole, a hopeless year, faith had been hard to come by.
‘We were in it together,’ he says. ‘You and me.’
‘Yeah,’ I whisper. ‘Together.’
There is a lull in the conversation as we once more begin the morose trip out of the cemetery. Chitchat seems disrespectful in this place. Dougie frowns and stares down at the ground as we walk.
‘There is just one thing that troubles me,’ he finally says as we meander out through the gates of the cemetery. ‘You said that we went swimming together –’ I look at him curiously as we walk, nodding slowly. Where is he going with this? ‘But you went after Martin. The two of you took the back path up to the road. You watched him flag down that car, cadge a lift off that old couple. That’s what we agreed.’ He pierces me with his eyes and I stop dead in my tracks.
‘I –’ I start to speak but words escape me. Dougie reaches out a hand and grips me firmly by the upper arm. I don’t try to get away; I couldn’t even if I wanted to.
‘It didn’t exactly go to plan,’ I remind him.
The book Dougie dropped in front of me was obviously really old. The spine was cracked and the writing inlaid on the leather front was so faded I could hardly read it.
‘Blood and Dust,’ I read. ‘The Dark Rites of Human Sacrifice.’ I looked up from where I was lying sprawled across his double bed. Dougie sat at the desk, spinning the chair round so that he could face me, a feverish light in his eyes. ‘Where did you get this?’ I asked.
‘Bought it off some guy on the internet. He’s got a shop down in London, specialises in druid stuff.’
‘Wow.’ I flipped it open, wrinkling my nose at the dusty smell that wafted up from the pages. ‘The writing’s funny, looks almost like Macbeth.’ We’d been reading the Scottish Play in English, ploughing through the Shakespearian language. ‘Can you read it?’
‘Most of it,’ Dougie replied.
I pulled my gaze away from the scrunched lines of tiny writing.
‘Enough?’
‘Enough.’ He nodded.
The half-smile on my face widened until it was a grin, then I giggled.
‘Are we really going to – ?’ I cut off the rest of my question, too overcome with the idea.
‘We’re going to,’ Dougie confirmed.
‘Can you imagine?’ A delicious shiver ran down my spine, excitement making my nerves shiver.
‘We won’t have to,’ Dougie promised. ‘It’s my birthday soon …’
I saw it.
Saw the very moment. The instant. The second the light drained out of his eyes.
Saw it, and savoured it.
I felt power rush through me, adrenaline flood my veins.
With hands ghostly pale, I reached out and closed his eyes. The bruises were already beginning to bloom on Martin’s neck.
No, not Martin’s neck. He wasn’t here anymore. On the body. That’s all this thing was now. A lifeless body. It was just like Dougie had said.
We’d hiked with Martin to the cairn – it seemed fitting. A burial mound. A tomb. Ancient, sacrificial.
‘Now, remember,’ Dougie murmured. ‘Remember what we agreed.’
‘He hitched a lift,’ I replied. ‘I saw him go.’
‘Darren knows.’ His voice was soft and came out of nowhere, slithering from the darkness behind me.
I jumped, whirled around to see Dougie’s face lit by the light of the torch, his expression grim.
‘What?’ I asked faintly, though I’d heard him.
‘Darren. He knows.’
My heart stopped for an instant, then began to beat again in double time.
‘How?’ I whispered.
‘He found Martin’s stuff, the book at the bottom of my bag. He went up to the cairn.’
Fear zinged through me, but it was quickly replaced by outrage.
‘What was he doing raking through your bags?’
‘I don’t know. Acting on suspicions?’ Dougie shrugged. ‘I’ve just overheard him telling Emma what he’s found. They’re going to hike out tomorrow and call the police.’
‘What are we going to do?’ A much more important question.
‘What we have to,’ Dougie answered. ‘You deal with Emma. I’ll take care of Darren.’
There was steel in his eyes. Steel, and excitement.
Dougie lifts a finger to my lips. ‘It worked out in the end.’ The finger leaves my mouth and he runs a hand through my hair, pinning it back behind my ear. ‘You did well.’
Did I?
‘But you got hurt,’ I blurt out. ‘If I’d handled Emma properly –’
‘You did well,’ he says again, disregarding my words. He flashes me a grin. ‘We did. It was just like we’d talked about, wasn’t it?’
Well, not exactly. I hate to bring up the names, but … ‘Darren … and Emma.’ My best friend. Her boyfriend. We haven’t talked about that.
‘They should have left it alone,’ he tells me, no hint of recrimination or regret in his words.
‘They should,’ I say. ‘If they’d stayed wrapped up in each other, like they were supposed to …’
I reach up, cup my hands around his jaw and he grins at me. Then suddenly we’re kissing and it’s all tongues and gasping and clashing teeth. Right there in the cemetery. I go up on my tiptoes, desperate to be closer.
‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ I whisper, breaking away. ‘We did it.’
The light in his eyes is devilish and full of excitement, matching mine. ‘We did it,’ he agrees.
Claire McFall
Claire McFall is a writer and English teacher who lives and works in the Scottish Borders. Her first book, Ferryman, is a love story which retells the ancient Greek myth of Charon, the ferryman of Hades who transported souls to the Underworld. Ferryman was shortlisted for the Scottish Children’s Book Awards and the Grampian Children’s Book Awards, longlisted for the Branford Boase Award and the UKLA (UK Literary Association) Book Awards, as well as being nominated for the Carnegie Medal.
Her second novel, Bombmaker, is a YA dystopian thriller in which the main character Lizzie struggles to survive in a London dominated by gangs and plagued by terrorism.
You can find out more about Claire at www.clairemcfall.co.uk and o
n Twitter: @mcfall_claire
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First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Hot Key Books
Northburgh House, 10 Northburgh Street, London EC1V 0AT
Text copyright © Claire McFall 2015
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-4714-0486-3
This eBook was produced using Atomik ePublisher
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Hot Key Books is part of the Bonnier Publishing Group
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