by Sarah Dalton
Not even Igor can say it. I suck in the cold night air. It’s too awful to speak of, too disgusting to say. A child, killed for enjoyment. I shudder.
Seth grits his teeth before he speaks. His eyes are dark, as though they sink back into his sockets at the thought of what they saw that night.
“Towards the campsite. I think we need to follow this path.”
Even Lacey is silent as we take a right turn and continue along the moors.
When I flash my torch around the surrounding area, an overwhelming sense of agoraphobia seizes my chest like a sudden fist around my lungs. For an instant I can’t breathe as I stare out at the miles and miles of moorland all around us. If we died right now, no one would know. No one would hear us scream. We would be waiting for the dog walkers in the morning, stiff and still.
“Mary?” Seth puts an arm around my shoulders. “Are you all right?”
I nod, eyes wide and unblinking.
“The moors, they’re so…”
“Vast,” Neil finishes. His torch light catches my eye and I squint.
“Yeah,” I say. “I didn’t realise…”
“Do you want to go back?” Seth asks.
I shouldn’t be this afraid. I’ve faced danger before. I’ve accepted the coming darkness with dignity. Yet there’s a quality about this place that unleashes a primal instinct. I do want to go back, and the itchy feeling in my stomach tells me I’m ashamed that I would abandon Seth to the murderous Amy. As I stand there, with my knees almost buckling beneath me, it’s Lacey’s eyes I seek out in the dark, it’s Lacey I look to for the strength to continue, and the only thing she needs to do is nod to me. Then I know that I can go on. I can face Amy with her.
“No, I’m all right,” I say. “I got a little overwhelmed for a minute.”
“Bloody kids,” Igor mutters under his breath.
We go on. It feels like we go on for miles. I check my watch to see that it’s 10:30, yet I could have sworn it was almost midnight. But that’s what the moors do to you. They stretch out your perceptions, stretch and stretch you until you can’t think straight. They are always in control, even when you think you’re in control.
No one talks. I concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other, following Seth as he leads us to the place where his father killed Amy. It has to be where she will show herself to us. We’re coming to finish this once and for all.
“Stop!” Seth says. “I think we’re close.” He shines his torch around us in a sweeping arc. “I recognise those stones over there, and the bushes.” He leaves the footpath and walks over to the cluster of rocks, climbing up and down the undulating mounds of moor-grass.
“Are you sure?” Neil calls out. “It was a long time ago.”
Seth shakes his head. “No, I remember. I remember everything.”
I believe him.
We follow Seth up a steep bank and down into an alcove amongst hillocks. The land is boggy, and water seeps into my shoes. The air is laced with mould and heather tickles my ankles.
“It was here,” Seth says. He paces around the small space, pointing at the ground. “I hid behind those stones over there.” When he turns, he whips around so fast that I start. My muscles clench. “I hid there, and I watched him.” He lifts his head to the sky. “It was different, that night. It was clear and there was a full moon. I remember the way it lit his face. I remember the blood on his hands and on hers. I… I… remember now. He wore latex gloves.”
I hurry to him and take his hand in mine. “It’s all right. You’re safe.”
He shakes his head. “Where did he get the knife from? He must have been carrying it with him all night, waiting. He planned it. On my birthday. The police never found it. They searched the moors, combed them, but never found it. That’s how he got away. He wore gloves and he killed her like it was something to remove from his to-do list. I don’t understand…” He wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “Why?”
“We’ll never be able to understand, because we’re not like him,” says Igor. “You can’t always stop bad folk from committing evil acts, but you can counterbalance it with good. My Shirls was killed, too. I’ve spent nigh on a decade looking for her in the afterlife. I never found her, but I know that she’d be proud of me, tonight. We’re putting that little lass to peace after all them years, and stopping her from killing again. I know, deep down, that little lass doesn’t want to kill over and over. It’s the ghost in her that won’t stop.”
The ghost in her.
I can’t help it. I look at Lacey.
Does she have a ghost in her?
“What if she doesn’t turn up?” Neil says.
“She’ll come,” Igor replies.
Lemarr moves closer to Neil and shifts his torch so they can hold hands. Without any conscious planning, we’ve formed a circle. Lacey is opposite me. When Neil and Lemarr jump back a step, I know she has revealed herself.
“Thought you might want to know where I am,” she says with a shrug.
“What do we do now?” Lemarr asks.
“We wait,” Igor replies.
Each time I check my watch, the minute hand has hardly moved. It has those glow-in-the-dark edges that make it look like there’s a clock face tattooed onto your wrist. Bright and neon. I wore the watch tonight because I thought I might need it. Now I wish I hadn’t, because staring at the time makes everything worse.
The wind picks up and moves my hair from my neck. Every time, I imagine Amy’s hands shifting my hair away so she can attack me like last time, asphyxiating me with her tiny fingers. But each time it is a mere gust of air blustering along the moors. It begins to beat my ears and attempts to throw me forwards. We can no longer talk to each other. If we want to communicate, we have to shout.
For the first time since I arrived in Nettleby, I’m freezing cold. My jacket is too thin, my hands are bare. The chill on the wind seeps in through my thin tights, turning my knees to ice. My teeth chatter. It’s far too cold for a July night, but these are the bleak, bleak moors of the North, and I should have known better.
I rub my hands together and blow on my nails. Nothing works. It seems to be an age before Lacey breaks the silence. She shouts over the gale, “She’s coming, I can feel her.”
And then the wind beats against my jacket, turning it into undulating waves of polyester. Lemarr and Neil look all around them, moving their heads in synchronised jerks, searching for the ghost they came here to find. Igor retrieves his Athamé and stands ready. Seth’s chest heaves up and down, up and down, his eyes like plates. His mouth is parted and twisted in a grimace.
“She’s here!” Lacey shouts again. The wind hardly touches her. She is an image of calm as we battle with hair and coats against the squall.
I steel myself for what is to come. I’d tucked my torch under my arm to warm my hands, but now I hold it aloft, illuminating the centre of our circle, waiting for her to show herself.
“Amy, we’re here to help you,” Lacey shouts. Her eyes are locked on an invisible presence in the middle of us. “We’re here to get you to back to…”
“What is it?” I cry. “What is she doing?”
“She doesn’t want to go,” Lacey replies. “She doesn’t want…”
“Lacey!” I scream.
But Lacey can’t hear me. Her eyes begin to bulge from her skull. For a horrible moment I imagine Amy with her hands around her neck, strangling my best friend. What happens when ghosts attack each other? Where do they go, then? But Lacey isn’t struggling against Amy. She’s in shock because something has happened, something we cannot see or hear.
Lacey turns towards Seth and utters one word. “You. You killed her. She wants you dead.”
“No,” Seth says, backing up. “No, it was my father.”
“What’s happening?” I scream.
“She says it was you.” Lacey’s ghostly form jerks towards Seth.
“She’s lying! She’s lying to you because she wants you to kill me,” Seth
pleads. He trips backwards and lands with a thud on the cluster of stones he hid behind all those years ago.
“Seth!” Before I can think I’m running towards him.
Lacey chases me, but I get to him first. “What are you doing? He’s a murderer!”
“No, he isn’t! I believe him, Lace. I trust him. I know him.”
“Because you’ve had sex? Don’t be so stupid and naïve!” She tries to push me away but her hands go through me, chilling me; she’s strong enough to move stones but not a person.
“No, we haven’t! And it’s more than that… I know in my heart…” I hold my hands out, trying to stop her from getting to him.
Her hand connects with my face, and I gasp, shocked that she hit me, shocked that she could hit me. Lacey stands before me, open-mouthed.
“I’m sorry,” she says, stunned. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Yes, you did.” I turn away from her to help Seth up from the rocks. When he’s on his feet, she’s gone.
It’s then that I see Amy in the centre of our broken circle.
She floats. Her head is down, letting the oil-slick of hair cover her face. It moves like snakes around her head, and her mouth is slightly open. The white, virginal dress floats around her like she’s underwater.
Neil and Lemarr are frozen in fear, clutching each other tightly. Even Igor is pale. When he steps forward with the Athamé, he stumbles. The knife slips from his hand.
I’m shaken, but it’s not from Amy. I keep hearing Lacey’s accusation playing over and over in my mind. It can’t be true. It can’t be. I know him.
Igor bends down to retrieve the Athamé as Amy floats towards me. I stand between her and Seth. My palms are slick with sweat and my throat burns with the memory she left for me. She lets out a long hiss that forms one word.
Rise.
Igor leaps back, away from the dagger on the ground, his gaze remaining transfixed on the grass by his feet. He clutches his chest with one hand, and shines the torch with the other. It’s the torch light that picks up the cause of his fear.
All around us, clods of earth are being forced up, and out of the ground come dark, twisted shadows.
My blood runs cold. Neil’s screams rip through the wind. Lemarr runs away and Neil turns to chase him. I seem to be rooted to the spot. I can’t stop staring at them. I can’t stop myself.
It grabs my ankle.
A shadow hand is attached to my leg, pulling me down into the boggy earth.
“No!” Seth snatches hold of my wrist as I’m pulled down. My torch drops to the floor and bounces down the moors. Igor hurries forward and helps Seth pull me away from the shadow hand.
We scuttle back from them, but when I turn around—breathless, with the wind whipping my hair into my face—the shadows are dragging themselves out of the dirt and heading towards us.
“Run!” Igor shouts above the wind.
I dip down and retrieve the Athamé before running as fast as my legs can take me. Without my torch I have no way of knowing where I’m heading, and no way to find the footpath. Seth runs along next to me. I can barely see him in the dark. Sometimes the shiny black of his jacket fools me into thinking that it is Amy beside me.
“Mary, watch out!” Seth shouts.
But I don’t hear his warning in time. The ground disappears beneath me for one horrifying second. Then I’m tumbling. I’m rolling and rolling, tossed from one mound to the next, dirt finding my ears and nostrils, my mouth, my fingernails. Stones graze and bump my cheeks.
I’m falling… falling… with my eyes tightly closed.
Somewhere I hear my name called.
Somewhere… it seems so far.
And then nothing.
Chapter Twenty-One
I wake up to the sound of wind howling in my ears. The squall continues to engulf the moors and chill me to the bone. I have to spit mud, and when I stand up, a stab of pain runs through my ankle. My face is sore, grazed and bruised from the fall. The Athamé is no longer in my hand. I check my mobile phone, but there is no signal.
“Seth?”
I doubt he can even hear my call over the wind. I squint into the darkness, but it’s impossible to tell how far I fell. There’s a long, sloping hill to the left, but it is too dark to see the crest. Behind me, it is all flatland. There are no lights in the distance. There is nothing.
Unarmed and alone, I drop to my knees, patting the grass for signs of the Athamé. Without it, I can’t defeat Amy. As I scramble through the moor grass, something crawls over my hand and I snap back, screaming. My blood thunders along with the wind in my ears. It was probably a spider, or a mouse. I shouldn’t panic. I shouldn’t…
“Seth!” I yell into the nothingness. “Seth!”
He could be hurt. He could have lost me in the dark. He’s probably wandering around the moors right now, as alone as I am… or worse… killed by Amy, cold and stiff on the ground.
How long was I unconscious for?
“Seth!”
My heart pounds as hard as the wind buffets my jacket. The last time I was filled with so much fear, I almost burned in a fire. The scars on my neck seem to heat, as though I am right there again.
The image of Gethen with the knife in his hand…
“Stop it. Stop it.” I whisper it aloud, as though it will prevent my mind from conjuring any more frightening images. Maybe it will.
I fall back to my knees, searching for the knife as fast as I can, trying to work in a sequence, but finding myself going over the same patches of grass each time. As my hand works, my mind wanders, thoughts twisted by the loneliness of the dark and the stretching of the moors. What if Seth is the murderer? He’s out there somewhere, waiting to kill me. But, no, he can’t be. I saw his heart. I saw his mum in that hospital bed… the friendly nurse…
It could be a ruse. He could have them all fooled. The quiet, thoughtful boy with the tragic past, the sort of young man always loved by middle-aged women and anyone else who longs to mother him. How do I know his father died in a car accident? How do I know he wasn’t the cause of his father’s death and his mother’s coma? I trusted him blindly, relying on the warm gooey feelings in my stomach instead of the cold hard facts. I let lust control me.
There is no one to turn to. No one at all. How can I trust a vengeful ghost, a known killer? I know ghosts to be tricksters, driven to invent problems out of boredom. Lacey is sympathetic to Amy because they share a desire. Neither of them want to move on to the next plane of existence. Amy stays for revenge, while Lacey stays for… me?
She could be motivated by jealousy, annoyed that Seth has taken a place in my life so abruptly, warped by her new ghost form. She is unable to feel human contact ever again. She will never be able to love again.
Because Gethen took her away from me, leaving me with an echo of what she was.
No, I mustn’t think like that. Lacey is different to Amy; she is still the same Lacey I met in Magdelena, the same girl who came to help me, even though she knew she could die.
Tears fall down my nose as I continue to crawl through the mud with my hands outstretched. Once or twice I mistake cool stone for the cold metal of a dagger, and both times it seems like a cruel trick, played on me by the moors.
I hate the moors. They are a hateful, spiteful place. They are the crime scene of the world, witness to our bloody history, lying silent and placid as humans empty their black hearts onto their carpet of heather. A scourge.
I let out a scream, but this time it is just for me.
If I don’t find this dagger, I may as well give up. Perhaps I should go to Amy right now, exposing my neck—my pitiful, scarred neck—so she can have her way. At least then Lacey will have company in the afterlife. At least then we will be equal again. My parents would adjust. I imagine the attention is quite nice for a daughterless mother. In time she will enjoy the consoling looks and sympathetic touches.
The moors have me now. They are controlling me. With each trembling shuffle through the
grass, I lose a little piece of my sanity. Bitterness creeps in. I imagine it running through my veins, making its way to my heart.
“I can’t keep going,” I sob. Every part of me is cold and battered by the wind. I’ve searched and searched, but there is nothing.
Then it comes to me.
The Thing.
A zombie-looking monster of a thing could never be a comfort to anyone, except me at that moment. It beckons me forward, and I shuffle on my knees, following its call. Its skull shines from its face like an x-ray, like moonlight on exposed bone. A piece of flesh falls from its finger.
As I’m about to give up and get to my feet, a sharp blade pierces my fingertip. I cry out, but the sound of my pain is mixed with joy. I found it! I found the Athamé. My fingers wrap around the hilt, never so grateful to feel anything within their grasp. And as I stand up, the laughter bubbles out of me. I forget all of my dark thoughts, putting them down to the moors getting to me, the cold perverting my mind. It’s okay. Seth isn’t a killer; Lacey isn’t bitter; everything is going to be all right. I look up, and the Thing is gone.
“Thank you,” I say to the darkness.
With the Athamé, I have at least some protection. Now I need to find the others, so we can complete our mission together.
“Seth! Lacey!”
My happiness is premature. I have to find the others first.
“Igor? Lemarr? Neil?”
Nothing.
The wind goes: Shhhwooooo-zhoooooo-vrooooooooo.
Shhwooooo-zhoooooo-vroooooooooo.
I have no torch and no way to see through the dark. All I can do is begin to climb the long ascent I tumbled down.
I start with a step.
It’s steep. My feet slide and slip in the mud. It’s the moor grass that keeps me going, jutting out in soft ridges, tough enough to hook my feet onto and push myself up. Sometimes I use the Athamé to help.
I’m almost vertical, and it’s a long climb, with some parts steeper than others. At times I walk almost upright, with sweat pouring down my temples. My ankle is hurt but I can walk on it, and that’s all that matters. I hope that I can still run, if it comes to it.