Burnt Snow

by Van Badham

  ‘A girl,’ I stammered. ‘A fifth person. She’s in the room.’

  ‘There’s no one but us in the room,’ Michelle said soothingly.

  ‘She’s on the outside of the Circle.’ My eyes were still closed.

  I felt Nikki move even closer. ‘Tell me what she’s doing.’

  ‘Yeah, Soph,’ came a blood-deep voice, ‘tell her what I’m doing.’

  I wanted to be sick. ‘She’s talking to me.’

  ‘To tell her what I’m doing you’re going to have to look,’ said the voice.

  ‘Go away,’ I said.

  ‘We’re not going anywhere,’ said Nikki.

  I could hear the concern in Kylie’s voice. ‘Nikki, stop – Sophie’s losing it.’

  ‘Not you,’ I said to Nikki. ‘Her. Please – please stop this.’

  ‘You’re going to have to look at me sometime,’ said the voice.

  ‘We’re not stopping until you look into the ball,’ said Nikki.

  ‘I’m frightened,’ I said.

  ‘She’s not okay!’ said Michelle.

  ‘Right, I’m ending this,’ said Kylie. I heard her struggle, and knew that the force field of the Circle wouldn’t let her stand up.

  ‘Confront your fear,’ growled Nikki. ‘Look in the ball.’

  I didn’t move. Then drops of something liquid hit my face. With the shock of it, I opened my eyes. Nikki was flicking oil at me.

  ‘Where’s she sitting?’ Nikki demanded. ‘Sophie, where’s she sitting?’

  ‘I want to know what’s going on!’ cried Michelle. Her voice was trembling now.

  Kylie struggled. ‘I can’t get up!’

  I was too terrified to look towards the doorway. In the glass ball I could see Marlina, as tangible as the other three girls. Her elbows and head had emerged from the half-open plastic box, her fingers were gripping its rim.

  ‘You can tell her who I am,’ said Marlina. ‘Nikki misses me.’

  Marlina’s knees floated up to her chest. She was spindly. As a knee rose to her ear, she flopped a calf and foot from the inside of the box onto the ground in front of her. It was like she was a boneless doll. It was the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen.

  ‘She’s folded in the storage box,’ I said to Nikki. ‘She’s unpacking herself.’

  ‘Sophie, we can see the box and there’s nothing there,’ Nikki said. ‘Nothing has moved. Your subconscious is making symbols for you. They’re not real. They stand in so you can make sense of other things.’

  ‘I don’t want to see things that aren’t there,’ I blubbered.

  ‘They’re not there, I promise you,’ said Michelle. ‘Please, Nikki, we have to stop.’

  ‘She’s not going to stop,’ Marlina said to me. ‘She wants to find me again.’

  The sound of the voice made me spin my head towards the doorway. ‘Go away!’ I cried, expecting to see an empty storage box.

  Less than two metres away, Marlina smiled and heaved another boneless leg out of the box.

  I screamed. I screamed with a lungful of pure fear. As I did, Nikki leaped towards me, muffling my cries with her hand. I could feel the bones of her fingers vibrate with my suppressed screams.

  ‘Shh …’ said Nikki. Objects rattled against one another in the box as Marlina tried to lever the rest of her body out of it. ‘Whatever you’re frightened of, you are safe in the Circle.’ Nikki’s arms were around me, but I was shaking, staring at Marlina. Behind me, Michelle seemed to be crying and Kylie grunted in frustration, but I could hardly hear them – I was transfixed with terror.

  Marlina was out of the box now, wearing the exact same robe as Nikki. She dusted herself off, straightened her robe and moved towards the door, turning the door handle. As the door swung open, it was not onto the short hallway leading to the Cipri garage. It was onto a forest covered in narrow, white-barked trees and heavy foliage; it was overcast. ‘You’re coming with me,’ cooed Marlina, stepping across the threshold.

  I looked and saw the ground of the forest was extending from the door into the room. Pebbles, scraps of grass and ground cover started creeping down the stairs, onto the floor and across the purple rug.

  I was losing my mind. I was schizophrenic. This hallucination, or vision, was overwhelming the room. As the rug was replaced with the pebbles and dirt, the walls around the doorway crumbled. Nikki, sitting next to me, fell into chunks of dirt and sticks, absorbed into the ground. Kylie was swallowed by vines; Michelle disintegrated into broken mounds of earth and patches of wild grass. The walls crumbled into air and I found myself sitting alone, totally alone, in the centre of a clearing, in the middle of a forest. I tried to look for Marlina, but she had disappeared.

  The air was cold. I was crying heavily now. ‘Help me!’ I screamed into the forest shadows. ‘Help me!’ Tears streamed down my face.

  ‘The first test of strength is always in the eyes,’ came a kindly voice behind me.

  I spun around. It wasn’t Marlina – it was a young woman with a strange accent.

  ‘There’s always the disconnect between what you see and what you choose to remember seeing.’

  Walking barefoot out of the forest, humming a soft tune, the woman wore a loose blue dress. She had long strawberry blonde hair radiating in unwound braids from her head. Her eyes were ice blue; she was tall and she had wide hips.

  I knew someone else with ice-blue eyes, but I couldn’t remember who it was.

  In the woman’s hand was some kind of pitcher. ‘I’ll give you some water when you’re ready,’ she said, holding it up.

  ‘Where am I?’ I asked her, wiping my eyes.

  ‘Pohjola,’ she said.

  It meant nothing. ‘I’ve seen you before,’ I said.

  ‘Since before you were even born,’ said the woman with a broad smile.

  ‘Why did Marlina bring me here?’

  ‘She’s just a … the English word … an avatar. You have found your own way here, and I have come to meet you.’ Something crossed her face that looked like motherly rebuke. ‘A dangerous game, little girls playing at witches.’

  ‘But how did – I don’t—’

  ‘Shh – there is not so very long to talk, and I am here to give you something. A very good present. You’ll like that?’

  I nodded – not to her question, but because I recognised her accent.

  Finnish.

  The woman was Mummi.

  66

  I wanted to throw my arms around the mirage of my nanna and beg her to help me stop hallucinating, but Mummi radiated an aura of calmness that kept me still and quiet.

  She came closer. I felt her long hair fall against my arm as she leaned over my crouching frame. ‘Little bear, this present is something very, very precious – precious but dangerous.’ Mummi touched my shoulder. ‘It’s my library,’ she said in a smiling whisper. ‘And it’s something you must never let anyone know I have given to you. There are bad people in the world – and bad worlds in people. If they know I’ve hidden my books in you, they’ll split you open to steal them.’

  ‘Where are the books?’ I managed, eyes wide with her luminous face.

  ‘In the jug,’ she said, brandishing it. ‘Isn’t that clever? But you have to promise. No one knows. Not even your mother.’ Her voice was hard. ‘Not anyone.’

  ‘I promise, Mummi,’ I said.

  She smiled. Behind her, the dark trees shook their leaves and were suddenly bright and gold. ‘You want to drink now?’ she said, offering me the jug.

  ‘These things that are happening – I want to understand – Ashley and—’

  Mummi placed her finger on my lips. Her eyes were sad and wise. ‘Knowledge gets you some way, but how to use it has to be up to you. I give it to you because you are a good girl. Not always,’ she said grinning, ‘but more than most.’ She looked into the pitcher, and her smile expanded as she stared into its chamber. ‘This is very good, though.’ She looked at me and touched my face. ‘There’s no more time, Little Bea
r.’

  And before I could say another word, Mummi pressed her thumb against the oil stain on my forehead. With her other hand, she raised the pitcher to my lips. And as I started to drink, she sang.

  67

  Mummi had said her library was in the jug. I expected to fall into a tunnel of books, but instead, drinking with the spout to my lips, I saw only the dark water in the well of the pitcher. The water was cool, but it just tasted like water.

  It was as Mummi sang, her long notes trickling through my ears, that I realised I couldn’t stop drinking, and as I drank, the dark water grew wider and deeper. The pitcher seemed to be expanding over my head – I could no longer see Mummi, but her song echoed in space … and the pitcher was growing.

  Coldness of air mixed with water was swallowing me. I couldn’t stop drinking, I was cold, I was freezing … I couldn’t speak – my mouth bit the rim of what had been the pitcher and now was a tough part of some tissue, like the lining of a stomach or a lung. It was slimy, pulsing, living flesh but my bottom lip was stuck to it, as if I were growing into the membrane from the lip first. I wanted to scream but still water flowed into my mouth, it kept flowing and I swallowed so I wouldn’t drown. The pitcher-membrane grew and my head was now immersed in it, immersed in darkness and slimy flesh and it was as if my own mouth had become the mouth of a cave in which a river flowed. Still, the melody of Mummi’s song rose and fell. Mummi, I pleaded, help me.

  The song echoed off the walls of the darkness and off the water like the voices of a choir. Above the sound I heard Mummi’s voice ring out like a soloist’s.

  Keep drinking, she sang.

  I did, and the grey flesh of the membrane grew black until I was swallowing the dark, unaware of where darkness ended and water began. That’s when shadows started to form.

  Even in blackness, black shapes grew visible. Slowly, my vision began to pick edges and folds amongst the emptiness. Here was the edge of a rock, and a crystal – a streak of metal in a molten wall. Then there was the frond of a tiny fern, then a bigger one, then a palm tree.

  Noise hummed, buzzed, dripped, sang; soon, my mind shot across the ferns and palms, flying through a forest of trees and shrubs, vines and weeds, fruits and vegetables as their shapes poked out of the space and almost instantly retreated. All were different, yet I knew each by its own smell; I sniffed out insects amongst them, and birds, and the blood smell of animals that crawled amongst their foliage until bears and lizards and wolves and women and men and everything that could inhale the air crawled across deserts, and huge creatures I couldn’t even name moved through vast oceans, propelled by elastic tentacles.

  Mummi’s song was soaring now. The echoing chorus shook each rock and feather, blade of fur and grass, and in seconds, the animals were not animals but illustrations of animals on the pages of old books … and I saw the pages flip and turn, and the pictures became symbols and there was a circle written with strange characters, containing a triangle, containing a square. There were drawings of men with lines across their foreheads, alphabets comprised of drawn faces; spreading, twisting inky lines forming a heart shape in a flower shape, then diagrams of human palms crossed with lines and numbers and maps of the stars … And then the paper of these pages blackened into night sky, and their symbols became the stars themselves, and then somehow, somehow, also the spaces between them. Then a noise like a bustling or crackling, not of the universe but of nearness, and I heard muffled voices. The song faded. Stars fell, one by one, from my imaginary sky and there was something on my shoulder.

  Something hard and warm, like a hand.

  68

  Mummi?

  ‘What are we gonna do with her?’

  ‘Is she unconscious or asleep?’

  ‘Her eyes are open!’

  ‘Have you got an eye mask?’

  ‘Only upstairs.’

  ‘Get that stuff into the box!’

  ‘But it’s only half-past nine!’

  ‘Water – get some water—’

  ‘You can’t! They’ll see you!’

  ‘Mummi?’ I said.

  ‘Sophie, wake up!’

  Nikki’s voice. I saw greyness now.

  ‘Wake up, Sophie, please.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Open the window! Get rid of the smell!’

  ‘You take her, you do something.’

  An electric light flicked on somewhere. Greyness lightened to silver.

  ‘Come on, Sophie,’ Michelle implored. ‘Wake up, wake up, wake up …’

  A voice through a closed door. ‘Nikki? Are you girls right?’

  ‘I’m coming!’ Nikki screeched.

  The silver light melted, leaving Michelle’s anxious face. Behind her, Kylie frantically blew out the candles on the windowsills.

  My head was pounding and my lips felt numb.

  ‘They will have seen these from the driveway!’ said Nikki. She was shoving the plastic storage box behind the couch. Kylie, abandoning the candles, threw blankets at me and Michelle and shoved one at Nikki, who threw herself over the back of the couch.

  I heard steps. I sat up. Michelle hurriedly wrapped a blanket around my shoulders then one around hers.

  ‘Can we come in?’ I heard a man’s voice say through door.

  ‘Sure thing,’ said Nikki.

  The door swung open. Nikki’s dad poked his brown face into the room.

  ‘What have you girls been doing?’ he said with a smile.

  ‘Just talking,’ said Nikki pleasantly.

  ‘Girl talk, huh?’ said her dad, winking at Kylie. Nikki’s mum appeared behind him.

  ‘What happened to the play?’ Nikki asked.

  ‘It wasn’t very good,’ said her dad.

  ‘We couldn’t make ourselves watch the second half so we slipped out,’ said her mum.

  In a moment of silence, I felt sweat start pouring from my skin. My stomach buckled.

  ‘Smells like fruit in here,’ said her dad.

  ‘From the oil burner,’ Nikki said.

  Nikki’s father was smiling but his eyes were scouring the room. I could tell he didn’t know what he was looking for, but he was convinced he’d know when he found it. My head ached so badly it was an effort to stay upright; from the look on his face, though, I knew I had to.

  As for Nikki’s mum, there was a look on her face that was downright suspicious.

  ‘Anything you girls want from upstairs?’ she asked. ‘Some old-fashioned South American xocolatl?’

  ‘It’s chilli hot chocolate and it’s really fun,’ explained Nikki to me with wide eyes.

  ‘That’d be great,’ said Kylie.

  ‘Excuse me, Mrs Cipri,’ I said, struggling to stand up. ‘Is there a bathroom downstairs?’

  ‘There’s one here in the hall, on your right,’ she said.

  ‘Do you need us to get out of the way?’ asked Nikki’s dad, watching me carefully.

  ‘If that’s okay,’ I said, marching for the door, ‘because I think I’m going to be sick.’

  69

  Fortunately, I made it to the bathroom in time. As I threw up, my cheeks burned – I couldn’t tell if it was because of the vomiting, or the painful awareness that everyone could hear me doing it. At least the horrible sweating had stopped, and the pain in my head was ebbing, if not going away.

  Minutes later, when my stomach was empty, I slammed the lid of the toilet shut and slumped in the corner of the cubicle.

  Michelle appeared in the doorway after a couple of minutes.

  ‘Dude, we got you some water,’ she said. ‘You look awful.’

  ‘I feel better,’ I said, taking the cup. ‘Though my throat and nostrils are a little nasty. Where are Nikki’s parents?’

  She was skittish. ‘Upstairs. They’re happy to take you home if—’

  I shook my head. I didn’t want Dad to fret. ‘Seriously, I think I’ve had some severe allergic reaction to peppermint oil. Maybe all that messing around with peach oil and stuff made
it worse.’

  ‘That was really frightening in there,’ she said, kneeling on the floor next to me. ‘You started telling us there was someone in the room …’

  ‘I started hallucinating,’ I said. The thought struck me that maybe I’d been hallucinating when I’d seen ancient Ashley Ventwood in the crow storm. ‘Do you think maybe I’m schizophrenic?’

  Michelle smiled. ‘I think you were in the half-dream room, girl. Maybe the oil and stuff did make you sleepy – I always have weird dreams when my stomach’s bad,’ she said, with a nod to the toilet. ‘I promise, Soph – soon after you first started wigging out, you just curled up in a ball on the floor.’

  I thought of Mummi. ‘Just a dream?’

  ‘Ya-huh!’ chuckled Michelle. ‘You were talking to yourself … and then you were just making this weird sucky noise. Totally weird sleep, but it must have been a dream.’

  Relief washed over me. Dreaming made sense. ‘Sucky noise?’ I asked, sitting up. ‘I really hope that stays under the rose.’

  ‘Your eyes were wide open. It spooked Kylie completely – she thought she couldn’t move—’

  Michelle was still smiling, but something anxious was glinting in her eyes. Looking closer, I noticed they were very red. ‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

  She blinked. ‘Just … the stuff that was said – and then Nikki’s parents coming home like that … She reckons they did it deliberately. They are totally suspicious that you’re drunk or on drugs or something. We’re all …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Rattled,’ she said.

  ‘How oft en do you … do that Circle thing?’

  ‘Whenever it’s just the girls. We used to just sit around and then Nikki got the rose idea from her sister, and then it was more and more intense. Now Marlina’s gone and Nikki’s got all that stuff from her.’

  ‘When did she die?’ I asked, as quietly as possible.

  Michelle stared at me. ‘Die?’ she said. ‘Marlina lives in Sydney and works in a café. How’d you get the idea she was dead?’

  70

  I had to excuse myself from the xocolatl, even though it smelled delicious; the dairy and chilli in it would wreck my delicate stomach. I did ask Nikki’s mum for some ginger, though – remembering some of my mother’s kitchen first aid, I made myself a ginger tea to settle my stomach.