Burnt Snow

by Van Badham

  ‘Why’s Marlina coming down?’ I ventured.

  Fran shrugged. ‘Nikki said it was for something with her cult friends, something to do with the birds or the fire, or … are you all right?’

  I saw thirty points of light travelling towards Yarrindi. One of them was named Marlina.

  ‘We have to do it today,’ I said. ‘Will you come? Is the box locked up somewhere?’

  ‘If it’s just psychological, it won’t last. I mean, surely they’ll just get over it,’ she said.

  I indicated Kylie, lying in the sickbed. ‘Yeah.’

  Fran looked at Kylie. Then looked back at me. ‘What do we need to do?’

  I was about to answer her when the door beyond the sick bay made a rattle and I heard the voice of the school nurse above the sound of swinging cupboards. There was a male voice too. A cupboard closed.

  ‘Kylie will be fine here for now,’ I said to Fran. ‘We’ll go get Nikki and Michelle.’

  Fran nodded and I opened the sick bay door.

  The nurse was seated facing someone who had his back hunched to us. The nurse had a bottle of antiseptic in her hand and some cotton wadding and stopped what she was doing as we came out.

  ‘Girls, you know there’s only supposed to be one of you in there,’ she said. ‘This isn’t a bus stop – no matter how much it looks like one.’

  From the way Fran was standing, I knew who the guy was before he turned around.

  ‘Hi, Fran. Hi, um, Sarah,’ said Dan Rattan.

  ‘Sophie,’ I corrected, staring at his face. Fran was wordless.

  Dan Rattan had criss-crossing sets of gouged wounds on his cheeks, neck and forehead. A deep cut over his left eyebrow had the stain of pink antiseptic. Dan looked as if someone had furiously scratched away his handsome, confident persona, leaving a frightened teenaged boy exposed underneath.

  Someone like Michelle.

  Dan turned back to the nurse, his posture hunched even lower.

  As we walked from the sick bay into the hall, I thought I heard Dan cry.

  55

  Fran and I went to the detention room first. This was a small room off the top of the stairs, next to the counsellor’s office. It looked as I imagined a room in a mental asylum might look; its bright blue door was punctured with a viewing window laced with chicken wire.

  Through the window, I spied Nikki. She was at a single desk, seated on a plastic chair. She was scribbling in a notepad, laughing.

  ‘Looks easy enough,’ I said, and reached for the doorhandle. It opened.

  Someone was in the doorway immediately – a teacher I hadn’t seen before. He was tall and clean-shaven with curly blond hair and a blue collared shirt tucked into his jeans.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he demanded.

  Fran almost disappeared into the wall outside the door.

  ‘I’m a friend of Nikki’s and I thought she might need something for recess,’ I fudged.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked the teacher.

  There was something about this guy I immediately didn’t like. I narrowed my eyes – I thought I could see something grey hovering around one of his hands. Something like a thin forcefield of smoke.

  ‘Gretchen Eighfield,’ I gambled.

  ‘Gretchen!’ Nikki bellowed from her desk. ‘I’m not friends with Gretchen. Gretchen’s lame!’

  ‘Niks, are you okay?’ I asked, leaning forward under the teacher’s arm so Nikki could see me.

  He moved to block my view, leaning a hand on the doorway. I could see that a ring on his finger was generating the forcefield, but I couldn’t get a good look at it.

  Danger, I knew. Danger, danger. I ran my fingers through my hair, flicking a band from my wrist to make a quick side ponytail.

  ‘Gretchen, you’ve been at this school long enough to learn that people in detention don’t get visitors,’ he said. ‘Finish your recess outside, please.’

  I looked up at him with big, hopeful eyes. ‘Mr, uh—’

  ‘Mr Jeules,’ he said. From his overconfident tone I guessed he was a substitute teacher.

  ‘—Mr Jeules, Nikki actually has my Modern History notes.’ Fran, I noticed, had now slid halfway down the corridor. ‘Is she going to be in here long?’

  ‘That’s really up to Mr Tripp. Now, Gretchen—’

  ‘Please, Mr Jeules,’ I pleaded, ‘I haven’t done anything wrong. I know Nikki’s in trouble but they’re my notes and I wanted to start working on my assignment. I never get into trouble, I’m a good student – you can ask any of the teachers.’ I was making my eyes so big they hurt. So big they could see the wisps of weak magic that misted around the ring.

  Mr Jeules sighed. ‘Nikki, do you have Gretchen’s notes?’ he said, still staring at me.

  ‘Oh, yeah, of course,’ said Nikki, giggling.

  ‘I’ll get them!’ I said, ducking under his arm and walking towards Nikki. I heard Jeules turn around.

  I bent down in front of Nikki to reach for her bag on the floor in front of her. As I did, I blinked at her three times – an improvised ‘trust me’ signal I desperately hoped she understood. As I reached for the ground, I summoned the blackout spell again.

  ‘What’s that necklace you’re wearing?’ I heard Mr Jeules say, just before he hit the ground.

  56

  ‘Ooh! Paranormal la-la, Sophie Morgan!’ chirped Nikki, swinging her bag over her back as Fran came running into the room.

  ‘I heard the – oh my – oh!’ Fran panicked.

  ‘We’ve just been lucky,’ I said in a firm voice, darting over to Jeules’s unconscious body. I took a deep breath; I’d now cast maybe four spells today – five if I counted the restraint from turning myself into a bear when Brody kissed Kylie; my energy was fading. I felt at Mr Jeules hands for his ring.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ begged Fran.

  ‘Bury him alive,’ said Nikki. ‘He’s a total freak.’ She looked at him with an evil smile and sang, ‘Sprung from detention! Suck that, creepazoid.’ Turning to me she said, ‘You rifling through the corpse, Soph?’

  I slid the ring from his finger into my hand. ‘Just checking his pulse,’ I bluffed, keeping the ring in my palm, where it buzzed limp, grey energy.

  ‘Oh my God!’ bleated Fran.

  ‘He’s fine – he’s totally fine, Fran, calm down. You close the door. Niks, help me get him into his chair.’

  Once Fran closed the door, the three of us struggled to prop him into the swivel office chair. I stuffed the ring into my pocket when I knew the girls weren’t looking. His head rolled on his neck. Fran gasped.

  ‘I totally don’t understand what’s going on,’ she said. I saw her hands were shaking. ‘First Kylie, now … now this guy.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, staring at her with intense focus, ‘maybe they’ve both got a virus. Maybe it’s hot and we haven’t noticed and it’s heat exhaustion, or everyone’s got an allergy. It doesn’t matter – we’ve got to get Nikki out of here and some higher power is letting us do it. We move him on this chair to the other side of the desk so if anyone looks through the window it looks like he’s facing Nikki and Nikki’s still in here. Help me.’

  The swivel chair had wheels so it was relatively easy to push him to the other side of the desk. I propped his elbows on the table and we wrestled his head into his upturned hands so it appeared he was looking at the desk. I pulled Nikki’s actual Modern History notes from her bag and placed them so it looked as though he was reading them.

  ‘We’re totally going to get expelled for this,’ said Fran. ‘If that guy is dead …’

  ‘If he’s not, we should kill him,’ said Nikki, leaning over him and staring him in the face. ‘It was like a full-on interrogation in here. Who was I? Did I think of myself as a bad person? Did I like being a bad girl?’ Nikki put her hand over Jeules’s mouth. ‘Will you like me being a bad girl when I suffocate you, you son of a bitch?’

  Fran snatched Nikki’s hand away from his face and Nikki laughed
.

  ‘You get Nikki to your car,’ I ordered. ‘Anyone stops you, you tell them anything – anything at all – but get her in there, and both of you hide under a blanket or your bags or something. Wait for me. And put on the child safety locks.’

  Nikki laughed again. ‘Bustin’ out! Crazy girl on a road trip!’

  ‘Where are you going now?’ asked Fran.

  ‘To get Michelle and Kylie.’

  ‘Okay – my car’s really close to the gate,’ said Fran.

  ‘Road trip!’ howled Nikki.

  ‘Go!’ I said.

  As Fran shuffled Nikki out of the room, I put a lock spell on Nikki’s mouth to keep her quiet. The effort to do so was tiring, and I was worried that my energy reserves were going to run out before we made it to the Cipris’ house – that the Circle wouldn’t be closed, that Nikki and Kylie and Michelle would wig out completely and eat a policeman or something before the day was over.

  I took what I knew would be a precious whole minute to collect myself. Breathing slowly, I took the stolen ring out of my pocket.

  It was a man’s ring, made of silver with a wide band. It had a blue azurite stone in its centre. A couple of seconds of deep concentration informed me the stone was to enhance intuition. I stared at Jeules and despised him, not knowing why.

  I turned the ring over in my hand. Behind the stone, there was an inscription in the silver.

  A triangle with a side missing, and a dot in the middle.

  My hand shot to my pendant. It was still emitting the dark buzz and wouldn’t speak to me, though I didn’t need a talking rock to tell me what I knew was true: thirty points of light were coming towards Yarrindi. One, at least, was already here.

  My heart was racing as I considered what to do. Something dark within me remembered Nikki’s words: bury him alive.

  I shook my head. Although my energy was weakening, I roused a spell for removing memories. Trying to keep myself completely still, I held my hand in front of Jeules’s eyes. Imagining a mirror image of myself reflected in his brain, I pulled my hand slowly away from his head, as if pulling out the image. When Jeules’s eyelids fluttered – struggling, if subconsciously, to fight me – the gulp of fear in my throat swallowed the spell and I had to start again, calmly, trying not to be frightened of the curly-haired Witchfinder who had seen my face and my necklace before I made him magically black out.

  A colourful puff of air – the image of my face – emerged from the pores of Jeules’s skin; for a second it hung between us, like a hologram, then shattered noiselessly into sprinkles of light and vanished.

  ‘Unohtaa,’ I heard myself say – the Finnish word for ‘forget’.

  As my hand retracted from his skull, I stared at the slack muscles of his sleeping mouth. Walking to the door, I thought to myself: He doesn’t look like a witch-trapper …

  I locked the door of the detention room with a twist of my thumb.

  … none of them do.

  57

  I walked briskly away from the detention room. Outside, I ran across the asphalt in the direction of the Technology labs. I only had a couple of minutes left of recess to move around freely, and I needed to find Michelle. My nose caught some faint scent of her – orange, electric like a firecracker – but I didn’t want to strain the sense too hard. Weakness in my legs was a symptom of ever-decreasing energy … and I didn’t want to risk my nostrils getting distracted by a whiff of Brody Meine.

  Just thinking his name brought back the image of him kissing Kylie and my weak legs stiffened. I half-hoped when I found Michelle she’d be doing something crazy so I’d be distracted from thoughts of him.

  I wheeled around the side of labs just as the bell rang. I could see Michelle was on the ground, Ryan and Matt were missing and Rob was walking with a consoling arm around Steve Peters’s shoulder.

  Someone touched my elbow. I jumped. ‘Oi,’ said Garth.

  Belinda was standing next to him. They were holding hands. Her eyes were steel.

  ‘You’re gonna get us all in trouble,’ Garth said, pointing an accusing finger at me.

  ‘Me?’ I was bold with indignation. ‘I’m running round trying to get everyone out of it!’

  ‘You were with them Friday night,’ he said, as if I was supposed to believe he knew something. ‘Seems a bit funny that they’re all messed up and you aren’t.’

  ‘Then it mustn’t have anything to do with Friday night because I was there and nothing went down stronger than a chocolate cupcake,’ I said.

  ‘Where’s Fran?’ asked Belinda, one eyebrow raised.

  ‘She’s helping me. We’re taking the girls back to Nikki’s.’

  ‘For more cupcakes?’ asked Belinda.

  ‘Because they’re freaked out and it’s close by. It’s better for them to get out of this place if there is something wrong – they’ve been lucky this morning, but—’

  ‘Tell Steve Peters how lucky he is,’ said Garth.

  ‘Or Dan Rattan,’ said Belinda.

  ‘I will do whatever you want if it means I can help the girls,’ I said, my arms folded angrily. I shot Garth a fierce glance. ‘You tell Ryan that Fran and I are looking after his girlfriend and I’ll call him when she’s okay. Let me get Michelle.’

  ‘She’s all yours,’ Garth said, and he and Belinda stepped aside.

  Michelle was on her hands and knees on the ground, clawing at the dirt. She looked as though she was trying to dig a hole. She kept stopping to scrape handfuls of grey dirt onto the back of her legs, as if she were trying to bury herself face-down.

  58

  ‘Black and blue, blood and guts,’ said Michelle, her eyes glassy. ‘Black and blue, blood and guts.’

  She was filthy with dirt, but my racing brain decided that needing to help Michelle clean up would be a decent excuse if we were caught out of class. I held her wrist with one hand and dragged her like a wayward dog to Fran’s car.

  Approaching, I could see Fran having trouble keeping Nikki still in the back seat. She had a large piece of black material that she was trying to pull over them, but Nikki kept pouncing towards the window.

  As I led Michelle to the car, Fran flicked the passenger chair forward and opened the door. ‘This is the worst day of my life,’ she said as her face emerged from the floor of the Corolla.

  ‘It’s about to get worse,’ I said, indicating Michelle. ‘She was trying to bury herself behind the Technology labs. At least she’s pretty quiet.’

  ‘Black and blue …’ mumbled Michelle.

  ‘You see any of the others?’ Fran asked, trying to get out of the car at the same time she was trying to keep Nikki in it.

  ‘No Ryan, no Matt. Steve upset, Garth and Belinda both blaming me for everything.’

  ‘Steve must know about Brody already,’ Fran said as I pushed Michelle towards the car. Fran managed to get out and she and I used Michelle’s body to trap Nikki in the back. It was like something from a clown show, in Yarrindi High uniforms. ‘He’d be devastated,’ she declared.

  ‘Rob’s giving him a shoulder to cry on,’ I said, half-hiding a smile.

  Once Michelle and Nikki were both in the back, Fran pushed back the passenger seat to contain them and quickly locked the door. Keeping our heads low, Fran and I sat in front of the car between the bumper and a shrubbery.

  ‘How’s this going to work?’ said Fran. ‘Kylie’s totally unconscious!’

  I thought fast, spoke slow. ‘She’s probably just dazed and exhausted,’ I said. ‘We’ll just put all three in the back of the car and go get the stuff from your place.’

  ‘Too dangerous,’ said Fran, indicating that the car was bouncing from Michelle and Nikki’s restlessness. ‘That’s a whole car full of crazies on the road for an hour there and back. If one of them goes for my face while we’re driving along the cliffs, we’re all dead. I’ll get you guys to Nikki’s – can you can play babysitter until I come back with the stuff?’

  ‘It’s just running into interference from
Marlina that’s the problem,’ I said. ‘If she arrives, there’ll be no one to stop her getting into the house. We need another person.’

  ‘Belinda?’ suggested Fran. I shook my head. ‘Yeah, maybe not. Ryan?’

  ‘Let me think,’ I said, but my fingers were already looking up Joel Morland’s number on my phone. As I went to text him, I noticed that there were three missed messages from Lauren on my phone. I punched, Can’t talk – crisis to Lauren and then, Can you skip class to do me a massively weird favour? to Joel.

  The shaking of the car was getting worse. ‘Better get Kylie,’ Fran urged.

  But my eyes were stuck on something else.

  An ambulance, its lights spinning red but its siren not on, was driving over the speed bump at the entrance and into the school car park.

  59

  ‘Is it for Kylie?’ yelped Fran, gripping my arm.

  I could feel her panic in the bones of her hand – mine was equal to it.