Burnt Snow

by Van Badham

  I nodded again.

  ‘Drugs?’ he asked.

  ‘Dude,’ I said, not wanting to lie, ‘the girls have really done a number on themselves. And we’ve got a problem. Nikki’s psycho insane sister could walk in any minute, and if she or Nikki’s parents think anything weird’s been going on they will have Nikki in a convent boarding school in five seconds flat.’

  ‘Why come back to Nikki’s then?’ he asked.

  ‘It was closest to school,’ I said. ‘I mean, hopefully they clean up and get back for lunch. Then everyone will forget this ever happened.’

  ‘I can’t imagine Steve Peters forgetting that his girlfriend kissed Brody Meine.’

  ‘Everyone makes mistakes,’ I said. Half of me wondered if it was my pendant talking, trying to convince me to forgive Brody.

  I couldn’t.

  A chorus of vomiting was echoing upstairs. Joel grimaced.

  ‘Fran is picking up some supplies,’ I said, watching his face light up at her name. ‘I’m just gonna nurse the girls through the worst of it until she gets here. I need you to create a diversion if Marlina shows up. Are you cool to do that? You would be doing me a favour that I will, I promise to God, owe you for life.’

  Joel smiled. He was a good person. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Maybe something with the bike?’ I suggested. ‘Like, go out on the road and pretend there’s a flat tyre or something. And if her car comes, flag it down.’

  ‘I can pretend there’s something wrong with the brakes – a flat tyre’s not so easy to fake. If I unhook a couple of wires only a professional would be able to tell it was deliberate. You know what kind of car she’s got?’

  I shook my head. ‘I can’t imagine anyone else randomly turning into this driveway. She may not even show, but we can’t risk it. I just need some time to get the girls back to school. And if she does turn up – whether she stops or not – phone me when she’s coming down the driveway and I’ll … improvise.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ said Joel.

  ‘I’m sorry that standing outside is a bit boring. I’d get you some food but the Cipris don’t have anything I’d want to offer you, really,’ I said, trying to suppress the image of Kylie and the black banana.

  On cue, more vomiting rang out loud.

  ‘Come on,’ Joel said, ‘this is heaps more exciting than being stuck in Wood Technology with Mr Cranbourne screaming at people. And I’ve always wanted to be an actor.’

  ‘Thanks, Joel,’ I said. Carefully placing my cup of peppermint tea beside the doorstep, I came forward and put my arms around him. I kissed his cheek in gratitude.

  We exchanged an awkward look when I stepped back. The smile on his face was difficult to read.

  He hopped on his bike and cycled back up the Cipris’ driveway. Just before the border of trees obscured him, he turned round to me and waved.

  I took a deep breath. I was grateful for Joel’s friendship. I really was.

  66

  I didn’t want to shut the door and go back in the house – actually, all I really wanted to do was curl up in a ball on the doorstep and go to sleep. Instead, I sipped at the peppermint tea until it was finished and tried using the most minimal healing spell I could summon to let the tea’s green magic subdue my aches.

  The effort required to step one foot in front of the other back up the stairs was debilitating. While the warm tea took the sharpness off the pain, my body still felt every scratch and bruise. My mind felt at its weakest. Maybe it was just panic that had hallucinated San Cipriano and the Under-the-House Marlina, but I didn’t think so.

  I really had to cleanse my pendant. To touch it and feel Izek’s dark buzz where I should have heard sensible advice compounded my feelings of being abandoned and alone.

  Ashley Ventwood, I thought, where are you now that I need you?

  I turned from the stairs into the lounge room and was surprised to see the armchairs vacant, the apparitions gone. Relieved, I went to check on the girls.

  Nikki, probably because it was her house, was occupying the separate toilet. She was kneeling with her hands gripped around the lid of the bowl and was making a noise like a cross between sobbing and retching. In the bathroom, I saw Michelle hunched over the porcelain bath, her arm outstretched around its rim like in a sculpture of a dead person. She was breathing heavily. The most noise came from Kylie, who was sitting on the bathroom floor with her back against the wall. Her lips and nose were bleeding again and she was shoving baby wipes into her face with as much force as her exhausted hands could manage. Blood bloomed into the damp paper of the wipes.

  I fetched them all cups of water and got Kylie some dry toilet paper to help stem the bleeding.

  ‘Why won’t it stop?’ she said as I dabbed the blood with the toilet paper.

  ‘You’ve just had a reaction to something,’ I said.

  ‘It hurts,’ said Kylie.

  Yeah, like watching you kiss Brody, I thought, but I reminded myself that Kylie had not been herself. What Brody had been, of course, was the more important question.

  Why did he kiss her back?

  ‘I promise it’ll pass,’ I said, patting Kylie on the shoulder. I was counting on there being an orange candle amongst the equipment that Fran was currently returning. I was sure I remembered one from the Tell-All. With a little more strength, I could heal Kylie. Depending on how well a candle-spell worked, I wondered if I could blot out the memories of the whole day for everyone. I stroked Kylie’s hair.

  Michelle groaned.

  ‘It’s really going to be okay,’ I said to them both.

  The bath was perpendicular to the sink, and at the end of the bath, facing the door, was a shower cubicle with glass doors.

  It was just a shower cubicle.

  It shouldn’t have been laughing.

  Dark, wet chuckles – the gurgle of a stomach and throat.

  Nikki stumbled into the room and stood in the doorway, leaning against the wall. Her eyes were bloodshot and she was tiredly wiping her mouth. ‘What are you laughing at?’ she said to me.

  ‘I’m not laughing,’ I said.

  She twisted an ear towards the shower when the chuckling started again.

  ‘I hear it,’ Nikki said.

  ‘Kyles, can you hear anything?’ I said, trying to deflect Nikki.

  Kylie shook her head.

  ‘You’re going mad,’ Michelle groaned from the rim of the bathtub.

  But there was a laugh in the bathroom, and it was coming from the shower.

  ‘Something dark’s in here,’ said Nikki, smelling the air. ‘It’s in the shower. You can hear it …’ She turned on me suddenly, her eyes flashing. ‘Sophie can totally hear it!’

  The laughter gurgled again.

  ‘You’re standing in front of the shower,’ I said. ‘Can you see anything?’

  Nikki peered at the glass door of the cubicle. The laughter was echoing through the room. ‘Can’t see,’ she said. ‘Too weak, can’t see.’

  I stood up and joined Nikki in front of the shower. ‘You’re imagining things,’ I said, putting my arm around her shoulder and trying to keep my mouth from trembling in fear.

  In the shower cubicle, San Cipriano stood in his purple robes with Under-the-House Marlina in her short white robe.

  ‘They’re coming for you,’ Marlina sang. ‘Finders, Finders, one by one, building a fire to burn someone.’

  Not wanting to alarm the girls, I nodded silently at the spectres in the shower.

  ‘They’re coming to kill the bear,’ Marlina said. ‘Make bearskin rugs for the Temple floor, kill so many bears and then kill more.’

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Nikki said, squirming out from under my arm.

  ‘Just checking it out,’ I said. ‘If you hear something, maybe there’s a blocked pipe gurgling, or—’

  ‘You’re talking to it,’ Nikki said.

  ‘Niks, there’s nothing there,’ said Michelle.

  ‘Voices, but I … I c
an’t hear … There’s a conversation. A woman. Sophie’s doing it – she’s doing this! It’s her somehow!’

  ‘It’s not!’ I said, but San Cipriano laughed again. Nikki’s attention shot back to the shower.

  ‘You’ll be saved and betrayed until you choose your own people,’ he said to me, a smile cutting across his lips and black beard like it had been razored into his head. Marlina’s arms wrapped around him from behind and her face nuzzled his neck.

  Nikki grabbed me by the shoulder. ‘What does “choose your own people” mean?’ she demanded. ‘Who’s talking to you?’

  ‘Niks …’ Michelle protested weakly.

  ‘She’s doing it! Are you deaf? There’s some guy in the shower and he’s talking to Sophie! She caused the birds! She was at the fire! All the glass – it’s her! It’s her!’ Nikki was hysterical.

  ‘There’s nothing—’ Kylie began.

  ‘She’s the reason your face is bleeding!’ barked Nikki. Suddenly, I felt something collide painfully with my shoulder: Nikki had punched me. ‘Where did you come from and why are you wrecking our lives?’ she screamed.

  I tried to barricade myself from Nikki with my arms but she kept flinging punches.

  ‘Tell me, you witch!’ she screamed. Her hand flew to my face and I registered a whack to my ear. ‘Tell me!’ I had to struggle harder to keep her back. Michelle was moaning but I couldn’t hear what she was saying.

  ‘Nikki, stop,’ I tried. ‘It’s in your—’

  ‘Don’t you tell me it’s not true! I know what you are! You’re a demon! Disgusting, running with wounds and sores and worms. Blackest of evil. Witch! Witch!’

  With strength I didn’t know I had, I launched myself forward and slapped Nikki’s face, hard. She fell against the door, silenced.

  The only sound in the bathroom was Nikki and I breathing heavily. A red mark blossomed on her cheek. My hand stung where I had hit her.

  Nikki started to cry. Her eyes ran sticky with mascara. ‘What’s happening to me?’ she asked, clutching the doorframe for strength. She sounded like a tiny child.

  ‘One became two; split two, make four,’ hissed Marlina with a smile. ‘Here come the drudes. Here come the drudes!’

  Marlina took San Cipriano’s chin in one hand and kissed him.

  With her other hand reaching behind her back, she turned on the shower tap. Blood rained from the shower head onto their kissing faces.

  ‘I’ll get you some ice for your cheek,’ I said to Nikki, and left the room.

  67

  When I came back to the bathroom with an ice tray wrapped in a tea towel, the ghoulish couple in the shower had, thankfully, vanished. Nikki was seated next to Kylie on the floor, leaning on her shoulder, still weeping a little. I handed Nikki the tray and was about to apologise for hitting her when she looked up at me and said, ‘I’m so sorry, Sophie, I’m so, so sorry.’

  ‘What for?’ I said. ‘I hit you really hard. That was unforgivable.’

  ‘I just lost it,’ Nikki said, timidly pressing the tray against her cheek. ‘Sometimes I think I hear things and I freak out.’

  ‘What things?’ asked Michelle.

  ‘Voices,’ said Nikki, ‘animals that aren’t there. Like I’m overhearing a conversation and it’s about … darkness. Bad things. When Marlina was still living here they used to tell me—’ Her words fell away and her head rolled to her shoulder. ‘That stuff makes me so frightened, I’ll do anything, say anything to make it stop.’

  I sat down in silence next to Nikki. The only sound was Kylie dabbing her lips and nose.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ asked Kylie eventually.

  ‘Waiting,’ I said, and slumped against the wall, closing my eyes.

  68

  I was actually asleep when I felt my mobile phone ring in my pocket. As it turned out, the girls were asleep too. I jumped when I felt the phone buzz, snatching it up as quickly as possible. Fran. As I flipped it open, I saw the girls stir awake.

  ‘I’m at the back door,’ Fran said. ‘Can you let me in? I’ve just seen Joel Morland at the front of Nikki’s house and I’m sure he’s stalking me. The freak.’

  69

  Leaping to my feet, I left the girls in the bathroom as I ran to the kitchen to meet Fran. The kitchen was thick with the stench of rotten food and I struggled with the lock on the back door. Remembering that I’d charmed it, I took a deep breath and hummed the lock open. A faint breeze perfumed with lemon balm and lavender flowers came through the door with Fran. Peppermint tea and a nap had revived me a little, but the smell of lemon balm amongst the stench warmed my heart.

  Fran looked bright as she bustled into the kitchen with the white plastic box in her arms, but her smile faded when she looked around.

  ‘Man, you guys have been having quite a party,’ she said, surveying the debris of rotten food, dropped containers and – I hadn’t noticed this before – puddles of vomit. ‘It stinks in here! What’s the deal with this food?’

  ‘The girls were eating it,’ I said.

  ‘Rotten food?’ she said, marching into the lounge room to get away from the smell. Of the box, she said: ‘Where is this going? TV room?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Where are the girls?’ she asked as we galloped down the stairs.

  ‘In the bathroom. Sick.’

  ‘If they were eating that stuff, I’m amazed they’re not dead.’

  ‘It seems to have helped – like they’ve purged and calmed down.’ I swung the door open into the Cipris’ TV room. Apart from a television guide flung on the couch, it looked much the same as it had last time I’d been here.

  ‘You know, they probably did do drugs,’ Fran said, putting the white box on top of the television, ‘and you and I running around with all this stuff is just a waste of our time.’

  ‘I think symbolism is important,’ I said.

  ‘You pay way too much attention in Art,’ Fran said, smirking.

  ‘I wish I did,’ I said, letting myself chuckle, rummaging around the box for the things I needed. ‘Get all the candles you can and put them on the windowsill – all but the big orange one.’

  Fran pulled candles out of the box and set to work. ‘You know I skipped the neighbour’s fence to get in here? Ran down this laneway, threw the box over. Nightmare,’ she said, setting the candles. ‘Joel Morland’s so creepy. I hope he didn’t see me.’

  ‘He’s actually helping us out,’ I said, putting the fat orange candle in the middle of the purple rug.

  Fran stopped what she was doing. ‘Joel?’

  ‘He’s trustworthy,’ I said cheerfully, having discovered, to my delight, that the roses from the Tell-All were in the box, dried and crumbly, but mostly intact. ‘Think you can get these into the light fixture?’

  Fran came close to me, put her hand on my shoulder. ‘Soph, he isn’t. Trust me. Trust me, okay?’

  ‘Was he trouble this morning, or did he help?’

  She shook her head. ‘He was fine this morning, but—’

  ‘But?’ I said.

  Fran didn’t say anything. I moved the box onto the floor and threw the black cloth over the TV. I poured sand from a container into the flowerpot and put the fat orange candle in it. I set the wooden chopping board in the middle of the rug. I passed Fran the roses, then picked the knife, the wand, the goblet and the crystal ball up out of the box and set them on the wooden board. ‘I think if he knows he’s helping me – and, more importantly, helping you – he knows he’d be stupid to let us down,’ I said.

  Fran stood on the couch and managed to spear the roses through the light. ‘But what’s his price?’ she said, jumping down.

  I didn’t get her meaning.

  She seized a packet of matches from the box and went back to the windowsill.

  ‘He’s not the kind of guy I’d want to owe a favour to,’ Fran said, lighting a candle.

  70

  We collected the girls from the bathroom – I could tell from Fran’s face that s
he was shocked at how bad they looked. All of them walked slowly downstairs – purged, maybe, but weak and strung out. They all had purple bags under their eyes and lank hair. Their clothes were spattered with food, blood and sick. Kylie’s nose was still bleeding and she left a pile of bloody toilet paper behind her on the bathroom floor.

  ‘Do you need me in here?’ Fran asked when we were downstairs.

  ‘What would really help …’ I hesitated to say, ‘… would be you cleaning up upstairs.’

  Fran sighed. ‘You bitches owe me for this,’ she said as I positioned the girls around the rug. Before she left, she gave my hand a warm squeeze.

  Maybe I’d been wrong about Fran.

  I checked my phone. There was another message from Lauren that I didn’t read, but there was, thankfully, nothing from Joel. I decided I’d call Lauren tomorrow, because looking around the floor at the sallow faces of Nikki, Michelle and Kylie, I knew I had to find inhuman focus to get through today.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, assuming the tone of a teacher, ‘what do I do first?’

  Suddenly Michelle piped, ‘Why are we doing this again?’

  ‘We’re closing the Circle,’ I explained. It was weird – five minutes earlier this had been a cold, normal, family television room. Now the girls were sitting in place and the candles were lit, the temperature in the room had gone up. I felt the beginnings of sweat underneath my shirt collar.

  ‘It’s hot in here,’ said Nikki. As if in agreement, Kylie pulled up the hem of her school shirt and stroked her stomach.

  I sighed and reached for the knife. ‘By the knife blade!’ I called, holding it up.

  ‘By the knife blade,’ mumbled the girls.

  ‘By the element of air!’ I said.

  ‘By the element of air …’

  I bowed down and placed the knife carefully on the ground. I felt for the matches and lit the orange candle.