by Tom Mitchell
We still had no idea of the time. The clouds had faded, the moon was clear and shining through the shed door and milky window like it had nothing to worry about, the lucky thing. It was weirdly warm and inviting inside the shed too. There wasn’t really anything in there, dead animal aside, and definitely no supplies. Some broken wooden boxes in one corner, a few sacks that might have once contained potatoes, like, two hundred years ago. Maybe having a roof over your head made it feel secure and safe? Was it this sense of security that had tempted the squirrel?
But we were working to a schedule. How angry would Robbie be? Too angry to give me a lift back to camp? Would I have to make my own way? I needed to be in my bunk before breakfast.
‘Umm …’ I said. ‘I don’t know if we’ve got time.’
‘I’m with you, Alexa,’ said Ellie, like I wasn’t there, staring at the bones. ‘Ten minutes won’t make any difference. We don’t always have to do what he says.’
And I admit I didn’t want to continue without them. Nothing good ever happens in dark forests when you split off from the group. So, ten minutes later, we were (still) sitting inside the shed with our backs against the far wall. We’d used the sacks as tiny rugs. We also put one over the squirrel skeleton because Ellie said it was freaking her out just lying there, being skeletal.
‘Can you get animal ghosts?’ I asked, but no one answered. ‘What happens when worms die? Is there a worm heaven?’
It was nice to sit down, even though it was in no way comfortable. But if there’d been comfy mattresses and soft pillows, we’d have fallen asleep and not woken until the morning and that would have been majorly bad.
‘I wonder who built this,’ said Alexa, choosing to ignore my questions about the worm afterlife. ‘The shed?’
Her voice was so sharp and solitary, like a voice-over in a horror movie, I felt like I had to reply. Letting the silence linger felt like surrender.
‘Probably a serial killer,’ I said.
‘Don’t,’ muttered Ellie.
This made me want to continue. Obviously.
‘He lives in town—’
Alexa interrupted. ‘Why’s he a man?’
‘They always are,’ I said. ‘Men are horrible.’
Ellie grunted and I’m not 100 per cent sure but it might have been laughter.
‘Anyway, this serial killer. Let’s say he’s a she, I don’t even care. She lives in town but she has this shed here because it’s where she brings her victims. Because, get this, her great-great-grandmother was killed for being a witch and her bloodline compels her to kill as many, like, men in authority as possible.’
‘Men in authority?’ said Ellie. ‘What?’
A noise came from outside the shed. A definite sound. A rustle of movement, the snap of a twig. Was it … could it be … a man in authority? Or, worse, the serial killer?!
‘Did you hear that?’ I asked.
‘Hear what?’ hissed Ellie.
Every one of my muscles tensed. Literally every one. Name a muscle. It tensed. And my ears strained. And I felt their filament hairs stand without a shiver, waiting for confirmation that there was something threatening outside.
That sound again! But closer! This time Ellie and Alexa both heard too.
‘It’s probably a bird,’ I said, the words forced awkwardly from my lips like they were too big for my mouth. I imagined a vulture with blood-red eyes, bigger than a car. I’ve always hated birds.
‘Didn’t Faulkner say something about wolves?’ hissed Ellie.
The sound came again, louder this time, like someone crushing a paper bag. We squeezed closer together, shifting our backsides and edging into the corner furthest from the door. I wished I’d not been speaking about serial killers a second earlier. Like Mum says, I can be an idiot sometimes. Terrible things happen in cabins in woods.
With the torch on, our focus was aimed at the door. Should we have closed it? I can’t think of any monsters or killers that have ever been defeated by wooden doors, but still …
From the gloom, as if emerging from water, a fox appeared. Again.
‘Arggh!’ said Ellie. ‘Get out of here!’
The animal flinched and stepped backwards. The darkness made its head hover without a body. With dark eyes sparkling in the torch’s beam, it took us in, its focus switching from Alexa to me to Ellie. Did it lick its lips or did I imagine that?
‘At least it’s not a person,’ said Alexa.
Ellie kicked out a foot. The fox swung round and disappeared. The last thing we saw was its feather-duster tail.
‘I’m through with nature,’ said Ellie. She pointed at the sack that covered the squirrel. ‘And that so is a badger.’
‘I don’t want to argue, Ellie, but it isn’t,’ I said, because sometimes the truth is important. ‘Badgers are big.’
I don’t know what it was about the size of badgers but my observation had a radical and instant effect on Ellie.
‘That’s it,’ she said, and she jumped up, turned and pointed at us, spitting out her words. Her eyes flashed with heat. ‘I’m sick of this! You said it would be easy to escape! I feel dirty and I want my bed and I can’t deal with know-it-alls any more. I wish I’d stayed at the camp. Give me the torch.’
As Ellie snatched the torch, Alexa displayed an unusual lack of her generally quite impressive emotional intelligence by saying, ‘But it isn’t a badger, Ellie.’
Ellie shouted, ‘GO STICK IT IN YOUR INBOX. I’M SO OVER THIS.’
And she stomped from the shed and slammed the door like every angry teenager you’ve ever seen in films ever.
Me and Alexa, we fell asleep. Why? It was the middle of the night and our eyelids were heavy. How? No idea. Waking? Awkwardly. Alexa’s head was on my shoulder. My head was on hers. Carefully I edged away. Unfortunately the edging wasn’t careful enough. Her head had to go somewhere. As I shifted my shoulder, it dropped. She woke with a gasp.
‘I dreamt I was falling,’ she said. Without the torch there was almost no light in the shed and I couldn’t see her face. ‘What time is it? How long were we asleep?’
I felt a knot of panic tighten within my chest.
‘No idea.’
And I felt even more tired than before. That’s the problem with naps; sometimes they make things worse. A nap cut short is a dangerous thing.
‘We’ve got to go,’ I said, voice squeaking.
Standing, I stumbled forward, careful not to stray too far to the left, where the skeleton lay. I’d seen enough horror movies to understand that you didn’t want to disturb the remains of the dead. The last thing I wanted to be dealing with was a supernatural squirrel monster with magic powers like being able to throw acorns with super-strength, for instance.
I pushed my shoulder against the part of the shed where I remembered for sure the door had once been. I mean, we’d entered through it.
Nothing moved.
These last few days, I hadn’t had much luck with doors.
‘Have you tried the handle?’ asked Alexa, yawning.
‘Yes,’ I muttered, shame steadying the growing panic that we might be trapped in the shed forever, like the poor squirrel.
I patted my hands around where the handle should be and it took a few seconds before I found its reassuring roundness. It was a distance from where I’d first guessed. It was, like, ridiculously high. I turned it. Again I shouldered the door. This time I felt movement, the rectangle of wood straining against its frame. The motion summoned a smell from the depths. An unpleasant one too – a mixture of wet leaves and dog poo.
‘It’s pull, isn’t it?’
I mean, I liked Alexa but she had a habit of asking annoying questions. And so I pulled, sighing, inwardly blaming tiredness for forgetting how to open things. My hand squeezed against the doorknob, turning back and forth. But the door wouldn’t open. It remained closed. I imagined its shape as that of a gravestone.
‘It’s still not opening,’ I said – squeaking even more, I’m not goi
ng to lie. ‘Where’d Ellie go? She’s locked us in, that’s what’s happened.’ I moved my face close to the door, hoping to shout through the wood. ‘You’ve locked us in, Ellie! Come and open the door!’
‘If I could just …’ said Alexa, polite as ever and not pushing me out of the way like anyone else would have done. I stepped aside (still a good distance from the skeleton, I was sure) to let her try. Because, who knows, maybe she had a knack for opening doors. We’re all good at something. But:
‘Nope.’
‘Why’s Ellie not answering? Elllllllll-ieeeeee!!!’
‘Maybe …’ said Alexa.
She didn’t finish the sentence. But I knew what she was thinking.
Serial killers.
Controlling my fear, I considered my feet. I’d spent much of the escape using them, so I decided that I may as well give the bad boys another go. My right one, in particular, my favourite. Because I was considering the TV shows where cops break through doors. Confidence. That was the key. Not strength. As long as you look like you know what you’re doing … like in hip-hop, like in life.
‘Stand back,’ I said. ‘And watch this.’
Alexa muttered something about it being too dark to see anything but I was lost in extreme focus. And, to be fair, I don’t think I’ve ever kicked anything as successfully as I did that door.
The effect was immediate. As soon as my Nike hit the wood, a huge crash sounded. Like a broken leg. The door moved, yes, but so did the wall. Moonlight flooded the shed as its entire front face fell away like all it wanted to do was have a nice lie-down.
I stood frozen, my leg still in the air, a karate champion. The remaining three-quarters of the shed creaked around us like a ship in a storm. Ahead, the forest gasped. Silver clouds of dust and that gross smell again, but stronger. Alexa grabbed my hand and pulled me forward, scrambling across the rough wall planks. Jumping from them, we spun round and pushed our backs against a broad tree. We watched the rest of the shed collapse in on itself like a room made of Top Trump cards. We stood there, fully awake, and surveying the absolute destruction. Alexa held on to my hand for a second longer than necessary.
In the silver light she looked at me. And I looked at her.
‘We got out.’ I shrugged.
‘Where’s Ellie?’ she whispered.
‘Why are we whispering?’ I whispered back, even though I knew we were both still thinking about the serial killer.
Ellie was gone. We had no idea what time it was, or how far away from civilisation we were. And if at that moment I’d been asked to mark out of ten how the escape plan was going, I’d have probably given it a solid three.
‘We’ve got to stick together,’ I said. ‘And ensure that our search for Ellie is systematic.’ I’d learnt this from a show about a kid lost in Alaska. I also added a phrase I remembered from when next-door’s dog went missing: ‘She can’t have gone far.’
‘Do you think someone took her?’
‘No.’
‘And what do you mean by “systematic”, Will?’
‘For someone who prefers communicating through email, you’re asking a lot of questions,’ I said, probably too sharply. ‘If only we had the torch.’ Without moving from the security of the tree I narrowed my eyes and tried to pick out detail from the dark forest spaces. Obviously, though, it took only a few seconds of guilt before I decided to speak again. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just, you know … I had a plan to escape on my own, and getting to my brother is everything, and it feels like it’s all going wrong again.’
My waffling was broken by a single word, but one not spoken by Alexa.
‘Help!’
‘Ellie!’ whispered Alexa.
‘Ellie!’ I shouted. ‘We’re here!’
Alexa flung her arm across my chest. ‘Why are you shouting?’ she hissed.
‘Because she shouted?’
‘But what if—’
‘Help me!’ called Ellie again.
An urgent flapping of wings followed the sound. She’d woken a bird. Despite the added noise, it was difficult to judge from where she was shouting. The sound bounced from tree to tree. It was almost as if the forest had stolen her voice.
‘Flipping sherbets!’ said Alexa. ‘Son of a frog!’
‘I’m stuck in a tree!’ shouted Ellie. ‘Can you hear me?’
I wouldn’t say we were glad Ellie was stuck in a tree. But I have to admit I was massively relieved it wasn’t something worse.
‘Yes!’ dared Alexa in a voice not that much louder than the one you’d use when asking a librarian if they had any books about elves and goblins. She grabbed my arm, smiled. ‘There’s no serial killer!’
‘Where are you, Ellie?’ I called, ignoring Alexa.
‘I said. In a tree!’ she shouted back, not really narrowing it down.
She hadn’t been kidnapped. She’d been elevated. We raised our heads and looked at the branches above. For a moment the night was perfectly quiet. I found the absence of sound disturbing. It didn’t help with my nerves, still unsettled by the earlier thoughts of mass murderers. And I’d become so used to the constant hum of cars that I heard every night from my bedroom that the lack of noise was troubling, like maybe something super bad was about to happen. But, as it turned out, it was something super bat.
‘Up here,’ said Ellie, breaking the stillness. ‘There are flappy things, people!’
She was definitely calling from the other side of the shed, the side closest to the path we’d left (how many?) hours before. I broke into a jog but caught my foot against one of the broken shed’s loose planks. I styled out the stumble and continued to where I thought her voice had come from, Alexa close behind.
‘Ellie?’
‘Here! Above you! I can see you! What are you playing at? Get me down!’
We looked up. Ellie was hanging face down, her arms wriggling past her head, hands grasping at air. At the foot of the tree was the dead torch. Ellie must have dropped it. Alexa picked it up, turned it on, and pointed it at Ellie. The light picked out the pinkness of her cheeks.
Did I laugh? No. But I hid a smile.
‘What happened?’ said Alexa.
Ellie responded in a quickfire burst. ‘What do you think happened? I was climbing this tree, there was that explosion and it made me jump and I fell. My legs are tangled in something. I don’t know. Help me before I fall!’
Alexa sneezed. I looked at her; she rubbed her nose. I looked back to the tree. Ellie was dangling just out of our reach.
Climbing the tree shouldn’t have been difficult. Branches stretched in all directions. But the hardest part was lifting myself to the first one. Alexa tried helping by pushing me up but I had to tell her to stop when she accidentally touched my backside.
When finally up, I was able to stand on a thick branch and keep myself balanced against another that was about waist height. When I reached the place where Ellie’s legs were tangled, something dark and leathery whistled past my nose. It was my turn to scream.
‘Bats!’
‘Will!’ shouted Ellie. ‘I’m going to pass out! I know about the bats; I told you about the bats!’
‘Is everything okay up there?’ asked Alexa.
‘Get ready to catch Ellie!’ I called down.
‘Umm … I don’t think I’m strong enough,’ she replied. ‘No offence, Ellie.’
‘JUST GET ME DOWN!’
Somehow loads of vine, the sort to swing over jungle gorges with, was tightly tangled round Ellie’s legs. I didn’t like to point this out, but she was kind of lucky these vines had stopped her falling out of the tree completely. Of course, the problem now was freeing her from them.
‘Wait!’ Brainwave alert! ‘Have you got your sporf?’ I asked.
‘Really?’ replied Ellie, still retaining her ability to be sassy even when hanging upside down from a tree, and clearly not understanding why I was asking.
She managed to get a hand to a pocket. The sporf was found. She strained to reach
up and hand it to me. With one arm wrapped tightly round a branch, I leant forward. We must have looked like that picture of Michelangelo and Adam that they show you in RS, only with more clothes. And a whittled piece of wood.
Ellie gritted her teeth and found an extra few centimetres. I grabbed the sporf.
To do her justice there’d been some effective whittling. I quickly found out it was sharp enough to cut through the green ties that held her. And it did. And as it did … she fell.
On to Alexa.
Despite the concerning thump, and their yelps of surprise, they seemed to recover quickly. Both were already back on their feet by the time I bounced down from the tree. I jumped the last bit, which, in different circumstances, might have deserved applause.
Ellie rubbed her back and brushed hair and dirt and pine needles from her face.
‘My spine,’ she said softly. ‘My poor spine.’
‘Oh, Ellie,’ said Alexa. ‘You’re not hurt, are you? Are you hurt?’
But Ellie just turned to stare at me like I was the issue. ‘Where’s the sporf?’
I held it out.
Ellie snatched it back. ‘A bat just flew into my face. Have either of you any idea how gross that feels?’
‘Why were you even up there?’ I asked.
Ellie stared, gripping the sporf tightly. ‘I was on lookout. For the town lights. And I didn’t want foxes or dead badgers or woodlice getting me.’
‘Right,’ I said.
‘Or spiders,’ she added.
‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘it’d be best if you went back to camp. You know, you just fell from a tree and—’
‘No chance. I’m not going back. Good job with the shed, by the way. I’m guessing it was you who demolished the thing and made me lose my balance in the first place. Anyway, where now? You’re the leader, Will. Tell us where to go. I’m waiting. It’s your plan.’
What did it feel like to be spoken to like this? It felt like getting shouted at by a teacher, that’s what. In a forest. In the middle of the night.
‘Ellie,’ said Alexa, ‘Come on.’
‘No,’ said Ellie. ‘I’ve really had enough.’ Her voice started to break as she rubbed her eyes. ‘Genuinely this time. And to think I was looking forward to working on my serve.’ But when she dropped her hands, her face was more tight with anger than smudged with sadness. ‘I asked the way, Will.’