by Luca Veste
Michelle pointed an accusatory finger toward a silent Stuart, who was edging away from the group with every passing second. He didn’t look as surprised by her outburst as the rest of us, but seemingly didn’t want to stick around to find out what the result of it was going to be.
“You’ve been all over me for days, then you’re just going to run away again?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Stuart said, but even I could see the lie from a mile away in the dark.
“Not what you meant?” Michelle replied, her voice louder and mocking now. Desperately trying to hide the hurt too, I imagined. I wanted to pick Stuart up and throw him as far as I could at that moment.
Idiot.
“How about you go now and leave us alone? It’s not like you don’t lift out easy enough. Last in, first out. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that what you’re afraid of? You’ve always wanted to finish things with me for good, but you don’t have the balls to do it, because you know what’ll happen if you do. Everyone in this group will choose me over you.”
Stuart laughed humorlessly, but when he looked at the rest of us he stopped. At Chris, who averted his eyes and crossed his arms across his chest. Easy to read, as he always was.
“Michelle, maybe this is something that you and Stuart should talk about tomorrow with clear heads.” No sooner had the words left my mouth than I realized they were falling on deaf ears.
Michelle moved toward Stuart, who stopped moving away but had his head lowered. Staring at the ground with great interest it seemed.
“Tell them all,” Michelle said, her voice echoing around the field. No doubt a few campers would be listening in with great interest, but if Michelle knew that it didn’t seem to bother her. “Tell them what you’ve done to me over the years. How you’ve cheated and lied so many times. How you’ve broken promises and told me the same crappy story over and over. Tell them what you’ve been doing without anyone knowing. Tell them what kind of man you really are. You’ve been using me for years and that stops now. I’ve had enough. I can’t stand your lies anymore. It’s gone too far.”
I listened to her voice get louder and louder, as she screamed accusations at Stuart. He seemed to take it all and not rise to anything. As if he knew he had no defense.
“And now, after you pretend to be normal with me all weekend, you lay this bull on me that you’re not even gonna be around. You’ve been lying to me with your actions all weekend, then can’t even wait until we’re on the way home before discarding me like I’m just a piece of rubbish to you.”
“Michelle, it’s not like that—”
“No, Stuart,” Michelle said before he had a chance to finish the sentence. She sniffed and stepped closer to him. When she spoke, her voice was quieter now. Steelier. “I hope you die. That’s what you deserve.”
“Come on,” Nicola said, moving to Michelle’s side in an instant and putting an arm around her. “You can sleep in my tent. Chris can bunk with him, and we can leave first thing.”
I turned to Alexandra, who opened her mouth to say something to me, but then decided against it. She followed the other two women as Chris steered Stuart away from the tents. I went with them, a few steps behind, as we walked in silence until we were far enough away to not be heard by the others.
“She’s not thinking straight,” Stuart said, looking at his feet instead of the two other men. “I don’t know what she’s going on about.”
“Sounds like she’s had enough, mate,” I said, moving toward him and slapping a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve been on again, off again so many times, it was always going to be the case that one of you would eventually need some kind of commitment. That’s just life.”
“That’s the thing though,” Stuart replied, looking at me now. The whites of his eyes were dull in the darkness, but I could almost feel them straining to be believed. “It’s never been casual for me. It was always her who pulled back. I wanted to be together properly for years, but she was never ready. Now, suddenly it’s all being thrown back in my face.”
“Mate, it’s not like what she was saying wasn’t true though,” Chris said, his voice soft and calm. That was always the way he was. The voice of reason whenever any of us faltered. He gave a knowing look at Stuart. “We know you’ve not always been completely faithful.”
“How is it cheating if we’re not really together?”
I recalled a TV character from decades earlier shouting “We were on a break!” and closed my mouth so I didn’t start laughing.
It was all so ridiculous. I felt like we were all in school again. Teenagers, arguing over silly little things that didn’t matter. Perhaps trying to recapture our youth at a music festival had somehow sent us back twenty years emotionally too.
“I’m sure she doesn’t really want you dead,” I said, trying to ease the tension and probably failing. “Still, probably best to sleep with one eye open.”
“Mate, I’m more worried that Nicola will take it as an instruction,” Stuart replied, nudging Chris with his elbow. “That girl scares me more than anyone else. When you’re arguing with her, do you do it from another country just in case?”
Chris didn’t rise to the joke, or take it as one, it seemed. “We never argue,” he said, shrugging his shoulders and kicking at the dirt beneath our feet. “She’s not that scary, is she?”
“No, course not,” I said, nudging Stuart to say the same.
Chris seemed to accept the slight untruth.
“Everyone’s had too much to drink and isn’t thinking straight,” I said instead, shaking Stuart’s shoulder with my hand. “Tomorrow, it’ll all be okay again. Maybe it’s time to have an honest discussion with her about things. I know it scares you, and that’s probably what’s kicked this off. What did you say?”
“That I was looking at going abroad for a few months.”
“Well, that’ll do it. Stop messing about, mate. Tell her how you feel and decide once and for all whether you should be together or not.”
“After that, I don’t think she’s going to want to hear it…”
“You don’t know that,” I cut in before Stuart had time to finish. At that point, I just wanted to go to bed. The weekend was catching up with me—the lack of sleep, the drinking, the noise. I didn’t sleep well at the best of times, but I’d barely had more than two hours a night since arriving there. “It’ll all be different by the morning. She’ll have calmed down, and you’ll actually have to talk this time.”
I caught a glimpse of his smile in the dark before we all headed back. It was quiet when we reached our tents, but we could hear whispers coming from where Chris and Nicola had been staying together. I watched Chris and Stuart get into the tent that Stuart had been sleeping in without a word.
Inside mine, it was empty. I didn’t have to wait long before Alexandra came back.
“Okay?” I said, my voice barely audible, even in the cramped space. “All calmed down?”
Alexandra nodded in the dim light of the electronic lamp I’d set up. “She was proper angry, but seems to have just slid into overwhelming tiredness now. More’s the pity. Would have been interesting to see what happened if she’d attacked him.”
“It would have been the end of the group, that’s for sure.”
“All things have to come to an end at some point.”
I whisper-grunted in response but lay back on the floor and smiled as Alexandra came next to me. Draped an arm over me and curled a leg over mine.
“Promise me we’ll never be like those two.”
“I promise.”
It was a promise I meant in the moment, but one I knew I couldn’t well keep. I’d been in enough relationships—short-term for the most part, of course—to know that things can change quickly. In a second, sometimes. The things that don’t bother us at the beginning can suddenly become the single most irritating action a person
can do at any moment. The arguments that would never happen in the first few weeks can increase in frequency.
We never really know another person.
Eventually, sleep took me. I was looking forward to a real bed, but that night I drifted off quickly.
Then, at some point in the night, I was woken by a sound. Silence ending. The dead of night cut through with a blade of shock and awe.
A scream in the darkness.
Five
The scream seemed to be from another world at first. One that was blurred and distorted, dreamlike, an illusion of reality. I was convinced at first that I was the only one who had heard it, but when it happened again, I felt Alexandra shift beside me and speak softly into the night.
“What was that?”
I almost asked if she’d heard it too, but instead, I heard noise from one of the other tents. Between the screams, the silence was suffocating. Punctuated with heavier breathing from Alexandra lying next to me as we worked out what to do.
“Was it a person?” I said, whispering, though by now, everyone would have heard the noise. “What was it?”
My eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness just as Alexandra picked up her phone and switched the flashlight on. The light illuminated us, and she opened her mouth to answer as another piercing screech destroyed the silence. Familiarity stung me.
“It’s Stuart,” I heard myself saying, but I was already scrambling out of the tent, the jeans I’d left crumpled up at the entrance to the tent halfway up my legs as I crashed out of it onto my knees. I struggled to stand up, as the others emerged from their tents around me. I was only faintly aware of them as I started running toward where I’d heard Stuart’s scream.
It was in the woods behind our campground. I didn’t think; there wasn’t a conscious thought about what I was doing. I simply took off in that direction, ignoring the protests from my legs as I hurtled into the woodland. Somewhere at the back of my mind, I was glad of the socks I’d left on my feet to ward off the cold. My jeans were over the long boxer shorts I’d worn to sleep, but I was shirtless as I scraped my body against branches sticking out in the darkness.
My mind became a mess of thoughts within seconds. It began as broken images of Stuart in danger. Trapped. Lost in the darkness. Then, panic gripped me in a vise of terror and wouldn’t let go.
Stuart’s screams for help had been filled with one thing. Fear.
Behind me I could hear voices, but it was my own that took precedent as I shouted Stuart’s name. I had been in the woods for less than a minute, yet it already felt like hours had passed. My body screeched with adrenaline, eyes desperately trying to become accustomed to the dark around me.
“Stuart!”
Another yell came back at me, and I switched direction and continued running. My own breathing, hard and heavy, echoed as I waded in farther, the woods becoming thicker and more dense.
Another cry of alarm was only yards away, and I raced up what was an incline in the trees. My feet scrambled for purchase as I fell forward, my hands feeling the soil underneath them. I brushed aside leaves and twigs. Kept moving upward as the top came into sight.
Below me was a clearing in the darkness. I could only see shapes in the shadows as the black of night enveloped me.
“Help,” Stuart cried, and I stood still.
I always felt as if fear would be an ice-cold feeling. It would run through my veins and freeze me in place. Real fear, that is. The type you feel when you hear a noise in an empty house at night. Or a loved one goes missing. I had never considered myself brave or courageous. I always suspected I would turn to stone and become a useless block of that cold, frozen fear.
Now, instead of ice, I felt my temperature rise, my mind begin to almost clear, and some primal instinct take over.
I heard myself shout, but it was disconnected from me. As if it were someone else’s voice, simply using me as a vessel.
It broke the spell, and I moved toward them.
And that’s what it was, I realized suddenly.
Them.
Stuart wasn’t alone.
I heard bodies crashing into each other. Shouts and screams, cascading down as they bounced off surrounding trees. All of it building and building to a wall of noise.
At first, I thought it was Chris pinning Stuart to the ground, but then I caught a putrid smell—unfamiliar and strange—emanating from one of the men and it broke the spell.
It was a stranger.
It was someone I didn’t know.
He was hurting my friend.
I piled in, dragging the stranger from Stuart and flapping wildly with clenched fists.
There was more noise from beside me, then the familiar scent of the expensive aftershave Chris wore. It was still on his skin, lingering hours after he’d applied it. I felt comforted by the smell as it assailed and embraced me.
I no longer felt alone in the darkness.
Then, the world seemed to shift and reality came through the fog I had been moving in. The darkness was punctuated by light from above, and I could hear Alexandra’s voice. She was holding her cell phone up, flashlight shining from it. Another light appeared from a similar source, but I couldn’t see who was holding it.
“No…”
I turned toward her, wondering why she disappeared almost instantly, replaced by a carpet of stars.
The sky was above me and my ears were ringing. The gentle thud of pain became a crescendo as the back of my head seemed to balloon in size.
There was a second when I didn’t think I could move again, then something took over me. I knew there was danger in those woods. Right now. In that clearing. Something was trying to hurt us, and I couldn’t let that happen.
I moved groggily to my feet and grabbed at someone for purchase. That smell still surrounded us, the rotting decaying scent that filled my nostrils and cleared my head.
“Matt—”
I heard Chris grunt my name and moved toward him. The lights from a phone were shining from above us, moving around as if we were in a violent disco. I could see a figure, large and imposing, gnarling and snarling as he gripped Chris from behind. Something else in its hand.
It was large. My first thought was that there was something wrong with his hand. Then I realized what it was.
It’s a machete. He’s trying to kill us all.
At their feet, Stuart had his head in his hands, swearing and breathing heavily.
I didn’t think.
I had never been a fighter. One or two confrontations over the years that were difficult to avoid. Most ended the same way. A dull thud of closed fist on jaw, usually partially blocked. Then, it was simply rolling around on the floor until someone broke us apart.
This was different.
This was about survival.
Someone was attacking my friends, and I needed to save them.
There was something hard on the ground beside me, and I grabbed it. A rock, smaller than a paving stone, heavy enough to do damage but not enough that I couldn’t pick it up and raise it over my head.
I hit the attacker in the middle of his back. He let out a cry and collapsed to the ground with an exhalation of air. I heard another noise of metal striking stone. I dropped the rock next to him, then it all became a blur again.
There was noise. I heard Alexandra’s voice beside me suddenly. Nicola’s breathing. Michelle’s crying. We were all together.
I don’t know who did what to the man. My feet were hurting, meaning, at some point, I kicked him, but it was a mess of action and violence.
Bodies crashing together. Grunts of effort, of pain, of fear.
At once, they all coalesced until they became a blur of nothingness.
Then, there was only silence that seemed to last forever. No sounds, no breathing, nothing. Just a blanket of sudden calm and still
ness.
The moonlight above us dipped behind clouds, as if it knew something dark had occurred and it needed to react. The sky was a little less dark, even as the moon disappeared.
Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight.
Red sky in the morning…
I looked around, avoiding anyone’s eyes. We were standing near a luscious green hill of some sort. Trees in autumn bloom surrounded us, no houses or roads in view. I realized I’d been there before. Earlier in the day, a couple of hours after sunrise, nursing a hangover and hoping I could walk it off before starting over again. I had stood at the top alone, and it had been almost as if I could see the entire world laid out before me. The palettes of greens and browns and oranges. The blue sky above me had seemed to stretch on forever.
No clouds at that point. A dull sun overhead, not overly impactful, not blaring or searing.
No darkness.
No death.
I could hear voices growing as panic began to set in. The silence was broken, but my mind tried to refuse to hear it. An arm went around my shoulders. Tried to pull me back, but I wanted to see what we had done.
I needed to see.
The sound of running, shouts flying in two different directions. Arguments breaking out. Cries and recriminations. Tears and anger.
I barely heard them all.
It was as if I were alone there.
I could no longer feel the hands pulling me back. It was only a few feet away from me now, and I couldn’t stop myself.
The body made me pause. The blood on his face. Pooling around him as it seeped—no, gushed is the right word—out of him.
I imagined a panicked look on his face as I reached out to him.
His pain. His anguish.
His silent plea for help.
Those things were created in my mind, as he remained lifeless.
The dirt and soil on his face, mixing brown and red together. The angled features of someone for whom this was his kingdom. We had disturbed him in his natural habitat and yet he was the one dead. Not us.