Blackfin Sky (11 page)

It was difficult to tell whether anything moved within the church, the angle of the moonlight creating planes and angles which didn’t belong to the ruins. Only the precarious spire was easily identified, looking like a giant’s hammer waiting to fall.

They crept around the side of the church, careful not to walk where the spire might strike if it chose that moment to crash down on them. Then Sean stopped, his fingers squeezing Sky’s gloved hand.

Sky couldn’t tell what he’d seen at first. He wasn’t looking inside the church, but deeper into the woods. Then Sean clicked on the light and shone it directly at the old woman standing there.

‘Excuse me, Madame Curio—’

All three froze at the same instant; Madame Curio no doubt surprised by the sudden appearance of two teenagers in the woods at night, and Sean and Sky startled by the old woman’s nakedness. Sean discreetly raised the beam so it shone only on her face and shoulders.

‘Aren’t you cold, Madame Curio?’

The old woman disappeared at hearing Sean’s voice, and he had to pan the torch quickly to find her standing not more than three feet away from them, now wrapped in a toga she had fashioned from a plaid blanket.

‘Old bones are always cold. Are your bones still cold after being in the water, child? But they never were, were they? Not in the water, not in the ground. Not these ones, leastways.’ She poked Sky’s shoulder with a claw-like finger, and Sky edged a little closer to Sean.

Madame Curio shuffled off in her blanket toga as though she hadn’t moved like a whip moments earlier. They followed her past the crumbling edge of the church’s south wall and saw that she had made a shelter out of old tarpaulins inside the ruined church. The massive fallen oak lay diagonally through the building, Madame Curio watching them from her perch at the far end of it.

‘See how you cling to each other … like two magnets pulling together, isn’t it?’ Sky and Sean both looked self-consciously at their intertwined hands, but neither pulled away. ‘Better than being set adrift, I suppose.’ The old woman didn’t seem entirely convinced. ‘But you came for answers, and I only have time for one. Ask a question.’

The abrupt nature of her speech left Sky stuck for words for a few moments before she remembered why they had come.

‘What happened to me the night I disappeared?’

The old woman’s eyes sparked like two flints. ‘Be specific, child. You have disappeared more than once, and will again.’

Sky had no idea what the old woman meant by that, but she persevered. ‘What happened to me at the pier on my birthday?’

The old woman smiled. ‘Better question would be
who
, not
what
, but never mind. You were chased, then you jumped off the pier.’

‘I
jumped
?’

Madame Curio shrugged. ‘You had little choice. But that’s two questions, and you have stolen my time.’

‘Wait, chased? By who?’

But even as Sky took a tentative step towards the old woman, the clock began to strike in the tower above them, and a low rumbling sounded through the trees.

‘You have brought him here, damn you! Severin would be so angry with me…’ Madame Curio leapt to her feet, squinting through one of the broken windows into the heart of the woods. Underneath the sill, a tarnished plaque bearing the name
Reverend Silas Peale,
with some indecipherable lettering underneath, swung like a pendulum from its single remaining screw. But Madame Curio was oblivious to the rasp of metal against stone, distracted by whatever – whoever – she feared was coming.

Severin.
The same name she had heard her parents whispering before she’d first snuck down to Blackfin Woods.

The low roar that had startled Madame Curio was building, getting closer as the clock continued to count the hours…

Ten, eleven, twelve.

Sky turned cold with fear. Something about that sound, that low growl all around her, getting closer by the second…

‘Come on!’ Sean tugged on her hand, urging her to run with him, back the way they had come.

‘What about Madame Curio?’ Sky looked around for the old woman, but she had vanished again.

‘She climbed up into the spire. Whoever’s driving that van, she seemed awfully anxious not to talk to them, so I’m thinking we need to get out of here.’

The van. Sky realised what the growling noise really was – the engine of the old van they’d seen on their way to the church, echoing through the clearing. Whoever the van belonged to, they’d obviously returned.

Maybe they spotted our tracks…

Sky scrambled over the rough ground, trying to hold her skirt up with one hand and holding onto Sean with the other until they were deep into the thick of the trees again. Sean stopped, catching Sky as she nearly tripped, and pulling her into the shadows as a beam of light sliced into the dark from the direction they’d just come from. Once, twice, it passed near to where they stood breathing hard, then disappeared as the torch’s owner moved on.

Sky sank against Sean’s chest. ‘Who
was
that?’

She looked up to find Sean’s eyes fixed on her. Her fingers had clenched around the fabric of his duffle coat when they had ducked behind the tree, and now his hands covered hers. Sky wondered when exactly she had taken off her gloves.

‘We should head back to the fence,’ Sky whispered into the air between them.

‘We should,’ Sean agreed, but didn’t move.

Sky looked around them for signs of the way they’d come into the woods. There were no tracks that she could make out, and the more she looked at the dense trees surrounding them, the more lost she felt.

‘Do you have any idea which way we should go?’

Sean considered. ‘Not really. But if we keep going in a straight line, we’ll reach the fence eventually.’ He held out his hand for Sky to take, like it had become a normal thing for them to always be touching. ‘This way.’

The trees were thinning out around them, but their surroundings didn’t look the same as when they had entered Blackfin Woods. Sturdy oaks had given way to spindly saplings, and the ground crunched beneath their feet as they picked their way through.

‘Do you know you hum when you’re thinking?’

Sky looked up from watching for obstacles in her path and stopped. ‘I do?’

Sean smiled at her horrified expression. ‘You do it when we’re studying together, too. Especially when we’re studying physics.’

She groaned.

‘I think it’s really cute. I’ve missed hearing it.’

Sky stopped breathing, but Sean had already started walking again. Now that she was looking up and not at her feet, though, she saw something that made her blood run cold.

‘
Sean.’

He stopped, hearing the note of panic in her voice, and peered off into the darkness where her eyes were now fixed. There, against an ink-black sky, twisted metal poles flew rags for flags, some with the tattered remains of the tent still attached to the circular frames.

‘What is that?’

There was no reason for Sky to know what it was, but she had never been more certain of anything.

‘It’s a circus.’

‘Why would there be a circus in the middle of the woods?’

‘I don’t know. There just is. Was. You can tell it got caught in the fire that destroyed the church.’

Sean looked on in silence for a while. ‘Maybe that’s where the fire started.’

But Sky didn’t answer. She was staring at the skeletal frames, feeling that some strange darkness beyond the wintry night had settled over the debris, almost hearing the sounds of the ringmaster calling in the acts to perform, the families cheering and gasping at the spectacles before them…

‘Sky?’

Lightning split the sky overhead, and in the flash of illumination Sky saw the tents as they had been – the candy-striped Big Top surrounded by smaller tents, people milling between them with all the garish lights and sounds of the circus drawing them in…

‘SKYLAR!’

Sean’s arms were wrapped around her like he was afraid she’d run, but she had snapped out of whatever daydream had snared her.

‘Thank God, I thought … I thought you were going to disappear again.’

‘Why? What do you mean?’

Sean released her but kept her hands in his. ‘I have no idea what just happened, but you just started to … fade.’

‘Fade?’ As though the word had been a trigger, Sky’s chest filled with cold terror. ‘Please take me home, Sean.’

They hurried on through the woods, neither stopping nor talking until the fence faced them and they were able to follow it to the gap where they had come in. It was all Sky could do to keep her eyes open on the short ride home, with Sean shooting worried glances her way every few seconds.

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she muttered, but whether to Sean or herself she wasn’t sure.

9

‘How’s your head?’

Cam’s response was to groan and whap her forehead against the desk.

‘I hate my braces. They are the devil’s train tracks.’

‘Should’ve got them out of the way sooner,’ Bo answered unsympathetically, chewing on her pen in the absence of a roll-up. ‘Like I did.’ Then she smiled in a way that was completely un-Bo-like, showing off her perfectly straight, white teeth.

‘Margaret Peeps?’

Bo’s grin turned sour at the use of her real name, then vanished completely as she spotted Mrs Hemlock in the doorway. All three girls knew what the headteacher’s sudden appearance meant: Bo’s father had been released again. Mrs Peeps always pulled Bo and her brothers out of school when her dad was coming home from his latest stint in prison, and Sky knew what her friend was about to ask even before she hissed, ‘I need to stay over at your house tonight. If my mum asks, we’re having a study sleepover.’ She looked from Sky to Cam until they both nodded, then followed Mrs Hemlock out of the room.

Cam turned to Sky with a grin until her jaw clenched in pain from the previous day’s braces-tightening.

‘Yay, thleepover!’

Though, scientifically speaking, there should have been a finite number of marshmallows Guillaume Rousseau could fit into each mug of hot chocolate, he managed to far exceed this number for the occasion of the girls’ impromptu sleepover.

Bo took a sip, looking reluctantly comfortable in her pink bunny pyjamas and wearing a foam moustache.

‘How’s your dad doing?’ Sky asked, fully anticipating the eye-roll Bo shot at her.

‘God, if we’re gonna talk about that loser we might as well actually do homework.’

‘But I know what we
could
talk about,’ Cam piped up, looking far too bubbly for someone with an alleged migraine. ‘Where you and Sean went sneaking off to so late last night.’ Then her eyes widened in horror. ‘Unless it’s something I really don’t want to know…’

Sky groaned and let her head fall back against her headboard. ‘It was nothing like that. I told you I was going to talk to Madame Curio, see if she saw anything from her hut that night.’ At Cam’s blank look, Sky realised Sean must have deleted the messages from Cam’s phone in case their aunt’s curiosity got the better of her. ‘Sean’s just helping me try to figure out what happened the night of my party.’

Bo snorted. ‘What is there to figure out, really?’ Both Cam and Sky stared at her. ‘I mean, do you seriously think you’re going to be able to just work out how you
died
and suddenly showed up three months later? Like you’ll realise the wrong page was showing on the calendar or some stupid thing, and it’ll all be neatly explained away?’ The two other girls said nothing. ‘Exactly. This is some weird Blackfin shit you’ve gotten yourself into, and you’re never going to understand the why and the how because there
is
no why or how.’

‘I’ll help you figure it out,’ Cam whispered, completely ignoring Bo’s extended rant. Sky wondered how these two had remained friends for the last three months without her as a buffer.