Blackfin Sky (9 page)

Sky ran down the length of the pier, not pausing as she passed the fortune-teller’s hut with its gaping, empty windows.

Do I really want to find out what happened to me?

She kept going along the promenade and up the hill, until she had to either stop or risk throwing up in her own front yard. But as the Blood House came into view, she knew she didn’t want to be there on her own, either. As much as she loved her house, she couldn’t face pretending not to see the strange things she always saw in the Blood House, the whispers and creaks and shifting wood grain which sometimes,
sometimes,
resembled a face.

She didn’t want to deal with anything mysterious for just a little while. So instead, she headed for Gui’s Garage.

‘Hi,
coco,
’ Gui slid out from under the car he was working on, having seen Sky’s heeled boots crossing the garage floor. Then he saw her face. ‘What on earth is the matter?’

Gui wiped his oil-blackened hands on a rag before guiding his daughter to sit on one of the workbenches. Sky looked up at his worried expression and debated whether or not she should tell him about all the craziness – the old fortune-teller living in the woods, Jared’s weird interest in what had happened to her, what Bo had said about someone digging up her grave… But at the same time, she felt almost certain that her parents were keeping things from her. They’d been tiptoeing around her like she was terminally ill, whispering behind closed doors and trying to keep her from talking to Officer Vega.

And despite her mother’s maidenly wilting on the day she had supposedly
reappeared,
they weren’t exactly acting like a couple whose daughter had miraculously returned from the dead. In fact, they were doing everything they could to act as though nothing at all had happened.

Maybe Officer Vega was right, and I should ask Mum about what happened that night. Confront her, maybe.

But Sky knew she’d have no luck tackling her mother head-on. If Lily Rousseau wanted to keep something a secret, it stayed a secret. That was why they hadn’t wanted her to speak to Officer Vega, she was sure of it. But what didn’t they want Sky to know?

The unanswered questions remained a cold, hard wall between Sky and her parents, and it meant that telling her dad what was happening in the hopes he’d fill in the blanks was only going to leave her feeling hurt and disappointed when he didn’t. Fighting with her dad was about the last thing Sky could deal with right now.

‘Nothing, don’t worry. Just had a crappy day.’

Sky sighed and closed her eyes as her father kissed her forehead. ‘I don’t have any hot chocolate, but I can easily go to get some if it will make you feel better…’

She laughed. Gui’s solution to most problems was hot chocolate, which Sky would have found ridiculous if she didn’t also grudgingly admit that it worked. Most of the time.

‘No, I’m fine. It looks like you have work to do, and I just kind of wanted to come and sit here for a while, if that’s okay.’

Gui disappeared into his office at the back of the garage for a second, then came back with his big old sheepskin coat. He wrapped it around Sky over her own coat, and nodded in satisfaction.

‘Sit as long as you like,
coco.
But it gets draughty
dans le garage,
and your mother will strike me down if I let you catch a chill.’

They both burst out laughing at the unlikely image. She might loose the occasional string of expletives into the ether, but Lily would never raise a hand against her supersized husband.

‘Thanks, Dad,’ Sky muttered softly, then watched her father get back to work on the new Chrysler which she recognised as belonging to Miss Schwarz, her science teacher.

Her thoughts whirled with too many questions, and she couldn’t decide where to start asking for answers. Blackfin was fit to burst with secrets, but which ones did Sky really want to unearth?

Before long Sky felt her head sinking towards the metal workbench, and she was gathered up in Gui’s colossal arms.

‘Time to go home, I think,’ he chuckled, and Sky let herself drift off to sleep while her dad buckled her into the cab of his truck.

7

‘
You knew she … like him, Lily
.’

‘But I never knew Severin … his gift was … how was I to know?
’

It was not the broken whispers drifting from her parents’ room that woke Sky, but the shifting groans of the old house. It was as though the Blood House wanted Sky to hear, carefully coaxing her from sleep to listen. She rolled to face the wall, fully expecting the grain of the wooden panelling to have shifted with the shadows. The Blood House did not disappoint her.

The friendly face of an old man held a finger to his lips, there and yet not when she concentrated on the texture of the wood. Nevertheless, Sky listened.

‘…makes sense … never asked Severin … the circus burned
…’

Unable to understand the snatches drifting through the old walls, Sky crept from her room, keeping to the edges of the floorboards to minimise the creaks. But the Blood House wanted her to hear, and so its boards made no sound as she carefully leaned against the door to her parents’ bedroom.

‘I thought we had left all this behind us the night of the fire.’

Sky’s father moved across the room towards the wardrobe, the sound of the floorboards giving him away.

‘The woods can’t hold our secrets forever, no matter how hard we try to keep them hidden. But how can we make Sky … how can we help her understand, Gui, if we don’t know how it works ourselves? Severin only told me bits and pieces, and I could never tell when he was being truthful.’ Sky’s mother sighed. ‘It’s a miracle she came back to us at all.’

The woods again? First Jared, now my parents…

Gui made a deep noise of agreement in his throat. ‘I wonder why she doesn’t seem to know she left, and yet she is aware that three months have passed since that night. It’s just …
c’est de la folie
.’

Lily made no audible response, though Sky pressed her ear tighter to the wooden door to try to discern her movements. When a few seconds had passed and she still heard nothing, Sky began to suspect her mother’s light-footedness was about to expose her in the act of spying. She crept away, back to her room. But she didn’t stay there long.

The brief snatches of conversation she had overheard had confirmed
something,
at least. If Sky wanted answers, she would have to start looking for them in the woods.

Blackfin Woods was a forbidding place. The locals spoke of three great silver wolves being sighted beyond the boundary, but the students of Blackfin High didn’t believe those rumours. The truth was no doubt something far more probable – like the town council meeting there to hold séances under the full moon, or Old Moley using the woods to grow those sweet-smelling mushrooms he ground into his pipe when he thought nobody was looking.

Sky’s hastily booted feet cast echoes through the night, the spiked silhouettes of the treetops looming ahead of her.

She wrapped her coat tighter around herself, though the night wasn’t quite cold enough to leave frost on the ground. But being alone at midnight at the woods’ edge carried its own icy coldness, and Sky felt it.

As she rounded the last twist of road, Sky caught the glint of light on metal. It wasn’t coming from the black coils of the iron gate or the knifepoint tips topping the fence, but a brand new, well-oiled chain which barred all from entering.

She strode up to the iron gates, craning her neck to assess their height and the likelihood of being able to scale them unscathed. Many stories – no doubt exaggerated by cunning parents – had filtered down to Sky’s ears about kids who had attempted the climb, only to reach the point of no return and find the lack of footholds led to inevitable impalement. She looked down at her boots. They weren’t as ridiculous for climbing as sandals or clogs would have been, but the black twists of iron looked awfully slippery.

‘Maybe not,’ she muttered, wishing she had pressed Jared to tell her how he got inside the fence.

The air had cooled sufficiently for her breath to mist in front of her. She searched the darkness in both directions, looking for any obvious weak spots in the fence. None presented themselves, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Choosing on instinct alone, Sky turned to follow the stretch of iron railings leading off to her right. Allowing her left hand to trail along the cold metal, Sky began counting her footsteps in the dark.

‘Twenty-eight, twenty-nine…’

The fence curved around as though hugging the woods, drawing them further away from the road. Though no street lamps lit the road edging the woods anyway, moving away from it was like stepping into an abyss. The trees seemed to lean forward in anticipation as Sky moved further along the fence, and she shrank away from them, no longer certain that the lightning trees were a myth.

‘Eighty-two, eighty-three…’

Skinny crab apple trees crowded in on Sky from both sides, their barren branches like children’s finger bones pointed down at her. With the toe of her boot, she kicked up a pile of leaves towards the nearest tree, glad that nobody was watching her for a change. But they hadn’t been watching her for months if they all believed she had died, had been buried under the clay soil to be eaten by worms…

‘One hundred and thirty, one hundred and thirty-one—’

She stopped as a flash of lightning split the sky, showing her the battered teeth of gravestones pegged into the meadow now before her. The forks of light seemed to swirl around her for a moment, like eels in water.

Sky spun in a circle, looking for the iron fence her hand had rested on just moments ago to try to gather her bearings, but could see it nowhere.

She was lost.

Sky stopped short. That couldn’t be right. She
never
got lost in Blackfin.

Except when you go missing for three months and everyone thinks you’re dead,
she answered herself with a snort. But then lightning flashed again, almost close enough to touch this time, and with that same viscous quality.

Dizziness swept over her. She hadn’t been hit with a migraine this bad in months.

The nausea she felt was sudden and intense, and she braced her hands on her knees until it passed. When she looked up, she met the crooked grin of Blackfin Cemetery.

How the hell have I ended up here? The cemetery’s half a mile from the woods!

As her eyes cleared, Sky saw the mounded grave in front of her. Her own name mocked her in bold letters across the headstone, with her birth and death dates below – exactly sixteen years apart. But despite Bo’s assertion, the grave was undisturbed.

Sky’s head began to spin again. Strange images appeared in the strands of light weaving around her – places and things she shouldn’t,
couldn’t
, be seeing – and she clenched her eyes shut. It didn’t help.

Fear that she would slip and land on her own grave had her scrambling backwards, tripping and landing on her backside so that she had to move like a demented crab to increase the distance between herself and something which simply
could not be
.

‘I’m not dead,’ she whispered, then repeated it. Over and over again she spoke her mantra, even as her boots pounded towards the cemetery gates and her shaky breathing turned to sobs.

Lightning scored her peripheral vision, chasing her, taunting her, until she was suddenly – inexplicably – on her own front porch.

There’s no way I ran that quickly,
she thought, still gasping on sobs and stolen breath.
It’s not possible.

Yet the evidence was as tangible as the painted green door of the Blood House now swinging open of its own accord to welcome her home. But that was just the way of things in Blackfin.