Dark Tides (3 page)

Later, I was wedged between the ghost and the werewolf in the back of the Fiesta, the cheap stereo speakers buzzing as they pumped out Wheatus’s
‘Teenage Dirtbag’. Rachel was sitting on the ghost’s lap, drinking from a vodka bottle that was being passed around. The ghost’s elbow was poking into me as he slid his hand up her thigh.

Dracula claimed to have bought the vodka with the money they’d raised from their singing, but I didn’t believe they’d made nearly enough. Someone must have put in extra cash. David, probably. He’d mentioned something about a Saturday job at a Ramsey cafe.

I’d taken a few sips but I wasn’t feeling any kind of buzz. The others were all singing and laughing and fooling around. Even David, who wasn’t drinking, was yelling song lyrics through his open window into the streaking darkness. I tried catching his eye in the rearview mirror a bunch of times – I thought maybe he’d tell me where we were going and why – but his attention was focused on the narrow coastal road ahead, his shoulders hunched, peering hard at the sway and bounce of his headlamps.

We sped round a bend and the werewolf nudged my leg with his knee. ‘Happy?’ he shouted, over the music.

‘Ecstatic.’

‘You seem a little freaked out. What is it? My hairy face? My pointed ears?’

‘Your fangs, maybe.’

‘Easily fixed.’

He removed his mask, then flattened his thick head of hair. It was dark in the rear of the Fiesta. His features were shadowed and indistinct. But I recognised him all the same.

He was attractive in a rugged, knocked-about kind of way. He had a square face, low brow, thick eyebrows. His two front teeth were crooked and his nose was flattened, as if it had been broken at some point in the past. I was almost certain it had been. I knew he had a reputation for getting into fights. I knew he’d been in trouble with the police many times. He stole things, or so I’d heard.

‘I’m Mark.’ He pointed towards the ghost with the wandering hands. ‘That’s Callum. And he’s Scott,’ he added, nodding at Dracula.

‘Having fun?’ There was a reedy quaver in Scott’s voice, as if it hadn’t fully broken yet.

I shrugged.

‘You will. Best part’s coming up.’

David drove on towards Bride, the island’s northernmost village, then turned off on to a rutted track. We bounced and thumped over potholes and through deep, muddy puddles, our elbows and knees jabbing into one another, the Fiesta’s headlamps lancing up into the cloudy night sky. The land was mostly flat all around. A mix of sandy earth, mossy grass, heather and gorse. Up ahead, I could just make out a windswept bank of reed-fringed dunes, a gravel turning circle and a small brick building with a lone electric lamp shining outside.

The building was a visitors’ centre for the Ayres nature reserve. I’d been up here before on a biology trip. We’d been made to carry out some fieldwork – throw a set square, count the plants and insects, that kind of thing. I knew there were rare species here. A few lizards. Some fancy orchid you couldn’t find anywhere else on the island. It was a popular area with bird watchers, nature lovers and ramblers during the day.

It was completely deserted at night.

David killed the lights and the engine, cutting off Shaggy’s ‘It Wasn’t Me’ midway through. A harsh wind tore in from the sea, across the dunes, blustering against the windows and rocking the Fiesta on its chassis.

Scott clicked on the dome light above him. He turned in his seat and flipped his mask up on top of his head. His cheeks were mottled with acne, his fine red hair clipped into a straight fringe across the top of his forehead. School was filled with boys just like him. Boys held so tight in the grip of adolescence that they looked as if they might never grow into men.

‘How much do you know about Hop-tu-naa?’ he asked me, his voice pitching and screeching unpredictably.

I felt my mouth twist up. Way more than I wanted to, I almost said. But I didn’t. I stayed silent.

‘Do you know about mummers?’

I chewed the side of my mouth.

‘Look, you probably already know that Hop-tu-naa is a Celtic festival, right?
Everyone
knows that. But way back when it all started, there used to be this tradition of mummers. People would dress in disguises, call from house to house, sing nonsense songs.’

Rachel giggled into the neck of the vodka bottle. I noticed that Callum’s hands had slid up a little higher.

‘But that’s not all they did,’ Scott said, ignoring the interruption. ‘They’d also carry out pranks or dares. Boys would knock on doors with turnips.’

David turned and smiled kindly at me, one hand still gripping the steering wheel. ‘What he’s trying to tell you is that we do the same thing. As a group, I mean.’

I stared at him. ‘You knock on people’s doors with turnips?’

‘No. But we do dares. Every year we take it in turns to choose.’

I thought of the singing and how I hadn’t participated in it. Had I failed some kind of unspoken test? That didn’t seem very fair.

‘I drove us out here because this is where Callum wanted us to come. He got to pick the dare this year.’

I turned to my left. Callum still hadn’t removed his ghost mask. He nodded at me from behind Rachel’s shoulder, the haunted expression of woeful despair sliding up and down in the dark.

‘Are you scared?’ he asked, in a hammy, mock-horror voice.

I thought about it. Truth was, I was a little afraid. I didn’t really know these boys. I was a long way from home. It was getting late. Nobody knew I was here. And Callum’s attentions, mixed with the vodka, were distracting Rachel. She seemed less and less concerned about me with every passing moment. Maybe this
was
a trick, after all. Maybe Rachel had duped me into coming, like some kind of lamb to a hormonal slaughter. These boys might want to do anything to me. And perhaps Rachel didn’t care about that kind of thing. But I did.

I shrank back towards Mark, then flinched.

‘I guess it depends on the dare.’

Scott was enjoying this now. He was almost bouncing with excitement. ‘You really want to know? There’s no backing out once you hear it. There’s a forfeit. Those are the rules.’

‘Just get on with it,’ Mark grumbled. ‘You’re freaking her out.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Tell me.’

But I didn’t want to hear it. Not really. And now I wish I never had.

We walked along the shingle beach, tramping across fine sand and pebbles, picking our way between driftwood and seaweed. I hugged my arms around myself as the wind slammed against me. I could feel the cold in my lips, my ears. It was dark but a waning moon was visible through a break in the clouds, casting the beach and the ocean in a faint lunar shimmer. Callum was carrying a torch that he’d removed from one of the zipped pockets on his combat trousers. The narrow beam jolted with his movements, flaring off a dented oil drum and an old plastic water container.

The sea was raging. It was wild. High tide. A major swell. The blue-black waters roiled and undulated, surf frothing and crashing against the shore. I glanced out as far as I could see and pictured myself alone out there, drowning, waving desperately to shore. I imagined my legs cramping, the frigid waters surging up, deep currents tugging at my ankles. I stared for so long, eyes watering, that I could nearly believe it was true. Could almost glimpse the pale streak of a hand signalling back at me.

I looked away. Tramped on. There wasn’t much talking. It was too cold, the walk too arduous, our feet sinking down with every step. I guess it didn’t help that the sea was so loud. The few times I tried to say something to Rachel she didn’t react. Maybe the wind snatched my words from me. Maybe I hadn’t said anything at all.

We walked for perhaps half a mile before Callum led us away from the shore towards the broad dunes running along behind the beach. I floundered to the top of a sandy drift and looked back towards the car park and way beyond it to the lighthouse at the Point of Ayre. The lantern rotated and the milky beam spun out to sea, winking off the oily waters, fading away into the endless dark.

‘See the trees?’

Callum was the only one still wearing a mask. I guessed the hooded cowl was keeping him warm, or maybe he was relishing the effect of his costume – the stark white plastic against the blackness all around made it appear as if his head was floating.

Beyond the flat grasslands I could just make out a dark, scrambled blur. I peered harder. The wooded area wasn’t large, perhaps no bigger than the playground at school. Maybe two hundred trees, hemmed in tight.

I didn’t like what I was seeing. It didn’t feel right to me at all. But the others started moving and I moved with them, plunging into a hollow among the dunes.

We hiked across the sandy grass, carpeted with moss and lichen and mounds of gorse, pocked with rabbit holes and sand pits, until we reached the isolated wood. The trees were pines. It looked as if they’d been planted in lines many years ago and had grown up in a rough grid of wayward rows and columns, branches tangling overhead.

I ducked beneath the outer trees on to a soft mulch of loose earth and fallen pine cones and needles. The dank air smelled of wet timber and decaying vegetation. The boys fanned out and prowled forwards like soldiers stalking an enemy hideout, stamping over twigs and fallen branches and rotting logs. Rachel grabbed my sleeve and dragged me after them. She found my hand and gave it a quick squeeze and I thought I knew why. There was a peculiar hush now that we were sheltered from the wind and the sudden stillness was disconcerting. It felt as if we’d stumbled upon a place that was waiting for something to happen. Something bad, maybe.

‘OK, stop.’

Callum had led us to a large pine in the middle of the woods. Someone had built a shelter next to it by leaning cut branches against the broad trunk. He cast his torch around, lingering on a ring of stones where a campfire had once been lit. He turned slowly and pointed the torch beam into our faces like he was taking a register.

‘Show me your blindfolds.’

We held them out for him to see. He’d passed them to us back in the car. They were sleepmasks, really – the type some people might use on a long-distance flight.

‘Good. Now go and pick a tree. But remember, you mustn’t be too close together.’ He placed the torch beneath his chin, firing the beam up at his mask, as if he was about to tell us a ghost story. ‘I’ll be watching you to begin with. I’ll know if you cheat.’

We looked at one another. Then David shrugged and turned away and the rest of us did likewise, spreading out as we blundered off into the black.

I listened to the crump of the soft ground and the snap of fallen twigs. Soon, the noises of the others started to fade until my ragged breathing, the creaking tree limbs and the distant rush of the wind were all that I could hear.

I stretched my arms out in front of me, feeling my way. I tripped over a thick root and almost fell. The fingers of my right hand brushed bark and I reached sideways, grasping for a tree and coiling my arms around the trunk.

I straightened and pressed my spine against the gnarled bark.

The light of Callum’s torch winked in the distant gloom.

‘All found one?’

The others shouted back, confident and eager. I swallowed thickly and shouted too, but my ‘yes’ came out shrill and sharp, lingering in the twitchy dark.

‘Put your blindfolds on. I’m putting mine on now, too.’

I raised my blindfold and fitted it clumsily to my eyes. I could smell some kind of perfume on the fabric. Maybe the mask had been worn before. Maybe it belonged to Callum’s mother, who had a whole collection of sleepmasks to wear at night. I guessed that was possible. It seemed like something a mum might do – although I was hardly an authority on that.

‘Remember. No talking.’

‘Tell yourself that,’ Scott shouted in his screechy falsetto.

‘Seriously. Anyone who talks after me pays the forfeit. No noises, OK? I’m going to start my watch in just a second. Twenty minutes. Nobody moves. Nobody talks. Nobody removes their blindfold. If any of you cheat or quit, you pay the forfeit. Everyone ready?’

There was silence. Stillness.

‘OK. Time starts now.’

I heard a low beep.

Then nothing more.

The silence built. The stillness, too.

There was something foul-smelling close to me. Animal waste, maybe. Or some kind of bog. I was starting to think that I’d selected my tree pretty poorly. There had to be better smelling trees around.

I strained my ears and listened hard, trying to figure out if any of the others were close by. At first there was just the wind up above, the low hiss of the far-off surf and the rapid beat of my heart. Then I heard a snort somewhere off to my right, followed by a giggle away to my left. One of the boys, then Rachel.

‘No cheating,’ Callum yelled, and I was pretty sure from the sound of his voice that he hadn’t moved from where I’d last seen him.

‘So-
rry
,’ Rachel replied.

‘Do it again and you pay the forfeit. I mean it.’

I had no idea what the forfeit was. I hadn’t been told. But in so many ways, it was irrelevant to me. I didn’t want to fail. Didn’t want to cheat. I craved friends that I could talk with and confide in. I needed people in my life who could make me laugh, make me smile, take me out of myself. I wasn’t prepared to do anything that might jeopardise that. And besides, I was good at being by myself. I’d had to learn to be. I’d been isolated for so long that it would have been crushing to imagine that I couldn’t cope for another twenty minutes.

The silence returned. I pictured myself standing in the dark, my arms behind me, wrapped round the tree, fingers clawing into the brittle bark. The vision wasn’t comforting. I opened my eyes but all I saw was more black. The mask was fitted snugly against my face, sucked into the hollows of my eye sockets.

How long had I been here anyway? Probably only a few minutes. I should have counted in my head from the beginning. That would have been the sensible thing to do. It would have occupied my mind and helped to keep the fear at bay.

Perhaps I’d been naive. Callum had said this was a trust exercise but I had no way of knowing if the others were obeying the rules. They might all be running away towards David’s car right now, laughing their heads off.

Stupid. They had to still be out here. Had to be close.

I thought about shouting out to confirm it, but if I did that and they hadn’t moved, I would have lost. The challenge, the one that had seemed so tame and ridiculous when Callum had first explained it, would have beaten me.

So I stayed still and I remained quiet and I waited, calling on a trick Mum had once taught me. When I was little, if I woke during the night into the shadow world of monsters and beasts that lurked under my bed or hid inside my wardrobe, I’d use my magic torch beam to see what was there. Silly, I know, but I found myself conjuring its powers now, swivelling my head, imagining my surroundings being cast in the greenish hue of my make-believe night vision. The clotted black became moss green, the hidden trees a pale mint. I could picture the others as acid-green blobs, ducking behind foliage, leaning against trunks.

I became a little calmer. A little more relaxed. It felt almost as if Mum was here with me, watching from just out of sight, much as she used to stand outside my bedroom door until all the monsters were gone.

Then I heard a noise – a dry
crack
from somewhere close behind.

My heart stopped.

I listened for more. Something was there. I could sense some kind of presence.

The magic torch was no good to me now. My childish prop had spluttered out, darkness crowding in.

I heard it again. The stamp of a foot. The crackle of foliage.

I bit down hard on my lip.

Then I felt the weight of a hand on my left shoulder.

I breathed in too sharply, almost choking on the rank air.

The fingers tightened by the merest fraction. If I hadn’t been so attuned to my senses, I might not have noticed. But the signal seemed clear. I was being told not to react. Not to move or shout out.

I’d risen up on my toes when I’d first felt the hand, and it was a strain to stay that way. The tension burned in the back of my legs.

A finger brushed against my neck. A barely-there stroke. Then no more. The hand remained on my shoulder, fingers poised.

Whoever was touching me, I could feel their breath parting the hairs on my head.

For a dizzying moment, I wondered if it could be David and part of me liked the idea. But wouldn’t he say something? He didn’t seem like the type to scare me. So maybe it was Mark. He had that dangerous reputation and perhaps he’d sensed the liquid thrill that had raced through me when our thighs had been pressed together in the back of the Fiesta.

Slowly now, the fingers started to move, lifting one after the other, like a pianist running through a halting score. They crabbed sideways towards my collarbone and crept round the side of my neck. They slid up to my mouth. A single finger probed at my lips, and I thought of Rachel’s lipstick there. Of the smudge it might leave.

It’s just a test, I told myself. It’s one of the boys. Scott or Callum. They want me to quit. Pay the forfeit. It’s all just a game.

Perhaps the others had sneaked forwards and gathered round me, too. Perhaps it was an initiation, in a way.

The hand moved on. The fingers walked towards the collar of my jacket and the neckline of my blouse, tracing an invisible path down between my breasts. The hand swivelled round the pivot of a single fingertip and hovered, then closed around my left breast, cupping me tight.

I didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. I could feel the thump of my pulse in my neck.

Then I heard a sudden fast beeping in the distance and the sound of Callum’s voice cut through the suffocating dark.

‘Time’s up. You can all come out now.’

The pressure on my breast lightened instantly. The hand slid away and I heard a fast shuffle of twigs and loose pine needles, followed by the rapid drumming of feet.

I let go of the tree and slumped forwards, clawing my mask from my eyes and wheeling around.

I saw the blur of an arm. A streak of grey. The twang and flutter of a nearby branch.

Then came the whoops and shouts and calls of the others, a whirling, confounding chorus from every direction other than the one I was looking towards.

A queasy shudder rippled through me. Who had touched me, I wondered? And what was I supposed to do about it now?