Dead Girls

by Abigail Tarttelin

  “Hey, Sam,” I say. “I’m thinking.”

  “What about?”

  “Billie wouldn’t have dropped the predictor. She knows not to litter. So let’s imagine we’re Billie. Maybe she dropped the predictor because she was scared, or distracted by something.” I look along the path and point. “She dropped it on the footpath and it just blew back along the path she took through the field.”

  “Maybe. It’s not really windy, though.”

  “It was windy on the weekend. I remember. We were walking to the den across this field on Friday, right? And I watched the wind blow Billie’s hair in the same direction as the predictor would have blown, if she had dropped it on the path. It was just like that on Saturday too.”

  I look around the surrounding fields for the impression of Billie walking there. We always leave big tracks when we go anywhere, dark lines snaking into the field and back out again, but there aren’t any in the next field, the one between the wheat field and her house, where Billie should have been going. There aren’t even any circular impressions, where someone could have been lying down, or there could have been a fight. I frown. “If there was someone out there, maybe they were walking on the footpath, and they made Billie jump, and she dropped the predictor. Maybe when she got on the path, she saw them.” I stand up and act surprised. “And she was shocked! So she ran along the track, all the way to…” I turn, and then I realize. “I know where she is.”

  Sam looks up at me. He is sitting cross-legged on the ground. He bites his lip.

  “Come on!”

  I turn and start to run. I’m pleased with my intuition. The psychic bond between Billie and me must be strong.

  “Thera!” Sam calls after me.

  “I have to find her!” I shout.

  I look back and he is finally following me. He glances across to the police, and speeds up. We run along the top, away from the police, parallel to the little raised footpath where Billie dropped the predictor.

  “Where are we going?” Sam asks.

  “Just trust me!” I shout. We run for ages, past two fields and some little trees, and then we turn and run down the hill through a fallow field, then a crop field. We come out onto the footpath, right by the entrance to the copse. Just at that moment, I think I see the ghost girl—a little flicker of hair—but then I squint, and she’s not there. I can feel that she was, though, and that she’s leading me to Billie. It was the ghost girl, after all, who told me Billie wanted to talk to me. I am starting to understand the game. Even though she’s creeping me out, I’m supposed to follow her. Like a spooky version of Lassie.

  The copse is a bit of land that anybody can go in. It’s not owned by anyone. It has a small pond, with a bird hide, and trees all around it. Our den is at the back of it, just next to the trailer park on the other side, but no one knows about it because it is surrounded by trees. It looks overgrown, like an enormous bush.

  “If Billie was scared,” I explain to Sam, “she would have run to the nearest place she could hide.”

  “The den!” Sam exclaims.

  “That’s right!” I say.

  “Wait, Thera. What about the black dog?” he says worriedly. Sam doesn’t like the woods. He’s scared of lots of things: ET, and boys that are bigger than him, and what’s under our beds. Sometimes I’m scared of what’s under the bed, but I have to be brave, for Sam.

  “Do you want to wait here, while I go in?” I suggest.

  “No!” he protests. “I’m fine. I’m not a baby.”

  “Stay quiet,” I tell him. Low hedgerows surround us as we walk from the sea of golden wheat and barley toward the mass of green.

  Suddenly Sam stops. “The gate’s open.”

  I hesitate. “Well, maybe somebody just left it like that.”

  “You’re not supposed to leave the gate open. The sign says.”

  We exchange a look. “I’m still going in, Sam,” I say. “Maybe she’s hurt. Maybe she can’t walk.” I turn, and leave him picking his fingernails on the other side of the gate. I only have to keep walking a minute until I hear footsteps running up behind me. I take his hand.

  We walk around the pond, poking our heads in the hide, just to check that Billie isn’t there. We reach the back of the copse, where the trees are closer together and it’s darkest. This is where our secret den is. The den where we took the Ouija board. The den where we saw the dogs. It’s made of a natural circle of trees that a bunch of vines and ivy have grown over, so you basically can’t see inside. We have been making it better and better by pulling the vines into the spaces where you could once see in, so there really aren’t any now. Hattie’s sister showed us how to do it and she got showed by an even older girl, who’s now eighteen, so it’s been around for a really long time. To get into the den, you have to crawl under a thicket of bracken. We go up to the entrance, and Sam points.

  “What?”

  “Hair,” he says simply.

  I peer close to the brambles, where he is pointing. There is hair there. Several strands of long, golden hair. “That’s Billie’s hair,” I say. “She’s here.”

  “Maybe she left it here when we did the Ouija board on Friday.”

  I frown, and squat down in front of the entrance. “Billie?” No reply. “Billie?”

  I get down on my belly to crawl through. “I’m staying here,” Sam says.

  I look up at him. “Okay. If you see anyone, scream, and I’ll come and get you.”

  Sam gulps. “Okay.” He turns his back on me. I leave him there, peering down the path, left to right, then over again. I duck down and stretch my arms ahead of me, and crawl on my hands and knees through the thicket. The thorns tug on my hair, and my knees get cold in the dirt, which is always cold, even in July. When I get through to the other side, I stand up and dust myself off.

  As I walk into the clearing, I keep my eyes to the ground, scanning back and forth for something that might indicate Billie’s presence. I don’t see her right away. She isn’t in the middle of the den, where we usually sit. Just past the entrance, the grass is flattened and ripped up a little. Half a muddy footprint has been left, even after last night’s storm. It’s bigger than mine, but not by much. I avoid the footprint, treading lightly on the dirt. The trees here are all deciduous—silver birches, beeches, and oaks—so they have wide leaves, not like pines and most evergreens. My dad knows all the names, so I know them too. In autumn all the leaves will be gone, but right now the ground under the trees is shielded from the sun by lots of leaves and branches, so it’s still damp from the storm. The leaves knit together above me, and the light coming through them makes everything green and eerie. It’s quite dark. I am focusing on small details, on what is in front of me. It’s like I’m too nervous to look around. It’s like I know there might be something I don’t want to see. The breaths I take are small, but they sound loud to me. I don’t have to walk far in before I stop, realizing.

  There is a ditch that runs along one side of the clearing that makes up the den. The water is higher than usual where I cross it, just past the entrance. There is too much water. I follow the line of the ditch. Now I notice the thing that is damming up the water.

  The shape is to my right. It’s a long lump covered in a dirty-white or maybe cream cloth. It comes into focus as I turn toward it. My breathing is getting quicker. I hear a crack in the undergrowth that makes me jump. I look around wildly, but I can’t see anything moving. I inch slowly toward the shape.

  The cloth is a sheet. The lump is a human.

  My lips start to tremble. Tears come into my eyes but they don’t fall. I keep my eyes wide to stop myself from crying. I look around again, then back at the lump. “Billie?” I whisper. “Billie?”

  “Thera?” Sam calls from the other side of the bracken. “Is she there? Have you found her?”

  “Billie?” I force myself to move toward the sha
pe. I tell myself Billie is my best, true, forever friend, and I have to be strong for her. I have to find out…I crack, and sob suddenly, then smack my hand over my mouth.

  Maybe it’s not her. It’s not her at all. It’s someone else. Or it is her, and she’s alive, and I have found her just in time, and Sam runs to get the police, and they come climbing into the den through the back, and the ambulance arrives just as she wakes up, and everyone is so relieved that I saved her, and Billie is saying, “That walker man said he was gonna kill me! But I knew Thera would find me if I concentrated on sending her messages with my mind. Indubitably! Phew!” and I will say, “That’s what friends are for,” and just smile knowingly. It will be such a relief. Everyone will think I’m a hero.

  I better rescue her now, then. But I still can’t move.

  “If she’s alive, you have to rescue her!” I tell myself in my head. “Look, she’s lain on her back, so she won’t have drowned.”

  My legs feel weak and rubbery, but I step carefully toward the top of the lump. The slight crook in the last third of the fabric is the shape of Billie’s knees, the way her legs always bend. That seems like a thing that wouldn’t be personal, but I would recognize that bend anywhere. Billie’s pointy elf ear is sticking out from underneath the cloth, the hair swept back from it like it always sweeps back from it when we are lying down. There is Billie’s one freckle between her ear and her hairline. I haven’t noticed myself noticing these things before, but it’s funny how I know them so well. If you showed me any inch of skin, or hair, or even a tooth, I could tell you if it was Billie’s. I lean over her. Holding my breath, I move my hand toward Billie’s face carefully. As I do, I notice our friendship bracelet on my own wrist. I wear mine on the left; Billie wears hers on her right. I hesitate for a second. Some weird thing in my head rationalizes that if I don’t pull it back, life will go on as it always has, and Billie being missing will all have been a big mistake.

  It’s a weird image, I know. This little eleven-year-old, four feet eleven inches tall, eighty-six pounds, reaching out for a body in a ditch with an intent, slightly crazed look in her eye. I think I probably knew she was dead. I was never someone you could call stupid. I just didn’t want it to be true. It was 1999, the precipice of a millennium, and I was eleven. My name was Thera Wilde. Thera the Wild. That’s what my first name meant—wild—and my last name too. My mum had picked Thera, and made me double wild, intending it to mean something for me. I think about what it is to be wild a lot. To be wild is to be brave, and sometimes savage. Right then, I was neither of those things. But I think the terror of finding Billie entered my blood, and it would precipitate everything that followed.

  I scream. Birds take off. Sam shouts my name. I stumble back, landing on my bum. The black dogs are back. There are five black dogs. They take a step toward me, then one by one they turn into girls. There is a cute little blonde one who is about five years old on my left. Next to her is one my age with dark skin, black hair, and black eyes. To my right is the ghostly girl I’ve seen before. She has blonde-brown hair, wears a school uniform, and is the oldest of them all, about thirteen. The fourth girl is about nine, with a fringe, ginger hair, and big eyes. In the middle of them is the fifth black dog, but as it walks toward me it becomes Billie. I scream again, and they’re gone.

  I crawl forward, on my hands and knees, to the body. Billie’s eyes are open, like in my dream. I thought a dead person would look asleep, but she doesn’t look asleep. She looks really, really dead, puffy and paler than I have ever seen anybody.

  My body is shaking with unreleased sobs. It’s holding them back without me thinking about it, so I can hear other things. I am on high alert, like an animal, for danger, for the walker. My ears pick up every tiny cracking sound in the woods. My eyes are suddenly like a powerful telescope, taking in all the details.

  The voices in my mind feel like they are shouting questions over one another. I look at her body and then around me. How could Billie have been killed here, when the den is so hard to get into? The entrance is through the tunnel in the thicket, so you have to be quite small. The walking man would have been too big, wouldn’t he? The only other way in is by running around the whole copse and coming through the back way, but there you have to cross a deep ditch filled with water, and then climb up a tall tree and through its branches. We’re not big enough yet to leap across the ditch without falling in the water, so we always get in and out of the den using the tunnel. If the killer was chasing Billie, he would either have had to follow her to the thicket and then have Billie wait patiently to be killed until he came ’round the other side, or he would have had to know she would hide in the den, and be here already, waiting for her. Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe he chased her, and when she went into the copse he just ran ’round, because he knew she would go to the den. But he would still have made a lot of noise, and Billie would have heard him and got away, right? It just doesn’t make sense. Who knows about our den? It isn’t visible at all from the outside.

  Also, why didn’t he bury her? She’s just lying here, ready to be found by whoever uses the den next. If I murdered someone, burying them would give me more time to get away before anyone came looking for me. Maybe he didn’t have time to bury her. Maybe he was disturbed. Maybe he was hoping that, if he left her out in the open, all the evidence would be eaten by a fox? And where did the sheet come from? I peer closer. There’s something else weird about her too, but I can’t put my finger on it.

  “Thera? Are you okay? I’m coming, Thera.”

  There is a rustling in the thicket and Sam’s head pops through the entrance. I panic, wanting to stop him from seeing her, feeling protective of both of them, Sam and Billie, but my mouth isn’t working. My lips are clamped together and trembling. If I open them, I’ll start to cry. Sam crawls out of the tunnel. He is shaking, but my lovely little brother is coming to my aid, even though he is scared. Sam looks around. As soon as he sees me, his face changes into a mask of horror. He looks at me standing motionless above Billie’s dead body, holding open the dirty sheet like a magician brandishing a cape, for about three seconds and then bursts out crying.

  “Don’t!” I shriek. “The killer’ll hear you!”

  My yell only spooks him more. He stares at Billie, his hands knitted together at his waist, his face all red and his mouth open wide and wet. He cries loudly and babyishly, and I drop the sheet.

  “I’m sorry for shouting, Sam, I’m sorry,” I tell him, running to him and putting my arms around him. His head tucks under my chin.

  “Fetch the police!” Sam cries. “What if there’s a murderer in the woods?”

  “That’s why I want you to stop crying—he’ll hear you,” I whisper, and he closes his mouth immediately, and whimpers through his lips. “I just need a few seconds more. Then we’ll get the police, I promise. Have you got a pen?”

  “W-w-what?”

  “Or a pencil.”

  He continues to sob. “I—I’ve got a pencil.”

  “Give it here.”

  “I don’t know,” he mumbles, shaking.

  “It’s okay, Sam,” I say, even though it isn’t. “It’s okay.” I search his pockets. His whole body is stiff and his arms are limp. Tears run down his face, and he looks up at me pleadingly.

  “I want Mum!”

  “I promise I’ll take you home,” I say. “I promise. Just two more minutes here and then we’ll get the police. Okay?” I escort him back to the entrance of the den, at the thicket.

  “Okay,” he says, his mouth wide.

  “Wait here. Don’t look ’round. I promise I’ll be right back.”

  I run the few steps back to Billie and stand over her. Now that I’m thinking of Sam, I feel braver. I have a half-full paper bag of candy in my pocket that Nan bought us on Saturday. I pour the rest of the sweets into my pocket and draw Billie’s position on the bag. The sheet has been folded neatly ove
r her in the ditch, as if someone took one last look at her before they covered her up. I have unfolded half. She is a bit sooty, the bottom half of her hair is gone, and she smells smoky and damp, like a bonfire the next day, but I don’t think she is burnt badly enough for burning to have killed her. She is a bit mussed up. Her bright pink T-shirt is rolled up on her tummy funny, her dungarees are halfway up her legs, and her shoelaces are undone. Why would her shoelaces be undone? I note this down. I can’t see any stab marks, and the water isn’t bloody at all. Her face is a bit blue. She is cold to touch, but she isn’t submerged in the water and she isn’t wet on her face, so she doesn’t seem to have drowned. I think about other ways to kill people. “Maybe strangled?” I mutter.

  “W-w-what?” Sam sniffs.

  “Nothing! Don’t look.”

  I peer closely at her neck, but with the sootiness I can’t tell if there are any marks or not. I sniff the air. It smells of burning, but there is another smell too, like a kitchen bin gone bad. There is a purple mark on her forehead, and a line of darkness along her neck where it meets the sheet, which is damp. I stare hard at her, marking down tiny details. When I reach the crook of her right wrist, I stop, shocked. “Her friendship bracelet is gone.”

  “Thera,” Sam moans. I barely hear him. “Thera!” He chokes up little wet sobs. “I want to go.”

  “Coming,” I murmur. I cover Billie up and leave without disturbing the ground, casting my eyes about for the bracelet. When I reach Sam, we crawl through the thicket, and I take his hand and keep walking. As we walk through the trees, I get the feeling we are being watched. At first I get freaked out and scan the woods all around us to see if we are being followed by an evil spirit, some frightening dead thing, but then I realize: Billie is a ghost now too.