I squat behind the jeep. I look underneath it. I can’t see anyone. I run ’round to the back and try the big back door with the tire on it. Luckily it opens, and I climb into Mrs. Adamson’s trunk. There’s a dog bed right in front of me, and I climb over the spade, the cleaning stuff, and the rope, climb in the dog bed, and pull the blanket over my head. I fit right inside it. It stinks.
In one of the Mystery Kids books that Billie and I like best, the hero, Holly, gets stuck in a villain’s car. To figure out where it’s going, she uses counting and her senses. I always thought this idea was great and would probably come in handy so I plan to use it today, although the stench in the jeep is horrible and I can’t really smell anything outside the trunk. As Holly went through the streets of London, she could smell fish and chips and things like that. The jeep surprisingly doesn’t smell like dog, what with the dog bed in it; it smells like rotting stuff, like when the bin gets old. The idea is, you count in seconds after you leave or make a turn, so you remember your way, like: “Seven, right, five, left, three, bridge, six, smells like pigs, must be near a pig field.” I guess I don’t have to count, though, until I reach the road, ’cause I’ll be able to tell when we’re going through the fields because it’s so bumpy.
When the jeep starts, I feel it rumble off across the track in the fields, and then the engine vrooms a little bit as we go up the hill and reach the top road. Then we potter quietly down the gentle slope until we reach the lane, which is actually a real road, but pretty thin and with bad tarmac. It’s the one I followed Mr. Kent home on. But when we get on the lane, the jeep takes a left, away from his house. I start counting. I’m not wearing a seat belt, obviously, and I bounce up and down with the bumps and cracks in the road surface.
“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,” I mouth. We are at the green grass triangle. We go right, toward the school. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.” I can tell by the swerving that we are going through the center of the village. We are past the school now, and we continue down the long straight. We are traveling relatively fast, as if we are going to leave the village. I can tell when we hit the forty-mile-an-hour signs, because the jeep speeds up. We are on the road to Eastcastle, where the big school is. I keep counting and it helps me keep track of where we are. We go over a little humpback bridge and I hear the river, and then more noise. The driver of the jeep has the windows down and I hear kids talking, so I guess we are nearing the new estates on the edge of Eastcastle.
The problem is, in the book that this was in, The Mystery Kids: Funny Money, when Holly got stuck in the bad guy’s car and had to do the counting trick, she only ever counted small numbers because the roads were all short and the villain was only driving around the corner. On this current road, from the village into town, I am on number 389.
Just then, we turn left. I can’t think which road we are going down, but then we curve left again and it’s quite windy, so I guess we have actually driven onto one of the new estates. I’ve never been on them before, so I don’t know which.
I zip open my bag for a second to check my weapons. Everything is there. I’m ready to pay them back for what they did. I can smell Mrs. A’s perfume. She’s driving. I was right! I think gleefully, then, because I think it’s important that I know where we are, I risk popping my head up just a tiny bit and looking out the window at the back. New houses are pretty blank-looking. I never thought about it before, but they do look like the kind of places where psychos would live. They don’t have any ivy growing up them, or any flowers in the garden. All the grass is that green like when it’s late at night and the TV stops, and the color chart with the girls and the puppet comes up and the green there is weirdly bright. (I’ve seen it once, at Nan and Granddad’s, when I woke up in the middle of the night and decided to be naughty and sneak down for a glass of milk.) All the bricks in the houses here are orange. They ought to be dark red or brown, like our house. “Hmm,” I say to myself, before I remember I have to be in-cog-knee-toe.
I slip back down into the doggie bed, but then we turn a tight corner and the bed slides over to the right of the jeep and I bash my head. I almost swear out loud. The jeep comes to a stop and the engine turns off. I hear the driver fiddling about with something for a minute, then there is a silence. I hold my breath. I hear the click of the door opening, and then two shoes on the drive. The door slams shut. There is another pause. I hear walking footsteps. I can’t tell where they are walking toward. There is yet another silence. But then a house door closes and I know I’m safe. “Phew!” I whisper.
I climb out of the doggie bed and unlock the back door from inside—easy peasy. I jump down and quietly shut the door behind me. A big hand reaches around my front, near my tummy. I look down at it, frowning, and then my eyes get big as a second hand reaches around my front at my face level. I try to scream, but the first hand grabs me and lifts me up, and the second hand clamps down over my mouth. The fingers spread out. His thumb presses into my right cheekbone. His pointing finger is over my left cheekbone. His palm is pressed down hard on my lips. He lifts me up like baggage and walks me into the house. The front door is open. Mrs. A must have opened it, faked closing it so I would hear the sound, and then opened it again and got the walker to come out to get me. I should have noticed.
It’s weird seeing inside people’s houses when you’ve met them a few times. You realize you have kind of already imagined what their house would be like, and then it isn’t like that and you are surprised. It’s funny how we judge people without even really thinking about it. I wonder how people judge me. Do they know immediately that I am brave? Do they look at me and think, “That girl will die at the hands of a man twenty years older than her because of her own bravery and (maybe) foolishness’? Well, they’re wrong.
The walker’s wallpaper has little flowers. I can tell, even though he has gagged me because I bit his hand, and is now carrying me upside down in a fireman’s lift through the corridor at the entrance to the house. There is a light pink coat hung up in the hall. I’m hitting him but he doesn’t seem to feel it at all, like he’s a monster or a robot or something. Like the Terminator. Why do I always think of that movie? Oh yeah, Edward Furlong.
The walker’s house has ornaments. Little Siamese porcelain cats, white with brown tips of their tails and ears. It has lots of mirrors. They are shaped like ovals, like ponds, to look in. When he throws me down on the couch, I notice it’s beige with beige throws. It’s exactly what I would have imagined Mrs. A’s house to look like. The cushions are the shade of Mum’s blusher and they feel like they have feathers in them. It’s quite soft. I could go to sleep here. It won’t be the worst place to die. But I won’t die here. I’ll die there, by the fireplace, having my brains bashed in by the poker. The photographs on top will watch me. The happy faces, the walker, and his wife. I smile, looking at them. I knew it. I’ll be dead soon, but I was right.
When I’m dead I’ll join Billie, Ellie, Jenny, and the rest of the dead girls. We’ll fly around the country avenging the deaths of little children. We’ll live in the cloud kingdom, but we’ll make day trips to earth.
He moves me around a few times on the sofa, picking me up and putting me back down, making my head comfortable, tucking the cushion underneath it. They have bare walls. No bookshelves. At Granddad’s, every wall is a bookshelf. The walker is a heathen. What was that other word Granddad used? It meant someone without culture…“Neanderthal”? No. “Neophyte”? No…I’ll think about it. It’ll come back to me.
“I’m sorry I had to gag you, my little sweetheart,” the walker says. “We just have to find out what you were doing in my wife’s car, don’t we?”
I smile as best as I can with this gag in my mouth, and nod. Now I am here, it’s not like I don’t feel any fear, but it’s as if the fear isn’t really getting to me. The top five percent of me, somewhere around my skin, is aware of terror, but I—my real, t
hinking me—am somewhere inside my body, and I’m not afraid. Is this how everyone feels when they are in the vicinity of a killer? Is this how Billie felt? As the walker is adjusting me, he brushes his hand against my almost-boob area, and I hear him suck in a little breath quickly. He is saying something, but I haven’t been hearing him at all. I’ve been listening and watching out for Mrs. A, but she hasn’t reappeared yet. There are just signs of her, everywhere, like the magazines on the coffee table: Beauty Essentials and Good Housekeeping.
“What are you doing here, then, kiddo?” he is saying while I bat at him and he struggles to tie up my hands. I wish I didn’t bite my nails. I might have been able to scratch my way to freedom. “What were you looking for in the car? Or did you just want to get closer to me?”
It’s so easy for him to hold me down. It feels like it doesn’t take him any effort at all. Maybe it’s not that girls are pretty and that’s why people kill them. It’s that girls are small and it’s fun to kill small things. Like squashing a bug. Like throwing stones at pigeons. It must be fun to be big, and to watch something you squeeze snap. I can never get anything I strangle to do that. Not Sam, not that bloody cat that scratched my arms, not that kid at the new summer school classes who let me practice on him.
When I’m safely tied up, the walker sits down next to me and puts his arm around me, like we’re a couple. He puts his hand on my thigh. He speaks softly now. “Did you come back to see me, Thera? It’s okay. I feel it too, this…connection between us.”
“Piz tek is gug aff,” I say.
“There’s nothing more beautiful than a girl like you,” he murmurs. “Vulnerable and sweet. So clever too, tracking me down. It makes me think we can talk honestly to each other.”
I try to speak more clearly. “Please take this gag off.”
“But”—he hesitates—“if I take the gag off, you’ll scream.”
“I romise I on’t.”
“What, darling?” He comes close to me. He is breathing heavily. It’s hot and smells like mint and meat. Not like Nathan’s. More like Dad’s.
“I promise I won’t. You can kill me,” I say, “and I won’t yell. I just want to talk to you.”
He looks really sad suddenly. “I wouldn’t kill you, kiddo.”
“Well,” I say, but there is a lot of spit in my mouth. “I oh aht, but still.”
“Huh?”
“I know that, but still.” I roll my eyes, getting impatient. “Urgh, take this bloody thing off me!” I accidentally swear, but it comes out like “ruddy” anyway, which is not a swear word, so it’s fine.
He strokes the hair on the back of my head. “Are you sure you won’t scream?” he murmurs.
I nod. He takes the gag off and I swallow all the drool I made talking through it.
“Is that better?”
“Yes,” I say. “Thank you.”
“Good girl,” he says.
Here we go, then. I know this game. I’m an excellent player. I played it all last week to trick Mum and Dad. This is the good-girl game. I play it with Mr. Kent and other adults for parts of almost every day. I talk in a high voice, and do what they say. I smile my small, neat, I’m-a-good-girl smile, and try to look innocent. This is how I tricked Mum and Dad into relaxing, into me not being grounded. This is how I will trick the walker, and get him to let his guard down, so I can bypass him to get to Mrs. A and exact Billie’s revenge.
“That’s much more comfortable,” I say.
He chuckles. “I’m glad.” Then he frowns. “I have to talk to you about something serious, though, Thera. I didn’t kill Billie. I would never do that. I really want you to believe me—”
“I do,” I say. “I know you couldn’t kill Billie. You loved her too much. You just wanted to cuddle her.”
“That’s right! I knew you would understand.” He gulps, and I hear it louder because of where my ear is. “Did you really come to my house to see me, sweetheart?”
“Yes. I climbed in her car to get to your house.”
“How did you know Eve was my wife?”
“You mentioned her to my friend Nathan,” I say. I don’t say what really happened, which is that my dead best friend turned her in. “And then it clicked. I’m glad. I wanted to see you again. We have a connection.”
“That gyppo? I’ll have to sort him out, Thera, I can’t have him telling lies about me to the police. Don’t you lie to me either, okay, Thera? You mean it, right? You feel something between us too? Maybe not like what Billie and I had but…something.”
“Maybe because of Billie?” I suggest. “We were both close to her. Maybe we’re cosmically entwined.”
The walker chuckles quietly. “Do you really fancy me, then? I wanna hear you say it.”
“Yes,” I say. “I like your eyes, and your hair, and how big you feel with your arms around me.”
“Yeah? Go on.”
“And I like…how cuddly you are, and the sound of your voice when it’s close to me, and…” I think about what women like. “Your lips. And your bum.”
He laughs. “Yeah?” He glances in the direction of the stairs. I wrinkle my nose, feeling grossed out, but I bury my face in his neck to hide it.
“Oh, Thera,” he moans. He leans back. “We have to slow this down. I’m going to make us some tea,” he says. “Or a warm glass of milk, to help us chill out? Have you ever had rum?”
“I’ll have some tea, thank you.”
“What about the rum?”
I don’t know what rum is. “That sounds great, thank you.”
“Just before I go…” He nips back across the room to me. “Stay still.” He gets a camera out of the sideboard and takes a photograph of me. It’s not a dirty photo, it’s just of my face.
“Cheeeeese,” I say. He looks a little unnerved, but when I smile at him he grins back, then goes to put the kettle on. I smile at him vaguely the whole time. How you win the good-girl game is you stay you inside: tough, brave, strong, wild, and full of hate. Outside you nod and say thank you for things you didn’t want anyway.
The kitchen is through a big double-door space without any doors in it, so he can see everything I’m doing. He stretches and rubs his hands on his chest under his T-shirt. “Do you want me to take my top off, Thera?”
“Sure,” I say. That’ll make things easier. A clearer target. The walker takes his top off. He strokes his naked chest and beams at the kettle, his mouth wide open and his teeth showing and everything. He’s a fucking loon. While he makes the tea, I kind of scope out the room. There are two doors, a front one and a back one, which is a sliding glass door. There is a set of windows at the front of the house where I might have been able to get out if we were in an older house, but this is a new one, and they are thick. I bet even if I did scream, I would barely be heard. I could run upstairs. But really I’m just not worried about escape, because escape wasn’t what I came here to do. My bag is lying by the front door, where he hit me after I bit him. He apologized right after but it doesn’t mean anything if a psycho apologizes to you. It’s like a bull apologizing for charging at you—they have no moral compass, they just act without thinking.
I need the bag to be in the living room, ideally, but I can’t attract his attention to it, because then he will look in there and probably throw away everything I need. Hmm. I need a distraction. That’s what happens in the films. Before you are killed, just in time, there is a sound, and the killer looks away. Only no one knows where I am to come and distract him. The kettle clicks off. He is whistling while he makes the tea. He pours the hot water into the teapot, still grinning, and looks toward me and winks like we’re sharing a big joke.
I grin back and pretend he’s a big ball of fluffy pink candyfloss. I say things to him in my head, like, “Hi, loony tunes! How’s the weather where you are, bumhead?” It makes the slightly sick feeling I had just now—thinking
about how this idiot is going to rape me, and I’m probably going to have to let him—go away. I tuck my legs under myself on the couch so I’m sitting up. He brings the teapot and cups over carefully, and puts them on the table beside me. He pours me a cup of tea and feeds it to me like I’m a baby. I sip sweetly. “Thank you. What was your name?”
“Nick. Call me Nick.” He sips his tea. “Would you like some more?”
“Sure.”
He feeds me from my cup again. “Do you like it?”
“Yes. It’s nice.”
“PG Tips.”
Only a psycho would prefer PG Tips to Tetley’s. I smile politely.
“Oh, Christ, Thera,” he says, and puts his chin down on his chest. “Christ.” He runs his hands through his hair. “Fucking Christ.”
“Don’t swear,” I say without thinking.
He looks up. His face is all red. “I know, I know, but I just…come here,” he says, and he takes my waist in both hands and pulls me down so I’m lying on the couch again, but this time he climbs on top of me and stretches his legs out. His fingers stroke the hair at my temple, one by one. I have a sensation, an idea that I will in fact not be able to overpower the real killer; that everything that came to Billie will come to me, including death, like a warm blanket, like a black cloud, like a ticket to Billie and the dead girls, and I’ll haunt another living girl with them, until she dies or triumphs, and maybe we’ll do it, over and over, until time ends, and everyone who loved us and missed us and longed to touch us again is dead. A cold stillness seems to take over my heart. I can’t even tell if I’m breathing.
Suddenly there are footsteps on the stairs, and a pause in the hall, then more steps along the carpeted corridor, followed by the unmistakable sound of my backpack hitting the floor nearby, just like it does at home every day at 3:40 p.m. when I come in from school. I tilt my head back, looking upward and then behind me, from my position on the couch. There she is.
Dead Girls Page 26
