Dead Girls

by Abigail Tarttelin

  “Mm-hmm,” I grin, and all the dead girls grin with me. “Well, we will now.”

  There’s a bit of a silence as she turns onto the road to Otter’s Plantation, the forestry commission land. It’s full of pine trees, tall and dark, in long rows. The sun comes through them in shafts. The tarmac gets bumpy and full of potholes on the smaller road. “This isn’t the way to my house,” I tell the girls silently.

  “We know,” they whisper back in unison.

  “You’re so lucky you’re young,” Mrs. Adamson says to me, as if she has been thinking about this for a while.

  “I suppose,” I reply. We’re on the track that leads to the World War Two bunkers. They are made of thick cement, and are deep and creepy. The heavy metal doors don’t have locks anymore, but they are so thick you can’t hear through them, not even if a person in the bunker cried out in pain. “Excellent,” I whisper. The dead girls curl my lips back in a grin. “Stop it,” I whisper to them. “I have to look little and frightened. Like a victim.”

  They laugh, and it echoes around my skull and in the hollow cavity of my chest.

  “What?”

  “Yeah, we get holidays and pocket money,” I say encouragingly. “Those are nice things about being young.”

  “Hmm. I didn’t mean like that.”

  “And candy.”

  “Now, that is a point!” she agrees. “I always have to watch my weight, but you eat whatever you want!”

  “Yeah.” It’s really difficult to hear her. It’s like I’m in the haunting realm, the spirit world, and she is on earth. There are so many girls whispering excitedly in my body. They are all inside me, laying their bets on me to get them to heaven. I won’t let them down.

  “And you’re not grateful at all, are you?”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re not! You don’t know how lucky you are.”

  “Well…” I think about this, try to concentrate. “I wish I had more say over stuff. Like—”

  “You’re just ungrateful,” she complains.

  I shrug, not caring now. I’m tired of making small talk. I can’t wait for what’s coming. The energy is surging around my body, making my legs and hands shake and jitter. My fingers grasp the end of a sock. “Whatever.”

  “To be young and pretty and not have any hard choices to make or compromises or men that…” Her lips tremble again. “He loves me, I know. He can’t help it. I’ve seen him try. But you’re his type, aren’t you?”

  The dead girls are thundering in my head behind Mrs. A’s boring drone. She looks at me as if she expects me to reply, and I stare at her for a second and then say, “Who? Nick?”

  “Mr. Adamson. My husband,” she says, like I’m stupid.

  “So…Nick?”

  “Yes! Nick. But don’t call him that.”

  She’s so ridiculously jealous. Why? He’s good-looking, but he’s totally insane. Was. Totally insane. “Did you know he killed Billie?” I ask innocently, half expecting her to confess to Billie’s murder now.

  She looks away. “Only after the fact, of course.”

  I grin while she can’t see. So she isn’t going to own up to it. She would let him take the rap. “So you didn’t suspect anything while it was happening?”

  “No, no.”

  “Even though you were parked in a jeep outside the woods?”

  “You heard us talking, Thera—I just thought he was going to spend some time with her.”

  What an idiot. It’s like she thinks I wasn’t listening earlier when they talked about him going to prison for her. “So what’s his type?”

  “Young girls, petite, blonde.” She is getting angrier.

  That’s good.

  “Not you, then?” I say, winding her up.

  “Of course me!” she squeaks. “I’m still young. And he likes red hair better than blonde, anyway. It’s just too rare to be his ‘type.’”

  “Well, you dye it.”

  “What?”

  “You’re not natural ginger, are you? Bet you’re gray underneath.”

  “What are you doing? Stop saying things like that.”

  I look into the dark of the woods. “Are you taking me home, then? Like he said?”

  She looks at me and seems to catch herself. “Of course. This is a shortcut.”

  “Cool,” I say. “It’s funny you didn’t suspect that he would kill her.”

  “Yes,” she says quickly, her nicest voice. It’s still obviously fake. “Yes, I suppose it was funny I didn’t suspect anything.” She looks into the distance again, ahead of us. She has turned onto the track into the woods now. “He would often talk about their skin, how their skin was so different from older women’s.”

  “Really?”

  “But his favorite thing was that they were so timid,” she whispers to herself. “They made him feel like a god, but like an adoring, worshipping…” She shudders.

  We—the dead girls and me—all play the good-girl game, and we turn my head to her sweetly, batting my eyelashes. “Did they make you feel like a god too?”

  “What?” she laughs nervously. “What a thing to ask! Haven’t we cleared this up already? Nick’s the murderer. I’m just an innocent bystander.”

  “I know. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Good.” She frowns. “That’s settled, then.”

  “Why are we in the woods?”

  “It’s quicker this way. It’s a detour. I wanted to show you something.” She slows the car down so we can park. We take my hand slowly out of the side of my bag. “It’ll be a little secret, between you and me. It’s just ahead, beyond those trees.”

  I laugh. That’s where the bunkers are.

  She looks at me. Maybe something dawns there, and maybe it doesn’t.

  “You must think I’m fucking stupid,” I say, and the ghost girls’ voices are in my voice, and it howls and haunts and sounds like the scraping of skin off flesh, off bone. And then we whack her on the head as hard as we can with the brick-in-the-sock.

  When I came up from the bunker it was about six in the evening; bright and pleasant. I squinted down the path through the trees, my hand shading my eyes, but there was no one in sight. There were usually some walkers around and I was kind of relying on one for a lift. I wouldn’t have taken one from a man, because even though Nick wasn’t a killer, his weird perverted urges were still the catalyst for everything that happened to Billie, but there are usually families and people with dogs wandering around at teatime. I walked all the way around the bunker and called out. The sound of my voice rose above the trees, sounding lonely and like it was spreading wide above them, filling the sky and scaring the birds. Some of them took off from the treetops. I decided everyone was probably eating tea at home. Hopefully I could get a lift on the road. There was no one at all in the forest as I walked back to the track; no cars as I passed through the parking lot, except Eve’s jeep, crashed into a tree, the driver’s side door still open. I closed it, so no dogs or people could jump in there and disturb the evidence.

  I felt exhausted, depleted, as if the dead girls had taken something of me with them when they went, and now there was nothing left inside me. It was silent in my head, and I couldn’t decide, as I walked through the rows of pines with their nice winter smell, if the silence was peaceful or cold or good or evil. It was weird to think the atmosphere of the forest could be changed by something people had done, especially by something I had done, but I think that was what had happened. The trees whispered to each other and looked at me funny. I waved back at them tiredly, my arms heavy.

  It took me just over an hour to walk the three miles back to Eastcastle. First I took the small road down through farmland, and then I joined the Viking Way, a footpath with birches and brambles on either side making it like a tunnel running parallel to the road. I came back onto the main ro
ad half a mile out of town. By this time, I was almost falling asleep, even though I was walking. I tried to hitch a lift into town and stuck my hand out with my thumb up, like people do in films, but it didn’t work and I gave up. A girl a few years older than me even sped up when she caught my eye. Luckily Eastcastle is in a valley, so I let my feet fall in front of each other and momentum carried me down the hill.

  My eyes were closing and opening in starts and fits, and I tried to imagine Billie walking beside me along the road, but I couldn’t make her be there. I tried to conjure the other dead girls, but they wouldn’t come either. The atmosphere wasn’t ghostly anymore. It just felt done: an atmosphere of something having ended, a bit like my last day in primary school.

  I guess the dead girls had gone to the cloud kingdom, satisfied with what we had done. I let the rest of them go in my mind, but I tried over and over again to get Billie to be walking beside me. I wanted to say a last goodbye, to tell her she’d always be my best, true, forever friend, even though she wasn’t alive anymore. I could see totally well in my mind’s eye the way she crinkled up her nose when she laughed, as if our jokes were always gross. (A lot of the time they were.) I could hear the sound of her voice but I couldn’t make her appear and I couldn’t make her talk. That is why, I realized, Billie was Billie and I was me. Billie always made up what she said, the stupid limericks and jokes she would tell, the funny impressions and her gurgly laugh. I couldn’t do it. Billie was capable of being Billie, and I’m capable of being me. Billie wasn’t there to be her anymore, to make up those limericks and sing silly songs. She wasn’t anywhere. She wasn’t with her parents, or haunting the woods, or waiting for me in my room with other dead girls. Now that I had enacted vengeance, she was gone, her spirit at rest. I guess that’s for the best. Maybe, on some level, I thought finding her killer and bringing her to justice would bring Billie back to me, but it hadn’t. Even though she was better off in heaven, I felt alone, and broken, without my friend. I realized I would never see her again. A part of me would always be gone. The part of my heart that was Billie’s.

  On the last steep slope into town, I start to cry.

  Either side of the road are houses, and I pass a few people, but they don’t look at me. They are busy doing other things, getting shopping out of their cars, gardening and calling “Don’t run!” at their kids.

  I take a shortcut that leads to the swimming pool and walk over a playing field to the police station. It is teatime, and as I walk past the last houses before the station I look in the windows and see lights on and people sitting down to eat, carrying casserole dishes and salad bowls in from their kitchens. I wipe my face on my arm before I go into the station, getting rust-colored tears on my skin, and then walk up the steps, under the blue-and-white police sign.

  I push open the door, leaving a smear of blood on the white paint. I blink and stop just inside the doorway, my eyes adjusting to the light, and see the lady detective, Georgie, leaned over the shoulder of a man at the reception desk. They are both looking at something on the desk that I can’t see. She looks up, drops her pen to the floor and shouts, “Thera!”

  “Oh good,” I say tiredly. “You’re here.”

  She flies around the corner of the big built-in desk and runs to me, which is weird because the room is small and I am not far away. As she approaches me she bends over to my height and grabs my arms, then my face, looking into my eyes. “Are you all right?” she shouts. “Who did this to you?”

  “No one,” I say. “What?”

  “Call an ambulance!” Georgie turns and shouts to the man at the desk. “Now!” Other police officers are running out from the back, where the little cells and the interrogation room are. She looks at me again and pulls up my T-shirt. “Where are you hurt, Thera? Where are you bleeding?”

  “It’s not my blood.”

  She frowns. “What happened? Did someone hurt one of your friends?”

  “No…” I sigh, suddenly tired. I feel faint. Maybe my blood sugar is low. I saw a diabetic on the TV once. “Can I have a cookie?”

  “Thera, sweetheart.” Georgie looks back and forth into my eyes. She even puts her fingers on them and holds the lids open. “Did anybody give you anything strange to eat or drink today?”

  “No,” I say, forgetting about the tea Nick gave me because I’m so tired.

  “You’re not hurt?”

  “No, ’course not.”

  “Was one of your friends hurt?”

  “No.”

  The police people continue to run around us, out the door, and to call to each other loudly. A man officer runs toward me with a towel and puts it around me. I wonder for a moment if I am shaking, but I don’t feel much. He rubs my arms with the towel, but Georgie takes it at both sides, tugging it ’round me, and wipes at my face, pushing my hair back from my forehead.

  “Thera,” she whispers almost nervously.

  “Yes?”

  Georgie hesitates, studies me all over, up and down, with her eyes. “You’re covered in blood.”

  I look down, pinching my T-shirt between my hands. It is red, a darkness that has soaked down into my skirt and dried on the walk back, becoming an itchy crust that sticks to my skin. I look at my hands and start to pick it out of the beds of my fingernails.

  Georgie stands up. “I’m taking her to an interview room,” she tells the young policeman. “Get Chief Inspector Macintyre.”

  “It’s…He’s at home today.”

  “Yes, I know!” she snaps. “Just do it, will you?”

  Georgie has her hand on the back of my neck, like when Felix, our school cat, had kittens, and picked them up in her mouth by their scruffs. (People touching me again. I really can’t stand it anymore.) She steers me past the desk and down a corridor into a little room. Everywhere looks old-fashioned, and the ceilings are high and arched and have cream-painted bricks. The little room has blue soundproofing fabric on the walls, and not much in it but a table, two chairs, and a jumble of different cassette players stacked on top of one another in a corner. She plonks me firmly down on one of the chairs. I try to shuffle it closer to the table, but it is bolted to the floor, so I lean forward to rest my arms on the table, then lay the side of my head on them, turned toward Georgie. I can barely keep my eyes open.

  “Can I have a cookie?” I say. “And some tea?”

  She blinks at me as if considering something, then rubs her eyes in a troubled way. “Did anyone force anything in your mouth? Because if they did…before you drink we should swab—”

  “No, nobody did. Please, Georgie, I’m really thirsty.”

  “I’ll get you some tea,” she says, turning.

  I relax, then I remember. “Oh! Georgie!”

  “Yes?”

  “This is for you.” I hand her the audio recorder, which I have been carrying in my left hand since the bunker. I realize now my hand is cramping badly. It shakes as I hold out the bloody machine.

  “One second,” Georgie says, and runs from the room. She comes back holding plastic gloves and a clear plastic bag. She pulls the gloves on delicately and takes the recorder from me. “What is it?” she asks.

  I am distracted, massaging my painful hand. “Um, the confession.”

  She looks down at it and slips it into the bag. “Hmm.” She turns and marches out of the room. “I’ll get your tea,” she says at the door. “Wait here.”

  I don’t see her come back. Instead, I wake up with my cheek pressed against the table, and a Family Circle box and a cup of tea next to my head. My throat is dry, and I reach immediately for the tea and swallow. It is almost cold. Still, I open the cookies, take out one with jam and cream in it, and hold it in the tea, to make it soggy. I chomp it down, and pick up a custard cream. When I have worked my way through five or six cookies, I start to get curious about why I am alone. It seems like I might have been asleep for a while. I can see
through a tiny window in the door that the corridor is darker than before. I stand up and walk to the door, but it is locked. I knock on the glass, quietly at first, and then louder, until Georgie ’rounds the corner. At first, she doesn’t see me—she has her head down—but then she looks up. I wave and point to the door, mouthing, “Can you let me out?”

  She starts to walk toward the door, but then an older police officer, a man, the one I saw with her in the woods when Billie was found, appears and takes hold of her arm. He steps in front of her and they argue briefly, but the door must be soundproof because I can’t hear a thing. Just then he seems to call for someone, and a woman in green ambulance clothes walks around the corner. She looks like the people who took Billie’s body away. The policeman walks toward the door, taking some keys off Georgie. He unlocks it and walks toward me, into the room, so I have to back up for everyone to enter.

  “Hiya,” I say. “I’m tired. Can I go home now?”

  “You’ll have to wait,” he replies with a Scottish accent. “This lady is going to take some swabs of the blood on you.”

  “For evidence?” I nod. “Sure. But if I have to stay for a bit, can I have some warmer tea?”

  “Waters,” the man says, and Georgie picks up my mug and hurries out.

  The woman squats by me. “This won’t hurt. Open your mouth, please.” She sticks in a swab and rubs the inside of my cheek, then uses tweezers to scrape a bit of blood out of my nails and into a tiny clear pot. “Hold out your hands, dear.” She looks me all over and pulls a bit of ginger hair off my sleeve. It’s caked in the crusty blood. She puts it in another pot, then gives me a clean T-shirt that belongs to the police, so I put that on and they take away my old one, for evidence. Finally she nods at the man and leaves the room.

  He kind of harrumphs. “Sit down.”

  I sit in my chair again, and he sits in the one across the table and leans in to me, frowning. It feels weirdly threatening. But then I realize I am probably just feeling weird because I am still thinking that, being a man, he might kill or touch me, and obviously now I know the pervert and killer have been taken care of, it’s okay. I relax.