Sleepless
Page 21
“Do you see that?” I said, but my voice got lost amongst all the others. I stood up and took half a step forwards, staring through the shadows. I could just make out the outline of long hair and a skirt. It was a girl standing on the table in the middle of all this chaos. No one else seemed to have noticed her.
“Jay—” I began, turning back towards him at the exact moment his mobile phone died. The screen light flickered and then went off. At the same time, the café lights came back on. I spun back round to look at the table where the girl had been standing, but there was no one there. The table was empty.
“Did you see her?” I asked Jay.
“See who?”
I stared around for the girl in a skirt, but there was no sign of her.
Anyone would think there’d been an earthquake or something. There was broken china and glass all over the floor of the café, many of the chairs had fallen over and a couple of tables had overturned.
“Who was that screaming?” people were saying.
“What’s happened?”
“Is someone hurt?”
“What the hell is going on?”
“Oh my God, someone’s been burnt!”
Bill, the owner, had led one of the waitresses out from the kitchen. She must have been the one who’d screamed in the dark. She was still sobbing and it was obvious why – all the way up her right side she was covered in burns. Her hand, arm, shoulder and the right side of her face were completely covered in a mess of red and black bleeding flesh, so charred that it was hard to believe it had once been normal skin. Her hair was still smoking and the smell made me want to gag.
I heard someone on their phone calling an ambulance as other people moved forward, asking what had happened.
“I don’t know,” Bill said. He’d gone completely white. “I don’t know how it happened. When the lights went out, she must have tripped or something. I think… I think she must have fallen against the deep-fat fryer…”
I could feel the blood pounding in my ears and turned back round to Jay. Wordlessly, he held up his mobile phone for me to see. From the top of the screen to the bottom there was a huge crack running all the way down the glass.
“Did you… Did you drop it?” I asked.
But Jay just shook his head.
The ambulance arrived soon after that and took the weeping girl away.
“In all the years this place has been open we’ve never had an accident like this,” I heard Bill say. “Never.”
Bill went to the hospital with the girl and the café closed early. Everyone filed away, going out to their cars and driving off. Soon, Jay and I were the only ones left. Normally, he would have cycled home and I would have waited by myself for my mum to pick me up but, today, Jay said he would wait with me, and I was grateful to him for that.
“Thanks,” I said. “And thanks for holding my hand when the lights went out.”
He gave me a sharp look. “I didn’t hold your hand.”
A prickly feeling started to creep over my skin. “Yes, you did.”
“Sophie, I didn’t. You must have… You must have imagined it. It was pretty crazy in there.”
I thought of those cold fingers curling around mine and shook my head. “Someone was definitely holding my hand when it went dark,” I said. “And if it wasn’t you, then who was it?”
“Well, it wasn’t me. Maybe you’ve got a secret admirer.”
“Did you see that girl standing on the table? I thought I saw her outline there in the dark.”
Jay stared at me. “Are you actually trying to scare me right now? Because it’s not going to work, you know. I’m not that gullible.”
I glanced back through the windows of the café. There’d been no time to tidy up before the ambulance arrived and the place had been shut up as it was, with tables and chairs and broken crockery everywhere. A couple of the tables looked fairly normal, with plates of untouched food still on them, which was almost weirder.
I shivered and turned away, not wanting to look too closely in case I saw the girl among the empty tables.
“Look,” Jay said. “It all got a bit mad when the lights went out because of the waitress who hurt herself and started screaming. If it hadn’t been for that, none of this would be any big deal. It was just a freak accident, that’s all.”
My mum pulled into the car park then, waving at me through the window.
“We could give you a lift,” I said.
Jay’s house wasn’t very far away and he always cycled home, but I couldn’t stop thinking of that final question he had asked the Ouija board: When will I die?
“No thanks,” Jay said. “I’ll cycle back.”
I hesitated. “Jay…”
“You’re not still worrying about that app, are you? Nothing’s going to happen to me,” he said. Then he grinned. “But just promise me one thing. If I do come to some appalling, grisly end tonight, I hope I can rely on you to tell the world it was a ghost that did me in.”
For once I didn’t smile. “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t joke about it.”
Jay laughed and put his arm around my shoulders in a friendly squeeze. “I think you really would miss me,” he said.
Behind us, Mum honked her car horn to tell me to hurry up. Jay gave her a wave and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow at school.”
“All right. See you tomorrow.”
I turned and started to walk across the car park but had only gone a few steps when I stopped and turned back. “Hey, Jay?”
“Yeah?”
“Will you do me a favour?”
“What is it?”
“Would you take the towpath tonight? Please?”
Jay usually cycled back home using the shortest route, which meant several busy roads. He did it all the time and nothing ever happened to him. I knew I was being silly. But if he went the other way, via the towpath, it would mean he’d miss all the major traffic and would only add five minutes to his journey.
I was afraid that he’d refuse, or make a joke of it, or tease me again. But instead he just nodded.
“All right, Sophie. I’ll take the towpath.” Then he grinned, blew me a mock kiss and said, “Anything for you.”
I got into the front seat of Mum’s car and waved at Jay as we drove past, keeping my eyes on him until the car turned the corner and I lost him from sight.
I didn’t really want to talk to Mum about what had happened at the café so when we got home I went straight upstairs and had a bath. Before going to bed I sent Jay a text to say goodnight. It wasn’t something I’d normally do, but I just wanted to reassure myself that he’d got home OK. He sent me a one-word answer: Goodbye.
I guessed he’d meant to say goodnight but that his autocorrect had changed it and he hadn’t noticed. He’d replied, though, so at least I knew he was home. I got into bed and went to sleep.
I didn’t remember until the next day that when Jay had shown me his phone at the café, it had been broken.
My dreams were filled with Ouija boards and burning hair and little girls holding my hand in the dark. And Jay inside a coffin. I tossed and turned all night. It was so bad that it was a relief to wake up, and I got out of bed in the morning without Mum having to drag me for a change.
With the sun shining in through the windows, the events of the night before started to seem less terrible. So the lights had gone out and someone had hurt themselves. It was horrible for that poor waitress but it had just been an accident, plain and simple. In the light of day, there didn’t seem to be anything that strange about it.
I dressed quickly, for once actually looking forward to school. Jay would be outside soon and we’d walk there together, like we always did.
As I got ready I was vaguely aware of the phone ringing downstairs and the sound of Mum’s voice as she answered it, but I didn’t really pay it too much attention. By the time I went downstairs for breakfast, Mum was just hanging up.
“Who was that?” I asked.
She didn
’t answer straight away, and when I looked at her and saw her face I knew instantly that something was very wrong.
“What is it?” I said. “Who was that on the phone?”
“Sophie,” Mum said, her voice all strained and weird-sounding. “I don’t… I don’t know how to tell you this… Sweetheart, you need to brace yourself—”
“Mum, what? What’s wrong?”
“It’s Jay. That was his dad on the phone. Something’s happened. He… He never made it home last night.”
“Yes, he did,” I said at once. “He texted me.”
But at that very second I remembered that Jay’s phone was broken. I pulled my mobile out of my pocket and started scrolling through, looking for his text, but it wasn’t there.
“I don’t understand. He sent me a text last night. I saw it.”
“Sophie, he didn’t send you a text. Oh, sweetheart, I’m so, so sorry, but… On the way home he had an accident. They think… They think that perhaps the brakes on his bike failed. He went into the canal. By the time they pulled him out it was too late.”
“What do you mean too late?” I said, clenching my hands so tight that I felt my nails tear the skin of my palms. “Jay’s a strong swimmer. He won almost all the swimming contests at school last year. If he’d fallen into the canal, he would have just swum to the side and climbed out.”
But Mum was shaking her head. “They think he must have hit his head when he fell in. Sophie, he drowned.”
It could not possibly be true. And yet, it was.
Jay was gone.
Copyright
STRIPES PUBLISHING
An imprint of Little Tiger Press
1 The Coda Centre, 189 Munster Road,
London SW6 6AW
First published as an ebook by Stripes Publishing in 2014.
Text copyright © Lou Morgan, 2014
Extract from Frozen Charlotte © Alex Bell, 2014
Cover copyright © Stripes Publishing Ltd, 2014
eISBN: 978–1–84715–573–3
The right of Lou Morgan to be identified as the author of this work respectively has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved.
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