The Lost Girls

by Sarah Painter

  The air was filled with the scent of copper and the sounds of people crying, screaming, gasping and gargling. The boy sitting in front of Rose slid to the side, a dead weight that landed unnaturally on the empty seat to the right. Rose put her hand on Astrid’s shoulder, panicking now. Astrid wasn’t screaming or crying. That meant she must be okay. Like Rose. They were the only ones in the back row, whatever had happened had obviously run out of power before it hit them. They were okay. She felt bad for thinking anything like ‘okay’ in the circumstances, in the enormous room filled with the dead and dying.

  ‘Astrid?’ Her own voice sounded like it was coming from far away. She wasn’t sure, actually, whether she’d spoken out loud at all. She shook Astrid’s shoulder and that was when she saw it. The blood. It was seeping out from underneath Astrid’s folded arms, spreading across the narrow desk. In a moment it would begin to drip onto the floor.

  Rose opened her mouth to scream but then the world seemed to jump frames, as if she was watching a film, a film that surrounded her completely. The blood was gone. The sounds of terror were replaced with the sound of Professor Lewis clearing his throat and saying, ‘Today we’re going to look at cognitive bias.’

  Astrid shifted a little, moving her face so that it rested more comfortably on her folded arms. Rose leaned closer, checking the desk, her hair and face. There was no blood. There was no screaming. No crying. Just the sound of scribbling pens on papers, the echoing voice of the professor and a faint electrical hum from the lights and computer equipment.

  Rose leaned closer still, catching the scent of shampoo from Astrid’s head. She looked perfect. Her skin almost glowed, like an angel in an old painting. Astrid shifted again, and then opened her eyes. They widened and she sat up, grumbling. ‘Personal space, Rose. Remember the bubble.’

  Rose opened her mouth to say ‘everyone was dead a moment ago’ but, thankfully, she managed to force the words back down. ‘Sorry,’ she said, instead. ‘I thought I saw a bug on your shoulder. But I didn’t. There isn’t one. You’re fine.’

  ‘And you’re weird,’ Astrid said. She closed her eyes. ‘More than usual, I mean.’

  * * *

  When Mal Fergusson was seven, his father taught him how to spot a demon. ‘Look at their eyes,’ he said. ‘They’re dead inside and if you look, really look, you’ll see it.’

  Seven-year-old Mal had accepted this as truth but, when he got a little older, he began asking questions. Did demon eyes look different? Were they a particular colour? And what about the rest of their bodies? Were they unnaturally pale or tall, or did they have long fingernails or teeth?

  ‘They look like us,’ his father had replied. ‘Like us, only wrong. The hair will stand up on the back of your neck.’ He touched Mal’s neck, and that brief contact had cemented the moment in Mal’s mind.

  Since his father’s instruction when meeting one of these creatures was to stab it through the heart with a silver knife, Mal rather thought that there should be more of a test than ‘makes my hair go prickly’ but he didn’t say anything. That would’ve been insubordination and his father didn’t respond well to any hint of disrespect.

  Once he was hunting regularly, Mal soon realised that his father’s advice had been correct. No matter how flimsy it sounded as a tool for diagnosis, there was something undeniable about demons. You just knew. In fact, Mal found it almost impossible to believe that civilians couldn’t tell. His questions changed from ‘How can you tell it’s a demon?’ to ‘How can you not?’ How could they be so blind? ‘They don’t want to see,’ his father had said. ‘And I don’t blame them.’

  Walking across the Meadows with some rare sunshine lighting up Arthur’s Seat and pretty students sitting on the grass with giant plastic cups of iced coffee, Mal conceded that his dad had had a point. If he could press a rewind button on his life and make it so he had never been trained, had never found out what it felt like to stare into a demon’s eyes and see pure evil staring right back, he would hit it so hard and so fast.

  But there was no such button. Proof, as if Mal needed it, was waiting for him in the Royal Infirmary. It had been five years since his big brother entered the place, and at least four since Mal had felt the slightest hope that he would ever leave it. Mal didn’t let himself miss a visit, although he switched the days in case anybody unfriendly was watching his movements. He didn’t think that Euan was a high priority for any of the nasties he and his family had bumped up against, but that was the problem with his line of work; it made you paranoid.

  The familiar antiseptic smell of the hospital filled his nose and he felt his shoulders tense in readiness. It never got any easier. Never became routine. Euan wasn’t asleep. You didn’t need to be medically trained to see that. The gentle wheeze of the respirator and the muted beep of the life signs machine were enough of a clue, even if you were likely to mistake the unnatural stillness of the figure in the bed. Mal knew that he ought to sign the paperwork and let them turn the machines off and, before every visit, he told himself that he would, but once he got there he just couldn’t do it. He was a coward.

  The nurses were always so friendly, so kind. They didn’t give any hint of judgement. Not about the fact that he only visited once a month, or that he hadn’t given them the ability to free up a bed in the ward. Now Emily, one of the regulars, ran through Euan’s care plan, as if it made difference. ‘He had a wee pressure sore on his right leg, but we’ve got it under control,’ she said.

  Mal asked, as he always did, ‘Is he in any pain?’

  ‘No, dear. He’s well dosed.’ She patted his hand and Mal felt like a fraud. He didn’t deserve her sympathy. He ought to do the right thing and let Euan go.

  In the beginning, before the words ‘nothing more we can do’ and ‘keep him comfortable’, Mal had stayed in the hospital, refusing to leave. Then, he’d visited every day. Then every other day, and, after the realisation that Euan wasn’t about to open his eyes and ask for breakfast, every week. After missing a couple of visits, Mal had officially allowed himself to switch to monthly trips. He’d told himself that Euan didn’t know any different; that, as the doctor had carefully explained in her refined Edinburgh accent, his higher brain functions were gone, his essential Euan-ness had left the building.

  Still, the guilt endured. What if he knew? What if, despite the medical science which said otherwise, he was trapped in there somehow? In the old days, people used to call bodies ‘soul cases’. What if Euan’s was still that? A case for his soul, keeping it safe and happy? What if he switched off the machine and destroyed that haven, dooming Euan’s soul to some unknown torment?

  All of this was made rather more difficult by the fact that Mal wasn’t even sure there was such a thing as the soul. His father had believed that the soul was the fundamental difference between demons and humans, and that their lack of one was what made demons evil. However, Mal couldn’t help noticing that demons didn’t exactly have a monopoly on doing bad things.

  Today, Euan was neatly shaved as usual. It didn’t matter how many times Mal told them that his brother had never been clean-shaven in his life, it seemed to be a policy and, as such, inviolable.

  Mal greeted him with a louder-than-necessary ‘hello’ and a squeeze of the arm. He thought the shape underneath the cotton pyjama top was thinner than last time, although he couldn’t be sure.

  He pulled the visitor’s chair closer to the bed and then spent an inordinate amount of time adjusting its position, taking off his jacket and sitting down. Once he was in place, he knew, there was nothing to do. He had bought a paper in the WHSmith downstairs, and now began reading from it, feeling self-conscious as always. Euan wouldn’t have read this paper when he was awake; why should he care now?

  Still, he persevered. In the beginning, he’d read that speaking out loud to coma patients was important, that you should never assume they couldn’t hear you, as medical science couldn’t be certain what was getting through or when a person might regain a level o
f consciousness. The doctors didn’t talk about levels of consciousness anymore. They gently reiterated that Euan’s condition was unlikely to improve, and, if pushed, they would admit that ‘unlikely’ was only a way of covering their arses. The more proper term was ‘never’. They would slip a pamphlet across the table or pat him on the shoulder while murmuring that it might be time for him to consider his brother’s options. More euphemism. Euan had no options. It was bed or death. What Mal would never admit to the doctor – could hardly admit to himself – was this: he lived in hope. Not only did you read about people waking up from thirty-year-long comas with no apparent ill effects (very, very occasionally, but still), but medical science was continually improving and developing. Added to this was the nagging feeling that one day, somehow, Mal would stumble across some piece of spellwork that would bring his brother back. He wasn’t supposed to ask questions, but sometimes Pringle would ask him to retrieve or deliver an item that was clearly not mundane. An amulet that exuded power, or a stone that shone with a colour he had never seen before and made his eyes hurt to look at for too long. Surely, eventually, he would come into contact with something powerful enough to heal Euan.

  After the hour had ticked by on the clock and Mal felt like he could reasonably leave, he folded the paper and put it on the bedside table, took the chair back to its original place and kissed Euan on the forehead. It was a parental gesture. Not that his father had ever kissed him – on the forehead or anywhere else – but Mal liked to think that Euan felt the affection of the touch. Maybe it infused his dreams with a mother figure or a more caring, gentle father. One who had taken him to football matches and the cinema, rather than for knife-throwing practice.

  Outside the hospital, Mal stood for a moment, breathing the cool city air. There was something about visiting the hospital that made him feel very alive. It added to his guilt, but he couldn’t help it. He took a moment, performing the adjustment from one world to the other, and then set off towards the Grassmarket. He had work to do.

  Chapter Two

  Eve flipped backwards, her knees securely hooked over the bar. She let her body hang, feeling the blood rush to her head. The tent upside down was a familiar sight, comforting. The sawdust on the ground so far below gave her no fear whatsoever. She had been working the trapeze for a year. No, for years. She couldn’t remember not doing it. She swung around and over, putting her legs out straight on the top loop and doing a brief, mid-air handstand before letting gravity and momentum swing her around. She sat on the bar, the spinning in her mind like an old friend. She spent so much time on the ropes that she felt more off balance when she was on the ground.

  She took a breath and swung herself upside down again, using her legs to make the trapeze move, building up momentum until she was carving wide pendulum arcs. The air rushed past her body and vertiginous views swooped with her, the beige canvas coming closer at the extreme edges of her swing. Then, in the space between one blink and the next, the canvas changed from beige to deep red. No, she thought. Not again. As the walls swung past and her head spun, she lunged for the platform and hooked the safety line. She waited, pulse pounding, until her vision cleared and her ears stopped ringing. The blood was rushing in her ears and she felt sick. The walls were billowing red silk and she wasn’t wearing her warm-up costume of black Lycra. Instead, she had a silvery costume covered with pale pink and blue sequins in a harlequin pattern. She forced her arms and hands to work, to climb down the ladder. She felt possessed with the need to get onto the ground, to lie down before she fell.

  As soon as her feet touched the sawdust she knew the arena wasn’t empty. A black shape unfolded from the shadows. It was a figure, moving quickly, arms outstretched and a silver shape held rigid and pointing. A second later, she fell backwards. Something had hit her in the chest. It was a solid blow like from a tree branch, but instead of a bruising pain, she felt a burning whiteness in the centre of her chest. Looking down, she didn’t see white smoke or flames or even a massive wound, but a bloody red stain spreading out from a hole. And then there was nothing.

  * * *

  Rose was in the dining room in her house. The curtains were drawn, and billowing as if the window was open and there was a stiff breeze. The walls were moving in the same way, as if they were made of material too, and it gave her motion sickness. Her mother was standing in the corner, her back to Rose. She was wearing a coat as if she was just about to go outside.

  Rose was frightened. She didn’t know why, but she was frightened that her mother would turn around. She felt as if she was in trouble for something, that she was about to get told off. A feeling like that, but magnified by several thousand. She dug her nails into her palms. She was dreaming. She knew this wasn’t real. She was asleep and all she had to do was wake up. She gouged her nails deeper, willing the pain to form a bridge back to reality.

  Slowly, her mother began to turn. She rotated slowly and smoothly, not like a person but like an object spun by an invisible hand. Rose knew she was going to scream before her mother turned fully to face her. She knew, in that dream logic way, that the figure wasn’t really her mother and that what she was going to see would be very bad. But the foreknowledge didn’t help her, didn’t stop the horrible shock. The figure was her mother but it didn’t have a face. Instead, there was a greyish puffy substance like uncooked dough.

  Rose’s mouth filled with saliva and she tasted vomit. Her mother raised her hands slowly, as if asking to be hugged. Then her dough face began to bubble and pop, as if the heat had been turned up. The substance began to slide away from her neck; it was doubling in size, growing and slipping all at once.

  Rose couldn’t close her eyes. No matter how much she didn’t want to see her mother’s skull appearing beneath the goo, she was dreaming and no one is allowed to close their eyes in a dream. Instead, she screamed and the dream changed.

  She felt herself tip backwards and, suddenly, she was falling. She could smell sawdust and feel air rushing past her body. She woke up before she hit the ground, her heart thudding and sweat cooling on her skin.

  Daylight was shining through a gap in her bedroom curtains and her phone said it was morning, the day after she had gone to sleep. That was a relief. She checked her tattoo, just to be sure, and got out of bed to shower and dress. Her hands shook as she squeezed shampoo into her palm and she felt dizzy with the leftover adrenaline.

  She only had one lecture that day – cognitive psychology at eleven. She forced herself to go through the motions. She listened to the lecturer and took notes, pushing down the panic of the previous day and the sick taste of fear left from her bad dream. She considered, for what felt like the hundredth time, that perhaps she ought to see a doctor about her strange symptoms. Or perhaps it was stress. That was what happened to students, it was well known. There were posters up around the university screaming about mental health. She had been hitting the books too hard. Perhaps she needed to go to one of the yoga classes at the union.

  What would really help, the only thing that she felt would help, would be seeing Astrid. When the lecture was over, she packed her bag and went to find her friend. Astrid worked every Tuesday in the ticket booth for the Edinburgh ghost tours, right at the entrance to Greyfriar’s Kirk.

  The weak spring sun shone on the Grecian-inspired McEwan Hall, and brightly-dressed students flocked across the paved slabs of the newly-developed Bristo Square. The light transformed the city’s buildings, making them beautiful with the blue sky as a contrast to the grey stone.

  Outside the green-painted front of the art shop, an entwined couple barged her off the pavement onto the road. She turned around to say something cutting to their retreating backs, but the sight of their tilted heads, their bodies forming both a question and an answer, made her throat close up.

  Ignoring a gaggle of tourists visiting Greyfriar’s Bobby, Rose waved at the statue of the little dog and turned into the Kirkyard. The Gothic architecture and wrought-iron gate of Greyfriar’s Kirk lo
oked almost cheerful with its backdrop of pale blue sky.

  Astrid was slumped in the little wooden booth, her head resting on her folded arms. All Rose could see was a waterfall of corkscrew curls and her elbows.

  ‘It’s a miracle you haven’t been fired.’ Rose poked one of the elbows.

  Astrid sat up, blinking slowly. She stretched her arms above her head and yawned. ‘Late one last night. It was epic. You should’ve come with.’

  ‘Let me in.’ Rose knocked on the wall. ‘It’s freezing.’

  Astrid scooted back and unlocked the door.

  Inside, Rose was enveloped in the good smell of planed wood and linseed oil. It was like a shed designed by a goth gardener, with an odd pointed roof and a hatch in the front to serve customers. Pins were shoved through customer receipts and notes directly into the tongue-and-groove walls, and a travel kettle was balanced on top of a stack of old catalogues.

  Astrid shoved a fake eyeball at Rose. ‘Squidgy face part?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’m good.’

  ‘Only fifty pence,’ Astrid said, examining the rubber. ‘They’re not selling though.’

  ‘I wonder why.’

  At that moment a shuffling figure appeared on the main path. ‘Your best pal’s arrived.’

  ‘Christ on a bike.’ Astrid rolled her eyes extravagantly.

  ‘Gotta give him props for perseverance,’ Rose said. ‘Consistency is very underrated.’

  The figure arrived at the booth. He had grey hair, slightly too long and plastered to his scalp with grease. The tramlines left by a comb made Rose’s stomach turn over.