Just when Jennifer thought she was going to have to pull out the big guns – the bluff that she’d pull Annabelle from the team – Annabelle folded. Huffing, she threw herself into her seat, rolling her eyes at Steph Clark, her seatmate and partner in crime.
“’Sake!” she said, loud enough for Jennifer to hear but sufficiently under her breath for Jennifer to pretend she couldn’t (which she did). “I was just taking a picture.”
“Seatbelt, Annabelle.”
Another roll of her eyes, another extravagant huff, but Annabelle did as she was told, slinging the seatbelt across her hips and buckling it.
“Thank you.” Jennifer smiled sweetly at Annabelle and turned her back on her, waiting until she was almost back at her seat before muttering, “Little cow.”
She sat back down across the aisle from Mrs Halliday, who was knitting something unidentifiable in a garish red wool.
“Anything wrong, dear?” The old woman raised her eyebrows questioningly, an innocent smile painted across her lips.
Jennifer offered a similarly fake smile in return. “No, no. Everything’s fine. They’re just excited about the game.”
“I don’t know how you deal with teenagers.” This from the bus driver, a large man who’d given Jennifer his name as he’d lectured her on not letting the girls eat, drink or touch anything while on board his bus. What was his name again? Davey, that was right.
“It has its challenges,” Jennifer agreed.
“Oh, goodness no,” Mrs Halliday squawked. “Our girls are lovely!”
Jennifer just turned towards the window, thinking her cheeks might crack if she had to force another smile. Making the decision to check the job-search websites that night while she enjoyed what was going to be a well-earned glass of wine, she stared out at the countryside as the bus chugged on towards Falkirk and—
“Did you see that?” she asked.
“See what, dear?” Mrs Halliday asked, looking up from her knitting.
“Davey?”
But the bus driver had his head thrown back, his attention off the road, as he stretched his mouth open in a huge yawn.
“What did you say?” he asked a second later.
Jennifer stared hard at the view out of the window, but what she thought she’d seen had disappeared. It looked exactly as it should: green fields, a few sheep. An industrial unit in the background…
“Nothing,” she said slowly. “I just thought I saw—”
There! She was positive this time. A flicker of red, the whole landscape awash with it as if she was seeing through coloured lenses. She paused, waiting to see if it would happen again. After just a couple of seconds it did, only this time the countryside disappeared, replaced with a sweeping burgundy vista.
And this time, it wasn’t just for a second or two.
This time it stayed red.
There was a sudden chorus of crying and shrieks of panic from the girls at the back of the bus.
“What in the hell?” Davey’s shout was all the warning Jennifer had before the bus started careening wildly. She looked through the windscreen to see that the motorway they’d been travelling on had disappeared and the bus was shuttling at 70 mph across sand. The uneven terrain threw the bus from side to side, and Jennifer was tossed from her seat as it skidded and slid to a halt. The bus’s front left wheel was stuck in some hidden crevice, making the vehicle tilt at a dangerous angle.
Jennifer held her breath, terrified, but after rocking for a few moments the bus seemed to decide that it wasn’t going to tip completely.
“OK.” Jennifer picked herself up shakily, fairly certain no bones were broken, though she ached all over. “Girls, are you all right? Is anybody hurt?”
More shouts and terrified screams, but as Jennifer made her way to the back of the bus, she didn’t see any blood – just petrified faces staring back at her. Waiting for her to take charge and tell them what to do.
“OK,” Jennifer said again, trying to stay calm. A quick glance back told her that Davey and Mrs Halliday were out of their seats, standing unaided – and looking to her for guidance. Brilliant. “We’re all right, nobody’s badly injured, so let’s just—”
A scream cut her off.
Annabelle stood, her arm shaking as she point out of the window.
“What the hell are those?”
Jennifer turned to look out of the window. She saw at once what Annabelle was pointing at.
As the screams echoed around her, Jennifer could only stare as a flock of creatures – much larger and more terrifying than any bird she’d ever seen – flew straight at the bus. As they got closer she could see fangs, claws. Absolute evil in their pitch-black eyes.
Attacking as one, the creatures crashed into the side of the bus. Jennifer watched, frozen, as the windows started to crack.
CHAPTER 13
Dylan knew there was something wrong as soon as she and Tristan stepped into the maths classroom. The atmosphere was quiet, subdued. Everybody was doing what they were meant to be doing – taking off jackets, getting jotters and pencils out of bags, settling into seats – but there was almost a furtive feel to the room. Like they were all waiting for something.
She realised what that was a minute later when Cheryl McNally walked in. She was leaning heavily on Dove MacMillan – who she’d been seeing and then not seeing in dramatic fashion over the course of the previous term. The last Dylan heard, it was very definitely off, but Dove’s arm was firmly slung around Cheryl’s shoulder.
Then Cheryl lifted her head.
Dylan had never seen Cheryl without absolutely perfect make-up. There was too much of it, and if you asked Dylan it was about four shades too orange for Cheryl’s natural skin tone, but it was always flawlessly applied. Now it was sliding down her face, orange streaks across her cheeks as if she’d been scrubbing at them, and eyeliner smudged in dark blotches under her red-rimmed eyes. There was a collective gasp from the class and the expression on Dove’s face went from stoic to furious in the space of a nanosecond.
“What the hell you all looking at?” he growled.
Everybody very quickly became absorbed in something else, anything else.
“Perhaps you should go to the office?” Mr Campbell, their maths teacher, suggested. “Ask to go home?” Cheryl shook her head, the gesture just a shimmy of hair since she’d dropped her gaze to stare at the floor. “Maybe for a walk, then? Get some fresh air?” Cheryl shook her head to each suggestion and Mr Campbell made a face, stymied and clearly uncomfortable.
Dylan was too – she’d no idea Cheryl even had emotions. And here was Dove, being protective and supportive, like an actual human being.
“I think the world must be ending,” she whispered to Tristan. “Strange things are happening.”
He just looked from her to Cheryl and back again, a perplexed expression on his face, and Dylan waved the joke away.
“Right, well… let’s start then,” Mr Campbell said. He glanced again at Cheryl, then seemed to give a mental shrug and picked up a textbook. “Open up to page seventy-two, folks. We’re going to look at how you use sine and cosine to find the angle in a triangle—”
But he didn’t get any further than that, because the classroom phone rang. Its shrill intervention didn’t garner the usual cheers, but taking in the way Mr Campbell looked at Cheryl again – who was cosseted quietly at the back of the class, as far out of the spotlight as possible – Dylan thought he might be cheering on the inside, thinking the call was to summon her.
Except it wasn’t. Dylan watched his expression go from hopeful to slightly annoyed as he barked out, “What, right now?” Sighing, he slammed down the phone and turned to the class. “It seems we have an assembly.”
Nobody turned to look at Cheryl – Dove was still there beside her, skulking menacingly – but everyone in the room heard the quiet hiccup as she tried to strangle a sob.
Out of respect for Cheryl, and a healthy respect for Dove’s fist, no one spoke as they left the
room, but once the class mixed with the rest of fourth year leaving the maths corridor, and then third year as they approached the assembly hall, speculation was rife about the reasons for an unscheduled assembly. Nobody seemed to have any idea what had actually happened, but general concensus seemed to be that it involved Steph Clark, Cheryl’s best friend.
She hadn’t been in school yesterday, Dylan remembered. She’d been bragging about being picked to be part of the Glasgow City Netball Team, and had been out for the whole day at some game in Falkirk. Dylan had had the misfortune of hearing all about it as she shared a table with Steph in Modern Studies, where the teacher took a sadistic pleasure in assigning seats.
Dylan thought about the genuine grief of Cheryl’s face, the way she’d tried to hide herself away, and found herself in a position she never, ever thought she’d be in: feeling sorry for Cheryl McNally.
For once, the headmaster had no trouble establishing quiet in the big assembly hall, even with all of third and fourth year crammed in there together. Everybody shut up as soon as he indicated he was ready to speak – they knew there was juicy gossip heading their way and were eager to hear it.
“All right, boys and girls,” the headmaster started. “You’ll be aware that this assembly was unscheduled. We’ve had some bad news as a school, and I thought it was important to talk to you all about it personally rather than let gossip spread half-true and hurtful stories.” He paused, cleared his throat. “Yesterday afternoon, a Kaithshall pupil, Stephanie Clark, went missing. She was selected to play as part of Glasgow City Netball Team and was on a bus heading to their match in Falkirk. We know that the bus left Glasgow on time, but it did not arrive at its destination. As of yet, the police have been unable to determine what happened to the bus—”
An outbreak of hushed whispers swept across the hall, building in volume until it sounded like the throbbing buzz of a swarm of bees. The headmaster held up his hands for silence, but this time he was forced to wait as a ripple of shock and conjecture circled the room.
“That’s so bizarre,” Dylan heard a voice behind her half-whisper. “How can they not find it? It’s a bus for God’s sake!”
Stunned herself, Dylan looked to Tristan, whose face was furrowed in thought. His eyes seemed a darker shade of blue, shadowed with consternation. He swallowed twice, like he couldn’t make his throat work, then opened his mouth to speak. Dylan got in there before he could.
“No,” she hissed. “No way. Not everything bad that happens is our fault!”
“Come on,” Tristan muttered. “Can you explain it any other way?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the right explanation!”
“A bus doesn’t just go missing—”
“Yeah,” Dylan whispered furiously, “but if it was wraiths there would still be a bus, wouldn’t there? Along with a whole netball team’s worth of bodies!”
“It might not have been wraiths.”
“Well, what then?”
Tristan opened his mouth, but he didn’t get the chance to answer her. The headmaster, tired of waiting, started shouting for quiet.
“Obviously,” the headmaster stressed, his voice lined with more annoyance that solemnness now, “this is a very upsetting time for Stephanie Clark’s family, and all of her friends here at Kaithshall Academy, so I ask you to be sensitive and sympathetic to each other during this difficult period.” A soft noise from the side of the assembly hall had the headmaster glancing over towards Mrs Mallaghan, head of pastoral, and he hurriedly added, “If any of you are struggling emotionally or feel overwhelmed by this news, make yourself known to your pastoral teacher – or any teacher – who are all here to support you.”
“Are you shutting the school?” a male voice shouted from somewhere amongst the seated pupils.
The headmaster scowled in the general direction the call had come from, but there were too many possible culprits for him to work out who had interrupted him, so he settled for squashing the air of optimism that had suddenly sprung up from the Kaithshall faithful.
“No,” he said sternly. “School life will go on as normal. While we are saddened by the situation involving Stephanie,” he didn’t sound very saddened now, Dylan thought, “your education is too important to disrupt.” He ignored the low chorus of boos. “We will of course keep you updated on any developments, and we are very hopeful that Stephanie will be found safe and well. Now,” he checked his watch, “there are only a few minutes left of final period, so I think we’ll just keep you all here until the bell goes.”
This was met initially with cheers, and then outrage and panic as pupils realised that they hadn’t brought bags and jackets down to the hall with them. When the headmaster was forced to reverse his decision, sending the third and fourth year pupils back to class with an ill-advised instruction to ‘move quickly’, there was general madness as everyone tried to get back to their classroom as soon as possible – God forbid they had to remain in the school a moment after the end-of-day bell rang – whilst also discussing the bombshell that had just been dropped.
“What did you mean it might not have been wraiths?” Dylan hissed as soon as they were clear of the hall. “If not wraiths, what?”
“Later,” Tristan murmured, eyeing the bodies crushed close to them as everybody pushed and shoved down the corridor. “Too many ears.”
Dylan gnashed her teeth with frustration as she was carried along by the crowd and back up to the maths classroom. It possibly said everything that needed to be said about Steph that, despite the fact that everyone in the room knew her, and had at least one class with her, no one seemed particularly upset by her sudden and strange disappearance.
Cheryl hadn’t returned to class, deciding, Dylan presumed, that she didn’t care enough about her stuff to face the speculation that was rife in the room.
“She’s dead,” one girl said with a matter-of-factness that made Dylan wince. “She must be.”
“Yeah,” her seating partner replied, “but where’s the bus then? It’s like one of those constable theories.”
“What?” Her friend looked blank.
“Constable theories.”
Dylan tried to tune the pair out as she packed things back into her bag, but their voices floated into the silence between her and Tristan.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You know, where people are sold a lie and there are all these theories about what the truth really is.”
“You mean…” a disbelieving pause, “a conspiracy theory?” Another pause, then, quietly and disgusted, “Seriously, Mandy.”
Normally Dylan would have laughed, but she was too tense. Too impatient. She checked her watch, not trusting the clock on the wall which seemed to be grinding along at half-speed.
Tristan was just as eager to get out of there. Desk already clear and bag on his back, he actually started bouncing on the spot, so strong was his desire to leave.
“The bell hasn’t gone yet, Tristan,” Dylan reminded him gently. “We can’t go until it does.”
“Nobody will care,” Tristan retorted, his eyes on the door.
Dylan was about to tell him that their maths teacher might have something to say about that, but when she looked over towards his desk, he wasn’t there.
She guessed the teachers were as morbidly fascinated with Steph’s disappearance as the pupils were – he was probably in the staff room discussing his own ‘constable’ theories.
“Go on, then,” Dylan said, heaving up her bag and sliding out from behind her desk, but before they could cross the threshold, the bell rang, clanging obnoxiously right above their heads. Caught up in the stampede, they were jostled and shepherded through the building.
The crowd thinned as they began walking away from the school and, at Tristan’s urging, they took the shortcut through the park even though it meant traipsing across a wide stretch of sodden grass.
As soon as they passed through the gate, splitting off from everyone
else, Dylan grabbed Tristan’s arm, forcing him to slow.
“All right,” she said, glancing around to check there was no one within hearing distance. “Tell me.”
Tristan pressed his lips together, then gave a little shrug. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I just…”
“Go on,” Dylan prompted, when he tailed off.
“We tore a hole in the wasteland—”
“We closed that!”
“And Jack and Susanna did, as well—”
“But we dealt with that one, too!”
“Just, hear me out,” Tristan pleaded. He waited a moment to ensure Dylan wasn’t going to interrupt again before continuing. “We don’t know how that other wraith got through; I’m absolutely positive no other ferryman has travelled through with a soul.”
“Which means?”
“Maybe it made its own hole.”
Dylan stared at him, incredulous. “But… how? We managed to tear the veil because I had a body to go back to. The wraith didn’t.”
“No,” Tristan agreed, “but maybe it didn’t need one. Maybe…” He blew out a breath. “Maybe we’ve weakened the veil, made it possible for breaches to occur. Like the wraith.”
“And the bus? You think it just barrelled right on into the wasteland?”
“It would explain its disappearance.”
“Be reasonable, Tristan.” Dylan shook her head. “If a bus had careened into the wasteland, the kind of hole it left would have been enormous. Swarms of wraiths would have come through! There would be carnage!”
“Unless the holes don’t last,” he replied quietly. “Think of it like your skin. If you puncture it, it works to reseal itself.”
“And in the meantime, things bleed through,” Dylan finished sombrely, the idea beginning to take hold. “But,” she scrunched up her nose, “but every other thing to cross over has come from the wasteland to the real world: us, Jack and Susanna, the wraith. If you’re right, the bus went from the real world into the wasteland. How is that possible?”
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