Three Strikes

by Lucy Christopher

  He scrambled up onto the empty sill of the tower then hauled himself up onto the roof, clawing at the tiles until he was able to grab the stem of the iron weathervane. His bandage had come away in his struggle, and he stood with his raw, empty eye socket glistening with rain. The weathervane had been spinning wildly in the wind but stopped now, its own vacant eyehole mirroring Silas’.

  ‘All the while,’ Edita’s voice whispered in Bo’s mind, ‘I lay in my tomb, dreaming … dreaming of escape, of finding Bruno … but by the turn of the hour, I dreamed no more.’

  Below, Bruno fell to his knees, and started pounding his fist against his chest.

  ‘No!’ he cried. It was almost unbearable to hear. ‘Noooooo…’

  Bruno looked up at Silas clinging to the very highest point of the steeple, his eyes as wild and inhuman as his voice.

  ‘In the catacombs!’ Silas called down, his own voice trembling now. ‘She’s down there, you can go down…’ His eyes focused on the wreckage of what had been his church just minutes ago, and the tree lying directly over where the entrance to the secret staircase ought to have been. ‘There’s another way in!’ Silas yelped. ‘The east door…’

  If Bruno heard these last words, he gave no sign. He was still, with one hand held over his heart, like he was about to give a rousing speech. But he didn’t say a word. Instead he just stared at Silas.

  ‘The east door!’ Silas tried again. ‘There’s a tunnel, east of here. Another way into the catacombs. It’s…’

  Bruno roared. Light speared the sky, snaking over the town too quickly for Bo to follow. But she saw the exact moment the lightning struck Silas. One splinter of it glinted through the hollow eye socket of the cockerel as though bringing the weathervane to life at the same moment it took Silas’ from him. The man fell limp, his body sliding down the roof tiles just as the bell struck one final, booming note. It was still echoing as Silas’ corpse fell from the tower, and the scene faded to nothing.

  Bo sat back, pulling her hand from the darkened crystal. Her fingertips felt numb. She rubbed her hands together, trying to stop them shaking. She took a deep breath and looked around her.

  ‘Well, I suppose that explains how his spirit might’ve gotten attached to the weathervane,’ she said, and laughed flatly. ‘Doesn’t help me find the bloody east door, though.’

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘I should be with Bruno… Twins should always be together… Find the east door…’

  Edita’s voice whirled around Bo like mist inside the fortune-teller’s hut.

  ‘Alright, I get it. You want to be back with your brother or whatever. Any suggestions on how to go about it? So far all you’ve achieved is pied-pipering all the kids in Blackfin around town for an hour each night.’

  An hour; that was how long it had been from the point Silas knocked Edita unconscious with his walking stick to when she presumably died, walled inside the underground crypt. Was that why Edita’s dream-voice or whatever it was only called to the kids in town for that same hour? Bo’s chest tightened at that thought, remembering the dreams she’d had after Sky’s death, about being trapped underground, buried alive.

  Wait, those hadn’t been dreams about Sky… They’d been Edita’s memories, shared through whatever weird connection her voice created. The connection that robbed Bo of her will whenever she heard it. Even setting aside the fact that what Edita could do was basically a gross violation of someone else’s mind, yes, even setting that aside, Bo couldn’t exactly help Edita if she couldn’t think for herself, and midnight was looming.

  ‘Look, here’s the deal,’ she addressed the disembodied voice in the tone she usually used to bargain with her little brothers. She just hoped Edita could actually hear her, and wasn’t simply broadcasting her dreams to all the young people of Blackfin. ‘I’ll help you, and figure out where the heck you’re buried and… well, find your brother and tell him, I suppose, so he can get you buried somewhere nicer. Somewhere that’s closer to him, is that what you want?’ Silas was dead, so revenge was hardly an option, and all of Edita’s shared memories seemed to focus on being reunited with her twin. ‘But if I do that, you need to keep quiet and not sing me into a coma again, okay?’ She paused, then added, ‘And leave everyone else to sleep normally, too. I don’t want my brothers or any other kids wandering around town anymore. They’ll just get in my way.’ No need to say that she was worried her brothers might get hurt. She wouldn’t have admitted that to the boys, so she would hardly tell a restless spirit.

  Bo waited, unsure Edita had heard her until finally she answered.

  ‘I will not sing my dreams tonight, or summon the little creatures from their beds. But only for tonight. I have woken and I am restless. If you haven’t found my tomb before the clock strikes one, I may feel the need to spend my energies doing something … unpleasant.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Bo snapped. Edita only laughed. It was a lovely, bell-like laugh, but Bo did not like it.

  ‘Twins should never be kept apart,’ Edita said. ‘Tick-tock, Bo Peeps.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’ Bo checked her watch. It was half past eleven, which gave her just ninety minutes to locate Edita’s tomb. That wasn’t much time. ‘Couldn’t you give me a bit longer than that? I mean, I am helping you out here…’

  There was no answer at all this time.

  ‘Ninety minutes it is,’ she sighed. She would just have to get cracking.

  After replacing the black cloth over the crystal ball and quickly tidying away any signs of her visit, Bo left the fortune-teller’s hut. She snapped the padlock back into place on the door, then set off for home, walking so briskly it was practically a jog.

  In Year 8 geography, Bo’s class had been tasked with drawing maps of Blackfin so that they could analyse how the ground had been sculpted by long-gone glaciers working their way down between the peaks of the Lychgate Mountains. Bo’s map had been given the best mark of the entire class, as usual. And, as with all the other bits of Bo’s work which were adorned with a red letter A or an ‘Excellent!’ Bo’s mother had kept the map in one of several boxes in their cluttered garage.

  It only took Bo a couple of minutes to find it, nestled between a folder of chemistry coursework and that year’s school report which, she noted rather smugly, had been straight As… if you overlooked the D she had received in PE, which Bo utterly disregarded.

  The map was carefully drawn on graph paper, each dip and rise of the coastline a perfect to-scale copy of the real thing, and every street, house, and footpath meticulously marked on it. The only problem with it was that the outline of Blackfin Woods held no interior detail. The teacher had specifically forbidden the class from entering the woods to map it more thoroughly, and as Bo knew it wouldn’t earn her any extra marks, it really hadn’t seemed worth the effort. But that meant that wherever the church was – or its ruin, now – Bo had no idea. And as the woods were broadly to the west side of Blackfin, it didn’t really help her narrow her search area for the elusive ‘east door’.

  Why had nobody in town ever mentioned there being a church there? Even Ms Stacks at the library hadn’t known about it … or had she just neatly avoided the truth about that? Surely someone must have known about the church. Once again, Bo felt that surge of frustration that always tried to choke her when she tried to fathom the town’s swathe of secrets.

  If she only knew where the church had stood, the map would be very useful. So she would just have to ask the only person she knew who had definitely seen it recently.

  That was, if she could find him.

  Bo tossed items from her wardrobe, creating a moat of discarded totes and shoulder bags as she ransacked it for something suitable to carry what she needed to take with her. But she didn’t own a backpack, a tote wouldn’t work, and her school messenger bag would only get in the way. Cursing, she hurried down the hall to her little brothers’ room and flung open their wardrobe. An avalanche of toys and games and more dinosaur onesies than two kids could
possibly need spilled out onto the carpet. But then Bo hit the jackpot. Next to Scout’s old Spider-Man lunchbox was a dark-blue backpack with a yellow skull and crossbones on the front. She grabbed it, then headed back to her own room.

  Rolling the map and securing it with a hair bobble, Bo put it in the pilfered backpack, along with a torch, a hefty hammer (suitable for smashing into a tomb, she thought), and one of Scout’s old school shoes which had a compass embedded in the heel. She paused, inspecting the items and considering what else she might need. Within two minutes she had added black leather gloves, a knife, and the old lock-picking set of her father’s to the bag. She was about to leave the house again when the phone rang. Bo checked her watch; she only had an hour left before Edita’s deadline. And as much as Bo hated toeing the line when threatened, she made an exception when the source of the threat was supernatural and capable of mind-control.

  The phone kept ringing. At this hour, it could only be her mother checking up on her, or someone calling with Bad News. Stifling a frustrated curse, Bo answered.

  ‘Bo! Oh, thank God you’re there. I thought for a minute you might be missing too, but of course you’re home because you’re on the landline right now and I don’t even know what I was thinking…’

  It took Bo a moment to recognise the near-hysterical voice of Mrs Pearce, Ernie and Phil’s mum. She’d always been a bit highly strung, but seeing as she let the howlers sleep over with her own boys every now and then, Bo suspected the woman was probably some kind of saint.

  ‘Mrs Pearce, is everything okay?’

  The woman stuttered at the interruption. ‘Yes, well, no, but is your mother there? I know she was working tonight, but I thought maybe she would be home by now…’

  ‘No, Mum won’t be back until three-ish. What’s up? The boys haven’t driven you to throttling them, have they?’ Bo laughed flatly, adjusting the backpack on her shoulder with one eye on the door.

  ‘I haven’t throttled them! Of course I haven’t! Why would you say such a thing? Oh my goodness, that’s what everyone will think: that I can’t be trusted to take care of anyone’s children…’

  ‘Mrs Pearce,’ Bo cut in again, far more calmly than she felt by this point. The woman’s prattling was starting to unnerve her more than talking to Edita’s spirit.

  There was a gasping, snotty sound from the other end of the line and Bo was horrified to realise Mrs Pearce was crying.

  ‘Mrs Pearce? What’s going on?’

  The sobbing ceased just long enough for the woman to choke out four words.

  ‘It’s Levi – he’s vanished!’

  All thoughts of Edita and her deadline flew from Bo’s head at that moment.

  ‘What do you mean, vanished? How?’

  Mrs Pearce was sobbing in earnest now, but between the choking gurgles Bo just about managed to gather that all four boys had been asleep upstairs an hour ago, but when Mrs Pearce looked in on them again as she was heading to bed, Levi’s sleeping bag was empty.

  ‘None of the other boys had a clue he was missing or where he might’ve gone! He hasn’t wandered home, has he?’

  Bo had been in the twins’ room just a few minutes ago, and there was no sign of her little brother there.

  ‘No, he’s not here. Can you put Scout on the phone?’ Bo knew she shouldn’t be snappy with Mrs Pearce, but it seemed to be the only thing that would stop her rambling. When Scout came on the line he sounded half asleep, and Bo could just picture him standing there in his onesie, knuckling sleep from his eyes.

  ‘Scout, tell me what happened.’

  ‘I dunno, Bobo. Levi wasn’t here when Mrs Pearce woke everyone up.’

  ‘And you’ve got no idea where he might’ve gone?’ Of course, Bo was beginning to have an inkling about where he’d gone, or at least who was responsible. The echo of Edita’s words: I may feel the need to spend my energies doing something … unpleasant rang through her mind. And the twins must never be kept apart bit: Bo had thought Edita was talking about herself and her brother, but had she been talking about the howlers? ‘Levi didn’t … you don’t know if that creepy voice spoke to him again?’

  There was the sound of a long yawn before Scout answered. ‘Maybe. He’s sleeping somewhere really dark right now, so I can’t ask him.’

  ‘How do you know he’s somewhere dark?’

  Bo could practically hear Scout’s shrug. ‘I just know,’ he said.

  ‘Well, do you know if he’s okay? Not hurt or anything?’

  Scout sighed impatiently. ‘He’s just sleeping. Can I go back to sleep now, too?’

  Bo hung up after quickly reassuring Mrs Pearce that she knew where Levi was probably hiding (which was a lie) and that she would let her know as soon as she found him (not a lie… she hoped).

  As Bo at last stepped through her back door and out onto the streets of Blackfin, she knew three things for certain:

  She needed to find Jared so he could tell her where the ruined church was, and hopefully help her figure out where the east door was likely to be.

  She only had an hour left before Edita’s something … unpleasant deadline.

  Edita had apparently kept her word at least partly so far: it was after midnight, and both Scout and Mrs Pearce seemed in full control of their faculties.

  Perhaps Levi really had just wandered off, and it wasn’t anything to do with Edita. Bo rolled the idea around in her head, and decided she didn’t like the taste of it; it smacked of wishful thinking. In any case, she would only know for sure when she found Levi, and she had a strong inkling that would happen more quickly if she located Edita’s tomb.

  ‘If you’ve got Levi, you’d better not hurt the little bugger,’ Bo called out to the empty house. ‘Even if he’s really, really annoying. You hear me, Edita? Our deal is off if you do.’ She wasn’t sure how exactly she would get revenge on a girl who was already dead, but she would get creative if she needed to.

  Chapter Twelve

  Bo had picked the lock on the gates to Blackfin Woods easily enough. Then it had just been a matter of following the faint tyre tracks snaking between the trees until she found Jared’s van parked beneath an enormous oak with branches like knotted tentacles.

  Quite out of breath and hankering for a cigarette, Bo was about to knock on the door of the van when she spotted an arched shape silhouetted in the moonlight. As she drew closer, she saw it was a window. Or rather, a window frame; the glass had long since disappeared from it, and now the moonlight shone unhindered through the stone arch.

  This was the church, right here. A wall of it, at least. The rough stones stood silent and grave, a forgotten monument. The rest lay mostly in rubble, the carcass of the huge tree she had watched fall on the building still lying diagonally amid the debris. It looked as though not a soul had been here since the night she had seen replayed inside the crystal ball. Someone must have visited, though, to have removed the weathervane from the slanted steeple and transplanted it to the roof of Blackfin High. And Jared had obviously been here when he found the journal.

  At any other time, Bo might have explored the ruin, but that wasn’t why she was here. Dropping her bag onto the forest floor, she rifled through it until she had her little brother’s compass-shoe and the map she had painstakingly drawn of the town. She traced the path she had taken from the gate of Blackfin Woods to where she was now – in the middle of the green blob, according to her map – and drew an X on it. It wasn’t as exact as it would’ve been had she been able to properly measure the distance she had walked in the indentations of Jared’s tyres, but it would do. Next she checked the compass, and drew a neat line from the X pointing eastward over the map.

  Hmm. It led directly back the way she had come, and she hadn’t seen any likely candidates for ‘east door’ status on her trek through the woods. It was possible the door was nothing more than a hole in the ground, but thinking about that didn’t help; there was no way she could conduct a thorough search for a hole in the forty-five minutes sh
e had left before Edita maybe, possibly, did something nasty to Levi.

  Forty-five minutes?!

  What about beyond the woodland perimeter? Bo tried to regain her focus. The line passed over the roofs of a few houses, a pond, the park, Blackfin High, and then hit the sea roughly half a mile from where Bo now stood.

  The school? Would an underground tunnel stretch that far? Perhaps, if it had been built to smuggle things brought into the bay by boat … or as a means for a clergyman to escape to a boat if he were being pursued, like when Catholic priests used to hide in priest holes back in the sixteenth century. She had initially dismissed the school because there was no east-facing door, but from what Silas had said, east door referred to its position to the church, not the way the door was facing.

  Bo studied the map again, but nothing stood out as a more likely option for the location of the east door. And there must be some connection between the school and the church; after all, Silas had been moved from one to the other after the church was demolished. So maybe there was a more tangible connection, too? Like an underground tunnel. It made as much sense as anything in this town did, anyway. She tucked the map and the compass back into her bag, retraced her steps to Jared’s van, and pounded on the metal siding with her fist.

  A few seconds later, his bleary-eyed face appeared at the van window.