Out of the Depths

by Cathy MacPhail

  Aisha pulled us on. ‘It’s one of Tyler’s stories. Tell us on our way to class.’

  ‘It’s not one of my stories.’ I had to make them understand. ‘It really happened. What are you two talking about?’

  ‘If you’re writing a murder story,’ Aisha said. ‘You’ll have to have a more convincing killer than Father Michael. Everybody loves him. He had a massive, and I mean MASSIVE, retirement party last year, didn’t he, Jazz?’

  Jazz nodded. Still eager for us to move on. We were running now, turning corners, hurrying down corridors.

  ‘Father Michael died in prison.’

  Aisha laughed. ‘So that’s the story. Well, if you’re going to set a murder story in this school, you’d better change the names.’

  Jazz laughed. ‘Yeah, ‘cause Mr Kincaid might be a bit annoyed if you kill him off. He’s getting married next year.’

  My head was still spinning. ‘Mr Kincaid.’ I stopped dead.

  ‘The teacher. Honestly, Tyler. Sometimes I think you’ve got a head full of cotton wool. Especially when you’re writing a story.’

  ‘And talking of Mr Kincaid, here he comes,’ Aisha said. ‘And he’s going to kill us for not being in class. And there’s a murder for you!’

  I looked down the corridor, and there he was, striding towards me. I still recognised the boy in him, though he was a man now. The same mane of dark hair, but tinged with grey, the same dark eyes. Mr O’Hara was by his side; they were laughing. Still friends.

  Ben Kincaid had lost that haunted look I had seen in him so often. His eyes were bright. He hadn’t seen me yet.

  It was Mr O’Hara who noticed us first. ‘Right, you girls. I might have known it would be you three! What are you doing wandering about the corridors? Get to class. Right now!’

  Aisha hurried on to the class. But Jazz pulled me towards her. ‘It was Tyler, sir. She didn’t feel well. Look, she’s still dead pale.’

  Mr O’Hara smiled. ‘You three have always got an excuse.’

  But I was sure I was pale as death. I couldn’t take my eyes from Ben Kincaid, now a man. Only moments ago I had seen him as a terrified boy. He stopped in front of me. ‘Are you feeling OK now, Tyler?’

  Hearing his voice again, I felt like fainting, black spots dancing in front of my eyes. So close, so real. A grown man … when only minutes ago … I stumbled against him, and the books he was carrying tumbled to the ground.

  ‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost,’ he said.

  I have, I wanted to tell him, and the ghost was you . Or was it me? Was I the ghost?

  But I didn’t need to tell him, because I was sure I saw in his eyes that he knew, knew everything. Remembered me.

  I bent to help him pick up the books. Handed them to him. ‘Thank you, Tyler,’ he said. His voice so soft the others couldn’t hear him. Only me. ‘Thank you.’

  Then he moved off with Mr O’Hara. I watched him. A man with a future and a past … Was that all thanks to me?

  Jazz grabbed me again. ‘Come on, you! I have something fantastic to tell you.’

  If only she knew what I could tell her. ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘I know who it is Aisha fancies.’

  ‘I thought we said it was Mac?’

  Jazz looked at me as if I was mad. ‘Mac … ? We would have to prize his eyes away from you first.’

  Now I was completely mixed up. Mac? Liked me?

  ‘It’s Callum,’ she said.

  ‘Callum … ?’ Why hadn’t we even considered Callum? Yet, so often when Aisha couldn’t come somewhere, neither could Callum! ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘The night of the seance … neither of them could make it.’

  Jazz let out a big sigh. ‘Seance? What seance?’

  The seance had never happened. Had never needed to happen. What else had changed?

  We ran to our class, and as I ran I knew I was relieved it was Callum Aisha liked, because I had never wanted it to be Mac. We walked into the classroom and Mac looked up then, and he didn’t glare at me, or look annoyed at me. Instead, he smiled with his warm … oh so warm brown eyes, and he winked.

  And I laughed. I’d never felt so happy in my life, because in that moment I realised I had changed everything. I wasn’t on my last warning at the school. The Procurator Fiscal wasn’t going to charge me with wasting police time. I hadn’t done any of the crazy things that had made Mac hate me. I had never seen the statues move. Never had the lake dragged. Because, thanks to me, Ben Kincaid hadn’t died …

  And Mac liked me.

  38

  I learned more over the next few days. Got used to the fact I had changed everything. Ben Kincaid had indeed been a wild child, always in trouble, the bane of his poor, harassed mother. A boy everyone agreed was heading for a life in prison. Even the kindly but firm Father Michael’s patience was stretched by his behaviour. He was the one everyone expected to snap. Yet, it was Mr Hyslop who had the nervous breakdown. A strong, athletic young man, he had always seemed able to handle Ben Kincaid’s bad behaviour. But he had only been holding in a terrible anger, an anger that had burst to the surface the night Ben Kincaid broke into the school. No one actually knew what had happened that night. Mr Hyslop had been admitted to hospital, and a shaking Ben Kincaid had been questioned by the police but never charged. Father Michael had taken him in hand after that. It seemed that had been the making of Ben Kincaid. He had changed. If not into an ideal pupil, that was too much to hope for, at least into your typical teenage boy. Made up with his friend Gerry O’Hara, and been involved in all the high spirits and stupid pranks that most teenage boys get up to, but never after that did he cause any real trouble.

  And so Father Michael had a long and happy career at St Anthony’s College … and Ben’s mother didn’t die of a broken heart … and I didn’t have the lake dragged, because I had never seen any ghosts or any moving statues.

  And Debbie Lawson came home. She had seen her parents on television, heard about the police digging up waste ground, dragging rivers looking for her body, and her guilt had brought her home.

  I did try to tell Jazz and Aisha all that had happened, and Jazz, crazy Jazz, had an explanation.

  ‘Remember the day you arrived at the school, you took a tumble outside the Rector’s office?’

  And of course I remembered.

  ‘You were unconscious. You were knocked out. You dreamed it all. You saw the statues in the school, the photos on the wall, and your imagination did the rest. It’s a great story … but, it isn’t real, Tyler.’

  And I wondered … was she right? Did I dream the whole thing? Or … is there another explanation?

  My grandmother had the gift. Have I some kind of gift too?

  And, what if it was true? And I really did change the past? It was such a strange experience. I’ll never be able to explain it or understand why it happened.

  But you know, all of it has made me think.

  I changed the future by changing the past. And I began to remember …

  ‘I saw my teacher in the queue at the supermarket last Christmas …’ I can picture her now. Looking over everyone’s heads as if she wanted me to see her, her eyes searching just for me.

  But she was dead. She’d died in a tragic accident. An accident that should never have happened.

  That should never have happened.

  What if … What if I could change that too? What if that was what I was meant to do? What if that was why she’d come to me in the first place?

  Do you think I’m silly thinking like this?

  Or, do you think … I should try changing things again?

  Loved Out of The Depths?

  Then turn the page to find out about Cathy MacPhail and her inspiration for this gripping story

  Why I wrote Out of The Depths

  I love where ideas come from – it’s magic! I’ve taken ideas for books from almost everywhere, even from a sign on a wall, but this is the first time I’ve written a book based on just the first line.

/>   Tynecastle High School in Edinburgh asked me to give them the first line for a short story competition. The first line is really important because it has to draw the reader into the story straight away. The line I came up with was this one.

  ‘I saw my teacher in the supermarket last Christmas. I was surprised to see her. She’d been dead for six months.’

  I thought it was a pretty good first line – it’s intriguing, with lots of possibilities. Then I went back to the school after the competition and the pupils were all asking me whether I was going to write a book using this first line. Now that was a challenge I couldn’t resist. I began to imagine that a girl comes into school one day and says she saw a teacher who had died the year before. Who would believe her? She’d be called a liar or they’d say she was going crazy. How would that make her feel?

  Angry? Upset? Yes, both, but perhaps she’d also be determined to find out the truth. So the story began to grow.

  When I get an idea for a story it’s as if my brain is a magnet and it attracts other things I need to bring my story to life. I visited another school, an atmospheric old building with stone statues everywhere. The pupils thought their school would be the perfect background for a story and I thought they were right. I had my idea, I had my location and now all I needed was a name for my main character. I found it at another school I visited, where I met a bright-eyed girl who loved writing. As soon as she told me her name, I knew it was perfect for my story. Tyler Lawless was her name, and suddenly Out of The Depths was born.

  At the beginning of Out of The Depths, Tyler has been practically expelled from her last school because of her story about seeing the dead teacher. She arrives at St. Anthony’s College and finds herself drawn into a different mystery. I thought I had known how Out of The Depths ended the whole time I was writing it, and then I realised that if I’d known the ending, maybe all my readers would know too. So, I decided that there had to be something else, another twist to the story, and it was then that Tyler Lawless acquired a very special gift. A gift that even I, the writer, hadn’t known she had. A gift that she could use over and over again.

  There are lots of little twists to the plot in Out of The Depths, things that lead the reader to question what they think is really happening – one of them is in the title. And there is a reason I named the school St. Anthony’s College … I love concealing mysteries within mysteries. But if you think you’re going to unravel the mystery of the dead teacher in this book, think again. For that, you will have to keep a close eye on forthcoming books featuring Tyler Lawless.

  Meet Cathy MacPhail

  Cathy MacPhail was born and brought up in Greenock, Scotland, where she still lives. Before becoming a children’s author, she wrote short stories for magazines and comedy programmes for radio. Cathy was inspired to write her first children’s book after her daughter was bullied at school.

  Cathy writes spooky thrillers for younger readers as well as teen novels. She has won the Royal Mail Book Award twice, along with lots of other awards. She loves to give her readers a ‘rattling good read’ and has been called the Scottish Jacqueline Wilson.

  One of Cathy’s greatest fears would be to meet another version of herself, similar to the young girl in her bestselling novel Another Me. She is a big fan of Doctor Who and would love to write a scary monster episode for the series.

  Cathy loves to hear from her fans, so visit www.cathymacphail.com and email her your thoughts.

  Q&A with Cathy MacPhail

  What are your favourite things to do when you’re not writing?

  When I’m not writing, I’m usually reading or visiting family – I love spending time with my children, turning up on their doorsteps when they least expect me! I enjoy going on cruises too because it’s the perfect way for me to visit new places. Like most people, I also love going to the cinema. I always have done.

  What are your favourite films?

  Oh, there are so many films I love. It’s a Wonderful Life is one of them. The hero is an ordinary man with just a few problems that are getting him down. Then he is visited by an angel who shows him how life would have been if he had never been born and he realises that his life is worthwhile after all.

  Another fantastic film is The Searchers. A story set in America in the mid nineteenth-century about a man’s struggle to find his niece who has been kidnapped by the Sioux. It explores issues of racism that were common at the time.

  But at the top of my list is Some Like It Hot. Two men pretend to be female musicians to escape gangsters and one of them falls in love with Marilyn Monroe! It’s so funny and it has the best last line of any film I’ve ever seen, ‘Oh well, nobody’s perfect.’

  If you could be a character from a book, who would you be?

  I have thought and thought about this because most books I’ve read have at least one wonderful character that I’d like to be, but I think Elizabeth Bennet has to be my first pick. She is so bright. Then there’s Cathy from Wuthering Heights. I like her passionate nature, and we share a first name! Also, both of them are admired by fantastic men. When I’m really old, I want to be Miss Marple. I will go around annoying people and solving murders.

  Have you ever seen a ghost?

  I’ve not actually seen a ghost, but I’m sure I have felt the presence of one. I was at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland, which I’d been told was haunted. I thought the haunted room was upstairs and so as I had a room on the ground floor, I assumed I was safe. Then I was woken in the night by something, or someone, sitting on my bed, moving closer. I was really scared. Finally I had the courage to leap from the bed and turn the light on. There was nothing in the room to be frightened of, but when I looked at my door the keys were swinging as if someone had just left the room. The keys kept swinging all night. I know this because my eyes never left them. In the morning, I learned there was no particular haunted room, but instead the ghost chose a different room to haunt every year. I used this incident as material for Out of The Depths.

  Dying to know what Cathy eats for breakfast or what her favourite book is? Email your question to childrensmarketing@bloomsbury.com.

  Five questions will be selected at random to be published in her next book, Secret of the Shadows.

  Cathy’s Choice

  My Three Favourite Detective Stories

  It was my son, David, who read The Falconer’s Malteser first. He loved it so much he wrote to the Children’s Film and Television Foundation to tell them they had to make it into a film. When they did, he took all the credit! Then, to his delight, he received a letter from the author, Anthony Horowitz. While on the set of the film, Anthony had heard about David’s enthusiasm for the book and so invited him, and me, to London for the film premiere. As you can see, I have many happy memories of this book. It’s exciting and funny, and it has some great characters. What more can you ask for in a good book!

  How can anyone not love Millions by Frank Cottrell Boyce? It’s heart-warming and tear-jerking, often all on the same page. It’s the story of what happens when a bag stuffed with money drops from the sky and two boys find themselves very rich. Damian and Anthony are such lovely characters and their dialogue is perfect. Millions is one in a million – pure gold.

  Sherlock Holmes is such a great character and an inspiration to many other detectives. There are so many wonderful Sherlock Holmes stories that I would be hard-pressed to pick a favourite.

  If you loved Out of The Depths,

  dive into these books

  COMING SOON

  Seriously spooky stories, with punchy plots

  and feisty characters, guaranteed to thrill

  every reader

  Catch up with Cathy at www.cathymacphail.com

  Tyler Lawless returns with more

  nerve-tingling tales from the

  unlawfully dead

  Spooking readers from March 2012

  To order direct from Bloomsbury Publishing visit www.bloomsbury.com

  Acknowledgements
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br />   A book is inspired by so many different things.

  I was asked by Tynecastle High School in Edinburgh

  to supply them with a first line for a story competition,

  and they challenged me to write a story using that same first

  line. Hadn’t a clue what I was going to write. Until I visited

  another school, St Joseph’s College in Dumfries, and the

  pupils there were so keen for me to use their wonderfully

  atmospheric school in a book. And then, in another

  school, I met the real Tyler Lawless, and it all came

  together. Light-bulb moment.

  Thank you all.

  Also by Cathy MacPhail

  Run, Zan, Run

  Missing

  Bad Company

  Dark Waters

  Fighting Back

  Another Me

  Underworld

  Roxy’s Baby

  Worse Than Boys

  Grass

  The Nemesis Series

  Into the Shadows

  The Beast Within

  Sinister Intent

  Ride of Death

  Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney

  First published in Great Britain in November 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © Cathy MacPhail 2011

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved.

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.