When Darkness Falls - Six Paranormal Novels in One Boxed Set

by Shalini Boland

  “Seth!” I yell into the nothingness. “Seth!”

  He could be hurt. He could have lost me in the dark. He’s probably wandering around the moors right now, as alone as I am… or worse… killed by Amy, cold and stiff on the ground.

  How long was I unconscious for?

  “Seth!”

  My heart pounds as hard as the wind buffets my jacket. The last time I was filled with so much fear, I almost burned in a fire. The scars on my neck seem to heat, as though I am right there again.

  The image of Gethen with the knife in his hand…

  “Stop it. Stop it.” I whisper it aloud, as though it will prevent my mind from conjuring any more frightening images. Maybe it will.

  I fall back to my knees, searching for the knife as fast as I can, trying to work in a sequence, but finding myself going over the same patches of grass each time. As my hand works, my mind wanders, thoughts twisted by the loneliness of the dark and the stretching of the moors. What if Seth is the murderer? He’s out there somewhere, waiting to kill me. But, no, he can’t be. I saw his heart. I saw his mum in that hospital bed… the friendly nurse…

  It could be a ruse. He could have them all fooled. The quiet, thoughtful boy with the tragic past, the sort of young man always loved by middle-aged women and anyone else who longs to mother him. How do I know his father died in a car accident? How do I know he wasn’t the cause of his father’s death and his mother’s coma? I trusted him blindly, relying on the warm gooey feelings in my stomach instead of the cold hard facts. I let lust control me.

  There is no one to turn to. No one at all. How can I trust a vengeful ghost, a known killer? I know ghosts to be tricksters, driven to invent problems out of boredom. Lacey is sympathetic to Amy because they share a desire. Neither of them want to move on to the next plane of existence. Amy stays for revenge, while Lacey stays for… me?

  She could be motivated by jealousy, annoyed that Seth has taken a place in my life so abruptly, warped by her new ghost form. She is unable to feel human contact ever again. She will never be able to love again.

  Because Gethen took her away from me, leaving me with an echo of what she was.

  No, I mustn’t think like that. Lacey is different to Amy; she is still the same Lacey I met in Magdelena, the same girl who came to help me, even though she knew she could die.

  Tears fall down my nose as I continue to crawl through the mud with my hands outstretched. Once or twice I mistake cool stone for the cold metal of a dagger, and both times it seems like a cruel trick, played on me by the moors.

  I hate the moors. They are a hateful, spiteful place. They are the crime scene of the world, witness to our bloody history, lying silent and placid as humans empty their black hearts onto their carpet of heather. A scourge.

  I let out a scream, but this time it is just for me.

  If I don’t find this dagger, I may as well give up. Perhaps I should go to Amy right now, exposing my neck—my pitiful, scarred neck—so she can have her way. At least then Lacey will have company in the afterlife. At least then we will be equal again. My parents would adjust. I imagine the attention is quite nice for a daughterless mother. In time she will enjoy the consoling looks and sympathetic touches.

  The moors have me now. They are controlling me. With each trembling shuffle through the grass, I lose a little piece of my sanity. Bitterness creeps in. I imagine it running through my veins, making its way to my heart.

  “I can’t keep going,” I sob. Every part of me is cold and battered by the wind. I’ve searched and searched, but there is nothing.

  Then it comes to me.

  The Thing.

  A zombie-looking monster of a thing could never be a comfort to anyone, except me at that moment. It beckons me forward, and I shuffle on my knees, following its call. Its skull shines from its face like an x-ray, like moonlight on exposed bone. A piece of flesh falls from its finger.

  As I’m about to give up and get to my feet, a sharp blade pierces my fingertip. I cry out, but the sound of my pain is mixed with joy. I found it! I found the Athamé. My fingers wrap around the hilt, never so grateful to feel anything within their grasp. And as I stand up, the laughter bubbles out of me. I forget all of my dark thoughts, putting them down to the moors getting to me, the cold perverting my mind. It’s okay. Seth isn’t a killer; Lacey isn’t bitter; everything is going to be all right. I look up, and the Thing is gone.

  “Thank you,” I say to the darkness.

  With the Athamé, I have at least some protection. Now I need to find the others, so we can complete our mission together.

  “Seth! Lacey!”

  My happiness is premature. I have to find the others first.

  “Igor? Lemarr? Neil?”

  Nothing.

  The wind goes: Shhhwooooo-zhoooooo-vrooooooooo.

  Shhwooooo-zhoooooo-vroooooooooo.

  I have no torch and no way to see through the dark. All I can do is begin to climb the long ascent I tumbled down.

  I start with a step.

  It’s steep. My feet slide and slip in the mud. It’s the moor grass that keeps me going, jutting out in soft ridges, tough enough to hook my feet onto and push myself up. Sometimes I use the Athamé to help.

  I’m almost vertical, and it’s a long climb, with some parts steeper than others. At times I walk almost upright, with sweat pouring down my temples. My ankle is hurt but I can walk on it, and that’s all that matters. I hope that I can still run, if it comes to it.

  On and on in a relentless plod. My breathing is loud and laboured, but barely audible, even to me, over the wind. My bruised muscles ache. Every few steps I stop and call uselessly.

  Seth. Igor. Neil. Lemarr.

  Lacey.

  Seth. Igor. Neil. Lemarr.

  Lacey.

  Both ghosts should be able to sense me. Neither of them come anywhere near me.

  Where is Amy? What is she doing to Seth?

  Lacey is refusing to answer my call. Is she so angry that she has left me for dead? Does she want me to suffer that much?

  They are wearing me down again. I don’t know which of the five moors I am in right now, but it is chipping away at my resolve. Step by step, slip by slip, tread by tread. Not long ago, I felt the cold fear as something crawled across the back of my hand. I think about it now, and each time, it gets bigger. What if it was a snake? They are rare, but venomous snakes exist in England. Worse still, it could be some creature escaped from whatever exotic place it came from. You hear of deadly spiders transported in crates of bananas, or dangerous snakes flushed down the toilet.

  I wipe the sweat from my forehead onto the back of my jacket. The ground is beginning to level out, now. I can’t be far from the summit. Surely, surely this is the end. This is it.

  And what happens when you get there? What are you going to do next?

  When I finally find level ground, my trembling fingers pull my phone from my shoulder bag. Still no signal.

  “Seth?”

  The wind is my one reply. I close my eyes in frustration.

  When I open them, I’m not alone.

  “Amy, you don’t have to do this. You can stop now, I’ll help you find peace. I’ll help all of your…” I search for a word to describe the strange shadows, “friends find peace and move on.”

  She advances. Her tongue snakes out of her mouth.

  At first, my muscles tense with the longing to run, to turn around and sprint into the darkness. But what good will that do me? What is the point in running when I don’t know what I’m running to?

  The Athamé is in my hand.

  “Amy, I’m going to free you. Don’t you understand?”

  I step towards her and lift the blade. Her eyes flicker for a moment, and she backs away from me, unused to her victims standing up for themselves.

  “Okay,” I say aloud. “The first symbol, what is it?” I think back to the night in the graveyard when Igor showed us how to create the circle of protection. “A sweep to the
left, arc underneath, two strokes right…” The symbol begins to take shape, burning brightly through the air. Amy’s eyes follow the movements of the knife like a cat watching a spider crawl across the wall. When it’s done, she stands still, quiet and observant.

  This isn’t the murderous ghost I’m used to.

  I take a sidestep to the right and begin the second symbol. Three strokes left, up and down, to the right… It burns in the air, suspended by nothing. Amy is still.

  It’s working and I don’t want to jinx it. I don’t want to spook her, so I step slowly to the right again, ready to draw the symbol behind her back, but this time, my mind draws a blank. Whenever I think back to Igor’s teaching, I can’t remember the third symbol. Why can’t I remember? Because Seth paused to kiss your nose and you lost concentration.

  Stupid Mary, stupid, stupid. Think. Your life depends on it, think. I close my eyes.

  Cold fingers grip my throat and I open my mouth to scream. As my eyes begin to flutter open, a horrible thought pops into my head. During that split second when my eyes had been closed, I’d imagined Seth with his hands around my neck, his face twisted into an animalistic grimace. It made me hesitate, for a fraction of a moment, frightened by what I might see, frightened that someone I care about could hurt me, and frightened to see Amy with her small wrists under my chin.

  I open my eyes.

  Amy.

  Should I be relieved?

  She presses her forehead against mine, and I feel her like she’s flesh and blood.

  “Don’t…” I croak. “You don’t have to…”

  The air crackles with energy before another shape appears. At first the shape is shadowed in dark, and I think that one of Amy’s strange shadows has come to finish me off, but then it steps forward and the moonlight catches yellow hair.

  Lacey.

  “Get off my friend, you silly cow!” Lacey grabs a handful of Amy’s hair and pulls her back. “I gave you a chance and you blew it. I wanted to help you.”

  Amy lets out a noise like a yelp as Lacey drags her backwards. Her hands release my throat and I rub the life back into the bruised skin. I find myself staring at the two ghosts, gormless and in shock. It takes me a moment to realise I still have the Athamé in my hand.

  “Lacey, hold her still, I’ll perform the ritual.”

  But Amy twists from Lacey’s grip and yanks herself away. Stunned by the confrontation, she gawps at us both, and her blackened eyes humanise with amazement. Her mouth opens and closes as though she is trying to speak.

  “I wanted to help you,” Lacey says.

  Amy drops to the ground. Her bare toes are no longer floating inches from the grass, and it tugs on my heart to see her at her natural height. She’s tiny.

  “I wanted you to trust me,” Lacey continues in a small voice.

  It never occurred to me that Lacey might take this mission so personally. We’ve always talked about stopping Amy from killing, but we’ve never taken the time to see her as the frightened child she is. I realise then that Lacey has grown attached to the girl. They’re both ghosts, and neither of them want to be dead. They were both killed by a murderer. They have a bond I could never understand.

  As Lacey talks, Amy’s strange hair begins to calm. It floats down to her shoulders, lying flat down her cheeks, dropping to her collar bones as hair should fall. She wrings her bloodied hands and the blood stains slowly fade away.

  “I still want you to trust me. We’re not here to hurt you. We just want you to stop hurting other people.”

  Amy’s mouth becomes a normal mouth, her eyes normal eyes, and her dress is whiter than before. Her skin loses the green-blue tinge; it is peachy, pink in the cheeks.

  I’m in awe of my friend. She tames evil before my eyes. She has brought the humanity back to a ghost long caught in a hostile revenge loop. I never imagined that Lacey could be this powerful.

  When Amy speaks for the first time, her voice is tiny. It is the fading wind that allows me to hear her. “I never meant to.”

  “I know,” Lacey says. “I know you didn’t.”

  “Are you going to send me away?” Amy says.

  “Only if you want to go.”

  Amy nods. She turns around and walks, like a regular human child, through the moors. I exchange a glance with my friend, and she indicates for us to follow Amy. We walk together in silence, following in the footsteps of the murdered child.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  There’s a reason many people don’t read the newspapers anymore, or watch the news at 10pm every night. Those who do keep up with current affairs assume that these people are ignorant and stupid. But that’s not the reason at all.

  The news is traumatic. It’s an information ticker of all the worst things human beings are capable of doing. It’s a run-down of the worst deaths from across the world. Some people can’t handle it, and they make the right decision to ignore it.

  Sometimes I wish I could ignore it, too. Maybe I could, if I stopped paying attention to the Things and stopped hanging around with ghosts. Maybe then I wouldn’t find myself on the moors at midnight, with my ears battered by gales and most of my friends missing.

  But I don’t feel like a watcher at all, I feel more like the reporter sent to warzones, like I have a duty to fulfil. There aren’t many people who can hear the dead. I assume there are others like me, out there somewhere, but I don’t know of anyone. So, right now, I’m all Amy has. I’m the only one who can listen to her story. The only living person.

  She shows us.

  We walk back to the spot where Seth told us he crouched behind the rocks and witnessed his father stab a little girl. Amy stands and looks down at the grass with her hands folded behind her back. She has an almost serene expression on her face, one of acceptance.

  When I see him, my stomach lurches so hard I think I might throw up. It’s the eyes first. They are clear, even in the darkness. They are brazil-nut brown, but with a hard glint. Dark stubble lines the jawline that I know so well. He has his shirt sleeves rolled to his elbows. He stands over Amy and the knife blade glints in the moonlight.

  “It’s not him,” Lacey whispers. “It’s okay, it’s not him.”

  Seth’s father is a flickering flame in the night. He’s here as some part of Amy, as she shows us her last night alive. Now I will share those memories with Seth. I’ll have a part of him with me forever.

  After it’s over, Amy walks away again. She is smiling now, like she didn’t just spend the last few minutes watching her own death. She waves us along with her.

  I should be relieved that what I already knew has been confirmed. Seth is not a murderer, but then I saw his heart, so I knew. But I wasn’t sure… It was the moors. I swallow thickly. It was the moors, playing with my mind. Of course it was.

  Amy winds her way through patches of heather, up and over hillocks, down into vales, walking and walking until I wonder if she might be leading me to my death. As the wind rushes through my hair, more strange moor-inspired thoughts pop into my mind—like Amy and Lacey, plotting together to murder me and keep me as a ghost. I shake my head. The moors cannot play with my friendship with Lacey. I trust her.

  Finally, she stops. Without saying a word, she points to a patch of grass, nodding.

  “You want me to dig?” I ask.

  Amy nods again.

  I turn to Lacey and she shrugs.

  I get on my knees for the second time tonight, using my hands, and the Athamé, to dig into the soil. It’s damp and easy to shift. Clods of grass are teased away with little fuss as I plunge the knife into the soil. With each motion, my gut clenches, anticipating what I might find. It could be the remains of another victim. I know that. My fingers shake with every dig, yet I keep going because Amy wants me to, and Amy deserves to be heard.

  When my fingers hit cloth, I panic. Tears fill my eyes.

  I don’t want to see… I don’t want to…

  But Amy nods me on. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t have to.
She simply nods.

  I’m cold all over when I grasp that cloth. I screw my eyes shut as I pull it from the earth. It’s only when I realise how light the object is, that I open them again.

  It isn’t remains. There’s no second body buried in the dirt, Amy has led me to the murder weapon. Wrapped in a bloodied, muddied shirt, is a kitchen knife.

  It looks so small, so small and insignificant. It’s the kind of knife you would use to dice onions into fine mulch. It doesn’t seem sharp enough, somehow.

  I recover it and place it in my bag.

  “I’ll take it to the police,” I tell Amy’s ghost.

  She steps forward with a small smile on her face. She was a beautiful little girl, with skin as soft as peaches. Her cheeks are filled with a delicate blush, and her raven coloured locks fall down to her chest, covering part of her white dress. My heart is sore for her. It’s as though I’ve been scraped with a cheese grater, leaving me raw and utterly shredded.

  “I’m ready now,” she says, in a voice that was robbed of its opportunity to grow up.

  I can’t believe that the girl in front of me is the same creature who tried to kill me—not once, but twice. She seems so calm. All it took was to listen to her story, to watch her memories, and find the evidence to deliver justice.

  “Are you sure?” Lacey asks her.

  Amy nods three times and smiles broadly. Lacey rushes towards her and pulls her into an embrace.

  I wipe the dirt from the Athamé and when Amy has taken her position in front of me, I begin the first symbol. This time, it flows through me as though I was destined to carve this symbol in the air. When it comes to the third symbol, I see it so clearly in my mind that it seems as though I’m looking at a picture. After the fourth symbol, Amy places her hands gently on the circle of protection.

  “I have to put the dagger in your heart,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she replies. “I don’t think it will hurt.”

  When she goes, it is with that same smile on her face. I have tears wetting my cheeks, dripping down my chin. A strange calm descends, finally soothing the squall, bringing with it a little drizzle, to cleanse me of the mud and memories of murder.