The Killing Woods

by Lucy Christopher

  ‘Tag!’ I shout as I grab him.

  He shakes his head, shakes his arm from my grip. ‘You have to keep hold ten seconds. You must remember the rules from Junior School! Give up?’

  ‘No!’ Though I’m sweating and panting hard.

  He shrugs. ‘Catch me then.’

  He runs faster down the bike trail. But I know where this trail curves, where there’s a shortcut I can use to head him off. It’s a shortcut I remember from ages ago, from when Dad had found an injured rabbit there. A few metres more and I dart down it: I’ll be back on the bike trail before Damon even realises.

  I leap brambles and branches. This shortcut is so wildly overgrown I can only focus on being fast, not quiet, on getting back to the bike trail before Damon gets there. I don’t look to the sides, don’t want to remember the click of that rabbit’s neck as Dad twisted it dead, or the soft, limp warmth of lifeless rabbit in my palms straight after.

  ‘It’s kinder this way,’ Dad had said. ‘Trust me. Put it out of its misery.’

  But I’d felt really sick at the way Dad had acted like that death was so necessary, that it was hopeless to even think about trying to save it.

  I keep my eyes straight ahead. I’ll grab Damon for longer than ten seconds and I’ll make him listen: see things from my side. Suddenly I’m bursting on to that trail and I’m spinning around left and I’m waiting. Damon’s coming straight for me, but he’s looking back over his shoulder. My chest heaves. When he sees me he skids in the earth, waving his arms about to slow himself, his mouth opening in surprise. He doesn’t have time to stop, not really.

  And I don’t think.

  I do something really stupid.

  I launch myself at him.

  I feel the hardness of his chest against me, hear the air leave his throat, and then he’s falling back against the ground and I’m on top, pushing. I get a flash of memory of what happened with Kirsty today, a twist of fear at what I am. Then I’m pinning his arms, putting my knees on his shoulders. I’m doing what Dad taught me to do once: disable the enemy as quickly as possible.

  ‘Dad wasn’t the only one in the woods that night!’ I scream it into his face. ‘And Dad couldn’t have chased anyone . . . not on these paths, not at night. He’s scared! When he’s in the woods, he doesn’t leave that bunker – there’s no way he could have stalked Ashlee!’

  I’m trying to make Damon see Dad as I do – make him see how Dad can’t be a killer, certainly not a murderer.

  ‘Dad gets scared in thunderstorms,’ I add. ‘Loud noises give him flashbacks. And he was in a flashback that night, but he didn’t kill Ashlee. Not murder, not manslaughter!’ I push into Damon’s chest so hard he can’t say anything back. Not until I’m finished. ‘Dad’s scared of heights,’ I explain, ‘of getting lost, of people, he’s scared of everything!’

  Damon is breathing funny. Perhaps I’ve winded him. I don’t get off him to check.

  ‘There was someone else,’ I say. ‘There must’ve been. Dad just found Ashlee that night, he was trying to help!’

  ‘Ridiculous,’ Damon hisses.

  ‘No! Dad doesn’t remember anything – that’s got to mean he didn’t do it!’

  Damon shakes his head. ‘No one else knows where that bunker is – Ashlee didn’t.’

  I lean closer, place my palms against Damon’s cheeks to keep his face still. ‘What did you see that night anyway? You were in the woods, you were in the car park at least! Why didn’t you see Dad if he was really watching and stalking her? You should’ve been a witness to that . . . if it happened.’

  Damon’s eyes narrow. ‘Get off me.’

  I don’t move. ‘Why didn’t you walk Ashlee all the way home, anyway? What kind of boyfriend leaves his drunk girlfriend in the woods after dark?’

  ‘You don’t know what I did.’ His face is red – mad! His voice is fierce.

  ‘You’re the last one who saw her alive, though,’ I say. ‘So why don’t you know anything? You should be the one giving me answers!’

  ‘Get the fuck off me!’

  I shake my head. ‘I caught you. I did my detention.’ I’m surprised at how confident I sound – surprised at the things I’m saying to him too. But I have to make him see. ‘I’ll get off you if you admit that it might not have been Dad who killed her, that there are other possibilities . . .’

  Damon looks even more furious than he did in the courtroom. I feel his breath against my skin, see his copper-coloured eyes glaring, and the sweat beading above his lips. I watch his top lip rise, see a glint of his straight perfect teeth underneath. There’s a beating feeling inside me, in my ears and chest. For a second I want to lean further into him, press my lips on his, taste his sweat and tag him that way . . . win like this. Show him. I want him to admit that I could be right. Perhaps Damon sees this because, so quickly, he’s pushing me off him and I fall hard on to the track. He crawls away, breathing heavily.

  ‘Freak!’ he spits. ‘Psycho! You’re just the same as him – the fucking same!’

  He gets up. He actually runs from me! I sit in the dirt, watching him go. I don’t know what the hell I just did. Why did I even say that stuff? Why did I get so mad? Why did I want to touch his lips like that too?

  I grab a bundle of damp cold leaves and squeeze them, hard. My breath is coming heavy and fast and my hands are quivering, and I’m thinking over and over, Who am I?

  12

  Damon

  I get out of there, skidding through damp, stinking leaves with rain starting to piss down on me. What the fuck? That wasn’t meant to happen; I’m not the one who’s meant to be running away right now. I wipe sweat from my eyes. I want to outrun all the crazy stuff Emily Shepherd was just shouting about – it don’t mean nothing! So what if her dad is scared of storms and heights and all the rest of it? It don’t mean there was someone else who killed Ashlee! Don’t mean it wasn’t him! I should never have met her here. I need Emily Shepherd in my life right now about as much as I need a bullet in my brain.

  I grab a small branch that’s hanging down, knocked about by the wind. I use it to bash at things: whack the dead, dried heads off foxgloves. I can’t believe she caught me! I’m never caught; not unless I want to be.

  As I run, I’m checking where I am – deep inside Darkwood, Game Play. Ashlee and the rest of us would have run round here stacks of times. Maybe this is where Shepherd watched Ashlee; maybe I’m somewhere near his bunker too. That would explain why his daughter knows this place so well; he must’ve showed her it. That should’ve been her detention: to show me that bunker too, to make her go there and face the truth. ’Cause the police still ain’t telling no one where it is.

  I’m breathing hard: two months off the Game and I’ve got unfit. Emily Shepherd looked too small and weak to run that fast and far, I didn’t think she’d keep up. If I was any sort of decent sports prefect I’d get her on a school team; instead I’ll get as far away from her as I can.

  I snap the branch, chuck the ends at a clump of bracken. The rain slides over my skull and inside my sports shirt: it’s cold, winter rain that’s come too early. I go faster. It feels weird running like this again, so fast and without the Game. This is how Mack and I used to run when we’d first come into these woods, when we’d run through town, sneak silently through the crack in the barracks fence as a shortcut, when we’d sprint through here. We’d lie exhausted on the forest floor after, breathing in time. Then we were brothers, part of the same pack – we was training for the army and stopping the bad thoughts inside of us same time.

  ‘Push yourself,’ Mack had said. ‘How much can your body can take, how much pain?’

  I’d made my body hurt so much I’d stopped thinking of anything else. For a time I did.

  I turn on to a bridleway. It’s not like there’ll be any horse riders out in this weather anyway, but there are deer. I hear them surging through the forest to my left. There are flashes of movement in the trees as they start to run with me – same direction, a
lmost the same speed. The thick undergrowth they leap in makes them slow. If I was with Mack and the others we’d be running after them, seeing how fast they could go. But this time I try to keep my feet in rhythm with the thud of their hooves, try to keep running as if I’m part of their herd. It’d be easy to be the stag leading those hinds away. As a stag, I could forget. I could piss off out of here and no one would notice. Emily Shepherd couldn’t catch me then. No one could.

  13

  Emily

  The rain is tipping down cold. Suddenly, being alone in these woods doesn’t feel so good: I get going. I don’t understand what just happened, why I’d felt so angry, why I’d wanted to push Damon over and make him listen. I don’t understand why I’d wanted to touch his lips either.

  Maybe I’m exactly like Damon said I am, like Kirsty said too: a freak, a psycho. No wonder people look at me strangely in the street. I am strange.

  I go the quickest way home, on a path that passes near to where the bunker is. I should find out what has happened to it – I know I should – but I’m still not ready. Not when it’s getting dark, not when shadows are slipping like unwanted thoughts between the trees. I glance left, study the dark spaces between silver birch trunks. It would be so easy for someone to stand still in there without me ever knowing. There are thoughts standing at the edge of my brain too. There are the questions Damon asked that I don’t have answers for.

  Today I’m glad to get out of Darkwood. I go through the wooden gate and stand on the cobbles in the lane behind our house, head bent and lightheaded. I feel like a horse just bolted, something that was wild a moment ago, caught and thrown into the light. Without looking back at the trees I turn right towards our house, keep walking down the middle of the lane to the end of the row. We have the last house at the edge of town, the last house before acres of woodland. And it’s not owned by the army, it’s ours. Mum used to say our house was holding the wilderness back; Dad said it was the town we were keeping at bay. I’m still not sure.

  My shoes are squelching, and my sports shirt is stuck to my spine. If Mum guesses where I’ve been she’ll be furious. But perhaps she’s already on to her second glass of wine. Florence is at the back door, wet and thin. I stick my key in the lock, quietly turn it, let Florence slip in ahead, her tail winding briefly around my leg. We hardly ever use the back door now and it whinges, stiff.

  ‘That you, Emily?’

  Mum doesn’t sound drunk. Quickly I shout some excuse about staying back to do homework with Joe. She might believe this more easily if I had my schoolbag as a prop, if I wasn’t dressed in soaking muddy sports kit. I quickly push off my trainers. There’s an unpacked shopping bag on the kitchen table with bottles of wine, a defrosting pizza and some oven chips inside. Florence is purring against me, but I’m not even stopping for her. When I hear one of Mum’s quiz shows start up on the telly, I tiptoe through the hall. But she shouts again when I’ve got one foot on the stairs.

  ‘Why are you so late? It’s almost dark!’

  Maybe I could bolt for it, make it upstairs and lock myself in the bathroom until I’ve washed off the evidence of the woods. I hear the creak of the couch as Mum gets up out of it. Then she’s standing near me, her eyes running over my wet hair and clothes, the mud.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ She leans forward and plucks a twig from my shoulder.

  ‘Just felt like a walk.’ It sounds pathetic, and anyway, I can see Mum knows exactly where I’ve been.

  She crosses her arms very slowly, studying me. Her oversized cardi makes her look thin, her wrists like sparrow’s legs emerging from its bulky sleeves. That’s another thing that’s happened to us in these past few weeks: we’ve got thin, saved on food bills.

  ‘You’ve been in there again, haven’t you? You’ve been in . . .?’

  I wait for her to say one of the words she no longer uses: Darkwood, the woods, Dad’s bunker; all the words that were once so common in this house. It’s as if she’s allergic to them now, though, as if she’ll break out in a rash if she even thinks the words. Once, Mum would say there was something about Dad and me when we’d been in Darkwood, a wild magic threaded through us. Once, she’d been happy that Dad took me there to learn about the forest. Once, she’d come with us. Now, she frowns.

  ‘Why do you want to go back in there anyway?’ She gives me this look like I’ve disappointed her, like I’m the freak that Damon and Kirsty think I am.

  ‘It’s autumn,’ I say. ‘The leaves are starting to turn. I always go then.’

  She doesn’t buy it. She’s suspicious. Just like she was suspicious of Dad after he was discharged from the army. She doesn’t trust either of us in those woods any more.

  ‘I didn’t go to the bunker,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t want to hear about that place.’ Her lips go tight and thin, and she’s already turning away. ‘I wish you’d never found it, that you’d never mention it again!’

  But I wish she wouldn’t switch off like this. I used to tell Mum everything about the woods in its different seasons and she used to want to hear it. It’s hard enough having her switch off about Dad, but pretending the bunker and Darkwood don’t exist too?

  ‘You don’t have to hate the woods,’ I say. ‘They’re just woods, they didn’t do anything.’

  Mum flashes me a look. She goes into the kitchen and I follow, not wanting her to ignore me any longer. She grabs the nearest bottle of wine and twists the top off: Cabernet Sauvignon, 14 per cent alcohol, red wine now. I wonder what it would take for her to move on to spirits? If she knew I’d fought Kirsty today? If she knew I’d chased Damon Hilary through the trees? That I had a detention?

  ‘Don’t go into Darkwood again,’ she says. ‘It’s not safe.’

  I hold her gaze. ‘I thought you didn’t believe me when I said someone else killed Ashlee Parker? That it wasn’t Dad?’

  ‘I don’t.’ Her gaze falters, flutters to the wine. ‘I just don’t want you back in there. I’m serious, Emily. There are other things that aren’t safe in those woods too, other people.’

  ‘You can’t stop me.’

  Mum meets my gaze with another sharp look. But saying I can’t go into Darkwood is like telling someone else not to go to school, or to visit their friends: Darkwood is the place I belong. At least, it always used to be.

  ‘The quicker we move away from those rotten trees the better,’ she says.

  I want to yell that I won’t move anywhere, but then I see that her eye make-up is smudged and guess she’s been crying at work again. It makes me hesitate. We’re both quiet as she pours a large glass of wine, listening to how the liquid gulps and glugs. I don’t want her to take a mouthful and push past me towards the telly, but this is what she does. I’d rather she shouted at me, got nasty even; slapping me across the face would be better than this. I’d rather she do anything except keep playing numb! I follow her into the lounge. This is when I see what she’s done.

  ‘Where have all the photos gone?’

  I take a step inside. None of our photographs are standing proudly on top of the mantelpiece any more. All the ones of the three of us sharing birthdays and holidays have disappeared, even the one of me and Mum having a snowball fight when I was about five years old has gone.

  ‘I don’t want to remember those times with your father,’ Mum says.

  ‘But Dad’s not even in half those shots!’

  Mum keeps staring at the telly with her cheeks a little red. There’s a tight, angry feeling in my throat, and it’s a bit like how I felt with Kirsty today, like how I felt with Damon. It’s hard to swallow. Ever since we knew Dad was pleading guilty to manslaughter – ever since we’d met Dad’s lawyers in the city and they’d laid out the case for us – it’s as if Mum wants to erase Dad from everything, every single part of our lives. Perhaps she wishes she could erase him from me too. It would explain why she never looks at me properly any more, why she doesn’t ever want to talk. It would explain why she always seems so disappointed.r />
  ‘Where did you put them?’ I stand between her and the telly so she can’t ignore me.

  She raises her eyebrows to the ceiling as if she thinks I’m an idiot for even asking. I want to hate her . . . but if I hate Mum too, I’m running out of people to love.

  ‘You have to start accepting what’s happening, Emily, stop living in a fantasy world.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with the photographs?’ It’s all I can think of to say.

  ‘You have to accept your father is different now!’ Her voice is battling it out with the roar of laughter from the telly. ‘He’s not coming back! You might as well start dealing with this.’

  I want to throw things at her. Tip wine over her face. I want her to stop watching television and discuss this with me normally. Instead I just glare, and she angles her head to continue to watch her quiz show around me. I swallow to stop myself screaming.

  ‘I don’t have to accept anything!’

  She sighs, longer this time. ‘Your father is guilty of manslaughter. He is suffering from severe psychological trauma brought about from what he saw, and did, in combat.’ She speaks these words slowly and carefully, like she’s spelling out something to a little kid. ‘You heard his plea, what the lawyers said. You know all this.’

  She doesn’t look at me. Something’s twisting in my guts.

  ‘He can’t remember anything,’ I say, like I always do. ‘So it could be someone else who killed Ashlee.’

  I move a few steps towards the fireplace and she shifts to see the TV again. She frowns at a question the quiz show host asks about floorboards.

  When the show audience claps she says, ‘You know, Emily, if the prosecution lawyers do accept your father’s manslaughter plea, the court may decide he’s too mentally unstable to even be given a fixed sentence. They may put him in a secure psychiatric hospital indefinitely.’

  I stare hard at the empty shelf where the photos were. ‘So he might never come out?’ I won’t let myself imagine it. ‘Why would they do that?’