beats per minute (6 page)

She sighed as her eye fell on the towers of clothing and
DVDs that seemed to have grown up around the bed. Her head, almost as if in
answer, gave an almighty throb.

Thump thump thump.

After ten minutes Raegan was still searching fruitlessly,
but the noise that seemed to erupt out of the floor was loud and strange enough
to drag her attention away from the old copies of
Glamour
littering the
carpet.

Thump.

 
‘Raegan!’
Con’s voice was
muffled, but it still pierced the quiet like a foghorn. A few more thumps. Was
he hitting the kitchen ceiling?
Another thump.
It
definitely sounded like a broom handle.

It was also doing nothing for her hangover.

‘You could’ve just knocked on the door,’ she muttered
sourly, clutching at her head before replying with a loud: ‘YEAH?’

‘We’re waiting on you! Get down here or I’ll be up to carry
you!’

She was about to respond when a strange buzzing noise made
her prick up her ears. Was that Con making the floor shake, or something else?
She held her breath.

Yes, there it was again, humming through the silence, a definite
buzz – like a phone vibrating! And it seemed to be coming from the pile of
clothing just by the door. With no thought for her bruised elbows, she flung
herself on the mound, sending clothes flying around the room.

‘YES!’ Breathing heavily, the phone clutched in her hand,
she sat up. ‘Raegan 1, Room 0.
Happy birthday to me.’

Her excitement quickly turned to surprise when she saw the
screen. A flashing envelope letting her know she’d run out of space in her
inbox, ten missed calls and two voicemails! She scrolled through the missed
calls list. Ramsay Home, Private Number,
some
0800 she
didn’t recognise… and then her finger slowed as the same name appeared, over
and over: Marie. Marie. Marie. Marie. Marie. Five calls within the space of an
hour.

‘
You have… two… new… messages…’

‘First message sent today at… two twenty-six am.’

‘Raegan!’
Her friend’s voice was
loud and excited as it battled against the background traffic noise. ‘Where did
you go off to? Naughty girl, ditching me, I didn’t even get a chance to sing!
Soooo: happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear
Raegan… or, wait, shouldn’t it be that song, you know, that old one my dad
likes
?-
“happy birthday sweet sixte-e-een”.’ She
finished with a tuneless flourish, giggling drunkenly. ‘Have a good one, babe.
What’s that? Oh yeah, Christian says to say Happy Birthday from him.’ Her voice
dropped to a whisper. ‘I think he likes you!’

Beep.

‘Second message sent today at…two fifty-seven am.’

‘Raegan?
Raegan, where are you?’
This time the voice on the end of the phone was quiet.
Breathless,
almost.
Then Marie spoke again and Raegan’s heart gave a lurch as she
realised her friend was crying. ‘I don’t know where I am. Philip and Christian
said they wanted to go to the Shack, and that they knew a shortcut through the
woods. But then they started messing, pushing me about, ‘
cause
I couldn’t see where I was going, like it was funny. Then they ran off. They
were l-l-laughing at me…’ Marie was crying hard now. ‘I’m in Lydgale somewhere,
but it’s so dark, and I’m nearly out of battery. Please, I can’t tell my dad
about this, he’d kill me! Please get this message! Please come and get me!
Please-‘

‘
End of message.’

Raegan hung up. It was as if she was in a daze; her fingers,
scrabbling at the keys, didn’t seem to be working fast enough. After an age she
finally pulled up Marie’s number and pressed ‘call’. Her mobile was switched
off. Her house phone just rang and rang and rang.

Her hands were shaking as she let the phone drop from her
ear. So many possibilities flitted through her mind, none of them good. What if
something had happened to Marie? What should she do? Call Marie’s father? Call
the police? Her eyes began to sting and she could feel the tears clawing at her
throat.
What do
I
do I don’t know what to do what
do I do…

Marie’s voice, anguished, panicked, echoed in her mind:
‘Please come and get me!’
Please. Please. Please.
Her mother’s voice
after the car had hit her.
Please.
The blood, warm and wet, sliding
through her fingers…

She groped for the floor blindly, desperate for something to
hold onto.

Her heart was hammering; her head overtaken with a sudden
dizzying lightness, as if like a balloon it could disconnect from her neck and
float up to the ceiling. Then, as if responding to the tumult of emotions, her
vision began to fluctuate. She blinked once, twice, but it continued. The
familiar room was mutating before her eyes. The sky outside the window appeared
to be changing from light to dark and back again, and the objects in the room
bent at the edges, in and out like a maniacal squeezebox. What was happening to
her? Was she hallucinating? The room continued to morph for split-seconds at a
time. She was going mad. Frightened, she pressed the heels of her hands, one
still clutching the phone, into her eyes.

The darkness was soothing. Focusing on her breathing and
nothing else, she commanded herself to exhale in and out, slowly – like her mum
had always told her to. Gradually, her heart began to slow.

In that moment it had been like her feelings and body were
linked: upset one and the other replied. Was that even possible?

With apprehension, Raegan cracked one eye open, and then the
other. The room was still. A great rush of air burst out of her lungs in relief
and she gripped the edge of the bed to steady herself, pulling herself to
standing.  

Either her hangover had reached brain-tumour proportions or
she was going mad, but right now she didn’t have time to focus on that. All
that mattered was that Marie was safe. A sickening sense of dread crawled over
her skin but she prayed, again and again, that this was just an
overreaction.  Just because Marie’s phone was off didn’t mean she was in
trouble. It could all be in her head.

Yes, that was it, Raegan told herself. She was probably
overreacting and she just needed to see Marie in person to reassure
herself.  After lunch she would go to her house. Marie was probably
hungover and probably hadn’t even charged her phone yet! Yes, that sounded like
something her friend would do. The fact that so much of her logic relied on the
word ‘probably’ was deliberately ignored. Raegan forced a smile; in the mirror
it looked as false as the Cheshire
Cat’s
grin.

Everything would be fine.

I’m going mad.

The thought reverberated in Raegan’s head as she walked.

What sane person decided to spend her birthday chasing after
a friend who was probably just dying of a hangover somewhere? What sane person
turned up at said friend’s house
and
her place of work? And what sane
person, after getting no answer at either property, decided to
go into the
woods?

‘And not just any woods,’ she muttered to herself, crunching
her way over damp leaves and uneven soil.
‘Creepy old Lydgale
Forest.
The one Bridey tells ghost stories about. Plus it’s raining.
Plus Con and Bridey don’t actually even know where you are. Great plan.’

And now you’re talking to yourself, the little voice in her
head cautioned.
Also a sign of insanity.

But it wasn’t madness driving her on. It wasn’t some kind of
latent alcohol poisoning. It wasn’t even fear. No, after she’d come down to
earth and some food and normal conversation with her grandparents had eased the
panic, it seemed to dawn on Raegan that Marie’s voicemail was probably just the
product of a drunken night out. True, she had sounded scared, and true, the
thought of Marie alone in the woods at night sent a shiver down Raegan’s spine
– but the chance of anything happening beyond that was incredibly remote. Her
friend was much more likely to be sleeping it off than in any kind of trouble.

Also true was that guilt, for Raegan, was even stronger than
fear. And she couldn’t get rid of the crushing feeling that if she hadn’t left
Mojo’s, hadn’t believed Christian when he said Marie had gone without her, this
would never have happened. It was her fault Marie had been left alone with
those two guys in the first place.

If anything had happened to Marie it was all her fault. Even
if the chances were slim that was the truth: there was no denying it.

Which is why – despite the angry storm clouds over head and
random drops of rain falling from a dusky sky; despite the fact that it was the
evening of her sixteenth birthday; and despite the fact that her grandfather
had grounded her – Raegan now found herself poking around the depressing,
derelict old building known as the Shack.

Why anyone would want to party here was beyond her, she
thought, kicking aside old beer cans as she trudged around the open plan room
at the bottom of the house. Old, damp mattresses, a few items of clothing –
nothing she recognised from Marie, thank god – and wine bottles lay alongside
old cigarette butts and something that looked suspiciously like a used condom.
Gross.

After twenty minutes of searching she had seen everything
there was to see; which was a good thing, as she didn’t think she could put up
with the smell for much longer. Still, she was glad she came. It was a relief
to see the place with her own eyes, to know that there was nothing in the Shack
to suggest that Marie had ever even been here. She shrugged. What she was
expecting to find, she didn’t know, but Marie’s voicemail made her worry that
if Christian and Philip thought it was funny to push her around in the dark,
they might also think it was funny to drag her to the Shack against her will.
And once inside… she shuddered. She didn’t want to think about it.

But it didn’t look like anything had gone down at the Shack
recently. In fact, it didn’t look as though the place had been used for months.

She furrowed her brow. That seemed weird. Why would
Christian and Philip even want to hit the Shack if there wasn’t a party going
on?

Before she could ponder that fact a rumble of thunder
distracted her. Racing to the entrance, which was marked by a rusty old door
hanging off its hinges, Raegan stepped out into the forest. The sky seemed to
swell angrily overhead, parting to shoot patters of rain onto the earth.
Lydgale Forest, wide, dark and long, loomed before her.

‘What am I doing,’ she muttered, suddenly feeling like an
idiot; the kid playing detective. Staring at the lowering sky also made her
realise just how quickly the light was fading. Standing alone in the woods was
probably not a good idea, no matter how excellent a track record for crime St
Jude’s possessed. She should go before it got really dark.

Easier said than done.
Taking a
step forward, she was immediately spooked by a sudden rush of air and something
winged flew over and close to her head, screeching. Recovering, she stood as
still as possible and tried not to make a sound as her eyes adjusted to the
gloom.

Then she noticed the hand.

White as snow, it emerged, a little way in the distance,
almost completely submerged in a monstrous, towering pile of brown and red
foliage. To her dismay, though mostly hidden, the fingers - slightly curved as
if beckoning her closer - were unmistakeably human.

Images flooded her mind so powerfully she felt physically
bombarded: the pale skin of her mother’s corpse, so delicate and human against
the unforgiving, black road; the doctor’s palm on the defibrillator as the ECG
monitor beeped and sputtered, transmitting her mother’s falling bpm, her
failing life, in garish green; her own long fingers, wrapped around her
necklace; and then an unfamiliar vision of foreign, white hands turning over
hourglasses. Reeling, she dropped to her knees, pressing her fists against her
temples as if warding off an attack. The forest swam before her. Sluggishly she
struggled to her feet and tried to move toward the hand - this person could
still be alive, and in need
of
help – but it was like
wading through tar. Her heart felt frozen in her chest, unable to supply oxygen
to her static muscles.

With tremendous effort, she forced herself forward.
Swallowing back the sudden rush of saliva into her dry mouth and the pressing
urge to vomit, she tentatively placed her fingers to the inert wrist. It was
stone-cold.

Raegan didn’t allow herself to draw any conclusions; to do
so would be to give way to the tears that were threatening. She had to carry
on. At what point she should call the police, she didn’t know – all she knew
was that she couldn’t just leave it like this, buried under leaves, dirt, and
assorted rubbish that had blown over. She also felt an urgent need to see this
person’s face; as if she owed it to him or her. Clinically, decisively, she
began to pull the leaves off the body. Thorns stuck to her blue woollen gloves
so she peeled them off and worked with her bare hands. Even as they grew
reddened, sore and so cold that the fingers did not want to work, she did not
stop.

After it seemed like years had passed her urgently moving
hands finally came to a halt. An old woman, her eyes shut, with long grey hair
and two thin legs sticking out of a battered, green coat, lay before her. Her
face was unmarked but below the neck she was one big bruise; the coat gaped at
the top, so that naked flesh, purple and raw, peeked out. Feeling incredibly
sad, Raegan tugged the zipper up. Protecting this woman’s dignity was the least
she could do. As she did, a flash, something vibrant and green, hit her eye.
Her fingers froze in mid-motion.

After a long, long moment, during which the entire forest
seemed poised in waiting – hardly daring to pierce the silence with the merest
rustle -the zip, now trembling, continued on its downward journey.

Tears fell on the green material as something of the same
colour, but an altogether more dazzling shade, was pulled out to rest against
it. Raegan would have recognised the object anywhere. It was one of a kind and
had meant so much to the one it was made for.

It was Marie’s necklace.

A strangled sob broke its way free from her throat.
Disbelieving, her mind whirled. How could this be? This was an old woman – had
she stolen the necklace from her? Marie would never have given this up without
a fight...

But there was something about the shape of the woman’s head,
the tilt of her brow, the curve of her lip... hardly daring to breathe, and
feeling totally morbid, Raegan slid the zipper down a little further. The
bruises were more extreme the lower she went. Violet now mingled with an
unpleasant, painful yellowish brown. Gently, she pushed the edge of the coat to
the side, not wanting to glimpse more than was strictly necessary.

It was as she had known it would be, deep down. The tiny
blue butterfly was there, dancing across the chest that would never again move
with breath.

***

By the time she struggled to her feet again, night had
fallen. The only light shone dimly from the houses in front of the forest,
separated from the trees by a concrete alley, looming solidly but offering
little comfort; like a squat, impenetrable line of backs turned away in
disinterest from the young girl weeping over her friend. She knew it was Marie;
every fibre of her body told her so. And yet she was racked with confusion. It
was impossible.

More importantly, if she could not quite reconcile herself
to Marie’s fate, how on earth could she tell anyone? She imagined herself
striding up to the police station and declaring, ‘I’ve found Marie! Yes, that
girl, you know, the one who hadn’t even been reported missing? She’s in the
woods, except it looks nothing like her because she’s not wearing the same
clothes, her hair is a different colour, and she’s very pale. Oh yeah, and
she’s about seventy years older – should I have mentioned that before?’

The truth was unlikely to set her free. Instead, it had
isolated her in a prison of awful realisation: the reality of what Marie had
suffered was hers to bear. No one would believe her. She was completely alone.

The unfamiliar crunching sound slowly piercing her
consciousness quickly disproved that assumption.

There was something about this sound that set it apart from
the frequent rustles of creatures in their nests. Raegan’s voice rang out, high
and terrified, on the cold air. ‘Hello? Is somebody there?’

The wind tossed her words back to her and she wished
straight away that she’d kept her mouth shut. Why was she standing here like
this, waiting for the noise to get closer? Then her eyes fell on the prone body
of her friend and she remembered. She could not just scurry off down the path
beside the houses. She could not leave her.

So she stood, eyes straining, as a pair of feet picked their
way across the leaves. The unmistakeable shape of a man bloomed in the darkness,
his fine-boned features and wide, pale blue eyes strangely discernible in the
absence of light. Raegan inhaled quickly. It was Christian.

And as Christian glided toward her, with the loping, easy
grace of a leopard about to crush some unsuspecting warthog, her pendant began
to throb. Usually cool and light against her chest, it now burned her skin with
a furious intensity.

It wasn’t logic that told her what to do. It was her blood
screaming through her veins and her gut clenching like a fist. Instinct alone
commanded her to turn on her heel. And run.

Her feet pounded on the spring carpet of the forest and her
heart jumped until it was pulsating in her throat. She felt vomit rising but
she didn’t care. All that mattered was getting away.
A
terrible wind, which rocketed her head back painfully as she tore through the
trees, howled in her ears.
The branches whipped back and forth at an
accelerated rate, scratching her arms.

Now her feet met pavement with dry, frantic slaps. Her chest
was beginning to hurt, breath ripping at her lungs with her rising bpm.
Keep
going.
The wind was still fighting her, and as she reached the side of the
row of houses her vision blurred in and out of focus. She imagined Christian’s
breath hot on her neck.

And then it happened.

The now familiar sensation.
The distortion of perspective, the images curling at the edges,
bending, like in her bedroom earlier that day.
Her mind was failing her.
Just keep going.
Her eyes were rolling in her head, panicked, as she continued
to move: she was being swallowed whole by a nightmare. She had no choice but to
plunge into the opening; but the path before was now a neverending tunnel,
terrifying, mutating in front of her eyes, compressing and expanding in tandem
with the beating of her heart. Cars zipped back and forth in the distance like
shooting stars, gone in a blink. She felt a strange crackle along her skin as
if all the hairs had shot up to stand on end. The pendant pulsed with heat
alongside.

The urge to stop and put her head between her knees had
never been stronger; but her desire to live won out. On she ran.

Suddenly, Christian was beside her. Then, as if
materialising out of thin air, he was on the other side; the howling of the
wind seemed to accelerate when he was near. Now, with a burst of unreal speed,
so fast she did not even see, he was in another position: flinging open the
gate, further down the path, and running toward her.

She skidded to a halt, her arms outstretched, certain he was
going to crash into her,
at
the speed he was going he
would knock her off her feet-

Her hands met thin air.

The weight of her movement propelled her forward, and
instinctively she fell down to one knee. Her darting eyes found only the flimsy
wood fence framing the alleyway and the dark expanse of the forest and roads
beyond; again, and again, she checked, but there was not a soul in sight. Even
so, her attention did not waver. She did not allow herself to register concern
that her vision was still flickering at the edges, as if objects in her
periphery were vanishing and reappearing at will. She did not even think about
why her pendant had begun to cool against her clammy skin. As her bpm returned
to normal the unsteadiness in her vision began to subside. She hardly noticed.

Her body, unused to exercise, ached. She was still shaking
from adrenaline and fear. But a little voice cut through the sticky, tar-like
mire of her mind and told her that she was too exposed, like a sitting duck.
She had to keep moving.