Blackfin Sky (14 page)

The hatch to the attic hung open, the pull-cord for the ladder swinging as though a hand had just released it.

‘What are you trying to tell me now?’ Sky muttered, not expecting a direct answer from the Blood House, and receiving none.

The ladder slid silently into place, and Sky hurried up it before her mother could come upstairs and catch her. Once through the hatchway, the smell of dust and old house greeted her. Sky pulled the ladder back up and closed the hatch, sealing herself in the musty darkness.

She turned, groped blindly for the cord to the bare bulb hanging overhead and found it a moment later, like it had been guided toward her hand. She pulled the cord, and the bulb burned into life.

Boxes were strewn in rough piles under the eaves, some marked in Lily’s neat script with words like
diner accounts
and
garage receipts.

Sky mentally discarded those boxes, then hesitated. If her mother wanted to hide something where Sky would never look for it, it would be just like her to mark the box
diner accounts.
Then again, the house and its secrets really belonged to Gui, and he would be more likely to mark it
Top Secret.

‘Start with the obvious, then.’

She started with the boxes that looked the oldest – so dusty that she expected they would have dinosaur eggs inside. But most were filled with the dull things you might find boxed up in any attic – old sweaters, toys from when she was little, picture frames her mother had fallen out of love with over the years. She’d gone through as many musty-smelling sweater boxes as she could take and was about to move onto her mother’s possibly deceptive
diner accounts
boxes when she pulled out the final sweater and found a wooden memento case hidden at the bottom. Its surface was scarred and pitted, bearing the initials ‘G.F.R.’ in one corner.

Guillaume François Rousseau.

The letters were crude, like they had been carved there by a child with a compass.

‘Bingo?’ Sky murmured uncertainly, setting the memento case on an old bureau under the single light. There was no complicated locking mechanism, just a hinge keeping the two halves of the case together. Sky opened it carefully, and thought for a moment that she had hit the jackpot.

Faded newspaper cuttings were packed inside the case, some with pictures under the headings. But they were all in French, and from the dates at the top of some of the articles, from way before Sky’s encounter at the Big Top could have happened, judging by how old her parents had looked. Her heart sank a little – until one word caught her eye.

Kidnappé.

Who had been kidnapped, though? The image accompanying the article was of a family with three children – two girls with long, dark pigtails, and a little boy with bushy hair who looked about ten. The only remarkable thing about the family was the colossal size of the man.

‘I’m guessing you must be Grandpa Rousseau,’ Sky realised. She stared at the man, so like her father in the way he stood with one big arm around his wife’s shoulders, his eyes crinkled at the edges from years of smiling.

That’s not the face of a murderer.

She unfolded the newspaper clipping and scanned the text.

Her French wasn’t good enough to decipher most of it, but she at least confirmed her guess. The words
M et Mme Rousseau avec leurs enfants
were written in the second paragraph:
Mr and Mrs Rousseau with their children.

It would have been hard to tell just from the grainy image, but now she could pick out her father’s features in the little boy.

Sky flicked through the other articles. Some focused on the parents, but one image featured a man Sky had never seen before. He had a gaunt face with sunken eyes, and lips which looked ready to twist into a foul expression at any moment.
Recherché par la police
was written beneath the artist’s sketch.

‘Are you the kidnapper, then?’ she asked the article, flipping it over to see whether there was anything else on the back.

That was when she saw it.

On the back of the article was another printed image, only this one looked like a promotional shot for
Le Cirque de Séverin
which had been copied to go with the news article. It featured a row of circus performers, all lined up in front of the Big Top with their ringmaster in the middle of the group. Even in the faded news copy, Severin’s eyes bored into her.

Wait – that’s not possible…

Sky set the clippings aside, her head starting to ache from all the impossibilities. She flicked through the remaining contents of the memento case, picking out random photos of her dad with his two older sisters and their parents, watching him age and grow younger as the photos jumped back and forth through the years. Then she noticed something peculiar: her father never seemed to be more than ten years old in the pictures. And then what Lily had said downstairs in the kitchen made the pieces all fall into place.

‘Gui hadn’t seen his family in fifteen years.’

The kidnapped child had been Sky’s dad, and his family had never managed to find him. Had the ringmaster kidnapped her father, taking him along with the travelling circus? It made sense, except…

Except that the circus had come to Blackfin, where Gui’s family were by then living in the Blood House.

The wooden boards of the attic floor moaned beneath her, a most melancholy sound.

‘They must have moved here sometime after Dad was taken,’ Sky thought out loud, carefully putting all the cuttings and photos back into the memento case. ‘Until Dad inherited the house…’

But then why would her father have inherited the house if he had a mother and two older sisters?

Unless they were the ones my grandfather murdered.

The Blood House had earned its name one way or another, and Sky had a horrible feeling she knew exactly who had been murdered in her house. If the murder had been committed around the time the circus came to Blackfin, then it was somehow connected.

But what did that have to do with the fire in the woods, or Sky being chased off Blackfin Pier years later? The connection was there, she was certain. All she needed to do was see it.

11

Whatever Officer Vega’s reason had been for letting those little creeps back out into the general population, Sky couldn’t fathom it.

The Swivellers denied all knowledge of the grave disturbance, and couldn’t be persuaded, threatened or coerced into admitting they had removed the body they found inside. That was, of course, assuming there had been a body inside it to begin with.

No use denying it. Someone who looked a lot like me got buried in that grave.

Her thoughts drifted back to the terrible dream she had had of being trapped inside that coffin, and a cold finger of dread iced its way down her spine.
Had
that been a dream? Or had she in fact travelled to some other time, some other reality, and materialised inside the coffin with her other self’s corpse?

The horror of that distracted Sky from the fact that she was nearing the Swivellers’ house. Sky ducked her head to pass by on the way to Cam’s, but she already knew it was too late. They’d spotted her, and were trickling like roaches out of their house to intercept her.

She picked up her pace until she was practically running, her boots beating a sharp rhythm on the pavement. But the Swivellers kept up, separating so that two were on either side of her. Seeing no alternative, Sky stopped.

‘What do you want?’

Randy Swiveller answered, his black eyes moving like they had been oiled. ‘You got us into trouble.’

‘I did? How exactly do you work that out?’

Sky took an involuntary step away from him, only to find herself backed up against Colby Swiveller. His reptilian hands grasped her upper arms, and Sky tried to wrestle free. But for all that they appeared jointless, Colby, at least, was incredibly tenacious.

‘Let me go.’

‘I say we fix what they say we done wrong, what do you think?’

Randy’s gaze never wavered from her face as he spoke, his smile so broad Sky could see the gums of his back teeth.

‘Put her back in the ground, you mean?’ Colby’s excited breath was disgustingly moist against her ear. Randy nodded.

‘Let me go, you idiots!’

This didn’t have the effect Sky had been hoping for. Instead, they all started laughing, then Jordy and Felix each stepped forward and grabbed one of her legs. Sky screamed and kicked at them as her weight shifted, and she was hoisted between the four boys like an animal ready to be roasted above a fire. They set off running up the hill, Sky cursing and thrashing to try and get free. Their knees bumped and jostled her with every step.

‘You can’t do this!’ Sky was really starting to panic. The Swivellers had always been creepy, but more or less harmless. Now it appeared that some twisted logic had convinced them that putting her back inside the grave they’d unearthed her body from would get them out of trouble.

‘Oh, we can, Skylar. You’ve already been officially dead, and there’s no one but Jesus coming back from that.’

They reached the cemetery within a minute, the old gate creaking open in welcome as the four boys carried her in.

Ohgodohgodohgodthey’rereallygoingtodoit.

Someone started giggling, and after a moment Sky realised it was her.

‘Why’s she laughing, Ran?’

Randy stared at her with his bug eyes and halted the others. ‘Dunno. Who can say what deaduns think?’ He stared at her a moment, then pulled back his arm and slapped her hard across the face. Sky gasped, feeling the sting of a split lip, and stopped laughing. Tears stung her eyes. ‘There, that fixed her. Right – in the hole.’

The open grave had been covered by a large board and cordoned off with police tape, but Felix simply batted the tape out of the way and dragged the cover aside.

‘Please—’ Sky begged, but they weren’t listening. The Swivellers dropped her into the muddy hole. She landed on her back, the wind knocked from her so that she could do no more than lie there and gasp while the four boys stared down at her from one side of the grave, the mound of fresh earth which had been removed with the coffin on the other. The grey strip of sky was too bright, too vivid for winter in Blackfin.

‘We should have brung a shovel,’ Jordy whispered, like he was embarrassed at the flaw in their plan. Their words filtered down to Sky as though from far away.

‘We can use our feet,’ Colby suggested, looking to his brothers for approval. Randy shrugged and nodded, and the four disappeared from Sky’s view for a moment. She scrambled to a half-crouch, her back against the wall of the grave where the head of her coffin would have been.

Then soil started to rain down in sharp bursts, making clouds of earth so that Sky had to hold the sleeve of her red coat over her nose and mouth to breathe. Even then, her hot tears and blocked nose made her choke in a matter of seconds.

I need to get out of here.

Holding her breath, Sky faced away from the intermittent shower of grave soil and jumped up to try and catch the lip of the hole. Her fingers clawed into the grass, but with the morning dew it was too slippery to gain purchase, and she slid backwards, twisting her wrist and retching as a breath of dirty air hit the back of her throat. Sky curled into herself, hugging her arms around her head until she could breathe a little without sucking in earth.

What the hell are they doing?

What had started as whoops of glee had turned into growls and snarls, like they were a pack of dogs and not four seriously twisted brothers. Stranger than that, though, was that the sound was almost familiar to Sky…

Where do I remember that sound from?

Soil continued to shower her for a few minutes, but the Swivellers were tiring from kicking at the mound. She could just about make out their laboured breathing overhead, and wished they would choke on their own dust cloud.