Rachel’s barely slept. Whether lying awake, or caught in a fitful dream, Edward’s painting has plagued her mind, disturbing images spinning in a ghoulish carousel, a horror movie she can’t switch off. She’s seen Sarah running in a white dress. Malcolm Crowe lumbering after her through the woods. Edward, too, chasing Sarah to the folly, his footsteps echoing up the stone steps, her dress catching in his paint-stained fist, his breath on her neck, his lips meeting not Sarah’s lips, but Rachel’s, and with their touch, a sudden, violent shove that had pitched her backwards, so that Rachel was falling, plunging from a great height… before startling awake.
An odd light presses at the window where her curtains don’t quite meet. A ghostly white seems to smother the glass panes, casting her bedroom in a strange, muted glow. At first, she wonders if it’s the remnants of her nightmare making her mind foggy, but when she pushes back the covers and goes to the window, she sees a thick fog has descended down the steep wooded slopes to shroud everything in the valley and across campus in an eerie mist. Beyond their rickety front gate, the school has vanished.
She checks for a reply from Ben, but there’s only one new text message on her phone and her stomach contracts when she sees who has sent it.
I hope you got home safe and sound. E x
Rachel tastes bile at the back of her throat. At first glance it could be any other concerned message, checking up after a night out, but something in those words ‘safe and sound’ hovers ominously, like a mild threat. She dials Ben again, not caring about the early hour, but his phone is still off and all she gets is his voicemail.
Frustrated, she drags herself into the shower and stands under scalding-hot water, dresses quickly then heads downstairs for strong coffee and a piece of toast she doesn’t feel like eating. Before she leaves, she taps on Ellie’s bedroom door. ‘I’m going in early,’ she says through the crack. ‘Will you be OK?’
Ellie murmurs something inaudible from beneath her duvet.
‘Don’t fall back to sleep,’ she warns. ‘And lock up when you leave.’
Out in the early morning air, it’s evident that the mist isn’t going anywhere. It clings to Rachel’s hair and smothers her woollen coat in a fine beaded veil as she takes her usual route across campus, the path reduced to just a few feet of gravel before disappearing into white. It’s eerily quiet, just the sound of her breath and her feet crunching on the path as she goes.
She can’t get the image of Edward’s painting out of her head. As she walks, she tries to understand his motivation, tries to square the man she thought he was with the fears now plaguing her mind. Could he have begun the painting after the events of the weekend? Was he creating some sort of twisted homage to Sarah? She frowns. Even if that were the case, even if he’d somehow managed to generate a prolific number of woodland studies and paintings in the few days since Sarah’s body was found, that doesn’t explain the photographs. Sarah had visited his studio. The evidence was there. Sarah posed in a white vintage nightdress, exactly like the one she’d been found in at the folly. Whichever way she tries to spin it, the facts are hard to ignore.
The distinct crack of a twig somewhere out in the white makes her jump. ‘Hello?’ she calls. She stops and looks around, trying to find form in the mist, overcome by the eerie realisation that someone is out there, following her. She feels certain of it, senses eyes trained on her deep in the fog. ‘Hello?’ she calls again. ‘Who’s there?’
There’s no answer but she picks up the pace and continues along the path, reaching for her phone, thinking to try Ben again, when she hears the thud of fast footsteps coming at her, heavy breaths echoing in the blank white. Fear jolts up her spine and she ducks off the path, just as a tall teenager dressed in running gear and large headphones barrels past. ‘Sorry, Ms Dean,’ he shouts over his shoulder, ‘didn’t see you there.’
She lifts a hand in a shaky wave, but he’s already gone, one of the school’s football players disappearing into the fog.
She adjusts the collar of her coat and hurries on, keen to reach the warmth and safety of her office as she leaves Ben another voicemail. ‘Ben, call me back. It’s urgent. I know you’ve made an arrest but there’s a man here at the school. Someone on the faculty. I think he may have been involved. Please, call me.’
If Ben doesn’t call back soon, she’ll go to Margaret Crowe. If Edward has been fraternising inappropriately with students, if he’s hidden his involvement with Sarah, god only knows what else he’s been hiding.