‘It attacked me … th-th-the Beast!’
Maggie was curled into a ball against the fridge door when I rushed into the kitchen with Tabby. Apparently, she’d been emptying the dustpan outside the back door when something big and brown and hairy had lunged at her and growled.
‘What did it look like?’ I bent down to her.
‘What do you mean, what did it look like? What do you think it looked like, a pickled onion? It looked like a bloody massive hairy wolf!’ She was shaking hard.
I smoothed her hair gently. ‘A wolf?’
‘Yes, a wolf. You know, brown hairy things with sharp fangs. Scares the crap out of little pigs and kids in red coats?’
Clarice ran in.
Regan piped up, ‘The Beast is supposed to be cat-like. Like a big black panther, or a sabre tooth tiger. It’s definitely not a wolf.’
‘How many times have you seen it, Regan?’ Maggie shouted, getting to her feet. ‘It was brown and it had big pointed ears and huge teeth and yellow eyes and … urghhhhhh! It was disgusting.’
Clarice was biting her pink nails in the doorway. They were all stumpy. ‘Did it hurt you? Are you hurt or—’
‘No, no, I was back inside before it came any closer. I just saw this horrible head and then I ran in and bolted the back door.’
I could smell alcohol on Maggie’s breath as she spoke. I went to the window and climbed up on the rung below the sink to look. Everything outside was white, as usual, as far as I could see. The formal terrace was there, with its snowed-over flower beds, bare bushes and frozen fountain. All lay undisturbed. No fangs, no fur. No nothing.
I climbed down and faced them again. ‘It’s not there now. There’s nothing there.’
I saw the cheese pie on the side, steaming slightly and browned perfectly on top. It looked almost appetising. ‘Let’s eat.’
‘Never mind the sodding cheese pie,’ said Maggie, visibly sweating now with stress. ‘Nash, this situation is getting more and more fucked up and it needs to get UN-fucked right now.’
Tabby went over to Maggie and clutched her hand. I beckoned Regan and Clarice to follow into the corridor.
‘How much has Maggie had to drink?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Regan. ‘She went to check on Leon about an hour ago and they were drinking then.’
‘Maggie and Clarice.’
I looked at Clarice. ‘How much has she had to drink?’
She shrugged. ‘A bit. A lot. I don’t know. I wasn’t keeping tabs.’
‘Where’s Dianna?’
‘I don’t know. She was pretty upset about your letter. Everyone was so angry with her that she ran off.’
‘Did she go outside?’
‘I don’t know. I think so.’
I felt a deep stab of guilt, despite Dianna’s crappy behaviour. What if the Beast already had her scent?
Regan whispered, ‘The booze cabinet’s nearly empty too. Do you think … Do you think Maggie might have imagined the Beast?’
‘No, I don’t think she imagined it, she gave too much of a description. And I don’t think she’s lying; she’s too shaken up. But she said it looked like a wolf, not a cat. That goes against everything we’ve heard so far from Leon and the myth book. And …’
They both stared at me. Neither of them was going to speak, so I had to.
‘… it’s not what I saw that night in netball.’
Regan’s mouth opened wide and her face grew about a foot in length. ‘So you did see it! I knew it, I knew you saw it!’
‘Keep your voice down. I don’t want to frighten Tabby.’
Clarice started biting her other hand, which had even less fingernails. ‘So you’ve definitely seen it? What, recently?’
‘About a week ago, I think. I don’t know. But it didn’t come anywhere near me and it didn’t look like a wolf.’
Regan’s face was full of alarm. Her glasses steamed up. ‘This is bad, isn’t it?’
‘I’ve no idea what this is,’ I said. I caught my breath. Call it bravado or a death wish, but I just wanted to see it for myself now. I wanted to scare it away. I wanted to do something; something other than just being afraid. ‘I’m going to go out. And take a look round.’
‘Are you mad?’ said Clarice. ‘Why would you do that? Why would you go outside when clearly something horrible is out there, waiting to attack you?’
I shrugged and looked at Regan.
‘I’ll get the javelins,’ she said.
Regan and I suited ourselves up in jumpers and coats and snuck out the side door to the kitchen so that nobody would stop us from going. Not that anybody would have. Maggie was still too traumatised, Tabby was too young, Clarice thought we were nuts and Dianna had gone AWOL.
I slowly turned the knob and we stepped out into the clawing cold air. The whiteness was still startling, but we could pick out landmarks on the horizon—hedges, fences, walls, follies.
Regan stepped forward and peered around the corner in both directions. ‘Clear.’ I joined her on the path of the formal terrace. Looking down, I saw she had two small spray cans in her grasp. One was a half-empty Dove 48h, the other was a travel-sized Elnett Super Hold, almost full. She’d taken them both from the Saul-Hudsons’ en suite.
‘Thought you could spray it in its eyes or something if it gets too close,’ she said, handing me the Dove one.
‘Thanks, Regan.’ I took the can from her and stuffed it in my coat pocket.
Snow crunched beneath our boots as we walked, slowly and determined, our breath clouding as we breathed. Every sound was a threat.
Something wasn’t right. I couldn’t put my finger on what, but there was a charge in the atmosphere. It wasn’t just me and Regan outside. There was something else out here too.
My heart thrummed painfully as we rounded the building, making our way down the steps towards the formal gardens and the Great Plat on the west side of the school.
‘You need anger and you need fear. You’ll think better,’ I heard in my head.
Seb’s voice. Karate on the rug. Always teach not by words but by example. Only a true attack has a true defence.
He was always telling me that fear was a good thing to keep you on your toes. I never believed him. I still didn’t. Regan didn’t look scared at all. The javelin was grasped in her left hand, her eyes ahead, always searching. Waiting. I remembered what she’d said about her grandmothers. She wasn’t afraid of the Beast. The Beast was the cancer. The Beast was her fear. The Beast was how people saw her at the school.
It was everything she wanted to get rid of.
‘It’s got much colder, hasn’t it?’ Her breath was a cloud in her face.
‘Yeah. The barometer in the Hall read six below.’
‘I’ve got a hole in my glove.’
‘I’ve got a hole in my tights.’
I laughed, even though it wasn’t funny. Regan smiled.
All was still and unthreatening as far as the eye could see. The ponds were frozen in the Ladies Garden and the Rotunda, and nothing had disturbed the places where little white piles of snow had settled on tree branches, hedges and the tops of walls. A choir of frosty crocuses hung with bowed heads to our left. Not a sound came. No birdsong even. Everything the same.
Until I looked down.
I nudged Regan, and she followed my line of sight to the pathway beneath our feet, leading up some slate steps to the formal garden and borders, which the kitchen window overlooked. There were footprints—small and semi-circular, like they’d been made by hooves—dotted in a straight line towards the steps, up the steps, and beyond.
We followed them.
‘Why would they be hoof prints, Nash?’
‘I don’t know,’ I whispered, steadying my javelin in my fist.
‘What the hell has two hooves?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said again, quietly, as we followed the line of prints towards the kitchen window. ‘Mr Tumnus? The devil?’
Suddenly Regan’s eyes widened and she thrust her javelin directly forward, missing my face by inches. I gasped and ducked away just in time.
She screamed. I screamed. Her target screamed, diving to one side as the javelin flew past its head and stuck solidly into a holly bush. The Beast was a man. A man with a navy-blue Bath University hoody on and Nike high-tops and jeans. A man with a wolf’s head.
Quickly, I pulled out the little can of hairspray, pressing the nozzle right in the wolf’s face. I kept it there until it started speaking.
‘What the hell are you doing? Stop. Get off me!’ said the thing beneath the wolf-head, launching into a coughing fit. Two pink hands fumbled to rip off the head, and there before us stood a sweaty, red-faced Charlie, breathless and annoyed, his blond hair sticking to his forehead. I stopped spraying and threw the can into the hedge.
‘Oh my God, you scared the crap out of us!’ I shouted, hitting him squarely in the arm.
‘What? What the hell are you two on? You just nearly kebabbed me!’
‘We thought you were the Beast!’ Regan ran to retrieve her javelin from the bush.
‘The Beast?’ he laughed. ‘It was supposed to be a joke.’
‘It was you at the back door? You attacked Maggie?’
‘Yeah.’ He smiled. ‘I actually came in peace. I brought the mince pies missing from your order the other day.’ He pointed to a white carrier bag sitting in the flower border, containing five boxes of iced mince pies. It was almost invisible amid the snow. ‘I put a free box in for the inconvenience. The wolf mask was an afterthought, really.’
I was ripped apart by feelings of anger that he’d done something so idiotic after everything we’d been through and happiness that he was here and he had forgiven me for running off from our date the other day. I wanted to kiss him and hug him and punch him all in one go.
‘Were those your footprints in the snow?’ said Regan.
‘Where?’
‘On the path between the borders.’
‘Oh, yeah. Probably.’
‘They look like hoof prints.’
‘I was on my toes. I saw Maggie in the window and I was trying not to make a noise.’
‘You freak!’ I shouted at him. ‘Do you have any idea what’s happened to us?’
‘Oh, come on, it was a joke,’ he said, gesturing towards the limp wolf mask in his hand. ‘S’good, isn’t it? I saw it at the fancy dress shop in Bathory Gorge the other day and I went back and got it. You shoulda seen Maggie’s face when I scared her at the back door. It was classic. I got her good and proper that time.’
‘She was terrified, Charlie,’ I told him. ‘We all were. You’ve gone too far this time.’
‘Oh come on,’ he said, willing us to smile and see the funny side. Neither of us did.
‘No,’ I told him. ‘Things have changed now. Pranks are over.’
‘We’re in big trouble,’ added Regan.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘And why’s there a dead sheep in your driveway?’
We went into the kitchen and told him all about it, behind the safety of our locked main door. We were all starving hungry and ate up both the cheese pie and the mince pies Charlie had brought us as we told him everything. About Matron. About Leon. About the menacing blizzard that had kept us awake night after night. About the phones. About the blood. With repeat choruses of ‘It’s a bloody nightmare,’ and a close group harmony of ‘What are we going to do, Charlie?’
‘Hmm,’ he said eventually, when all the nuts of information had been gathered. ‘Hmm,’ he said again. And ‘Hmm,’ he said, once more.
‘So you’ve not got any bright ideas either then?’ said Maggie. Tabby climbed up onto the draining board, Babbitt ear in mouth, so she could sit beside her.
‘No. Well, we’re gonna have to get you lot out of here, aren’t we? I’ll use my phone to call the police. That would be a start.’ He patted his pockets, like a best man pretending to have forgotten the ring at the crucial moment.
Except Charlie wasn’t pretending.
My heart dropped like a stone. ‘Don’t tell me.’
‘I left my phone at home. It’s charging. I thought I’d only be an hour.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Why did you walk here?’ said Maggie, accusing him with her tone. ‘We could have used your car to go and get someone.’
‘I thought if you saw my car coming up the drive, my cover would be blown.’ He nodded towards the wolf mask, lying on the kitchen table. ‘Plus, the roads round here are pretty dicey at the moment. It snowed again last night. It’s better to walk when it’s like this.’
‘Maybe we could risk walking then?’ said Regan, still clutching her javelin like a Roman sentry. ‘It’s still quite light.’
‘But it’ll be dark soon,’ said Clarice. ‘That’s when It comes. I’m not risking my life.’
‘Well, look,’ said Maggie, extricating herself from Tabby’s hug and smacking both hands decisively onto the metal table, which wobbled where the wheels weren’t braked. ‘The school minibus is here, right? He can drive us all out of here and we’ll go to the police station at Toppan. Or at least the nearest phone box.’
‘Charlie just said the roads were dicey,’ said Regan, giving her the most withering look of her collection.
‘Yeah, but we could risk it,’ said Clarice, backing Maggie up on something for the first time ever.
‘I dunno,’ said Charlie, biting his thumbnail. ‘I don’t feel confident about taking all of you at once. I say I go alone, or take one of you so you can tell the police the whole story.’
I looked at him. ‘I don’t think any of us should go out there. Leon was attacked, Charlie. I’ve seen the teeth marks on his leg. You haven’t.’
Tabby was looking at me, still cross-legged on the draining board, sucking the life out of Babbitt’s ear. I felt awful for admitting the truth in front of her now, but times were changing and she was here dealing with them as much as we were. ‘I’ve seen it. A few times actually. It’s a huge catlike thing. And it has yellow eyes. I don’t know if it’s got Matron or Dianna but if it hasn’t then where the hell are they both?’
Clarice frowned. ‘Hang on, Leon said it had red eyes. It attacked him, it was on him and he said it had red eyes. I heard him say that. Didn’t you?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I heard him say that. But it has yellow eyes. It definitely has yellow eyes.’
‘Which means …’ said Maggie.
‘That he’s lying,’ finished Regan.
Charlie fiddled with his friendship bands under his cuff and stared right at me. His eyebrows rose and his eyes swivelled to the ceiling, then back to me.
‘Leon?’ said Regan.
Charlie nodded. ‘I’d say he’s the reason your matron and your friend are missing.’
Tabby reached for the wolf mask and put it on her head. She looked at me and I couldn’t help but smile. Maggie looked away. I told Tabby to take it off again.
‘What do you suggest we do?’ said Regan, twisting the javelin round and round in her grip.
‘Is he handcuffed?’ asked Charlie.
‘No,’ I said. ‘He sleeps all the time anyway. I don’t think he’s a threat.’
‘It can’t be him,’ said Clarice. ‘I know him.’
‘Yeah, she knows him intimately,’ said Maggie. Clarice threw her a look. ‘No, I wasn’t taking the piss. You know him better than any of us.’
‘What, so you’re agreeing with me?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh.’
‘You don’t think it’s him?’ I said.
‘Of course it’s him,’ said Charlie bluntly. ‘You can’t afford to be this naive any more, guys. We’ve got to do something before he wakes up.’
‘I could lock the apartments. Keep him in there,’ suggested Maggie.
‘Yeah, good idea,’ said Charlie.
‘But he’s not dangerous. He can barely walk,’ I said, stopping Charlie as he went towards the back door.
‘Nash, when did you meet this person?’
‘Yesterday,’ I told him. ‘But—’
‘Have you got a crush on him or something?’
‘What?’ I laughed. ‘Charlie for God’s sake …’
‘Why else are you defending him. Hot, is he?’
‘Really hot,’ said Clarice.
‘Shut up, Clarice,’ I snipped. ‘Charlie you’re being ridiculous, I just don’t think—’
‘Why are you blushing?’ He was jealous. He was actually jealous.
‘Charlie, stop it.’
‘You insisted on bringing him indoors, you just told me that. You’ve undressed him and bandaged his wound. You like him, admit it.’
Just when my petrol tank of excuses had completely burnt out, salvation came in the form of the last person I’d ever expect to speak up for Leon.
Maggie.
‘It’s not like that at all,’ she said, stepping forward. ‘You’ve got it arse backwards. I told Nash to bring him inside. I thought he was dying. And yeah, I fancied him. I told Nash we needed to help him. Kindred spirit and all that.’
‘You wanted him in here?’ Charlie confirmed.
‘Yeah. Nash had nothing to do with it.’
Charlie looked from Maggie to me, expecting one of our masks to break. But they didn’t. We held strong. ‘How stupid can you get?’ he said, looking straight at Maggie. ‘You let your hormones do the thinking on this one, for sure.’ He laughed at her. ‘Well I guess it’s a bloody good thing that I arrived in time, isn’t it? Before he murdered you all in your beds.’
‘Keep your voice down,’ said Regan. ‘He’s sleeping.’
‘But once he gets wind that we suspect him, it could be a different story. Okay, how about a couple of us get the bus moving, say me and Maggie, and you stay here and look after the others, and pretend to Leon like we’ve just gone to the phone box in the village. Don’t say we’re going to get the police or anything or he could get testy.’
‘I don’t think he’s that bothered, actually,’ said Clarice. ‘He told me he’d rather go back to prison than stay outside in the cold.’
‘Someone said we should lock his door. We should go and do that now,’ Regan suggested.
‘I’ll do it,’ said Clarice and Regan threw her the keys.
‘I’m coming with you two to the bus,’ I said to Charlie and Maggie. ‘It’s snowed in and the wheels are going to need digging out.’
‘All right,’ said Charlie. ‘You’re the boss.’
‘Come on,’ I said, plucking my gloves from my coat pocket and putting them on again. ‘Me and Maggie can do the digging. You can try the engine. Tabby needs to stay here.’
‘Awww,’ she whined. ‘I want to stay with you, Nash.’
‘No, Tabs, you’ve got to stay here and look after the Chief, all right? He needs you, go on.’ Head bowed, Tabby marched off into the utility room to find the aforementioned Newfie.
‘Regan, you look after Tabs.’
‘Okay,’ she said.
Wrenching open the door of the store cupboard, I found the panel of spare key bunches hung up just inside. I located the one for the bus. ‘Might need these then.’
‘Great,’ said Charlie, catching them as I tossed them over to him. ‘So me, Maggie and Nash will go and get help.’
Clarice, Regan and Tabby all looked back at us and stared.
‘I tell you what,’ I said to Tabby, ‘why don’t you go and find a nice board game to play in the common room and maybe Clarice and Regan will play it with you? I think there’s Junior Scrabble in there. And Mousetrap. Okay?’
Tabby nodded. Regan half smiled. Clarice looked like she’d cheerfully have stabbed me straight through the heart.