28
The moon shines down hard and I don’t know where I’m going but I let my feet take me. I need to run ’til this roar inside me is quiet, ’til I get answers for these questions. I wake a huddle of crows – a massive murder of the things – send them screeching and squawking into the night. I run through the feathers and leaves raining down. Then I crash through a small wooden gate and I’m on a cobblestone lane, behind a neat row of houses. I’m somewhere on the edge of town.
I know this place.
I stand, heaving. It would be this place, wouldn’t it, that I find my way to now? My eyes dart up and right to find her bedroom, or the one I imagine would be hers. There’s a flicker of light behind her curtains. Candlelight? So, Emily Shepherd can’t sleep. Somehow that’s good to know. A little part of me wants to climb up to that window and crawl inside it. But why the hell would I want that? To see her? Talk? I get an image of her sleeping, her blue-grey eyes shut. I imagine telling her everything I just thought about in that hollow. I breathe, deep as I can. The air is sharp enough to razorblade my throat.
If I did climb up to her window, I really would be a madman. She’d be on the phone to the cops in a second. My skin twitches, trembles. Emily Shepherd won’t tell me what I want to hear, she won’t tell me nothing. The only thing she’ll say is that her dad is innocent.
I hear footsteps, coming out of the woods behind me. It’s one of the boys, following – Mack – coming to check I’m all right. I turn to face him. But as I do, I hear the footsteps are slow and careful. It don’t sound like he’s in a rush to find me. I wait. I’ll ask him everything – about Ashlee, about how he played the Game with her, about what happened to the rest of them that night afterwards and whether we all met up. I’ll make him help me work out these thoughts.
I see his tall body coming down the path. He’s loping, almost casual. Maybe he can’t see me properly with the moon at his tail because suddenly he’s barrelling into me, all tall and skinny and . . .
It’s not him. It’s not any one of the boys. When I see who it is I get this strange urge to laugh.
‘Joe Wilder?’
His eyes go big behind his glasses.
I step up close. ‘What are you doing here? Were you following me?’ I try to make my voice nasty, but I’m too shocked.
He’s got a camera hanging round his neck. He stares down at me with his eyes huge. I want to wipe the glasses off his face, stop that goggle-eyed way he’s looking. Then I realise what he’s staring at – I have gunk from that tree across my cheeks. And how hard did Ed punch me? Can Wilder see that damage too?
What else has he seen?
I move forward to grab him, shake him, but Wilder trips backwards. He moves away, stumbling on the cobblestones. This is the last thing I need! Wilder, of all people, knowing I’m flipping out. Knowing I been in these woods again!
‘I was just . . . I was . . . ’ He’s holding up the camera round his neck. ‘Pictures!’
‘You what?’
I get a memory that this was his excuse when I found him with Ashlee all those months ago, another time when I wasn’t expecting him to be in Darkwood. But he’s gone before I can ask him about it, racing away into the dark.
‘Wilder, come back here,’ I say. ‘What you been doing?’
I’m trying to keep my voice low; I don’t need Emily Shepherd or her mum to come out here either after hearing all this noise.
I start following Wilder ’til he skids up a garden path into a house. I hesitate, looking in. He lives on the same street as Emily Shepherd? Really? Now I know I should’ve grabbed him, stopped him and made him spill. What the hell was he doing in the woods anyway?
I go round to the street out front. It’s still as stones here, all the curtains closed and house lights off. I crouch beside cars, try to see myself in their side mirrors but can’t get much visual. It’s freezing, car windows starting to frost up, and I’m knackered-tired, but it’s a long way home from here. The quickest way is straight through the woods and out the car park again. But when the guys are still in there wondering what the hell just happened to me? When I ran off like a loser? When I don’t even know what I’d say to explain it?
A hall light goes on in a house, and I move – crouching behind more parked cars – shivering. I don’t know where I’m going, what I’m doing. I want to call Mack, but I don’t know what to say. I try to make some sense of it in my fugged-up brain.
But there’s nothing – nothing!
Just Ed arriving. Just my hands on his neck. My hands on a neck.
The door of the car I’m crouching beside is open slightly, unlocked. And because I’m too cold to do nothing else, I get in. It smells funny inside here, all aftershave and mustiness, but it’s warmer at least. And there’s a mirror. I check myself in it, wipe off the tree gunk and see if I’ve bruised up. There’s a mark under my left eye already, can’t tell how bad it’s going to be yet, though. I find a freezing can of de-icer under the seat and hold that against my cheek to take the swelling down. Bloody idiot, Ed! Maybe I’ll wait here a few hours, just ’til I’ve got my head together . . . just ’til the buses start up. Mum will think I’m at Mack’s anyway.
Again I look over to where Emily Shepherd’s house is. What would it be like to walk up to her door and ask to speak to her? I could do it. I could make her help me work this out. She could tell me how her dad fits in. She could show me where that bunker is too. I could find Ashlee’s collar.
Maybe.
I shut my eyes. Every single inch of me wants to sleep. But I can’t, because I’m thinking about the boys and how we don’t keep secrets from each other. And I’m thinking that whatever Ashlee had told me that night couldn’t have been about them, couldn’t have been so bad. And I’m thinking that I’ve been keeping secrets, secrets even from myself.