‘No, unfortunately it’s a true story. I suppose at least their memory is kept alive even if it is in some stupid urban legend.’
‘You’ve never seen their ghostly apparitions then?’
He stopped, turned back to look at her and nodded. ‘I’ve seen things, but I don’t talk about them. There is no point in adding fuel to the fire. This place would be inundated with teenagers doing even more stupid stuff in weather like this, causing us all problems we don’t need. The lake is just over there’ – he pointed in the distance – ‘be careful, it creeps up on you and after the first few feet it drops down deep, too deep. If any of them fell into it I don’t think they’d get out alive, the cold would take them soon enough.’
Morgan realised she could hear the lapping of the water once they’d stopped talking. She looked out onto the lake, it was barely visible, but what she could see of the water looked ethereal with the white mist lingering over it. Then she saw something out of place that should not have been there. She shouted, ‘Someone is in the water.’
Ben jumped at the panic in her voice. She began to kick off her boots, not caring about the danger she was about to put herself in. Ben reached out to stop her, but his fingers just missed the sleeve of her jacket. She ran towards the lake, shrugging off her jacket.
‘Morgan, don’t.’ His voice was deep, tainted with fear. She ignored him and ran into the water.
‘Hey, it’s too dangerous. You can’t see where the shoreline is and it drops off after a couple of feet,’ Amos called after her. ‘You’re going to get yourself in trouble.’
Her feet were already seeped in the icy water and immediately her teeth began to chatter it was so cold, but she could see the figure bobbing on top of the water, just ahead of her.
‘Use your voices to guide me back in.’ Then she was wading out, and as the freezing water reached her hips, her feet suddenly had nothing below them and she stumbled into the deepness that Amos had just warned about. She had no choice but to swim. The water numbed her entire body, but she carried on. Even though Ben was shouting her name, she had to focus if she didn’t want to succumb to the blackness below her. She daren’t even think about how deep it was below. She reached out to the person she’d seen from the shoreline, and grabbing hold of their coat, she began to drag them back to the shore.
Ben’s voice was calling to her. ‘Keep coming, you’re not too far away. Twenty feet. Follow my voice.’
Morgan’s arms were practically frozen, her body began to slow down and she felt sluggish, as every stroke she made was getting harder. Her fingertips were numb, but she wouldn’t let go of whoever this was.
‘Come on, lass, you’re almost there.’ Amos’s deep voice called out, and she heard splashing as someone came into the water. Strong, rough hands grabbed her, dragging not just her but the body she was barely clutching hold of towards the shore.
‘Jesus, Brookes, what the fuck!’ Madds’s voice shouted into her ear, and she realised he had dragged her out, shocking her out of the almost frozen stupor.
Then she was out, and Ben wrapped his jacket around her, hands around her shoulders, and was dragging her to the dilapidated wooden shack to get her out of the freezing air.Her legs could barely hold her weight, but he didn’t give up and dragged her inside, stripping her wet clothes off her and bundling her into her own coat, then his. She felt something heavy drape across her legs and realised it was Shep. She nodded her thanks at the dog and closed her eyes.
FIVE
Tori listened to the beeps from the machines in the busy A&E department, but she couldn’t open her eyes. Couldn’t get the images of the figure who had come striding out of the fog, dressed from head to foot in black with a bat over their shoulder. She couldn’t see the face, just their eyes. At first, she had thought it was the girl Dawson had almost run over, but who was this? Had he been chasing the girl? Is that why she’d run across the road? Or had Dawson been mistaken because she was sure it had been a man who’d attacked him. She squeezed her eyes hard and shook her head. No, no, no, this wasn’t real, was it? But the sickening crunch as the guy had swung the bat at Dawson’s head and cracked his skull echoed around her mind. Dawson had collapsed to his knees, and Scarlett had rushed towards him, screaming; Tori had run the other way, the fear too great to help her friends. Another loud thwack and Scarlett’s screams had been cut off. Tori’d had no idea where to go or who was attacking her friends, but she had run through the mist, her lungs burning, her legs like jelly, looking for somewhere to hide. She had never felt fear like it, but had known if she didn’t get away, whoever it was would come after her, too. So, she’d tried to keep the screams bottled inside, though she was breathing too heavy. Shecould run, but she’d never run for her life before and somehow this had made her pick up her pace until she’d found an old overturned wooden boat and scrambled underneath it, then remembering to phone the cops, only to find she had no signal. Pulling the boat over her, shaking with cold and fear, she’d clasped her hands together and begun to pray, silently mouthing The Lord’s Prayer on repeat – the only prayer she knew; it had been drummed into her at primary school.
A warm hand touched her forehead, and she jumped; her eyes flew open and she let out a high-pitched keening sound.
‘It’s okay, you’re okay, I’m so sorry. You’re safe now, in the hospital.’
Tori stared at the young doctor dressed in green scrubs and clamped her lips together. Two nurses appeared behind the doctor.
‘I thought she was asleep,’ the doctor said to them apologetically, then turned to Tori. ‘I’m sorry, I thought you were sleeping. I was just checking your body temperature.’
Tori tried to move and realised she was under a silver blanket that crackled loudly; she looked like a turkey wrapped in tin foil ready for roasting, she could feel the heat soothing her bones. She looked at the doctor and burst into tears; this was real. Her friends were dead and she hadn’t done anything to help them.
‘There’s another woman coming in with severe exposure, jumped into a lake to drag something out.’
One nurse whispered to the doctor, and Tori’s head snapped in their direction. ‘Scarlett’s, okay?’
The nurse shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, there is no news about your friends yet, this is a police officer who went into the lake too.’
The woman stopped talking, and Tori squeezed her eyelids together. She didn’t want to know why the woman had gone intothe lake, but she had a good idea and the thought filled the back of her throat with bile.
‘Your dad is on the way. He said to let you know he’s tried to get hold of your mum, but she’s not picking up.’
Tori wasn’t surprised one bit. She lived with her dad, as he was her responsible parent, and he was going to be so pissed with her when he found out what she’d been doing. Her mum, on the other hand, was a bit wild to put it politely; she had taken off when Tori was six to travel around America and never come back. Sending cards with twenty dollars in for her birthday and a fifty for Christmas, which had been no use to her whatsoever. She had that money in an envelope in her top drawer. One day, when she could afford to fly out to the States, she would use the money to find her mum and tell her what a complete bitch she was and how much she hated her.
Her dad had told her she was a dancer when they’d met, and he’d tried his best to change her, but Tori knew the truth. She was an exotic dancer and always had been; it was good money and the reason her mum could afford to start a new life out there. Tori didn’t care about the dancing; she cared that she was selfish and had left her behind when she needed her mum. Her poor dad had grieved as if the woman was dead, which she might as well have been she had treated the pair of them so bad. She doubted the woman was going to rush all the way from Las Vegas to come see her because of this and, to be honest, she didn’t want her to.
What she did want was to know that Dawson and Scarlett were okay. That this had all been some bad dream, or hallucinations brought on by how cold and damp it had been up on that fell, and that she wasn’t living out her worst nightmare.
The reality was that whoever had done this to her friends was still out there. What if they came looking for her? What if they attacked some other teenagers stupid enough to go out there?
