Prologue
I’m there again, in the flames.
The knife plunges into her and she falls forward.
“No!” I yell. “No! Lacey!”
She collapses into my arms. Blood pours from a wound in her back and the only thing I can do is drag her away.
“Stay awake! Please, stay awake.”
He strides towards us, the flames behind him creating a deathly halo of orange and red. My skin is hot. My blood boils.
“You’re going to get caught,” I say, backing towards the window. “They’ll see what you’ve done to Lacey and lock you away.”
“Not if I can help it. Tales will be told for years of how Mary Hades killed her roommate, set the hospital on fire and then slit her own throat. It’ll be legendary.” His lips peel back to reveal that his teeth are clenched in a joyless grin.
My back hits the window. A surge of desperation tightens my throat.
But then there’s movement in the flames. Dark shadows rise, dozens of them, filling the space behind my attacker. People of all ages, sizes and races: a little girl with a bald head and a tube emerging from her nose; an elderly man, so thin his hospital gown hangs like a deflated tent. They step forward and I know what they’re here for.
“Not if they have anything to do with it.” I nod behind him.
He turns and a moan escapes his lips, full of sick, animalistic desperation. The ghosts surround him, grabbing him, pulling him to the floor and smothering him. He tries to slash at them with the knife but it does nothing.
“No!” he screams. “No…”
The stench of mildew and burned flesh turns my stomach and I look away.
“You’re not afraid of the darkness anymore,” says the ghost. His hands are filthy with the flesh of my attacker. “You toughened up and you fought.”
He’s right. I’m not afraid of the darkness. I’m not afraid of anything. I never wanted it to end, you see. I really didn’t. But we all end, one day.
Chapter One
The promise of July: sunglasses and cut off shorts, feeling the warm blades of grass between your toes, trips to the brook at the edge of the woods, short nights that seem to go on forever—smothering you with oppressive heat until you wake up gasping for breath, your hair plastered to the back of your neck.
The long days provide freedom from school and parents, and often even friends. It’s a time to be alone, to let yourself grow, to shed another layer of skin as you progress through adolescence. Each summer tracks your maturity with the flakes of skin trailing your footsteps. Those layers are childhood husks. You know that when you go back to school, passing notes in class will become a thing of the past; too immature for us now. Crushes become relationships. Gossip turns from who snogged who to who shagged who.
We are in the midst of that rarest of things—a warm and sunny English summer. It has lasted for almost two weeks and even the old ladies at the bus stop have stopped talking about the weather. No one wants to jinx it. No one wants to frighten the sun away. We treat it like a bird in the garden, tip-toeing our way through the lawn, trying not to startle it into taking to its wings and abandoning us.
I’ve been waiting for this moment. Since the fire, my burns have taken time to heal. Now the bandages are off, and I can go out in the sunshine. I want to enjoy the rest of my summer before it fades into September and brings the school term with it. The thought of exams and coursework make my abdomen clench with anxiety. Right now, I want to forget about all that, enjoy being alive, enjoy my well-earned freedom.
But as soon as the opportunity is within my grasp, it’s snatched away by those who-think-they-know-best. I find myself pouting like a little girl, regressing into the stereotypical teen, whinging away at my parents.
“You’ll enjoy it, Mary.” Mum has her back to me, folding clean clothes into three neat piles. One of those piles is mine. “It’s nice to get away from here. There will be plenty of people your age.”
“Camping?” I say again. “I shouldn’t be going camping with my parents anymore. I’m seventeen.” The words it’s not fair are within dangerous proximity. I’m a cliché.
She turns towards me and seizes a t-shirt from the basket. “It’s a static caravan on a campsite. It’s not like you’ll be in a tent. Discos every night—”
“For children.”
“—entertainment—”
“For children.”
She purses her lips. “The holiday will be what you make of it.” Her eyes dart to the door and back again. She lowers her voice. “It’s all we can afford this year. You know, since your father lost that job.” She mouths the last words as though she’s ashamed to say them.
Dad used to teach at a private school. It was a good job, bringing in a high salary. But they decided to cut back in the science department and now he’s had to take a job at a comprehensive school in Leeds. It’s an hour’s commute and less pay. I see less of him, and he spends a large portion of his salary on petrol. Mum’s a full time office manager, but her firm has had a freeze on pay-rises for the last three years, due to the recession.
“You should be proud of his new job,” I say. “There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“I am,” she replies. “But your father isn’t. That’s why it’s easiest to avoid the subject.” A silence hangs for a moment. No matter what she says, I hear that tone in her voice, the one that speaks louder than her words. Now she can’t turn her nose up at the riff-raff at the office, or attend the Christmas prom at Dad’s old school wearing her one diamond necklace. She’s back to being a regular wife. “Mary, take these clothes up to your room and start packing.”
The bundle of clothes is thrust into my arms and I pull it to my body, inhaling the clean scent. My feet pad across the carpet.
When I’m halfway to the hall, Mum calls out, “Hey, you never know, you could have a holiday romance.” She waggles her eyebrows for emphasis.
“In Nettleby, North Yorkshire? I’d be lucky to find anyone under sixty,” I reply. But somehow the tension fades and we both laugh at the same time.
She pauses before she says, “You know, I hope there is a nice boy in Nettleby. It would do you good.” Her eyes drift to the scars on my neck and the smile fades from my face.
I shake the uneasy feeling away, the one that tells me my mum wants someone to make me feel attractive again. Maybe she’s right. Maybe it won’t be so bad. After everything that has happened in the last few months, it’ll be nice to spend some time with my parents. And to be honest, Nettleby does sound peaceful, and peace is what I could do with, right now.
My fingers fumble with the door handle to my room. My room. The one place in this house I can call my own.
The summer has turned it into a hot house, with sunlight streaming through the attic window. Tiny specks of dust are illuminated as they hang in the air like daylight stars. I flop down on the bed, the motion wobbling the mirror-ball I keep on my bedside table where it catches the light from the window. Squares of gold move along the pastel blue curtains, dance over my dressing table, and travel shakily across my MGMT poster.
I bury my head in the duvet, inhaling the scent of lavender from Mum’s brand of washing powder. As much as we clash with each other, if she was hurt or died, I would come into my room, smell the lavender, and have the world pulled from under my feet. She’s a rock, and I have to remind myself of that, even when she’s really annoying.
She helped me get better.
Well, she tried.
As my mind drifts from daylight stars to daylight monsters, the temperature of the room dips, and my muscles tense. A prickling cold spreads over my skin. Someone is here.
A light film of sweat forms on my forehead as I inch myself up on my elbows. At the end of the bed stands a girl, about my age, and most definitely dead.
Not that you can tell.
Her blond hair falls into her eyes, which are ringed in black. She wears a grey hoody, with the hood down, and grey jogging bottoms without a cord or belt. Her blue eyes bore into mine. Her jaw opens to speak…
“’Sup, Mares? Give you a fright did I? Couldn’t knock or owt, what with the… you know.”
“Inability to take corporeal form?” I say.
“That’s the one.” She grins at me. “So what’s the news? The afterlife is boring as hell.”
A shiver of guilt passes down my spine.
Did I forget to mention that my best friend is a ghost? Well, it’s complicated. I was in a mental institute at the time—so was Lacey—and we had a murderer to find. The day that he found us, I had expected to die; instead, he killed Lacey. He stabbed her in the back. Since then she’s stuck around.
“We’re going camping,” I say with a groan. “Can you believe it?”
Lacey leaps forward to grab my arm, but her form crackles like electricity and fails to make contact. “Damn it, stupid ghost form. Camping though, mate. That’s awesome! I used to love camping. Can I come?”
I laugh. “Sure, you can come. You know the drill though, right?”
Lacey chuckles. “You mean I’m not allowed to stand next to people pulling faces and twerking on them?”
“Oh man, I got thrown out of that cinema but it was so worth it.” I can’t keep the grin off my face as I remember Lacey dancing around the cinema, rubbing her bum against the unsuspecting people on the front row. I almost choked on my popcorn. Unfortunately, my then boyfriend didn’t find it so amusing. “Mo still hasn’t called. I can’t believe he ended it like that.”
“Fuck him,” she says. “Actually, no, don’t. Delete him. Delete his number, burn the photos—get him out of your life. He’s not worth it. You would think after everything he’s been through he’d have more of an open mind.”
I met Mo on Magdelena Ward. I was in for schizo hallucinations, he was in for paranoid schizophrenia. I guess it was always doomed to fail, but the final nail hit the coffin when I told him about Lacey. He reckoned my “negativity” and inability to “see the truth” could tip him over the edge when it came to his mental health. I don’t blame him, to be honest. But that doesn’t mean I’m not disappointed in him. Why couldn’t he trust in me?
Lacey leans forward and my skin chills again. “Seriously. Forget about him. He’s not worth it. He’s not worth you.”
Lacey Holloway, the one-woman-ghost committed to bolstering my self-esteem. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it. A hesitant smile forms on my lips, but then I remember how Lacey will never have another relationship and that smile is replaced by a heavy feeling of guilt: like a woollen blanket, familiar but itchy.
“Mum said I might have a holiday romance,” I say.
“That is a perfect idea. You need to get over Mo.” Her eyes widen with excitement. “I can be your wing-ghost.”
I start laughing, but then catch my reflection in my dressing table mirror. My hair is long, thick and dark. Destined to never be tamed, it falls over my eyes and ripples down to my collar bones. But from the laughter, I’ve shaken it away from my pale, oval face.
My fingers rise to my throat, which has become exposed from me tipping my head back. There I trace the lasting reminder from the fire at Magdelena. There I trace the translucent white marks left to me by Dr. Gethen. My nightmares are filled with that night. I replay it over and over. My skin warms beneath my fingertips, as though I’m there again. I pull myself away, move my hair over my neck, and try not to think about it.
“You’re coming camping with me, then?” I ask Lacey. “Because there’s no way I’m getting through the week on my own.”
She winks at me. “Do ducks fart underwater?”
I frown. “Eh?”
She laughs. “I dunno, my dad used to say it. Yes, Mary, of course I’m coming!”
To drown out the sound of me talking to a ghost, I put on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at full blast. Before long we’re wailing along with Karen O. Lacey dances around the room, crackling and sparking like a broken television. My suitcase fills up and I don’t even care about camping, anymore. At some point, I forget that Lacey is dead. I forget about how her body is in the graveyard three miles away, off the main road heading north. The Lacey I know is the vibrant, dancing, singing girl pogoing up and down with her arms spread wide. A rush of something—I don’t know what—fills me up from my toes to my ears. Maybe it’s that freedom I wanted.
*
The smell of exhaust fumes sneaks in through the open car window. The leather seats stick to my bare thighs, and the sound of honking horns is my soundtrack as everyone decides to try to travel on the motorway at the same time. In the front of the car, my parents argue while holding the AA road map across the dashboard. I lean back against the head rest of the back seat in our stationary vehicle, and zone out the traffic jam, parental swearing, and fumes by plugging in my iPod and escaping into the music.
A few hours later—after a greasy meal at the motorway service station—we leave the major roads behind at last, and navigate the twisting rural lanes of North Yorkshire. It’s moorland here, heather growing amongst the spongy grass, stretching out for what feels like forever. Jagged rocks peek out of hillsides. The occasional sheep looks up and stares at our car, chewing its grass in a languid, deliberate motion, as though its mind is occupied elsewhere.
I lean forward, hitting the back of Mum’s seat with my shoulder. “There’s nothing here. What are we going to be doing?”
“We’re not there yet,” Dad reminds me, grinning at me in the rear view mirror. “Positive thinking, Mares.”
I sigh and lean back into my seat. I guess he’s right. I let my head swing to one side, watching the world go by. This bit—I like.
I love the way the greens and browns merge together as the car travels through the countryside. Beneath me the car rocks like a cradle. I used to read whenever we went somewhere, but now I follow the landscape with my eyes, picking out the occasional stream, the flowers in the grass verge, and the black and white splodges of cows.
A fleeting memory pops into my mind—driving through the countryside with Dad, him slowing the car to a crawl so I can reach out of the open window and pick the long flowers swaying above the reedy grass. He had one of those ‘Dad’ smiles—the ones where their eyes are sad because you’re growing up so fast. Then he whispered, “Don’t tell your mum. If she knew you’d had even a finger out of that window…” I’d giggled. Knowing that we were breaking Mum’s car-rules made it even more fun.
But then the world changes. That safe feeling is pulled out from underneath me, as though I’ve leapt high into the air before glancing down to see the trampoline disappear. My heart freezes before it quickens and the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. My throat tightens. I clutch the edge of the seat so hard I feel the blood drain from my hands.
You would think I’m used to seeing them now, but I’m not. I never will be.
Standing like a scarecrow in the middle of a crop field, is one of them. Its skull shines through its face, and haunting sunken eyes stare at me, dark as night. A chill passes over my body.
This is a warning.
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
