Although Katie had been so bone tired a few hours ago that she could have easily fallen asleep standing up, it was impossible to sleep. The walk in the fresh are must have woken her up a little – cleared the cobwebs, Mom liked to say. Her parents had gone to bed a few minutes ago, she could hear her fathers cleaning his teeth, and Dan had been in bed for over an hour when she got home. After another minute, faint light from the bathroom blinked out, footsteps clunked across and a door clicked shut. And everything was silent.
Nervous energy buzzed around inside of Katie like a tiny pinball of electricity. It was probably excitement about the move in the morning. The light up dial on her watch – even the digital clock had found its’ way into a box – told her it was just a couple of minutes shy of midnight. She had not gotten home until ten and the obligatory round of tears and ‘are you sure you’ll be okay?’s had put her appointment with bed back another hour.
The bed she slept in was wrenched away from the wall so her skeletal-looking furniture could be stacked against it. Somehow though, maybe it was being in the middle of the room, maybe it was because the dolphin duvet cover and seascape sheets had been stripped off, but it didn’t feel comfortable any more. It didn’t feel like hers. And an uncomfortable bed seemed to mean that sleep was not going to visit its occupant tonight. No problem. Mom had packed away the last of her clothes while she was out, everything she owned and wanted to keep was ready to. Now she could let herself get excited about her new life. There would be a host of new challenges at the academy – new courses to study, friends to make. Everything would change and the only people she wanted to talk to wouldn’t be there.
Katie swung her legs out of bed and found an old book in a box she had not taped fully. It was an old copy of Romeo and Juliet that she had used for her GCSEs and wanted to keep in case she needed it again. There were a few blank pages near the back of this study edition, ostensibly for notes but she had written all of hers in the margins or over the text. She and a group of kids in her English class had decided to use each other books as a sort of mini yearbook with little stick figure self portraits and short messages. One page was dotted with stick people bearing cheesy smiles or fake tears and speech bubbles that said, ‘Good luck in your future. I won’t forget you.’ Chances were that most of that crowd already had forgotten her. No big deal. They weren’t worth wasting tears or sadness over.
Something creaked behind her and Katie looked over to see the door of a wardrobe yawned open. Any minute now a bony, dark hand would stretch out of it and curl one finger to her, silently calling her over to it. She would go with it. No hesitating, no moment to think, just follow the hand. The hand would flatten out in front of Katie and she would place hers in that large skeleton palm and then step through the wardrobe door which couldn’t be a wardrobe any more - wouldn’t she remember putting a creepy corpse hand there? She stepped onto the wooden bottom of the tall cupboard, vaguely wondering if she would get splinters in her feet, and felt cold smooth floor beneath her. Marble. She glanced down and found she was no longer holding on to the bony fingers; only a strange cold outline of a hand signalled there had ever been anything there. All around was dark but light must have been creeping in from somewhere because, as Katie stared into the darkness, her eyes adjusted and she could just make out shadows far away and leaning against what she assumed were the walls to this place. She stepped forward a bit, using her feet to feel the ground at every step just in case it fell away or there was something to trip her. Stepping forward was the only thing to do. It was also crazy as a jack in the box. Something rustled. The dark shapes. They were moving. Katie thrust her hand behind her and pawed the air for the door, a way back to safety, although she knew it had either closed and locked or disappeared totally the moment she had stepped into this place. Forward was the only way to go. She knew that. She willed herself to run in measured, even strides like she had trained to do. But she was frozen. Fear did that and maybe there was a little of that. The shadows were so far away they could be anything from a giant fluffy bunny to a psychotic clown with thoughts of doing her good or harm. But it wasn’t the idea that something might hurt her that held her in place – it was knowing they were alive and moving towards her. A footstep clicked down on the hard floor and echoing around like a stacked heel with some weight behind it. Echo… echoes were caused by sound rebounding in an open space like a cave or a canyon. So the noise had to be bouncing off something –walls, she guessed, and walls meant a room which meant there must be a door out of here. That was logical but Katie’s legs seemed not to comprehend logic. Then the rustling started up again. Nothing moved when she looked but every black hump and lump seemed a tiny bit closer when she turned. And that was enough for Katie to will her feet into unwilling movement. One step. Two steps. That’s all she managed before the footsteps of one of the shapes started again. It was just a little two far away to be within touching distance but Katie certainly was not going to look around to see how much leeway she had. If she did, she knew, the sight would be so terrifying that she would be afraid to move or even breathe. She put her hands to her ears and did her best to step forward calmly but quickly. These blobs of black would doubtless know if she started running but she did, her hands falling towards her sides and pumping out the rhythm of her strides. There was darkness stretching on forever and no end in sight. And the clicking footsteps were always coming after her and pretty soon they were joined by more and more sets of heels – too many to count. No rustling, no voices, just footfalls that never seemed to run but never seemed to get farther away, no matter whether she walked or ran. For one heart-stopping instant, Katie decided that there was no way out of here. Running put no distance between her and whatever was chasing her – maybe it would be just as well if she halted and let these unformed things catch up to her, grab her, swallow her whole. These splashes of black in the nearly black which had no faces or names. And then, so far away it may have been a trick of the light, such as it was, or the mirage of a frenzied and frightened mind, a thin strip of light opened up. She headed for I knowing that if she slowed then there would be no escape from this nightmare. A nightmare where the monsters were unseen, where there was no light to show the true horrors it contained. Heels clip-clopped after her. The chink of light was growing a touch larger with every step. But it wasn’t close enough. The leader of the phantom pack hunting her reached forward with one deeply dark limb and came within inches – maybe centimetres – of her shoulder. Katie felt the air whoosh by her. Too close. Part of her wanted to scream only that would be wasting breath she sorely needed for running. All that running and the crack of light seemed to be almost no closer than earlier. Katie kicked down and pulled on her energy reserves, picking up her pace and trying to keep in a straight line. The steps sounded as though they were merely inches away now. The crack of light was a few inches wide and tall enough to be a door. But the light not only gave Katie something to run towards, it threw light into this dark room. Not much, just enough to tempt a person into looking around too see exactly what was chasing them. The girl willed her feet to run that little bit further, her protesting legs which felt like they had run so far and so hard this night – and then threw herself towards the light with eyes squeezed shut so tightly. She didn’t want to see the faces of the things that followed her – if they had faces – or the hand that would reach out for her, grab her and pull her back until she could no longer be seen amid that dark, moving mass.
“Moving time!”
“Wha -?”
Katie whipped her head off her desk where she was slumped over her empty desk and drooling over her old, ratty Romeo and Juliet. Most of the boxes had already been taken away, Dad was carting them downstairs and singing to himself a song with word he had made up and in a tune no-one had ever written. It was mid-morning on a Monday – no-one had the right to be that cheerful. Katie looked over at her sister who was bouncing
on the bed.
“I’m gonna miss you, Dan.”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s not like you’re never coming back.”
“No, but it is a long time. I’ll phone and email though.”
Dan rolled her eyes. “Do you have to?”
Katie laughed and pushed her out of her room so she could get dressed. Gone was the twelve year old tomboy who had hugged her and made her a gift and reminded the world she actually had a vulnerable side and back was the moody, hard as nails pre-teen. Katie had been like that not too long ago. She still had moments when her attitude got the better of her and probably always would. How would she cope at the academy with no-one to rein her in?
There was a loose tracksuit draped over her bed which was so old and mucky she was happy to ruin it in today’s move and finally put it out of its’ misery. Katie picked it up and started to cross the landing to the bathroom. The hot jets of water bean to rain down and Katie lifted a leg to hook the hanging shampoo bottle without having to leave this lovely bubble. She tried to bend her foot to snag it with her toes and an explosion sent needles of pain shooting up her leg. What happened? She had no memory of injuring herself. But this had happened before. She had tripped over on a run with school and twisted an ankle. It had felt fine at first and she’d even finished the run. Then, after sitting still for hours in the subsequent exam, she had barely been able to walk. It was stiff and sore but the pain had more or less disappeared when she had walked on it for a while. Katie gave her hair the quickest wash ever, dressed and went downstairs. Mom was buttering toast and there was a bowl of cereal on the table. Katie ignored it for the moment and went to the freezer fashioning a crude ice pack out of ice cubes and a tea towel.
“Are you okay, love?”
“You remember when I twisted my ankle last year? Well, I reckon I just worked it too hard this weekend. It’ll go off in a while like before.”
Mom finished scraping the toast and put it down in front of her, taking over the ice pack duties while she ate. The school nurse had warned them that this might well happen. The ankle was weaker now. It could even break. And then there was Dan, who had fallen from a post and only ended up with a sprain, which was no doubt why Katie always decided to run through the pain because everything would turn out fine. But Dan was at home where they could keep an eye on her and take care of her if anything happened and Katie, the indestructible, take-on-the-world Katie, would be fending for herself. If she got really hurt or…
“Mom, I’ll be fine,” Katie assured her as if she had known exactly what she was thinking. “Don’t worry about me.”
“Oh honey, it’s my job to worry about my baby girl. Going off to college. Growing up. And then one day you might not even need silly old Mom and Dad.”
“If that ever happens you have my permission to slap me. You’re my parents and I’ll always need you for something, probably just for someone to chat to about my day or whatever.”
“I’m just not sure about this. You’re only16 still and you’ve been through so much this last year.”
Katie took the pack from her mothers hand and emptied the melting ice into her empty bowl. A trick the athletics team from school had used was to make sure the tea towel, or rag of t-shirt which had been always available then, was properly cold and then just tie it around the ankle, knee, wrist, whatever was hurting.
“Ready?” said Dad. He had loaded all but a few of her belongings ino the van he had managed to borrow from his brother-in-law for the day. He leaned down and planted the tiniest kiss on Katie’s head.
She glanced up at him and, all at once, a ridiculous amount of tears blurred her vision. Some of them she managed to force back but some – too many – found their way out and carved a hundred paths down her cheeks. Either the tears were silent or no-one noticed because her parents only seemed to see the smile. “Good to go.”
CHAPTER THREE