The Killing Woods

  There’s one thing I can’t believe – that Dad is only using his post-traumatic stress disorder as an excuse, as a way to cover up what he really did, as a way to cover up murder.

  I start to lift the lid, my arms shaking.

  On the day we’d found this bunker, Dad had knelt at this opening; he’d pulled me close so I could look too. I’d been amazed. Under the ground was an entire buried room, just like the earth had swallowed it. Dad had jumped down into its darkness, held his hand out for me to jump too.

  ‘What if it falls in on us?’ I’d said.

  ‘It’s solid.’ Dad had pulled me towards him. ‘Anyway, I’m taller than you so it’ll fall on me first.’

  I’d jumped into his arms; he’d been strong enough to catch me then. The bunker had smelt like an unused cellar, like things forgotten, like fear. Dad had walked around it, pushing against the walls and seeing how it was made. The roof was curved and ridged like ribs. It had felt like we were in the belly of a beast.

  ‘There are secret bunkers like this all over the country,’ he’d said. ‘Just in case.’

  ‘In case what?’

  He’d looked at me as he’d thought. ‘In case it all starts again: the invading, fighting. People always need somewhere quiet and safe.’

  But this place was more than that, even then. Maybe if I go inside, I’ll be able to make sense of who Dad was that night, what happened.

  18

  Damon

  I go the long way to school, the really long way that makes a massive detour through Darkwood. I’ve got that twitchy thing going on in the corner of my eyes, making it hard to see straight. Headache too. Did I even sleep last night? How many nights has it been now of lying awake? How many weeks? Have I slept at all since Ashlee died? Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

  The car park is empty. I go straight over to Ashlee’s tribute pile. More soft toys and flowers have been placed since I was last here, making my stupid rose look like nothing. I pick it up and dried petals fall over my hand. Keeping hold of it, I sift through some of the other flowers, see who’s left them: I don’t even know most of these people. I go back to the note I wrote: You were beautiful, Ashlee. I miss you. The words don’t seem like much now. Maybe I should’ve said I love you, or something like that, but we never said these things to each other when she was alive, so . . .

  I untie my note from the rotting rose, slide out one of the fresher flowers from the bunch my mum made me drop off for her and pin it to that instead. What I should leave here is my collar; Ashlee would’ve wanted it more than flowers or toys – to have beaten me for all time. There’s a lump in my throat as I walk to the place where we were all drinking that night. How long had we stayed here, an hour? Not even. How much had I drunk before I’d got into the woods? How much dust had Ashlee given me? She’d sat on my lap and wiggled her bum around in just the right way. She’d known it would make me want her.

  ‘Just got to catch me first,’ she’d whispered. Her mouth had smelt like liquor, her skin like roses and salt.

  I go through the gate to Darkwood’s main path, walk along it for a few metres ’til I reach the smaller track that peels off left towards Ashlee’s housing estate: her shortcut home. This is where I always left her after a Game, where she wouldn’t ever let me walk her any further.

  ‘My parents don’t like me with boys,’ she’d say. ‘You’re a secret.’

  I don’t think she ever told them about me, not properly.

  ‘But I’m a prefect,’ I’d said. ‘So that means I’m responsible, yeah? You don’t need to worry!’

  She’d just laughed. ‘You’re still an army boy, Damo.’

  And now Ashlee’s parents hate me. But why wouldn’t they? I took Ashlee to a car park beside the woods to drink. I’m the one responsible for not getting her home. They probably want me and the rest of the boys locked up too. But what they don’t know is that it was Ashlee who’d wanted to do it all so bad in the first place, and they don’t believe it was Ashlee who’d brought the drugs.

  I was here that night – on this track – I’d kissed her goodbye. It isn’t some other night I’m thinking of, it can’t be! I lean my head against a tree trunk, try to remember what else we’d done that night. You’d think if we’d had sex, I’d at least remember it. She’d promised we’d do it on the first full moon after exam results, during a Game.

  ‘It’ll be more fun this way,’ she’d said, ‘dangerous!’

  But sex was sex, wasn’t it? Why did it have to be dangerous?

  I kick at this tree trunk, kick ’til my shoe is scuffed. But it’s no good. I’m not remembering any more just from hanging around here, and I’m already late for school.

  19

  Emily

  I think I hear footsteps, running in this wood, closing in on me, but I wait and no one comes. When it’s quiet again, I turn on my phone, the light shaking thin and bluish when I hold it into the bunker to see. I’m almost expecting a hand to reach out and grab my arm, pull me down. But the bunker is empty. It’s like a snail shell that’s been left behind. There’s some stuff on the floor, though: branches and dead leaves, rubbish. Dad’s chest of drawers is still in one corner, and his old paraffin lamp has fallen on its side. These are the only things the police have left here. Apart from the drawings.

  Feet first and stomach to the ground, I lower myself in, slide down until I feel the floor. The light from my phone goes off, but I don’t turn it back on yet. It’s warmer inside. I touch my fingers to the slit that runs horizontally along one wall of the bunker, push out the earth and wet leaves that are clogging it. Shafts of light spill in from the forest floor.

  ‘Funny window,’ I’d said when I’d first seen it. I’d been measuring its height with three of my fingers stacked on top of each other, my eyes level with the ground outside.

  Dad had smiled. ‘It’s not for light.’

  If Joe were here now he’d take a photo of how the sunlight falls through this slit; he’d say it could be one of those cracks to another world. I look out of it again to see Darkwood from beetle height; see how the moss grows on just one side of the fallen branches and how it’s green as emeralds. There’s an earwig, centimetres from my eyes, dodging water that’s dripping from branches far above. There are a million shades of orange, a million more of brown, hundreds of red and yellow and green. But if I were looking through this crack from the other side, peering into this bunker? It would be a different world I’d find then, a lonely room built for violence. A place Dad got sad.

  I turn towards its pale concrete walls. I can’t ignore Dad’s drawings any longer, all these dank scrawls around me. I look at one near the roof – a wolf clamping its jaws around the neck of a deer. Below is another wolf with red eyes. Near that is a sketch of a gun. The police took photographs of all this. If Dad’s case goes to a murder trial, the police might say these sketches are evidence of a killer’s mindset.

  I remember the other dark scrawls that appeared on the front of our house after Dad’s murder charge went public: the words Killer . . . Psycho . . . Child hunter . . .

  I force myself to notice that there are other animals on these walls too, not just wolves and deer, but foxes and squirrels and birds. There are wild boar with tusks like spears; dark, detailed insects; a snake. It reminds me of a game Dad and I used to play, ages ago, when I was a kid: he’d draw an animal and I’d say who it looked like. Or sometimes we’d do it the other way round: I’d say a person and he’d draw their animal equivalent. He was so good at getting the likeness just right. I keep walking around the bunker and looking at the drawings: in one corner is a noose dangling from a branch, in another there’s a dark swirling pit, there’s a skull.

  He should have killed himself, not her – that’s what people yelled outside the courtroom. Ashlee’s mum had sobbed in her husband’s arms. ‘He murdered her. . . that monster should be burnt!’ she’d shouted.

  I want to scrub these pictures away, return this place to how it looked wh
en Dad and I first found it. I wish we’d never found it at all. Maybe then, Dad wouldn’t have ended up so sad and strange. Maybe all the bad things wouldn’t have happened. I sweep the dead leaves and other stuff into one corner, near an old pile of firewood that’s also been left. Everything about this place feels dying and abandoned; the air is rotten.

  Once Dad would have made his hands like a step so I could reach the forest floor easier; now I scramble up the bunker wall, spider-like, until I’m through the hole and sprawled in the clearing. A moth comes up with me, clinging to my clothes. I hear light rain tip-tapping on leaves high above, though I can’t feel it on my skin yet.

  I close the bunker lid, listening to something rustling. The logical part of my mind knows that this rustling sound is just a blackbird digging in the leaf litter for insects; the stupid part thinks it’s someone watching me. I scan the trees, remembering the footsteps I thought I’d heard earlier, remembering how Joe had followed me yesterday. Perhaps someone will step towards me, someone from the list.

  Or maybe the noise could be Dad, moving through the bracken. This would be the first place he’d go, after all, if he were released; he’d choose here over our house. He’d walk into the clearing and tell me he was innocent, that he’d been set free from his prison and he’d walked all the way. I stare hard at the trees. There’s a fluttery feeling inside me.

  Just go home, I tell myself. It’s no one. Nothing!

  But my heart still hammers as I stare at the mottled brown leaves on the ground, as I squeeze through the hedge and get back on the path home. Then I go still, a bunch of questions in my brain in a rush. There are eyes – ahead of me – and they are staring back. They are huge and brown and unblinking. They’re like Ashlee’s.

  But they can’t be.

  I look properly, and this time I see that these eyes don’t belong to a human. A female deer, thin with youth, is in these trees with me. She’s watching something. I follow her gaze, turning around on the path until I see another deer. A stag, only about a metre back. I let my breath go, slowly so as not to scare him. Dad would have said it was lucky, seeing a stag, he’d have said it was a sign of something going to change.

  ‘These creatures are supernatural,’ he’d said once. ‘They lead people places, help them find their way through the woods.’

  I plant my feet and stare back. The stag’s eyes flick from mine to the doe in the trees, his nostrils widening as he picks up her scent. His ears are as big as coat pockets and his antlers as still and bare as winter branches. It’s like he’s grown from the trees, is part of them. Stags can attack humans during the rutting season; sometimes they’re too blind with lust to control themselves. But I’m not scared of him. Right now, with the way he’s standing so motionless, he reminds me a little of Damon from yesterday; I can almost imagine him lowering his head and pointing his antlers in the same way Damon pointed his fingers like a gun. I look at his wet nose, his endless fur. I want to touch it. Perhaps if you touch a stag in the woods your luck turns best of all? I’m stepping towards him without even meaning to, just wanting to be closer.

  The stag moves in a heartbeat, springing out of the trees and on to the path. I see the ripples in his muscles, hear the snort of his breath, watch the thrust of his antlers as he sweeps his head from being tangled in the undergrowth. He leaps past me. The young female skitters away and he’s after her, melting into the trees. Then the woods are quiet again, branches swaying back into place as if nothing had happened.

  20

  Damon

  Emily Shepherd’s not at school. I’m looking across the schoolyard to where I’ve seen her lately, hanging around with Joe Wilder. Today he’s there, and that Mina girl is too, but Emily is nowhere. I almost go across and ask him where she is – almost – but I don’t want to ask nothing of Joe Wilder. Other people are staring at me too. Do they all think I know something about why Emily’s not here? I didn’t tell anyone about the detention, only Mack, but she might’ve, and word travels fast in this place. Is everyone wondering what happened? Or am I just wired from no sleep, jittery from going back to Ashlee’s shortcut track and not remembering nothing? There’s this feeling that none of this is real, that soon it’ll be a Sunday morning and I’ll wake with Ashlee’s thin, sparkly collar in my hand and all this just in my head . . . I’ll meet Ashlee in the woods and kiss her so hard it hurts.

  I feel a thump on my back.

  ‘How’d it go, mate?’

  Mack.

  I turn to find him with his eyebrows raised, reeking of smokes. ‘Hypocrite.’ I make an exaggerated sniff.

  ‘Yeah, well, you make me stressed.’ He grins, half shrugs, looks across at Wilder too. ‘So where is she anyway?’

  ‘I don’t know! She did her detention!’

  Mack nods. ‘Chill out.’

  He looks behind him to where Ed and Charlie are slouched against the Common Room wall chatting to some of the girls in the year below. ‘Why didn’t you join us anyway?’

  ‘Didn’t feel like it.’

  There’s a weird silence between us, and I’m thinking that there’s a whole heap of stuff I should tell Mack – about how Emily Shepherd caught me in Darkwood yesterday, how she wasn’t scared, how the things she said about her dad kept me awake most the night. I should tell Mack about how I returned to Ashlee’s shortcut track this morning too, and how I didn’t remember nothing. But I stay silent instead and feel like the worst kind of friend.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, mate,’ Mack says, guessing at what’s bugging me. ‘Joe Wilder would be panicked if something had happened to her, he’d be yelping.’

  But what if this is what I do now, leave girls in the woods, leave girls who never come out? I get a shiver. I’m remembering Emily Shepherd’s angry words as she pinned me: what kind of boyfriend leaves his drunk girlfriend in the woods after dark?

  ‘Come on.’ Mack starts leading me back to Ed and Charlie.

  But flirting with girls is the last thing I want to do now, not when I’ve got this gnawing inside of me. Not when my head’s too full with Ashlee. Too full with thinking about Emily Shepherd also, wondering where she is.

  ‘I’m going to class,’ I say.

  ‘I’ll come with.’

  Again, I think it: Mack’s a mate. He doesn’t make a big deal of things, just gets what I need. But maybe what I really need is to come clean about all the stuff in my head. Perhaps then Mack’ll just say I’m being a dick, tell me something about that night that’ll make everything clear . . . he’ll fill in the gaps.

  But what if he can’t?

  Mack salutes the other two as we pass.

  ‘You’ll be late!’ I call out, try to force a grin. ‘I’ll give you both a detention slip.’

  ‘Whatever!’ Ed flicks me the bird, and the girl he’s been talking to giggles.

  Mack and me carry on towards the science block. ‘So, how’d it go, anyway?’ he asks. ‘Last night? Get what you needed?’

  I’m thinking about how I left Emily Shepherd sprawled on the bike trail, how I didn’t look back . . . not once. How I’d been so angry.

  ‘She was pretty determined,’ I tell him. ‘Pretty certain her dad’s not a killer.’

  ‘Then she’s pretty stupid. He’s pleading guilty.’

  ‘To manslaughter.’

  Mack snorts. ‘Does it matter which?’

  I look across. He’s got rolling papers out, right here in the middle of school. ‘It matters.’

  Mack pauses, tobacco in his hands and a paper stuck to his bottom lip. ‘Listen, mate, one way Shepherd did it and can’t remember; the other way he meant to do it all along. But it’s still the same fucking result, he’s still the same fucking bastard!’

  And then I get it – I work out why I’ve been feeling so sick and angry ever since Shepherd said that plea of manslaughter in court. It really does matter which way Shepherd did it; it means everything.

  ‘It matters,’ I say again, trying to work out how to phrase what?
??s bothering me, ‘. . . because if Shepherd didn’t plan to kill Ashlee – if his flashback story’s right and it is manslaughter – then it means Ashlee got to his bunker by herself, didn’t she? He didn’t lure her there, or stalk her, or whatever. She walked there!’

  Mack shrugs. ‘So maybe his bunker is near her shortcut.’ He starts rolling his tobacco, licks the paper shut. ‘So maybe Ashlee stumbled a little way off it and he found her that way.’

  I place my hand over Mack’s lighter to stop him flicking it on, check about me for teachers. ‘You know we would have found that bunker if it was close to her shortcut track – that track’s in Game Play.’

  ‘So, then Shepherd’s story can’t be real – simple! He stalked her after all. He got her to that bunker.’ He puts the rollie behind his left ear. ‘The court won’t accept his manslaughter plea anyway, you’ll see. Guilty bastard’s a murderer, straight up.’

  ‘Yeah, course he is.’ But I don’t sound as confident as I did before yesterday and even I can hear that.

  Emily’s determined face won’t get out of my head either: those piercing grey-blue eyes. She’d been so certain of her dad’s innocence, so certain of how damaged he’d become after being in combat. She’d talked about her dad almost like how I talked about mine: as if something could’ve been done differently, as if a person’s life had been wasted, as if she loved the fucker. I clench my fists.

  ‘Emily Shepherd’s a liar,’ I say.

  I’m not going to feel sorry for her. She’s a wildcat backed into a corner, trying to make me believe what she wants. I won’t let her make me doubt everything.

  Mack’s watching me. ‘She said something, didn’t she?’

  ‘I don’t believe anything she said!’

  But again, my words don’t sound confident. And this manslaughter plea is still bugging me. Because I know about flashbacks. I’ve seen films about that shit, and Mack and me once spent ages talking to an old war vet under the railway bridge in town about his. The stuff Emily Shepherd said about her dad – about him being scared and not remembering – that sounds about right. I’d heard about another soldier who’d gone on a shooting spree in a building site because he’d thought, in his flashback, that it looked like the compound he’d been protecting overseas. I pull Mack on.