Twisted Heart

  ‘Why? What do you know that we don’t?’ Regan demanded.

  ‘Ziegler is the one who’s covering stuff up,’ Blake insisted. ‘He holds all our personal details, including our medical records.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he knew Conner had major heart surgery when he was fourteen years old.’

  ‘Whoa!’ Marta sprang up and backed out of the firelight, almost bumping her head on a low branch. ‘He had a weak heart?’

  Blake nodded. ‘I talked with Ava. She says his doctors gave him a programme of exercise, diet, et cetera. They put Conner on a list for further surgery, maybe even a transplant. They made it clear he shouldn’t put too much strain on his heart.’

  ‘But Ziegler ignored their advice?’ I asked.

  Blake spread her hands, palms upwards. ‘Well, he makes Conner enter the triathlon and the poor kid’s heart can’t take it. Conner drowns and Ziegler’s in big trouble. It’s just a typical example of the way they run this place.’

  ‘It must be part of the reason why Jean-Luc is quitting.’ I broke the conversation-stopping news without warning. ‘Even I can see he doesn’t fit in around here – there are too many big egos; he can’t make himself heard.’

  ‘Jean-Luc is leaving?’ Regan said at last, his voice filled with disbelief. ‘You know for sure?’

  ‘He’s going to live in Paris with his dad,’ I insisted as I saw a tall, dark figure step into our small circle of firelight. ‘He told Jarrold early yesterday. Ask him. He’ll tell you it’s true.’

  11

  For a second I saw a lean, mean wolf-glint in Jarrold’s eyes. His face was honed and harsh, his jaw clenched.

  ‘Where did you go?’ Marta demanded. ‘We were worried about you.’

  ‘Not true,’ Blake argued. ’We knew you’d be cool. It’s OK, Jarrold – the camera’s switched off. You can talk.’

  ‘Yeah, tell us about Jean-Luc,’ Regan said.

  Slinging his backpack on to the ground, Jarrold was slow to respond. ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘Tania says he’s quitting New Dawn. We want to know why.’

  ‘Go figure.’ Sullenly Jarrold took out his sleeping bag and threw it inside the shelter, crawling in after it.

  ‘You mean, who except a crazy person would stay here if they had a choice?’ Regan didn’t need to have it spelled out.

  ‘Me,’ Marta contradicted. ‘And Blake, Kaylee, Channing … I could give you a long list.’

  ‘Count me out,’ Jarrold grunted, already zipped up inside his bag and ready to sleep. ‘The sooner I’m out of here the better – zap. I’m history!’

  The others muttered and grumbled, but Jarrold’s reappearance had put the brakes on our confessional. Soon we were following him into the shelter, where it turned out the only space left for me when I crawled in was next to Jarrold – exactly the place I least/most wanted to be. So we lay waiting for sleep in a tightly packed row – Marta, Blake, Regan, Jarrold then me.

  ‘I can’t even breathe. All move a couple of inches to your right,’ Marta complained.

  I felt Jarrold’s shift of weight, grew hyper-aware of his presence. Though it was pitch-dark in the shelter, I pictured him with eyes closed, his skin smooth and clean, his fair hair falling clear of his face.

  I lay too close, felt the attraction at the same time as the fear. I remembered Blake’s mocking voice telling me that a Friend was free to fall in love with an Explorer and saw again Holly’s doting gaze when Channing kissed her lips.

  ‘Thanks and goodnight,’ Marta said from the far end of the row. ‘Sleep well, everyone.’

  I crawl through thorn bushes after the wolf man. I enter his lair.

  It is humid, dank with sweat and spilled blood. A gleam of amber light in the darkness – his eyes.

  He drags me out into the open. A whole pack of wolves hunt in the forest. They rear on to their hind legs, snap their jaws and morph into creatures you only hear about in folk tales where man becomes beast, ogre or frog. Which one do you run from before he eats you up? Which one do you kiss?

  I run. The beasts shape-shift again and carry axes. They paint their naked bodies crimson and black, they wear feathers in their black hair and ride horses across the plains.

  Only one has hair that is fair, the colour of ripe corn. His face is streaked with red clay, he wears a dagger in his belt. The wind whips his hair from his face as his horse gallops. He comes straight at me with a thunder of hooves, he leans out and sweeps me from my feet, carries me away. I am saved.

  I am in his arms when I look again and see that the golden hair is dull and matted, there are yellow fangs in his mouth, blood on his breath.

  ‘Tania, are you OK?’

  I crawled out of the shelter, gasping for breath. It was still dark – the middle of the night.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Jarrold asked again.

  ‘I had a nightmare. I was scared,’ I admitted.

  To my surprise, he wrapped his arms around me and held me close. I felt the strong beating of his heart.

  Again, I crept back into the shelter and tried to sleep.

  Antony Amos appears dressed in a long buckskin shirt with blue beads around his neck. Ziegler stands beside him, carrying a feathered staff.

  They stand on a flat rock in a forest clearing. The rock is the shape of an altar. Storm clouds sweep across the sky, fast-forwarded so that day becomes night – clouds, clear sky, stars and moonlight.

  Amos and Ziegler do not move, even when stealthy coyotes, bears and wolves creep out of the shadows and surround them. Ziegler raises his staff then thuds it down on the rock. The creatures howl at the moon then they stop and listen as Amos starts to speak.

  ‘I bring storm and tempest,’ he proclaims in the voice of a prophet, a shaman. ‘I bring winds of destruction. Watch!’

  He takes the staff from Ziegler and thrusts it towards the starlit sky. Lightning strikes, thunder cracks, a savage rain tears the leaves from the trees.

  ‘I turn man into beast and beast into man.’

  At his word, the coyotes fall on their backs and writhe in the dust. They snarl and spring to their feet as lithe young guys – each one handsome. The bears roar and strike at each other with curved claws. They wrestle their opponents to the ground, roll and recover. When they leap up, they are as sleek and strong as action heroes. Even the wolves – those sly, stinking, creeping creatures – tear at each other with their fangs then shed their hairy coats and morph into the hot guy you would fall in love with at college and worship from a distance. Exultant, Amos and Ziegler gather their army of dark angels. ‘You will go from here and seek out your victims,’ Amos exhorts, raising both arms above his head and grasping the staff in two hands. ‘They will be young. Each one will know in their heart what love is.’

  His followers listen intently, like extras being given direction for the next take. They are eager to enact every move Amos gives them.

  ‘Carry their souls back to me!’ he cries, his voice rising. ‘Like thieves in the night, you will steal their beautiful, unspotted, loving spirits. You will drag them to the dark side. So our army of dark angels will grow until we outnumber the angels of light!’

  I woke again, stunned and cold as death. The questions that had drilled into my brain for days were answered by hammer blows of certainty. Right from the start, when I first saw Amos by the side of the lake, I had been deceived. He had been too clever for me.

  I’d been deep in denial, I realized. I’d refused to listen to Grace and Orlando’s warnings and, worse still, had ignored both my good angel and my nightmare visions. I’d been so busy preparing to stand and face my enemy that I’d missed the thing right in front of me – Amos was my dark angel after all.

  This time I didn’t crawl out of the shelter and look to Jarrold for comfort, but drifted like a corpse sinking into murky depths of panic, waiting until the dawn light sluggishly appeared.

  My first thought when I finally emerged from the overnight shelter was
to flee from my Wolf in the Snow band and head back to New Dawn to find Holly.

  Jarrold found me kneeling in the crisp snow, studying my map and working out my route. He quickly snatched the map and ripped it to pieces.

  ‘Hey!’ I cried out, scurrying after the paper fragments, which the wind had lifted into the air. ‘What are you trying to do?’

  ‘Save your life?’ he suggested.

  ‘By destroying my map!’ I was furious and helpless, turning on him with fists clenched. ‘I’m going to see Holly!’ I yelled. ‘I want to find out exactly what happened to her!’

  Jarrold gave me his speciality blank stare. ‘Boring, Tania,’ he muttered as he began to build a fresh fire. ‘Change the freaking track.’

  Grabbing my bag from just inside the entrance to the shelter, I was about to swing it on to my shoulder and head out of the camp when Blake sprang into action. She grabbed my wrist and dragged me inside. ‘You heard Jarrold – don’t even think about it!’

  ‘Let me go! I’m leaving. You can’t stop me.’

  Blake pushed me against Marta and Regan. ‘Funny – I had you down as smart,’ she mocked.

  Knowing I didn’t have the brute strength to resist, I appealed to Regan and Marta. ‘My friend’s in big trouble. Would you stick around if you were me?’

  ‘Actually, yes,’ Marta said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Regan echoed. ‘I’d stick with what Ziegler told you.’

  ‘You’re all brainwashed!’ I cried, struggling to get past Blake, who blocked my exit. ‘I thought you got it after the talk we had yesterday. All this crap about trust and teamwork – it’s just mind control.’

  ‘And you’re hysterical,’ Regan said quietly, as if any girl who splurged her emotions was an alien creature. He’d already turned his back on me and got busy rolling up his sleeping bag.

  ‘OK, look at this rationally,’ Marta cajoled, squatting beside me. She seemed to be the only one willing to spend more than five seconds on my fragile state of mind. ‘We know the incident with your friend has spooked you big time, and we understand that. But Ziegler is a good guy in an emergency. He’ll get Holly the best possible treatment and by the time he picks you up in the Jeep later today, she’ll be fully recovered and back to normal, believe me.’

  ‘I don’t trust him, or Channing,’ I confessed. ‘I think there are things going on here that you wouldn’t even believe.’

  Evil things, fuelled by my dark angel’s desire for revenge. A great cosmic battle between good and evil. And Holly is under the spell of a love-thief, losing touch with reality. She’s being drawn into a tormented shadow world which you’re part of, even if you don’t know it.

  I thought these things, hunched in the dark corner and staring pleadingly at Marta, but I didn’t dare to say them out loud.

  ‘Smart but paranoid,’ Blake scoffed as she left the shelter.

  ‘So, like I said – cowboy up,’ Marta whispered. She was concerned about me, enough to show sympathy while the others mocked and turned their backs.

  ‘Don’t risk your life by trying to make it out of the wilderness alone. That really would be dumb, Tania.’

  ‘OK, I’ll stay with the group,’ I promised.

  Scraps of my map flew in every direction. Members of the Wolf band were my jailers for the day. What choice did I have?

  At eight a.m. we deadened the fire, shouldered our bags and left camp, hiking in single file towards a small frozen lake called Mule Pond, an old watering station for the wagon trains heading west through the mountains. Jarrold led the way.

  Ten hours to go, I told myself, focusing on my meeting with Ziegler and praying that he’d show up as promised but fearing that it was already too late to rescue Holly from Channing’s clutches. Remember the dazed look she gave him, the slurred words, the hole in her memory, I thought.

  We walked through the morning under a cloudy sky. At noon, a hot sun broke through.

  ‘So now we get the snow melt,’ Blake predicted.

  We were walking along a narrow ledge with the force of the sun directly overhead. Already the frozen surface had developed the slippery wet quality of water on top of ice. I watched Regan lose his footing and grab on to Marta, who stood firm until he got his balance. My heart skipped a beat as I looked down at a sheer drop of thirty or forty feet.

  The melt happened incredibly quickly, almost before we were off the ledge and entering a narrow valley between ridges. Already there were new streams forming, clear water cascading down the rocks, snow disappearing to reveal flattened vegetation below. Above us, the noon sun blazed.

  And we’d fallen into the deep silence that develops on a wild walk. Our feet slithered through mushy snow, water splashed down rocks, steam rose from the dark ground.

  At two p.m. we came to a lake surrounded by pines. On the near side there were the crumbling remains of wooden shacks, old fence posts and rails where horses had been tethered while the pack animals drank.

  ‘Mule Pond,’ Jarrold announced.

  ‘Kodak moment!’ Blake got ready with the camera, lining us up with the dripping cabins in the background. ‘To prove that we made it,’ she explained. She gave a voice-over as we posed. ‘This is the newly formed Wolf in the Snow band by Mule Pond. The noise you hear is the sound of snow melt. See the creek has burst its bank.’ Panning round to her left, she captured a stream gushing over a succession of pink granite ledges. ‘The ice on the pond has totally melted,’ she commented, turning the lens on the flat, blue surface. ‘Pretty, huh?’

  ‘OK, cut,’ Marta told her. ‘I’m heading for that rock and I don’t want the camera on me when I’m squatting.’

  ‘So what’s for lunch?’ Regan asked.

  ‘Whatever we can catch in the lake.’ Jarrold’s answer came as he strode along the shore to a crumbling wooden jetty where he lay on his belly and stared into the water. ‘Salmon,’ he told us. ‘Plenty of them.’

  Smiling, Blake joined him on the jetty. ‘Here, little fishes!’

  ‘Like they’re going to jump out of the water right into our hands,’ I muttered. I was counting the hours, worried that we wouldn’t get from here to Spider Rock in time for six o’clock.

  Regan laughed and told me to start collecting firewood. ‘Only the driest stuff,’ he recommended. ‘Take a look inside the old cabins, see what you can find.’

  Thirty minutes later, we had a fire blazing on the shore and three salmon from the lake, gutted and beheaded, magically sizzling in a pan.

  In the afternoon I took a turn with the camera.

  ‘Isn’t that why you came?’ Jarrold reminded me in that mocking way.

  Had I imagined it? Was it part of my dream last night that Jarrold had crawled out of the shelter and held me in his arms? ‘Why are you mad at me?’ I asked, remembering the strong beat of his heart as I trained the camera on his face.

  He stared back. ‘Do you even have to ask?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m asking.’

  ‘Because you wanted to break up the band.’

  ‘Oh, the band! Well, I’m sorry I was more concerned about Holly’s safety than about guiding principles. How stupid am I?’

  ‘Sarcasm doesn’t suit you,’ he snorted.

  ‘And you think it suits you? God, Jarrold, you’re so arrogant!’ The camera wobbled in my hand as emotion took over.

  He looked as if he was about to walk away as usual but them changed his mind, raising a hand to cover the lens until I eventually turned off the camera. ‘You don’t fool me,’ he whispered. ‘I can see right through you, Tania. You only came on this trip so you could find something to pin on me – something about Conner.’

  ‘No,’ I began, my heart in my mouth. ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Sure it is. But now you know about Conner’s heart problem – yeah, Blake told you. And you also realize your friend Holly lives in la-la land. So why can’t you put two and two together and come up with the right answer?’

  ‘I do,’ I protested. ‘I know you and Conner had
a fight but it was over. I believe you – really!’

  We were standing closer than I’d realized, glaring at each other – near enough for me to see a small, tense muscle jumping in Jarrold’s jaw and the fleshy, pink softness of his lips. He had two days’ blond stubble which brushed my cheek as he leaned in to kiss me. ‘I’m not mad at you,’ he murmured. He drew back, stroked my hair, turned and walked.

  Now it was me who was mad at Jarrold. How dare he? What made him think that he could do that? We’d been arguing, not flirting. He was way out of line.

  Maybe I’m the character in Hamlet who protests too much – ‘Methinks the lady … whatever.’ William Shakespeare again. That guy knew everything and it was four hundred years ago, back in the dark ages.

  So anyway, I was confused.

  And I was convinced that Marta, Blake and Regan had seen and heard it all – the sarcasm, the fighting, the kiss.

  ‘Is this genuinely the way to Spider Rock?’ I asked Marta, who was as close as it got to being on my side. I’d begun to doubt every little thing, including the direction we were headed.

  ‘Sure,’ she shrugged. End of conversation.

  ‘Don’t tell me – Marta has a thing for Jarrold,’ I sighed as she walked off and Regan approached me. ‘She saw what he just did.’

  He laughed in my face. ‘Everyone has a thing for Jarrold, remember.’

  ‘Or Channing.’

  ‘Which is why guys like me don’t stand a chance in this environment. But wait until I’m king of the apps universe … !’ He gave a lopsided grin, dropped back and brought up the rear.

  Regan was the one who saw me slip down the sink hole. These are the craters created by forest fires, when tree roots burn underground for weeks and carve out great hidden chasms that you never see until it’s too late.

  I screamed as I dropped out of sight, felt wet earth and soot fall on my head, reached out with both hands and tried to claw my way back to the surface.