Authors: Lauren Henderson
“Eew,” Taylor says, frowning now, the lines drawing together.
“I know. It’s weird. It didn’t feel that wonderful.”
“I’m not surprised,” she says, as we turn a corner. “ ’Cause—whoo!”
The passage has suddenly widened into a close as wide as a street, dipping away from us sharply; I’ve lost any sense of which direction we’re going in this maze, but I imagine we must be standing on the ridge of the rock on which Edinburgh Castle is built, and this close falls away down one of the steeper hills. Girls farther down the stony slope are giggling and clinging to each other as the guide calls us to a halt.
“Now, I’m sure all you fine young lassies are very used to posing for a photo or two, aren’t you?” he asks rhetorically. “Pretty young things like you must have all the boys asking to take your picture!”
“He’s kind of like the too-friendly old uncle your mom tells you never to be left alone with,” Taylor comments as Jane hisses to Miss Carter:
“I am
not
comfortable with his gender assumptions, Clemency.”
The guide raises his cane to the high beam in the ceiling.
“Smile for the camera!” he says. “It’ll go off in five seconds—counting down—”
To be fair, he’s bang-on about most of the girls here. The St. Tabby’s posse is more than used to posing for the cameras, and the speed with which they all hit their marks is impressive: groups form lightning fast up and down the steep slope, hair tossed back from faces, bodies snapped into their most flattering angles, smiles blazing, pouts pursing out. Taylor jams her hands into her pockets and scowls; she hates having her photo taken. And I just stand there, staring up at the beam, as a white light opens up and vibrates for a long, eyeball-searing moment, leaving us temporarily blinded when it finally dissipates.
“That’ll be available to purchase in the gift shop when you finish the tour,” the guide says, “if you’re happy with the way you look—I know the leddies are always complaining about the way they look in photos, aren’t they?”
“I’m
definitely
going to lodge a complaint!” Jane fumes as we slip and slide down the slope.
“Did Plum catch us up?” I say suddenly, very aware of the state I left her in: white-faced and shaking. I didn’t see her in the photo groups, and it’s completely unlike Plum not to have been in the center of one of them.
I swivel round, worried now that she stayed back and might have got lost in the corridors. It’s actually a relief when I see her tall figure picking its way toward us, long giraffe legs in tight jeans and high heels, one hand out to the stone wall to help herself balance.
It’s what’s behind her that makes me freeze. The shadows are thick around the doorway at the top of the slope, but I see it quite clearly now: a dark figure, stocky and square-shouldered, as if the gloom has taken form, coalesced into the shape that is already horribly familiar to me from two nights ago in the night streets of Leith.
I grab Taylor’s arm. And this time, I know I’m not going mad: I know Taylor can see it too, because she turned when I did, and she’s looking in precisely the same place I am.
“Look!” I say, sounding almost frenzied. “
There!
Look! There
is
someone!” My other arm shoots out and I point at the doorway, my hand shaking with emotion.
Plum spins round, alerted by my frantic voice, and stares into the doorway too as the shape slides back, into the dark, blending imperceptibly into the shadows behind it until it disappears completely.
“Come on, girls!” Aunt Gwen calls impatiently from farther down the slope. “There’s been enough dawdling!”
But I’m taking off in the opposite direction, in the direction of the shadow. Taylor grabs my arm, physically stopping me, pulling me back.
“Scarlett! We’ve got to go—your aunt’s calling—”
Impatiently, I jerk at my arm, but Taylor’s grip is like a vise.
“Let me go!” I say urgently. “I can catch whoever it is! They’ve been following me—I can catch them—”
“Scarlett—” Her face is right in front of mine, her brows dragged together in one straight line. “Scarlett, there’s nothing there, okay? I didn’t see anything! We have to get going!”
“
Girls!”
Aunt Gwen sounds furious. “Come
on
!”
The seconds are ticking away; whoever was standing there at the top of the slope, watching us, has had a chance now to slip into one of the many little rooms or closes in the maze up above. I’ll never catch them now. My shoulders slump in frustration and anger.
“There
was
someone there! The same shape that was following us in Leith!” I insist to Taylor as she pulls me down to join the rest of the group. “You
must
have seen him!”
“I didn’t, Scarlett,” she says, shaking her head. “I’m really sorry.”
I wrench my arm free.
“I don’t believe you,” I say, tears of rage pricking at my eyes. “I don’t believe you didn’t see it—it was right
there
!”
“
I
saw something,” Plum volunteers, skittering down the incline and nearly falling into it. “There was definitely someone in the doorway. I saw it too.”
“Oh please,” Taylor snaps. “You’re just lying to suck up to Scarlett.”
“I’m
not
!” Plum insists as we all reach the bottom of the gradient and turn in to a small room with open wooden struts that look as if they’re barely managing to hold up the ceiling. There’s hardly room for all of us. I shuffle in, pushing forward through the cluster of girls and teachers to get as far away from Taylor as I can—I’m furious with her for stopping me from chasing that shadow figure.
But as I reach the front of the group, I see a truly creepy sight.
Dolls. A wooden trunk full of dolls, set against the stone wall, more dolls spilling out of it, some arranged on a shelf above, their beady eyes staring sightlessly in front of them, glassy and dead, as if they’re gazing at ghosts only they can see. It’s like something from a horror film, and for some reason it affects me really strongly. I freeze, transfixed. There must be over a hundred of them, their beige plastic skin gleaming in the harsh glare of the single lightbulb hanging overhead, their cheap acrylic hair bright and fake.
Behind us, the guide is gleefully telling the story of the dolls. I catch snatches of it as I stare, hypnotized, at the trunk and its contents.
“And so, when the psychic came into
this
room—well, she didn’t even come in, poor leddy, she stopped there on the threshold and said she felt so cold she couldn’t move, like a presence was haunting it …”
Some of the dolls are bald, like babies with grossly oversized swollen heads, shiny in the light.
“… eventually she did a séance or some such and got in touch with the spirit of a puir wee dead lassie called Flora, who said she wanted her dolly …”
Lizzie, next to me, starts to sniff in sympathy with Flora.
“… and when she made the documentary, we found ourselves swamped with dollies for Flora. They come from all over—Australia, Canada, even China, people have sent dollies from round the globe. The leddy said Flora told her she died of the plague and her mummy left her here.…”
Lizzie starts to cry, which sets off Susan. Sighing, Aunt Gwen reaches in her bag for a packet of tissues and extracts a couple, handing them over to the girls. As Susan leans over to take them, sniffing and sobbing, her head grazes against the hanging lightbulb; Susan’s as tall as a model. It’s just a brush of her scalp against the white plastic protective cage round the bulb. Susan barely notices. But it sends the bulb, hanging from a thick white safety wire, swinging back and forth.
I know I shouldn’t look back at the dolls. I know I shouldn’t. But I can’t help it; the impulse is stronger than common sense.
So I do.
It’s a huge mistake. My nerves are already wound tighter than elastic on a spool; I’m groggy and vulnerable from lack of sleep; and I’m totally freaked out, not just from seeing that shadow-shape again, but even more from the fact that Taylor once again denied seeing it when it was plainly in front of her.
Is it Taylor playing these awful tricks on me? Is she in league somehow with the person who’s following me? She must be—why else would she deny she saw something that was right there—something I saw with my own eyes!
The swinging lightbulb is sending pools of light and patches of shadow back and forth, back and forth across the trunkful of dolls. It makes their eyes glitter and their expressions ghastly. And as it moves, it catches the shape of one of the dolls propped up on top of the pile, magnifying its shadow hugely against the bare stone wall. For an awful moment, with its squat, bulky body and round head, it looks almost exactly like the shape I saw in the doorway just now. Only this one is reaching out toward me with one stubby, clawlike hand.
I’m completely overloaded, still in a flood of panic at seeing that menacing shape in the doorway at the top of the close. I’m deep in a maze of confusing passages, being followed by a dark, mysterious figure, with my best friend turning on me, doing her best to drive me crazy by telling me I can’t believe the evidence of my own eyes. Everything’s upside down: I can’t trust Taylor. Which makes me so insecure it feels as if my head’s going to explode.
I realize that I’m barely able to breathe. And the next thing I know, I’m swaying dangerously on my feet, and the room’s going black.
sixteen
SOMETHING’S VERY WRONG WITH ME
I should be mortified, totally and utterly mortified, at making such an awful scene over a trunk of kids’ dolls and a swinging lightbulb. And deep down, I
am
thoroughly embarrassed, but it’s a dull sensation buried under layers and layers of other emotions that are much sharper and more stabbing. Fear. Confusion. Panic.
Someone’s caught me and is holding me by the shoulders, keeping me on my feet. It’s Jane.
“Has anyone got a paper bag?” she’s asking urgently. “She’s having a panic attack—it helps to breathe into a paper bag—”
“It’s like that shadow on the wall! Like that shadow we saw up there!” Plum squeals. “I know why she’s screaming! She saw something at the top of the slope in the doorway—she said someone was following her—”
“Wee Flora’s just a story, lassie,” the guide says, sounding very worried. “There’s no documentation for it; we’ve just got the psychic’s word for it. She might have made it all up, y’know—”
“Throw some water on her!” Miss Carter recommends.
I really can’t breathe now. Dark spots are spinning before my eyes. My head’s tightening, as if my skull’s shrinking, and my body feels lighter and lighter, my legs as wobbly as jelly.
And then someone grabs my arm in a grip even tighter than Taylor’s and starts dragging me out of the room. I feel every single finger digging into me, separate and distinct, the thumb sinking into my tricep muscle, and the pain is sharp and clear and hugely welcome, because it’s an instant distraction from my panic. I gasp in shock and drag in a long, merciful breath as I’m pulled out into the corridor and up the incline, then shoved into a stone embrasure, an old window frame onto which I slump. It’s an improvised chair; the hand stays on my arm and the other hand comes down on the back of my head, shoving it between my knees.
“Blood to the head stops a faint,” Aunt Gwen’s voice snaps above me.
“Oh, well done, Gwen,” Miss Carter says, trotting up the slope in our wake. “Very well done. What on earth is going on with Scarlett? I know she had period issues on Arthur’s Seat, but I’m beginning to think we have a serious nerve disturbance here!”
“Her mother was very unstable,” Aunt Gwen says grimly. “A lot of these problems start at puberty, you know.”
“Oh
dear
…” Miss Carter clicks her tongue.
I try to speak, but my head’s still swimming. Aunt Gwen is a foul, evil witch who can’t resist an opportunity to bitch about my mother, and yet she’s the only person who had the wit to save me from fainting. I suppose I should be grateful to her. Which is incredibly annoying.
“I’ll take her back to Fetters and let her rest,” Aunt Gwen says. “It’s the best we can manage for now.”
“Absolutely,” Miss Carter agrees. “I really don’t think that silly little ghost story was remotely upsetting enough to cause something like this. Plum was saying Scarlett hallucinated some sort of shadow, isn’t that right? We’ll have to get her checked out by a doctor once we’re back at Wakefield.”
“One thing at a time,” Aunt Gwen says. “Scarlett, lift your head up now and take deep breaths from your diaphragm. You
can
control yourself, and you
will.
”
It’s amazing that Aunt Gwen’s rough treatment is actually working. But it is. She’s let go of my arm by now, but it’s still throbbing, and the pain’s a focus for me to concentrate on. Pain I can deal with. Panic’s much harder. By the time I raise my head as Aunt Gwen commands, the black spots in my vision have gone, and my head isn’t spinning anymore.
“Miss Carter, what’s happening?” Taylor sprints up the slope, sounding as frantic as I just felt. “Is Scarlett okay?”
“Goodness knows, Taylor,” Miss Carter sighs. “Her aunt is taking her back to Fetters to lie down. We’ll see what the nurse has to say.”
“I’ll go back too!” Taylor says immediately. “She shouldn’t be alone. I can sit with her in our room—”
“I think I’m more than capable of taking care of one hysterical teenager, thank you, Taylor,” Aunt Gwen snaps.
“No—Miss Carter, Miss Wakefield,
please
let me come!” Taylor sounds hysterical herself. “She’s my best friend,
please
!”
“I suppose it couldn’t do any harm—” Miss Carter starts, but I interrupt her.
“No!” I say loudly. “I don’t want her!”
“Scarlett!”
Taylor almost wails. “Scarlett, you
have
to—”
“I don’t have to do anything!” I yell. “I
know
you saw that ghost—no,
not
a ghost, it was something real—I
know
you saw it, and you’re
lying
! Not just now, when we were coming back from the Shore as well! That’s twice you’ve lied about it!”
“It’s not—I can explain—” Taylor begins, but Aunt Gwen’s voice cuts through us like a knife through butter.
“This situation is completely out of control,” she snaps, her voice as tart as a lemon. “I am taking Scarlett back to school
immediately.
Miss Carter, will you please escort Taylor McGovern back to the group
now,
before the girls work each other up to any further heights of childish hysteria?”
“Come on, Taylor,” Miss Carter says, turning away. “This isn’t helping Scarlett at all.”
I look at Taylor; she’s white as a sheet. Pushing past Miss Carter, she runs up to me, dropping down next to me so she can be level with my face.
“Scarlett, let me come with you!” she pleads. “
Please!
I can explain everything—just let me come back to school with you—”
“Leave me alone,” I say angrily, my voice echoing off the stone walls. “I can’t trust you anymore!
Plum
saw that thing—whatever it was—it’s
mad
that you’re the one who kept lying to me, and
Plum
didn’t! Everything’s so messed up, I don’t know what to think!”
Aunt Gwen pulls me to my feet.
“This is clearly a case of a friendship getting too close,” she says over my head to Miss Carter. “We see it much too often, don’t we? It’s the bane of single-sex schools.”
“What?”
Taylor jumps up, yelling at Aunt Gwen. “That’s bull! You’re the one who told Scarlett she couldn’t see her boyfriend! If you were worried about me and Scarlett getting too close, why didn’t you let her see Jase?”
“Jase Barnes is Scarlett’s boyfriend?” Miss Carter says in surprise, before she shakes her head. “This is getting
completely
out of control,” she says firmly. “Gwen, you’re absolutely right. Taylor, you will come with me this instant to rejoin the group.”
“But, Miss Carter—”
“Now!”
Miss Carter barks at her, with all the authority of a gym mistress more than used to making reluctant girls jump on command.
Aunt Gwen is already marching me back through the narrow underground passages as expertly as if she had spent her life down in these closes. In a matter of minutes, we’re climbing the wooden staircase again, emerging into the gift shop, startled faces turning to stare at us as we exit through the heavy iron-framed door into the daylight. The Royal Mile is bustling, and I balk at the number of people on the pavements, the sightseeing buses lumbering past; it’s too much for me to deal with. Too much reality, too much confusion.
But it certainly isn’t too much for Aunt Gwen. Maybe she really is the best person to be taking care of someone in as highly emotional a state as I am right now; she hails a black taxi and has me inside, slumped on the backseat, almost immediately. The familiar ticking noise of the cab’s engine is loud and comforting, and in the fifteen minutes it takes us to drive back to Fetters, we don’t exchange a word.
Aunt Gwen doesn’t take me to see the nurse, for which I’m also grateful; that woman was nasty enough to me last time I collapsed. I can’t imagine how sarcastic she’d be at the sight of me coming in twice in three days with fainting symptoms. Instead, I’m marched through the main hall, up five flights of a back staircase, and through a series of fire doors to a modern wing of the school so tucked away behind its Victorian Gothic facade that I didn’t even know it existed. This is clearly for the teachers—Aunt Gwen has her own suite of rooms, which are as spacious and luxurious as the pupils’ are cramped and old-fashioned.
So this is where a lot of the school fees go,
I think, the cynical granddaughter of a headmistress.
Bet they don’t let the parents anywhere near this wing.
Aunt Gwen chivvies me into the sitting room and indicates an armchair while she bustles off into the adjoining kitchenette. I peer around and notice a bedroom off one side of the sitting room, and what I assume is an en suite bathroom beyond it. The living room is very nicely furnished, with a leather sofa and two matching armchairs round a coffee table, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a desk, and two huge windows with views over the parking lot to the Fetters football pitches beyond.
“Here, drink this,” Aunt Gwen says, coming back with a mug of tea and setting it down in front of me on the coffee table—on a coaster, naturally. “Plenty of sugar in it. That’s always good for a shock.” She takes a seat in the other armchair. “Oh, and open that window next to you,” she adds, nodding at it. “Cold air will do you good as well.”
There’s no disobeying Aunt Gwen; I stand up obediently and twist the chrome handle, cracking the heavy, double-glazed window open as little as I can get away with. The breeze is sharp on the back of my neck as I turn away, and I must admit, she’s right; it does wake me up, even as I’m shivering.
I sit back down in the armchair and pick up the tea, blowing on the top to cool it down. Aunt Gwen has brewed it as strong as she could.
“Drink it all,” she commands, fixing her bulging, green gobstopper eyes on me.
One of Aunt Gwen’s most effective powers is her ability to not say a word, which is a lot harder than you’d think. Under her basilisk stare, I dutifully drink down my entire mug of tea. The sugar and caffeine rush, combined with the cold air blowing over my face, dispels the last wisps of dizziness from my meltdown; I set the mug on the table, feeling as good as I can, considering that I just threw a major wobbly and am now seated in front of my horrible aunt, doubtless about to get one of her special, nerve-crunching lectures about exactly what’s wrong with me.
I take a deep breath and brace myself for the onslaught. But her first question takes me completely by surprise.
“Are you still in contact with Jase Barnes, Scarlett?” she asks, leaning forward and smoothing her tweed skirt down over her knees. “Taylor McGovern said just now that he was your boyfriend. I told you in no uncertain terms to break it off with him earlier this year. And I certainly assumed that after all that unpleasantness with his father, and Jase’s disappearance, the two of you were no longer in touch.”
I bite the inside of my lip and prepare to tell a string of lies. There’s no point having a confrontation with Aunt Gwen; I live in her house, and she made it very clear to me months ago that if I kept seeing Jase, she would do everything in her power to turn my life into even more of a living hell than she’s managed to do so far.
“No, Aunt Gwen,” I fib, sliding one hand under my thigh so I can cross my fingers. It may be a silly superstition, but this isn’t just any lie; it’s to do with Jase, and after what happened last night at the quarry party—blood rises to my face when I think about it—I’m more protective than ever of our relationship.
It isn’t enough, though. Aunt Gwen doesn’t look remotely convinced.
“He’s gone,” I say. “I haven’t heard from him since he took off. We weren’t even seeing each other when all that happened. I just wanted to help him because I was sure he was innocent.”
To sell the lies, I call on the memories of how awful I felt when Jase didn’t ring me for all those weeks, and how even more awful I felt when I thought we’d broken up. It’s like being an actress, when they tell you to think of something really sad, like your dog dying, so that you can cry on cue; I feel my face sag in misery, my mouth turning down at the corners.
From Aunt Gwen’s expression, I see immediately that it’s worked; she’s nodding in satisfaction.
“The Barnes family are nothing but scum,” she says, settling back in her armchair and crossing her legs. “Look at the grandmother! And that pathetic creature Kevin married!”
I don’t think I’ve ever heard Aunt Gwen say a nice word about another woman,
I reflect,
but she’s particularly nasty about poor Dawn.
Jase’s mum isn’t exactly the Brain of Britain, it’s true, but she means well, after all, which is more than one can say about Aunt Gwen. It’s odd that I think of Jase’s mum by her first name, rather than calling her Mrs. Barnes, but when you meet Dawn, you know that treating her like an adult just doesn’t feel right. In a maturity contest between her and Lizzie Livermore, I honestly think Lizzie would win.
“You really don’t like Dawn—Jase’s mum,” I observe.
Aunt Gwen’s eyes bulge.
“There’s nothing to dislike,” she snaps. “Dawn Barnes is simply a nothing. She wasn’t even that pretty when she was younger, let alone now.”
Harsh,
as Taylor would say. But you just have to look at Aunt Gwen to understand why she might be catty about another woman’s looks. Poor Aunt Gwen didn’t have much luck in the beauty department; she takes after her father, and my grandfather’s craggy, masculine features and big, sturdy build don’t translate well to a female. Of course, Aunt Gwen could make more of an effort—do something with her frizzy sandy hair, dye her eyebrows, wear clothes that make her look less like she’s in an Agatha Christie village mystery from the 1940s, with her twinsets, pearls, and orthopedic-looking sturdy shoes. But it’s true that the raw materials don’t give her much to work with, and the thyroid disease that makes her eyes bulge out like an angry frog’s is very unlucky.
I don’t look anything like Aunt Gwen; I’m a dead ringer for many of the Wakefield women in the family portraits. Small frame, white skin, blue eyes, dark curly hair. My mother was actually a distant cousin of my father’s, so I have Wakefield blood on both sides, which explains why the resemblance between me and a lot of the previous Wakefields in crinolines and bonnets and, later, bustle skirts, is so pronounced. I know Aunt Gwen hates me for this, but it’s not exactly my fault, is it?