The Killing Woods Read online

  I should be racing for the police station, should be doing anything other than just sitting here. But I think I’m starting to understand something. Already my fingers are moving to open up the next film back, and I’m starting to watch it. And I’m listening out for the noises in the bunker behind me.

  54

  Damon

  Someone is shouting at me. Grabbing my arm. ‘You have to stop!’

  Emily? She’s back? She’s pulling me. And there’s a different noise too, like crackling. A heat.

  ‘Stop!’

  I let her wrench me away.

  Mack’s cowering on the floor. His eyes are shutting like he’s going unconscious. I did that? But he’s moving – just – I think he is. My face feels sticky, hot. I put my hand up to it and find something dark. Red. Blood? It’s everywhere. Where from? Emily tries to turn me.

  ‘We have to get out!’

  She’s dragging me – trying to – but I won’t let her pull me away from him, not entirely, because I ain’t finished yet . . . I can’t have. He’s still got some movement in him.

  ‘Fire!’ Emily yells. ‘There’s flames!’

  I see it then, behind her: flames where the lamp has fallen over. They’ve caught on the pile of wood in the corner, they’re moving up Shepherd’s chest of drawers. It’s not a big fire, not yet, but it might not take long.

  ‘Come on!’

  I let her drag me. And somehow I make my hands into a step so I can get Emily out of the entrance hole first. Because even when I don’t know what’s going on, I know she’s done something for me . . . stopped something. I know it’s not fair for her to get trapped here too. But as I’m coming up after her, she’s leaning down and she’s still shouting at me.

  ‘Mack! Get Mack! You can’t leave him!’

  I look back and he’s still there, still half-unconscious. It won’t be long before the fire is right beside him, smothering him, making him choke. I want to let it. I want to let him suffer for what he did to Ashlee . . . for being a liar and not a brother at all. But I can’t, can I? Even now I can’t do that. And Emily is screaming something else.

  ‘It was an accident! A game! You can’t leave him!’

  And I don’t know whether she means about the fire starting, or Ashlee’s death, or all of this mess. But I’m remembering what Ashlee wanted me to do to her that night.

  ‘Try it,’ she’d said. ‘A new sort of Game.’

  Could Emily be right?

  So, I return to him. Somehow I pull him up and get him half-draped across my shoulders; blood from his nose smears across my neck, stains my old man’s combat shirt. He comes to a little, starts using his legs. He’s murmuring at me, I can’t make any sense of it, I think he’s trying to explain.

  I push him towards Emily through the bunker entrance and she’s dragging him outside. But the fire’s bigger now, and I’m starting to cough, and it’s all I can do to struggle up after him. I lie on the forest floor with smoke circling from below.

  ‘We have to close it.’ Emily’s crawling away from Mack and pulling at the bunker lid. She’s got her mouth pressed against her shoulder, trying not to breathe in.

  I feel too weak to lift anything else, but somehow we do it together and shut the lid with a thud. We shut the smoke inside. Then I’m going back to Mack because I’m making sure he doesn’t run and I don’t know whether I want to hurt him some more or do something else. But he’s not going anywhere. His eyes are red and sore-looking and wet. Wet? I ain’t ever seen Mack cry, not in all the time I’ve known him. But now he presses his head into the forest floor, away from me, and I see his spine curl and shake. I lay my hand against it, more to keep him here than anything, more so he doesn’t run. He reaches up and grabs my arm, just below where my elbow is, grips me tight.

  ‘Sorry,’ he’s murmuring, over and over, ‘I never meant to . . . neither of us did . . . it was just a . . . we were just trying to get . . .’ His words don’t make no sense, but something in me understands them. Whatever he did with Ashlee was something that went wrong, that went too far.

  ‘You’ve got to believe me, mate,’ he whimpers.

  He’s begging and murmuring and coughing and apologising and gripping hard at my arm. I lean my head close to hear.

  ‘Brothers,’ he’s saying, ‘. . . still brothers. Never meant to . . . not hurt . . . not Ashlee . . .’

  And I think my eyes might be wet too.

  55

  Emily

  There are lights, sweeping the forest floor, flickering in the trees. And I’m scared, because I don’t know what they are or why they’re here – because it could be Mack’s friends coming to back him up, or weirdoes because it’s Halloween. Maybe I should make a run for it, take the evidence and go. I could leave Damon with Mack now – the fight’s out of him. I’m breathing hard, panting like an animal. I’m looking around at the paths and willing my legs to stand. But they’re not listening to me. None of me is moving.

  The lights are getting closer. Torchlight? For a second it’s like I’m in Joe’s game and these are the cracks of light he talks about – the cracks in the dark, the exits to other worlds. But I can hear people calling, I can hear someone shouting my name. Am I just imagining this?

  Damon and Mack are crouching over each other, Mack’s coughing and talking fast. I can’t understand anything he’s saying. And there is someone coming into this clearing. There are a whole load of people.

  ‘Listen!’ I shout it at Damon and Mack.

  When Damon turns, I see blood on him. Is it Mack’s, or his? I feel sick. Scared enough to shake.

  Torchlight is sweeping everywhere now. And there are all these different voices, men I think, deep sounds. But someone gangly and tall is leading them all. I’d know his loping figure even in this darkness.

  Joe moves quickly towards me, waving a torch. ‘Emily? You all right?’

  He doesn’t even see the other two, not straight away. He bends down as he gets close and wraps his arms around me. And this time I let him hug me. I bury my face into his bony shoulder and I’m apologising about before, and he’s saying something the same.

  ‘This way!’ he shouts back to the people and the flickering lights. ‘She’s here!’

  From inside Joe’s hug, I see the other people emerge into the clearing – police in high-vis jackets. Torches and movement and voices. Joe’s brought them all.

  ‘When your mum called I knew you’d be here!’ Joe says. ‘At the bunker.’

  His eyes widen as he sees the smoke seeping up through the gun slit. He touches my face.

  ‘You’ve got blood on you,’ he says.

  I point at Mack. I try to explain how it’s his blood from when I helped get him out of the bunker, and Joe tries to pull me away fast.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ His eyes are going from the smoking bunker, to them, to me.

  I try to explain what I can. I say that it was Mack who killed Ashlee; that he didn’t mean to.

  ‘They were playing a game,’ I say. ‘It went wrong.’ I hold up the phone and tell him about the evidence.

  I’m trying to tell him more, but I can’t get the words. I’m just gabbling. Saying nothing. Gasping for air. I’m aware of Damon coughing, and of two police officers coming across. I hear Damon starting to explain, start to say the same things I’m trying to tell Joe.

  ‘It wasn’t Dad,’ I whisper, finally. ‘Not Damon either.’

  I gasp in cold forest air. As I look back at Damon and Mack, I see other people stumbling out from the trees behind them, like they’ve been drawn to these lights too: Charlie and Ed are standing on the edge of the clearing, staring at everything. They look at Mack and Damon, and then over to where Joe and I are crouched, they’re looking at the smoking bunker. I see someone in a high vis jacket stop them before they move off again.

  Then, finally, I see a police officer coming towards me, carrying a plastic cup.

  ‘We should move out of the smoke,’ Joe says, grabbi
ng my arm.

  I let him lead me. I reach out and grab Damon’s other arm, try to get him to move too. We all sit on the edge of the clearing, leaning against trees.

  I keep breathing deeply.

  56

  Damon

  Islump forward on the interview table, my chin on my hands. It suddenly seems important to talk – to say it all. And I’m trying to keep my eyes focused on the two detectives, but I can’t hardly put words together. Maybe the joint’s finally worn off and I’ve got a weed hangover. Or maybe I used the last bit of energy I had getting Mack out of that bunker. For whatever reason, I’m hazy as fuck. Exhausted. But I’m trying . . .

  This is important.

  I know.

  There’s a camera up high in the corner of this room and it’s pointing direct at me, winking red lights now and then. Maybe Mum’s arrived. They said they were calling her and that she’d watch from another room.

  I force my eyes back to these detectives, the same ones as last time – the hard-faced DC West and the woman, DC Kalu. They’re still staring at me quietly. It’s like they’re watching an animal in a zoo, checking its behaviour. I stare right back. I’ve got nothing to hide this time, and they should know it. Again, the woman sits a little away from the table, half in shadow: I’m pretty sure she’s the one in charge.

  Even with all this, though, it doesn’t feel like how it was the last time I was here. For one thing, there’s no legal rep beside me. For another, I don’t want to lie. I rub my eyes, hard, as if that could make me wake up a little, and I explain how things started. I even say about the games I used to play with my old man when I was a kid. I say how Mack and me started to muck about in the woods after my old man died – how we started his games again but made them harder: how it was training at first.

  ‘We did it to get our minds off things,’ I say. ‘Plus we was training to get into the army.’

  I say how Ashlee had heard about the Game and wanted to play it too. But I’m getting hit by a whole load of memories and thoughts as I talk.

  ‘I think Ashlee must’ve played the Game differently, though,’ I say slowly. ‘. . . with all of us. Different rules. Different rules with each . . .’

  Something’s coming together in my mind.

  I’m thinking about how Ed’s brother is a dealer, and how Ed could get drugs. I’m thinking about that packet of fairy dust he’d had during that last Game. Is it possible that Ashlee got the fairy dust from him that night? And all the weed and other stuff she’d used?

  ‘I been thinking that maybe Ashlee swapped her collar for things she wanted,’ I say. ‘That this was her real Game Plan.’

  Maybe it makes sense – a collar for drugs, a collar to play a secret game with Mack. But what about Charlie? I’m frowning and the detectives are watching. Maybe it’s possible that she just wanted to fight him? Maybe she just wanted the adrenalin like the rest of us did? And maybe Charlie was the only one of us who’d fight a girl, who didn’t hold back. I’m remembering his words from Biology. Hadn’t he said as much then?

  DC Kalu brings her chair forward. She leans towards me and looks at me very serious. ‘Did you know about Mack and Ashlee before, Damon?’

  I twist my face away, because those words hurt. Those words say I was the shittest boyfriend in the world. DC Kalu stays still, watching.

  ‘Did you know what game they were playing?’

  My throat’s gone tight and painful. I shake my head.

  DC West coughs once. ‘Not your game, was it?’

  He looks across at his partner, who gives him a nod, takes a breath.

  ‘Sometimes kids choke each other,’ he says. ‘They do it to get themselves high – apparently the lack of oxygen gives them a cheap thrill. Some of them call it seven seconds, knockout game, gasp, pass-out game . . . any of these sound familiar? What your girlfriend called it, maybe?’

  ‘Fairyland,’ I say. ‘She said that. Sometimes.’

  DC West nods. ‘Could be.’ He exchanges a look with DC Kalu. ‘These kids think it’s safe. I mean, it’s just a game, right?’ He turns back and I smell onions on his breath. ‘But, Damon,’ he says, ‘too often things go too far.’

  He continues, explaining how other teenagers have died from playing this game, how some have got brain damage.

  ‘Depriving yourself of oxygen is about the most stupid thing you can do,’ DC West says.

  And I can’t stop thinking about Ashlee now. How she was obsessed with going to Fairyland, with getting out of it and escaping. Disappearing. How she was always looking to get high. I’m remembering what Mack used to say when we fought each other – Living on the edge, mate! – he’d got off on that stuff too. Did he think this game with Ashlee was training somehow? Was playing it another way of testing himself? Being tough?

  DC West is laying out pictures of people either passed out or dead, plus close-ups of bruised necks and red eyes. He’s asking if I ever saw Ashlee look like any of this.

  ‘The bruises, yeah,’ I say. ‘But we all have bruises – from playing our own Game – the one I explained to you.’

  DC Kalu keeps talking, saying how people can play Ashlee’s game alone too, how sometimes they choke themselves with their own scarves until they pass out. I think about how Ashlee wore scarves. How long had she been doing this, chasing this stupid rush? How long had I not noticed?

  Then DC West lays out two more pictures. These ones are actually of Ashlee. In one she’s up close to the lens, looking beautiful and sexy, in the other she’s a blurred figure in the woods.

  ‘Who took these?’ I say. ‘Where’d you get them?’

  But I’m already getting a feeling about that. That day in the woods – Joe Wilder – the reason why I dropped him from the cross-country team. DC West points out the tiny marks you can see on Ashlee’s neck in that close-up. And I’m annoyed at Wilder all over again.

  ‘Why didn’t he just say something?’ I say. ‘Why hide something like this?’

  I press my chin on to my hands and I tell them about that night – her last night. I tell them the stuff I’ve been remembering – about how Ashlee had grabbed my hands and put them on her neck, about how she’d urged me to press . . . about how I’d been too drunk and out of it to realise she wasn’t playing my Game no more, but hers instead.

  ‘She was trying to show me what she did with Mack,’ I say, ‘. . . trying to get me to play it too. She was asking me to. Only I was too . . . I dunno . . . I didn’t get it!’

  But it’s why I got mad – because Ashlee tried to choke me when I was spinning on drugs. Because she’d wanted me to do it to her. And when she’d told me about the game with Mack? That’s when I’d tried to break up with her. She’d pressed more dust to my teeth and I’d passed out all over again. Maybe she’d thought I’d forget the next day, I dunno. But all these bits of memory, I guess they make sense now. But why Mack and Ashlee did something so stupid in the first place? That don’t make any kind of sense.

  ‘The choking game,’ DC West tells me, getting my attention back. He sucks air through his teeth. ‘It’s like Russian roulette: either a few seconds of buzz, or death.’

  I think about Ashlee’s description of what Fairyland was like: tingles and lightness and slipping down into another place. But killing yourself just so you can get a rush? It seems the dumbest thing of all. Perhaps the booze and drugs and fighting wasn’t enough for her – getting off with me wasn’t enough of what she was looking for, neither.

  I think of Mack talking quietly to me in that police car, less than an hour ago now.

  ‘Shepherd must’ve been there the whole time,’ he’d said. ‘In that bunker – he must’ve heard me shouting . . . panicking . . . and when I couldn’t wake Ash up . . . he must’ve heard that too.’

  He’d told me about how he’d been going to call for help but had found Shepherd standing behind him instead – all spaced out and in a flashback and calling him soldier – how he’d arrived out of nowhere like a ghost.
/>   ‘I was hallucinating,’ Mack told me. ‘That’s what I’d thought at first.’

  And then the thunder had cracked. And the rain had come. And he’d run. Guess that makes him a coward, running like that; guess it makes him a lot of things.

  He’d sunk down against the police car window, relieved, as he’d told me. Mack will be in another interview room now, saying all those words again.

  And that dragging sound? The one that kept going in my brain, over and over? That was Mack too, coming back for me after running from Shepherd. He’d pulled me through mud and leaves with my arm across his shoulder, he’d dragged me through the rain. Just like a soldier would do. He’d taken me from the hollow and down that deer track. And when we’d got to that huge oak tree, he’d pushed me against it, told me to wait. He’d shoved Ashlee’s collar into my hand, panicking.

  ‘Keep it safe.’

  I’d done what he’d said. Now I can remember turning that collar over, feeling the soft wool of its inside – I remember my head had spun too much to hold it tight. I’d put that collar in the safest spot I’d known: the middle of an oak tree.

  It’s why it’d all felt so damn familiar. That tree. That hole. It’s how I knew it was there.

  Mack had told me in the police car about how, when he’d gone back, he hadn’t been able to find Ashlee in that clearing – how no one was anywhere no more. Not even Shepherd.

  ‘I was freaking out, man,’ he’d explained. ‘I thought I might’ve imagined the whole thing.’

  That’s when he’d got rid of the phone, chucking it down the one place the living never go: Suicide Drop. He’d been half mad, I think. And then he’d come back for me.

  So, that memory of stumbling down the high street with Mack was right after all. He’d thought he was looking out for me, getting me home. He was panicked out of his brain.

  ‘If I’d known they were playing that,’ I tell DC West. ‘I would’ve stopped it.’

  I hope I would’ve.

  But I’d wanted to hurt Mack just a few hours ago too, and I would’ve done it. It might’ve taken just one squeeze more, a little more anger, just for Emily Shepherd not to have been there. I cough, my throat on fire. It’s like I’ve got my own burning bunker trapped inside me.