‘Where?’ Connor mouthed, his eyes narrowing as they held Pip’s.
‘My ten o’clock,’ she whispered. Fear like a blistering frost dripped into her stomach. Wide eyes spread like a contagion around the circle.
And then with an eruption of sound Connor grabbed a torch and sprang to his feet.
‘Hey, pervert,’ he yelled with unlikely courage. He sprinted out of the marquee and into the darkness, the light beam swinging wildly in his hand as he ran.
‘Connor!’ Pip called after him, disentangling herself from her sleeping bag. She grabbed the torch out of a dumbfounded Ant’s hands and took off after her friend into the trees. ‘Connor, wait!’
Shut in on all sides by black spidery shadows, snatches of lit trees jumped out at Pip as the torch shook in her hands and her feet pounded the mud. Drops of rain hung in the beam.
‘Connor,’ she screamed again, chasing the only sign of him up ahead, a vein of torchlight through the stifling darkness.
Behind her she heard more feet crashing through the forest, someone shouting her name. One of the girls screaming.
A stitch was already starting to split in her side as she tore on, the adrenaline swallowing any last dregs of beer that might have dulled her. She was sharp and she was ready.
‘Pip,’ someone shouted in her ear.
Ant had caught up with her, the torch on his phone guiding his feet through the trees.
‘Where’s Con?’ he panted.
There was no air left in her. She pointed at the flickering light ahead and Ant overtook her.
And still there was the sound of feet behind her. She tried to look around but could only see a pinpoint of growing white light.
She faced forwards, and a flash from her torch threw two hunched figures at her. She swerved and fell to her knees to avoid crashing into them.
‘Pip, you OK?’ Ant said breathlessly, offering his hand.
‘Yeah.’ She sucked at the humid air, a cramp now twisting into her chest and gut. ‘Connor, what the hell?’
‘I lost him,’ Connor gasped, his head by his knees. ‘I think I lost him a while back.’
‘It was a man? Did you see him?’ Pip asked.
Connor shook his head. ‘No, I didn’t see it was a man, but it had to be, right? I only saw that they were wearing a dark hood. Whoever it was ducked out of the way while my torch was down, and I stupidly kept following the same path.’
‘Stupidly chased them in the first place,’ Pip said angrily. ‘By yourself.’
‘Obviously!’ Connor said. ‘Some pervert in the woods at midnight, watching us and probably touching himself. Wanted to beat the crap out of him.’
‘That was needlessly dangerous,’ she said. ‘What were you trying to prove?’
There was a flash of white in Pip’s periphery and Zach emerged, pulling up just before he collided with her and Ant.
‘What the hell?’ was all he said. Then they heard the scream.
‘Shit,’ Zach said, turning on his heels and sprinting back the way he’d just come.
‘Cara! Lauren!’ Pip shouted, gripping her torch and following Zach, the other two beside her. Through the dark trees again, their nightmare fingers catching her hair. Her stitch ripping deeper with each step.
Half a minute later, they found Zach using his phone to light up where the two girls stood together, arm in arm, Lauren in tears.
‘What happened?’ Pip said, wrapping her arms round them both, all shivering even though the night was warm. ‘Why did you scream?’
‘Because we got lost and the torch smashed and we’re drunk,’ Cara said. ‘Why didn’t you stay in the marquee?’ Connor said.
‘Because you all left us,’ Lauren cried.
‘OK, OK,’ Pip said. ‘We’ve all overreacted a bit. Everything’s fine; we just need to head back to the marquee. They’ve run off now, whoever it was, and there are six of us, OK? We’re all fine.’ She wiped the tears from Lauren’s chin.
It took them almost fifteen minutes, even with the torches, to find their way back to the marquee; the woods were a different planet at night. They even had to use the map app on Zach’s phone to see how far they were from the road. Their steps quickened when they caught sight of distant snatches of white canvas between the trunks and the soft yellow glow of the battery lanterns.
No one spoke much as they did a speedy clean-up of the empty drink cans and food packets into a bin bag, clearing space for their sleeping bags.
They dropped all the sides of the marquee, safe within its four white canvas walls, their only view of the trees distorted through the mock plastic sheet windows.
The boys were already starting to joke about their midnight sprint through the trees. Lauren wasn’t ready for jokes yet.
Pip moved Lauren’s sleeping bag between hers and Cara’s and helped her into it when she could no longer bear to watch her drunkenly fumble with the zip.
‘I’m guessing no Ouija board then?’ Ant said. ‘Think we’ve had enough scares,’ said Pip.
She sat next to Cara for a while, forcing water down her friend’s throat while she distracted her by talking idly about the fall of Rome. Lauren was already asleep, Zach too on the other side of the marquee.
When Cara’s eyelids began to wilt lower with each blink, Pip crept back to her own sleeping bag. She saw that Ant and Connor were still awake and whispering, but she was ready for sleep, or at least to lie down and hope for sleep. As she slid her legs inside, something crinkled against her right foot.
She pulled her knees up to her chest and reached inside, her fingers closing round a piece of paper.
Must have been a food packet that fell inside. She pulled it out. It wasn’t. It was a clean white piece of printer paper folded in half.
She unfolded the paper, eyes skipping across it.
In a large formal font printed across the page were the words: Stop digging, Pippa.
She dropped it, eyes following as it fell open. Her breath time-travelled back to running in the dark, snapshots of trees in the flashing torchlight.
Disbelief staled to fear. Five seconds there and the feeling crisped at the edges, burning into anger.
‘What the hell?’ she said, picking up the note and storming over to the boys. ‘Shh,’ one of them said, ‘the girls are asleep.’
‘Do you think this is funny?’ Pip said, looking down at them as she brandished the folded note. ‘You are unbelievable.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Ant squinted at her. ‘This note you left me.’
‘I didn’t leave you a note,’ he said, reaching up for it.
Pip pulled away. ‘You expect me to believe that?’ she said. ‘Was this whole stranger-in-the-woods thing a set-up too? Part of your joke? Who was it, your friend George?’
‘No, Pip,’ Ant said, staring up at her. ‘Honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. What does the note say?’
‘Save me the innocent act,’ she said. ‘Connor, care to add anything?’
‘Pip, you think I would have chased that pervert so hard if it was just a bloody prank? We didn’t plan anything, I promise.’
‘You’re saying neither of you left me this note?’ They both nodded.
‘You’re full of shit,’ she said, turning back to the girls’ side of the marquee. ‘Honestly, Pip, we didn’t,’ Connor said.
Pip ignored him, clambering into her sleeping bag and making more noise about it than was necessary.
She laid down, using her scrunched-up jumper as a pillow, the note left open on the groundsheet beside her. She turned to watch it, ignoring four more whispered ‘Pip’s from Ant and Connor.
Pip was the last one awake. She could tell by the breathing. Alone in wakefulness.
From the ashes of her anger a new creature was born, creating itself from the cinders and dust. A feeling that fell between terror and doubt, between chaos and logic.
She said the words in her head so many times that they became rubbery and foreign-sounding.
Stop digging, Pippa.
It couldn’t be. It was just a cruel joke. Just a joke.
She couldn’t look away from the note, her eyes sleeplessly tracing back and forward over the curves of the black printed letters.
And the forest in the dead of night was alive around her. Crackling twigs, wingbeats through the trees and screams. Fox or deer, she couldn’t tell, but they shrieked and cried and it was and wasn’t Andie Bell, screaming through the crust of time.
