When I manage to do it properly, it feels as if the fire I was burning in suddenly turned into a tranquil waterfall.
It doesn’t last. The fire returns like a blaze.
Shepherd is turned halfway up the first flight of stairs. He’s looking at me. It’s been a long time since I made eye contact with those dark eyes. I’m a small bug trapped in the spider’s web. His crow eyes scorch my body, turn it to ashes.
I want to die. He’s caught me in the madness of my checks.
I’m the mad girl living in Magpie Ward, Room 4.
I cannot hide in this place.
His smile reminds me of those vintage vampires you see in old movies. Crooked, ugly . . . beautiful. I can feel my face getting hot. I hope the tinted moisturiser on my cheeks hide it.
He turns, and I listen to the footsteps heading up to the top floor. They’ve gone past my room. I check my watch. A quarter past eight. I need to take a walk around the lake. I need to do it twice before nine o’clock. But I can’t leave now. Not with Dracula’s return. I go back up to my room.
That crooked smile threw more wood to the fire burning inside me, and I feel like Hera, the angry goddess who wants to kill Hercules.
Shepherd thinks he can rise from the dead after five years and pretend we’re two perfect strangers meeting in a foyer of a private retreat. There was no repentance in those dead eyes.
When I was nearly fifteen, he played a cruel joke on me. I was a toy in his hands. Then he humiliated me in front of the whole school and made my life hell.
We met when we were nine. It’s so rare to know somebody from that age. Years later, I fell in love with him. Young love, a princess and her prince. A genie lamp full of hope and wishes. I thought he loved me too, and so I trusted him.
I twirl the gold seahorse pendant circling my neck, a secret crucifix against evil. The sweet-boy Shepherd who gave me this, is dead to me.
I swallow my glass tears and look up at the ceiling. The thud of his boots remind me of the thud of thunder from that night, six years ago.
The night he destroyed me.
The pain in my head makes it hard to think. My memories are hazy, fuzzy round the edges, like an out of focus photograph.
I waited in the woods by Angel Stone. I waited four hours in the snow storm. I checked my watch for every minute ticking by, wishing this would be the minute he would appear. I wished that no matter what, he would never leave me out in the cold.
But he did.
I was tired, hurt, and my fingertips had icicles biting my skin. When I turned to leave, Shepherd’s friends jumped out from the looming trees a few yards away, with their mobile phones pointed at me. They were recording me and laughing, I was a clown to be taunted. It was snowing as big and solid as cats’ paws, so I didn’t realise those were teardrops falling on my face until my cheeks went raw. I tried to search for Shepherd’s face amongst the hyenas, but he was Gone Boy. Missing.
Carrie, they called me, over and over. They called me Carrie because of the accident I had at school. I was thirteen, just started my period. The blood leaked through my skirt. The nickname stuck for years. It was Shepherd who rescued me that day . . .
I didn’t know I was the star in the latest Greystone movie until Shepherd’s gang posted the video to the whole school the next day. The film about the desperate girl who wanted to be alone in the woods with Shepherd, when all along it was a prank. Angel’s stone was where the teenagers went for drinking and sex.
The worst of it all, worse than the video of me sobbing my heart out in the snow like Princess Elsa, was the graffiti on the school wall the following day.
‘Carrie shags all the boys in the woods.’
I never found out who did it, but I always suspected it was Shepherd. The finale to his cruel games.
Afterwards, he never came near me. He wouldn’t look me in the eye at school — if he ever turned up. He bowed out of my life and closed the curtains. I stopped visiting the children’s home, it hurt too much. Then, a year later, just like that, when we were fifteen, he vanished from Greystone town like a ghost. Without a word. Without an apology. Without a reason why.
It’s like all the screws fell out of us the night the snow fell, and we lost any chance to stay together.
Now, he’s back to make my life hell. I know it like I know rain is wet. Why else would he be in Swan Lake?
Ghosts, restless and sad, stir inside me like a night circus. It takes all my effort to tamp them down with a hard mental shoe.
I rest my hands lightly on the back of the door. I try to breathe, try to forget. My heart is beating so fast, it feels like somebody is shooting it with a railgun and won’t ever stop.
I sit on the edge of my bed for a while with my eyes lifted to the ceiling, as if I can see him through the plaster and the rafters. All the time, I’m fighting the urge to start checking the windows again.
I concentrate on my
