I snatched the bottle off Cora as she made to pass it to Fash, and I tipped my head back as I raised it to my lips. I didn’t even wipe it first. I just swallowed—once, twice, again, until Fash grabbed the bottle away from me, and I collapsed forward, coughing.
“Jesus Christ, Abi,” Fash was saying, somewhere off to my left. “Are you OK?”
“She’s fine,” I heard Mason say. “Just getting into the spirit of things. Right, Abi?”
I tried to grab the bottle off Fash again. I don’t know whether I wanted another drink or just to chuck it at Mason’s head.
But Fash moved it away from me. He passed it straight on to Mason.
“How about some music?” said Mason. “I’ve still got my iPod. Maybe we should listen to one of the playlists Sadie made me.”
“Dude . . .” said Fash, glancing at Luke.
“What?”
“Just . . . I don’t think we should.”
“No,” agreed Cora. “No music.” The bottle had come round to her again, and she took a gulp. If I’d had to guess, I’d have said she was feeling the way I was. Just, like, screw it. You know? Like she was determined to get as drunk as she could.
And that’s the way it went. The bottle kept coming round, and we all just kept on drinking. At least, that’s what I thought, but the bottle seemed to last forever. And then eventually, at some point—I couldn’t have told you when, because I’d completely lost track of time—but at some point the whiskey was gone. Finished. And I didn’t feel cold anymore. I barely even noticed that I was still soaking wet.
When the bottle made its way back to Mason, he held it up to the light. Then he stood up, and tossed it into a corner of the cave. It didn’t break. It just landed by the entrance with a thonk.
Mason smiled when he turned back to us, and he didn’t sit down.
“So,” he said. “What should we talk about?”
The rest of us just stared. It was like, we had been talking. A bit. Just as we drank, you know? Not about anything in particular. About the rain, mainly. About how mad it was after the summer we’d had. About how it felt like an end.
“Abi?” said Mason. “You had a subject, didn’t you?”
“Huh?” I said, confused. And more than a little bit pissed. Not happy pissed, though. Normally stuff like whiskey makes me happy. Lively. But sitting there against the wall in that cave, I didn’t think I’d ever feel happy again.
“Death,” said Mason. “That’s what you were talking about earlier, wasn’t it? You and Fash? So go on. Why don’t you ask the others what they think about the afterlife? About whether they think ghosts are real.”
I’d been . . . not dozing exactly. But sitting there in a sort of trance. Letting my brain swim away on the alcohol. All of a sudden, though, it was like a warning siren had gone off somewhere inside my head. Like when you fall asleep in front of the telly and then the phone rings, and you don’t know if it’s your alarm or your mum’s car getting broken into outside or a signal that, actually, the building’s on fire and you’re seconds away from being roasted alive. You get this jolt, like electricity, telling you to get ready for something bad.
“What about you, Cora?” said Mason. “Do you think, if people die, they find a way to come back to haunt us? Assuming we deserve it, I mean.”
“I don’t want to talk about ghosts,” said Cora, with a glance toward the woods outside. All we could see was the rain, and the slope of the bank on the other side of the stream, and the gray silhouettes of the trees. And I don’t know if it was just because of what Mason had said, but to me they looked like people. Like dead men in the dark, closing in.
“No,” said Mason. “I don’t imagine you do.”
Cora looked up at him, sharply.
“So how about a game instead?” Mason went on. “Truth or dare.”
“What are we, twelve?” said Fash. “Come on, mate. Sit back down. You’re making me nervous.” Which he said with a laugh, like he’d meant it to sound like a joke, but all it did was make him sound afraid.
“Let’s start with an easy one, shall we?” said Mason, ignoring him. He’d started to pace, meaning from where I was sitting he was moving in and out of the light.
He stopped, and turned to face us. “Which one of you tipped away the water?”
There was silence as the rest of us tried to work out whether he was joking.
“Was it you, Cora?” he said. “Or you, Abi?”
“What? No, I . . .”
“For Christ’s sake, Mason, not this again,” said Cora. “You’re drunk. Just sit back down, like Fash said, and let’s the lot of us get some sleep. And then, in the morning, we can all go home. We’re not going to find anything else out here. Not in this weather. And we should tell the police about Sadie’s phone.”
I’d started nodding without even realizing.
“I’m not drunk,” Mason said. “And I hate to disappoint you, but nobody’s going anywhere. Not until we get this straightened out.”
He sounded drunk. But the thing was, I believed him when he said he wasn’t. Whatever was making him act the way
