Out of the Depths Read online

  Him.

  Ben Kincaid.

  The boy with the pale face. His dark eyes always watching me. Not scary in the classroom. In daylight. But here, in midnight dark, in the black silence of my own bedroom, too terrifying to think about.

  Could I hear him breathing? Did ghosts breathe? Or was that the breath of the wind outside. I longed to leap to my feet, throw the covers back, confront him. If I’d been writing this in a story, that’s what I would have done.

  But I was too terrified to move. And what would I see?

  And why was he here? And even thinking it, I answered my own question. He knew what I had written in my diary, that I had made him disappear; I had killed him off, and he wasn’t going to let me do that. He had come here to warn me. To let me know he wouldn’t leave me be.

  A movement, the covers grew taut. As if whoever was sitting at the end of my bed was leaning towards me. I imagined his face coming closer.

  Please, let me have the courage to look!

  But there was no courage in me. I wanted to sink deep into the bed, sure I could feel his dead breath on my face.

  Did I hear a voice? Was it only in my mind?

  Help me, Tyler. A whispered plea. And again. Help me, Tyler. Words that seemed to drift like an icy breeze against my ear.

  I could take it no longer. I had to get out of that bed. Had to see for myself who was there. If I thought about it a moment longer, my courage would leave me. With my eyes still closed, I threw back the duvet, I rolled from the bed, away from him, expecting at any second his cold hand to clutch at me, pull me back. I hit the wall. Curled up there for what seemed an age of time. My hands balled into fists, pressing against my eyes. Terrified to look. Imagining when I did, his face close against my own, his dead eyes staring into mine.

  But I had to see. I finally had to look.

  And he was gone.

  The room was empty. No one here but me.

  Had he ever been there? Had anyone?

  Or were moments like these more signs of my madness? I scrambled ever further into the corner. I drew up my legs, hugged my knees. My eyes scanned the room. I expected something to leap out from every corner. Every shadow a threat.

  There was no one here. This was my bedroom. I knew every inch of it. But I needed the light. The dark was making me too afraid. My quaking hand reached for the lamp to switch it on.

  I blinked at the sudden light. My bed was crumpled, the window closed. I looked at the clock again.

  12.01 …

  The time I had first woken up … but that couldn’t be right. Minutes, many minutes had passed since then. How could time have stood still?

  Or had it all been a dream? A nightmare?

  I looked all around the room, and my eyes came to rest on my keys hanging where I always put them, on a hook beside the door. They were swinging back and forth, back and forth, as if someone had just moved them. Just touched them.

  I watched them all the rest of that night.

  And they never stopped swinging.

  18

  Mum said I looked pale next morning. ‘Pale as a ghost’ were her exact words. They made me shiver. No wonder I was pale. I hadn’t gone back to my bed. Stayed crouched in that corner. Had hardly slept all night, and when I did drop off, my head falling on my knees, my sleep had been filled with dreams – dreams of dark figures standing in the shadows of my room, long fingers reaching out to me, and whispers in the dark.

  Help me, Tyler.

  I would leap awake and focus my eyes on every dark recess, sure I could see something moving. I so wanted to run into Mum and Dad’s room, crawl into bed between them, just as I had when I was a little girl. But I didn’t even dare to move from the room, because those keys never stopped swinging, and I was sure if I opened the door someone … something would be there waiting for me.

  ‘Are you feeling OK?’ Mum asked once again.

  I wondered if I could ask to take the day off school – but immediately decided against it. She would want me to go back to bed, tuck me in there, and I could not bear the thought of going into that room again.

  I walked to school in a daze, and Aisha and Jazz caught up with me as I stood on the little arched bridge over the mist-covered lake.

  ‘It’s eerie, isn’t it?’ Jazz said, taking me by surprise.

  ‘I’ve never even seen the other side. There’s always been a mist hovering over it.’

  ‘You’re the writer,’ Aisha said. ‘If this was one of your stories … what would be on the other side?’

  And I imagined another world, another dimension, another time. Nothing of this world at all.

  Jazz nudged me. ‘Don’t look so scared. There’s only trees and bushes. Nothing mysterious at all.’

  ‘It’s lovely in summer,’ Aisha said. ‘We go round there and have picnic lunches.’

  My imagination wouldn’t let me picture it in summer, in sunshine. The water was too dark. The winter bare branches hung too low, their bony fingers scratching the surface of the water menacingly.

  ‘There isn’t a body down there, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ Jazz said, as if I’d asked her. ‘Remember? The lake was dragged. Wherever Ben Kincaid’s body is, it isn’t down there.’

  Could she read so clearly in my face what I was thinking?

  ‘You look terrible, Tyler,’ Aisha said.

  I so wanted to tell them what had happened. And I wondered if I could. Tell them about the figure on my bed, the cold, the whispered words. But all I said was, ‘I didn’t sleep too well.’

  ‘No wonder,’ Jazz said, ‘after the day you had yesterday.’

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t be talking to me,’ I said. And I hadn’t. I’d expected to be ignored.

  Aisha smiled. ‘Don’t be silly. You made a mistake. It happens, and you have such an imagination.’

  What she was telling me was that I hadn’t seen Ben Kincaid in the classroom, I couldn’t have. And surely that was what I wanted.

  ‘Me and Aisha talked about it last night,’ Jazz said. ‘And we’ve decided we talked too much about the murder …’

  Aisha broke in. ‘We decided you talked too much about the murder, Jazz.’

  Jazz waved that away as if it wasn’t important. ‘Whatever …’ she said. ‘And then we shouldn’t have wound you up about the school being haunted.’

  ‘You were the one who wound her up!’ Aisha said.

  Jazz rolled her eyes. Her pierced eyebrow shot up. ‘Anyway, your imagination did the rest. So … we’re going to forget about it. Start afresh. What do you think?’

  I wanted to tell her I had already decided that last night. Had even closed the whole affair up in my diary … and then … the cold feeling of someone sitting on my bed in the dark, the clock stopping at 12.01, the whispered words … Help me, Tyler.

  I wanted to put it behind me. I wanted to start afresh. I didn’t think Ben Kincaid was going to let me.

  But I wasn’t going to tell them that. It would do me no good at all. They were giving me the second chance I wanted. I was going to take it. Whatever happened after this, I would keep to myself.

  But I knew it wasn’t over.

  Ben Kincaid wouldn’t let it be over.

  19

  I had an awful day at school. Everywhere I went I had pupils laughing at me, or asking if I’d seen any more ghosts. The word had gone round the whole school I’d claimed Ben Kincaid had been sitting at the back of the class. I was a nutter. A weirdo. Mac had to be behind it. I was grateful Jazz and Aisha stayed beside me. I don’t think I could have borne it if they hadn’t.

  The day couldn’t be over quick enough; I longed to go home. Yet, as soon as I stepped inside the door of my own house, I knew there was another horror facing me. My bedroom.

  I didn’t dare go in it.

  Jazz called me that evening. I lay stretched across the sofa, dreading the moment I’d be expected to go to bed. Couldn’t bear the thought of going back into that room. I was miserable and scar
ed too. Was I going mad?

  ‘I’ve been thinking about you all day,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’re crazy, like everybody else does, Tyler.’ She said it as if that would comfort me. ‘Now don’t tell Aisha I said this, because she’s made me promise not to mention it again … but … I think you’re psychic. Like a medium maybe.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I told her, because that sounded really crazy. I was an ordinary girl, and things like that didn’t happen to ordinary girls. There was a reasonable explanation for everything that was happening. I was sure of it.

  Me, a medium? That really was nonsense.

  Jazz didn’t want to listen. She’d decided I was psychic, and that was that. ‘Tyler, I think we should have a seance.’

  ‘No way!’ I almost shouted it. There was no way I was taking part in anything like that.

  ‘I don’t mean we’re going to sit around holding hands and chanting. But we could use the ouija board, see if we can find out what’s happening. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?’

  ‘This isn’t a game, Jazz.’ Jazz, none of them knew the half of it. I’d never told them about the statues that moved. Or … Help me, Tyler …

  ‘I know it’s not a game. But it might help. Help you understand. It’s worth a try.’

  Would it help? I didn’t know what Ben Kincaid wanted of me. But I was sure he wasn’t going to let me go … unless … The thought came to me. Maybe she was right. Maybe this would help. ‘Have you done this before?’

  ‘Lots of times,’ she said, at once. ‘It’s great fun … and it tells you things … but never anything bad,’ she assured me. ‘I don’t know how it works, but it does.’

  ‘And you have a ouija board?’

  There was a pause on the line. ‘Not exactly a ouija board. I use a tumbler, and bits of paper with the alphabet written on them.’ I heard myself giggle. Jazz sounded offended. ‘But it works exactly the same way. And it’ll be a laugh.’

  Maybe that’s what made me finally agree. The idea of the tumbler and Jazz’s insistence that it was a channel to the other side. It made me laugh, brought the whole thing down to earth. It wouldn’t do any harm. And who knows, it might even help.

  Jazz was good for me, I decided.

  And that night, when I did dare to go back to my room, and slip into bed, the fear somehow left me. Ben Kincaid was getting what he wanted. We were going to have a seance. I wasn’t forgetting him.

  I slept peacefully all night.

  At school, Mac still seemed angry at me. Though, in fact, I was the one who should have been angry at him. What had he been saying about me at my old school? What had he been asking about me, and why?

  Aisha was really annoyed when Jazz told her about our night with the tumbler.

  ‘You do this all the time, Jazz! You’re not supposed to be encouraging her. You’ll just get her into more trouble.’

  ‘It’s my decision,’ I tried to assure her.

  I’d wondered why Jazz had told her at all, if she knew she was going to be so annoyed about it. But Jazz insisted she had to tell her. ‘Me and Aisha don’t have secrets from each other. I just wish she’d stop moaning about it. She’s worse than my old granny.’

  ‘Well, I’m not coming,’ Aisha said snappily. Her parents would never allow it, she said. ‘My mum would go spare if I took part in anything like that.’

  ‘And what do you think my mother would do, Aisha?’ Jazz stood with her hands on her hips, overacting the completely shocked bit. ‘My mum’s a good Catholic woman. She’d kill me. That’s why I’m waiting till her line-dancing night before we do it.’

  Callum decided against it too. Unfortunately, Mac was up for it. I couldn’t understand why. Not when he seemed to hate me so much.

  ‘I didn’t think the boys would be coming, Jazz.’ The thought of Mac being there scared me. Jazz tutted. ‘We’d never get the spirits to come through for just two of us, Tyler.’

  Adam burst out laughing. I almost laughed too, she said it so seriously. And he was coming too, it seemed. That made me feel better. I liked Adam. Although it seemed the main reason the boys were agreeing to come was because Jazz’s mum made a mean cheesecake and always had one in the fridge for Jazz’s friends.

  So it was settled for Thursday, the night Jazz’s mum went to her line dancing. I even began to look forward to it.

  But something almost stopped me getting there.

  When I told my mum and dad I was going out, Dad was all against it.

  ‘There’s a police warning. Young girls shouldn’t be allowed out after dark. They’re beginning to think that Debbie lassie was abducted from somewhere here in this town. Somebody reported seeing her with a man in the town after she was meant to have left.’

  ‘Och, there’s been all sorts of reports, Dad,’ Mum said. ‘That Debbie Lawson’s like Elvis. She’s been spotted everywhere.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, they’ve got to follow up every lead, no matter how tenuous.’

  ‘But I’m only going to Jazz’s house. To stay in. I won’t go out.’ Now that it was planned I didn’t want to miss it.

  ‘Oh, let her go,’ Mum insisted. ‘She’s made a nice friend there. And I can run her there and pick her up. She’ll be in no danger.’ I breathed a sigh of relief and Mum winked at me. I felt a sudden pang of guilt, because Mum wouldn’t be so happy if she knew what we were planning. Getting in touch with the dead. Mum hated anything like that. I was deceiving her. I didn’t want to but I had no choice.

  20

  ‘Mum’s picking me up at ten o’clock,’ I told Jazz when I arrived.

  ‘Plenty of time for us to contact the dead,’ Jazz whispered.

  I had wondered all the way to her house if I was doing the right thing coming here. Maybe I would only be making things worse. But when Jazz said that, I laughed. The idea of summoning the spirits before ten o’clock was so ridiculous it chased all my fear away.

  While the boys got stuck into the cheesecake, Jazz and I cleared and polished her dining-room table.

  ‘It has to be really slidy so the tumbler can move quickly,’ she said, very matter of factly, as if contacting the dead was something she did everyday of the week. Then she produced a whisky glass filled with squares of paper. She’d obviously been busy since she’d got in from school. Each square had a letter of the alphabet printed on it, and two other squares had the words YES and NO written on them. She put the tumbler in the middle of the table and placed the squares alphabetically in a circle around it with the YES and NO opposite each other.

  Jazz dimmed the lights and lit candles and placed them all round the room. Their light flickered and reflected on the glass tumbler and cast moving shadows on the walls.

  Adam’s face appeared round the kitchen door, he had a tea towel wrapped round his head like a turban. ‘I am the spirit of the tumbler … ask me anything. I am your servant.’

  I giggled, because he sounded more like a dalek than a spirit.

  He didn’t get the chance to say another word. Jazz was taking all this much too seriously to allow that. She whipped the towel from his head and ordered him to sit down.

  ‘This is no way to treat the spirits,’ she said. ‘We don’t want to annoy them before we start.’

  Adam made a face at me and I giggled again. Couldn’t help it. This was going to be fun, nothing scary about it at all. Adam and Mac wouldn’t let that happen.

  I knew from the way they sneaked a glance at each other that they intended to have a laugh about the whole thing.

  At the start, it was hard to take it seriously.

  The bits of paper would blow off the table every time a door opened, and the candles kept going out.

  But, by the time we all took our places, and the house was silent, and candlelight illuminated our faces, it didn’t seem so funny then. I’d never done anything like this before. Maybe we were tempting fate even trying it. My feelings must have shown on my face. Adam leaned towards me. He whispered, ‘Don’t look so worried, Tyler. You
don’t really think we’re going to contact the dead through this?’

  Mac just stared at me. I knew what he was thinking. That I would take over the whole thing, try to get all the attention he thought I craved.

  ‘OK, fingers on the glass,’ Jazz said, and we all laid our index fingers lightly on top of the tumbler.

  ‘Spirit of the tumbler … are you there?’

  The glass shot to the square that said YES.

  Jazz immediately took her fingers off the glass and yelled at Adam, ‘You pushed that!’

  He grinned. ‘No? It must have been the spirits.

  Honest!’ Then he laughed and half the squares blew off the table again. It took ages to pick them all up and place them back where they’d been.

  ‘For goodness’ sake,’ Jazz said. ‘We’ve only got till ten o’clock!’

  Adam laughed again. ‘Spirits got to be back in their graves for then, eh?’ He laughed so much the rest of the paper fluttered off the table.

  ‘Och, this is a waste of time,’ Mac said. ‘Let’s have more cheesecake.’

  But Jazz insisted. ‘It’ll work. You wait and see. You can laugh all you want, but it’s going to work.’

  So again, once everything was back in order, and Jazz had threatened the boys with no more cheesecake if they didn’t behave, we put our fingers on the glass and Jazz closed her eyes and whispered, ‘Are the spirits with us?’

  For a moment nothing happened. I was almost ready to giggle again. And then … the tumbler moved. I pulled my finger away, looked at Adam. ‘Is that you again?’

  He shrugged. ‘Not this time, I promise.’ And I knew from the baffled look on his face that he wasn’t lying.

  ‘Tyler,’ Jazz said. ‘Put your finger back on the glass. The spirit is here.’ She closed her eyes again and said softly, in a voice that didn’t sound like Jazz at all, ‘Have you a message for someone in this room?’

  As soon as my finger touched the tumbler, it moved again. First to the letter T and then to the letter Y.

  I pulled my finger away so quickly the glass trembled on the table. ‘It’s going to spell out my name.’ I looked around, at Jazz, at Adam and at Mac. ‘One of you is pushing it.’ I kept my eyes on Mac. I wanted him to admit that it was him.