Well, just like Meredith, I don’t really do Halloween, but seeing as it’s the eve of All Hallows Day, I thought I had better treat you to a vaguely spooky little story – something a tad new-school Gothic, set in the fictitious University of The East Midlands (which makes an appearance in several of my stories). So, pull up a pew and lose yourself in a quirky Halloween tale …
Death in the 90s
The guys were late.
Meredith shivered and huddled lower into her coat. They were late: and it was cold and damp … and dark - far too dark to be hanging around alone on the woodland path at dusk. She sighed in annoyance, more at herself than her friend. Why the heck had Em told her to meet on the path to the University Park’s lake?
The tangle of yew and alder which had looked so picturesque in daylight now seemed to hedge her in, obscuring the distant lights of Willoughby Hall, just visible through the trees - a beckoning beacon amid the descending autumnal gloom. She sighed once more and checked her phone for the millionth time. It was barely 5.30 PM, but the light was already fading, the branches of the trees skeletal against the rapidly darkening sky.
She began to pace, forcing herself to ignore the rustling of branches, then hearing a noise glanced up the brighter ribbon of the path which led up to the edge of campus. Still no sign of Em – or the others; she suddenly found herself wishing she’d never agreed to meet them – what the heck had she been thinking, it wasn’t like she even really wanted to go? And then she was shivering, telling herself it was stupid to stand around in the wood after dark, resolving to ditch it and head back to campus – imagining herself cosied up in her room, book in hand, hot chocolate at her…
Something moved unexpectedly in the bushes just behind her and she twisted with a start.
‘Hello?’ she ventured anxiously, sure there was someone just beyond the twisted tangle. ‘Hello?’
Twigs snapped discernibly and she felt her scalp began to prickle, her mind caught somewhere between chiding herself for standing around alone on the edge of the woods after dark and the sudden desire to turn and jog away. ‘Look, if this is some kind of prank …’
She felt her pulse leap, gasping involuntarily as a shape lurched out of the darkness, a dark figure untangling itself from the spindly trunks. The breath catch in her throat, too shocked to scream, her mind overwhelmed by the horrifying dark –socketed face.
‘Got you!’ exclaimed the wide eyed girl who was now clapping her hands onto her shoulders, grinning wildly from what looked to be some kind of skeleton mask, before pulling away to shake leaves from her hair.
‘Emily?’ she exclaimed in a tone which sounded terrified even to her own ears, still struggling to make sense of her course-mate’s ghoulish appearance: not a mask she realised, but face paint, giving her brown eyed friend a gaunt and deathly look. ‘God, you frightened the life out of me!’
But Emily seemed not to be listening. ‘Man, these woods are, like, so atmospheric after dark!’ She looked totally wired, her eyes unnaturally wide in the gloom, ‘isn’t this just the best!’ Meredith sighed under her breath, feeling her pulse begin to slow – it was clear that her course-mate had been drinking.
‘Yeah, really picturesque,’ she said with thinly veiled frustration, ‘thanks so much for that! So, where are the others?’
‘Meeting us in CJ’s bar,’ Emily said distractedly, pulling out her phone, ‘loading up on shots … Jess is already, like, totally wasted on prosecco …’
Meredith fought not to sigh. Just great. Why she’d even agreed to go to the Union’s Halloween Ball seemed suddenly beyond her. From what she could gather the annual event was little more than a glorified school disco … with drinking. She swallowed, feeling again that sting of discomfort, acutely aware of how hard she’d found it to fit in since coming to read English at the UEM; and that, she reminded herself, was why she had accepted Emily’s unexpected invitation - because she needed a friend, and at the moment, her fellow Lit student was the closest thing she had to one.
Her course mate clicked off her phone and grinned at her with phantasmagorical lips as she shoved it into her pocket. ‘So: what do you think?’ She beamed, indicating her heavily painted face, with its gaunt cheeks and black, skeletal, eye sockets.
Meredith hesitated. ‘I have a feeling a hideous reanimated corpse wouldn’t be packing so much eye-liner,’ she commented glibly.
Emily looked at her as if hurt for a moment then shrugged. ‘TBH I think I’ve done a pretty good job of the whole skeletal beauty thing.’
Meredith chose to reserve her judgement. In fairness it was a pretty skilful piece of face painting - the tones around her cheek bones skilfully darkened to create the appearance of skull-like emaciation - but she suddenly found herself in no mood to tell her as such. ‘I dare say your average vampire-zombie-ghost wouldn’t be wearing retro Nike Airs and a puffer jacket,’ she observed wryly.
Emily rolled her eyes. ‘This is, like, death in the 90’s,’ she explained with a dramatic flourish of her hands, ‘I’m, cashing in on that old Willoughby legend of the girl who appeared like she’d just stepped out of nowhere.’
‘What?’ Meredith frowned. It wasn’t a story she’d ever heard in halls. Her course-mate looked at her like she’d been living under a rock.
‘Seriously?’ Emily breathed, ‘You’ve been living in Willoughby Hall for the best part of a term and you’ve not heard the story?’
She shrugged, trying to return a non-committal look.
‘Man, it’s like … I mean, everyone knows that story!’
‘Clearly I don’t,’ Meredith replied a little despairingly, then broke off as a branch creaked audibly above them. ‘Well, go on,’ she invited in an effort to take her mind off the deepening gloom. Emily shoved her hands into her jacket pockets and beamed like she was overjoyed to have a chance to retell it.
‘Well, it was like some time after the millennium, maybe 02 or 03 and one night this girl turns up at the Hall Warden’s door, panicked and in a state, and she says she’s been locked out of her ground floor flat – that someone else was in there and wouldn’t let her in, like they’d taken it over or something.’
‘And?’ Meredith frowned, trying to look skeptical, but even as her friend spoke, the world seemed to fade to her friend’s disconcerting death’s-head face.
‘Well, she was confused and pretty upset – but when one of the security guys went to investigate, they found the room in question was occupied by one of the new intake of undergrads - I mean, it was like, their room – not this mysterious girl’s – and they’d always lived there, since the start of term.’
‘So this girl had got the wrong room,’ Meredith said flatly, ‘maybe she was drunk or something.’
Emily just looked at her and shook her head. ‘Nope – no way - she wasn’t drunk, that’s for sure – if anything she was nuts - she kept saying that everything was wrong, pointing out where different buildings and features of campus used to be … like before the leisure complex by Willoughby was built, and when they took her to the warden’s flat, to try and work out what was really going on, she kept saying the craziest thing.’
Meredith swallowed, feeling herself suddenly aware of the weight of the silent wood around her, as if the trees themselves were holding their breath, peering over her shoulder. ‘Which was?’
Emily’s eyes were almost crazily wide in her ghoulish face. ‘She kept insisting it was the year 1995.’ The words seemed to hang between them on the chill night air.
‘O-kay,’ said Meredith, trying to sound sceptical, but there was something in her friend’s story which felt inexplicably unnerving, enough to make her want to glance over her shoulder.
‘I mean, it’s a cool story for Halloween night, right?’
Meredith cleared her throat. ‘Yeah - a drunk student who got locked out of her flat,’ she said cynically, yet a part of her now felt weirdly unsettled. She shuddered and glanced back up the tree lined slope towards Willoughby Hall. Night had taken full hold now, the damp air misting incandescently around the intermittent LED street lamps, glowing white pools amid the sea of waving dark branches. ‘Won’t the others be missing us?’ she said trying to keep the unease from her voice.
Emily frowned at her quizzically for a moment, then smiled. ‘You’re not scared are you?’ Meredith began to procrastinate, but before she could answer, her friend added, ‘well, I am – isn’t it just cool!’
‘Yeah, great,’ Meredith sighed, supressing a shudder as the wind tugged at her hair, ‘come on, we’d better get going, the ball starts in twenty minutes.’
‘Cool,’ Emily nodded, then shivering fell in step with her as they trudged back up the tree lined path. ‘So, anyway,’ she continued, like she was elated by the creepiness of the whole idea, ‘the police were called, but when they came to interview her, she couldn’t be found – she’d just vanished, like, into thin air: just like that.’ She made a theatrical gesture with her hands.
‘It’s just a stupid story,’ Meredith said trying to convince herself that’s all it was, ‘just a tipsy student who got lost, causing a fuss.’
Emily shrugged. ‘Well, some say that, and others say that she was a ghost – or a troubled soul lost outside her own time.’ It was clear from her tone that she had an opinion.
‘And you?’
‘Wormhole,’ her friend said confidently as they headed up towards the distant glow of Willoughby Hall, ‘that’s what I think, some kind of passageway in the space-time continuum – dragged her out from 1995 and then sucked her into oblivion.’
Meredith slowed her pace to shoot her an incredulous look. ‘Right.’
Emily likewise paused, her skeletal face eerie in the pale light of the nearest lamp. ‘Why not?’ she said with a confident shrug, ‘the universe is a big place – and science hasn’t proven everything.’
‘Yeah, but … look, no offence Em, but all that stuff’s just sci-fi rubbish.’
‘Can you disprove it?’ the other girl said with unexpected conviction.
‘Well no, but …’
‘I mean, there are tons of stories about people – and things – just vanishing, from all over the wold,’ her friend said more seriously, ‘Stuff that inspired sci-fi: like the Bermuda Triangle, The Philadelphia experiment, Pan Am Flight 914 - and that Roman legion that just disappeared in the North of England.’
Meredith found herself struggling to keep up. ‘Pan Am Flight 914?’
Emily pushed her hair away from her face as the breeze stirred it gently. ‘Yeah, it was an airliner which went off the radar after take-off from New York in 1955 then appeared out of no-where to touch down in Miami 37 years later …’
‘What?’ Meredith scoffed.
‘It’s a famous urban legend,’ her friend replied casually, ‘and its evidence that time travel is real.’
‘O-kay,’ said Meredith, finding herself unwilling to meet her gaze – what had she got herself into?
‘Why not!’ Emily replied enthusiastically, her face unexpectedly animated, ‘why should that kind of stuff be totally impossible?’ Meredith chose not to answer, trying to keep her gaze from straying to the dark thicket which now surrounded her on either side.
‘So, what does a phantom airliner have to do with this girl who turned up in 2002?’
Emily twisted to shoot her a despairing look, like it was totally obvious. ‘Like I said, time travel, this girl clearly stepped straight from 1995 to 2002 without even realising she’d done it!’ She broke off to glance out into the darkness as something rustled in the undergrowth.
‘And then conveniently disappeared,’ Meredith concluded. Emily rolled her eyes in her skeletal face.
‘Now that’s not totally the case.’
Meredith dragged her own gaze from the gloomy branches to look at her directly. ‘Go on?’
‘Well, the last that was heard of her, was when two drunk students saw a terrified wraith like figure in the trees later that same night, she bumped into them – literally – raving that there were freaks and monsters in the darkness and then she just vanished off into the wood.’
‘How convenient,’ Meredith replied drolly, but she was finding it difficult to drag her gaze from the dark branches which surrounded them on either side, certain she saw movement amid the gnarled and twisting forms.
‘There are just tons of legends attached to these woods,’ Emily added as if reading her thoughts, ‘– did you know it used to be the edge of a royal hunting preserve?’
‘I did,’ Meredith replied more belligerently than she’d intended.
‘And in the twelfth century an anchoress is supposed to have lived in that rocky hollow where people always do barbecues.’ Meredith raised an eyebrow. ‘Like, a holy, girl-hermit,’ Emily added in explanation.
‘I know what an anchoress is,’ Meredith replied a little tersely, ‘– it comes from the Greek anachoresis, a flight from the world …’ she broke off and shook her head as if to clear it, ‘look, where on earth did you get all this from?’
Emily shrugged. ‘I just read these things on line – and I listen, to Dr Speedwell … a lot.’ Her expression was hard to read behind her overly-theatrical makeup, but she could imagine that she was blushing. Emily cleared her throat: ‘anyway, this girl-hermit is supposed to have had loads of visions and prophesies, and people used to come from miles around because they believed this was a crazily powerful place, supernaturally I mean.’
‘And before that it used to be a Native American burial ground,’ Meredith quipped, to which Emily laughed and shook her head.
‘You’re just unreal!’
Meredith forced a smile, yet oddly, as she felt the weight of the brooding darkness around her, she could easily believe that there was something unusual about this place, something powerful – significant even. She let out a tense breath. It was at moments like this she regretted opting for Dr Speedwell’s Folklore Studies Module on her first year English Lit course – almost. ‘Well, I suppose that if there’s a perfect time for freaky creepiness its Halloween.’ But Emily seemed not to be listening.
‘Man, is it me or is it getting seriously cold?’ she said as she began to zip up her jacket. With a frown Meredith shuddered and did likewise. It was getting cold, and a mist seemed to be gathering thickly around them, a low and almost palpable mist, cold enough to make her teeth chatter.
‘Anyway,’ said Emily, clearly trying to lighten the moment, ‘– where’s your costume – or is that your costume?’ There was an odd look in her eye, like she was trying to suppress a hysterical giggle. Now Meredith rolled her eyes.
‘Like I said in the flat, I don’t do Halloween, it’s just a capitalist ruse to exploit consumers – and beside, the whole tradition’s barely fifty years old - it’s just a made up American Holiday, loosely based around All Hallow’s Eve – the Evening before all Saints day …’ A twig snapped behind them and they both turned instinctively. Nothing. Just darkness and the gently swaying branches.
Emily seemed to shudder. ‘Probably just a squirrel or something.’
‘Yeah,’ probably, Meredith echoed, finding it hard to drag her gaze from the dark woodland, then picking up her comment said: ‘so anyway, it was the night people used to light lanterns to ward off evil before the biggest Saint’s Day in the calendar, and in America the whole gourd carving thing went a bit mental.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Emily replied, but it was clear she wasn’t quite listening, slipping her phone from her pocket as she walked. ‘That’s funny, no signal?’ she said with an absent minded frown. Meredith sighed despairingly, yet found herself glad to have something else to think about.
‘Can’t you even keep off insta for one …’
But now Emily was really frowning. ‘This app cannot be supported … No signal – no nothing …’
A breeze began to stir the branches around them, making the twigs dance and dry leaves scuttle across the path around their feet. Meredith couldn’t help but give her friend a concerned frown. ‘Look, Emily, I guess we’d better …’ But her course-mate wasn’t listening, her phone forgotten as she gazed past her through the trees, eyes following the dimly lit woodland path. ‘What?’ she frowned, sensing suddenly that something was horribly wrong.
‘The lights,’ Emily said shakily.
‘What?’
‘Look – the lights!’
‘What lights?’ Meredith frowned, turning her gaze to where her friend was desperately gesturing with her phone.
‘The lights up by Willoughby, they look funny.’
‘Funny?’ Meredith echoed, still unsure what she was getting at - and then she paused.
‘Oh.’
The bright white low-energy lights surrounding Willoughby Hall were now an odd, almost unnatural orange hue, bathing the distant buildings in a strange amber-washed glow.
‘Well, this is hashtag weird,’ said her friend in a surprisingly dead-pan tone. Meredith shuddered, her gaze still running over the weirdly lit buildings just visible between the swaying trees.
‘It’s not just hashtag weird,’ she exclaimed ‘it’s seriously unnerving!’ then broke off, realised her misting breath was glowing almost incandescently as she exhaled.
‘And that’s just downright creepy,’ Emily added stepping back to watch her own breath fogging in front of her face, ‘it wasn’t that cold a moment ago!’
Meredith felt an inexplicable fear sweep over her, each lung full of air now painfully crisp and cold. ‘Come on!’ she said, grabbing Emily’s arm, ‘let’s get out of here – it’ll just be a power outage or something …’
‘Yeah,’ just a power cut,’ Emily echoed as they began to hurry up through the wood, yet Meredith couldn’t stop her heart from thudding wildly, couldn’t shake the feeling that she was now being observed – pursued - hemmed in from all sides by something unnerving which watched her from the darkness. Her mind returned to the vanishing girl. ‘Look, how do you know so much about this crazy old story anyway?’
‘I’ve been doing some digging,’ her friend admitted as they waked, her eyes darting and watchful, ‘Speedwell’s lecture on how local superstitions develop got me thinking, and poking around in the local news archives in the library I came across a missing persons case –,’ she broke off as if suddenly afraid to go on – like she’d remembered something she didn’t dare to express.
‘Go on,’ Meredith encouraged, suddenly desperate to know what she had found.
Emily swallowed. ‘Well, in October 1995 a young woman studying here at Whitmore College, as the UEM used to be called, was reported missing by her flatmates, when she didn’t come back from a walk around the lake.’ Meredith shuddered as an unnerving sensation ran down her spine, like she’d found herself on the verge of learning something which would change the course of her very existence.
‘So what happened?’ Her mouth was suddenly so dry the question emerged as a croaky whisper, barely audible above the rustle of the leaves and the creaking of the branches. Her friend took an uneasy breath, her gaze now flitting briskly around the trees.
‘She was like super into paranormal stuff,’ she said far too loudly, ‘and was writing this article for the student magazine about the history of the happenings here …’
‘The what!’ Meredith exclaimed, fear lurching to a new level, but Emily just shrugged as if it was yet another perfectly obvious thing she should have heard of.
‘These woods are, like, notorious for weird happenings – or at least they were up until the 1950s; I mean, there was the medieval cult of the anchoress, the long history of people seeking miracles at her cave - claiming they had seen her, or an angel - even centuries after her death.’
Meredith frowned, aware that she had begun to quicken her pace yet further, her breath now shaky, ‘what do you mean after her death?’
‘Seeing visions, apparitions,’ her friend said briskly, gaze fixed on the path ahead, ‘– and then there are the disappearances …’ Meredith tried to reply, but it was suddenly as if the darkness which bore down on them crushed the strength from her voice.
‘Yeah, in the seventeenth century and the eighteenth – and the nineteenth, come to think of it – a parson, a bunch of children, a local labourer, all vanished, swallowed up in the mystery of the legend: by this.’
Meredith cleared her throat far too noisily, ‘by what?’
Emily glanced up at her sharply like she was totally stupid. ‘By this place,’ she breathed, ‘– this wood – this missing student was like super into the history of this woodland before it became the University Park: and according to her friend she had some kind of crazy theory.’ Meredith just looked at her, still struggling to process the story. ‘The disappearances, the anchoress - the weird apparitions … according to her best friend she reckoned she knew how it was all related – and then she just vanished.’
From Emily’s expression, it was clear that there was something more. ‘So, what …’
‘So, she was on our course Meredith,’ her friend exclaimed before she could continue, ‘– what became our module – it was the first time it ever ran!’
Meredith felt a sickly chill begin to creep over her, a dreadful, inevitable, sensation – like this moment, like her very presence at the UEM – in this wood – was not the work of mere chance. ‘Oh god,’ she whispered under her breath, desperately trying to keep her mind from the darkness, trying to focus on the semi-familiar lights on the edge of campus, but it was almost impossible. The mist and the gloom seemed to be wrapping itself around her, seeping under her coat, caressing her skin – the gloom spine tingling, almost charged with something she couldn’t quite place.
Emily gasped and glanced towards her with horrified eyes.
‘The path,’ she exclaimed worriedly, ‘what’s happened to the path?’
Meredith dropped her gaze to the surface beneath her boots: no longer a packed and wheelchair friendly surface, but a rough ribbon of compacted gravel and water eroded ruts.
‘I – I could have sworn ..!’
Movement broke the silence of the wood, and with it a sound so horrible, Meredith could hardly process it – a wail, accompanied by the crashing of branches, the slithering of feet – rising up into a breathless scream.
‘Oh my days!’
Meredith felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end, so horrified she could barely believe what she was seeing: a figure running parallel to them, stumbling madly between the trees, barely six metres away. She felt her pulse leap in primal terror, her scalp prickling involuntarily as she realised what she was seeing – a pale face twisting out of the darkness towards her –coal dark eyes in a horrified face, hair wild as she twisted to meet her gaze. For a split second it was as if reality seemed to coagulate, time slowing as she locked eyes with a young woman barely older than herself – face dirty and tear stained, hair lank and bedraggled – and then Emily was yelling in terror at her side, and then the apparition was staring at them in recognition, likewise screaming at the top of its lungs before twisting briskly away.
Meredith just stared, wide eyed, her pulse thudding so crazily she felt sure she was about to pass out. ‘Meredith!’ Emily was saying shakily, but at that moment a twig snapped close behind them and they both turned with a yelp.
‘Hell, did you see that!’ hissed a voice from the gloom, ‘jeez – what the hell!’ But they were already running, ripped from the paralysis of sheer terror, chests stinging as they broke for the campus lights.
‘Come on!’ Meredith gasped, aware Emily was falling behind as they broke free of the woods, stumbling as dirt track gave way to concrete steps, unable to stop herself from risking a glance at the shadowy figures which pursued at the edge of her vision. ‘Oh hell!’ And then the woods were gone, replaced by concrete and stone: sanctuary! She gasped breaths as her pace instinctively slowed – or perhaps not.
‘No … no, no, no …’
‘What?’ breathed Emily, likewise slowing to a halt as the unfamiliar familiarity enveloped them. Willoughby Hall – the same, but different: the weird amber glow of old fashioned sodium lighting, the dated looking signs; old wooden sash windows …’ she felt her huts turn to lead: no smart signs, no card swipe access on the doors, just Yale locks and …
‘What’s going on Meredith?’
‘Alright, ladies,’ called a laughing voice which made them both turn with a yelp, ‘what’s going on girls, are you two alright? Two young guys had crested the steps into Willoughby’s courtyard – presumably the figures the voices they had heard in the woods – just two drunk students she though with relief, and ignored them turned anxious eyes on Emily.
‘It’s not Willoughby Hall,’ she said shakily, ‘not the Willoughby we know anyway!’
Emily’s eyes were wide with fear. ‘W – w – where ..?’
But Meredith’s thoughts had begun to race. ‘The girl – the apparition – we’ve got to find her!’
‘What?’
But Meredith was already twisting away, pushing past the two young men, descending once more into the gloom. ‘It was the girl from your crazy story,’ she said breathlessly as Emily struggled to keep up, ‘… the missing girl and we’re …’ Meredith found herself beginning to feel light headed as she descended back into the mist. The wood: it seemed suddenly both the place she wished to flee from in all the world and yet also somehow her only hope – the smell of damp and loam, the air of age and decay – like an endless sea of darkness beyond the sanctuary of the amber lit quad – but it was their only hope. ‘We’ve got to think this through,’ she gasped shakily, ‘– got to stay calm!’
‘Meredith!’ Emily replied from just behind her, ‘we’re in the past – like really in the past …’ But Meredith hardly heard: Sanctuary.
‘There’s something in these woods – somewhere – a doorway the girl in the story had discovered!’ And then, it was like she was glimpsing a different moment, her head spinning as her mind made a titanic leap. ‘We – we’ve got to find her – if we can follow her, then maybe we can find this gateway or door or whatever she discovered.’
‘What?’ Emily gasped.
‘The girl!’ she exclaimed, quickening her pace as her eyes scanned frantically, ‘the girl in the story - we’ve got to find her! If she just vanished again, then maybe she found a way back – maybe we can use it to get home?’
‘B – but those guys … the street lights …’
‘We have to find her!’ Meredith breathed desperately, grunting as twigs snagged on her coat, but even as she said it, she knew that it was hopeless, the wood was large and the screaming young woman could be anywhere by now – if she was even in the same moment of time at all! She stumbled over a root and felt despair threaten to well into a sob of frustration.
‘That cave!’ her friend said unexpectedly at her side, ‘the sand stone cave where people do barbecues - the anchoress’ sanctuary!’
Meredith felt her pulse skip with hope. ‘Of course – a sanctuary - come on!’
They gasped and stumbled, winding down through the darkness, passing an old brick bridge, at the lake’s edge before struggling up to the overgrown sandstone crag at its side.
‘Here,’ she said breathlessly, ‘if anywhere’s going to be a focus of something weird, it’s an old hermit’s cell!’
It took a few minutes of cursing and stumbling through knee-high foliage, but soon she was stood, heart thudding, hesitating by the low sandstone overhang, gazing into the primordial gloom.
‘Okay,’ said Emily in a shaky whisper, her face lit suddenly by the eerie glow of her phone’s torch; and then they were pressing forward, wild shadows dancing, stooping low as they ducked into the musty space. Meredith crouched, heart thudding, staring through the mist of her own breath as she allowed her eyes to adjust – terrified by what she might find. She felt her heart sink.
‘Nothing,’ commented Emily, her thoughts echoing hers. Meredith swore. No sign of occupation, no mysterious presence of unearthly glow.
‘Damn.’
There was movement behind them and Meredith heard Emily yelp.
‘Man, shoot, we thought you were the ghost!’
Two guys were right behind them in the darkness just beyond. Meredith found herself too freaked out to reply.
They’d clearly been drinking, the taller of the pair swaying a little, a bottle held loosely in his right hand; yet their eyes were wide, seriously rattled.
‘Yeah!’ Emily replied breathlessly at her side, ‘we saw her, she was, like …’ She broke off, her jaw falling slack as she took in the appearance of the two male students.
‘We saw her,’ Meredith echoed shakily, realising why her friend had gone silent, her mind accelerating onto a chain of thought she suddenly didn’t wish it to take, her frightened mind taking in the appearance of the two male students who stood in front of her: the taller boy’s lank hair and baggy jeans; the other guy’s slouchy Denim jacket and dated looking polo shirt.
‘Great costume girls,’ the guy with the bottle said, ‘want us to walk you back to Willoughby?’ But Meredith hardly heard.
‘No. No thank you – we’re good – all good,’ and grabbing Emily’s wrist began to pull her past them.
‘Meredith?’ her friend said shakily, but she was already dragging her away with an apologetic smile. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Did you see their clothes?’ She hissed desperately.
‘It’s the two guys!’ Emily exclaimed in realisation, turning to glance at the laughing pair who were now peering into the cave, ‘the last people to ever see her alive …’
‘Yeah,’ Meredith breathed, ‘the two drunk students who saw the apparition in the woods!’
‘The freaks the girl was babbling about - the monsters … ‘her friend said, glancing back at the two young men who were gazing after them in bemusement, ‘it was us! And now we’re part of it Meredith!’ She turned to her with horrified eyes, ‘now we’re part of the story!’
Meredith closed her eyes then took a breath. ‘And we’re trapped in the past.’
To be continued?
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