‘Sorry.’
She waves a hand. ‘I might look at the cellar instead.’
‘You just moved in?’
‘Yesterday.’
‘What d’you think of it here?’
‘Honestly?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s a dump.’
‘Welcome to the shit end of nowhere.’
‘You live in the village?’
‘Yeah, over the other side, with my mum. You?’
‘Just me and my mum too.’
‘So, are you going to Warblers Green Community College?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Maybe I’ll catch you in school then.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Okay. Cool.’
Conversation momentarily exhausted, they stand, looking at each other. His eyes are an odd silvery green, she notices. Almost feline. They’d be cool to photograph. She could really bring out the strange flecks. And then she wonders why she is thinking about his eyes so much.
‘Right, well, see you.’
‘See you.’
Wrigley starts to turn, then pauses and looks back. ‘You know, if you like taking photos, I could show you a really cool place?’
‘Yeah?’
‘There’s this old, abandoned house, over the fields that way.’ He points with a wavering arm. ‘It’s creepy as hell.’
Flo hesitates. Wrigley is weird, but weird isn’t necessarily bad. And, if it wasn’t for the strange twitching, he’d actually be kind of cute.
‘Okay.’
‘Are you around tomorrow?’
‘Well, my diary is packed …’
‘Oh.’
‘Kidding. I’m free. What time?’
‘I dunno. Two?’
‘Okay.’
‘There’s an old tyre swing in the field past the graveyard. I’ll meet you there.’
‘Fine.’
He grins at her from under his hair before loping jerkily away. Wrigley. Flo shakes her head. Hopefully she hasn’t just agreed to meet the village’s resident psycho.
She snaps a few photos, but she’s losing enthusiasm. She starts to wind her way back down towards the chapel. Her foot catches on something and she almost goes flying. She just manages to regain her balance in time and stop her camera from smashing on to the headstone in front of her.
‘Shit.’
She looks back to see what tripped her. A toppled headstone, submerged in the undergrowth, half covered in moss, the inscription almost worn away. She raises her camera to take a photo and then frowns. It seems a bit blurry. She fiddles with the focus. Still not quite right. She turns to try and refocus the camera on something else in the distance and almost jumps out of her skin.
A young girl stands a few feet away.
She’s naked. And on fire.
Orange flames flicker around her ankles and lick at her legs, blackening the skin and stretching up to her smooth, hairless pubis. That’s how Flo knows it’s a girl. It would be hard to tell otherwise.
Because she’s missing both her arms and her head.
TWELVE
Damn. I accelerate along the narrow lanes, cursing Simon Harper, his family and myself.
Fair to say, my tenure here is not turning out to be the quiet idyll Durkin intended. In fact, things couldn’t get much worse if I stood naked in the middle of the village and sacrificed a few chickens. Or pheasants. They seem intent on committing suicide beneath my wheels anyway.
Still, I should know from experience that things can always get worse.
I park outside the chapel, stomp up to the cottage and let myself in. I’m immediately seized by the quiet.
‘Flo?’
No reply. I frown. She mentioned taking some photographs in the graveyard. I wonder if she’s still outside, around the back. I’m just about to go and look when I hear a creak from upstairs.
‘Flo?’
I climb up the staircase. Her bedroom door is open. She isn’t in there. I try the bathroom door. Locked. I bang on it.
‘Flo. Are you okay?’
No reply, but I can hear movement.
‘Flo – talk to me.’
‘Wait!’ Urgent, annoyed.
I wait. After a few more seconds there’s the sound of the bolt being drawn across. I take this as my cue and gently push the door open.
‘Quickly,’ Flo hisses, and I immediately understand why.
A flattened cardboard box has been used to obscure the bathroom’s tiny window. Photographic equipment covers every available surface and most of the cracked lino floor. The small room stinks of developing chemicals. Her battery-powered safelight is propped on top of the bathroom cabinet. The shower curtain has been shoved to one side and the rail is being used as a drying line. Wet photos are clipped to it with pegs from the laundry basket. While I was out, Flo has turned the tiny bathroom into a makeshift darkroom.
I watch as she carefully takes a sheet of photographic paper out of the wash tray and hangs it on the shower rail.
‘What are you doing, sweetheart?’
‘What does it look like?’
‘It looks like I’m out of luck if I need to pee.’
‘I have to get this film developed.’
‘Can’t it wait?’
‘No. I need to see the girl.’
‘What girl?’
‘The girl in the graveyard.’ She adjusts the photograph on the clothes peg and regards the row of black-and-white images.
She’s made the graveyard, with its higgledy-piggledy headstones, look hauntingly beautiful. But I can’t see a girl in any of the pictures.
‘I don’t see anyone.’
‘I know!’ She turns in frustration. ‘But she was definitely there. She was on fire, and she had no head or arms.’
I blink at her. ‘I’m sorry?’
She tilts her chin at me defiantly. ‘I get how it sounds.’
‘Right –’
‘It sounds nuts, right?’
‘I didn’t say that.’ I pause. ‘You think you saw, what, some sort of ghost?’
A shrug. ‘I don’t know what she was. She looked real. Then she was gone.’
The shrug is too casual. She’s trying to keep it together and not sound hysterical, but I know my daughter. She’s scared. Whatever she saw, it’s shaken her.
‘Okay,’ I say gently. ‘Could there be another explanation?’
‘I know what I saw, Mum. That’s why I tried to take some photos – I knew no one would believe me.’
‘Well, what about a statue or some kind of – I don’t know – weird trick of the light?’
I’m grasping now. Flo folds her arms and narrows her eyes.
‘It was a girl, on fire, without a head or arms. That’s some frigging trick of the light.’ She turns and squints back at the photos. ‘But why hasn’t she shown up on film?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
But Joan’s words suddenly come back to me.
The burning girls still haunt the chapel. If you see the burning girls, something bad will befall you.
I look around at the detritus littering the bathroom. ‘Look, why don’t we go downstairs and come back to this later?’