Just Before I Died: The gripping new psychological thriller from the bestselling author of The Ice Twins. S. Tremayne K.
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Yet something snags. I look again at the scattered line of trash in the frost. I can see a hairbrush. Incongruously pink, and now rimed with a varnish of frost.
It is mine. I am sure it is mine. I lost it a while ago. And now I step a little closer I can see my own fine brown hairs are still meshed in the prongs, though stiffened to wire by the cold, and there are scrunched-up, mouldering tissues trailing from the brush, red and stained, either kissed with lipstick, or dabbed with blood. I shudder in the freeze. Is this my blood? And there, at the end, under the tree, is that a tampon? One of my used tampons? I have to throw away tampons carefully, in bags: our sewage system out in the wilds cannot cope with these things, but why would my tampon be scattered out here?
Revulsion shudders through me. I feel invaded, or poisoned. Violated. It must be the scent of all this, the blood, the hair, the waste, that is freaking out the dogs, who are now backing away from the clearing, hackles up, growling.
Lyla calls after them. I stare at the tissues daubed obscenely with my blood. Who is doing this? Who has taken my trash, my hair, my brush, and laid them out here in the wood, next to these sad little birds, stiffened and killed by the cold? I look at my daughter, could she have done this, as a joke, or some ritual, making a pattern? Why? This is not her style, she is not sly or conniving, and she looks as shocked and alarmed as me.
‘Mummy, what’s wrong with the dogs?’ Lyla’s face is even paler than usual. ‘Where are they going?’
My blood thumps. I wonder if it was me that dumped this here, or lost this here, and I have simply forgotten. Part of my amnesia. Yet why such intimate waste? Blood, tissues, hair.
Abruptly, Lyla grabs at my hand, her fingers freezing, and lets out a piercing scream.
‘Mummy! I can hear someone coming!’
Wednesday evening
‘What? Where?’
I clutch my daughter’s hand, very tight. It is so dark now I can hardly see the bare frozen twigs of the dead trees on the other side of the clearing.
‘Lyla, what can you hear?’
She shakes her head and tilts her face, listening intently. My words are clouds of mist. The twigs tinkle in a subtle breeze, like sentimental chimes. It could be minus five. We need to get away, get far away from this wood and this sickening trail of trash.
‘Lyla, come on.’
Lyla shakes her head at me, almost angrily. ‘Listen!’
I strain but can’t hear anything unusual. ‘There’s nothing, no one. Come on, Lyla—’
‘No! That’s him!’
She’s almost screaming. Her hearing is ten times better than mine. Needles of fear prickle my fingers.
‘Who? Lyla, who can you see?’
‘No one!’ she says, whispering now. Hard and low. ‘But I can hear him, he’s out there, I know it! Mummy, he’s watching us, it’s him, the man on the moor, in the freeze.’
‘Stop this. Let’s go! When we get home we can call the police.’ I pat my raincoat pockets for my phone. I have no phone, of course, and anyway it wouldn’t get a signal out here, but it does have a little torch. But I left it charging in the car. So we don’t have any light. We have to leave right now.
‘Lyla, come on, we have to go.’
‘But what if he sees, Mummy, what if he catches us on the way? He’ll do it again … He’ll take you to the lake.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Mummy, Mummy, look!’
She is chattering with cold, or terror. Helpless, I stare around at the quiet wood. In the gloom, the leafless, frosted, moss-hung trees seem to edge towards us, their dark, frost-rimed fingers lifted to the twilit sky as if they were once a crowd of trapped, imploring people, burned to blackness by an awful fire.
Is that someone, or something, in the trees?
‘Mummy, he’s so close! That way, over there!’
I look and think, for a second, I see movement. But no, there is nothing here, is there? Just us and the dogs and the dead birds, and my hairbrush, and a hideous used tampon.
My resolve is snapped, by a crackle of frosted twigs, a human footfall.
‘Mummy!’
Lyla bolts. She wrenches from my grasp and goes sprinting down the frosty path, out of the woods, towards the distant car. She is a faster runner than me, she runs so much on the moor. But I must not let her out of my sight. I hear the dogs barking wildly as they scatter into the woods, not pursuing us: pursuing someone or something else. Or they are being pursued in turn.
‘Felix!’ I shout. ‘Randal! Come on!’
Lyla is racing away, a dim little figure, getting dimmer in the dusk. Trees and brambles snag at me, lacerate my hands and neck as I stumble on cold, mossy rocks. I urge myself on; it is so dark, I can barely see, but I can hear my daughter. I fall, cracking a knee on an icy tree stump. Ah. Ah ah ah! I shout at the sudden sparkling pain, and look ahead. Lyla has stopped, on the path, by a little wooden footpath sign.
She turns in the gloom, and shrieks, ‘Mummy, he’s coming! He’s coming after you! Right behind you!’
‘Lyla—’
‘Don’t look back, Mummy, get up get up!’
I can hear crashing noises behind me, something big emerging from the cold heart of Hobajob’s Wood; the dogs, or someone else?
Someone I know.
Pushing myself to my feet, I start running, again. But Hobajob’s Wood wants to lock us inside. Dead branches block the path, ice patches crack as I trample my way, breathing chilly fog. I have reached the ancient stone wall, toothed with new icicles. Climbing over, I jump down, the crashing behind me as loud as ever – but I am too scared to look back.
There. The car. A welcome grey shape in the deathly twilight. I see Lyla is already inside, her face pressed to the rear window, her eyes wide with fear.
The cold car door handle stings my hand, I yank it open and fall into the seat and twist the key into the ignition, but Lyla shouts at me, ‘Wait, Mummy, the dogs, where did they go?’
‘They ran off, but they’ll find their way back. We have to go.’
‘No! He’ll kill them.’
She is right, she is wrong, she is screaming, I open the door again, to the frigid dark air, and see – what? Who? Something? – and there is Felix, crashing over a fence, leaping it in one go, СКАЧАТЬ