Ariana Chambers - The Secret

Miss Black sighs and reaches into her bag.

I vent my frustration by hammering a tent peg into the ground. Why should they get a prize for cheating? Then I see what the prize is and I start to grin.

‘Here you go, girls – and Stephen,’ Miss Black says. ‘Some bunting to decorate your tent.’ She hands them streams of bunting covered in pink bunny rabbits.

Holly starts to giggle. ‘What a lame prize! It’s even worse than a compass.’

Izzy and the others clearly think so too from the way they’re glaring at it.

‘Go on, then,’ Holly calls over to them. ‘Make your tent look nice and pretty.’

Izzy glares at us. I smile back sweetly.

As Holly and I continue putting up our tent I think of my mum and imagine her and Clara going camping when they were our age. I imagine Mum’s hands on the canvas where mine are and it makes me feel warm inside.

Next to us, David and James start play-fighting with their tent poles. Spiky-haired David is always fooling around. Seriously, you could send him to a funeral and he’d find a way of making a prank out of it.

Holly looks at me and shakes her head. ‘Longest three days in history.’

‘Stop it, boys,’ Miss Black snaps at them from behind us.

‘Sorry, miss,’ David says. ‘We were just . . .’ He breaks off and looks around blankly.

I turn and follow his gaze. There’s no sign of Miss Black anywhere near us.

‘Did you hear Miss Black?’ he says to James.

James nods and stares, confused.

Vivien walks past with a smile on her face. ‘Must have been a ghost,’ she says.

‘She mimicked her,’ I whisper to Holly.

Holly nods. ‘Another wasted power,’ she says wistfully. ‘Still, maybe we don’t need to worry about them on this trip if this is how they’re going to use their powers.’

Miss Black appears from behind the toilet block on the other side of the clearing. David and James start putting up their tent in silence.

‘My rucksack!’ Eve calls out, her voice shrill with panic.

I turn to face her. Eve’s tent is up and she’s looking around wildly. ‘It was right here, now it’s gone.’

‘Are you sure?’ I ask, walking over to her. ‘You didn’t leave it on the coach, did you?’

Eve shakes her head, her eyes wide behind her glasses. ‘No, I was just looking in it for the tent instructions. It was right here.’ She points to the ground by her feet. ‘Someone must have taken it.’

‘Is everything all right, girls?’ Miss Black calls over.

‘No. My bag’s gone missing.’ Eve looks distraught. ‘It’s got my phone in and my clothes and everything.’

Miss Black strides over. ‘Well, it can’t have gone too far.’ She turns to the rest of the group. ‘Has anyone seen Eve’s bag?’

Everyone shakes their head.

‘I don’t understand,’ Eve says, her voice wobbling. ‘It was here just a moment ago. How can it have disappeared?’

I look over at Izzy and she looks straight back at me, her pale green eyes glinting with amusement. ‘It must have been the ghost of Mad Bess,’ she says quietly.

I suddenly feel a very long way from home.

High up above me in the treetops a crow starts to caw.

‘First of all, you need to get your kindling,’ Mr Matthews calls.

It’s the evening and we’re all sat in a circle in the middle of the clearing learning how to make campfires. So far, this has involved hunting around the woods for dry leaves, moss and sticks of all shapes and sizes. Holly and I start putting our twigs and pieces of bark into the small pit we’ve dug in front of us.

‘Make sure it’s well spaced out. There needs to be room for the fire to spread.’ Mr Matthews starts walking around the circle, inspecting our efforts. He’s changed out of his suit into an ancient-looking tracksuit and a battered pair of hiking boots. ‘Good job. Good job,’ he says as he walks past each of us. ‘Now place your tinder on top of the kindling.’

We carefully put our leaves and moss on top of the twigs.

‘And now, you may light the tinder!’ Mr Matthews announces dramatically, as if he was declaring the opening of Parliament.

‘I’ll do it,’ I say to Holly, grabbing our box of matches. Although Holly’s got way better at controlling her energy-harnessing power, there’s no way I’m risking getting my eyebrows singed off.

‘If you insist,’ she sighs.

I strike the match and hold the flame under a clump of leaves. A flame shoots right up. Holly giggles.

‘Was that you?’ I frown at her.

‘I was only trying to help,’ Holly says. ‘And speaking of which, I wonder how Izzy’s getting on.’

We look across the clearing. Tiny flames are licking at their kindling like orange tongues. Holly frowns and scrunches up her nose. The flames splutter out. Stephen lights a match and throws it on the leaves. Once again, some small flames flicker – and once again they die out.

I look at Holly and grin. ‘Are you doing that?’

She nods. ‘After everything they’ve got up to today I think it’s time they were reminded that they’re not the only ones with powers.’

‘Good plan!’ I say. Although I can’t help wondering if using our powers to play pranks is part of being a Silver Witch. We’re only supposed to use our powers to do good. Although you could argue that getting one over on Izzy, Vivien and Stephen is a very good thing. I watch the flames in Izzy’s fire leap up and immediately die out yet again.

‘What are you doing?’ Izzy snaps at Stephen. ‘Here, give them to me.’ She grabs the matches from him.

‘Oh, this will be good,’ Holly mutters, staring at them intently.

Izzy strikes a match and the flame leaps up, almost singeing her fringe. She shrieks and drops the match on to the ground, where it instantly fizzles out.

‘Good job,’ Mr Matthews says as he crouches down next to us, placing his hand on my shoulder. ‘Very good job indeed.’ He continues making his way around the circle, inspecting the fires until he gets to Izzy. ‘Oh dear.’

‘There’s something wrong with our matches,’ Izzy says sulkily.

Holly laughs. ‘What’s that saying about a poor arsonist always blaming his matches, sir?’

Mr Matthews smiles. ‘A poor workman always blames his tools.’

Izzy scowls.

‘Never mind,’ I call out to her. ‘You guys can’t be best at everything. And, hey, at least you won the bunny-rabbit bunting.’

The flames in our fire start leaping about as if they’re laughing, blocking the glares coming from the other side of the clearing.

Once we’ve had dinner – blackened sausages cooked on our fires, which actually tasted surprisingly good – Mr Matthews declares that it’s story time.

‘Storytelling around a campfire is a tradition that goes back to the dawn of time,’ he says. ‘It was a way of bonding as a tribe, communicating ideas and –’

‘Would anyone like to begin?’ Miss Black cuts in.

Izzy nudges Stephen. ‘I will,’ he says immediately.

Holly groans. ‘Seriously? He only knows about twenty words.’

‘Once upon a time,’ Stephen begins, pushing his floppy blond hair back from his face, ‘there was an evil demon who haunted a wood, just like this one. The demon’s name was – was – Bloodbark, and he was the grossest thing you ever saw. He had, like, really rough skin like tree bark and these teeth that were, like, so sharp they could shred human skin in just one bite.’

‘Yawn, yawn,’ Holly mutters.

Somewhere in the woods behind me I hear a rustle and a twig crack. I hug my blanket around me.

‘Bloodbark lived in the trees in the wood. He was actually, like, a wood demon. The evil spirit of the oldest tree in the wood. Just like that one.’ Stephen points to a huge old tree at the side of the clearing. As if on cue a chill wind gusts through the clearing, causing the tree’s branches to wave and creak. A shiver runs up my spine. Why did Mr Matthews have to suggest this? Why couldn’t we have had a sing-song around the fire instead? I wistfully think of my guitar, propped against my bed where I left it after my farewell strum this morning.