S. Bolton - Dead Scared

Evi took a moment to hide her annoyance. Most people would dismiss such a prank as a laugh. Jessica, who’d suffered from eating disorders since she was twelve and who had been hospitalized twice as a teenager when her weight had dropped to under six stone, would find it anything but amusing.

‘Did you report the theft?’ Evi asked.

‘I did. One of the other girls told me I should and went with me to the police. They said they couldn’t get involved in a student prank.’

‘Anywhere else it would be burglary and intimidation,’ said Evi. ‘In a Cambridge college, it’s a prank.’

‘Do you remember that website I told you about? The one that had the photographs of me?’

‘Yes,’ said Evi. ‘I tried to find it. None of the search engines I used could locate it.’

Jessica bent down and pulled a laptop from her bag. ‘I’ll show you,’ she said. She opened the computer and switched it on. After a few seconds she tapped her fingers over the keys, waited a while longer, then turned the screen to face Evi.

Evi reached forward and picked it up, tilting the angle so that she could see it clearly. It was a Facebook spoof. Facefeeders, it was called. Who’s been eating the pies this week ? ran the subheading, directly above several photographs of Jessica herself.

Except they weren’t Jessica. Jessica was an exceptionally lovely girl whose size ranged from model slim when she was well and happy to painfully thin when she wasn’t. In the photographs someone had digitally altered Jessica’s tiny frame to make it enormous. All the photographs were nude. All were Rubenesque in their proportions, with swollen bellies, rounded dimpled buttocks and great pendulous breasts. They’d even managed to make Jessica’s face look fatter.

Oddly, the photographs weren’t unattractive, but to Jessica it would be like seeing herself turned into a monster. And these were on a website, for the world to see.

‘Remind me how you found this site?’ Evi asked. ‘Did someone tell you about it?’

‘It popped up when I was working one night,’ said Jessica. ‘I clicked on it without thinking.’

Evi made a note on her pad to alert the detective to the website. ‘Do you have any idea who might be doing it?’ she asked.

Jessica shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Everyone I’ve told thinks they’re appalling.’

‘I agree,’ said Evi. ‘Not that the photographs are appalling in themselves, because even if you were as large as the girl in these pictures is supposed to be you would still be beautiful – I know you don’t believe that, but you would. They are appalling because they’ve been created to cause you distress.’

Tears were running down Jessica’s cheeks.

‘I feel like everybody’s seen them,’ she said. ‘If I go to a lecture or a tutorial, even a bar or the dining room, I feel like everybody’s whispering about how fat I am. I can even hear them in my sleep.’

‘You’re still not sleeping well?’

Jessica shook her head. ‘You remember I told you about that night my mobile kept ringing, every half hour until I turned it off?’

‘I remember,’ said Evi. ‘You never found out who it was?’

‘No,’ said Jessica. ‘And now, although I always switch it off when I go to bed, I can still hear it ringing.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I wake up several times every night, thinking I’ve heard my phone. But I haven’t because it’s switched off. I dream that it’s waking me up and so it does.’

‘How long has this been going on?’

The girl shook her head. ‘A couple of weeks,’ she said. ‘But if it’s not the phone, it’s the voices.’

‘Voices?’

‘In my dreams. Whispering about how fat I’m getting.’

‘Jessica, when did you last get a good night’s sleep?’

The girl couldn’t respond. She was trying too hard not to cry.

‘Jessica, you need to sleep. I can give you something that will help. Just for a couple of weeks, just to break this cycle, does that sound like a … What? What’s the matter?’

The girl looked terrified. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t take sleeping pills.’

‘It’s understandable to be wary,’ said Evi, ‘but we’re very careful to guard against addiction.’

‘It’s not that,’ said Jessica. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘No, I don’t. Please try and explain to me.’

‘The interruptions, the imaginary phone calls and the voices, I think they’re my brain’s way of protecting me, of stopping me falling into too deep a sleep.’

‘Why would your subconscious do that?’

‘Because of the real dreams, the ones I have when I’m so deeply asleep I can’t wake up.’

‘And what are those like?’

‘Unimaginable. Like I’m in hell.’

I DIDN’T GO back to my room after leaving Dr Oliver. I’d found the box-like space, stripped of all traces of its previous occupant, oddly depressing. So, instead of returning to college, I headed for my car and drove to the hospital on the edge of town where I knew I’d find Bryony Carter.

The nurse in the burns unit indicated a private room about three-quarters of the way down the corridor. I paused for a second at the open door. I’d seen the photographs. I knew what to expect.

So much worse than I’d expected. I couldn’t go into that room, I just couldn’t.

I’d imagined something clinical: clean, neat, white and sterile. I hadn’t realized there would be blood and other fluids seeping through the dark-stained bandages. I hadn’t expected that the skin covering her face and her hairless head would be open to the air and would look like something I’d only ever seen before on corpses. I didn’t know that her left arm had been amputated just above the elbow.

The room was so hot. And the smell … oh, Christ, I couldn’t do it.

‘She’s not in any pain. She’s very heavily sedated right now.’

I’d been transfixed by the sight of the lifeless figure under the transparent tent. I hadn’t noticed anyone else in the room. The man speaking to me was standing by the window, dressed for the outdoors in a thick blue woollen sweater and blue jeans.

‘She had a bit of a setback earlier,’ he went on. ‘They’ve been weaning her off the ventilator over the last few days but her oxygen levels plummeted. They’ve put her back on it for twenty-four hours, just so she can stabilize again.’

I swallowed hard. The smell would be tolerable if I breathed through my mouth. I’d come across worse.

‘Are you a friend?’ he asked, and I looked at him properly for the first time. In his mid-thirties, he could have been a model in a country-living magazine: tall and slim with curly hair the colour of a wet fox. ‘If you are, you’re the first to make it through the door,’ he went on.

Without noticing, I’d crossed the threshold. ‘I’ve just moved into her old room,’ I said, having cooked up a cover story on the way over. ‘And I found this tucked under her bed.’ I pulled the book from my bag. ‘There’s a page corner turned down. I think she must have been reading it before it happened.’

‘ Jane Eyre ,’ he read, looking down at the Penguin Classic paperback. ‘Doesn’t the hero get very badly burned?’

‘I didn’t think of that,’ I admitted, feeling stupid. ‘I should just take it away again.’

‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘Let her parents decide, when they come back.’

I made myself take another look at the girl in the clear plastic tent. ‘Why does her face look like that?’ I asked. ‘Her skin looks dead.’

‘That’s not her skin,’ the man replied. ‘And it is dead. That’s cadaver skin covering her face. Tell you what, I was just about to get a coffee and you look like you need one. Come on.’