S. Bolton - Dead Scared

JESSICA CALLOWAY REGAINED consciousness slowly. Her mouth was dry and her eyes were sore. She swallowed and the back of her throat felt like the skin had been scraped away. Behind her eyelids she was aware of murky grey light in the room. Morning then. Her eyes opened before she had a chance to ask herself whether it was a good idea. Oh, thank God.

She sat upright, letting the duvet fall down around her waist. She was wearing a tight yellow camisole and yellow striped pyjama trousers. What she always wore to bed. She pushed the duvet aside and swung her legs round to touch the cold linoleum of her bedroom floor. She sat there for a whole minute, not quite believing it.

She was in her room in college. Her body was sore and stiff, but seemed otherwise OK. The back of her skull felt tense, as though a serious headache might be threatening but nothing a couple of aspirins wouldn’t sort out. On the table by her bedside was her clock radio. Nearly seven thirty in the morning. In just a few seconds it would be … it clicked on. Heart Radio, what she always woke up to, even on the morning after the worst nightmare imaginable.

The curtains of her room were drawn tight but outside she could hear the usual early-morning sounds of St Catharine’s College. The odd jogger running past. A cyclist. A delivery van on the road outside.

Everything was exactly as it should be. The horrible, scratching things that had crawled towards her in the dark had been the result of something slipped into her drink. The shapeless forms that had banged on the inside of the wardrobe door to be let out had existed only in her own head. The cold, claw-like hands that had stroked … Jesus, she needed a shower.

Jessica got up, on legs that weren’t too steady. She felt weak, as though she hadn’t eaten for some time, and a little nauseous. There was a bruise on her forearm she didn’t remember from the evening before. She reached for the gown on the back of the chair. Her work was where she’d left it on her desk. Her laptop was switched off but still open, her books on the bookshelf, her bag from the night before under the desk, spilling half its contents over the floor. Everything normal.

Except that all the books on the shelf were upside down.

Jessica reached out to the books, just to make sure they were real. They felt very real. So who had turned them all the wrong way round? Nearly fifty books. Why would someone do that? The song on the radio was speeding up. Like an old-fashioned vinyl record being played at the wrong speed. Jessica looked back at the radio, suddenly afraid. The song stopped. There was a second of silence and then a new tune began to play. Fairground music.

No.

Jessica half ran, half fell to the door of her room. It was locked, of course, she always locked it at night, but the key was right there, in the lock, all she had to do was turn it, take hold of the handle and pull the door open. The lock turned, the handle was slick with sweat and the door would not open.

She tried again, checked the key – it looked the same – pulled on the handle, even banged on the door a couple of times. Then she turned and ran to the window. She half fell across her desk and pulled at the curtains.

The window wasn’t there. In its place was a photograph of the head and torso of a circus clown, large enough to fill the entire frame. Jessica had always been scared of clowns, but even she had never imagined one like this. The huge red nose, red and white cone-shaped hat and royal-blue ruff could, at a pinch, have belonged to a clown who wouldn’t scare a child to death. But no parent would ever expose her child to a clown with a face that long, bony, yellow and old, with a grinning mouth so huge, so full of yellowing teeth, with opaque white eyes, rimmed in black and scarlet. No child could see this clown and keep its sanity. Jessica thought she was probably about to lose hers when she heard a soft tapping sound behind her.

Still half lying across her desk, she turned. The door to her wardrobe creaked and swung open. Standing inside was another clown. This one was worse, far worse. This one wore a mask that was white as a winter coat, with a huge, animal-like mouth and hooked red nose. Only the eyes looked human.

TO MY SURPRISE, Talaith was in our living room when I got back, her tiny bottom perched on the chair, feet up on the desk in front of her. She was dressed for bed and, judging from the relatively steady way she was painting her toenails black, was sober. Her hair wasn’t quite the shade of purple I remembered from the previous evening. More red, less blue, bit more of a plum shade. She waved a mug at me. ‘Coffee?’ she offered. ‘It’s instant shit but I’m broke as usual.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it, though. You’ll smudge.’

While I filled the kettle, found a couple of mugs and put instant coffee in them, Talaith finished her artwork, raised her feet off the desk and waggled her toes in the air, supporting herself entirely by stomach muscles. She had to be sober. No drunk could manage that.

‘Someone asked me about Bryony today,’ I said, when we’d exchanged the usual social pleasantries about the sort of day we’d had and how I was settling in. ‘That must have been really grim for you.’

‘Worse for her,’ said Talaith. I inclined my head. Difficult to argue with that one.

‘Do you know how she is?’ I asked.

‘Better today,’ said Talaith. ‘I visited. I think she knew me. The nurse who came in said they thought she might pull through.’

Something on Talaith’s face made me think that wasn’t necessarily good news.

‘She’s going to be very badly disfigured,’ I tried.

Talaith shook her head. ‘She won’t cope. She was gorgeous before and she couldn’t cope. Take looks away from someone like Bryony and she’ll have nothing left.’

‘Sounds a bit harsh,’ I said.

‘Realistic,’ Talaith insisted. ‘You wouldn’t believe the hours she’d spend on her appearance. Or the money, come to that. She was paranoid about wrinkles. At her age, most girls are just grateful they’ve outgrown zits.’

‘Not sure I have yet.’

‘All the photographs she had around the place were of her,’ Talaith went on. ‘Not family, mates, boyfriends, just her. And they were all those arty-farty studio shots, you know, soft focus, tons of make-up. Sometimes I’d catch her just staring at herself in the mirror.’

‘Sounds like you didn’t get on too well,’ I said.

Talaith shrugged and drank coffee. Mine was still too hot to touch. ‘She wasn’t too bad when she first got here,’ she said. ‘Bit highly strung, nervy. Easily bruised flower is what my mum would say, but to be honest, a lot of people here are.’

‘Really?’

‘God yes. When you think about the pressure we’re all under to get a place at any decent university, let alone here, it’s a wonder we’re not all basket cases by the time we arrive. Bryony was bright enough, but she was no rocket scientist. I think she’d been coached and hot-housed and pushed all her life. Not too bad, though, no worse than a lot.’

‘So what went wrong?’ I asked.

Plum-coloured hair danced around as Talaith shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t around too much. I was having a good time and it was obvious we weren’t going to be soulmates. She got a bit freaky, though, towards the end.’

Freaky? Nicole had got freaky too, according to her college-mates. Or what was the phrase they’d used? Well weird.

‘Freaky how?’ I asked.

Talaith looked as though she wasn’t sure how much to say. ‘She had bad dreams,’ she opted for.

That didn’t sound too bad, until I remembered that Nicole Holt had also had bad dreams shortly before she killed herself. ‘Naked-in-public bad dreams or blue-lizards-crawling-out-of-the-walls bad dreams?’