Chloe shuffled reluctantly over, her face still half hidden in her jacket, hands shoved deeply into her pockets. Will had marked the new position of the van on the map with a biro cross, but they still had to work out exactly where they were now and then work out which direction to go – no mean feat without a compass.
‘Well, clearly we’re here,’ said Rachel, stabbing at the map with one of her clear glossy nails, ‘where that blue line crosses over the clearing. So all we have to do is get from here,’ she jabbed the page again, ‘to here.’ Now she jabbed the biro cross Will had drawn. Her face had lost the fixed smile it had worn in front of Mark and Will and once again her mouth was set in the hard line familiar from the office. ‘Except how do we know which direction to go in?’
By now Sarah was feeling faint, and sat down on a felled tree trunk with her head in her hands. She’d had ‘funny spells’ as she called them, throughout her two previous pregnancies, times when she felt dizzy and lightheaded, as though the world was receding in front of her. Her stomach lurched and she retched, but without any food left to throw up, she managed to swallow it down.
‘Hang on. Isn’t this something?’ Charlie was squinting at a point on the map very close to the clearing. Sarah knew he had been prescribed glasses by the optician but was too vain to wear them. ‘These two faint crosses here?’
‘Graveyard,’ said Chloe. ‘Little one from the looks of it.’
‘That be where the witches be buried,’ said Amira. No one laughed.
‘According to the map, that graveyard is directly north-east of us, really close by, so all we need to do is find it, and then we’ll be able to work out which direction is south-west, which is where the van is.’
With her head still in her hands, the others’ voices were indistinct and Sarah had trouble following what they were saying. Someone was suggesting they go off in pairs to look for the graveyard, but Ewan and Chloe, who’d been put together, were insisting it made more sense for everyone to go off independently, so they’d cover more ground. The crosses appeared to be really near. They wouldn’t have to go far.
‘I’m afraid I think I’ll have to stay here,’ Sarah said, without looking up. ‘I’m not feeling well.’
Instantly Amira and Charlie came to stand on either side of her, worried.
‘I’ll be fine. I just need to be still for a few minutes.’
Really, she wasn’t fine at all. It wasn’t just that she felt so awful, there was something about this place, something about the way the trees merged into blackness on all sides, and the fetid air that seemed to suck the air from her lungs.
A figure appeared in front of her. With her head bent, Sarah could just make out Rachel’s skinny black jeans and black leather and Gore-Tex hiking boots.
‘I’ll stay with her,’ said Rachel. ‘The rest of you go off and look for the graveyard and report back.’
Dread fought with nausea inside Sarah as she hunched over on the tree trunk. But she was feeling too dazed to protest. She heard the others talking in low voices before disappearing off in different directions through the trees.
Then they were alone.
‘I’m sorry,’ Sarah whispered. She was too hot inside her jacket. She felt as if her veins and arteries and all the little capillaries were on fire and her head was filling up with smoke. ‘I’m just being a wuss. It’s always like this at the beginning of a pregnancy.’
‘Stupid bitch.’
Sarah’s head jerked up so that she was staring straight into Rachel’s blue eyes. For a moment, shock burned a path through the wooziness in her brain so that she was able to take in clearly the edges of cheekbone, the upper lip twisted into a snarl. Then the dizziness returned and she once more dropped her face into her hands to steady herself. She was vaguely aware of Rachel wandering away towards the stream, but by now she was swaying and everything was spinning, and the heat from her coat was overwhelming and the ground, with its carpet of dead brown leaves, was rising up to meet her . . .
A voice brought her back to reality. Someone shouting ‘found it’ from somewhere far off. She opened her eyes and found she was slumped on the ground with her back against the tree trunk; everything felt heavy and unreal. She ran her tongue around her dry lips as she heaved herself to her feet and stood blinking in the grey drizzle.
Footsteps in the leaves announced someone’s arrival.
‘I found it,’ repeated Ewan. ‘The graveyard. It’s just up there.’ He pointed in the direction behind the tree trunk, and then picked up a stick and drew an arrow in the leaves and mud just to be sure. ‘Horrible place, actually. Gave me the creeps.’