Dead Romantic (16 page)

No, no, no, it was the terriblest thought. It couldn't be possible. Splodge and Poppy must have got the coach to Wales for the festival on Thursday night. But I couldn't shake my worries about the note. What if they hadn't made it to the coach station? What if Zoe had seen them first and bundled them into the back of her car, then broken in through Poppy's bedroom window and left the note? Could Zoe really have overpowered Splodge though? Big
fat almost-six-foot-tall Splodge? Splodge who played piano in the orchestra. Splodge who had very nimble long white fingers. And hadn't he had a mole on one of them? I wished I could remember his hands more clearly. Damian had been knocked over last night too. Had that been Zoe as well? Or had it really just been an accident, some drunk driver?

All I knew was that I didn't know. But I did remember what Zoe had said when I'd asked her where she'd got the hands and organs from:

I had some spares lying around from when my father used to experiment
.

And I remembered something else she had said earlier on the bus:

My sources are limited. I take what I can get
.

Did that mean killing people if she couldn't find what she wanted in Daddy's spares box or in the hospital mort-yooary? Was she really going to some medical school in London to get the head? Or had that been a lie? If I'd been in a film or one of those detective dramas, this would have been the bit where I started breaking into offices and stealing secret papers or hiding around corners with a camera, hoping to get proof, and it would have had this tinkly suspensey music in the background and I'd have been acting all shrewd and detectivey as I pieced the bits together. But I wasn't shrewd or detectivey and I had no idea how to begin piecing what little proof I had together.

One thing was for certain – I didn't really have a clue what Zoe Lutwyche was capable of.

 

 

 

 

A
nother night, another truly cruddy night's sleep and it wasn't just because I kept knocking my nose. I had an even more cruddy dream. I dreamed that me and Louis were being chased by some hideous, tall, drooling blue-eyed monster and the monster got Louis and dragged him to the ground and he was screaming and being eaten alive. The only good bit in the dream was that hanging from the trees were millions and millions of cherry hair scrunchies, just like the one I'd lost. And when I woke up I missed it even more.

Me and Pee Wee walked to college for double Biology, eating our greasy bacon-and-sausage sandwich, and I saw
Louis standing outside the front entrance. I was a little relieved after what had happened to him in my dream. He was wearing a black basketball vest and shorts and he smiled when he saw me. My heart did a little pole vault thing. Definitely needed to go easy on the fried food.

‘Has Splodge called you yet?' I said, unable to stop smiling myself for some weird reason.

‘No,' he said. ‘Walk with me? I'm late for practice.'

‘I didn't know you did basketball so early,' I said as we walked side by side towards the sports block.

‘It's an extra practice cos we've got a big inter-college championship coming up. I'm usually a sub but they've had a few guys off with injuries so . . .'

‘What kind of injuries?!' I said, grabbing his arm. ‘Did they say what happened?'

He frowned. ‘Just hamstring pulls and stuff I think. But look, I'm getting really worried about Splodge.'

‘Why?'

‘I went round to his house and his mum told me about him just doing a bunk in the middle of the night with Poppy. She showed me this note he'd written. Something wasn't right though. It was a really neat note. It didn't look like Splodge's writing at all.'

‘I had the exact same thing when I went round to Poppy's house! Her mum showed me this really messy note from her.'

‘I guess they could have written each other's notes?' said Louis.

I had a think. ‘Yeah, that would make sense I guess. What did his note say?'

‘It said “I'm in love. Back soon.” That was it.'

‘That was it?'

‘That was it,' he said, pulling his sports bag up his shoulder from where it had fallen down. ‘Maybe Poppy was just in a hurry and neat handwriting was the last thing on her mind?'

‘Yeah. I thought that too. Maybe Splodge just felt like writing it neatly cos . . .'

‘. . . for once he cared what he was writing about?

Louis nodded. ‘I guess that makes sense. I didn't know he wanted to go to the stupid festival so badly. Just wish he'd call. It still doesn't feel right.'

‘What do you mean?' I said, as Pee Wee cocked a leg against the sign for the maths room. ‘Good boy.'

‘Well, Splodge has never even had a girlfriend before. Now suddenly he ups and leaves without a word to his two best mates? Me and Dame have known him since forever. I mean, okay, he hasn't always been the most reliable friend, but I've been there for him. I know him, Camille. He wouldn't have just gone off like this.'

I squinted and shrugged. Squgged, I guess. ‘But have you ever known him in love before? Love makes you do crazy things.'

A couple of boys went past and their laughter floated over to us. They were looking at me and talking about freshers', I knew it. I heard the word ‘sandwich'. They were laughing about my purple-tinged nose too. I didn't even care. I didn't even get the pang of hurt I always got when people laughed at me. I was tooooo tired.

Louis shook his head. ‘I'm really worried about him,
Camille. I can't sleep, I can't concentrate . . .'

‘Me neither!' I said.

‘What if they've had a car crash and they're in some ditch?'

I rubbed my eye. ‘No, Mrs Lamp said they took a bus to Abracadabra or something.'

‘A bus crash then.'

‘We would have heard about it.'

He stopped walking as we reached the double doors at the back of the gym and we moved to one side to let a small group of girls through. ‘Well, the festival's over now, shouldn't they be on their way back?'

‘I don't know. I just don't know.' Cue the tinkly suspenseful music. I couldn't say anything that would make him feel better. He looked like he was going to cry.

‘Did you see the news last night?' he whispered. ‘A young couple out hiking in the Welsh hills got mauled. They don't know who or what did it. How do we know that wasn't them?'

My mind went into free fall. Two bad nights' sleep and though my body was exhausted, my brain was a hamster on an endlessly-moving wheel. A bad mad hamster thinking bad mad thoughts.

‘Oh Louis, don't!' I said, now proper crying myself. It came out of nowhere – I just started bawling.

‘Camille, I didn't mean to upset you.' He leaned into me and wrapped his arms around my back and I sank into his shoulder. He was so warm and so comfortable and he smelled of that man shower gel that I liked sniffing in the supermarket. He rubbed my back. ‘I'm sorry. I'm just way
overtired. It's just me being paranoid.'
Rub rub rub
. I went limp against him. I was soooooo comfy.

Seconds later, he was standing before me, holding me at arm's length. ‘Camille? You went to sleep!' He was laughing.

‘I did?' I said, clearing my throat and blinking manically.

‘Yeah. Look, do you want me to walk you home? I can skip basketball practice and Geography. I haven't got anything else until Media so I could be back for that.'

‘No, I'll be okay,' I said, trying to stretch my eyes open where they kept falling closed. ‘I have to go to Biology. I have to see if Zoe's back.'

‘Well, let me walk you back home later then? I'll meet you out here at lunch.'

‘No, I'll be fine.' I started walking away. A swaggering figure in the same black basketball kit as Louis was coming straight towards me. It was Damian.

‘You seen the mess them hamsters made of reception? They've totalled it.'

‘Yeah,' said Louis. ‘It's out of bounds for the whole of this week.'

They were in full conversation about the hamsters – how the music room was all holey; how the cellos would have to be replaced. I started walking away but I was still looking at them, waiting for Louis to look back at me. And then he did and smiled and put his hand up to say goodbye.

And I walked straight into the side of the building.

*

I should have taken Louis' advice and gone home. Double
Biology was horrend. The lab smelled of fish, I got told off for yawning and Zoe was there but she completely blanked me. When the lesson ended, she was first to leave.

At lunchtime, after I'd walked Pee Wee, I really needed to sleep so we went to the least-visited corner of the Library, Large Print, and cuddled up for an hour. It didn't help. I was still yawning my head off by the time double English came around at three o'clock. Our tutor, Jill Price, made me read aloud the opening paragraph of the short story we were all supposed to have read.
Herbert West: Reanimator
by H.P. Lovecraft.

None of us had read it.

‘
Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror
,' I began. ‘
While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities
.'

‘Thank you,' said Jill. ‘Anyone like to have a stab at what the narrator is telling us there?' Everyone looked at everyone else. ‘Come on, who has read this?'

A sea of blank faces. My mind went cloudy. Rain pitter-pattered on the darkening windows. The room was so warm. My eyelids went heavy.

Weird Alice's voice: ‘He's talking about his friend's weird experiments and how at first he thought they were wonderful and boundary-pushing and then, as the scientist got more and more dangerous, he grew afraid of him. Terrified even. He's witnessed something really bad and he's going
to tell us about it.'

Jill Price's voice: ‘Yes, good. Well, I'm glad someone's read the set homework. So can anyone else tell me what these experiments were?'

My eyes started closing. Nobody was making eye contact with Jill. There was a very definite scratching sound in the pipes behind the wall. Hamsters, no doubt. We all got a little distracted. But Jill wasn't having any of it. She slammed her dry wipe marker down on the board ledge.

Weird Alice piped up again. ‘They experimented on dead bodies,' she said.

My eyelids sprang open. ‘What?'

Weird Alice looked at me and frowned, nodding. ‘Yeah. This Herbert West was trying to bring them back to life and the narrator is explaining how they went about it, stealing the bodies and stuff.'

‘Oh my God,' I gasped under my breath.

‘Right,' said Jill. ‘Since Alice is the only one who even bothered to look at this text, we'll waste the entire period reading it aloud so everyone else catches up, all right? You'll take turns. Philip, you carry on from where Camille finished, please.'

As Philip Always In Shorts read on, the story just got weirder and weirder. I wished I understood some of the really flowery bits and long words, but I didn't. I just highlighted them in my book with my pen that smelled of strawberries. I felt sick with every new passage I marked. Though it could have been the smell of strawberries.

In his experiments with various animating solutions, he had killed and treated immense numbers of rabbits, guinea pigs, cats, dogs and monkeys
.

That was Zoe! That was Zoe's dad! Animating solutions, like the blue serum!

We followed the local death notices like ghouls, for our specimens demanded particular qualities
.

Like we'd done with Luke the Lifeguard's body, read through the obituaries!

I saw him inject into the still veins the elixir which he thought would to some extent restore life's chemical and physical processes. It had ended horribly
. . .

Oh my big fat God . . .

His slight form, yellow hair, spectacled blue eyes and soft voice gave no hint of the supernormal – almost diabolical – power of the cold brain within
.

So Zoe wasn't slight or bespectacled and she didn't have yellow hair, but she did have blue eyes and a soft voice. And a cold brain. A cold, cold brain.

And the story got weirder and scarier. It was as though this writer bloke had time-travelled to our college, spied on me and Zoe and gone back to his black-and-white olde worlde time and written it all down, changing all the names
so no one knew.
We
were the story. The story was us!

I looked at the skirting boards. The filled-in holes where the hamsters had gnawed through.

One thing . . . had risen violently, beaten us both to unconsciousness and run amuck in a shocking way before it could be placed behind asylum bars
. . .