The Lost Guide to Life and Love (28 page)

It was the last thing I heard. Becca’s voice soaring, screaming, as the car left the track and plunged into nothingness. For a brief moment there was a feeling of exhilaration as we lost contact with the ground. ‘We’re flying!’ I thought ridiculously as Becca screamed.

I was thrown forward and snatched back by the seat belt. But I seemed to be upside down, swirling into the fog. Then there was a huge bang and a crash of metal as the car hit a rock and bounced, knocking my head against the window and rattling my teeth together. Then it lurched up into the air again, wavered for a second and then crashed on to its side and slid round with a terrifying grating noise. There was the sudden awful sound of smashing glass and a rush of cold damp air into the car. It rocked for a moment, then shuddered to a stop.

Silence. Darkness. No screams. No shouts. Just grey,
damp, suffocating silence. And the fog filling the car, bringing the Halloween night in with it.

I don’t know how long I lay there, unable to move, unable to think. It could have been seconds, minutes, even an hour. But the silence went on.

I was lying on the side of the car, almost upside down. I could feel the door handle pressing into my hipbone. The car was on its side, the door on the ground. I moved myself slowly, experimentally. I could feel my toes. I wiggled them. My fingers too. My head hurt and, when I tried to lift it, I yelped as my neck hurt too. But I could move it. That had to be a good sign, didn’t it? The seat belt was tight round my throat, almost choking me. I couldn’t work out where it was fastened so that I could undo it. I had no sense of the right way up, or round, or anything. I put my hand round the belt at my throat and followed it down. Or up. I found the fastener but couldn’t remember what to do. Did you press it or what? I prodded around ineffectually for a while, and then suddenly it slipped free. The pain in my neck eased a little as the belt loosened, but I found myself falling further into a crumpled heap behind the driver’s seat. But if I tried gently, ignoring all the pains in different bits of me, I could get a grip somewhere and heave myself up.

There! Done it. I was sitting on the door, leaning against the seat.

The others! What about the others? I pulled myself up and I could just make out Sandro in the darkness. His head was resting on the smashed glass of the driver’s window, his face jammed up against a piece of rock. I reached my fingers out, delicately, gingerly, frightened, to see if I could feel him moving, breathing. I felt something wet and sticky on his face, on my fingers. Blood.

Oh God. Becca was slumped on top of him, her body hanging from its seat belt, her head lolling.

Please don’t let them be dead. Please don’t let that have happened.

What should I do? I couldn’t think. I knew I had to be calm and sensible but I seemed unable to think where to begin.

I moved carefully, frightened that the car would shift, but though it groaned spectacularly it hardly moved. It was jammed on the rocks and stuck in the side of the hillside. The engine was off, the lights out. Before I could do anything I would have to get out. I tried to move in the cramped space. Various bits of me screamed in agony, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was getting out.

I had to get help. That’s it. That’s what I had to do. But how? I moved around carefully so I could reach towards the other door. As I groped my way along the back seat, I realised I was groping through piles of plastic that had fallen on top of me. The pumpkins!

Suddenly, in a moment of clarity that later I could never understand, I remembered that the pumpkins were lanterns. I picked one up, embraced it in my arms and felt gently round it. There! A tiny switch. I pushed it and the car filled with a horrifying orange glow from the grinning jaw and empty eye sockets.

And I giggled. God forgive me. With Sandro and Becca lying there I giggled at the sight of the pumpkin. And I started shaking. I always wondered what people meant when they said their teeth chattered, and now I knew. My teeth were off on a dance of their own and my body was shaking so much that I was almost in convulsions.

But with the glow of the lantern I could find the door handle above me. I reached up. It clicked open and I managed to push the door up and open. I wriggled round and freed my feet. I had no idea how far it was to the ground. I inched myself out and then dropped. The car
hardly rocked at all. My legs buckled underneath me and I found myself kneeling on the wet grass. I stretched back into the car and got the pumpkin and stepped carefully round to see Sandro.

He was breathing. Thank you, God. But his head and his throat were surrounded by ragged shards of glass and metal. Just the slightest movement…I needed to smash them off, if I could do it without disturbing Sandro. I tried pushing it with my hand but the glass and the pain just sliced into my fingers. I battered it with my elbow and that worked for a moment, but Matty’s silk jacket was no protection. I needed something to bash with. The broomstick! There’d been a broomstick, hadn’t there? I groped around the floor of the car, located it, and used it to smash as much of the glass away as I could and then wrapped a plastic witch’s cloak into a cushion and gently slid it between Sandro’s neck and the window. Just in case. He made no noise but he was still breathing.

Where there’s life, there’s hope.

I couldn’t work out how to get to Becca. I couldn’t get through the driver’s door, obviously, because Sandro was there. But with the car up on its side, I couldn’t reach her from the passenger door either. With that I heard her moan and mutter something.

‘Becca! Becca!’

She groaned and, in the light of the pumpkin, I could see her eyes flutter open. ‘The car’s crashed,’ I said urgently. I don’t know where we are.’

Becca moved her head. ‘Eerrggh,’ she said. ‘My shoulder…my arm…’

I looked more closely in the light of the pumpkin. Her shoulder seemed to be sticking out at a strange angle and her arm was dangling down oddly towards the gear stick. I’m sure it wasn’t meant to be that short of shape.

‘Don’t move, Becca,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll sort something out.’

I scrabbled round in the back of the car. I didn’t think my phone would work, but it had to be worth a try. I thought I’d felt something warm and woolly in there too. A blanket maybe. I hauled it out. It was a stylish coat. Sandro’s, I guess. I flung it over Becca so it also draped over Sandro as well. I piled some witches’ cloaks on top of them. The thin plastic might keep out some of the damp.

‘There. That will help keep you warm.’ I thought of undoing the seat belt, but then Becca, her crazy shoulder and arm would collapse right onto Sandro. No, I would have to leave her as she was.

Back in the car I had felt something leather. Clayton’s jacket. I suddenly remembered what had happened. How he’d proved to be a cheat after all. But I couldn’t afford to have principles right now. I shrugged into the jacket, noticed almost automatically, even in my strange state, the luxurious softness of the leather, and relished its warmth around me. There were witches’ hats, but I couldn’t think of anything to do with them. Devils’ horns. I switched them on too. Only a little flickering glow of red, but it might help someone find us. More pumpkins. I found the switches and lit them. Maybe someone would see us. Find us.

At last I found the thin strap of the tiny bag I’d brought out with me. I felt for my phone and switched it on. Its screen lit up but there was no signal. ‘No network coverage,’ it said. And I sobbed.

Then it dawned on me, horribly, crawlingly, like the fog creeping into the car, that no one would look for us because no one knew we were missing.

The party people—if they had even noticed, let alone cared—would just assume we’d gone home. People at home would think we were at the party. If we didn’t come
home, they would presume we had stayed there, that we were having a riotous time. It could be hours, maybe even days before they raised the alarm.

How would Sandro and Becca last that long? How would I?

One of those blessed samplers flashed into my brain again.
God helps those who help themselves.

I would have to go for help. But where? Which way? I had no idea where I was. I could be trailing the moors for hours. There were rocks, cliffs, bogs and mine workings. Even in daylight I could get hopelessly lost. But in the dark and the fog, I stood no chance at all. But what else could I do? There were still seven hours until daylight. Becca and Sandro needed help. Sitting here panicking would help no one. Maybe somehow I could get back to Ravensike.

I picked up the pumpkin and limped slowly round the car. Even a yard or so away, the shape of the car was almost swallowed up by the fog; all I could see was the stupid orange glow of the pumpkins. But even in that eerie light I could see the steep hillside above me. We had come over the sheer drop of a small cliff. I could make out the scars where the car had sliced off the grass at the bottom, but above were just rocks. There was no way I could get back up there. Dejected, I turned down, the other way.

I was wearing party shoes that scribbled and scrabbled and sank into the moorland. I stopped and wanted to cry. Really, it seemed to be the most productive thing I could do right then. But holding the pumpkin, as I inched past the car wheels in the air, I peered down. Maybe there was something a bit firmer there…Tricky to see, but maybe there was a sort of path. It could, of course, just be a trail left by the sheep, but no. There were stones and cobbles, worn smooth. It
was
a path.

Well, that was a start. But where did it go? I hobbled a
few tentative steps and thought I could make out a shape in the fog. A wall, perhaps? Right up close, I could see the outlines of a ruined building. That was something. But which one? There were scores of them round here. But there was a path. Ow! I’d walked into a tree, a narrow branch had whipped sharply across my cheek. Like a razor-cut in the cold. There were virtually no trees up on the moors and yet I’d managed to walk right into one. Brilliant. I held the pumpkin lantern up so I could see more clearly to avoid it. Crab apples. There were tiny wizened crab apples hanging from the branches. As I looked at them I remembered that sharp, sour taste when I had bit into one. And there, just out of reach, hanging from a twig, was a piece of something fluttering in the fog.

I couldn’t reach it. I tried to stand on a stone, hold on to the tree, but it was out of my reach. But I’d bet my life that it was a piece of cherry-red velvet ribbon and that this was the ruined house at the bottom of the valley I had passed on the day I had met Matt. It had to be!

Well no, actually, it didn’t. It was probably a chocolate wrapper abandoned weeks ago by a walker. But there was a chance. My only chance. I hung the pumpkin from one of the twigs of the tree, which was so weedy that it bent right down under its weight and took most of the light with it. I took off one of my shoes and slithered on the stones as I reached up, right up and…yes! I hooked the heel over the thin branch and brought it back just within reach. As I grasped the fluttering piece of material, the branch whipped back out from under the shoe and up out of the eerie orange circle of the pumpkin light. The material in my hand ripped away and I was left holding just the tiniest scrap of it. But it was enough. As I rubbed it in my fingers, I didn’t need the light to know that this wasn’t a chocolate wrapper but velvet ribbon.

It was the same tree I saw that day I met Matt. It had to be. The building seemed right. The broken wall, the crabapple tree. I had to believe it. I rammed the ribbon into the pocket of the leather jacket. My brain, which had previously been numb, suddenly went into overdrive. I tried to remember which way I had approached the house that day. Think. Think. I had come this way…and reached that way…and seen the house…here, and the tree there…So if I faced that way, I should follow the path along the valley bottom and eventually get back to Kate’s house.

Could it be that easy? It would mean that Sandro had tried to drive along the path I’d walked when I bumped into Clayton on the day of the helicopter ride. That did make a sort of sense. That he’d veered right instead of left when he’d gone through the gates in the fog.

I groped my way back to the car. Becca’s eyes were open now. ‘Are you OK?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said, which sort of proved she was really.

‘I think I know where we are,’ I said. ‘I’m going to get help. I’ve left you the pumpkin lanterns.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Becca, her voice slurred. ‘Too dangerous. You’ll get lost…Arggh!’ She had tried to move and was now gasping with pain.

‘It’s the only way,’ I said. ‘I think we’re in the valley bottom near the Aldersons’. I’m setting out. Tell you what,’ I said, struck by a brainwave, ‘I’ll take some of the witches’ hats and drop them on my way. So if I’ve gone completely the wrong way, people will know which way I went.’ Becca looked at me. I don’t think she knew what I was talking about. Then she winced in pain. ‘Sandro?’

‘He’s unconscious but he’s breathing. And the bleeding seems to have stopped,’ I said.

I clutched the pumpkin and the witches’ hats and set off. I had gone only a few yards when the car and the pumpkin
lights vanished in the fog. I was utterly alone, swallowed up in the vast expanse of whiteness. The weight of the fog seemed to press right into my lungs, making it hard to breathe. There was nothing to take my bearings from. I was a city girl, used to neon and street signs and pavements. But here there was nothing. I could feel panic rising, rising until I wanted to scream. But I didn’t. I fought it down.
God helps those who help themselves.
I dropped the first hat. I knew, whatever I did, I must not turn round. I had to keep walking in the same direction, otherwise I could end up walking round in circles. I kept my feet firmly facing the same way. I walked slowly, carefully, my feet slipping out of my party shoes, slithering on stones, sinking in the ruts as I followed the path. It was little more than a narrow stretch of flattened grass with occasional smooth stones. Sometimes I thought I was imagining it, that it wasn’t there at all. But I tottered and tripped and slipped on. Occasionally I switched on my mobile, which gave a narrow shaft of clearer light. But I was saving that in case I got somewhere where there was a signal.