I Dare You

7. Songs and Whispers

Chapter Seven

SONGS AND WHISPERS

Abigail McKenzie stands by the kitchen window, tea-towel limp and forgotten in hand as she stares out beyond the glass. Her black hair is pulled back into a tight bun, but already wisps are starting to fall out and hang around her face.

Something seems unusual, she thinks, pushing these strands away from her face and setting the tea-towel down. Something seems not right.

There's nothing out of the ordinary she can see outside the window. Curtains are pulled open to reveal families sitting together to eat breakfast, owners with their dogs stroll down the pathway, intent on an early morning walk, birds twitter and occasionally swoop from tree to tree.

Old Ms Frentt's house, directly opposite her kitchen window, stands in silence.

Abigail swallows something dark and writhing and unnamed that has started crawling up her throat, and takes a step closer to the window to peer at the old house.

The curtains are drawn. The gate is shut. The garden still wild and savage.

The door is slightly open.

Abigail McKenzie gasps and quickly draws the curtains over her kitchen window, as if doing so would obliterate what she had seen. She rushes out of the kitchen, leaving eggs to over-cook on the stove, and into the bedroom she shares with her husband.

Anthony has already gone to work. Abigail looks around fervently, then drops to her knees next to the bed. By way of pulling and yanking, she manages to extract a large black box that has a thick layer of dust on the lid. Ignoring this, Abigail pulls the lid off impatiently and takes out a thick book, one that she hadn't seen need to use for over fifteen years.

Her diary.

***

I wake with bleary eyes - and in black clothes. I frown at them for a second, confused, before remembering a lot - too much - everything.

I groan and turn over, my mind whirling. Some things are too vivid to just be dismissed as a dream. And besides, I can feel aches all over my body: from jumping out the window, from landing face-first onto the ground, and then landing hard again on cold floorboards.

But my mind is aching more than my body.

I hear a slight knock on my door. "Bethany?" says Patricia in a soft voice, "Can I come in?"

"Yeah, OK," I reply.

Patricia tip-toes in wearing long baggy pants and a singlet. She obviously had more sense than me and thought to get changed before going to bed. She sits down on the end of my bed, and without preamble says, "What do you think about Jasmine?"

My minds still feels foggy so I take a while to answer. "Well ..." I reply finally, "Is it that important? It was weird, I know, and unnatural, but she didn't actually do anything. Should we just make sure she never goes back there?" The words feel strange and fake in my mouth, like they belong to a movie.

"What about we write down everything," Patricia says suddenly, "Everything that happened, everything we heard and saw, and then compare notes."

I mumble something like, "It's too early in the morning," but then stumble over to my desk to get paper and pens anyway.

My mind feels scrambled and confused when I try to start recounting the events of the night before. I decide to start at when I woke up in the middle of the night and Patricia knocked on my door. In my drowsiness I find it hard to remember all the details exactly, but I get the basic outline of what I think happened down. I'm up to the part where Jasmine ran down the corridor when a thought strikes me.