The owl outside hooted for the…oh, I didn’t know how many times. I lost track a long time ago. But it had hooted a lot and the darned creature was annoying me no end. I turned onto my side as I tried to get comfortable in my almost non-existent sleeping bag. It was so thin that I’d retreated to the car almost as soon as I’d got in it and snatched up a blanket in favour of not freezing to death. The quiet around me now however, combined with the dark, was making me claustrophobic and so I pushed the blanket out of the sleeping bag from around me to give me more breathing room. The cold flooded into my sleeping bag almost immediately, making me shiver in the cool night air. I groped around for where I thought I had put my phone a while ago. I held it up in front of me, pushing the middle button and wincing at the light that it expelled into my unwilling eyes.
23:47 it said.
I sighed and threw my phone down beside me, turning onto my back and staring up at the patterns of light the moon was throwing through the fabric of the tent. We had arrived at the campsite a few days earlier and the only thing I could really see that this holiday had going for it was the swimming pool- and even that was icy. The only noise I could hear now as I kicked myself out of my sleeping bag was my mum snoring contentedly in the compartment next door. At least she was actually getting somewhere with her plan to sleep. I was beginning to feel convinced that I was nocturnal.
I wondered for a minute about climbing out of the small fire exit that I had figured I could fit through earlier that day, but decided against the idea of shaking the whole tent or getting stuck in an attempt to escape. I sighed again, a long expel of wind and lay back staring at the ceiling, willing something to happen.
I really wish I’d thought twice about that.
A startlingly loud noise immediately brought me out of my downhill slope into boredom and made my senses sharpen just that bit more- as they do when you’re on edge. I calmed down a little when I realised that the noise had only startled me and sounded loud because of the intense quiet-but only a little. And then my overactive imagination kicked into overdrive.
It was probably just a leaf falling from a tree or something like that, or a small woodland animal, like a badger, or a bear…Or a dragon… Or a death eater… I shook my head and grinned at myself, ridding myself of some of the bad aura that had collected in the last thirty seconds and settled down to try to go to sleep with no sleeping bag. Suddenly, just as I was about to turn around to turn my phone off the rustling came again a lot closer to where I lay- At least enough to cause unease. I froze in my tracks which at that point happened to be a slightly awkward position of one hand in the air behind me and my body turned the other way.
Another noise completed my fear. A car could be clearly heard pulling up outside of our tent and footsteps of two or may be three men could be heard to be getting out of it. I listened to the door slam, jumping when it did. I could only catch snippets of the conversation that was apparently going on.
“Leaving the manager alive…rather…I don’t care…just…gun and shoot…dead.”
To be fair it was the last word that worried me the most.
And anyway, we were in France on a camping trip so why weren’t these men speaking French? I could just imagine how scared I must look right now. I opened my mouth to call out to my parents or older brother, I didn’t really care if I woke them up I was that scared. But even before I had chance to arrange the words in my numb mind the zip on the front of the tent began to slide open. I could only sit and wait for what would happen next. I hoped the men would take what they wanted and retreat without acting on their ‘gun and shoot dead’ plan.
I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed, something I had never done before. The men were all inside now and I could hear their heavy boots crunching over the tarpaulin of the floor. It was as if they weren’t even making an effort to be discreet. Suddenly I had a bolt of lightning shoot my brain. Being as quiet as was humanely possible under the circumstances that included scratchy tarpaulin and noisy rustling sleeping bags, I made my way over to the fire exit on the side of my compartment. My only way of getting out of there was to unzip it and hope for a miracle.
