The Bridal Party, page 17
‘But you guys are always there to look after me, aren’t you?’ comes the voice from the sleeping bag, blurred by sleep and drink. ‘I’m so glad. So glad …’
Nada puts a hand on Clarisse’s hair and strokes it for a bit; she even shushes her, like a baby. She is sure that Clarisse has fallen asleep within moments and does not feel it. But it doesn’t matter; Nada feels an ache to protect her, to mother her.
She sits there in the tent, listening to Clarisse’s soft, slow breaths Thoughts swirl in her mind.
Finally, after long minutes have passed, she climbs back out as quietly as she can, and heads back towards the blue glow.
‘Is she asleep?’ asks Gaia as she approaches.
‘She’s asleep.’ Nada gives them a look of determination. ‘Let’s go.’
Now
Twenty-Four
There was a silence. A sickening silence.
‘You did what?’ said Elena. Everyone shifted in their chairs, exchanging looks with each other. Only Gaia did not look surprised; she shook her head in sadness, pity.
‘You slept with the Traveller,’ continued Paul. ‘You betrayed the Nun’s trust; you went behind her back and seduced the one she loved. Is that right, Jester?’
‘No … it wasn’t like that …’
Nada raised her face for a moment, to see Clarisse’s reaction, but it was too painful; Clarisse’s hand was on her chest, and it was like she was having trouble breathing. Nada wailed, and looked away, her face burning with shame, with regret.
Paul continued. ‘You had the strongest motive of all, didn’t you, Jester? What would people think if the Traveller, so hated by everyone in the fiefdom, was not just the Nun’s lover, but yours too? What would that do to your reputation, to your place in society? You needed the Traveller to be kept quiet. You needed him gone.’
Everything around Nada was dancing. The candles, the body on the table, her friends, Clarisse … even the house and the woods beyond it. They surrounded her; suffocated her. It was as though the world was crushing her, bit by bit; she couldn’t breathe – it was like she was ready to pass out.
‘ENOUGH!’ she screamed. She drew back from the table, trying to get up, to squirm away, but it was to no avail; with the first step she took, Paul’s hand came onto her shoulder, and the very touch of him made her lash out in panic, retreating until her back was against the wall.
Everyone stared at her, mouths agape, sitting at the table in some masquerade of a dinner party. All of them suffering, crying, dressed in their idiotic costumes, like a vision of hell.
‘I did it, okay? I’m responsible!’ Nada screeched. ‘I killed Noah. Just please … stop this. I can’t take it any more.’
The world fell deathly silent; all that was left were her sobs, and the crackle of the fire.
‘Well,’ said Paul, his smirk dancing on his lips once more. ‘It seems like we have our Wicked.’
Before
It is a while before they find him.
It takes a lot of scrambling about, slipping and climbing; with the one torch they have between them, they rely on their phones to illuminate the way.
But they find the spot where the struggle occurred, and manage to lower themselves down. The gush of the stream gets louder and louder. Normally, Nada thinks, she associates the rush of water with peace, tranquillity. Here, though, it means something else.
The beams of light scan across the trees, making shadows swirl and fly. Nothing.
And then, finally, they see him.
He is by the stream; there are a few large rocks at the side of the water, with trees overhanging them. He is lying face down, the stream gnawing at his side.
There is a hush as they approach him. All torches centre on the unmoving, too-still figure, with its limbs sprawled at unnatural angles.
They stand a metre or so away, contemplating him, looking down upon him. No one says anything; no one is brave enough to utter the words. Dread sits in them; Nada feels it aching through her body, making her thoughts lurch. She feels like she might vomit, like she might pass out. She glances over at Tamsyn; her face is lined with silent tears.
‘Afreya,’ says Gaia. ‘Shouldn’t you … check him out?’
‘Me? I’m just a student. I’m not a doctor yet – what do I know?’
‘You know more than us.’
Afreya takes a few breaths to prepare herself, then takes the torch from Gaia. She picks her way across the rocks and shines the beam at Noah’s face. They can now see more detail. He has hit something hard: there is blood all over his head, joining the flow of the stream.
Afreya crouches and examines the wound as closely as she can; she puts a finger to his nostrils to check his breath, shines the light into his eyes, feels for a pulse.
‘Is he alive?’ asks Nada, afraid to hear the answer.
‘I think so.’
‘What do you mean, you think so?’ asks Elena.
‘I mean just that. I think he’s alive … but not by very much. Look, I’m not an expert yet, okay? I haven’t exactly been over this kind of situation in my lectures!’
‘So … we go and get help?’ Elena says.
Afreya stands up, leaving Noah on the ground, and takes a few deep breaths.
Gaia steps forward and speaks quietly. ‘Afreya … tell us. By the time we get up the hill, and find help, and they get back here … what are his chances of making it?’
Afreya looks at with desperate anger, her jaw jutting forward. ‘How I am supposed to know that?’
‘Just give us your best guess.’
‘I … I don’t know. But I think the chances are slim.’
There is a note of agony from Tamsyn, a groan of despair.
Gaia turns to the others. ‘He was drunk; people would have seen him drunk at the pub. No else was there, on the path …’
‘What are you saying, Gaia?’ demands Nada.
Gaia bites her lip and faces her. The torchlight dances between them, spraying uneven light over their faces. Gaia seems tall, commanding; a general talking to her soldiers.
‘What I’m saying is … we could leave him. If we wanted to, I mean.’
‘Leave him to … die?’ croaks Tamsyn.
‘Sounds like he’s going to die anyway. No one saw us push him; no one has to know. If we tell anyone what happened here … well, we could go down for manslaughter. Our lives, gone, just like that. All on that fucker’s account.’
‘We didn’t do anything wrong, though,’ protests Tamsyn.
‘Think that matters? Think that Nada and I will ever be able to teach again after this? Think that Afreya will be able to become a doctor?’
The air hangs silent between them. Gaia looks around for support. ‘He could have fallen. When someone discovers him, that’s what they’ll think. That he was drunk, and he fell. And that’s pretty much what happened, wasn’t it? No one here wants to be a criminal, do they?’
‘I don’t know about this, guys,’ interjects Elena. ‘I don’t know about this at all …’
‘What do you think, Nada?’ Gaia stares at her, pleading, begging.
Nada tries to dig deep within herself, to make sense of all the emotions and thoughts that are frantically fighting for attention inside her. She looks at Noah, face down, blood seeping out of his body and into the stream.
She thinks of the afternoon she spent with him in his flat, and the guilt that followed because of it. She thinks of Clarisse, in her tent, getting ready to be the wife of this vile and violent man. She thinks of how ugly he was at the pub, putting his hand on her back, and then following them down the path in the dark.
And she gazes back at Gaia, and finds that the words come from her lips easily. Naturally.
‘We leave him,’ she says simply.
Now
Twenty-Five
Nada steeled herself for the worst. She had no idea what it meant to be the Wicked, but at that moment, she didn’t care. The mystery was over; it didn’t feel like anything else could possibly be as bad.
‘Thank Christ for that.’
She started. Who’d said that? The voice was so familiar, even after all this time, but it was muffled; like it was talking from behind a veil.
Paul went to the table and pulled on the sheet. As the body was revealed, everyone gasped, and leapt to their feet.
Noah sat up, rubbing himself, aching from lying still for so long. He met Nada’s gaze. ‘Thank you, Nada. It seemed like that was going to take forever.’
It was unmistakably him; his manner, his voice hadn’t changed. However, his face seemed wrong, like a crooked version of its former self. A scar lined his forehead; it cut through his eyebrow, throwing his features off centre.
He swung his legs off the table. He was wearing a shirt and skinny jeans, just as he always used to.
‘Well, that was emotional. My back’s killing me … but it was worth it to hear you all squirm. It’s been so easy, hasn’t it? To forget that you had blood on your hands. To pretend that you’re all good, law-abiding people who stick to the rules. You’re all killers, every one of you; don’t you forget that. Just because we have our Wicked doesn’t mean you won’t get your punishment.’
They were all rooted to the spot; there was no reasonable explanation for what was in front of them. Almost all of them were bunched up against the far wall with Nada. As if distance between them and Noah would make any difference.
Only Clarisse, blank and expressionless with shock, had remained where she was, sinking back into her seat.
‘How …?’ whispered Afreya.
Noah turned. ‘How did I survive, do you mean? Well, I guess your diagnosis was off. I managed to get out of the valley, bit by bit, crawling on my hands and feet.’
‘But why didn’t you—’
He waved a hand at her, dismissing her before she could speak further. ‘I hated everyone. I hated you for what you’d done to me; I even hated Clarisse.’ He turned to her. ‘You’d done nothing, you poor thing. And yet it was hard to forgive you, hard to think that you didn’t suspect a thing about your filthy friends. I needed a clean break. I left, went to Jersey. You can lie low here, you know. Start again. It’s not quite Cambodia, but I didn’t want to go that far anyway. I had unfinished business …’
‘You conjured this whole thing up … to scare us? To make us confess?’ Nada said, not believing the words that were coming out of her mouth.
‘To make you see what you’d done. Of course, I couldn’t have done it without Paul, and his access to the airport. He was able to put these lovely, ridiculous costumes in your bags. And his knowledge of the local legends was handy.’
‘He’s a psycho,’ breathed Gaia.
Noah exchanged a look with Paul. ‘Are you a psycho, Paul?’ he asked.
Paul gurned in response. ‘Maybe a little.’
Noah continued. ‘In any case, it did the trick, didn’t it? I couldn’t exactly count on Tamsyn to keep you all in line …’
They all turned to Tamsyn. She looked horrified; her trance was fully broken, and now she was herself again, a mess of tears and regrets. She slumped down at the table and put her head in her hands. It was like it had taken all her strength to maintain the facade of the Bard, and now there was nothing left.
Clarisse got up, a blank look still on her face, and mechanically, as if in a dream, went to Tamsyn, putting her arms around her. Tamsyn had done what Noah had told her to; she’d been part of this horrific scheme. And yet in that moment, it seemed that she was the only one Clarisse trusted.
Finally Tamsyn was able to speak, with the encouragement of Clarisse at her shoulder. ‘Noah came to me; he threatened me, my family … I had to do what he said. I had to answer his questions, organise this whole sick weekend. I’m so sorry. I … I had no choice.’
Noah nodded. ‘You were very cooperative, Tamsyn. You were the best Bard I could have hoped for.’ He stepped forward, as if to join Clarisse in embracing her, but then thought better of it. ‘I went to you first because I knew for sure that you’d pushed me down that hill; that you’d done something wrong. But I felt in my guts that someone else was really to blame. The person who’d decided to abandon me, to leave me for dead.’
He turned around, looking at all the participants in the mystery, hatred in his eyes. ‘I tossed and turned, you know. All through my recovery, I wondered: who did it? Who made that decision, to leave a man to die? Who here is the killer? That was the true purpose of the game. To see you rat each other out, to see you point the finger at the person most responsible.’
His eyes rested on Nada. ‘As it was, it was easy. Someone broke; someone crumbled. Of course … little Nada. The sacrificial lamb.’ He stepped towards her; Nada recoiled as he ran his fingers lightly down her arm. ‘I don’t know whether you’re the most to blame, or whether you just think you are. But no matter now. Everyone will get what they deserve, in the end.’
Noah’s gaze seared into her. Vomit threatened to rise in Nada’s throat, and she closed her eyes so that she would not have to look at him.
‘Well then,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Let’s play the game, shall we, Nada?’ He gritted his teeth. ‘We are witches, are we not? There has been magic here tonight. Magic and justice. Everything I could have hoped for.’
Nada trembled. She could not take much more of this; she felt like she was going to pass out.
Noah took a step away, and let her breathe.
‘Leave her alone—’ Gaia began.
‘Enough!’ Noah shouted. He turned to Paul, who raised the axe and swung it through the air: with a loud crunch, it embedded itself into the table, sending a web of cracks across the wood.
‘Next time, that’s you,’ said Paul to Gaia. ‘Have you got that?’
Gaia backed away, her hands up. ‘Okay, okay … just don’t hurt her,’ she pleaded.
‘Don’t hurt her?’ said Noah, gesturing towards Nada. ‘Well, that entirely depends on how well she does.’
How well she does? The words shuddered through Nada. How well I do at what? she wondered frantically.
‘You have a minute’s head start, Nada, before I come after you. If I catch you, your soul will be purged.’
‘Wh-what?’ Nada stammered.
‘You heard me,’ said Noah. ‘Go. The Wild Hunt has begun.’
Twenty-Six
At first, it was like Nada was paralysed; she simply couldn’t move.
And then there was a chorus of screams telling her to go, telling her to run as fast as she could.
The last thing she saw was Noah, looking at her with his strange eyes.
And then she turned and ran.
She sprinted out of the living room and through the hall. Her feet seemed to have a will of their own; they were in a state of panic, almost sending her crashing to the ground as she flew through the door and raced across the gravel. The forest, so forbidding before, seemed to invite her now; she had to get across the boundary, into the woods, before Noah saw in which direction she was headed.
She dived into the bushes; they embraced her with scratches and cuts, but she did not care. All she cared about was who was coming after her. She craned her neck back as she ran, and caught sight of him sprinting across the lawn … right towards her.
He’d seen her.
Fuck.
And what was that he was carrying in his arms? She gave herself an extra half-second to check. It was some kind of long wooden contraption; he held it like a gun, but it didn’t look like one.
Is it a crossbow? she wondered, and then forced herself to keep going. It didn’t matter what he had. All that mattered was that she had to get away from him.
She plunged into the undergrowth, ripping her way through bushes. She could barely see, but it didn’t matter; with adrenaline coursing through her veins, she couldn’t feel the whipping sting of the branches as she tore past.
Behind her, though, she could hear grunting, stumbling. The woods were filled with the echoes of their chase, with his shouts and cries and two sets of footfalls on the autumn floor. It was enough to spur her on, though she did not know which direction she was going in, or whether it was the right way or not.
And then, as she tore through another cluster of bushes, she remembered. The road. That was where Gaia had caught sight of Noah earlier that evening. She’d said that the road was lit. If Nada could get there, and follow the lane, then she could find help.
All she needed to do was go downwards; find her way to the bottom of the valley. She peered into the gloom. Surely she would be able to see the glimmer of the street light?
And there it was: a weak golden glow, off to her right.
She was about to move, to head towards it, when she realised that she couldn’t hear Noah any more. She stopped, tried to stay as still as she could.
Silence.
She attempted to slow her heavy breathing, to be as quiet as possible. If she couldn’t hear him, then it meant that he wasn’t moving.
Does that mean he’s found me?
She tried not to imagine him, standing in the bushes to the side of her, readying that crossbow. Aiming at her.
She cleared her head and willed herself onwards. She slowly raised one foot, placed it ahead of her. It made a rustle; the crackle of leaves seeming deafening. Not good enough, Nada, she told herself. Be quieter.
She tried again, ignoring the thumping of her heart, the breath that she wanted to exhale loudly through her mouth. Another step. Again a rustle of leaves; a small sound, but enough to attract attention.
She paused, waiting to hear whether the sound had alerted him, or caused a reaction. Nothing.
And then she heard it.
A metallic click.
Abandoning her attempts to be quiet, she pounded ahead, towards that glow, sprinting as fast as she could. The silhouettes merged together around her, just a mass of darkness, as she leapt and darted.
